In this 130th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast, Birgit Pauli-Haack is joined by Tammie Lister to discuss the latest developments in WordPress, Gutenberg, and the broader ecosystem. The conversation opens with Tammie sharing insights from her new role at Convesio, where she works on product collaboration within hosting and payments.
The episode highlights Tammie’s upcoming WordCamp Europe talk, focusing on the concept of “human in the loop” with AI. She emphasizes the importance of integrating humanity into AI processes, ensuring that humans are involved throughout, not just at the beginning or end. Both speakers reflect on how AI empowers learning and creativity, with Tammy sharing personal stories about using AI for education and art.
A significant portion is devoted to the anticipated release of WordPress 7.0, which was delayed to accommodate more thorough testing for real-time collaboration features, especially in less powerful hosting environments. Birgit Pauli-Haack and Tammie commend the community for developing a comprehensive testing suite and discuss the challenges and importance of performance, infrastructure, and backward compatibility.
Other highlights include community plugin updates, especially around AI, collaborative editing with Claude by Gary Pendergast, and the growing list of AI providers and skills for WordPress. The duo reviews notable Gutenberg plugin updates (22.9 and 23.0), exploring enhancements such as improvements to the UI component packages, block library features, command palette, and upcoming media editing tools.
The episode wraps up with excitement about continued innovation, the empowerment AI brings to different skill levels, and the ongoing evolution of WordPress as a robust content management and collaboration platform.
- Editor: Sandy Reed
- Logo: Mark Uraine
- Production: Birgit Pauli-Haack
Show Notes
Tammie Lister
- WordPress | X (former Twitter) | BlueSky
- Website tammielister.com/
- WordCamp Europe Human in the loop means something
WordPress 7.0
- WordPress 7.0 Release Party Updated Schedule
- distributed-rtc-performance-testing
- Roster of design tools per block (WordPress 7.0 edition)
Community Contributions
- Building a block theme from scratch – Workshop resources
- Claudaborative Editing 0.4: Twice the fun!
- AI Across The WP Ecosystem
Gutenberg Releases
- What’s new in Gutenberg 22.9? (8 April)
- What’s new in Gutenberg 23.0? (22 April)
- Media Editor experiment: add experimental image editor and cropper
Stay in Touch
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- If you have questions or suggestions, or news you want us to include, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com.
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Transcript
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Welcome to our 130th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk about WordPress 7.0, Gutenberg 22.9 and 23.0 WordCamp Europe and block themes and so much more. I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and a full core contributor at the WordPress Open Source project sponsored by Automattic. And with me on the show is my longtime friend and regular guest Tammie Lister. And she’s a core committer, chief product officer at Convesio and was the co-lead of the first phase of Gutenberg. Tammie, it’s wonderful to have you in on the show.
Tammie Lister: I’m so pleased to be here.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Thank you. Thank you for the time. So how are you today?
Tammie Lister: I’m great, thank you. How are you?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I’m good, I’m good. You started a new job. So what are you working on in your new position?
Tammie Lister: I’m incredibly lucky that I get to facilitate and collaborate on products within Convesio hosting, and we’re working on a range of different things. We work on both hosting and payments along with some other products. And I’m really excited to be able to do that and kind of grow with that team.
WordCamp Europe
Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s wonderful. Wonderful. Yeah. Well, congratulations. So. And you are also a speaker at WordCamp Europe. Your title is Human in the Loop means something and we probably learn what it means.
Tammie Lister: Yeah. So we always kind of had this idea with AI that the human in the loop, maybe it’s just like the prompting that you start with doing and you’re like at the start of the being the human in the loop. And I think as kind of we’re learning to be with AI and we’re learning to see AI as more of integrated. My talk is about how when we use the term human in a loop and I think kind of people just drop it now into product making processes and they drop it into anything that they’re doing. It should be various points in that loop, should be where humans are not just at the start and then having something kind of chucked out of them by AI just produced. That’s not the human being actually in the loop. That’s the human being at the beginning and the end of the loop. Rather than being integrated. That’s kind of the one angle of it and the other is that AI really needs to kind of be integrated in our lives. It already is, but it actually needs to be integrated, not just forced and therefore it needs to learn to kind of integrate with us and it needs to learn to be with us. There are various technologies that are doing that and in that talk I’m going to kind of explore how that happens and how that happens from a product perspective as well.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, well, that’s going to be really interesting because I, what I, my experience is more like the, all of a sudden the humans become the bottleneck and then some programmers try to work around that and say, okay, we need to get AI, be smarter, but you…
Tammie Lister: still do the opposite. I think if we take the best of humans and combine it with the best of AI, we have the best future.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I think so too. Yeah. Because humanity is all that’s left. Right. And that needs to serve that.
