In 2016 at WordCamp US in Philadelphia, PA, Matt Mullenweg announced to the world that a new post and page editor would be coming to WordPress. “The editor does not represent the core of WordPress publishing,” Mullenweg said. His vision of the editor was geared towards a more block-based approach that unifies widgets, shortcodes, and…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by Matt Mullenweg, co-creator of the WordPress project. We discussed a number of topics that have been making the rounds across the community such as: The WordPress 5.0 release strategy and how it will evolve once it’s released. Whether or not Gutenberg is ready and…
During last week’s core dev chat, Matt Mullenweg urged developers to consider WordPress 5.0 as “coming as soon as possible.” Nevertheless, his decision to set Thursday, December 6, for the new release date has taken many by surprise. Official feedback channels and social media erupted with largely negative feedback on the decision, as the new…
The new Gutenberg editor has basic support for galleries with a few nice features, such as the ability to set the number of columns and automatically crop thumbnails for a more uniform appearance. If you need more control over your galleries, Rich Tabor’s Block Gallery plugin is currently the best option made specifically for use…
WordPress 5.0 RC2 was released today with 15 notable updates, including improvements to block preview styling, browser-specific bug fixes, and other changes. RC2 was released simultaneously with Gutenberg version 4.6. The official release date for WordPress 5.0 has not yet been announced, because it depends on feedback from RC2 testing. Contributors’ uneasiness with not having…
Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator of the Gutenberg Times website, is hosting a Q&A session with Gutenberg’s phase 1 design and development leads on Friday, November 30, at 2pm ET (19:00 UTC). Matias Ventura, Tammie Lister, and Joen Asmussen will join Pauli-Haack to discuss their journey “Creating Gutenberg” over the past two years. If you have any…
WPCampus is seeking funding to conduct an accessibility audit of WordPress’ Gutenberg editor. The non-profit organization is dedicated to helping web professionals, educators, and others who work with WordPress in higher education. Educational institutions often have stricter legal obligations that require software to be WCAG 2.0 level AA compliant and many European institutions set the…
WordPress 5.0 will soon replace the editor with the new Gutenberg editor as part of a multi-phase project to improve the experience of authoring rich content. Phase 2 will shift focus to tackle site customization, bringing more complex layout and page builder capabilities to Gutenberg. As this phase kicks off soon, it’s valuable to see…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by Pippin Williamson, founder of Sandhills Development, LLC. Pippin describes what he’s learned going through the process of opening a brick and mortar business. He also describes the emotional process of firing employees, making business decisions as a team, and how he wants to create…
Jetpack 6.8 was released today, introducing the plugin’s first set of blocks for Gutenberg. The necessary infrastructure was added in version 6.6 and all existing features that touch the editor are in the process of being ported over to blocks. This release includes blocks for payment buttons, forms, maps, and markdown. The Contact Form module…
WordPress 5.0 RC 1 was released over the weekend after a string of five betas that began in late October. According to the Gutenberg stats page, more than 1.1 million sites have the Gutenberg plugin installed and users have written more than 980,000 posts using the new editor. These numbers are conservative estimates, as the…
WordPress core committers, core contributors, and former release leads made strong, last-minute appeals on Monday for the 5.0 release to be deferred to January. RC was expected Monday but those urging its delay cited the large number of open issues on the milestone and the fact that many confirmed bugs are being aggressively punted to…
Block Lab is a new tool that provides an admin interface and a templating system for creating custom Gutenberg blocks. Rob Stinson, Luke Carbis, and Rheinard Korf, all employees at XWP, kicked off the project in their own time with the goal of removing the relatively steep barrier to block creation. The plugin is now…
The team working on integrating Gutenberg into WordPress’ mobile apps is making progress, but users will not have access to the new editor in the apps until early 2019. Jorge Bernal, a mobile engineer at Automattic, posted an update yesterday, highlighting current capabilities: Gutenberg Mobile [is] working inside the apps and the first post published…
WordPress 5.0 Beta 5 is available for testing and includes all of the block editor changes that are in Gutenberg 4.4. One of the major changes in this release is the addition of a Permalink panel that is in the Document sidebar. The panel was added based on user feedback that the UI for editing…