Gutenberg Times: WordPress 6.8 Dev Notes, WP:25, new Blocks and sites — Weekend Edition 321 - Digital Media Marketing, and Technology News

Hi,

This week I will feel a lot of FOMO as I had a chance to attend CloudFest but had to bow out at the last minute, to give my busted knee a rest. My doctor is convinced that I had overdone the walking in Manila and WordCamp Asia. So going to an amusement part and another trade show, would not be wise. Unfortunately, there are no live-streams to participate remotely.

Meanwhile, I have been testing WordPress 6.8 and although there are no new ones, the updates to existing features are amazing and make content creation so much easier. Next week on Tuesday, in time of Beta 3 release, I’ll publish the Source of Truth, while Anne McCarthy is on sabbatical. The release team started to release Dev Notes already. You’ll find the list below.

This week, I have many updates again in this edition. Enjoy!

Yours,
Birgit

Table of Contents

Tom Willmot, CEO of Human Made posted the WP:25 Recap: The Future of WordPress with links to the recorded session. WP:25 was a virtual conference, hosted by Human Made with some awesome speakers and panels. I wanted to highlight two of them:

Tammie Lister speaking on The power of FSE, in which she took the audience “through the incredible transformation Full Site Editing is bringing to WordPress. Tammie made it clear: FSE isn’t just another feature—it’s a fundamental shift in how teams build and manage content.”

Mary Hubbard, executive director of WordPress, and Noel Tock chat about what’s next for the world’s favorite CMS in the coming year. WordPress in 2025. “AI is reshaping the way we interact with content, and WordPress is embracing AI in every way, any way that can enhance it, without replacing the human creativity aspect. So I think this right now, we’re at a pivotal point, not just for what it means for open source, but actually, what it means for the project itself.” – Mary Hubbard.

You’ll find the other WP:25 sessions on this YouTube Playlist

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

WordPress 6.8 release cycle is progressing as schedule to Beta 3 next week. WordPress 6.8 Beta 2 was released this week.

And a reminder to Help Test WordPress 6.8 to figure out if all features work as supposed to and report bugs. The instructions provided Krupa Nanda are excellent to get a head start on many things updates in WordPress 6.8

The first Dev Notes are now available on the Make Core blog:

Latest episode: Gutenberg Changelog 115 – Gutenberg Releases 20.2, 20.3, 20.4, WordPress 6.8 and WordCamp Asia with special guest Jessica Lyschik.

Jessica Lyschik and Birgit Pauli-Haack recording Gutenberg Changelog 115

Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners

In his latest post, How to disable and lock Gutenberg blocks, Bud Kraus takes you on a deep dive into content governance topic and how to provide guardrails to authors and enforce editorial guidelines for your site. It’s comprehensive coverage of the topic and includes explanation on how UI tools work as well as enforcing block locking with PHP and via theme.json.

ICYMI, After a longer beta period, GenerateBlocks 2.0 was released Mid-February with the aim of providing “fundamental changes to GenerateBlocks with a streamlined and robust system to make building fast and effective sites easier” Kathy Zant wrote in the announcement post Introducing GenerateBlocks 2.0: A New Era for High Performance Websites . The post also provides a migration path from version 1 to version 2 and outlines many changes for the plugin.

Diane and Yann Collet created a great resource at WP Gallery featuring beautiful websites designed with the Gutenberg Block Editor. It’s a fantastic place for inspiration.

Twentig also a creation of Diane and Yann Collet, was also updated last month. The plugin is a toolkit designer working on Block Themes and has over 25,000 users. It provides Starter content, more Gutenberg Blocks and hundreds of patterns. You can browse the changelog of the latest version on the Twentig website.

Bhargav (Bunty) Bhandari posted on X (former twitter) about his work on a new block to add LinkedIn-like work experience information to a site. With it, you can showcase professional experience, with option to add a title, company name, description. The plugin is on its way to the WordPress plugin repository, and it might take a few weeks to be released. Meanwhile, you can download it from GitHub repo.

