In Episode 127 of the GT Changelog podcast, Birgit Pauli-Haack and Jessica Lyschik dive deep into the upcoming release of WordPress 7.0, focusing on the features arriving with beta 2 and their impact on users and developers. They begin by emphasizing the importance of testing betas, especially for plugin and theme creators, highlighting how early testing helps prevent compatibility issues at launch. A walk-through of the beta testing process, tools like the beta tester plugin, and considerations for time zone differences during the official release (scheduled for April 9th) are discussed.

The majority of their conversation centers around the headline features of WordPress 7.0. Real-time collaboration steals the spotlight, now allowing multiple users to edit posts and pages simultaneously—streamlining workflows and minimizing version conflicts. The episode also celebrates the introduction of visual revisions within the block editor, making change tracking clearer and more intuitive. Other notable updates include responsive block visibility controls, enhanced navigation and submenu options, improved lightbox support for gallery blocks, and the long-awaited introduction of the icon and breadcrumbs blocks.

Birgit Pauli-Haack and Jessica Lyschik also discuss the new content-only pattern editing feature, revamped backend color schemes, and incremental improvements for both end-users and developers, such as the font library UI and under-the-hood advances. They note that some planned features, like the playlist and tabs blocks, did not make the cut for 7.0 but might arrive in future releases. The episode ends with practical advice: test your sites early and stay informed to ensure a seamless transition to WordPress 7.0.

Show Notes / Transcript

• Editor: Sandy Reed
• Logo: Mark Uraine
• Production: Birgit Pauli-Haack

Show Notes

Special guest: Jessica Lyschik

• https://x.com/jessicalyschik
• https://www.youtube.com/@jessicalyschik
• profiles.wordpress.org/luminuu
• Greyd Conversations, to be found on YouTube

WordPress 7.0

• Help Test WordPress 7.0
• Iframed Editor Changes in WordPress 7.0
• What made it into WordPress 7.0
• What’s new in Gutenberg 22.6? (25 February)

Stay in Touch

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So welcome to our 127th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk mostly about WordPress 7.0 because Beta 2 has been out and a little bit about Gutenberg 22.6, but most of what’s in that release is actually coming to WordPress 7.0.

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. And today, Jessica Lyschik is with me on the show again, and we will tackle most of the WordPress 7.0 updates. Jessica is a core contributor to WordPress, default theme co-lead for Twenty Twenty-Four, speed building champion Twenty Twenty-Five, and works as a senior developer for Grade, a company building WordPress products for agencies and large companies. And Jessica is a regular host on the Grade Conversations to be found on YouTube. How are you today, Jessica? Welcome to the show again.

Jessica Lyschik: Thanks for having me. I’m good. I’m good. I mean, the sun is shining outside, so I’m expecting hopefully a nice workday today and then catch some sun rays because it’s been a long winter here. Yeah, it’s been very cold, very moody, cloudy. So the sun is very nice. Having some sunshine is a very nice change.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I was walking the streets of Munich the other day and I saw the little plants kind of coming out, crocuses and whites and yellow. So spring is coming.

Jessica Lyschik: Definitely, definitely.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And it’s— I actually saw a sunrise at 6:30 in the morning. So the days are getting longer too, which is part of my mood changing thing. Yeah.

What’s Released – WordPress 7.0

So WordPress 7.0 comes in big steps and WordPress 7.0 Beta 2 was released just yesterday and we’re recording this on February 27th. So let’s go through the list of things that actually made it into 7.0. I’m also sharing in the show notes, not only the list, but also a link to the help test WordPress 7.0 that the test team has put together with some nice instructions and videos on how things are supposed to work. And you have to— can go in and test if they’re actually working like that or if something else is breaking. And you ask dear listeners to help do that. I also always kind of say, the best way to learn what’s in WordPress 7.0 is to heed to the call of testing, because that’s the first step to learn what’s working for you, what works with your sites and with your plugins. And it will be really helpful to know this before the release comes out. So if you just follow the instructions on how to present feedback and bug reports. Your team has started testing.

Jessica Lyschik: When you have a plugin and you do not look at the Beta versions or release candidates and suddenly the release date rolls around and you’re not prepared and clients update their websites and then they say, hey, my site’s broken, then you’re in trouble. So avoid that as best as possible. That’s why I’m glad that we have Beta phase and release candidate phase so we can like really have a closer look. And it’s so easy with the Beta tester plugin. To be honest, that’s still the one way I’m using it, just installing the plugin. I configure the default configuration a little bit differently only to show me Beta and release candidates versions. And then it’s just hit update and go for it with whatever installation you have at the moment. So that’s actually, I find this to be one of the easiest ways without needing to have big technical knowledge about that. Of course there’s WP CLI, there’s many other ways you can achieve that, but for me, this is probably the easiest and can be thrown on any installation, local or online, probably not live sites, but any staging or testing environment that you have.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So exactly. And it’s a good point. Don’t test this on a live site.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah. Things can break. I mean, that’s why it’s called a Beta version or release candidate. Things are supposed to break. I spotted an issue this morning with something, not a big issue, but it is an issue. So we have to look into this, but we still have time. How long are we away? 6 weeks, I think about 6 weeks.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So yeah, April 9th is the final release date. So we are a little bit 5 weeks more than 6 weeks.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And it will be, I just saw the note, will be released during Contributor Day at WordCamp Asia. So some of the release squad members will be in Mumbai to hit the big button. But of course, it’s all remotely and you can do it from anywhere. So it doesn’t really matter where the release squad is. The only thing that might screw it a little bit, skew it, not screw it, skew it a little bit is the time difference between where the other release squad members are and the ones in Mumbai. But for Europe, it’s a 3.5-hour time difference. So it’s not that big of a deal. You just need to organize it.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, usually they are fast in Europe, their releases are in the evening. So something around 7 PM, 8 PM sometime. It depends on when the dates are announced and the times. So it will be a bit earlier for us in the day, but still like afternoon-ish. So not in the middle of the night. So, but of course, if you move further to US time zones, like East Coast, West Coast is particularly early for them, I guess. If it’s fun, it could be like early morning for them.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, could be in the middle of the night.

