


<p>With the best will in the world, some people are not as great as others at doing live things. You know, they go down rabbit holes, and they lose their train of thought or what have you. This completely gets rid of that problem. They can do it as many times as they like and give you the best version.</p>



<p>But also that lovely aspect of, they suddenly become available to have a conversation in the chat, whereas before, they was presenting, you know, and presumably needed to go and have a bit of a lie down afterwards. Whereas in this situation, much more relaxed, you can ask them the questions.</p>



<p>I really appreciate that format. I think that&#8217;s actually, that&#8217;s my preferred way of a summit, kind of like this, the Accessibility Day in this case, being put together. I think that&#8217;s very forward thinking. And I hope that you continue doing it that way because I think the presenters probably appreciate it. Your audience will appreciate it, because it will be polished, and also you get to chat with the person involved. Anything on that, David?</p>



<p>[00:25:11] <strong>David Denedo:</strong> Yeah. Another thing we forgot to talk about is the translation team. So as the talks are being presented, there are also some nice volunteers who are translating it into other languages to have as much diversity as possible. Because some people, English is not their first language, so we have a team trying to convert to like French. We have the one for Spanish. There are also some other ones, even like Hebrew and so many other ones. So it&#8217;s a very nice feeling to have so many translations and everybody is doing their bit.</p>



<p>That is one thing I love about WP Accessibility, the entire organising team is the fact that everybody&#8217;s skill level, it doesn&#8217;t matter your skill level, you can always put in something. So that is something great. Whether you are a web designer, you are just a business owner, you can sponsor the event. If you are good with multilingual, you can be part of the translation. You can apply to speak.</p>



<p>The whole talks is not all technical, like you already mentioned. The talks are varied, so we talk about risk management, we talk about designers can give their own bits. People who are in business can give the business case for accessibility. So it&#8217;s all, it&#8217;s a lovely spread and I really love it.</p>



<p>[00:26:30] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> There really is a lovely spread. I mean, firstly, one thing that I should have done right top of the show, which I didn&#8217;t, and I will mention it because I record a preamble before we actually start talking, one thing I will do is I&#8217;ll read into the record the URL. But I&#8217;ll do that now as well.</p>



<p>So the URL is fabulous, by the way. It&#8217;s just ideal. If you are returning customer, if you like, it&#8217;s wpaccessibility.day. Just one more time, wpaccessibility, the regular spelling, no underscores, no hyphens or anything like that, dot day.</p>



<p>And then as a subdomain you are going to put in the year. So in this case it&#8217;s going to be 2 0 2 5, 2025.wpaccessibility.day. And you&#8217;re going to find all the different bits and pieces over there.</p>



<p>And one of the things that I noticed about the getting involved side of things is, yeah, there&#8217;s the whole sponsorship thing. So you can become a sponsor if you&#8217;d like to do that. But also you can volunteer, you can become a media partner. If you feel philanthropic and you just want to donate some of your money into the project, that is also an option. And then there&#8217;s a whole tab for the attendees as well. It&#8217;s under community. There&#8217;s an attendee section as well.</p>



<p>So it sounds like it&#8217;s not just this little event which flicks on for a couple of days and then turns off again. I mean, certainly from your side, it sounds like there&#8217;s a whole fun community of things happening in the background.</p>



<p>And really that&#8217;s the glue that binds a successful project together. If it was all very uninteresting and dry and a bit boring and you were all feeling under pressure, it wouldn&#8217;t have so many legs, it wouldn&#8217;t be able to run for this many years. But I&#8217;m guessing that you&#8217;ve had nice experiences, right, in the background?</p>



<p>[00:28:04] <strong>June Jiu:</strong> Oh, yes. Yes. We have a lot of fun. But thank you for mentioning those links.</p>



<p>[00:28:08] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> No, I think that&#8217;s wonderful. So again, go and check that out.</p>



<p>The other thing to say though is, let&#8217;s talk about how it&#8217;s actually happening. Obviously you&#8217;ve described that it&#8217;s going to be prerecorded videos. How are you making that content available? What&#8217;s going to be the platform of choice, or how are you going to get it?</p>



<p>Is there a way that you can, I don&#8217;t know, for example, download all of the bits and pieces so you can watch them in your own time? Is it an event which is spanning a single day, you know, a 24 hour time?</p>



<p>[00:28:35] <strong>June Jiu:</strong> Yeah, we do say that it is 24 hours, but all the content and the videos, they&#8217;re going to be available for replay after we go through the post-event production. Either from each subdomain, as you mentioned, the 2025 will be available on the 2025.wpaccessibility.day.</p>



<p>Last year&#8217;s event is available on the 2024.wpaccessibility.day. So you can rewatch them. It&#8217;s also available through YouTube. So if you need some background noise, I often do it. I just turn on that and let it roll.</p>



<p>I have to say, it is a lot of information to absorb, but I do find it to be very resourceful. I know that one of David&#8217;s work this year is to put in chapters for these past event videos. So that has been very helpful to me when I find the relevant video from the past. And I said, I remember somebody saying something about that. Now with the chapters there, it&#8217;s much easier to navigate and find it. So good work, David. Thank you.</p>



<p>[00:29:37] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Yeah, indeed. Good work. But what&#8217;s this, in the show notes that were shared before we actually joined the call, it describes, it says here, and I don&#8217;t know which one of you wrote it, but it says, the event will be hosted through Zoom events. And Zoom is capitalised, so I presume it&#8217;s the platform Zoom that we&#8217;re all familiar with. I don&#8217;t know what a Zoom event is. Does that differ from a regular Zoom call? Is there some key difference?</p>



<p>[00:29:59] <strong>June Jiu:</strong> Yes. It&#8217;s different from like a Zoom webinar or a Zoom call. It&#8217;s a platform that has a lobby. You&#8217;re registering on our site, but then on event day you&#8217;ll be able to go into the Zoom event.</p>



<p>There&#8217;ll be a lobby and there&#8217;ll be a chat room, that&#8217;s where you can find all the information for the event. So, it&#8217;s not like a traditional webinar where there&#8217;s just one link in order to go and join it, to join that session, or that sector of sections. So now you can go in and when that hour pops up, that session would pop up.</p>



<p>[00:30:32] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Oh, I see. Right. So you go to this one central place, and everything&#8217;s kind of bound in this one, so as soon as you&#8217;re in, you&#8217;re in, basically, and you don&#8217;t have to keep clicking links in emails to find the latest session, which is going live.</p>



<p>[00:30:44] <strong>June Jiu:</strong> Exactly.</p>



<p>[00:30:45] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Okay. That&#8217;s really nice. Dave, anything to add to that?</p>



<p>[00:30:47] <strong>David Denedo:</strong> Yeah. And you also have access to like swag. Everything will be in the event, so you can get some of the sponsor swag, you can chat with the speakers, you can chat with other event members, all within the same platform. So not having to jump from one platform to another platform to chat and then come back. You can lose people that way, but now everything all packaged together.</p>



<p>[00:31:12] <strong>June Jiu:</strong> I wanted to give a shout out to the platform itself. It allows us to do live captioning. A lot of times with webinars, it is just automated caption. We actually do have live captioners typing into Zoom. That is another layer to WP Accessibility Day that is not a feature in other events.</p>



<p>[00:31:32] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> No kidding, yeah.</p>



<p>[00:31:33] <strong>June Jiu:</strong> Yes. And the other big one, expense for us is the American Sign Language interpreters. So they will be also on hand on event day, and there&#8217;s a team of them that will be available to us, and they do the ASL.</p>



<p>This year one of our speakers is from Australia and he will be bringing in Australian Sign Language, which is different from American Sign Language. So there&#8217;s another layer to the accessibility. We understand either British Sign Language or American Sign Language but, yeah, there&#8217;s Australian Sign Language too.</p>



<p>[00:32:08] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> You drop this as if it&#8217;s really straightforward, but when my head starts spinning on the technicalities there, the idea of injecting real time, typed transcriptions, somehow overlaying that into the video, there&#8217;s a whole technical piece there.</p>



<p>And then you&#8217;ve got a sign language person. That&#8217;s a whole nother layer as well. That all needs, presumably, I don&#8217;t know if that&#8217;s going to be done live or filmed. Maybe there&#8217;s an opportunity.</p>



<p>[00:32:33] <strong>June Jiu:</strong> It&#8217;s live.</p>



<p>[00:32:33] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Yeah, okay. So all of that, there are lots and lots of moving parts here.</p>



<p>[00:32:37] <strong>June Jiu:</strong> That&#8217;s why we have the technical and vendor team, and the volunteer team. They&#8217;re pivotal on event day to have those two teams in place.</p>



<p>[00:32:47] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Can I just ask, because I know there&#8217;ll be some people that are curious about the, how to describe it, the business status, let&#8217;s put it that way. And maybe this is not something that either of you can answer, I don&#8217;t know.</p>



<p>What&#8217;s the structure of WP Accessibility Day? So, for example, if I was to donate, in the UK we call these things charities. I think in the US the correct term is non-profit. So if I was to donate, do I have some sort of assurance that the money isn&#8217;t going to end up in some, I don&#8217;t even want to say the words because I know that nobody&#8217;s ethics are this poorly thought through, but I&#8217;m going to say it anyway. Just want to make sure that the money doesn&#8217;t end in somebody&#8217;s back pocket.</p>



<p>Where did the donations end up? How is the structure of this organisation ensuring that everything is out in the open and clear and easy to understand?</p>



<p>[00:33:28] <strong>June Jiu:</strong> Well, this year WordPress Accessibility Day was recognised by IRS as the 501 C3 public charity. So based upon that, a hundred percent of our income that comes in goes right back into the event.</p>



<p>Organisers and volunteers are not paid. Every one of us who are working on this is out of the goodness of our heart, and what time availability that we have.</p>



<p>The one caveat I will say, some of our translators are paid because translation is an income based business. And this is a recent development. In the past we&#8217;ve had to ask them to please donate their time to do the translation. But now we have a little bit more security to be able to pay them.</p>



<p>People who have the ability to speak multiple languages, look into the translation because if you aren&#8217;t able to participate as an organiser or a volunteer, donating your time to translate or being paid for be translators for us is a huge difference for us to bring all these sessions available to a greater audience.</p>



<p>[00:34:36] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> I think everybody would understand that there&#8217;s, that is how that industry works, isn&#8217;t it? When you go to a WordCamp, for example, and you see the people doing the live captioning, or you see the people standing on the stage and they&#8217;re doing the sign language, I think it&#8217;s understood that that is what they do for a living.</p>



<p>[00:34:51] <strong>June Jiu:</strong> And I would be remiss not to give credit to our sponsors too. We have many sponsors who are repeat sponsors year after year, and they support us with their sponsorship. We are very appreciative of that.</p>



<p>This year we have some new ones and a lot of repeating ones from every range. Our higher level are of course now closed, but we still have the bronze level, which is at a $500, or a micro sponsor which is at $150. And the difference between that is the Bronze has a webpage, a dedicated webpage for their company, and the micro sponsor has a logo on our sponsor page.</p>



<p>[00:35:28] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> So as of recording, and maybe that will keep going right up to the deadline, I don&#8217;t know, so if what you&#8217;ve heard has made you feel that you&#8217;d like to be involved on a sponsorship level, bronze is available, that one is $500, and there&#8217;s a micro one. And obviously you can go onto the 2025 Accessibility Day website and discover for yourself what&#8217;s available in there.</p>



<p>So we found out what&#8217;s happening. We found out why it&#8217;s being done. We found out some of the people that are being involved. I suppose what we ought to do at this point is drive people toward the schedule.</p>



<p>Well, you&#8217;ve announced it already, but let&#8217;s just make sure we&#8217;re doing it again. The date for this event is when?</p>



<p>[00:36:03] <strong>David Denedo:</strong> So it&#8217;ll be happening on October 15th to the 16th, and it&#8217;ll be 24 hour long event. So it&#8217;s going to go right up for 24 hours. We have the speakers all in the schedule, so you can go ahead and check it out. The link will be in the shownotes.</p>



<p>[00:36:19] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> It will. Yeah, that&#8217;s absolutely right. So the 15th of October, it&#8217;s a 24 hour event. So I don&#8217;t know if you start in the sort of Pacific neck of the woods, that seems to be the traditional way that things are done. So Australia, they&#8217;re the sort of first people to receive the content, and then it just goes around the globe. And maybe the people in, on the west coast of the US and Hawaii and what have you, they get the content more towards the end of the day. I assume that&#8217;s how it&#8217;s working.</p>



<p>But if you go to the URL that we mentioned earlier and just add forward slash schedule to it, you will be able to see through opening remarks from Joe Dolson right at the beginning of the day, right through the keynotes and everything, to the closing remarks, or at least the last presentation, which is happening some 23 or so hours later.</p>



<p>I think that&#8217;s all the questions that I had. Is there anything that you feel it would&#8217;ve been important to say that we didn&#8217;t say? If that&#8217;s the case, please feel free to use this platform now.</p>



<p>[00:37:09] <strong>June Jiu:</strong> The event is free, but we do ask that you register, so that we do have a good count of how many people are coming. So please sign up at 2025.wpaccessibility.day and you&#8217;ll find the registration link there.</p>



