WordPress plugin developer Jeffrey Carandang continues to plough forward with new features for EditorsKit, a collection of page building block options for Gutenberg. What began as a block visibility management plugin has grown to include more features aimed at tweaking various settings in the editor. Version 1.5 adds some text, heading, and paragraph styling and…
Today’s release of Gutenberg brings a major improvement to the usability of the Group block. In previous versions of the editor, it wasn’t easy to see if a block had been inserted as a child block, especially since the default behavior was to insert an empty paragraph block. Gutenberg 5.7 brings more clarity to the…
After six months in development, Advanced Custom Fields 5.8.0 was released yesterday with a new PHP-based framework for developing custom Gutenberg block types. ACF Blocks was announced in October 2018, to the great relief of many developers who didn’t know how they were going to keep pace with learning the JavaScript required to use WordPress’…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by Rachel Cherry, Freelance software engineer, consultant, and director of WPCampus and Brian DeConinck, a front-end designer and developer with the OIT Design and Web Services team, part of the Office of Information Technology at NC State University. We learn how Tenon was chosen as the vendor to perform the…
Last week we reported on Laraberg, a Gutenberg implementation for Laravel that is now in beta. The project was based on Gutenberg.js, a package that makes it easier to bring Gutenberg into other applications. Nick Khaetsky, a backend developer at Biz-Mark, took Laraberg and used it to build a Gutenberg plugin for the open source…
WordPress plugin developer Jeffrey Carandang has rebranded his Block Options plugin to EditorsKit. Carandang created Block Options prior to co-founding CoBlocks, which was recently acquired by GoDaddy. It began as a plugin for controlling block visibility, inspired by his Widget Options plugin, but has since grown to include more features for managing Gutenberg blocks. EditorsKit…
WPCampus has published the results of the Gutenberg accessibility audit the organization commissioned from Tenon, LLC. The audit was crowdfunded by the WordPress community and Matt Mullenweg and Automattic pledged to cover the balance to ensure it would be fully funded. Tenon’s analysis includes a 329-page technical audit of the editor along with user-based testing…
Clean Blocks is a new free theme from Catch Themes that was released last week on WordPress.org. The design is suitable for businesses, agencies, freelancers, and other service professionals who require featured content, a portfolio, testimonials, a blog, and a services section. Clean Blocks includes basic Gutenberg compatibility in that it supports all core blocks…
The family of Gutenberg derivatives is expanding with the beta release of Laraberg, an implementation for Laravel. Maurice Wijnia, a developer at Van Ons, an agency based in Amsterdam, created Laraberg as an easy way for developers building applications with Laravel to integrate the Gutenberg editor. It includes a simple API and support for the…
Gutenberg 5.5 was released with the long-awaited Group block, previously known as the Section block. It was renamed to avoid confusion with the HTML5 section element and prevent potential overlap with future site/theme type sections, such as headers, sidebars, and footers. The first iteration of the Group block supports the ability to nest other blocks…
GoDaddy has acquired CoBlocks, ThemeBeans, Block Gallery and Block Unit Tests, one of the leading Gutenberg product lines in the WordPress ecosystem. Founder Rich Tabor is joining GoDaddy as Senior Product Manager of WordPress Experience and will lead a team dedicated to understanding users’ needs and expanding the company’s Gutenberg-related products. Tabor’s fellow CoBlocks founders…
The Gutenberg team has published a Blocks in Widget Areas RFC (request for comments) document, detailing a technical approach that brings blocks to the wp-admin/widgets.php screen and the Customizer. This is one of the goals on the roadmap Matt Mullenweg outlined in his 9 Projects for 2019 post. Based on the requirements outlined in the…
The Gutenberg team merged a pull request three days ago that adds a local “playground” development environment for testing outside of the WordPress admin. Riad Benguella, the technical lead for Gutenberg phase 2, said that the playground could grow over time to contain “more than just a standalone version of the editor” and could become…
Gutenberg 5.3 was released today with basic block management, a feature that will be included in WordPress 5.2. It is a new modal that can be launched from the vertical ellipses menu, inspired by Rich Tabor’s CoBlocks implementation. Users can turn individual blocks on/off or even entire sections, such as Common Blocks, Formatting, and Embeds.…
WordPress core contributor Alex Shiels has published a proposal for a WordPress.org block directory that would host JavaScript-based, single block plugins. The directory would make blocks searchable and installable from within the Gutenberg editor. Building a directory for discovering blocks and seamlessly installing them is one of the nine projects that Matt Mullenweg identified as…