Jessica Lyschik: Oh no, no, we have to, we have to think backwards. It will be like, I don’t know, but is it like in the afternoon on the 9th? Do you know more details about that?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I was looking for the release party. Post, but I haven’t seen it.

Jessica Lyschik: I mean, there’s an overview post somewhere.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I remember that. Yeah. On the Make blog. Definitely. I’m just looking at it when the release party schedule is.

Jessica Lyschik: I’ll see if, uh, there’s only a date so far on the, on the overview.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Beta release was about 3 PM UTC. So that’s 4 o’clock in the afternoon in Europe. -9, that’s about 7 o’clock in the morning.

Jessica Lyschik: It’s early morning. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: In Pacific time. Yeah. So about that time. Yeah. I’ll get a better look at that when we get closer to see when they actually schedule the release parties. But it’s always great fun to be in the core channel to kind of see it coming together.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So that’s about the process. April 9th, we mentioned it, is the release. We have release candidate. So Beta is the feature freeze. So after that, only bug fixes are going to be merged into core. Release candidate 1 is on March 19th, and that is considered a string freeze. There will be release candidate 1, 2, and 3, and only things that are— don’t have a string. Well, the reason why they do string freeze is because then the translator can start translating the version or the new strings into their respective languages. And to give them about 3 weeks to 4 weeks is a good number. But when you don’t do string freeze, then they have to start all over again when the new version comes out.

Jessica Lyschik: So many things change. I mean, things will change. Maybe there’s always the thing that a bug appears and maybe strings have to be changed. So there’s always some moving parts, but it is way much reduced if you would just, if you’re stopping to actually make massive changes so people can catch up with things and then when it’s just a few more strings that need to be adjusted or retranslated, then it’s not like 500 new strings, but only 5 the day before the release. So yeah, it makes total sense. I mean, it has worked great over the past many years that we’ve been doing this like that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely. Yeah. So now with all the talk about the release, what’s actually going to be in WordPress 7.0? And there have been quite a few. So there was a roadmap and then there were these tracking issues that are on the Gutenberg repo. So there is not a whole lot of mystery behind what’s coming, but we definitely should talk through that. And one of the biggest features is the real-time collaboration. So now the message that somebody else is editing your post will go away, or it will still be there, but you still can access the post and then you can see who else is working on the post. And you can have more than one person in the post or in the page to actually edit that and not get into trouble with losing content. So that’s a feature that has been a long time coming. And it’s also something that has been tested already in the enterprise section for, I think, a little over a year or half a year since August last year. So, and now it comes to WordPress core. So it’s really cool. I’ve, I like it.

Jessica Lyschik: I have not seen it in action yet because I mostly work on things where it’s only me and rarely anyone else, but I’ve seen the notes feature. This is like the kind of site quest, if you will, which has been already around since 6.9, if I remember correctly.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right.

Jessica Lyschik: But yeah, I’ve just opened the GitHub issue around it that is linked in the testing post. And it’s quite interesting. It will be interesting to see. I think we have to spin up a session with my colleagues and all go into one page and see what it looks like, how it feels like.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So yeah, there are some avatar bubbles showing up on multiple places. Yeah, it’s kind of in the headline and also when they’re both there. And also if they’re the notes and the real-time collaboration are kind of merging now. So the same avatars that show up in the notes will also show up in the, in as where the cursor is. So it’s kind of really interesting to see. I think it’s not only for enterprise, it’s also for if you have a blog site, you probably also have a designer or a person that manages your media. You can all be in the post and kind of do things just right before publishing and you don’t have to coordinate, get out of the post, get into the post. What do we change? Yeah.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It will save things. Even if you have a team of two, it’s still an interesting feature. And I’m really hoping as working on the WordPress developer blog that we kind of cut out the step where we do everything in Google Docs, do all the comments there. And then once everybody kind of has their word and say to move it and that we actually start creating the post in the blog and then just do the reviews from there. The only caveat is that to review and help, you have to be a member of the blog. You have to be an editor of the blog. But I think everybody who’s writing and reviewing either will be on the blog or will in the future or already has written a blog post. So they should be able to do it.