<p>[00:37:26] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Is that a mere request or is that a requirement? In order to gain access, do you need to have, yeah, okay. So I&#8217;m getting a nod of the head there from June. So go and register in order to access the content as well. David, anything we missed?</p>



<p>[00:37:38] <strong>David Denedo:</strong> Yeah, the only thing is that I&#8217;m excited for Vitaly Friedman, because he has a very wide following, so he will bring more people into our event, hopefully. And he is going to be talking about accessible designs, which is something quite powerful. Because in this day and age, people always associate accessibility with very boring designs. But he&#8217;s coming to show you that you can have very beautiful designs in 2025 and still be accessible. So that&#8217;s a very important topic.</p>



<p>[00:38:09] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Well, the WP Accessibility Day website is an example of that. It&#8217;s actually a really tasteful, beautiful design. I&#8217;m going to guess that it&#8217;s, you know, the accessibility credentials of it are fairly strong. Let&#8217;s just, make that assumption, but it&#8217;s beautifully designed.</p>



<p>Yeah, we didn&#8217;t really touch on the names of the speakers or what have you. But yeah, I&#8217;ll just go through a few just as I scroll through, just to give you some ideas.</p>



<p>So accessible design patterns is Vitaly. Being a colorblind designer, typography, readability, digital accessibility, building accessibility that works in the global south, hyper accessible web design for the blind, audio accessibility, accessibility lawsuits, gosh, we&#8217;re only like six or seven in, and we&#8217;ve run the full gamut already. So here we go. Why accessibility matters, video and media your post-production, guide making WordPress events accessible, gosh, that&#8217;s fascinating. Auditing WordPress plugin accessibility, demystifying screen readers, technical checklists. That means testing WordPress themes and plugins for accessibility. The future is automated, will it be accessible? Making Gutenberg blocks accessible. I&#8217;m going to stop there, but you get the idea. There&#8217;s absolutely loads of breadth and depth.</p>



<p>It&#8217;s very much the case that if you were to show up, I would guarantee more or less that there&#8217;s going to be something which will pique your interest and keep you engaged. The schedule, like I said, is at forward slash schedule.</p>



<p>Okay, if that&#8217;s the case, I will just say thank you so much for being one of many cogs in this very important wheel. Thank you for doing what is incredibly important work, making the web accessible to far more people. Thank you. That&#8217;s quite amazing.</p>



<p>So June and David, thanks for joining us today. Really appreciate it.</p>



<p>[00:39:46] <strong>June Jiu:</strong> Thanks for having us.</p>



<p>[00:39:48] <strong>David Denedo:</strong> Thanks for having us.</p>
</div></details>



<p>On the podcast today we have <a href="https://2025.wpaccessibility.day/people/june-liu/">June Liu</a> and <a href="https://2025.wpaccessibility.day/people/david-denedo/">David Denedo</a>.</p>



<p>Both June and David are key members of the <a href="https://2025.wpaccessibility.day/">WP Accessibility Day</a> organising team, a global, volunteer-driven event focused on improving accessibility in the WordPress ecosystem. June serves as the marketing team co-lead and works with sponsors, bringing her background in project management to keep the event’s efforts on track. David, a web designer and content creator based in London, contributes to the marketing and post-event teams, with his interest in web accessibility stemming from his personal experience as a visually impaired user.</p>



<p>WP Accessibility Day has grown significantly in the past few years, uniting a large, international group of volunteers and organisers to drive awareness and practical change in web accessibility. The event is powered by a host of teams, marketing, sponsors, tech and vendor, post-event, translation, speakers, and more, ensuring that everything from live captioning to sign language interpretation is in place.</p>



<p>We begin by learning about June and David’s unique paths to accessibility advocacy, one through direct lived experience, and the other through supporting a loved one with cognitive challenges. Their stories highlight why accessibility can&#8217;t be an afterthought and how events like WP Accessibility Day are raising awareness in this important area.</p>



<p>We discuss what attendees can expect at this year’s event, happening from October 15th, 2025. It’s free, fully virtual, and runs for 24 hours, making space for a diverse range of speakers and topics. Whether you’re interested in the moral, legal, or technical cases for accessibility, there’s something for you here, including sessions on accessible design, risk management for agencies, legal compliance, and demonstrations of assistive technologies.</p>



<p>June and David share how the event format, a combination of pre-recorded talks and live chat, mixes polished content with real-time engagement, plus how translation and community involvement are key to its growing impact.</p>



<p>If you want to learn more about how you can make your WordPress sites, and the web in general, more inclusive, or if you’re motivated by global collaboration and personal stories, this episode is for you.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Useful links</h2>



<p><a href="https://2025.wpaccessibility.day/">WP Accessibility Website</a></p>



<p><a href="https://2025.wpaccessibility.day/about/organizers/">The WP Accessibility Day Team</a></p>



<p><a href="https://2025.wpaccessibility.day/schedule/">The WP Accessibility Day Schedule</a></p>



<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCes9XCUZd51CAigbBEGlfNg">WP Accessibility Day YouTube Channel</a></p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 01 Oct 2025 14:00:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"Nathan Wrigley";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:39;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:21:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:43:"WordPress.org blog: WordPress 6.8.3 Release";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:35:"https://wordpress.org/news/?p=19204";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:59:"https://wordpress.org/news/2025/09/wordpress-6-8-3-release/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4937:"<p><strong>WordPress 6.8.3 is now available!</strong></p>



<p>This is a security release that features two fixes.</p>



<p>Because this is a security release,<strong> it is recommended that you update your sites immediately</strong>.</p>



<p>You can <a href="https://wordpress.org/wordpress-6.8.3.zip">download WordPress 6.8.3 from WordPress.org</a>, or visit your WordPress Dashboard, click “Updates”, and then click “Update Now”. If you have sites that support automatic background updates, the update process will begin automatically.</p>



<p>The next major release will be <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/6-9/">version 6.9</a>, which is planned for December 2nd, 2025.<br />For more information on WordPress 6.8.3, please visit the <a href="https://wordpress.org/documentation/wordpress-version/version-6-8-3/">version page on the HelpHub site</a>.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Security updates included in this release</h2>



<p>The security team would like to thank the following people for <a href="https://hackerone.com/wordpress?type=team">responsibly reporting vulnerabilities</a>, and allowing them to be fixed in this release:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>A data exposure issue where authenticated users could access some restricted content. Independently reported by <a href="https://hackerone.com/mnelson4">Mike Nelson</a>, <a href="https://hackerone.com/hurayraiit">Abu Hurayra</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/timothyblynjacobs/">Timothy Jacobs</a>, and <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/peterwilsoncc/">Peter Wilson</a>.</li>



<li>A cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability requiring an authenticated user role that affects the nav menus. Reported by <a href="https://x.com/Savphill">Phill Savage</a>.</li>
</ul>



<p>As a courtesy, these fixes have also been made available to all branches eligible to receive security fixes (currently through 4.7). As a reminder, <strong>only the most recent version of WordPress is actively supported</strong>.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Thank you to these WordPress contributors</h2>



<p>This release was led by <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/johnbillion/">John Blackbourn</a>.</p>



<p>In addition to the security researchers and release squad members mentioned above, WordPress 6.8.3 would not have been possible without the contributions of the following people:</p>



<p><a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/jorbin">Aaron Jorbin</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/hurayraiit">Abu Hurayra</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/zieladam">Adam Zieliński</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/xknown">Alex Concha</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/andraganescu%20">Andrei Draganescu</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/davidbaumwald/">David Baumwald</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/ehtis">Ehtisham Siddiqui</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/iandunn">Ian Dunn</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/whyisjake">Jake Spurlock</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/audrasjb">Jb Audras</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/joehoyle">Joe Hoyle</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/johnbillion">John Blackbourn</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/jonsurrell">Jon Surrell</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/desrosj">Jonathan Desrosiers</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/mnelson4">Michael Nelson</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/peterwilsoncc">Peter Wilson</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/phillsav">Phill</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/noisysocks">Robert Anderson</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/rmccue">Ryan McCue</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/coffee2code/">Scott Reilly</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/timothyblynjacobs">Timothy Jacobs</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/vortfu">vortfu</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/westonruter">Weston Ruter</a></p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">How to contribute</h2>



<p>To get involved in WordPress core development, head over to Trac, <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/report/6">pick a ticket</a>, and join the conversation in the <a href="https://app.slack.com/client/T024MFP4J/C02RQBWTW">#core</a> Slack channel. Need help? Check out the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/tutorials/faq-for-new-contributors/">Core Contributor Handbook</a>.</p>



<p>Props to <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/ehtis/">Ehtisham Siddiqui</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/johnbillion/">John Blackbourn</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/paulkevan/">Paul Kevan</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/desrosj/">Jonathan Desrosiers</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/jorbin/">Aaron Jorbin</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/westonruter">Weston Ruter</a> for reviewing.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 30 Sep 2025 19:31:04 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:15:"John Blackbourn";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:40;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:21:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:25:"Matt: What’s Your Time?";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:23:"https://ma.tt/?p=150037";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:32:"https://ma.tt/2025/09/tick-tock/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:908:"<p>I think some of the best writing about technology PR is this ten-year-old article by <a href="https://www.onbackground.com/">Aaron Zamost</a>: <a href="https://medium.com/backchannel/how-the-tech-press-forces-a-narrative-on-companies-it-covers-5f89fdb7793e">What’s Your Hour in ‘Silicon Valley Time’?</a> It describes the cycles that companies go through in public perception, and the beauty of revisiting it ten years later is that you can see which of the examples are still relevant, or the domains that 404. As someone who has been around this clock probably a dozen times now, I highly suggest this for anyone &#8220;going through it.&#8221; Some of the most powerful words in the English language: <em>This too shall pass</em>. </p>



<p>See also: The Zen fable or old Chinese poem of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_old_man_lost_his_horse">the old man who loses his horse</a>.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 30 Sep 2025 17:30:25 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4:"Matt";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:41;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:21:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:95:"Open Channels FM: Surviving the WordPress Plugin Grind Growth, Marketing and Overcoming Burnout";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:33:"https://openchannels.fm/?p=110777";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:101:"https://openchannels.fm/surviving-the-wordpress-plugin-grind-growth-marketing-and-overcoming-burnout/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:237:"In this WP Behind the Builds episode, guest Devin Walker discusses his transition from corporate IT to successful WordPress plugin development, focusing on GiveWP, WP Rollback, and lessons learned about business and community engagement.";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 30 Sep 2025 11:34:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:42;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:21:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:11:"Matt: Om 59";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:23:"https://ma.tt/?p=150022";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://ma.tt/2025/09/om-59/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:3905:"<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img alt="" class="wp-image-150030" height="340" src="https://i0.wp.com/ma.tt/files/2025/09/IMG_0803-1-edited-scaled.jpeg?resize=604%2C340&#038;quality=89&#038;ssl=1" width="604" /></figure>



<p>I want to dedicate my blog post today to my dear friend and brother, <a href="https://om.co/">Om Malik</a>, whose birthday it is. Om is a multi-hyphenate, but at his core, he&#8217;s a writer, someone who looks at the world and parses it down for others, a seeker who appreciates the spark of creation before most others.</p>



<p>Om was one of the earliest users of WordPress and he was one of <a href="https://ma.tt/2005/01/meetup-aftermath/">8 people who came to the very first WordPress meetups at Chaat Cafe on 3<sup>rd</sup> street in San Francisco in 2005</a>. (You can tell what an early adopter he is because he has the username &#8220;Om&#8221; <a href="https://x.com/om">on Twitter/X</a> and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/om/">Instagram</a> and WordPress and probably more.) We had connected on the WordPress support forums when I helped him get set up around the 1.0 days. After I moved to San Francisco to take the job at CNET he connected me to people like Phil Black, Tony Conrad, and Toni Schneider who would become, respectively, an investor, board member, and CEO of Automattic. These are folks I still work with and consider close friends today. As a journalist, he had a keen nose for BS and made sure as a naïve 20-something in SF I was connecting with quality people.</p>



<p>Since we met we&#8217;ve both had a shared love for photography, and I&#8217;ve seen Om blossom into an amazing photographer with a really unique style and approach, <a href="https://www.photosbyom.com/">in fact you can even buy some of his photography prints</a>.</p>



<p>Over the years, we&#8217;ve dipped in and out of shared obsessions with cameras, watches, shoes, fashion, and design. We have a fair number of matching things in each. In photography we&#8217;ve shivered in minus thirty weather in Antarctica and Jackson Hole at odd hours to catch a special shot. We&#8217;ve traveled to Europe and Japan dozens of times, being very early (pre John Mayer and Kanye) to brands like <a href="https://www.visvim.tv/">Visvim</a>. <span style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">When I wear something like a bespoke<span style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">, hand-made piece from <a href="https://45rglobal.com/" target="_blank">45R</a> to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45HRzzc0waU" target="_blank">speak at WordCamp US</a>, he recognizes it off the cuff </span>and even knows the one store on Crosby Street in New York where you can buy it.</span> He is a tastemaker and an aesthetic connoisseur in every area he&#8217;s interested in, from food to coffee to pens, and everything in between. Sometimes we&#8217;ll start a journey together, for example, trying nice pens, and years later, I&#8217;ve moved on and he&#8217;s gone deep into collecting dozens of them, being in obscure forums and Reddits, or attending events like the <a href="https://sanfranciscopenshow.com/">SF Pen Show last month</a>.</p>



