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    Gutenberg Times: Gutenberg Changelog #124 – Gutenberg 22.0 and WordPress 6.9

    tonyheth Posted on

    In episode 124 of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast, Birgit Pauli-Haack and guest Ellen Bauer discuss the latest WordPress and Gutenberg updates, including the upcoming WordPress 6.9 release and Gutenberg 22.0. Highlights include insights on AI-powered site building, the importance of collaboration tools like block comments, new blocks such as accordion and stretchy text, and the enhanced plugin security review.

    Ellen Bauer shares her experiences from WordCamp Kansai and speaks on the impact of AI in making WordPress site building more accessible. They also touch on improvements for theme authors, plugin developers, and the upcoming WordCamp Asia. The episode wraps up with community announcements and a look ahead to features planned for WordPress 7.0.

    Show Notes / Transcript

    Show Notes

    Special Guest: Ellen Bauer

    Announcements & Community

    What’s Released

    What’s in the works or discussed?

    Stay in Touch

    Transcript

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Welcome to our 124th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk about Gutenberg 22.0 and WordPress 6.9 and so much more. I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and a full-time core contributor for the WordPress open source project sponsored by Automattic.

    Today on a Saturday morning, Ellen Bauer joins us from New Zealand. She works for Automattic as a product manager, works with themes, blocks and the AI site building tool. And as a former agency owner and professional theme builder and designer, she brings important perspectives to the software powering millions of merchants at WooCommerce of the World. She’s also a longtime friend and I’m delighted you join me again, Ellen, to the show. Welcome and how are you today?

    Ellen Bauer: Thank you very much. That was a lovely introduction. I should copy that for my who I am. I actually like that. Thanks, Birgit. I’m very well. It’s very early in the morning for me, so please bear with me everyone. If I’m babbling a little bit. I yeah, I’m very well. I’m actually very recharged because I just returned from Botkin Kansai in Japan, and I added a little personal holiday on top of that with my family. So yeah, that was a lovely time away and it’s always good to connect to the community and attend WordCamps because yeah, you just feel recharged and inspired. So yeah, I’m feeling really excited and I’m happy to be on that podcast here again.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Always so glad you’re here. So don’t worry as long as you don’t snore. We are, we take anything that you want to say.

    Ellen Bauer: Inspired my by my Japan travels. I’m having a green tea next to me so that should keep me running.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, and I have green tea too, but that’s now from a shop that I saw in Taipei two years ago at WordCamp Asia. So I’m really kind of every time I have a cup of tea, I’m thinking back on that.

    WordCamp Kansai, WordCamp Asia

    So you gave a talk at WordCamp Kansai about building a WooCommerce store using block themes and AI site building. So how did it go and what did you learn from putting it together actually.

    Ellen Bauer: So I was again, it’s a very new topic for me, so I was like, oh, what did I do to myself presenting that. But it was very exciting and there were a few AI talks that were really, really cool at the WordCamp. So it’s a good idea to check out the YouTube stream from the WordCamp other videos there. It was really cool to talk about a topic that I’m very excited about and just kind of getting into more and more with my work at Automatic as well. So I learned a lot. I looked at a lot of competitors and what they’re doing and obviously AI inside. It’s pretty wild what is happening and fast paced. So I think it was good to also bring the topic to a WordCamp and I had really, really positive feedback. Everyone was excited. The room was packed which I didn’t expect with an English speaking talk at a WordCamp. They had a live translation which worked really well and that was cool. A lot of questions in the end as well and a good conversation and yeah, just an exciting new opportunity for me. I see it as just AI is a possibility to help us fix or help us with the problems users have with site building because it’s not easy to do us to build your front end site for WordPress Store or any website. So if AI tools can help users, our WordPress users, us to do these things a little easier and faster and maybe more inspirational with real content, like more related content and images that relate to the site you actually want to build. I think that’s just very exciting. And yeah helps for me seeing users struggle with our themes as well and finding the right theme for what they wanted to build over the years. I think it’s just a great opportunity to make it easier for users and also kind of then yeah make WordPress attractive on another level to very beginner users and can just do so much. It’s an exciting time, honestly I think.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, no, I hear you. Yeah, There is this. WordPress.com has started with the AI site builder and I find it really helps with the onboarding of users that just want to get a site built. You still have to make the decisions about what’s your content about and what are the images that you want to do but. But it kind of gets out of the way in putting those things in and you don’t have to search for things too much. I think that WordPress 6.9 also and we’re going to talk a little bit later about the whole release that’s coming up with a command palette. Yeah, you can really shortcut some of the things, but you still need to know what you want to do to put the command in to get to where you want. But it’s also, yeah, there’s a lot of help out there. And I’m really excited also for the AI site building that ends up with a block theme and with a really fast site. So it’s a really cool thing.