Right now it’s only me doing it. Yeah, I publish in January and in February a post and it’s only me doing it. But it’s interesting to do this via notes. Yeah, because you get emails and all of that. Yeah, already. So it’s a good feature. The real-time collaboration, I haven’t done anything on that yet because it just came out. Yeah. So it’s not yet implemented. Anything else about real-time collaboration? Oh yeah. At the moment, and that’s with Beta 2, it’s a setting that you can opt into. So you have to go to settings. Writing, and I think the fourth from the top is the enable collaborative editing or real-time collaboration. Otherwise it wouldn’t work. I think for later versions it will be an opt-out, but it will be on the same space.

Jessica Lyschik: Where do you put this? I’ve just opened up the preferences. I have a test site which I spin this one up.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: But you go to the admin settings, the normal settings for writing.

Jessica Lyschik: Ah, the normal setting. Okay. I was in the editor, so that’s probably why I’m not seeing it there.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. It’s not in the preferences. It’s in the admin dashboard and then settings and then writing.

Jessica Lyschik: Writing. Yeah. Oh yeah. There it is. Enable real-time collaboration. Let’s just try this out, how it looks like.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Jessica Lyschik: I mean, I’m curious to see.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: You don’t see it when, when you are alone, all alone.

Jessica Lyschik: Well, I could create a second user and then just—

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, and switch over in the second browser.

Jessica Lyschik: Switch over in another browser or another incognito tab.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think it could be in a different browser window. I tested it with Firefox and Google just to kind of not get into the way of each other.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, you need a different browser tab in the same browser. It’s not going to work because then you’re logged in with the same user, so you need to be logged in with two different users in order to make that happen.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Jessica Lyschik: So it’s either an incognito window in the same browser or a different browser.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Basically, you log in as admin, but you can switch the user over. There’s a user switching plugin. That’s what I’m using by John Blackburn. He has a very easy user switching plugin, and I’ll share the plugin link in the show notes. But then you can switch over to a different user. And then because I uploaded two avatars, so I can see the difference and all that. In the same note, another big feature, it’s not a new feature, but it’s a total revamp, is the visual revisions.

Jessica Lyschik: Oh yeah. Yeah. This is a big change. I’ve, I’ve tested this out before we started because I was really curious to see and Yeah, this is no more text walls and complicated HTML tags to understand and everything like before. I mean, I think the old one does have an advantage for like someone like me who’s used to looking at code all day and I can get my way around it. But I guess for many people who are not this, do not have an eye for this, this is like a massive wall of text and some green and some red stuff flying around somewhere. So I found it a very interesting way to create the revisions, to visualize the changes. I mean, I only made minimal changes to a page, like adding a paragraph, removing, removing a sentence and whatnot. But yeah, it’s actually kind of interesting.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So one of the major features is it’s in the editor. You don’t have to switch screens to see your revisions. That’s also a plus. It knows what blocks are. So every change is filled in red and green. Red when you remove something, green when you add something. And it has a little banner on the right-hand side to outline.

Jessica Lyschik: To indicate where on the page about where. I mean, I only had a short page, so it wasn’t that big of a deal, but it kind of, I think it really showed where it was. Like if there’s a specific paragraph you’re looking at, then let me just open up this.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s really nice. Ella did a fabulous job on that.

Jessica Lyschik: And there’s also not just red and green, but there’s also yellow if something inside a paragraph changes that is not like completely adding or I think I know for this one, I added something inside an existing block. So the block itself is outlined in yellow. Hey, something changed here. And then the part where I added the words that is highlighted in green. So it’s like also kind of detailed and not just red and green like before, but you have also yellow, which indicates some sort of change, maybe with either an additional removal.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. It’s really nice. It’s very visual and staying in the block editor is such a relief. You don’t have to go back and forth and you have on the top of the screen. You also have the different versions of things. So you can, it’s a slider with the dates attached. So you can kind of, and the publish button changes to a restore button. So you can select the version that you wanna restore here.

Jessica Lyschik: And you can also exit there. So it’s like you do not have the editing ability anymore. So the entire editing ability is stripped from that page. And instead you have either restore or exit. So I think this makes it distraction-free. So it’s also good because then people will not start editing inside that. It’s just a visual representation of things that have changed.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Exactly. Yeah. Good. And then do you want to take the next feature or?

Jessica Lyschik: I have not. I have seen this. So I was curious to see because I saw something else down in the Gutenberg 22.6 Release notes, if you will. But I saw that when you’re trying to hide any block, you can now hide them specifically either on desktop, tablet, or mobile. So it’s not just on or off, but you can now, in WordPress core without any extra plugins, say this either show only on desktop, show only on tablet, show only on mobile. The little downside here is that if I’m not mistaken, you can still not change the ranges of the viewports. You can?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, no, that’s still hard-coded.