<p>When you walk into a coffee shop with Om he doesn&#8217;t just know the barista&#8217;s name, he knows their dog&#8217;s name and the story of every person working there.</p>



<p>I&#8217;m 500 words in, and I still haven&#8217;t even scratched the surface of describing Om&#8217;s journey, from growing up in Delhi to becoming a journalist for a Japanese publication in New York, a book author, party promoter, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, photographer, and explorer. If you want to understand the AI bubble we&#8217;re in right now, you should <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0471660612?tag=photomatt08-20">read his book Broadbandits on the crazy telecom / Enron bubble</a>. This is a long way to say, happy birthday Om!</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Mon, 29 Sep 2025 15:50:56 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4:"Matt";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:43;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:21:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:19:"Matt: Craft vs Slop";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:23:"https://ma.tt/?p=150017";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:33:"https://ma.tt/2025/09/craft-slop/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:1964:"<p>In an age where AI can generate an infinite amount of stuff, what matters? Some of the most interesting writing I&#8217;ve read on this comes from <a href="https://willmanidis.com/">Will Manidis</a>, who makes it biblical and says that Craft is the Antidote to Slop:</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">
<p>From Genesis, man enters not a paradise without labor but a world of intentional creation. The LORD God places man in the Garden of Eden<em> &#8220;to dress it and to keep it&#8221;</em> (Genesis 2:15) establishing labor not as punishment but as sacred vocation. This original calling invites us to co-create the Kingdom, tending and developing the world with intention and care. Our fundamental purpose is not consumption but participation in the ongoing work of creation.</p>



<p>The serpent&#8217;s temptation represents the first shortcut in human history<em>.&#8221;Ye shall be as gods&#8221; </em>(Genesis 3:5) was not an invitation to deeper engagement with creation, but a way to get out of the work required to tend to it. The consequence wasn&#8217;t the introduction of work itself, but its corruption into burdensome toil: <em>&#8220;In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread&#8221; </em>(Genesis 3:19). Humanity&#8217;s first sin was, in part, choosing the easy shortcut over the meaningful process – preferring effortless gain to the demanding but fulfilling work of tending the garden.</p>
</blockquote>



<p>You can read the rest as <a href="https://x.com/WillManidis/status/1971920155996574168">screenshots on X</a> or <a href="https://minutes.substack.com/p/craft-is-the-antidote-to-slop">on his Substack</a>, but I hope he gets a real website soon. This also makes me think you should watch the <a href="https://www.weareasgods.film/">We Are As Gods documentary on Stewart Brand</a>, supported by the amazing folks at <a href="https://press.stripe.com/">Stripe Press</a>.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Mon, 29 Sep 2025 06:41:36 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4:"Matt";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:44;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:21:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:111:"Gutenberg Times: Gutenberg Changelog 121—Gutenberg 21.6 and 21.7,  Block Theme Development, and Block Themes";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:53:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/?post_type=podcast&p=42062";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:124:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-121-gutenberg-21-6-and-21-7-block-theme-development-and-block-themes/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:81565:"<p>In Episode 121 of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast, Birgit Pauli-Haack and Anne Katzeff dive into Gutenberg 21.6 and 21.7, touching on theme development, block themes, Figma workflows, Playground blueprints, and upcoming WordPress 6.9 features. They discuss enhancements to data views, grid layouts, the new accordion block, command palette improvements, block-level commenting for collaboration, accessibility updates, and the ongoing evolution of global styles and admin redesign, offering insights for both theme builders and developers.</p>



<p><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-121-gutenberg-21-6-and-21-7-block-theme-development-and-block-themes/#shownotes">Show Notes</a> / <a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-121-gutenberg-21-6-and-21-7-block-theme-development-and-block-themes/#transcript">Transcript</a></p>



<p></p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Editor: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandy-reed/">Sandy Reed</a></li>



<li>Logo: <a href="https://markuraine.com/">Mark Uraine</a></li>



<li>Production: <a href="https://icodeforapurpose.com">Birgit Pauli-Haack</a></li>
</ul>



<p class="has-larger-font-size" id="shownotes"><strong>Show Notes</strong></p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Special guest: Anne Katzeff</h2>



<ul class="wp-block-social-links is-layout-flex wp-block-social-links-is-layout-flex"><li class="wp-social-link wp-social-link-linkedin  wp-block-social-link"><a class="wp-block-social-link-anchor" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/annekatzeff/"><svg height="24" version="1.1" viewBox="0 0 24 24" width="24" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"><path d="M19.7,3H4.3C3.582,3,3,3.582,3,4.3v15.4C3,20.418,3.582,21,4.3,21h15.4c0.718,0,1.3-0.582,1.3-1.3V4.3 C21,3.582,20.418,3,19.7,3z M8.339,18.338H5.667v-8.59h2.672V18.338z M7.004,8.574c-0.857,0-1.549-0.694-1.549-1.548 c0-0.855,0.691-1.548,1.549-1.548c0.854,0,1.547,0.694,1.547,1.548C8.551,7.881,7.858,8.574,7.004,8.574z M18.339,18.338h-2.669 v-4.177c0-0.996-0.017-2.278-1.387-2.278c-1.389,0-1.601,1.086-1.601,2.206v4.249h-2.667v-8.59h2.559v1.174h0.037 c0.356-0.675,1.227-1.387,2.526-1.387c2.703,0,3.203,1.779,3.203,4.092V18.338z"></path></svg><span class="wp-block-social-link-label screen-reader-text">LinkedIn</span></a></li>

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<p><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/live-q-a-design-systems-and-theme-json/">Gutenberg Times Live Q &amp; A: Design Systems and Theme.json</a></p>



<p><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/06/05/hallway-hangout-theme-building-with-playground-create-block-theme-plugin-and-github/">Hallway Hangout: Theme Building with Playground, Create-block-theme plugin, and GitHub</a></p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Gutenberg plugin releases</h2>



<p><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2025/09/10/whats-new-in-gutenberg-21-6-10-september/">What’s new in Gutenberg 21.6? (10 September)</a></p>



<p><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/releases/tag/v21.7.0">Changelog 21.7</a></p>



<p></p>



<p class="has-large-font-size">Stay in Touch</p>



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<p class="has-large-font-size" id="transcript"><strong>Transcript</strong></p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Hello, and welcome to our 121st episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. In today&#8217;s episode, we will talk about Gutenberg 21.6 and 21.7, as well as about theme development, block themes, and all this good, good stuff. And I&#8217;m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator of the Gutenberg Times, developer advocate, and core contributor for the WordPress open source project sponsored by Automattic. And with me is Anne Katzeff, a dear friend of mine. She joins me in this episode. She was here before on the show, and she&#8217;s a longtime WordPress theme builder, educator and artist, and a longtime friend of mine. He previously connected on WordPress Meetup Co-organizers in Southwest Florida, but that&#8217;s ages ago. Anne has been on a podcast before, and it was episode 109 almost a year ago. So glad you&#8217;re here, Anne. How are you today?</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> I&#8217;m good, Birgit. Thanks for inviting me. It&#8217;s great to see you and reunite. I hope you&#8217;re well. I was just thinking, I can&#8217;t wait to catch up on all the WordCamp stuff that you and others have been posting. I&#8217;ve been immersed in two things recently. Redesigning a client&#8217;s very old website.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>When you say very old.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Oh, it was using. It&#8217;s still live, although it barely displays correctly because the code is so old. It uses custom templates from a custom theme that has some of the content baked into the code.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Oh. Oh, yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> So it&#8217;s really hard to edit. The client has a real hard time doing that, as I do as well. And now I&#8217;m rebuilding the site. I&#8217;m using a cadence theme, and it&#8217;s a whole new area for me. I&#8217;m seeing the pros and cons of that system. And I&#8217;m also redesigning my own website. I don&#8217;t even want to tell you how long that&#8217;s been since I designed it. It&#8217;s built on Bootstrap. I do have a WordPress blog, so I have to update the bootstrap part and the WordPress part.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Okay. So you have the design and the styling is in Bootstrap, and you kind of massage it into the WordPress, so.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Exactly.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Seamless. Okay. Yeah, yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>And, you know, people ask me, why don&#8217;t you do the whole thing in WordPress for me? I do occasionally build bootstrap sites, so this is a way. It&#8217;s kind of an excuse for me to keep current in what&#8217;s happening in Bootstrap. So I&#8217;m using new tools like figma for my prototyping, and once I get that finished and we&#8217;re nearing that point I&#8217;ll start rebuilding and bootstrap, and probably I&#8217;ll use the 2025 WordPress default theme for the blog part. So with both of these projects I&#8217;m using these new tools and riding a learning curve and it&#8217;s all good. It&#8217;s challenging and stimulating and integrating the new with the familiar. So it&#8217;s like my mind is like uhh.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah, but it could be. It&#8217;s a great exercise. You have to kind of see okay, how far can I still rely on what I&#8217;m doing? And oh this cool new stuff is also good. So I know that Jonathan Bosinger, he&#8217;s a co-worker of mine and he was one of the educators on the Learn team and he has started live streaming and this last livestream he&#8217;s trying to. He got a Figma design from a designer and now wants to create a block theme about it and finds that there are no like you know in the old days where you had a Photoshop to WordPress kind of. Yeah, yeah. He kind of had hope that there is a from figma to WordPress kind of thing and there is but you need to be very deliberate on how you set up Figma exactly to make this work. So.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> God, I was just thinking about all that. That&#8217;s so interesting. Yeah. You have to have they call it auto layout and of course I don&#8217;t, and I&#8217;m not going to redo all my stuff in Figma just to pray that whatever plugin I use will work. But that&#8217;s what they recommend the so. Oh well it wasn&#8217;t what I had planned. I wasn&#8217;t going to do an automated thing but. But now this kind of validates a reason why I can&#8217;t. It&#8217;s not quite there yet. Yeah, there are curious things in Figma and there are amazing things in Figma.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>So it&#8217;s like any new tool. Yeah, yeah. It has your tradeoffs and you need to kind of unlearn a lot of things before you can learn. Yeah. So the VIP theme builders or designers, they actually have a process where they go from Figma to theme JSON because they&#8217;ll have websites where they like you do. There&#8217;s a component that&#8217;s not WordPress and there&#8217;s a component that&#8217;s WordPress, or they have customers that have multiple different brandings for different things but they&#8217;re also, they&#8217;re all in Figma but then you can do themes and then that theme, you can use a plugin that you can then export your design decisions on the, on fonts and on colors and other things to migrate to theme JSON and then immediately kind of start up a block theme. I&#8217;m going to find that, dear listeners, I&#8217;m also going to find the link for you, not only for Anne. Thank you. We had David Bowman on the live Q and A maybe two years ago where he kind of demonstrated that all. So we will share those in the show notes and kind of see how that, I don&#8217;t know how that kind of works with you and how you approach figma, but it might be a good way to see if that works for you.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> That would be fascinating as well. I mean, I am using variables for some of my styles. I&#8217;m limiting it because again, of the learning curve. But I&#8217;ve got so far the color palette and very basic typography assigned to, you know, text in the six head levels to match up with a bootstrap scenario. And I&#8217;m thinking ahead even beyond that. Well, how will I translate that into a WordPress theme? So it&#8217;s. I like the complication. I don&#8217;t mind it.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah, yeah, no, the complexity is really intriguing because all of a sudden you kind of have these, all these pieces that fit together very well and you feel like, oh, this is genius.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Yeah, yeah, I actually, I wish I could remember the guy&#8217;s name, but I saw, I watched a YouTube video. Maybe I&#8217;ll find it and I&#8217;ll send you a note about it. But he explained the Figma variables really well, and he has maybe an hour and a half tutorial that I&#8217;ve yet to just scratch the surface.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah, I know that Justin Tadlock, who is our theme guru, I would call him, he is working on a design system where he combines the color palette and the fonts with semantic kind of. So he&#8217;s not saying, okay, this is the main color, this is the background color, foreground color. But he&#8217;s saying, okay, this is a text color and has a separate design system that&#8217;s built into theme that he builds into theme JSON. So he can actually switch out a theme if the theme actually follows the same standards in there. He just can change colors and then the theme looks totally different.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Exactly. That&#8217;s kind of the idea behind the variables.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah, exactly.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Definitely try to be semantic.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah. Michelle Hunt did a good funnel from Atomic Design to the Design system at WordCamp US and the video is online. And she also had a similar custom color setting design system in Theme JSON actually built into. Yeah, so I&#8217;m, of course I&#8217;m going to share all that, but with you and our listeners.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Yeah. We can&#8217;t anticipate everything that comes up in these conversations, can we? No, we don&#8217;t have all the links right here.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. But at least I know where I can look. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I&#8217;m writing a blog post and I&#8217;m still a little bit stuck in that. But on how to use Playground to build a theme demo where you can have content, like to showcase your theme and then create a Playground blueprint to share with your clients or your customers so they can test WordPress with the theme and some content in there.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>So great idea.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>So they know how the patterns look or the color scheme or how the front page can look. And because sometimes you have this problem that you have a theme and you see that there was a front page, but when you install the theme, it doesn&#8217;t look like that. Yeah, so, yeah, so that&#8217;s kind of part where theme builders or even agencies can really make some great showcase for their product. And I&#8217;m using Playground, but there is actually importer. So you can put all the content into your local site and then export it and then import it into Playground with the blueprint. Kind of have the XML file on GitHub and it kind of puts it in and you can do all the settings here. What&#8217;s the front page like? A blog post or a block theme? Or is it a page? Or is it. Which one is the news page then? And so you can build that all out. And now I&#8217;m kind of. The missing piece is still navigation. So the navigation, if you just build the pages, it automatically builds the page layout or the page list layout. But if you do a custom navigation work, it doesn&#8217;t get imported yet because somehow the parser doesn&#8217;t know that those links need to be transferred to the new site. So it didn&#8217;t work. Right. But I&#8217;m working on it and I know that the Playground people are really busy on doing stuff, doing this and fixing things. So that&#8217;s what I&#8217;m working on. And I&#8217;m.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>So it sounds like you&#8217;re using it also as a prototyping tool.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> You could, you could. Yeah, yeah, yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Is it like the concept, like a live link that you can share with a client and they can view it? Yeah, okay.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah, yeah. You could also do the prototype thing with. Well, you can share. You can. Yeah, you can share it with a client and every client who kept the link gets the same site. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>So is it stored in GitHub?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>No, it&#8217;s stored in memory on browser. On the browser, it&#8217;s Playground is a tool that runs WordPress. In the browser. You don&#8217;t need a server, you don&#8217;t need a database. You just need the playground.WordPress.net and then you have a WordPress site. And then with blueprints that are configuration files in JSON written in JSON, you can say, okay, which plugin do I want to install? Which. What&#8217;s the landing page? Which theme do I want to have in there? And do I want to have additional content in there? Yeah. So you can use it to showcase your plugin or your theme. And we use it for. For all kinds of different things as well. And on the team, we use it to test PRs from a good look and track that are not merged yet, that are not yet in a. In a version of that. So you can just kind of isolate the whole thing and just test this particular thing. That&#8217;s really cool. And I&#8217;m going to have a talk at a WordCamp about using Playground, GitHub and the great block theme. Okay. To change themes without touching code. So making changes to the themes through the editor. So if you need a new template or need to change a template, change or add colors and all this kind of things, but then at the end you export it to GitHub and it creates the PR that then one of your developer is going to merge with the theme where all the other developing things are happening.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em></p>