Tammie Lister: And if we don’t have AI with that splash of humanity, one where some of us aren’t going to use it and we, we can evangelize as much for people to use it as possible, but people are going to have a bit of reaction to it and also it’s, it’s going to be kind of that friction when we do use it and going to be like talking to kind of a calculator or a fridge all the time. It’s not going to kind of. And I’m not talking about giving it a cute name or making it kind of that or anthem performance. I can never say that word, that word. That’s not what I’m talking about, talking about and talking about just being able to have a splash of humanity with it and, and how that AI can learn from us as much as we can learn from AI.
And we also, it’s that augmentation as part of it. So I think we’re all learning about how AI can be used both in part of our process as well and how it can make us better at what we do. And you know, there’s this kind of 10x all these kind of things. I think that’s quite a flippant thing because that’s like, well no, we were doing the best we could do before. It just means that we now have the abilities through doing this. So yeah, I’m kind of forming it at the moment and it’s going in lots of different angles and I’ve got to kind of try and take it in one straight angle. But I know for me and many other people, AI in particular the last year it’s been very empowering both from the work that they do and in the kind of personal life. So hopefully there’ll be some take home on things you can use as much as kind of sharing the maybe a more optimistic future perspective.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah I feel the same way. I feel totally empowered to. Yeah. To submit PRs, create more documentation and all that and. And also for writing. Yeah. With English as a second language it’s so much richer when you learn from. From AI to kind of different angles and all that. So it’s a. It’s a really interesting.
Tammie Lister: The point you said about learn from and I think that that’s something really important that we can learn from AI and sometimes we. I cannot remember. I was actually found an article I cannot remember again but there was an article about like it being unlocking education for people. And I know there’s like different conversations about where that is and where your sources are for that, but it actually can like the things that I have learned and the things that I have been able to expand my knowledge base with because I now have access to it that I didn’t have access research PA different things. I’ve been able to. I have one of these things I use in my open claw that’s called Explain this. It’s a skill but it explains it how I understand it. As for me which is a very unique way that I understand things. But it will say it like that. Then it will relate to the job I do. Then it will lead to the areas of interest that I have and I’ve refined that skill to talk to me. Not many people nobody else can do that and I hadn’t got that before so been able to do that and give it things initially do that and then help me break things down has been really really, really important to me.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah that’s the most. The application that I use it most is actually to learn things .
Tammie Lister: Explain this as I would understand this.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So I. I had on my flight to. So I was in Costa Rica and I was on a flight that didn’t have any WI fi and But I still was able to. To take my laptop and open it up and ask a question because I had Olama installed and I had one of the. One of the LLMs there and I learned about Transformers and all that and you can actually ask it to explain it to me like I’m a five year old. And then it gets further and further. There is a whole education school out there that wants the kids to go and learn for themselves and not in a. In a complete setting. I think I would thrive in that because I could they had yeah. Dive deeper into topics that I’m interested in and never Come out. Yeah.
Tammie Lister: I think even, even for me from personal, like creating art with it, doing all these kind of different things like it has been to me. Yeah. So I’m hoping like I’m still forming my talk because I’m a bit of a last minute in that sense. It’s not that last minute, but yeah, five weeks, right? Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: You always do your own pictures, right?
Tammie Lister: Well, I may not. I don’t know.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: You may not.
Tammie Lister: I’m curious about could, could I get AI to create like me? That’s something I’m exploring because it feels like it might be right if it took my pictures. If it took. I don’t know. I have not decided yet on that angle. So more to come on that I’ve been exploring how AI can take my art as a source. I already paint with AI what AI creates. I paint that. So the full circle might be that AI creates from my artwork.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Interesting thing. Interesting. Yeah.