Jessica Lyschik: Exactly. So you’re still tied to the default states of what is desktop, what is tablet, what is mobile. So that is the little downside, if I say so, because oftentimes, at least in my experience, people want to really hone in. I want mobile to go to up until this specific size and tablet to be in this range. And they often differ from what WordPress offers by default. So that’s why many plugins have been popular in the past and many different integrations are there. So I think it’s important to mention that it does work. I guess it does work because otherwise it wouldn’t be in the Beta version, but it is restricted to what core says about the viewports.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So yeah, yeah. And it’s a, it’s a range. It’s mobile starts at 480 and desktop starts at 768 and in between is the tablet. So I have found that I cannot make my browser window small enough to see the mobile version, but that’s, I think, a setting on my desktop. I’m not quite sure, but if you use the developer tools, you can see it or the previews, of course. Yeah, the preview inside the block editor will show you yes or no. With 20.6, they also added a feature for the list view where you see the eye for visible or invisible. It also has a little tooltip saying, okay, it’s visible on desktop or it’s visible on mobile and hidden on tablet and these kind of things. So there’s a little bit more visual support for figuring out why is that block not working. Yeah.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, that’s true. Yeah, it seems to work pretty well. So I just played around with it and put a paragraph to hide on desktop. It does no longer show at desktop, but once I make the browser smaller, it appears again. So seems to be working pretty well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah, the next feature is, well, it’s kind of a set of features for the navigation block. That has been coming in. There are a few things that are making navigation easier. One is that you now have control for your hamburger menus, your mobile hamburger menus, or if you want them on desktop too. Yeah. So you can now create different overlays for your navigation. And 7.0 will come with a few patterns. So you don’t have to do the whole creative work. You can just kind of say, okay, I will use this one and this one. It’s on the basis of template parts, so it can be reused on other places and templates if you have different overlays. And so I really like that.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, it gives more customization that wasn’t there before because you just only had a mobile version of the navigation you created. And I know from our experience at Grade that people like to switch up things in this mobile view because they want to add a button or add information or whatever, or change the menu items by default to have less menu items than they would have on desktop. So this was only possible with other tools, and now it’s in core as well. I also played around with it a bit, just adding random blocks to it. So it’s not just limited to specifically a navigation, but can add anything you need into that because it’s a template part, as you said.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So yeah, right.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So it actually is then also possible to create mega menus, which is also something that a lot of people wanted to do with those template parts.

Jessica Lyschik: Well, I haven’t played with, played it that far so far. I haven’t looked at the settings in detail, but. I guess I have to test this out.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Well, there are a lot of people who are going to be testing things and I wish they would share a little bit more about their successes or, well, they never really talk about their successes, mostly about, oh, this is a bug that needs to change kind of thing. But it would be really cool to see some other implementations. Yeah.

They also revamped the submenus a little bit with handling that. So it now defaults to open or closed states, and you have a place to put the close button for that. Yeah, the patterns we talked— the overlay patterns is kind of with a black background, with an orange background, with a side info as well. So it’s pretty cool. Oh yeah, and what also changed in the navigation is that you can now— well, you always could add new pages when you create a navigation bar, create a new page, but now you can, you have a toggle switch that you can actually publish it. So the create a page is then available in your pages, but the menu works. And they did also a fantastic job making the links in the menu a little bit more smart. Yeah. So when you change the title or the slug of a page, it now reflects in the menu where it’s actually used. So that is, was also a big big pain point that you always had to think about, oh, I changed the slug of my page or my post. Now I need to update two menu items because I have a header, a footer, a header menu and a footer menu. And yeah, it’s all kind of a, it was a little bit.

Jessica Lyschik: Or another five menus in different places that you all need to update and you forgot about them. So yeah, that’s actually very nice. I just opened up also the, when you have a navigation block focused and go select one of the pages that is in there. It now shows a little, I’m not sure how long this has been there, but there’s a box popping out saying the title of the link and then it links to this specific page, which is a page. So the post type is shown and also what status it has. So it is published, is it draft or whatever. So there’s, I think if I click on that, yeah, I can now go directly into editing and I can go back. Oh, this is fancy.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. That’s also fairly new. I think it was in 22. So it’s between 6.9 and 7.0. It’s a new feature. It’s a new feature.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah. I think this will definitely enhance the whole working with navigation, with navigation in general, because to be honest, it has been a pain to work with navigation. So I’m glad to see some improvements here. They’re looking really good. Oh, you can even add more stuff, description and real attribute. Nice. That’s looking good. I like that. I honestly like that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Awesome. Very good, Birgit. What’s next on the list?

Jessica Lyschik: Next on the list is gallery block add lightbox support.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Ooh, that’s my personal favorite. Yeah. Well, lightbox support was there before, right?

Jessica Lyschik: I was just saying that the lightbox has been around for a while. But yeah, not only for images, right? Not for the gallery.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It was for the gallery, but it only added the click to open big. It wasn’t a real lightbox. It kind of— you needed to close it and then look at the next picture and open it up again. And now you actually have navigation with next and previous, so you could actually have a really nice gallery viewing experience. And I was waiting for this for quite a while. Not that I didn’t find any plugins that do that, but yeah, to have it in the browser.

Jessica Lyschik: I think that’s a very nice feature because it reduces the need for a plugin if the functionality is enough for the user. I mean, there will always be plugins that enhance this functionality or create another variation of a lightbox with even more features. There’s always like that, but it’s, it’s good to have that because it’s just, I’ve never really worked so much with galleries in the past, but probably I will do more because now you can continue switching to the other images without even having to close that. So I think that’s really a good quality of life improvement.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Those sites that have big visual assets on there, like pictures and they have portfolios or they want to show a decoration or be it food. Yeah. Each one of the sites. And what I like about it is also that you can swipe it on mobile. You don’t need to—

Jessica Lyschik: Oh, nice.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s not animated, but it’s definitely there.