<p>That sounds really cool.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Well, clearly I haven&#8217;t used Blueprint very much.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Or Playground.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Or Playground. Sorry.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah, but I get what you said before. Yeah. I like the complexity. So. Okay, let&#8217;s see how complicated and easy we can make it. Yeah. Well, I think we could now head into Gutenberg 21.6. </p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">WordPress 6.9</h3>



<p>So WordPress 6.9 is coming. Let&#8217;s talk a little bit about WordPress 6.9. We will have other shows about that, of course, but just to get the timing right, we are about four weeks away from Beta 1, and Beta 1 is pretty much feature freeze, and it will all have in there 15 Gutenberg releases from 20.5 when WordPress 6.8 came out, 20.4 was the last one. So 20.5 until 21.9, it&#8217;s pretty much 15. But there was a period of Gutenberg releases for about four, four months when not a whole lot of features came in. But that is going to be offset that in the last two or three releases. There will be a ton of things in there. So we will change our cadence from having two Gutenberg plugins in a show to one and do another. I hope we can go back to every other week instead of every month recording. </p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Gutenberg 21.6</h3>



<p>What we are talking about today is about Gutenberg 21.6 before I go in there. So release is going to be December 2nd, so everything you need and beta one is October 21st and in between are release candidates and release candidate one, I think is November 2nd or something like that. So by that time we hopefully have all the developer notes in there and Source of Truth will come out there at the same time or a week later. So just so you can prepare a plan or not. I&#8217;m a planning person, so I always need to know the dates. I always have. Most of the time I have a plan. So when something changes, I know what to change. Yeah. So. Well, let&#8217;s head into the Gutenberg 21.6. </p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Enhancements</h3>



<p>It has a few enhancements and we start with the Data Views enhancement. And one of them is. Seems to be a minor thing, but there is a card layout in the components for the Data Forms where you can support combined fields and show the description in there. And that&#8217;s fairly new. So there&#8217;s also a storybook documentation out for those plugin developers who all kind of want to try out the new Data Views and the Data Forms. Data form is really where people then can enter stuff, filtering and all that. That&#8217;s all in Data Forms. And then there&#8217;s also in the Data Views we have the grid layout is now a little bit more flexible. You can have it without a title and then you have the actions are available on Hover, which is quite nice.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> But yeah, I like that. That&#8217;s a wonderful enhancement. And of course it got me into another path of both grids and thinking about using the grid layout for the post template. So I started to play around with that. Got lost in that for about an hour. So far I don&#8217;t really see an advantage for using the grid over the default grouping with columns, but I&#8217;ll play around with it a bit more.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah, there is actually a more interactive way of using the grid layout in the Gutenberg experiments. So that might be. So when you use the Gutenberg plugin, there&#8217;s one menu item under Gutenberg that says Experiments, and there are probably 10 different experiments, amongst them the new blocks that are in there, but they will come out of experiments hopefully soon. There&#8217;s also the data view usage for posts. Because right now it&#8217;s only a site editor with pages where you can use the data views but also use them for posts. And there are a ton of experiments and one of them is interactive grid layout where you can drag and drop things.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Oh really?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Use it. Yeah. For different kind of content as well. So you have pictures in there, you can have a cover in there and you can have just text in there and each grid and then you can also stretch it out over two rows.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Oh yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Or two columns or two rows kind of thing. And. And it. Oh, cool. Kind of merges all that. So it&#8217;s really cool. But it hasn&#8217;t gotten any updates for a while. It&#8217;s still an experiment because of our other priorities. But it&#8217;s definitely. You see what&#8217;s coming. That&#8217;s one thing. Also to kind of okay, how can we. How can this be improved? Yeah, and kind of. Yeah, let the developers know. That&#8217;s the. Yeah, I like the grid layout too.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Yeah, yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Do some interesting things with it.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Definitely.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah. Yeah. There were updates to the core data packages but they are so developer oriented and so technical that if you&#8217;re interested that just check out the changelog of 21.6. But 21.6 has one new thing and that&#8217;s. Well, it was actually in 21.5, but that&#8217;s the accordion block and I cannot talk often about it. Often enough about it. I&#8217;m really happy that the accordion block made it into Gutenberg. Now it&#8217;s still under experiments, so you need to switch it on. I think it&#8217;s the second. The second from the top on that page. I had a plan to create a post about all the experiments that I Gutenberg. But yeah, that kind of fell to the website.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Well, it&#8217;s constantly changing I would think.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah, that&#8217;s one thing, but it&#8217;s also kind of. Oh yeah, well, let&#8217;s do the other cool stuff too. Yeah, yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>I&#8217;ve seen a lot of discussion about the new accordion features and I checked about. Of course, you know, I had to look at that. I still think the UI needs some tweaks. Although of course I. I think the add button is a no brainer. That&#8217;s a really good addition. So I was looking at the accordion from a user point of view. Not on the front end, but the back end. And those pan. What do they call them? Panes. They&#8217;re tucked right next to each other. I think just from a UI point of view it would be nice to add a little bit of space between them. Because I had trouble acclimating to how does this actually work and what&#8217;s going on. I hit this plus sign and then it opens up. So just a little bit more tweaking on that, I think would be.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah, I think that&#8217;s also something to think about with block style variations, where you can actually put that in a style.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff</em>: Sure.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>And then I did some discovery on that because I wanted to figure out how many different designs can I come up with? My AI can come up with that. I can put a variation. How many did you discover? Right now, I did it all by hand and kind of do the discovery because I had the whole same thing. But I had too much white space. I did a background into the panel.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>That&#8217;s a good idea. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>And then I had a white space there. And so I needed to reduce the margin to get rid of that white space. But, yeah, I think that&#8217;s the design decisions. It&#8217;s so new that you&#8217;re. There are not all the supports are there. I think you can have some dimension support there with spacing and margins. So you can definitely see that in the side. In the inspector controls and the sidebar of the block. You just need to make sure that you select the right block, because there are four blocks. One is the accordion, that&#8217;s the wrapper, and then you have the header, and then you have the panel, and then you have the content. Yeah, there&#8217;s a. A lot of moving parts that if you create a style variation for that, people can just, with one click.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Oh, okay. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Change the design of things. Yeah. Kind of make it either an FAQ or pricing or whatever to do that. So style variations are really a cool feature. Yeah. So the next thing is. Well, the query loop block had a. Had a broken placeholder and it&#8217;s fixed now.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>And that&#8217;s on small screens, right?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah, that&#8217;s from plus on mobile, pretty much the next one is. Or Core Commands. So Commands is the command palette where you do Control K and then you get a little. Like on a Mac, you get little things and you can say Open Site Editor or add a page or something like that. And now you can now return to the dashboard. Yeah. Because you&#8217;re five levels deep in the Site Editor and now you want to go back to your post. You just open up Control K and say return to Dashboard or just type in Dashboard. And then it kind of gets you to. To that place. It also has some permission checks, so if you are not allowed to go there, you&#8217;re not you&#8217;re not going to go there. So that was kind of missing before. It was kind of. Yeah. Wherever you go, you go.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Oh, so it was like a back door.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Access to.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Wow. But it&#8217;s all, all in the admin. There&#8217;s nothing on the front end, but it&#8217;s. I think it will. So the command palette has those in. In 28. So in the next one there will be additional commands. So command palette, you can register commands with code. So plugin can say, okay, if, if that&#8217;s a team, a team plugin with team members, you could say add a team or yeah. Update theme or something like that. And then because it&#8217;s just a one liner kind of thing, you could also then tap it into the Abilities API. That&#8217;s kind of the next step. It&#8217;s not going to be in 6.9 for sure, but it is something that you can kind of daisy chain some workflows or tab into an AI ability kind of API that then lets you also do some AI stuff there. So it&#8217;s kind of that interface that you will be in in the future more often if you so choose to. But I think that&#8217;s a really interesting development there because now, right now you always have to remember, okay, which menu is it in and where do I go and what&#8217;s the name of it? Yeah, is it template parts? Is it pattern? Is it templates? Is it pages? Yeah, what&#8217;s.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>I tend to click on my little picture icon to get back to the previous screens.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Okay.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Yeah, yeah, that&#8217;s what I tend to do because I don&#8217;t know how often.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah, how often do you do it?</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah. And now you can just do Control K and I like that. Then you&#8217;re back there and you don&#8217;t have to do 15 plus things. Yeah. So no, I really am quite. I like the command palette anyway. But now it has so much perspective in the future.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Yeah.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">New APIs</h3>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>The next thing is about global styles and we talked about. No, we didn&#8217;t talk about it. So you can now, in the theme JSON file, you can now have support for form elements like the inputs, all the inputs on your site, or the dropdowns and selects. So if you create forms and you can style them through the theme JSON file, you don&#8217;t have to do custom CSS for that anymore. Many, many theme builders ask for this too because it&#8217;s, well, what&#8217;s a website without a contact form? Yeah, what&#8217;s a website without a get me your quote or something like that? You need some forms and then you want to style it. You don&#8217;t want to kind of have another CSS file in there. If you have those tools for theme JSON and oh yeah, the developer blog, what&#8217;s New for Developers in September Edition that came out about two weeks ago had some code examples on how you can put that in your theme JSON. Yeah, how. How you phase it and all that. Yeah. So it&#8217;s okay. It&#8217;s really cool. It shows you how to. So you get into the elements section of your theme JSON and then you have text input and then you can do borders, colors, typography, or select and have the different colors for text and background, for instance. That&#8217;s the example in the developer blog.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> So more and more we can do things in theme JSON that will allow us to use additional CSS or custom CSS less and less.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yes, that&#8217;s one thing. And you could actually write CSS in a custom.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>That&#8217;s true.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah, yeah. But yeah, it&#8217;s. It&#8217;s such a habit to go to additional CSS and just fix something. Yeah, yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Or I have very little. Well, actually this comes up later in the changelog, so I won&#8217;t get too deep into it, but I have very little in my additional CSS these days.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>That&#8217;s good.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>It&#8217;s just those few instances where I just can&#8217;t do it in theme JSON.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah, it&#8217;s still not particularly all covered there. Yeah. </p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Bug Fixes</h3>