Djordje Arsenovic created a Typewriter block, and it is now available in the WordPress plugin repository. Use the block to make text appear on the fronted as it was typed out on the old-fashioned typewriter machine.

WordPress 6.8 will be released on April 15, 2025.

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

Is your theme.json getting too big? Iulia Caza, developer at Dekode, built an npm package called Create Theme JSON that lets you split up the theme.json into multiple files in a theme-json folder and the build script assembles it into your theme’s theme.json file, when ready. “It definitely makes development much easier and faster.” Caza wrote on LinkedIn.

Anne Katzeff published a new tutorial on how to add categories to a Block Theme menu and guides you through accessing the menu editor and adding custom links for categories by copying their URLs from the WordPress dashboard. Katzeff also demos the steps in this YouTube video

Ryan Welcher worked on a new WordPress block theme for the Block Developer Cookbook during his live stream. You can watch how he creates a new skin for his theme (aka Style variation) and also add different block style variations. Welcher also prompts Cursor AI to make changes. The code is available on this GitHub repository.

Joshua Siagia announced the arrival of WindPress – a platform-agnostic Tailwind CSS integration plugin for WordPress that allows you to use the full power of Tailwind CSS within the WordPress ecosystem, streamlining workflows for developers. It supports Tailwind CSS v3 and v4, offers features like autocompletion, HTML-to-native conversion, and class sorting, and ensures lightweight performance with optimized CSS caching. Seamlessly compatible with popular builders like Gutenberg and Bricks, it simplifies customization while maintaining speed. WindPress is ideal for developers seeking efficient Tailwind CSS integration in WordPress projects. It is now available in the WordPress plugin repository: WindPress

“Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2025”
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: 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.

Save the date! Nick Diego and Ryan Welcher will demo on March 19th, 2025 How to build incredible WordPress Blocks with Cursor AI on YouTube Live hosted by Jamie Marsland. They will explore the power of AI in crafting exceptional WordPress blocks. In this session, you’ll discover practical techniques, pro tips, and AI-driven tools to enhance your block-building skills and streamline workflows. Whether you’re a developer or looking to expand your WordPress expertise, this is your chance to unlock new possibilities for your WordPress site!

Bart Kalisz, JavaScript Engineer at WooCommerce announced in his post WooCommerce Blocks client files relocated to complete monorepo merge. As of March 5, 2025, WooCommerce Blocks client files have moved from plugins/woocommerce-blocks to plugins/woocommerce/client/blocks, completing the monorepo merge initiated in December 2023. This change enhances codebase consistency and repository organization. Developers with existing pull requests need to rebase their branches. End users will not experience any functional differences. The build process remains the same, ensuring a smooth transition.

Do you want to jumpstart adding AI to your site? Felix Arntz has you covered with his plugin AI Services from the WordPress repository. The plugin provides a “central infrastructure that allows other plugins to make use of AI capabilities. It exposes APIs that can be used in various contexts, whether you need to use AI capabilities in server-side or client-side code.” The latest update comes with AI image generation, starting with OpenAI’s DALL-E and Google’s recently published Imagen models! The plugin page also lists a few code examples on how to integrate it using PHP or JavaScript.

Developer Advocates, Brian Coords and Nick Diego were experts on this week’s InstaWP webinar: Building WordPress Plugins with AI with founder Vikas Singhal to “reveal game-changing insights for leveraging AI to build powerful WordPress plugins.” Both developers demo’d their workflow programming with Cursor AI.

This post Introducing Preview Sites: Pushing the Limits of Collaboration with Studio, Antonio Sejas catches us up on the latest features of Studio, WordPress’s local development tool. “Demo Sites” are now “Preview Sites” with increased storage (2 GB) and more sites allowed (10). Personalized URLs are introduced, and sites remain active for seven days after the last update. These changes enhance collaboration and testing for Studio users.

Geoff Graham built Baseline Status in a WordPress Block and published a blog post about his approach, from scaffolding, settings, supports, rendering front and back end and styling. The plugin is available on the WordPress repository
Baseline Status

Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s master branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.

Now also available via WordPress Playground. There is no need for a test site locally or on a server. Have you been using it? Email me with your experience