Block-based Themes Meeting Notes – May 6, 2020

Happened in #themereview channel, facilitated by @kjellr.

GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ Roundup

Gutenberg 8.0 was released! Here are some highlights:

Folks are working to bring feature parity between FSE blocks and other existing coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. blocks, eliminating a lot of extra CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. we’ve had to write for block-based themes: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/21087

Lots of good discussion around whether template parts should specify their own HTMLHTML HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a markup language that is used in the development of web pages and websites. tag, and include group block controls: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/20997

Support for dynamic content (relative media paths, translations) in block templates: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/21932

Adding a button to the full-site editor to download a theme including changes you’ve made: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/21958

  • There are concerns about the increased volume of themes that are essentially copies of other themes.

Discussion Topic: Keeping up with Gutenberg Changes

@poena recently asked:

Where does your news and updates come from?

  • GithubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ notifications
  • #core-editor chat summaries
  • ReleaseRelease A release is the distribution of the final version of an application. A software release may be either public or private and generally constitutes the initial or new generation of a new or upgraded application. A release is preceded by the distribution of alpha and then beta versions of the software. changelog
  • Tags for in-progress work, e.g. [Feature] Full-site Editing, [Feature] Themes

A longer, nuanced discussion ensued around the challenge of influencing changes before they are made / released happened in SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/..

Two primary suggestions emerged that the team is going to try out!

  1. A weekly news digest focused on in-progress work and changes related to themes. @itsjusteileen and @kjellr will take a pass at the first post next week!
  2. Using the [Feature] Themes tag on the Gutenberg repo more often as relevant, and using tags in general.

#block-based-meeting