<p>So now we come to the bug fixes. And one was the randomization of the gallery block doesn&#8217;t work when the lightbox is enabled. But you had a question there.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Yeah, I wasn&#8217;t thinking about that randomization. I didn&#8217;t know about that bug. But in the projects that I&#8217;ve been working on, I noticed the lack of navigation in the. The light box. So I know that that&#8217;s deep in the works now. And look, I. I just recently went to the PR and it looks like a lot of progress has been made. I think they&#8217;re about to say this is a done deal, or maybe they already have. So that&#8217;s really good because otherwise you would do all the things you needed to do to enlarge the image, but you couldn&#8217;t get to the next image in the gallery. Well, that&#8217;s not really a light box, is it?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah, well, everybody Lightbox, I think they&#8217;re around for 15 years now, so everybody has a different idea. But yeah, it was.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Right.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> It was definitely missing navigation to. To just kind of use it as a slider that you can Slide exactly. Forward and backwards without having to. You click on the X and then you&#8217;re at the gallery and then you have to click on the next pictures and then go it up. So it was a little tedious. After the third one, everybody escaped. Yeah, that. Yeah. And PR that Anne is talking about is the 62906. If you want to go on. On the GitHub and check it out. 62906. And yeah, they&#8217;re pretty far with it. It&#8217;s some nice previous and next. And you get some. Yeah, I tested it too. Yeah. With Playground you cannot do Gutenberg and then the PR and then you can play around with it. And that was quite nicely done. Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of people have given input not only from the developers or from the contributor, but also from other developers and from the accessibility. Because that was. I think the first part was the accessibility part was. It didn&#8217;t kind of pan out. So they. They did some interesting.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Oh, were the arrows too small or something?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Errors too small? No area label, no announcement. Yeah, there&#8217;s a lot of things that need to happen for accessibility there.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>I&#8217;m deep into accessibility these days. I mean, with this client&#8217;s site being redesigned, her brand colors don&#8217;t cut it for accessibility. And I don&#8217;t know how, but I somehow convinced her to tweak the web colors to meet the accessibility requirements. I think I was so happy.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Oh, my God. Yeah, so it&#8217;s.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>It&#8217;s a big thing.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah. You don&#8217;t want to get them. Get them into trouble or. Yeah. Have a. The user less optimal experience.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Yeah, exactly.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>So I think we talked about it. A plated science and classes to the experimental form block. That&#8217;s part of the getting the element section into the theme JSON part. There is an experimental form block though. So if you have the Gutenberg plugin installed and go to experiments, One of the 15 choices there is form block. So you can actually create a form from those blocks in your editor. But most people actually have a separate plugin for their forms. I&#8217;m not sure how expanded that&#8217;s going to be used. Yeah, that&#8217;s pretty much. We are through the bug fixes and then there&#8217;s one fix. So much. So the zoom out. We had this in 6.8. There was a problem that when you have the show template, you couldn&#8217;t show the template when you were in zoom out, and now they actually put it out. It didn&#8217;t work. You just didn&#8217;t get it to it. And now they actually took the. They now fixed it that the zoom out is disabled when the show template is toggled off. You need both. You need to in zoom out because when the show template is off, the renderer doesn&#8217;t see the main section of the page because that&#8217;s all the content anyway. But zoom out needs to have that main section. So it&#8217;s all kind of. Wasn&#8217;t consistently kind of working. So now they finally fixed it. Anything else? No, I think we&#8217;re through with 21.6. Except there&#8217;s some block library. Image block.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Code Quality</h3>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Oh, yeah. And that got me thinking how useful it would be to have live updating with the alt text. Because if I change the alt text in the media library for an image, it doesn&#8217;t automatically sync to where it&#8217;s being used in a page or a post. Oh, I have to. I have to click on the image and the page or the post and replace it with the same image with the revised alt text. So I was thinking, wouldn&#8217;t it be nice if that was all synced together? And then that got me down another path. So maybe you have the answer to this question. So I noticed for, well, quite a long time, I&#8217;ve been noticing that when you&#8217;re in the image library and you click on an image, the fields differ depending on your media library mode. If it&#8217;s list and you click on an image, you get a different set of metadata or fields versus a grid. And I think it&#8217;s. With the grid. Yeah. There&#8217;s no alt text option from a list mode, but there is from a grid mode. And so why. Do you know why those fields differ?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>No, I have no idea.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> I don&#8217;t know either. Ladies and gentlemen.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yes. Well, it&#8217;s interesting that you actually notice that. Yeah, I. Yeah, I always have my media library on grid, so I&#8217;m not.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Yeah, me too.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>I don&#8217;t. I don&#8217;t see the difference, but you&#8217;re right. Yeah. I know that the contributors are working on the media library for the admin redesign and I think it would be good to talk to them about it because they also will have a grid view and a list view, because the data views actually support that. Yeah. So to make sure that definitely needs to be consistent, you know that all.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>The fields are available here, maybe in the outreach channel. I&#8217;ll put it out there and see if anyone.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah. Yeah. Or we wait until 6.9. After 6.9. Yeah. Because I think. Yeah, that&#8217;s where it&#8217;s not. 4619. We are. We are all hoping for. For the data views coming into 6.9. But I&#8217;m. The data views will be in there, but I don&#8217;t think that the admin design will come in for 6.9. That&#8217;s just not enough time. Right. It&#8217;s now only four weeks. Okay, so you have question. Oh, you have another question in there?</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Do I know?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Okay.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Create Block Theme</h3>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> About the Create Block theme and style editing.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Create block theme. Oh, right. Create block theme. So it&#8217;s interesting. I haven&#8217;t looked at it in a month or so. It&#8217;s good to sometimes look at it with fresh eyes. And it looks like there used to be two paths to editing the styles and it looks like those have been eliminated. You were once able to edit via this path, Appearance editor, Design styles. When you get to design and you click on styles, there&#8217;s no longer the option to edit them from that point. And then the other way would be from a page or a post. I no longer see the cbt, the Create Block theme wrench. I see it only when on the side. Templates, template parts, sync patterns. And another interesting thing, I mean this is all. It&#8217;s a lot of information here, but let me try to slow down. So both of those previous paths gave access to that full featured. What I call the full featured Create Block Theme panel. It had all the things that you can do with the Create Block theme plugin. Now the other thing I noticed is if you click on a page as if you&#8217;re editing it like a normal person would edit. You know, regular person, not normal, but regular person, the wrench is no longer there. However, if I go through the full site editor path and click on a page, the wrench appears that way. So it&#8217;s just this inconsistency, and I&#8217;m a pretty well versed user and it was a little confusing. It&#8217;s like, well, why can I get to the full feature panel this way and not that way?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. So one is that the page post editor, when you go from WP admin posts and pages goes in a slightly different editor mode than go into the appearance and editor. When I first listened to you, I thought you might. It wouldn&#8217;t be related to the create block theme because with the site editor we also have two different path to access styles. Yeah. One is through editor and then styles. There&#8217;s no design anymore. It only says styles. It&#8217;s with the navigation styles, templates and patterns. When you click on styles there, you have access to the same thing that comes if you are in the edit mode on a. On A template or on a page. You also on the right hand side there&#8217;s a styles interface. Both are now kind of pretty much on par with the features. So before a couple of months ago or maybe even longer, there was a discrepancy between what you could do on the right hand side in the styles and if you come from the left hand side. But that is pretty much eliminated. The only difference now is only how the style book looks, but it&#8217;s really marginally. Yeah, but we have one thing that comes with the next plugin release that we&#8217;re going to talk about is the additional CSS you will only access on the right hand sidebar and not on the left hand side. And that has been fixed now. So you get to the additional CSS from both sides. But the Create block theme has changed. So the great Block theme theme plugin only works in the site editor. So if you come from the pages or from the posts on the WP admin, you don&#8217;t have access to it.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Right.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> So you only have it in the Site editor. And I think that makes sense because that&#8217;s. It does what you do with that. Yeah, because that&#8217;s the place where you actually would edit a theme component. So it also had changed the right hand side sidebar. When you click on save the changes to the theme, you get additional checkboxes. What exactly do you want in your theme? So that definitely was an improvement there because it also included some localization from text and you could also kind of eliminate the navigation IDs and all that.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>And I brought another issue up with the team several months ago, which is the cbt, which I&#8217;m calling it CBT Create Block Theme Plugin. That&#8217;s my shorthand, the page for it from the administration sidebar. When you go to it directly from the sidebar, those options differ from the full site editor pathway to it. In my mind, all of that should be the same. You should have the same access to the same features.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Well, on that settings page, the only thing that you get from there is actually what you want to do. Do you want a greater theme? Do you want to create a from scratch, do you want to clone it? Or do you want a child theme? All the other features are actually in the site editor.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Right.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Need to be connected with the site editor. So I don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s a whole lot of benefit from it to put it in a settings page that you. That has no connection to any of the other features that are in there.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Yeah, I, I hear you. I understand that I just like consistency.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>I think it&#8217;s less confusing when you have the same. That&#8217;s a full page devoted to it. Why don&#8217;t I have access to everything that I can do with it? That&#8217;s my logic.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Because you need the editor too. The settings page doesn&#8217;t have access to the editor.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Yeah, yeah, I totally understand that. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> It&#8217;s like when. Why, why don&#8217;t you have the font or dimensions in a settings page? Yeah. Because it&#8217;s not the editor that has that sidebar. Yeah. Okay.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Fair enough. All right. This is why it&#8217;s good to talk.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah, yeah. But I, I hear you. With all the questions that we have there. The inconsistency is definitely something inconsistent. User interfaces overall, the whole site editor. I think there have been great strides made in the last four months to make this all more consistent. Have all the support for all the blocks like the border and fonts and dimensions that every block. Who has. Who needs it, actually has it. Because there are really some inconsistencies that some. Why does the heading not have a font size or something like that? Yeah. When everybody else, every other block has it. But that&#8217;s. It takes a. A lot of perseverance to get through I don&#8217;t know, 60 blocks and kind of make them all consistent that have been built in the last three years. </p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Gutenberg 21.7</h3>



<p>Let&#8217;s get into 21.7. The release is going to be on Wednesday, tomorrow, September 24th. We are recording this on September 23rd. So the listeners. When you, when you listen to it, it will already be out because we are not publishing it until Sunday, our episode. So let&#8217;s get into it. We are doing that from the talking through the changelog from the release candidate one that was published last week. So just to. If there are changes on what we didn&#8217;t have in there from the final release next tomorrow. Okay. </p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Enhancements</h3>



