Block-based Themes Meeting Notes – May 6, 2020 – DocsWP

Happened in #themereview channel, facilitated by @kjellr.

Gutenberg Roundup

Gutenberg 8.0 was released! Here are some highlights:

Block patterns now live in a tab of the inserter: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/20951
All center-aligned blocks now include float clearing in the front end and in the editor: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/21608
The default inserter now correctly inherits paragraph font styles. No need to write an additional style rule in your editor styles: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/21725
Button markup changes and issues were reverted / resolved: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/21923 https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/21816

Folks are working to bring feature parity between FSE blocks and other existing core blocks, eliminating a lot of extra CSS we’ve had to write for block-based themes: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/21087

Lots of good discussion around whether template parts should specify their own HTML tag, and include group block controls: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/20997

Support for dynamic content (relative media paths, translations) in block templates: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/21932

Adding a button to the full-site editor to download a theme including changes you’ve made: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/21958

There are concerns about the increased volume of themes that are essentially copies of other themes.

Discussion Topic: Keeping up with Gutenberg Changes

@poena recently asked:

How do all of you theme authors keep up with the changes to Gutenberg?

— Carolina Nymark (@carolinapoena) April 29, 2020

Where does your news and updates come from?

Github notifications
#core-editor chat summaries
Release changelog
Tags for in-progress work, e.g. [Feature] Full-site Editing, [Feature] Themes

A longer, nuanced discussion ensued around the challenge of influencing changes before they are made / released happened in Slack.

Two primary suggestions emerged that the team is going to try out!

A weekly news digest focused on in-progress work and changes related to themes. @itsjusteileen and @kjellr will take a pass at the first post next week!
Using the [Feature] Themes tag on the Gutenberg repo more often as relevant, and using tags in general.

#block-based-meeting