Around 2010, child theming had finally caught its stride. Bigger theme shops were starting to take note, and some were implementing advanced parent themes that were meant to serve as a “framework” for creating child themes. The theme development community hit a bit of a brick wall amid this explosion of child theming. Grandchild themes…
WordPress’ block editor, colloquially still widely known as Gutenberg, is making inroads into the segment of users who have heavily relied on page builders for years. For the most part, page builder plugins have either declined in growth or stagnated in 2020, with the exception of Elementor. In contrast, block collections with page builder features…
Gutenberg 9.7 landed yesterday with several updates and improvements. Users should expect to see changes to the interface for block variations, transforms, and patterns. Reusable blocks are being worked on after what seemed to be a hiatus. Developers can also now add custom page templates to their block-based WordPress themes. This release had the fewest…
As we inch closer to a year in which WordPress’s primary focus will be on Full Site Editing, it is fortunate timing that Themes Team representative Carolina Nymark publicly announced her latest theme, Armando. It is a blogging theme that makes use of the latest features from the Gutenberg plugin. The theme is currently awaiting…
For some people, Christmas arrived a couple of days early. Gutenberg 9.6 launched with its first iteration of drag-and-drop blocks from the inserter. There are some other enhancements like vertical buttons, heaps of bug fixes, new APIs, and other improvements. But, let’s be real. The ability to drag blocks from the inserter into the content…
Kjell Reigstad announced the Photo Blocks theme on December 9. It is a part of an ongoing set of experimental work from the WordPress Theme Experiments repository on GitHub. It is essentially a testbed of ideas that are helping to propel the upcoming block-based theming era. In the past few months, I have covered the…
As I said last week, 2021 will be the year of the site editor. Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word confirms it. WordPress 5.7’s release planning is focused on it. It has been a long journey getting to this point, and it will be a much longer adventure afterward. The ultimate promise of the work…
All hands on deck. 2021 will be the year of the Site Editor. Anne McCarthy announced the official start of the Full-Site Editing (FSE) Outreach Program last Friday on the Make Core blog. The program is primarily geared toward end-users. With few channels for average users to communicate with the development team, this offers an…
Update some of the things. That was the goal that Jon Quach, a Principal Designer at Automattic, laid out in the roadmap for integrating the G2 Components project into Gutenberg and, eventually, core WordPress. The project is a reimagining of the pieces that make the block editor, a “from-scratch” overhaul of the component system. Updating…
Gutenberg 9.5 went live today. The development team is continuing forward with work that we will start seeing down the road in WordPress 5.7 and beyond. The big user-facing highlights for this release were the additions of a full-height alignment option for the Cover block, font-size support in the Code block, and improved previews for…
Gutenberg 9.4.0 was released this week with many small improvements to existing features, while work on full site editing continues. This release will not be included in the upcoming WordPress 5.6 release but those who are using the Gutenberg plugin will have access to the improvements right away. The button block now has a width…
The “version 1.0” launch of block patterns in WordPress 5.5 was overall successful. However, it was easy to overlook the problems while waiting for this feature to land after months of anticipation. Now that we have had a couple of months of seeing the block pattern system baked into core WordPress, it is time to…
Version 9.3 of the Gutenberg plugin dropped earlier today. It is the first version of the plugin during the WordPress 5.6 release cycle that will not see its new features land in the core platform. However, bug fixes have been backported to WordPress 5.6 beta 2 and 3. Much of the work for the release…
Two weeks ago, the Gutenberg team put out an open call for block-based widgets feedback. I had already written a lengthy review of the new system earlier in September but was asked by a member of the team to share my thoughts on the most recent iteration. With the upcoming freeze for WordPress 5.6 Beta…
Munir Kamal shows no signs of slowing down. He continues to push forward with new features for his EditorPlus plugin, which allows end-users to customize the look of the blocks in their posts and pages. He calls it the “no-code style editor for WordPress.” The latest addition to his plugin? Animation styles for every core…