So the thing that moved to the next version in WordPress is showing the captions somewhere on that. Yeah. Right now it’s just a picture and the navigation, but that’s a huge step forward. What also is new for the gallery block and many blocks is that the sidebar where the settings and the styles are now also have a content tab where you can see, for instance, all the pictures in a list and then just open it up and add an alt text to it, for instance. So you can have an easier way to update the content of things. You’ll see that also on other blocks that are kind of multi-blocks, like the social icons or the buttons or the list, that you get now a little content section on the right-hand side. And you don’t have to, for that, open up the list view. It’s a little bit of duplication, but I think it’s a different mindset when you just want to edit that particular group of blocks and see it in one view.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, but you can, I just created a gallery on my test site and picked some of the pictures. And when you are in this content section and you click on an image, you are put to the specific image block within the gallery. So I don’t think this is too much of a crazy thing. Yeah, you are right about the duplication that if you are on the gallery block itself, you can add something. That’s probably easier on the right side now to add something. But you also get the context options that you would have in the list view. So this is the duplicated part. But to be honest, I mean, I work a lot with the list view. I always— the first thing I do when I come into a brand new editor is go to preferences and say, list view, always show list view. Because I still don’t get why this is not the default. But yeah, for people who may be not using the list view too much, I think this is a pretty nice way to work with the gallery block. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And there are also people who are overwhelmed by the list view. Yeah. So kind of, they don’t.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, I can understand. But yeah, I’m a big fan of the list view.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So yeah, there will be two new blocks. There’s a breadcrumbs block and the icon block. And the icon block just made it out of experimental with 22.6.

Jessica Lyschik: I think this was a very close call, right? I just saw Ryan’s post the other day. It’s like, we made it. And I was like, oh, that’s close. Isn’t Beta 1 already out yet?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, no, it was, uh, actually in Beta, but the discussion was about— not about the icon block per se, but it only has limited functionality. When you— for a designer, you cannot register your own icon collection.

Jessica Lyschik: That would have been my question. Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And that has been the API that was too close to be comfortable in creating a new API at the last minute, so to speak. And they said that needs to be similar for a moment. And that was pushed in 7.1, but you still can use the icons that are in the block editor already.

Jessica Lyschik: It mostly, it will be arrows or the chevrons or maybe something like pencil or image or home. Yeah. The default ones are there. So it’s, I would say for, for the, for the beginning, it’s fine. And I think for the extensibility, it’s definitely needed that we have an API to add any kind of icon that we want or that the user needs because people work with the most different things. I think the same, we had the same thing with the social icons block, if I remember correctly, like you had a fixed set, but then later on. It was added the ability that you can upload your own icons, if I’m correct.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Jessica Lyschik: So I would very much look forward to potentially in 7.1 that we get the ability to extend this icon library to whatever icons we need, have an upload.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. I think designers really work, love working with icons and when they design sites, it would be really helpful to actually have the branded icons, whatever they have to be uploaded. But yeah, in the release post of 22.6, Bernie Reiter, who was a release lead, he uploaded an implementation which makes perfect sense, which is the location for a map, kind of, yeah, what’s the address, what’s the link for Google Maps, and what are the ratings, so to speak. And you can all do that with the icon set that’s already in the block editor. It was worth it, even with not registering the API, to put that into a core. And it’s still helpful.

Jessica Lyschik: I mean, the icon block has been long awaited, so it was about time.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And the other block is the breadcrumbs block, which I’m really happy that it made it because that’s a very versatile block. It has a lot of smartness behind it where you can put it on any page and then it figures out what are the breadcrumbs to get to that page and also to get back again. So you could do categories, archives, subpages, parent pages, child pages. It’s all picking up those things. And it’s a really nice addition for larger websites to have a user find their way back or orient themselves on the website.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, I think there’s also enough settings to work with it. So it’s looking good. I just added it to my test page. You have all the color, typography, dimensions, border. So there’s, there’s something to do with it. I would say.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, you can definitely work with that. So then the existing blocks obviously also get some improvements. Do you have any favorite of those? I do. So the paragraph has two new things. One is the indentation. So you can make a paragraph or on a page manage the indentation of the first line in a paragraph. There are two versions of it that you need to handle in the settings page. One is to have the first paragraph not indented, but all the subsequent paragraphs. And then if you toggle that off, then also the first paragraph is indented. And that is that it’s in the English-speaking countries, the first paragraph is not indented. But in the right-to-left and other countries, even if they are left-to-right, they always want all the paragraphs indented. So it’s a different standard for publications in different countries. So they needed to take care of that. But the default is to have the first paragraph not indented and all the subsequent paragraphs are.

Jessica Lyschik: Interesting.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Jessica Lyschik: It’s like I usually do not come around that the need for this. But obviously if there’s a need for it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. A lot of publications have that as standard, especially those that are in the news and long-form content publications like essays and that kind of thing.

Jessica Lyschik: Apparently I do not read those, so I do not have any experience with that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Or you just haven’t noticed it because it feels natural.