    Ellen Bauer: Yeah. What I like about it too, that it’s on the blocks patterns. Block theme foundation. What you can test. I really like it for something that is difficult for nonvisual users is you can get color palettes, ideas, you get template ideas. Because one of the things I always hear also with patterns from users, it’s like how do I decide which. You maybe have a pattern library in a theme, but it’s like how do you decide to put a page together with these patterns? It’s very challenging. Users don’t really know should I have testimonials in the bottom or at the top or what is most important? So there’s template page templates, suggestions shown and you can just pick one. It makes it way easier and more appealing. Same with like fonts. How should I know if the font is a professional font or a classic or more modern? It’s very difficult to tell. That’s like very advanced decisions you need to make on the design side as well. So if we can give suggestions and help, I think that makes it just easier and also more fun to build sites. Yeah. Another thing I probably have mentioned on the podcast is the word telex and doing. And you can test about it. Probably. Yeah. Because that’s also another thing I was like, oh, that’s so exciting because you can build blocks with AI and it’s so difficult to build blocks, but now it’s easy to have an idea and build a block.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. There was this blocktober fund by Tammie Lister which is now came to end. But there are 31, I think blocks that she built and she had some great ideas. I will put a link to it in the show notes again, but because what you can learn from there is also how you prompt the telex to actually get something out of it. So it was a really cool thing. And other people did also some, some great thing with Telex, the experimental block builder. Yeah.

    Ellen Bauer: So that was also part of my talk prompting tips. And I think you could do a whole talk just about that and it will be way more important moving on how we. Yeah. How we talk to AI to actually make it efficient.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely.

    Ellen Bauer: Yeah.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: And I’m really looking forward to the next flagship WordCamp where that will probably be even more prominent because the next one is WordCamp Asia in Mumbai. And I submitted some Talks there, not AI talks, but I’m still in the you build it yourself kind of block theme. I will do a workshop on block themes and how the different workflows work together. And so the good news was that the WordCamp Asia speaker team extended the deadline for speaker submission to December 15, which is kind of another month out.

    Ellen Bauer: So I thought it was November, right?

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And that was. They made a mistake on their Twitter account. I clarified that in the WC Asia channel on WordPress Slack so you can read up about it. But because there was a discrepancy between what the website said under speaker submission, what the tweet said. And it’s actually December 15th. Yeah, you don’t have to worry. Hurry next week.

    Ellen Bauer: Oh, that is nice. The WordCamp Asia in Mumbai is. I just checked the date April 9 to 11 for everyone looking for travel dates and I submitted a talk as well. I will submit maybe a better version, improved version if I now have more time, which is great because it was a rushed application. But yeah, I’m really excited for that outcome and really, really hope I can make it there.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. It’s the week after Easter so if you want to go a little bit earlier, you have some Easter holidays to cover your vacation, not to have to take. Well, in Germany we have three days, no two days vacation or holidays that are around Easter. So it’s a Good Friday as well as the Easter Monday they are off in Germany. So we have another holiday weekend that we could go there. So we plan to be a little bit ahead of time in Mumbai in India. So yeah, it’s going to be interesting. They also have a schedule of when they release tickets so you can go on the website and see that at the WordCamp Asia website, I think November 11th and then they have two more dates where they release tickets because the first one actually sold out within an hour or something like that. Yeah, yeah, I think it’s going to be a huge bootcamp.

    Ellen Bauer: I think I got my tickets already for us, so. Yeah, but that’s nice that they released the dates.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. The Guternberg Times, I also applied for media partners, so either speaker or media partner, maybe I will get my tickets that way.

