First, thank you all for your active participation in this meeting. The meeting was held based on this meeting agenda.
Channel: #themereview
Facilitated by @kjellr
Notes Taken: @ashiquzzaman
BlockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience.-based Theme Updates in GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc.
https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/
Gutenberg 9.9 is coming out on Friday! This includes new formatting rules for experimental-theme.jsonJSON JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, is a minimal, readable format for structuring data. It is used primarily to transmit data between a server and web application, as an alternative to XML., so if you haven’t updated your block-based themes yet, please take a look at the docs.
Couple of PRs that need highlight:
- A new Post Navigation block is in the works here and could use some testing: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/28602
- @aristath is working on a cool PR that would improve front-end performance for FSEFSE Short for Full Site Editing, a project for the Gutenberg plugin and the editor where a full page layout is created using only blocks. themes: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/28358
Please give those a test if you have a moment!
TT1 Blocks Updates
TT1 Blocks’ experimental-theme.json file has been updated to work with the upcoming Gutenberg v9.9 release: https://github.com/WordPress/theme-experiments/pull/182
At the moment, that’s only available in the version from the GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged by the repository owner. https://github.com/ repo, not the version in the theme repository. @kjellr will submit the update to the Theme Repository shortly after the Gutenberg pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party. update is live to minimize any compatibility hiccups.
Just a couple other updates:
- @poena has been keeping up this helpful checklist of theme updates to make it compatible with the upcoming WordPress 5.7 release: https://github.com/WordPress/theme-experiments/issues/181
- @scruffian pulled together a list of all the template tags used in Twenty Twenty-One to help analyze what features are still missing: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/22724#issuecomment-771788465
For the status of everything else, check out the TT1 Blocks project board:
https://github.com/WordPress/theme-experiments/projects/1
Discussion Topic: How might classic themes migrate to block-based themes?
Background:
- General idea + discussion
- Falling back to PHP templates when no block-based templates are present
- PHP Theme template conversions
- A prototype for allowing PHP in block templates
@pbking asked – Are there plans to make dynamic blocks available to PHPPHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. https://www.php.net/manual/en/index.php templates? Allow for the transition to start using some of them instead of calls to PHP functions without going all-in.
Example: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/22724#issuecomment-771788465
@kjellr replied with – There have been discussions about that sort of thing here and here. In general though, it seemed to me that folks were leaning more towards having a pretty limited set of PHP functions available. And then scaling up from there as needed, versus opening the door to all of the standard PHP functions available.
@aristath’s explorations here might be of interest:
@pbking – There aren’t blocks that are only available in Block-based FSE themes?
@kjellr – There are, but Gutenberg should probably allow for those to be present in special cases when FSE isn’t active.
@poena – “Falling back to PHP templates when no block-based templates are present” seems doable but if the reason for doing it, is that we can not do what we want in an FSE theme, this is the wrong way to solve that. I think that makes sense just in the context of gradually “upgrading” to FSE: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/24803
@poena – We should allow for global styles for old themes without the site editor.
Open Floor
@poena – There are themes being submitted to the https://github.com/WordPress/theme-experiments/ repo but nobody is reviewing them, help is needed.
@pbking and @scruffian offered to help review.
Any comments and discussion can be done via the below comment box.
#block-based-meeting, #meeting-notes