Jessica Lyschik: But probably, yeah, yeah, I maybe, maybe that’s also the case. I don’t know. Yeah, but it’s interesting to see that. I was wondering, didn’t we have something like this before, or was it something else, or I’m mixing this up with something? I don’t know.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And the second formatting part for paragraph block is that automatic text columns. So you can have a larger paragraph and say, okay, but I need this into a smaller space, but I have multiple columns. And that also works very well. That was actually a plugin from the Block Editor Learn program. There was one course that actually created that kind of columns. So I’m glad that it made it to core because I really found it nice to have that possible. It automatically creates those columns. You can say 2 columns or 3 columns, and it’s really nice. You need to enable it through the typography, the 3-dot menu.

Jessica Lyschik: I was just about to say, I’m not seeing the setting. Where is it? Ah, here it is. Columns.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, columns. And also the indentation. And that’s also where you’ll find the fit the text into that. So there are typography changes, but right now only, I think, available for the paragraph block.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, it made sense to have moved to the tools panel to get a bit more in the technical side, because if I’m looking now at the typography settings that are available, but this list is like endless. Yeah, it’s getting endless. So having this to be hidden by default and you can, if you need the to change something, you edit. That’s something, yeah, definitely to not clutter the sidebar too much.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So yeah.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a good call to always look at the three dots in the menu to see, okay, what other options do I have available there? Because they may not be visible just, and you look stupid like I did to find the columns.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: You look not that stupid.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, it’s just like, well, why, why I’m not seeing this? Where is this? Is this a setting somewhere? It’s like panicking on the inside on the podcast. I know it’s, it’s like day-to-day business.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So yeah, I’m all good. So what else is in the current block? There are so many things in there. So the font library has now its own menu item in the appearance menu. Yeah. Nothing else.

Jessica Lyschik: So it’s available for any themes if I recall correctly.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So it’s not—

Jessica Lyschik: you can now do all the stuff. Yeah, it’s exactly the same like the modal. You just have it like as in the regular backend, basically. It’s been like extracted from the editor to be its own backend page.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Jessica Lyschik: But it’s in the new style. I just realized that when switching between the default themes, we have the overview to switch the themes. It’s like still the we did get a little change in the backend. Maybe we can talk about that later. But when you are on themes, you have still this dark, not dark, but lighter gray, very light gray background. And it’s no rounded corners. And when you go into fonts, you have this more site editor-like white background and rounded corners around. I just realized that there’s this kind of difference.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I think that the team really wanted to do the data views. Use components from the data views for these new pages. And it will also be, and I just saw that for the Beta 2, that the connector for the AI client, that the connector page is under Settings. Yep. And the page also follows that data view.

Jessica Lyschik: Correct.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Design from what’s actually going to be the new admin design that’s not coming to 7.0, but some of the pages are, look a little bit different yet. Now.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Jessica Lyschik: I just see, I just see these small details like instantly. So I was like, oh, this looks different.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. It looks a little bit fresher. It’s my personal view on that.

Jessica Lyschik: And I, I think the most visual change everyone will have is when they log in. So, or when they upgrade to 7.0 and they have not seen the Beta or release candidate that suddenly the default color scheme changes. In the backend. So I think this will be a bit of a woo moment for everyone who is not like looking into this before. So if I guess it’s a shout out to everyone who’s working with clients who do not see a Beta version before, be prepared because I’m sure there will be questions coming in from everyone like, my admin looks different. What happened?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, the buttons all have a different color. Yeah.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, the, the, I think the black is a bit darker if I remember correctly. And of course the blue shines very differently. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So, but the color scheme was available before. It’s called the modern.

Jessica Lyschik: Yes, correctly.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So it’s now just the default. I don’t think we have materialized any writing about that. So I kind of need to look at the core changes. Right now I’m just looking at the block changes, but yeah. Oh, and one thing that we should mention is the content-only pattern editing that’s now coming with 7.0. And that is a way, if you have a pattern that you put into a post or a page, that the edit the pattern is kind of reduced to edit the content of it. So you don’t have to change the pattern. Yeah. And I think that’s reducing a little bit the overwhelm. And the danger that people get into when they just use pattern, that they are kind of, you still can edit them, throw out the image and put a different block in there. You always can, you can change the headline, paragraph, whatever the pattern is designating as content only. Blocks, patterns, headlines, paragraphs, lists, buttons, those can all be just added, just change the content of it. But there is an edit button on the right edit pattern, and it’s for unsynced patterns as well as for sync patterns. The sync patterns has a different workflow when you change the original. That was always in there, but now this is coming to the unsynced patterns as well. When there are multiple patterns in multiple blocks in a pattern. So they’re kind of designated a section and then you can reduce the trouble a content editor can get themselves into.

Jessica Lyschik: I see. I see. Yeah, it certainly looks different. Yeah, you have different buttons. But yeah, you cannot go into like— yeah, you can like make it bold or italic or any of the work with the text. But yeah, you cannot say I want the button color to change. Is this the default for all patterns? As you said, it’s like I’ve now just added a regular pattern. And it’s not synced. So I assume it’s not synced.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Let me check.

Jessica Lyschik: I think so. Interesting. So when I go to edit pattern, oh, I now have to go to edit pattern in the toolbar. In the sidebar. I have now edit pattern.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Jessica Lyschik: No, no, in the block toolbar.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Jessica Lyschik: That’s the block toolbar. You can say edit pattern and then you get all the controls for each block to move them, delete them, whatever. And then you can go back and then you have, when you are in the pattern, you have only the editing ability as you described. So you can, cannot change the blocks itself, but you can like change the contents. I can change the image and set an alternative text, but I cannot say, give it a different aspect ratio or use a different image size or whatever.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Or make the paragraph a list or something like that. There, those decisions.