    Announcements

    So yeah, so we’re coming through the announcements. The first one that I wanted to talk about is that Anne McCarthy updated us in her post update on phase three collaboration efforts November 2025 on the state of the phase three, the progress made, what’s in the works for the Future and especially WordPress 7.0. Now we’re talking 7.0 on the eve of release candidate for 6.9; there is not a whole lot of more information out there and the post is talking about the real time collaboration with multiple authors. Edit the content simultaneously without conflict. Now this feature has been tested with a small group of clients from WordPress VIP, but they’re loving it it seems, and they are bringing things to Core WordPress 6.9 has the asynchronous notes of collaboration. That’s the commenting on blocks that comes to WordPress December, but it allows you to add comments directly on the content blocks and there will be refinements and additional features kind of coming in the future. And what’s also prepared for WordPress 10.0 is behind the scenes the contributors are rebuilding the admin screens with a new Data View and Data Forms tools. There’s a whole new Fields API that kind of runs the data form components and then you organize and display information on admin pages. Part of it is also Media Library revamp and the extensibility for plugin developers. So that’s pretty much kind of a short rundown of what’s in the post. It’s much more detailed information with links to GitHub issues and PRs and all that. Any comments?

    Ellen Bauer: I’m actually really, really excited about that and the start of that. It’s cool to see that in 6.9 already. I think just collaboration in general within WordPress is one of the things missing to have this thing like in Google Docs we all kind of love it. It’s so easy and yeah, I’m just so, so excited to get that in because we have always run our Elmo Studio blog with two people and at some point like even we had guest authors. So yeah that just makes it so much easier to actually work together in WordPress.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah and well we use Google Docs for any of the articles be it on the developer blog or internally at Automattic or for the Gutenberg Times. And this would just eliminate one step because you still have that step left that you need to copy paste things over and put the images in. And if you can start drafting already in WordPress it eliminates so much time that you kind of win there. It’s really cool.

    Ellen Bauer: I never, I can’t even write in Google Docs, and I’m actually I’m using Notion as a drafting tool because it just doesn’t look as nice so. And yeah just easier if you can just collaborate within your save so much time and effort and it just, it’s just Nice to see the people you’re working with in your post and kind of work together there, the comments and feedback and I think even also for design stuff like I love Figma comments as well. It’s just. Hello, it’s so good to give feedback. So even if we can have a block section or even on patterns, we can comment on design topics as well there.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

    Ellen Bauer: So yeah, even for the visual part of feedback on pattern designs and stuff, it will be really exciting to use that too.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely.

    Ellen Bauer: For writers and content creators.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So what is probably coming to WordPress 7.0 is that you also can highlight text. Not right now, you only can comment in the notes, just on single blocks. Yeah. So if the block is a long paragraph, you cannot just highlight things and then comment on that. So it’s not like Google Docs yet. But I think that’s the aim that developers have to make that work as well. I’m really excited for what’s to come. We’ll see. But it’s a lot of work. But the last half a year there has been some great progress there.

    All right, so the next thing that I wanted to point out here is the new the plugin review team has this plugin check plugin that you can as a plugin developer kind of use and check your plugins before you submit it. So you don’t get a whole lot of back and forth with the review team until they approve your plugin. That plugin also has a new version and the review team announced it just last week that they now not only screen new plugins that come to the repository, but also will screen updated plugins or plugin updates for security, compatibility and compliance. Right now it’s in testing form so currently the team evaluates the information only internally and sends reports to authors if needed. And they want to kind of. It’s like the normal WordPress way, you kind of look what it does and then you iterate on it. Yeah, they want to observe the behavior during updates and put in some refinements.

    And after that initial testing phase, automated security reports will be emailed to authors right after the plugin updates. This is such a huge progress because plugins account for 96% of WordPress vulnerabilities in 2024 in a report. And that increased scrutiny on the WordPress plugins repository is really a huge impact on the health of the whole WordPress ecosystem and it definitely will make the web a better place with 43% of all websites being WordPress having that additional layer There is really going to be huge.