<p>This release has quite a few additional updates on the block comment thing. So that&#8217;s part of the Gutenberg phase three collaboration phase. Where you have one is from the collaboration phase one is synchronized editing where multiple people are working on the same post at the same time, which is a bit scary, but it works in Google Docs. But we are not there yet. But what already is in the works and has been for a while is the block level commenting. So you can. You&#8217;re in your block editor and you click on. And anybody else who has access to it can go in there and say, okay, in this paragraph, change a comma, an acronym, a wording kind of thing, put it in a comment and then you can resolve it in a comment. So the comments show up in the right hand side in the sidebar and each block that has a comment has a little icon that there are comments in there.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Oh wow.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> And then you can add a comment by going to the block settings, block options drop down where you also have the grouping and the before and after. There&#8217;s also now comment on the block, and then you can start commenting on it, and then it shows up in the sidebar and then other people who are also come back tomorrow or something like that can answer that or you can also resolve it. So there are quite a few improvements on that. So first is that we only talk about two of them. One is to render the comment content. So it&#8217;s rendered in the comment the content completely. So it doesn&#8217;t. And it&#8217;s still. It&#8217;s a HTML kind of thing. So you can put in links in there without having all the HTML. Yeah. Kind of anchor links there. That&#8217;s one thing. And the other one is that the user text area auto size up until now you couldn&#8217;t. You could write in it, but it kind of would go underneath the box. You had to manually kind of increase it, but now it&#8217;s auto sized. That&#8217;s really cool. Yeah, yeah. So. And I know you are a single site producer so you probably might not have a whole lot of use case for that. But I can see, I can see.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>The use for it for sure.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Would you kind of work with your clients on that or rather with another coworker like a developer or something?</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>I think to educate my clients about the feature and then they could work together on content. It&#8217;s a nice collaboration tool but with any page or post only one person can edit at a time. So there&#8217;s that which is a useful barrier, unlike a simultaneous thing. So I can definitely share that with people, let them know about it.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>So there&#8217;s now the ability to reopen resolved comments to see enable inline comments for published posts. Yeah, so if you. Up until now when it was published, all the comments would go away. You wouldn&#8217;t see them. So there was a lot of thought going into that how it&#8217;s actually used from the previous versions.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>You know, actually my brother uses WordPress. He&#8217;s a writer and he works with a rather large company. So I&#8217;ll let him know about this upcoming feature because I don&#8217;t know how they manage the editing of content and it would be good if they could do it right there.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah, it&#8217;s kind of. It could eliminate one step. So when you work with a team on a, on a content you normally go into, or we go with the developer blog and other blogs, we go into Google Docs, write the draft, have all the communication in there, including the comments there and then once all the things are resolved, you copy paste it over to WordPress and that sometimes gets you into trouble. And that copy paste step and the reformatting that is necessary kind of could be eliminated with something like that. Yeah, absolutely.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Exactly. Back in the day when I used, when I was a print Designer, we used InDesign. There is a plugin, so to speak, for InDesign where content writers could do all their magic, all their writing right in. It&#8217;s. I think it&#8217;s. It&#8217;s not in vision, I&#8217;m not remembering, but it doesn&#8217;t matter. Same concept.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> What I really like about it as a designer, they had no access to the styling, they couldn&#8217;t change the colors, size. Yeah, I really like that. You know, the head is. Just leave the head alone. It&#8217;s 24 pixels or.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Print design points.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I get this. Yeah. That is actually coming also to WordPress with the write mode. It&#8217;s kind of a content only mode that you can have patterns in content only and you can only change wording on that. But the rest of it is. Even the, the structure of the pattern is locked. So there is a design mode and a write mode. It also streamlines kind of the process because you&#8217;re not distracting by all the design features you could do. Yeah, so I really like that. But that. That&#8217;s coming.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Same idea.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah, yeah. It&#8217;s also. Yeah. So yeah, in 21.7 there&#8217;s also quite a few updates to the data form, especially data forms, also data views. But it has to be kind of to make the form handling kind of bringing up to par to what actually other forms are doing. So the form component has quite a few additional updates in there. So it&#8217;s the radio control, be it the Boolean field types with a toggle, you know, being. Having a URL field that can be in the field control, having a phone field. So it kind of is a build out of what you actually expect when you do forms. But it&#8217;s all in the data view. So it will be in the admin section, not on the front end. So think about when you have a post or page where you have a quick edit. Yeah. Where you can change a few things. That is the form that this is working on. Yeah. Or what the people are working on is kind of. Okay. In the admin we have a user putting data in what can. What controls do we have available for that? Not on the front end or something.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Right.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Or in the edit in the block editor. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Okay, so this is just for quick view.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Well, it has a better panel for that. The whole data views has. I think Matthias talked about that in one of his blog posts on the Make Core blog about the different building blocks of the new admin design. And one of them was the infrastructure and what&#8217;s on the panel. So thinking about what are the rooms in the house. You have a kitchen that is differently furniture than the living room and you need the different tools in there. And the form is. Is in a tool you can actually create a form that is then triggered through a modal. Yeah. Or you can add. Open up another panel on the right hand side kind of the data. So those are decisions that the developer is gonna. Is going to make. So plugin developers for most of our plugin developers or core developers. And then you have different tools available for different use cases. Yeah. And. But you always need a form. Right. If a user is going to change something. So depending on how much space you need, quick is only Quick edit is just a very limited. Yeah, yeah yeah. This is going to be a little bit more comfortable to do. Yeah it&#8217;s really interesting to. To see it all come to together and how. How granular the whole development process is. Yeah. So the next ones are kind of navigation pieces. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> I noticed the changing add page to create page and it seems like such a small thing, but it&#8217;s, you know, it&#8217;s significant. I like that one. That&#8217;s a good change.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah. And it reminds me, I did some. Some support in. In the forums of WordPress forums and there was one person who had trouble distinguishing between creating a pattern. Yeah. Adding a pattern.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Oh yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah. It&#8217;s it for. For mere mortals, I would say. Yeah, it&#8217;s the same. Yeah. I add a page. Yeah. Let me put the count. Or. But the pattern is you create a pattern that you can reuse or. Or you add an existing pattern to the page.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Exactly.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>It&#8217;s kind of that. Yeah. And this is pretty much similar to add a page or create a page. So add a page would be a page link that you add from your existing page and create a page as okay, I want that link, but I don&#8217;t have the page yet. And now you get a button that says create the page. And of course in the write mode it&#8217;s going to be hidden.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>And you were asking me to check on the status with the navigation block and I don&#8217;t see anything that&#8217;s changed. If you edit the navigate via the navigation area. So you go appearance, design, navigation, the UI seems to be the same as it has been for months, which is in my opinion, ugly and confusing. But if you edit via the design area. So if you just stop at appearance design and click on the navigation there, the. It&#8217;s so much more aesthetically pleasing. It just makes for a more enjoyable experience. It&#8217;s attractive and intuitive. So I know this has been on their plate for a while and when I say them, I mean all these wonderful WordPress team developers. Maybe a good place to start improving this UX is to somehow merge what we&#8217;re seeing in the design UI with the navigation UI.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah, yeah, no, I get you. Yeah. I. When I was creating my theme demo, I had the same. I couldn&#8217;t do anything with the. Well, I saw the dark side of the site editor. It&#8217;s the dark side menu and on the right hand side. So when I go into a template header and just click on the navigation, it opens up the sidebar on the right hand side and there you can add blocks or add another page link and it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s very pleasing to kind of add to that. That part. You don&#8217;t have on the right hand side or on the left hand side in the dark area of navigation or all you can do is I think click on edit and then you go somewhere. But it&#8217;s the isolated navigation and it&#8217;s kind of plucked on top of the. This.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Yeah, exactly. It&#8217;s just this.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>You don&#8217;t see very nondescript piece of navigation plopped the top of the screen.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>On top of the content design it. You can&#8217;t, you can&#8217;t. You don&#8217;t see it in context. Yeah, so exactly. It&#8217;s definitely something to think about in, in the. In the next few versions to come. Yeah, yeah. And there was this big or that issue that Matthias wrote about. What other new blocks do we need?</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Oh, yes, yes.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>And Justin Tadlock kind of reversed his stance on what needs to be in Core and he wrote of the Gutenberg Times on why we need new blocks, and that is so theme developers can actually prepare for that out of the box. They don&#8217;t have to check. Is an accordion available from. I don&#8217;t know, the other 15 plugins that have accordions and how to style it. There is one in Core and that&#8217;s what my theme is styling the same with a table of contents block. Or there will be. So they are working on grading the table of content ready for coming out of the experimental stage, which it has been for I think three years now. Yeah. So. But there were no resources to kind of attribute to the table of content block.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> So would this be something you could use in a blog post to identify the sections of the blog post itself and they would be anchor links to that section. Oh, nice.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah. That&#8217;s a table of content block. Yeah. And if you.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>I know a use of that.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Several of my own blog posts.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. Yeah. And if you don&#8217;t have Gutenberg installed, the plugin installed, you don&#8217;t have that block. Yeah. Because it&#8217;s. It&#8217;s only available in Gutenberg and it&#8217;s not yet in Core. But there&#8217;s a big push to hopefully get it into Core. The implementation had some accessibility issues and then some usability issues, but there was kind of. The first version was in there, but then every so. And then the other contributors tried to change it, but then they couldn&#8217;t follow through on this because. Yeah. And now maybe this time is the right time. And then there is a new block. It&#8217;s called the terms query block. It&#8217;s like the query block for post, but it also is for terms. So that&#8217;s the categories and the tags. So you can list them in a rolling block in a post. So I need to see it, how it works to kind of find a good use case for it. But we probably have that. It&#8217;s already in Gutenberg and it has an order by. And with a single drop down and. And these kinds of things. So.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> So it&#8217;s almost like integrating. Could you integrate that on the same page as a. A category?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. With the descriptions and all that. Because it has the tone blocks in there. Yeah. So you can kind of. So if you. For instance, if you have a parent category and you have a blog post in that category, you can say, okay, I want. Underneath every single post, I want a list of all the categories for that parent category or the children category. So people can navigate a little bit deeper into my content forest.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> I bet that would impact SEO positively, right?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Well, yeah, if you don&#8217;t have too many. Too many categories and too many terms. Yeah, because that definitely. If you have too many terms, you get into the duplicate content issues when multiple terms of the same content in there, but that&#8217;s a different story. So. But it gives you more flexibility on how you can link deeper. That definitely. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And then we mentioned that before that in Site Editor always show the additional CSS button is now finally available in and it will come to 6.9 is what we talked about before that you did we talk about it. Well, with the Site editor you have a place where you can add additional CSS for your site. That what you, you know also from the customizer from classic themes where you had additional CSS. CSS that wasn&#8217;t in the theme. It was on the right hand side on the styles. Yeah, you could add that. But when you were on the left hand side of the styles you didn&#8217;t have a way to add the additional CSS.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>See now this really. This threw me for a loop because I never noticed that, and I can&#8217;t reconstruct the sequence of events from. I have a tutorial site using the 2024 theme and it has just a little bit of additional CSS in it. So yesterday when I noticed this and I explored and I saw my additional CSS field disappear when I deleted its contents and I was like, oh, that&#8217;s not good. And it really threw me for a loop because I always have a backup. So I uploaded my theme backup and thinking it would be in theme JSON and reinstate itself, but it wasn&#8217;t reinstated. So then I had to look at my revision history and find the spot where I was before I deleted really unsettled me.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah, I imagine. I imagine. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>So now if you&#8217;re saying the additional CSS in the right sidebar is the same as what shows up in the. Okay.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. So if you said okay, there must be another way to get to the additional css.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Exactly.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Clone to the right hand side. But that, that is such a. Yeah, it kind of really threw quite a few people. Oh yeah, yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> So but why didn&#8217;t it show up in my theme JSON? That&#8217;s what I was.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>It&#8217;s not, it&#8217;s not routed through theme JSON. It&#8217;s user content. So it&#8217;s in the database and when it, when that renders, it renders the last item before the in the head with the styles. That&#8217;s the last thing that is going to pull in. So it overrides everything else what you had in theme JSON in the default. So that&#8217;s why it kind of doesn&#8217;t show up in theme JSON because it&#8217;s a different level of customization. Yeah, it&#8217;s the last defense, so to speak is the user oriented stuff. I&#8217;m glad you pointed this point in pulled in last. Yeah. You will see it so if you go to View Source, you see your additional CSS, the last style tag before you start with the content tags. All that.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Okay.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> All it takes. Okay.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Thank you.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>You&#8217;re welcome.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>I can breathe now.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. But it shows you that it&#8217;s really hard to kind of keep it all straight when you have multiple places where you can change styles. Because the same thing will happen when you change. So you could change your. This appearance of a block for the whole site in the styles styles and then you go further down this typography layout and then you have blocks there. You change how each block, how a block appears every time you use it. But there&#8217;s also a place when you have a paragraph on one page and you change the look and feel of that paragraph through the right hand side with the. With the tools there.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Sure.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>That&#8217;s two places. And the other places theme JSON also kind of controls how a block looks. Yeah. So if something is not right, you have to look at multiple places to find the place where you can change it or where you can. Where it actually was controlled. So that&#8217;s why the additional CSS is just another place to look and to kind of control this. But I think to eliminate the cognitive load, I think learning how to put custom CSS in the theme JSON is probably a good additional skill set to have kind of take away think about not doing the additional CSS right because the advantage is also it only will be loaded. So the additional CSS is always loaded on each page even if the block or whatever you have is not on the page. But if you do it in theme JSON, it will only pulled in when that particular element or block is actually on page. So it&#8217;s actually a performance issues as well. But not a whole lot of people put a whole lot of in additional CSS. So I think it&#8217;s negligent. But just a cognitive load that kind of eliminate another place to.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Right. And that ties into a whole other subject. Not for now, not for today. But CSS specificity, that&#8217;s a whole other thing.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Oh yeah, yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Gets very complicated.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Volumes of books have been written about that. So the command palette is getting another update with 21.7 that is made the navigation commands available on all screens. So you can now go into your Tools menu on WP admin, hit Control K and say go to Site Editor. Then you can kind of jump like that. You don&#8217;t have to be in the editor to use the command palette. We talked about it before, but it&#8217;s getting more and more in there. Oh, there is a nice template API change that it reads really non-ecstatic. This kind of allows template duplication plus the concept of active templates. That&#8217;s something I would ask anybody who does works with template to test out. Because what it helps you is that you can have multiple single post templates on your site and only one is active. So if you have a plugin that kind of adds templates to your site. So through the template hierarchy that WordPress has, there are certain templates need to have a certain slug to be pulled automatically. So the single post or the archive pages or that. But if you want to test out different kinds of templates, right now what you do is use patterns for a certain template and you&#8217;re not adding them to templates, but you&#8217;re adding them to patterns.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>But if you can do, okay, I have a single post template. Oh, and I also want to know how it looks without the featured image to add another single post template and then you can activate each one of them. And that makes it for a much clearer proposition on what templates do and what patterns do. And that also when you have a plugin that adds a template, because plugins now can suggest. Oh, push templates into the template editor. Yeah. Like woocommerce. Yeah. Is going to do that.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Right.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Or when you have a theme, a team plugin or a business directory plugin, you can get the templates into your template editor. So you can modify them. Yeah. As a user, but you already have a team member custom post type template, so the plugin would overwrite it. But if you can have multiple template duplication, deplete duplication or multiple, not only two, but more, you can just. With the activation flag, you can say which one is the one that&#8217;s going to be rendered on front page. Does it make sense?</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Okay, cool. So. And I&#8217;m totally excited about that. Yeah, I can&#8217;t.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>This is. It&#8217;ll take me down so many different paths. I won&#8217;t get any work done for a month. I&#8217;ll be busy exploring and testing. That&#8217;s all good.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. But Ela Vandorp, one of the Goodmoor developers, has been working on that for so long. Yeah. And when you go to the PR, it has, I don&#8217;t know, 150 comments or something like that. Yeah. But it&#8217;s. It finally made it into the Gutenberg plugin release. Yeah. Now we can test it before it goes into WordPress core in a month. So go and test it, please. Okay, everybody here on the Gutenberg Changelog Podcast needs to test this. And Aki Hamano, he&#8217;s a contributor from Japan.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Oh, sure. Yeah.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">New API</h3>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. He has a few things that really he contributed quite a lot to Gutenberg in the last year and he introduced a new function called Use Commands. So you can register more than one command for the command palette, which is good, especially when you kind of think about kind of getting the abilities API kind of connected with the commands palette. So yeah, for developers it&#8217;s definitely something to check out how you can add additional commands to the command palette for your users. Your agencies probably can change some of the workflow hiccups that some of the clients have. Yeah. If you can add a command to it and you teach them to control K and you something, that&#8217;s definitely good. </p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Bug Fixes</h3>