WordPress 7.0 / Announcements
All right, so let’s dive back to WordPress. We have a few announcements. One, the biggest one is last time we talked here on the podcast WordPress 7.0 still had was scheduled for April 9th. That obviously didn’t happen. And before we get into more details here, the good news, we have a new release date and updated information about WordPress 7.0. May 20th is the latest date. And I also put in the show notes the post that kind of announced that beta release candidate cycle resumes with the next release party that’s scheduled for May 8th at 1500 UTC. And then that kind of starts I think it’s two releases that are quasi beta and then two releases that are quasi release candidates. And also in that discussion, there’s also a discussion that the RTC performance testing script that automatically tests for possible architecture approaches for hostings is about to be released and I’ll share the link to the repository. Dorin, not everybody would need that, mostly hostings. But that was also the reason why things got a little bit delayed. So Tammie, I’m going to try to explain this, how I understood it and the reasoning behind it and you can correct me and elaborate what you feel is important.
So if I understood it correctly, the delay was actually requested by Matt, but in coordination with core committers and the hosting team, because WordPress 7.0’s main feature is a real time collaboration project, and collaborators worked on it for over a year and the goal was to get it into best shape in what it can be for the first release. But it had been a whole wide testing done but it was only on enterprise infrastructure. So with the inclusion into core it also needs to work in less powerful hosting environments and hosting companies didn’t have enough time or tools to actually test it. So during the release cycle there was this feedback that they needed more time and test the feature more so they can enable it for many, many clients. They couldn’t they needed to switch it off and that was not the purpose of that. It should be a wide enough application. So the team created a test suite for the hosting companies and also published a death note on how to create an external provider for this offloading of the resource heavy sync process. Because that’s all of a sudden you have not one person on the. On the screen, you have five maybe. And that increases stuff. Yeah. So that’s my understanding.
Tammie Lister: Correct, it was also not necessarily the delay, but there were also kinds of pieces of it table and kind of all right, the pieces were kind of needed to be done or. Or were done and kind of like that. That has implications. I think the too long don’t read is real time collab is complicated. Real time collab is very complicated from an infrastructure perspective and we need to have thorough testing across every implementation. And one of the things which when you think about it, it’s for humans to do real time collaboration. But actually one of the most interesting things is not humans doing real time collaboration.
And actually now we have the testing suite we can actually test with not humans doing it. That’s why I’m kind of fascinated to do some of this testing and that can be even more load bearing. So if you think about like someone like I think one of the cases was like if it’s on a small hosting I only have one person. Well not if that one person gets very excited about agents because that person could have suddenly lots of agents even though their own like a tiny little bit of hosting and they’re not enterprise. They could have made themselves enterprise and they couldn’t have made themselves into that situation just by being at the forward of like agentic work. So we had that balance like on in 7.0 we’re promoting be forward with AI. Agentic is like a word. You might as well like to take a sip of tea every time you hit the word agentic. I don’t think alcohol would be super tissue.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, what a thinking game.
Tammie Lister: I’d be tea drunk. I really would. But it. So people are going to want to push and test it. Right. So I think it is. I would much rather people were cautious with something that someone that works in hosting that would bring down hosting. But I think it is hard for everybody involved when we have to pause a release, when we have to say oops, we’re not doing it now. And oops is one way but hey, we’re not doing it now kind of help. It’s hard. People do not do this lightly. They do not say we’re not going to do release lightly. So, you know, yeah, there’s a lot to be kind of thought about that having been involved with one of the longest ones that was stopped before. It’s a lot for humans to have that. I love that we have a testing suite now. I love that we can have that. This feature is going to potentially in 7.1 and in the patches and in the point release afterwards. And I don’t want to be a doomsayer, but we’re going to have to adjust it, we’re going to have to perform it, we’re going to have to get that feedback. So it needs to be the best bet to go live with and then we need to take it from there. So. But this is now it’s in the best shape it could be, so it can kind of go from there.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So. Yeah, yeah. And you just mentioned that there’s also for the updates and coordination, there’s an. There will be an extra table added to WordPress as well to manage that polling and the intermediate storage of things.
Tammie Lister: That’s not a light thing to do that. That is like, like I, I said it very flippantly, but it’s not a flippant thing.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, no. And there needs to be really thought process in there because it’s gonna be in WordPress for the next 20 years.
