gutenberg

Since version five of WordPress the top feature that is getting most attentions is the Gutenberg project. The first phase of the project is the block editor which is already released with WordPress version 5.0. The Gutenberg project is a reimagination of the way we manage content on the web. Its goal is to broaden access to web presence, which is a foundation of successful modern businesses.

For this year 2020, seven priorities have been outlined by project executive director Josepha Haden, we’ll go through some of them in details below :

  1. Creating a block for navigation menus. (target WP5.5)
  2. Build a WordPress.org directory for discovering blocks, and a way to seamlessly install them. (target WP5.5)
  3. Provide a way for users to opt-in to automatic plugin and theme updates. (target WP5.5)
  4. Provide a way for themes to visually register content areas, and expose them in Gutenberg. (target WP5.6)
  5. Upgrade the widgets-editing areas and the Customizer to support blocks. (target WP5.5)
  6. Provide a way for users to opt-in to automatic updates of major Core releases. (target WP5.6)
  7. Form a Triage team to tackle more than 6,500 open issues on Trac.

1. Creating a block for navigation menus

This feature is already under development, but lots of it have been done. You can see in the mockups below some of the features of the new block editor for menus where you can manage menus, styles, colors, etc using simple drag and drop.

2. Directory of Blocks

The blocks directory is already there and there is already an experimental feature in Gutenberg allowing you to enable search block directory. There are already 115 block tested for WordPress 5.5.1. Blocks can be submitted to the directory using the regular plugin submission form and improvements to the block directory itself are ongoing !

3. Provides Opt-in feature for Plugin and Themes updates

Now Auto-update feature is enabled by default for WordPress but not for themes and plugins. The new feature will allow site owners to enable auto-updates, which should be disabled by default for everyone. There are still some issue with this feature which is under development, especially for multisite, and language support, however you can see in the screenshot below how it should looks like :

4. Editing Content Areas beyond the post content using Gutenberg

As you may notice, Gutenberg is become the main tool to edit everything in WordPress, and with this feature theme could register blocks to be edited inside the Gutenberg editor. The new feature is now coded as FSE (Full Site Editing), so yo understand that you can edit the whole site from Guternberg and most of the tasks have been implemented in the part 1 of the project, and as usual we are sharing with you some mockups :

5. Support block in the widgets-editing areas and the Customizer

The widget blocks editor will be added to a new section in the Customizer and the widget editor, and as more of WordPress becomes editable within a Gutenberg interface, you’ll be able to add blocks anywhere you want. As usual here is a mockup of the new feature :

December will be Hot for WordPress

December 2020 will be very hot for WordPress. After the release of Gutenberg 8.9.0 last month, we saw lots of features already implemented and ready for testing in FSE experience. Widgets also moved out of experiments. Gutenberg should be ready for the big day, however there are still lots of work, of testing and improvements. Issues on trac exceeded the 6800 today, 3800 of them are bugs ! However there are only 246 ticket on the release trac of the 5.6 release, so until December things may change but if 2020 was the year of Covid19, 2021 will be for sure the year of Gutenberg !

You can check Gutenberg live here, or install WordPress. The Gutenberg WordPress editor is the default editor since WordPress 5.0.

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