    Ellen Bauer: I love that too because yeah, it’s funny, I just remembered when you said that most of the. As a theme author, I can’t even count the number of times I get support requests for something is broken. And first thing I always said, oh yeah, I kind of sensed, oh, it’s, it’s a plugin. It’s most of the time the theme is not affected because there’s not much to a theme. You have to deactivate all your plugins and check the list when the error occurs. I think. I don’t know how much time I spend on plugin support actually as a theme author.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I mean security, if you put a point to it, is actually something the server or the hosting company should really implement as well as an agency. When we were dealing with other websites from other people that actually support their businesses. Yeah. We made sure that they are on a hosting company that actually has their own security screening and the automating, removing of malware if that occurs. The plan might be a little bit more expensive, but it’s kind of that peace of mind for all of us is really important. But yeah, even then things could get through.

    Ellen Bauer: So yeah, yeah, this is like very important help.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely.

    Ellen Bauer: I think that if the offerings also for Hostess got better over the years, I think and more awareness. But yeah, just funny. It’s like part of my WordPress history is fixing plugin update issues.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

    Ellen Bauer: Gosh.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. But I, I, that was work that I really hated.

    Ellen Bauer: Yeah. Although it’s money because I was like, I’m just. It’s a theme, but it’s not the theme.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, no. It wasn’t something I thought or something like that. Or it was more like it’s not work that I would like to do. Yeah.

    Ellen Bauer: So it was also work that we weren’t paid for. It was a lot of support. We did.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: But even if you get paid, it’s not work you want to do.

    Ellen Bauer: That’s true.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, some people do, but yeah.

    Ellen Bauer: So yeah, I didn’t like it either, but I had kind of. It’s funny if you do it like for so many years, like 10 years or so, you get a sense of. Also if you see the plugin that you already kind of know, like it’s like a six, then do you get on where the problem is? It’s kind of weird.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I think also the site health plugin that the WordPress contributors put together is really helpful in just kind of eliminating the plugins and that kind of. Yeah, that really helped with the research. But yeah, that can also happen. Not in a security context. It’s just kind of. Yeah, it broke my site. Yeah. So some update because it was a plugin conflict and the site health plugin is really helpful for that.

    Community Contributions

    So there’s WordPress Studio. I think I’m not sure if we ever mentioned it here at the podcast. It’s an open source local development tool and it now can handle blueprints and those are Playground blueprints. So they’re lightweight and they’re fast to implement and it’s a topic close to my heart. This year I did many talks about Playground and the blueprints and you can watch three of them on WordPress TV and I will have the link in the show notes. They are now available also to be used in Studio because Studio is based on Playground so it makes spinning up new sites so much faster. You can select three pre-built blueprints. One is just a quickstart WordPress.com website or a site for building plugins or themes, or creating an online store with WooCommerce and companion plugins pre-installed. But you could also kind of build your own and have all the plugins that you ever want to need for any site and spin up a new site with the theme or with some standards that you in an agency or as a freelancer always use and then can work on it. And I love this local development tool and paired with Playground CLI. Yeah it made my testing and development so much easier. It’s really great.

    Ellen Bauer: I use it every day as well. Yeah, I didn’t. I wasn’t aware that there’s a WooCommerce version of the blueprint as well. That is cool because you don’t need to go ahead and test. Sometimes you just need to test a store and you don’t want to install all the plugins yourself a little bit annoying. So that can be.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s absolutely handy.

    Ellen Bauer: The next update I will cover that and it’s actually kind of an interesting thing and Matt blogged about it on his personal blog as well. So you can check out that link. It’s that a new plugin called the Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer. That’s a long name for plugin, but it helps to get an archived link to any kind of broken link that you have. Which for a lot of us who have older WordPress blogs or websites that is probably the case. And I actually I haven’t installed the plugin yet, but I will go to do that this weekend because yeah, that’s exciting. You can just get a link to any, any broken link to the Wayback Machine version, archived version of that website or blog post. And yeah, check out that post on Matt’s blog where he talks about it quickly and introduces it and yeah, I think that’s a really cool additional plugin that we have available to help with broken links. Really exciting. I love that. I will, I will test it and then maybe I blog about it too.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. So go ahead. The plugin is free, but you need a free account on the Internet Archive site to obtain an API key because you tap in right into this and to connect your site to the interactor Archive. And then step two and three, you just have to make some additional decisions. But they’re very well explained about if you want automatically your site kind of put into the Wayback Machine and all that.