Tammie Lister: That’s like building something to the house, right?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So you cannot just tear it down because you don’t like it anymore.
Tammie Lister: No, that’s. That’s definitely.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: People build on it. Yeah. Yes. So May 20th is the next release date and whoever hasn’t tested their plugins and themes with a you get another. Almost a month of grace. Time to do it now. Yeah, don’t wait. Do it now. Sometimes I say don’t wait. Procrastinate now. But this is not the case here. No.
Tammie Lister: And I think you really, if you don’t ever test your plugins on ever releases, test them on this one. Not just because of editing, but also because of the admin interface changes as well. Not changes in a big way, just in a. Just enough that maybe do some testing.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And there’s Also the minimum PHP version is changed to 7.4. Have a bit of a look. Yeah.
Tammie Lister: Just spend half an hour.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. See if it blows up or not. Yeah. And there’s only a late addition to the developer notes. The roster of design tools per block that have been since 6.7 I think it’s now updated to version WebPR 7.0. And one of my next projects is that I create. Create a plugin that actually has a few more table block features. So it doesn’t. Is so yeah rudimentary anymore but especially the sticky header when you have 90 rows in a table. Yeah, that would be really helpful.
Tammie Lister: Yeah I love that because the table block to me is one that I always end up having to do custom work on or I have to do it. If anything in my work is going to take whenever I’m doing don’t always do sites but whenever I do do sites if there’s anything comparison tables such a common thing we end up doing. Right. Like or even if you’re going to do like pricing or comparison whatever you’re going to do at most sites at some point if they’re a SaaS or if they’re a product based they’re going to have something like that on. You always have to do something with CSS on there or even down to like how you put image. Putting images inside there and it’s a bit nickety and all those kind of ways.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s all. Yeah there are some projects out there that I probably won’t tackle but it’s the sticky header and then that you can. The first column can be styled differently than the rest of it and then also have a sticky first column so when you horizontally scroll that you still have the lines in there and merge and unmerge for cells because that really helps. So. But I will see how far it gets. I submitted it to the first version slightly version tiny version to the blog repository and there are 763 ahead of me. So it probably takes two to three weeks. That’s fine with me. Yeah.
Tammie Lister: But I mean that’s a pretty good.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Compared to three months before, you know. Five months or six months. Yeah. So I’m. I’m not worried about that. And it’s gonna be on GitHub anyway.
Community Contributions
So. Yeah, there are other contributions, community contributions. One. I just wanted to let you know that if you have subscribed to the Gutenberg Times weekly edition, you know about that. But it’s the. I have published my workshop resources from the Building a block theme from scratch from WordCamp Asia. And it has all the resources that you need. You have the kind of a little slide deck, but it also has a reference theme and then content that you can put into your studio. Has instructions how to set up WordPress Studio or use Playground and then step by step instructions how to rebuild the theme with the site editor and not touch code. So see how far you get if you want to learn that. But you should be able to do this within an hour or two or three. But you need some familiarity with the site editor, definitely. And the Create block theme plugin. And so that’s for you in the show notes. The next one is maybe you can talk about it. Claudia Borative Collaborative editing with Claude by Gary Pendergast here has a new plugin. Yeah, yeah.
Tammie Lister: So apparently it’s twice the fun. So it’s kind of what I was saying about like clap of editing is great, but one of the things I think a lot of people have been thinking of is like, oh, yes, so that’s humans. No, no, no.
Tammie Lister: What if it could be agents? And this is really worth checking out to have a look at that. Gary is a long time. Is a core committer. Long time worked on. Gutenberg works on in Automattic. So he’s. He’s definitely got the experience to work on it and he’s definitely kind of brewed this up. Super excited about it. It is Claude only at the moment. I think there’s plans to kind of make it a little bit kind of expansive there. Maybe that dropped last night. It’s work in progress and it’s been worked on, so I love that. But to me, this is where I get a bit more excited as someone that’s already trained my. It’s a me problem, but I’ve already trained my open Claude to write like me. Not that it’s going to just write without me being a human in the loop, but because of that, me being able to collaborate with. I call it Exo. With Exo, it means that I can have that conversation, that I can do it within WordPress, which is really powerful for me. I. I do it in Obsidian at the moment. I have been able to take that in and do it in that environment. I was doing something before this plugin.