<p>A lot of bug fixes, bug fixes, data form fixes. Yeah, I don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s anything I wanted to point out except the global styles bug fix was. Is that the border radius presets kind of had a little bug in there that it generated the wrong variable name in pattern code. And that is definitely fixed. It works. Thank goodness it works good for them. In the block library accordion now has a block gap support. I think that&#8217;s what you are kind of thinking about.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Oh sure. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>That is now in 21.7 and then you also have a term list drop down.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Oh, there was a limit. What is. What is the new limit?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>I think it&#8217;s now 100.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Oh, I was just thinking yeah, 100 would be good and I would never get to 100 but someone might.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> It takes 10 to 100. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>So okay, that&#8217;s quite a limit. 10.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Well, you shouldn&#8217;t use too many terms because each term creates another page. A page that needs to be indexed and doesn&#8217;t have a unique thing there.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Content only pattern patterns.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah. Yeah, that&#8217;s definitely something to test. Is kind of added content in.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>So the purple icon was taken away.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>I think so, yeah. Well, in the right mode. Yeah. It&#8217;s kind of that mode where you only can change certain things and not do design. So unsync patterns are actually content only by default. So when you add them to the page you only kind of change content if. If it&#8217;s in the write mode. Yeah. So you don&#8217;t get distracted by certain things like edit. Yeah. If you want the pattern to be. It&#8217;s unsynced so it doesn&#8217;t propagate the design over every usage. But you still want to have a consistent layout. And then editors who use that in on the page shouldn&#8217;t change the composition of the pattern, only the content that&#8217;s. </p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Experiments</h3>



<p>And then there&#8217;s a pattern content only experiment that makes the template parts section blocks. Yeah, that was one thing that came out of section styles that&#8217;s in 6.6. IIn WordPress 6.6 is that you have patterns that are actually sections and you could style them through JSON files. And then you only get in the style section of the right hand side. You get, I don&#8217;t know, two or three styles and every. The pattern changes its look and feel according to their styles. But it was hard to figure out what makes a pattern a section and whatnot. So it ended up that every group block was actually a section. So the styles would apply to other group box as well that were not meant to do. But there was no way to say okay, only for section styles. I want these. So this call for action or call for call for action block or book kind of things. So it was a little confusing for the users to apply that and some of the features. So in zoom mode when you added a pattern you had a little, little drop, kind of a. A fluid drop that would. You could toggle through. Not toggle, browse through. All the styles that are. Can be attached to that pattern. Oh yeah. And those also needed to be sections. But it wasn&#8217;t clear what does one pattern distinguish. The other pattern is a section. And now they are trying to do that in an experiment and see how far it gets with also the styling part. I don&#8217;t know if all that makes sense what I&#8217;m saying, but.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> No, no, I understand.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>I think that was it for 21.7 that I kind of saw. Yes, that&#8217;s it. Yeah. So now we&#8217;re coming to. I think we&#8217;re really out of time today with our. With our episode here. </p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">What’s in Active Development or Discussed</h3>



<p>So I wanted to talk about tabs, we need to kind of have it in front of us. Yeah. So it. They are not. So one of the new blocks that are. Is worked on is the tabs block. Okay. And the other one is the modal block or the pop up block is kind of when you. So you have a trigger, you have a block for a trigger and then when a user clicks on it, then a modal comes up and you can fill out something. That&#8217;s also in an HTML standard, but there&#8217;s no blocks there. And it definitely is a common use case for certain things. And those things are. And the same as tabs. So you have not as an Accordion where you have one header and then the panel opens and then the next header is. You have multiple tabs on top and then the panel changes. That is also in the works. I hope it makes it.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff</em>: Oh, nice.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Makes it to the 6.9, but I&#8217;m not quite sure it actually goes there because I haven&#8217;t seen anything in the last week that kind of contributes to that. But I&#8217;m also. I might have been out of the loop there because there are so many things that going on at the same time. And I&#8217;m. I&#8217;m waiting. I know that Anne McCarthy, she&#8217;s working on the kind of what&#8217;s the state of the development now? But I hope that it comes out next week or something like that and then we have it for the next episode.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Good timing.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah. So WordPress 6.9 comes with really a lot of good features and also quality of life changes for. For the editor and for the flow of things. So I&#8217;m really excited about that. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> And wasn&#8217;t there a reduction in the number of releases that was decided to condense?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yes. So in January there were initiatives when Automattic said, okay, we are going to stop contributing for a while. And then the core committers then decided, okay, if it&#8217;s not that we have one more release, that was 6.8 and that would be the only release in 2025. And then in May, Automattic decided to contribute again and kind of push everything further and then said, okay, then we can also have one more release this year.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Okay.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> And that&#8217;s 6.9. And that&#8217;s what we are building up to. That&#8217;s also why there are so many and Gutenberg releases kind of put together into one of the. Into the major WordPress release. Normally it was kind of between 7 and 10, but now we have 15.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Okay.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah, so yeah, yeah, but that was a good question. Yeah. Not everybody kind of know they stopped, but did we start again contributing to Core? You know. Yes, we did. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Excellent. Well, I look forward to the next release.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>We do, yeah. So we are at the end of the show. Thank you so much for going through that with me, Ann. It was great to talk to you again.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>I know. It was great to talk with you.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah. As always, dear listeners, the show notes will be published on <a href="http://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast">GutenbergTimes.com/podcast</a>. This is episode 121, 121. And if you have questions, suggestions or news you want us to include next time, send them to <a href="http://changelogutenbergtimes.com">changelog@gutenbergtimes.com</a> that&#8217;s <a href="mailto:changelog@gutenbergtimes.com">changelog@gutenbergtimes.com</a> and the show notes will have all the contact information for Anne and it will be on, as I said, Gutenbergtimes.com. </p>



<p>So thank you, everybody. </p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Thank you for thank you, Birgit. </p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Thank you, Anne, for your time. And I hope you have a wonderful time in fall. Take care. Bye bye. </p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Bye. Bye.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Sun, 28 Sep 2025 20:07:25 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:18:"Birgit Pauli-Haack";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:45;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:21:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:21:"Matt: Saturday Shares";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:23:"https://ma.tt/?p=150000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:38:"https://ma.tt/2025/09/saturday-shares/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:2724:"<p>A few links for you:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>From Kirschblütenboogie to Khruangbin (from Houston!), here&#8217;s a <a href="https://open.spotify.com/playlist/27gcPbqPTfnjS1xnfq9jFe?si=lF1sBoR1R3SyrPOEu3c3aQ">Saturday chill Spotify playlist I made for you to have good vibes this weekend</a>. Perfect for sunsets. Hat tip: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielgruneberg/">Daniel Gruneberg</a> who first introduced me to Hermanos Gutiérrez.</li>



<li><a href="https://openssf.org/blog/2025/09/23/open-infrastructure-is-not-free-a-joint-statement-on-sustainable-stewardship/">Open Infrastructure is Not Free: A Joint Statement on Sustainable Stewardship</a>. &#8220;Billion-dollar ecosystems cannot stand on foundations built of goodwill and unpaid weekends.&#8221;</li>



<li>Chat-based photo editing is one of the most magical uses of AI right now, and <a href="https://blog.google/products/photos/android-conversational-editing-google-photos/">Google Photos just made it available to everybody</a>.</li>



<li>Did you know <a href="https://automattic.com/expectations/anti-glossary/">Automattic has an anti-glossary</a>?</li>



<li>It&#8217;s cool to see <a href="https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/07/07/copyleft.html">Vitalik Buterin come around to copyleft licenses</a>.</li>



<li>I&#8217;m going to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQDNgy774sg">re-link the Grit interview, some people are saying it is their favorite they&#8217;ve seen of me in years</a>.</li>



<li>BCG has an annoyingly-good rundown of <a href="https://www.bcg.com/publications/2023/corporate-development-finance-function-excellence-art-of-capital-allocation">The Art of Capital Allocation</a>.</li>



<li><a href="https://siliconangle.com/2025/06/26/linux-foundation-open-source-ai-opensourcesummit/">The Linux Foundation thinks open source contributes $9 Trillion in global value</a>. Really what we&#8217;re doing is sharing the technological phylogenetic branches for humanity&#8217;s progress.</li>



<li><a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/08/study-social-media-probably-cant-be-fixed/">A great interview with Petter Törnberg on his paper about how social media might be structually dysfunctional</a>. &#8220;Rather than bringing us together into one utopian public square and fostering a healthy exchange of ideas, these platforms too often create filter bubbles or echo chambers.&#8221;</li>



<li>See <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4JxqES_Gzk">Harry Mack meet Will Smith and Martin Lawrence</a>.</li>
</ul>



<p>Fun fact: this post has the ID of &#8220;150,000&#8221; in <a href="https://codex.wordpress.org/Database_Description#Table:_wp_posts">my wp_posts table</a>.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Sun, 28 Sep 2025 01:31:04 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4:"Matt";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:46;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:21:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:99:"Gutenberg Times: WordPress 6.9 is coming, moar plugins, Query block and fonts—Weekend Edition 342";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:35:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/?p=41984";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:106:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/wordpress-6-9-is-coming-moar-plugins-query-block-and-fonts-weekend-edition-342/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:19187:"<p>Hi there, </p>



<p>I send you greetings from Gdynia, a polish port city on the East Sea, with some pirate roots, maybe. My only clues are pirate theme of the WordCamp Gdynia, with the Wapuu, the harbor cruise on a pirate ship, and the branding assets of the WordCamp. For one of my slides, I had Gemini create a background image to celebrate the Site Editor the pirate way. </p>





<p>Enjoy the weekend edition and have a fantastic weekend!</p>



<p>Yours, <img alt="💕" class="wp-smiley" src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/16.0.1/72x72/1f495.png" style="height: 1em;" /><br /><em>Birgit</em></p>


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<p><strong>Table of Contents</strong></p>



<nav class="wp-block-table-of-contents"><ol><li><a class="wp-block-table-of-contents__entry" href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/wordpress-6-9-is-coming-moar-plugins-query-block-and-fonts-weekend-edition-342/#wordpress-6-9-is-coming-into-focus">WordPress 6.9 is coming into focus. </a></li><li><a class="wp-block-table-of-contents__entry" href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/wordpress-6-9-is-coming-moar-plugins-query-block-and-fonts-weekend-edition-342/#0-p">Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners</a></li><li><a class="wp-block-table-of-contents__entry" href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/wordpress-6-9-is-coming-moar-plugins-query-block-and-fonts-weekend-edition-342/#2-word-press-6-0-1-and-6-1-scheduled">Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks</a></li><li><a class="wp-block-table-of-contents__entry" href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/wordpress-6-9-is-coming-moar-plugins-query-block-and-fonts-weekend-edition-342/#3-building-themes-for-fse-and-word-press">Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.</a></li></ol></nav>
</div></div>
</section>


<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="wordpress-6-9-is-coming-into-focus">WordPress 6.9 is coming into focus. </h2>



<p>I almost missed it; <strong>Anne McCarthy</strong> <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2025/07/28/roadmap-to-6-9/#comment-47884">commented</a> on the Roadmap post that some priorities changed for WordPress 6.9:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list has-light-background-background-color has-background">
<li>&#8220;Added in a “New blocks<strong>” section</strong> under “Refining Content Creation” after there’s been a shift in momentum there.</li>



<li>Removed “An initial experimental version is planned in the Gutenberg plugin, where contributors can opt-in and offer feedback” under “New WordPress Admin experience” as that’s no longer planned based on the current state of work.&#8221; </li>
</ul>



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<p><strong>McCarthy</strong> is also <a href="https://nomad.blog/2025/09/24/exploring-work-in-progress-for-wordpress-6-9-v2/"><strong>Exploring work in progress for WordPress 6.9 v2</strong></a> on her personal blog. You&#8217;ll find videos and links to all the pertinent information. It&#8217;s a lot; you probably have to be selective to digest it all. She updates us all about:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Ability to hide blocks</strong>: The first version will just be a hide/show menu item. Don&#8217;t get rid of the Block Visibility plugin just yet.  </li>



<li><strong>Command Palette everywhere</strong>: It is already available in GB 21.5. Additional work is done on the back end to solidify the API. </li>



<li><strong>Block commenting</strong> has received a myriad of updates, and the UI is still refined. </li>



<li><strong>New block</strong>: summarizes work around already merged Accordion and Post Term query blocks and work on the way for the Page breakcrumbs, Icons, Stretchy, Tabs, Time to read, and Table of Contents blocks.</li>



<li><strong>Simplified site editing</strong>: Two different experiments are pursued, one more Write/Design mode and the other is a Pattern ContentOnly idea. Videos and more details are in the post. </li>



<li><strong>Expanded template management</strong>: work around duplicate templates, switch which one’s active, disable theme templates &amp; keep your custom ones, and use the new “Active templates” view.</li>



<li><strong>Various dev updates</strong>—standardized UTF-8 support, Abilities API, Interactivity API, Block bindings. </li>
</ul>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide" />



<p><strong>Jamie Marsland </strong>gave a sneak peak on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSXUfsECVFI"><strong>WordPress 6.9 in 250 seconds</strong></a> and covers <a href="https://www.youtube.com/"></a>Block-level commenting, improved template management and portability across themes, block hiding, and more powerful editing controls.</p>


