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
Block-based Theme Updates in Gutenberg
Gutenberg 9.9 is coming out on Friday! This includes new formatting rules for experimental-theme.json, 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 FSE 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 GitHub repo, not the version in the theme repository. @kjellr will submit the update to the Theme Repository shortly after the Gutenberg plugin 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 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