    Just for people who don’t know, the Internet Archive is a nonprofit library of millions of free text, movies, software, music, websites and more. And they run the Wayback Machine which pretty much surfaces previous versions of websites. So if you are new to a company and you want to do a redesign of the website, you probably want to go back and see what have they done in previous redesigns to kind of go back to see what’s important to them. And it’s probably a better way than to ask 15,000 questions.

    Ellen Bauer: Yeah, that’s a nice idea. I haven’t thought about that. I actually love to go sometimes on the Wayback Machine with Manu. Just kind of looking at the old designs we had for our own website. It’s so fun to do that. Old designs of other sites that you loved and really, really fun. You can check out the old WordPress. Org versions or even like the Google Google site. It’s just fun to do that. And you kind of get a little bit of a nostalgic feeling. Oh yes, I remember that.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So when I started Gutenberg Times I had the 2019 default theme on it. And then somewhere in 2020 I think I switched to the Excel theme by Anders Noren and there were a few things that didn’t work that way in the other themes. So I just kind of adopted. And then now I come back and kind of compare what was the old one and what was the new one. It was, it was really interesting because I’m now building the third theme for, for the site and I want to do it myself and now I can do whatever I want with it without having to follow a theme, but I still wanted to make sure that I have all the things that I thought were important also in the new theme. So we’ll see. I’m definitely going to share my journey.

    Ellen Bauer: You plan to update that soon?

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Soon as a relative term.

    Ellen Bauer: When do you do it?

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: I’d like to have it by the end of the year, but we’ll see how that comes out. Yeah. I built it already. I needed an additional plugin for my podcast because I wanted to have the social icons from the podcast directories where our podcast is in. And only the 6.9 now has the possibilities that you can do custom social icons. So I tested that and it works. But I need to wait till it’s out too. So the plugin is available but it’s in the plugin repository. But I have one fix that I need to do. But also I wanted to have a better template for the podcast and the plugin API to register templates. That was in 6.8, but I needed to figure out how that works as well. Not all the things that I talk about. I know how to do it when I want to do it. It’s kind of really interesting.

    Ellen Bauer: Yeah. And it’s always just finding the time for these on the side things.

    What’s Released – WordPress 6.9 Beta 4

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So now we’re coming to the what’s released section of our podcast and the first one is today, Friday, November 7, WordPress 6.9 beta 4 was released. It’s a quiet beta. It has a release post, but that’s on the make blog. Just because there was one thing that they needed to reverse and so they wanted before the release candidate on Tuesday, November 11, they wanted to have another beta to make sure everything works all right or the thing that they changed works all right. Let me put it this way. Yeah. So this is also a good place to talk about last minute WordPress 6.9 feature decisions. Contributors have decided to not move ahead with the enhanced template management feature for this version. The content only editing was also punted to 7.0 as well as the updated block binding UI for external sources, there were a few issues with all three of them during testing sessions and that can’t be While the content only editing was earlier decided that it’s not going to come to 6.9, but the other two, there were issues that couldn’t be resolved in the remaining time before the strength freeze in release candidate one, which is Tuesday. So yeah. Ellen, what are your favorite features for 6.9? Anything standing out for you?

    Ellen Bauer: Yes, I was looking forward to the template management feature of course we have to wait. We have to wait for that.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s still in Gutenberg. Yeah, it’s still in the plugin. It’s just not.

    Ellen Bauer: Then second pick. I still am super excited that at least we start with the commenting option on post. Like on blocks and posts. I’m excited to just have this in there. Like that’s something we haven’t had in WordPress. So yeah, that’s. I think I would pick that as my favorite. And then instead.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Are you getting excited about the new blocks?

    Ellen Bauer: Oh, yes, new blocks as well. So the accordion, it’s actually nice to see that come in because we have started using that in WooCommerce for an update on the. Having the tabs for a description, like a product description, additional information and comments in there. So I think I’m a little bit semi proud. Maybe that pushed it, the accordion block into more attention, into Core and then the. I’m not sure if I have the name right. Is it called Sticky? Sticky Sketchy text? Yeah.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, Stretchy. Stretchy.