Jessica Lyschik: So this is actually very good to know because I just stumbled upon that and, ooh, this will be why I wanted to do this. This will be interesting because that’s like, that’s a huge change. I can see the struggle people will have who are not aware of this to get into the editor. They have added a pattern, simply a pattern, and now they want to change the heading. For example, and now on 7.0, they’re like, the possibility to change the heading is gone. And they do not realize that they have to click on the edit pattern block first in order to change the heading level, for example. So I think this could be from the user experience part.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, a little bit of a stumble block. Yeah, absolutely. The dev note, and I see, I saw the draft of this dev note for that. There’s also a way for site admins to opt out of content-only. That especially if you are working with clients or you’re creating themes, you probably want to, because you want to edit the pattern all the time. You can opt out of it with a filter. And both are available for PHP as well as for JavaScript. And as a plugin developer or theme developer, you can designate patterns as content-only. And with an attribute in the pattern. Block thing. Those who create custom blocks, they can also designate in the block JSON which attributes are content only. You give it a role equals content in the block JSON. So there are multiple ways to kind of skin that cat, as they say in America. So for the end user, I think the advantage is that there is no ambiguity if I change that. Is that getting me into trouble or something like that? Yeah.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah. Yeah. From that point of view, I’m coming from a different point of view where the user is used to working with that and suddenly they cannot on the first glance, they cannot edit stuff anymore. Like they cannot change the heading level or font, font size, font, font family, whatever. So I think from that perspective, this will be a bit of a struggle.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So yeah. But I think the edit pattern button is prominent enough in the sidebar. But yeah, we’ll kind of need to see what the verdict is about that.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, yeah, true, true. So this will be an interesting thing to catch on, especially if you’re a heavy pattern user. This will be very interesting.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I think the—

Jessica Lyschik: I mean, I do see, I do see, don’t get me wrong, I do see the point in like having this content only. I mean, we have something very similar in our Grid plugin. Where you can lock down, like you have the structure, but you can only edit the content. It’s very, very similar. So there is the need for this. It’s just like coming when you are already working with WordPress and then you’re coming to this. That is the issue that I’m seeing. So, but for real, for real, the, yeah, for real, the, this reduction of overwhelm to, oh my God, I have so many options, but the pattern is there, but you cannot break it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Mm-hmm.

Jessica Lyschik: Uh, totally. That’s totally a cool thing.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And I get your point, but what is it? It’s a 30-second, oh, I need to click on edit pattern. Uh, kind of reveal of that. Yeah. It’s not a kind of totally, oh, I, I get your point.

Jessica Lyschik: Well, if, if you are lucky, if you are lucky and the people see it and have the, I do not want to sound, uh, too, too negative about it, but if they have the curiosity to like explore. To do like, okay, what happens if I click on edit pattern? But you also have those people like who are like literally overwhelmed already by this and then go to whatever support people you have, whether it’s a plugin, a specific plugin is, I do see an increase of people coming into our support, for example, and saying, hey, things are not working anymore because of, I don’t know what’s happening here.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So, yeah.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So I get that, especially because people just go into the website to get something done. And if they are overwhelmed with all the changes, it’s kind of a certain whoops.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I didn’t expect that to change on me forever. Yeah. I totally get it.

Jessica Lyschik: If they just want to add a text, they will probably not notice or maybe realize, okay, something is different. But as soon as they want to change anything that is related to the blog, I think then it’s when it’s going to be—

Birgit Pauli-Haack: just to the design. Yeah.

Jessica Lyschik: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, exactly.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So I think the last thing that we talk about a little bit here is what did not make it into the 7.0. That was on the roadmap. And that was the playlist block didn’t finish in time. The dialog block, which I really like. The dialog block is something that you get a button or a link and then you can control what dialog comes up for that. And the tabs block that I’m really sad about that it did not make it.

Jessica Lyschik: Do you know what happened to like why the decision was made to not bring it in?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: They have some, there was an aspect of the active tab state in a non-standard way. There were some accessibility issues that they kind of wanted to revisit.

Jessica Lyschik: Oh yeah. Tell me about it. Tell me about it. I made the Tabs plugin, the great plugin accessible. So it’s possible. So, but yeah, I get that this may be the reason why it has been cut out.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think there were too many people, too many cooks in the kitchen for that with different changes. So I think they need to be finalized as well. And then the playlist block. I’m really sad about that, but we will see. And then some of the notes features that were thought about didn’t make it either. There were a few things that haven’t been worked on that were in the roadmap, were kind of, kind of was aspirational, but it wasn’t really prioritized. So like there were short blocks. A lot of people would like to see that. That’s like block binding, but inside the paragraph. So you can change dynamic data in a paragraph and just in, in a certain way. It could be a date or could be a change like the time zone change, yeah, depending on something. Or data from the meta fields, custom fields that are just in the flow text kind of, you want to put them in. I know that people work on that. Slider block was not worked on and some of the media things. Didn’t make it either. So are you excited about WordPress 7.0?