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<p>Last month, <strong>Justin Tadlock</strong> already published a tutorial on how to <a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/news/2025/08/registering-custom-social-icons-in-wordpress-6-9/"><strong>register custom social icons in WordPress 6.9</strong></a> on the WordPress Developer Blog. With the new WordPress version to be released on December 2, 2025, developers will be able to create block variations using JavaScript for editor registration and filter the block_core_social_link_get_services hook for frontend display. The tutorial demonstrates building a plugin that adds Ko-fi, IMDB, Letterboxd, Signal, and YouTube Music icons, including proper brand color styling for both logos-only and standard variations, making social media integration more flexible and customizable.</p>



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<p><img alt="🎙" class="wp-smiley" src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/16.0.1/72x72/1f399.png" style="height: 1em;" /> The latest episode is <a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-122-gutenberg-21-8-and-wordpress-6-9/">Gutenberg Changelog #122 – Gutenberg 21.8 and WordPress 6.9</a> with Beth Soderberg of <a href="https://bethink.studio/">Bethink Studio</a></p>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full is-style-no-vertical-margin"><img alt="Gutenberg Changelog 122 with Beth Soderberg" class="wp-image-42236" height="193" src="https://i0.wp.com/gutenbergtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Screenshot-2025-10-11-at-12.32.48.png?resize=652%2C193&#038;ssl=1" width="652" /></figure>



<p class="has-small-font-size"><em>If you are listening via Spotify, please leave a comment. If you listen via other podcast apps, please leave a review. It&#8217;ll help with the distribution.</em></p>
</div></div>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="0-p">Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners</h2>



<p>During their latest <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28VenSxzTZs"><strong>WPCafe #128 </strong></a>show, <strong>Keith Devon</strong> and <strong>Mark Wilkinson</strong> of Highrise Digital shared how they use the block editor to support their sales effort.</p>


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<p><strong>Ajit Bohra</strong>, Lubus, released the <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/blablablocks-formats/"><strong>BlaBlaBlocks Formats</strong></a> plugin that adds custom RichText formats, like highlights and tooltips, to your WordPress site. You can review the <a href="https://github.com/lubusIN/blablablocks-formats/wiki">documentation</a> on GitHub.</p>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/blablablocks-formats/"><img alt="" class="wp-image-42037" height="326" src="https://i0.wp.com/gutenbergtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/BlaBlaBlocksFormats.png?resize=652%2C326&#038;ssl=1" width="652" /></a></figure>



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<p><strong>Justin Tadlock</strong>, developer advocate at Automattic, announced the release of a new <strong><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/x3p0-breadcrumbs/">Breadcrumbs Block </a></strong>plugin version. It now supports the built-in Layout and Block Gap (Spacing) features, and developers can extend the block with custom code.  Checkout the <a href="https://github.com/x3p0-dev/x3p0-breadcrumbs/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md">Changelog notes</a> for information on styling this block in your themes. </p>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img alt="" class="wp-image-42046" height="353" src="https://i0.wp.com/gutenbergtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Screenshot-2025-09-27-at-10.17.50.png?resize=652%2C353&#038;ssl=1" width="652" /></figure>



<p><strong>Troy Chaplin</strong> updated his <strong><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/block-accessibility-checks/">Block Accessibility Checks plugin</a></strong>. Version 2.1 brings a mix of accessibility improvements, developer-focused enhancements, and a much cleaner user experience. Chaplin recorded a short demo video walking through the plugin in action, including validation of both core and custom blocks right in the editor, as well as a tour of the brand-new settings page. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvunSl2j1CU">A demo of version 2.1 of the Block Accessibility Checks plugin for WordPress</a></p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="2-word-press-6-0-1-and-6-1-scheduled">Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks</h2>



<p><strong>Mitch Canter</strong> just wrapped up an awesome online workshop for the WordPress training team on <a href="https://wordpress.tv/2025/09/26/mastering-the-query-loop-block-in-wordpress/"><strong>Mastering the Query Loop block in WordPress.</strong></a> The recording is now up for you to check out! You&#8217;ll dive into how the Query Loop block works and turn it from something that seems super complicated into your new best friend for creating dynamic and eye-catching content. You’ll discover how to tell WordPress exactly what content to grab and how to make it look good… all without having to write a single line of code. </p>



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<p><strong>Bud Kraus</strong> looked into <strong><a href="https://kinsta.com/blog/variable-fonts/">variable fonts in WordPress themes</a></strong>, explaining how these fonts can hold different weights and styles all in one file, making them faster than regular web fonts. With the update in WordPress 6.1 that adds <code>theme.json</code> support, variable fonts can load quicker, offer more design options with custom weights, and adjust nicely for different screen sizes. Kraus shows how to use fonts like Vollkorn in child themes, create simple plugins for controlling weights, and add fonts through the Font Library, highlighting how variable fonts are both efficient and versatile in design.</p>


<section class="wp-block-newsletterglue-callout undefined not-color-set" style="border-color: #f9f9e5; border-radius: 22px; border-style: solid; border-width: 0; padding-top: 20px; padding-bottom: 20px; padding-left: 20px; padding-right: 20px; text-align: left; margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; background-color: #f9f9e5;">
<p><strong> <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/references/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">&#8220;Keeping up with Gutenberg &#8211; Index 2025&#8221;</a> </strong><br />A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test, and Meta team from Jan. 2024 on. Updated by yours truly. The previous years are also available: <strong><strong><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/references/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index-2020/">2020</a> | <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/references/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index-2021/">2021</a></strong> | <strong><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/references/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index-2022/">2022</a></strong></strong> | <strong><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/references/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index/gutenberg-index-2023">2023</a></strong> | <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/references/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index/gutenberg-index-2024/"><strong>2024</strong></a></p>
</section>


<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="3-building-themes-for-fse-and-word-press">Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.</h2>



<p><br />In his post, <a href="https://wordpress.com/blog/2025/09/23/telex-turns-everyone-into-a-wordpress-block-developer/"><strong>Telex Turns Everyone into a WordPress Block Developer</strong></a>, <strong>Nick Diego</strong> explores Telex, Automattic&#8217;s experimental AI tool that converts natural language prompts into functional WordPress blocks. Unlike traditional block development requiring React, JavaScript, and PHP expertise, Telex democratizes the process for site owners, agencies, and developers. Users simply describe desired functionality, and Telex generates working blocks within minutes using WordPress Playground. The tool supports iterative refinement through follow-up prompts or direct code editing, making WordPress block creation accessible to everyone regardless of technical background.</p>



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<p>You can also review the discussion on Reddit r/WordPress space: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1nozn1k/did_you_try_wordpress_telex_its_awesome/">Did you try WordPress Telex? it&#8217;s awesome!</a></p>



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<p><strong>Ryan Welcher</strong> continues his Blockdevelopment Cook Book series on YouTube with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIMbcHF-g3M"><strong>Customizing the WordPress Build Process Made Easy!</strong></a> He explained how to customize the @wordpress/scripts build process to bundle a plugin with a single custom block, a JavaScript file that registers a block variation, and a CSS file to style it. &#8220;We’ll keep things neat by organizing the block code in a blocks directory and the JS/CSS in a resources directory—a clean and tasty setup for your project! &#8221; he wrote. </p>


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<p><strong><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/need-a-zip-from-master/">Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg&#8217;s master branch?</a></strong><br />Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review. </p>



<p>Now also available via <a href="https://playground.wordpress.net/?blueprint-url=https://gutenbergtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/playnightly.json">WordPress Playground</a>. There is no need for a test site locally or on a server. Have you been using it? <a href="mailto:pauli@gutenbergtimes.com">Email me </a>with your experience</p>



<p><img alt="GitHub all releases" src="https://img.shields.io/github/downloads/bph/gutenberg/total?style=for-the-badge" /></p>
</section>


<p class="has-text-align-center has-small-font-size"><em>Questions? Suggestions? Ideas? </em><br /><em>Don&#8217;t hesitate to send <a href="mailto:pauli@gutenbergtimes.com">them via email</a> or</em><br /><em> send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph</em>.</p>



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<p class="has-text-align-center has-small-font-size">For questions to be answered on the <a href="http://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast">Gutenberg Changelog</a>, <br />send them to <a href="mailto:changelog@gutenbergtimes.com">changelog@gutenbergtimes.com</a></p>



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<p>Featured Image: </p>



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<p class="has-text-align-left"><strong>Don&#8217;t want to miss the next Weekend Edition? </strong></p>


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</section>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Sat, 27 Sep 2025 09:29:48 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:18:"Birgit Pauli-Haack";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:47;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:21:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:47:"Matt: Five Publications I’d Love on WordPress";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:22:"https://ma.tt/?p=51331";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"https://ma.tt/2025/09/big-five/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:1808:"<p>When WordPress started in 2003, I never dreamed it would power over 40% of websites, nine times the number two CMS, but I wrote on a notecard a list of five publications I admired and respected so much I wanted them to run on WP someday. In the interest of sharing your dreams to help them come true, here they are:</p>



<ol class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/">Atlantic</a></li>



<li><a href="https://www.economist.com/">Economist</a></li>



<li><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/">New Yorker</a></li>



<li><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/">New York Times</a></li>



<li><a href="https://www.wsj.com/">Wall Street Journal</a></li>
</ol>



<p>And one bonus: <a href="https://www.chron.com/">Houston Chronicle</a>. (Gotta root for the hometown.)</p>



<p>There has been uneven progress toward this over the years; we&#8217;ve gotten some of the NYT and all of the New Yorker at one point, only to have them revert under new CTOs. Also, there have been some unexpected huge wins, like when <a href="https://ma.tt/2023/07/chorus-and-wordpress/">Vox Media retired its proprietary CMS Chorus and brought over amazing publications like The Verge and New York Magazine</a>. For any projects related to these publications, including trials or micro-sites, I&#8217;d be happy to provide my feedback on architecture, design, and opportunities, and contribute <a href="https://automattic.com/">Automattic</a> and <a href="https://wpvip.com/">VIP</a> resources wherever they could be helpful. </p>



<p>I believe the most crucial aspect to get right for these customers is real-time co-editing, which is on the <a href="https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/">Gutenberg</a> roadmap and shipping soon. If I were writing this list today I might choose some different targets.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Sat, 27 Sep 2025 03:28:52 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4:"Matt";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:48;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:21:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:16:"Matt: Harry Mack";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:23:"https://ma.tt/?p=149863";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:33:"https://ma.tt/2025/09/harry-mack/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:1480:"<p>I love the culture of freestyle rap, it&#8217;s so inspiring to see how people can create such rich poetry riddled with allusions and puns on command. Last week <a href="https://matt.blog/2025/09/19/with-harry-mack/">I got to meet Harry Mack</a> and see him improvise live and it totally makes sense that he has a jazz drums background. If you&#8217;re not familiar with <a href="https://www.harrymackofficial.com/">Harry Mack</a>, this is a good example of him taking three words: Imported, Lurking, <a href="https://automatic.com/">Automatic</a> and freestyling with them. (BTW, if you noticed, we finally got the domain spelled correctly.) </p>



<figure class="wp-block-embed alignwide is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">

</div></figure>



<p>There is a video chat site called <a href="https://www.omegle.fun/">Omegle</a> that paired you with random people, and Harry would record these encounters, such as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mccIi2YOFgQ">this cute one with girls from Sweden who gave him the words Cartoon, Titan, Death</a>. It&#8217;s awesome to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4JxqES_Gzk">see him meet Will Smith and Martin Lawrence</a>.</p>



<p>For some fun WordPress rap history, check out when <a href="https://youtu.be/KG5vJKOwsjw?t=195">Childish Gambino referenced me in a rap he performed on Tim Westwood back in 2012</a>.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 26 Sep 2025 06:38:37 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4:"Matt";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:49;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:21:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:91:"Open Channels FM: 12 Tips for WordPress Businesses Navigating the WordPress Media Landscape";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:33:"https://openchannels.fm/?p=109514";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:98:"https://openchannels.fm/12-tips-for-wordpress-businesses-navigating-the-wordpress-media-landscape/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:211:"To enhance your business visibility in the WordPress ecosystem, employ strategies like mapping channels, collaborating with influencers, sponsoring newsletters, and tailoring content to different audience needs.";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 25 Sep 2025 10:44:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}s:4:"type";i:128;s:7:"headers";O:48:"WpOrg\Requests\Utility\CaseInsensitiveDictionary":1:{s:7:"*data";a:9:{s:6:"server";s:5:"nginx";s:4:"date";s:29:"Wed, 22 Oct 2025 04:15:53 GMT";s:12:"content-type";s:8:"text/xml";s:13:"last-modified";s:29:"Wed, 22 Oct 2025 04:00:21 GMT";s:4:"vary";s:15:"Accept-Encoding";s:15:"x-frame-options";s:10:"SAMEORIGIN";s:16:"content-encoding";s:2:"br";s:7:"alt-svc";s:19:"h3=":443"; ma=86400";s:4:"x-nc";s:9:"HIT ord 2";}}s:5:"build";i:1745808582;s:21:"cache_expiration_time";i:1761149753;s:23:"__cache_expiration_time";i:1761149753;}