    Ellen Bauer: Stretchy. Stretchy. That makes more sense. Yeah, just that’s from a designer perspective. It’s interesting actually to see that in Core because that’s like just a design tool and a fun kind of block. I love seeing that in Core. Yeah. Just nice to see this kind of more fun not experimental, but like just design tool core blocks coming in and then icons block. Really, really nice to have that. But that’s not like needed, wanted. Oh, no, that’s seven.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, the icons block didn’t make it.

    Ellen Bauer: Oh, no. Oh, sorry.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay.

    Ellen Bauer: We have to wait. Well, next year then we will get more excited. Yeah, I want that so badly.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, the icons block as well as the. The block visibility is there as well, but it’s more like the basic kind of feature, the foundation for what’s to come in 7.0. But it’s good to have it in talking about the accordions if you want to kind of get a little bit of a head start on styling accordions. Justin Tadlock just published last week a tutorial on how to style accordions with WordPress 6.9. And he walks you through how to do it in theme JSON and how to do a style variation as well as how to do the pattern for an accordion pattern. So that gives you a head start on updating your theme or your own site with it.

    What’s coming to the developer blog? We have just the editorial meeting yesterday. We just approved a snippet how you can also add structured data to your FAQ accordion. So it gets right into the SEO kind of thing because Google treats the FAQs differently. It kind of does answer question answers quite nicely. So you can make that also with the accordion. And he will publish that probably in about two weeks or three. We’ll see how that comes. Yeah. There’s also on the developer blog where additional theme related things like the border radius, size presets that come into WordPress 6.9 and also I mentioned it, the social icons, custom icons that you want if you want them. Also a tutorial on the developer blog register custom social icons and we have one more that is the how to style forms with theme JSON that comes also with six point nine.

    Ellen Bauer: That’s a big one. Oh, that’s cool.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely.

    Ellen Bauer: Very exciting because that’s one of the things you miss that was missing always for themes and our custom icons. Actually I think it’s a bigger feature than you think because that was always for years one of the requests like how do I get my own icon in there? Like, oh, it’s missing. Like maybe certain countries have their big individual icons that were not what kind of icons icons, but tools, social.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: I can. Websites. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

    Ellen Bauer: I remember there was a German one we were always asked for. I don’t remember what it was, but from different communities you get different requests.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. In Germany there was this ext or next or something like that was a social one. Right. But that kind of folded into LinkedIn now. So. All right, I’ll put the links to the developer blog posts into the show notes and so you can all follow along on that.

    Gutenberg 22.0

    And that brings US to Gutenberg 22.0, and Carlos Bravo was the release lead on that and he kind of said that it was a relatively quiet Gutenberg release because it followed the WordPress point release and it normally prioritizes core quality and bug fixes over new enhancements. So we probably get here pretty quickly go through that.

    Enhancements

    Well, I’ll start with the block library changes in the navigation block. You can have a button create a new page, but you create it and then what happened. Now you have a notice that there was a page created and how to find it. So that’s really cool. It’s a quality of life improvement that. Yeah, you only notice that it’s there or that it’s not there, but it’s missing all the time.

    Ellen Bauer: And the second one was that breadcrumbs now get support for archives. That was missing, just missing before, Birgit.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, so breadcrumbs came in actually with this Release out of experimentation, but it will not make it to 6.9. But the breadcrumbs block is a new block and the archive support was. There were kinds of discussions about how deep does the first version has to go. And now that it’s not getting into 6.9, it just gets. Just ongoing improvements. So it gets into WordPress 7.0.

    Ellen Bauer: Yeah, I love that. For blogs, that makes a huge difference.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely. That’s one thing. Also, when you have a huge site and you have 50 pages or something like that, your visitors most very often get lost. Unless you have additional navigation in there, and breadcrumbs help you so you don’t have to do this all manually and kind of think about how to get back to other places. I really love that. That and that the team actually takes time to get to work on this a little longer. And so the version is actually delightful and not just like an MVP or something like that. Yeah. The next one is that the categories block has a taxonomy CSS class now. So that’s probably only interesting for people that were looking for that and had to do custom CSS to kind of figure that out. But that’s definitely now in Gutenberg 22.0.