Jessica Lyschik: I mean, there’s a lot of very interesting changes and I mean, just because something didn’t make it, I think there’s a lot that made it that is already giving an impact. We haven’t even touched the AI part. So I think this is also something that is really coming. And even that in itself is probably enough to make another episode about if you want to. Yeah.

But overall, I think there’s some good quality of life improvements. I mean, real-time collaboration is something that everyone has to look for themselves if it’s useful. I can see it useful, of course, in like Google Docs style if you need to collaborate really on something, but also in support essentially to like, okay, let me get into the same page and show me on a video call what are you doing, or without even being on a video call, without screen sharing, to see what the other person is doing essentially. I’m not sure if I think you can only see the editing sort of things, but overall to see, okay, I do this, I do that, and then this happens. I don’t know. This could maybe be a thing. Maybe we get the icon block, long, long awaited. We do have some more responsive hiding features, if you will. It’s, how to say, rudimentary, but it’s like, it works. So if you’re fine with that, then you’re good. Font library available to everyone. I think that’s not bad either. So yeah, I think overall this will be an interesting, an interesting release to have available.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And I mean, there’s always work to do, so we’re not running out of work. You know, no, even if, uh, with the help of AI, I think the work is always going to be there. So for the developers amongst us, I think you want to look at the PHP-only registration for blocks. Also, some of the data view package changes for your own plugin might be very interesting for you.

Gutenberg 22.5 RC

Also, the client-side media improvements, they are there, but it’s not visible to anybody. It’s just kind of that the browser is now doing all the changes to the image, the downsizing for smaller aspect ratios or sizes. Yeah, it is done in the browser and doesn’t have to go to server and back. But that’s all relatively invisible to a normal user. True. I would come to an end here. We are almost at the hour and it was so much stuff to talk about. So is there anything, Jessica, that you want our listeners to know and you didn’t get a chance to talk about?

Jessica Lyschik: Not really. Go testing, I would say. Make sure if you have a product like us, make sure things work so you do not get in too much trouble. There will always be people coming to you saying, hey, something does not work. I mean, we do have that too. It’s like, then it’s just simply helping people with WordPress that is not related to the product itself. But yeah, overall, just make sure things work because like there are some changes happening. We also didn’t touch too much on the iframe editor situation in our chat. So I think this is something you should look into. I think there has been a new post by Ella this week with some more information. So yeah, for the developers of us, take a look at that because I think that maybe can potentially cause issues.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It shouldn’t, but yeah. And I’m kind of hard to think about a scenario how we could test this with older plugins because I don’t see sites that are in with maintenance with a developer, so they probably won’t have a problem. They’re already kind of up there because the Gutenberg plugin has always already been updated with the iframe. So, I’m looking at people who haven’t updated their site for 5 years or something like that with the old blocks version in there. And all of a sudden they come back, but they, the front end won’t change. So they wouldn’t see it unless they go in, in the editor. And I have not seen yet something that fails. So that’s why it’s now in the Gutenberg plugin. That the post editor is loaded in the iframe.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, it will not be enforced in 7.0, but on the horizon we already see, okay, if it’s now in Gutenberg 22.6, potentially we will have to deal with it in 7.1. So this summer around that time. Yeah, I think that’s, that’s something important to, to just have in the back of your mind that if you have a product or if you have not just a product, but also like, like you said, created custom blocks for a client for specific websites. And there is like either no maintenance or very low maintenance contract, then you need to be aware that things can change, will change. And we had these discussions in the past. I have to say that there are people who were very frustrated that things have changed in the editor and made actually their frontend go sideways and not too bad, but like, okay, wasn’t looking as it was before. So I can totally understand that frustration, but, I mean, it’s software. It’s a moving project. It’s never going to be this forever unless you lock in the default WordPress version and only receive security updates, then well, okay, you can deal with that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: But yeah. Yeah. But I don’t think that this block iframe or block editor iframe thing for post edits, this is really a major change or breaking change. That, yeah, it, I don’t think that most WordPress users would even know that that happened or haven’t even noticed that it’s already happening. So for those who do client-side that are a little older, yeah, keep an eye out and let us know or let the contributors know if it’s breaking, what is breaking, so it can be dealt with for the next iteration on it. All right.

And I also share in the show notes, the latest conversations that Grade and Jessica had with two agency owners about the block editor and FSE. I think that’s pretty insightful.

Jessica Lyschik: Oh, that was with the Codable Experts. Yeah, it was not the agency owners, but the Codable Experts.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. Codable is an agency that matches up projects with freelancers and they have a very strict screening method for the freelancers. So they are real experts and they know what they’re doing and so, thank you for telling me that. Anyway, so I will share that. So if anybody who wants to listen some more, it’s on YouTube and it was Jessica.

So, and as always, the show notes will be published on gutenbergtimes.com/podcast. This is episode 127. And if you have questions and suggestions or news you want us to include, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. That’s changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. And thank you so much for spending this time with me and Jessica and going over the WordPress 7.0 features with me. And it was good to see you and talk to you. Thanks for listening and goodbye.

Jessica Lyschik: Thanks for having me. Bye.

Sorry, You're not allowed to submit vote !

Total 0 Votes

0

0

Tell us how can we improve this post?

Captcha: + = Verify Human or Spambot ?