    Ellen Bauer: I think having CSS classes for pretty specific things from theme author perspective, just helpful. A lot of time to just have that in there. So I like that. The next one was that I think that’s just added an explanation to the fit text feature that it gets just a description is added, that it overrides the default font settings.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

    Ellen Bauer: So that’s what I wasn’t visible just for users being aware of that.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think so. Yeah. That’s just a mix. Users are aware that sometimes you don’t get the connection, that if you have one option, the other option goes away. Yeah. So.

    Ellen Bauer: And I think that helps. So I think yeah, they just added it fit into the container and then overrides your font’s default font setting. That helps to just explain it better.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely. And just now that we’re talking about it, the stretchy text, they are still not sure if the font size or the font option or separate blocks. So they’re now getting into a variation for 6.9. I have not seen that issue or the pull request actually be merged, but we’ll see if it’s going to be in Release candidate one or it still stays as it is and comes in 5.7, 7.0. Why 5.7? That’s wrong. Yeah. The latest comments block now has an option to display full comments so there were only two versions. One was just the title and then an excerpt. And then now you can have all the full comments displayed in your post template or page template. So that’s also pretty cool.

    Ellen Bauer: One additional new update is also in the global styles and actually Birgit had to help me figure that out. Global styles are now, can now be accessed in the post editor. But you need to have. What is it? You need to have Active show template template. Yeah, show template. And it’s like, okay, where is show template Burgundy? Had to help me out with that one. It was under preview.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: It was the preview of the test.

    Ellen Bauer: So where you, where you look for the tablet and the mobile version of the preview, you also have the show template and I couldn’t find it. And then you get the little icon for global styles.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. And then you can make changes. Yeah, you can make changes to, to your template on the global level, which really helps with. You don’t have to go back and go through the templates and all that. So it’s really interesting. I haven’t really worked with that yet because I didn’t find a need for that. But I, I can see that then all of a sudden post in the template when it says, oh, this is wrong, you just want to go in and make a small change of things. So this is helpful to not have to get out of your post and then have to go into the site editor and the template. And yeah, it’s kind of just a shortcut for.

    Ellen Bauer: I think it also builds like having that connection also builds a little bit more awareness for users of the connection between where what a template actually is and that you can. What global styles are that you have that connection of. Oh, the global styles are connected to the template of this post and if I change something there, it’s changed in the post. I think there’s still difficulty for users to understand that connection if the templates are hidden and the global styles are hidden in just the site editor.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: So that’s a good point.

    Ellen Bauer: It just builds that connection.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s a good point. Yeah. Thank you. I haven’t even thought about it, but that helps people figure out because the template, new WordPress users might not have that problem, but long time WordPress users, they never had to deal with templates because it was all, it was all something that the theme developer would do for them and they were just using it. But now that they have control over it, they also kind of need to be aware what they’re doing with it. And the enhanced template management is Also part of it, that it needs to be a little bit less confusing. And also follow some. Some things that they say if I change something on a template, I don’t want it to go public without me knowing. So I want a draft section there and keep the other template going until the other one, the new one is finished. So that is something that comes with enhanced template management and I’m really looking forward to that.

    Ellen Bauer: That will be exciting also to make templates more exciting to play with because. Yeah, I think there’s still an amazing amount of confusion of what a template versus a page actually is. So just if users play more with custom templates and build their own, I think that builds more awareness of that. The difference between these two.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. So I think one of the last things that we want to talk about here is the. That the math block, which is a new block coming to 6.9. Yeah. Yeah. I’m love it. I actually was in school, I had all these big formulas to talk about. To write and. Yeah. And I was never kind of thinking, oh, I could do a blog post about things that. Because I had no way of knowing how to do the formulas. Yeah.

    Ellen Bauer: And you can’t really output them.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And they follow the mathwork, follows latex formatting, which is the math kind of language, and then puts it into your site. And now it also. It’s now enabled. Horizontal scrolling is now enabled because those formulas can be really, really long. And so you can kind of have a horizontal scrolling on your formula so you don’t have to kind of put line breaks in there where no line breaks. I want that.

    Ellen Bauer: I want to start a blog to blog about math. I was never good at math, but I always. It’s admiring too. I love it. So maybe we should all start blogging about math now.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah.

    Ellen Bauer: Problems.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Math problems. Yeah. Especially fractions and all that kind of. What was it? Five. You’re very long.

    Ellen Bauer: So we need the scrolling.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, we can do the scrolling. Yeah.

    Experiments

    And I’m gonna scroll further through the changelog and I’m stopping at the experiments because the real time collaboration experiment is still on in Gutenberg and we talked about it, but there have also been some changes now. And one is that it’s supporting synced post data and it also the YJS import is actually behind the experimental flag, which is actually a code quality thing. And they implemented CRDT persistence for collaborative editing. And that just means that’s the. The saving of your immediate changes and then the sync part that works persistently on your collaborative editing plane. It’s a really complicated thing to do. But they seem to have figured it out with that library, the YJS and Kevin, who is the maintainer of that, was part of the initial MVP of the collaborative editing and now. Yeah, so it’s really cool.

    And you need to go install 2020.0 Gutenberg plugin and then go to the Gutenberg menu item and enable the look at the experiments page and enable real time collaboration. So there are a few steps there to get to that, but that’s good. So it all stays behind the experimental flag as long as it’s in development. Good.

    What’s in Active Development or Discussed

    So for the developers amongst you listener, there is. I’m sharing an issue about the version 2 of the build WordPress scripts where Riad Benguella, one of the lead architects of Gutenberg has opened this issue about kind of making scripts a little bit more flexible and also have the point that it comes easier and feels a little bit more simple. But that’s all is good. Good goals I would say but I think the technology is a little bit more complicated. But I will share that for all the developers on the show or who listen here to check out because Riad needs people who build plugins and have a build process and use the WordPress scripts to actually test the version 2 so they can catch all the edge cases and all the use cases before they actually migrate that all over. So that’s my thing. Alan, is there something that you want to remind people about upcoming events or releases.

    Ellen Bauer: Actually I can’t think of anything at the moment.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: So if people want to connect with you, where would they find you on the.

    Ellen Bauer: I’m definitely on the Slack WordPress Developer Slack or on social. I think I’m moving more and more to Blue Sky.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay.

    Ellen Bauer: And yeah also on X and there and YouTube is like a thing I want to be more present and add more content to. So yeah, I have a YouTube channel. I think you can find me just under my name on all of these or maybe Elmer studio on the YouTube. I’m not sure. I think both is possible.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay. Yeah I will share share this all in the show notes and as always. Oh I wanted to announce something. Sorry on November 13th. That’s next week. If you listen to this over the weekend you get the chance to see the developer hours come back to the online workshops on Learn on Meetup and JuanMa and Jonathan Bosinger are going over the developer parts of WordPress 6.9 one is the Data Views and Data Forms and Fields API. The other one is the Abilities API and they might even be covering Interactivity API, seeing what kind of time they have. But that’s on meetup on November 13, just to let you know.

    Ellen Bauer: Exciting.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes. As always, the show notes will be published on GutenbergTimes.com/podcast. This is episode 124. 124. And if you have questions and suggestions or news you want us to include, send them to changelogutenbergtimes.com that’s changelogutenbergtimes.com and if you want to leave a review on Apple or podcast or Pocketcast or any other of your favorite podcast, only.

    Ellen Bauer: Five star, of course.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, I, I take anyone. Yeah, that, that’s kind of how I connect with the listeners and if you can improve.

    Ellen Bauer: But you deserve the best.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, thank you. Thank you. I think so. But yeah, maybe other people have a different opinion and my, my opinion only counts when I’m home alone. So. Yeah. So thanks everyone. And until the next time, be well. And we see we hear each other just before Thanksgiving. And thanks to Ellen Bauer for coming to us.

    Ellen Bauer: Thank you. Bye, everyone.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Take care.

    Ellen Bauer: Bye. Bye.

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