I was kind of doing like a. A faked version. I had. There was a UK children show called City show and bear with me on this. And I ended up with the characters like doing agent work together just to test collaborative editing for myself because I wanted to see if it could be done and it’s pretty effective to be able to have agents talking to each other and testing. So it is a really good experience. Maybe you’ve got one. Again, it doesn’t have to be that you are as a human doing it. Maybe you have an agent that is looking at your grammar. Maybe you have an agent that is specializing in images. Maybe have a. So you can have agents that are specializing in different things or you can even have someone else’s agent come and do different things for SEO or different. Different stuff. So I think that’s the thing. Like if you are enterprise, you probably have agents that work across the company that do very specialist skills and then you could have them come into the editor. So projects like this are really interesting for that.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. No, it’s absolutely fascinating, the whole thing. Yeah. And if you really want to go really, really deep in AI across the.
Tammie Lister: You need snacks for this post.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, definitely. So there is a James LePage who is the head of AI at Automattic, but also the team rep or team lead for the core AI team. He has put together a blog post with. I haven’t counted it, but I’m thinking more than 70 or 80 links about anything and everything that’s done with AI in the WordPress ecosystem from the community AI providers. So WordPress 7 has this connector page where there are three AI providers by default that you can install. But the community also came very fast up with the providers for other LLMs like Mistral for Europe or Open Router provider or Olama provider or Alibaba. So you get a link for all those. Those will not be displayed in default, but once you install the plugin you can connect them to the things and then a lot of plugins that have already implemented the Abilities API. Yeah. From ACF to Jetpack to Fluid Design System for Elementor, Divi, WP and main WP maintenance kind of dashboard. They all come up with mcps. So you can connect your agents with them if you want to. You totally can ignore that segment on the podcast if you’re not interested. Agent skills. They’re not only the WordPress agent skills, but others have also automatic, for instance, published agent skills.
Tammie Lister: Or those skills are invaluable. I’m just gonna say. Yeah, those skills are absolutely. They should be required in any work.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: that you’re doing, right? Yeah, I don’t do any. Anything WordPress development without those agents. Yeah, they’re definitely required reading for your LLMs, your coding agents. Yeah. And then infrastructure agency, Enterprise Adoption Community. So It’s a really long. And I’m going back to that post multiple times in the last two weeks since. Since it was published. So I wanted everybody to know about that too. Yeah, that’s it. Any thoughts for now or would I forgot.
Tammie Lister: Love going there and seeing all the amazing stuff people are building as well, which I think is really important. And to think this is the list today and that list is only going to get bigger.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I think after the last two weeks, the. Since it was published, a lot of things already happened. So I’m kind of thinking it’s the same for me. It’s the same situation like it was when Gutenberg was introduced and I was kind of putting the Gutenberg times together. I’m kind of. Oh, I need to kind of.
Tammie Lister: Yeah. Which is I. I love that problem.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh yeah, totally.
Tammie Lister: We are being creative and we are creating cool stuff.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely. And I’m really amazed by how, how people come up with things and how you work with it, how my co workers work with it, how I explore.
Tammie Lister: Enabling people to have ideas that they, the ideas have sat in their brains or they haven’t been capable of doing this. It’s not so they, they haven’t had the either the language to like the skill language to do. It’s not that they’re not capable, is it that they haven’t had the knowledge to do it right. Everybody is super capable. It’s just empowered them to be able to do it for themselves. Maybe they were a designer, now they can do development, but the developer, now they can do some more designer stuff and then also pairing up with people. I’ve seen a lot of that where people be going like, okay, well this has enabled us to collaborate easier and faster as well. So you don’t just have to be isolated on your own, just talking to a group of agents, which is kind of sad if you only do that. But that’s okay. That’s my life. But you know, actually collaborating with people who are also doing this stuff, like the buzz like that you can get from that is really like I went to Cloud Fest a month ago now and just talking with people about this stuff again, getting that kind of vibe about, oh well, here’s the stuff that I use or here’s the stuff that I use where like an instantly you level up your stack, and you level up what you’re doing and come away with some cool ideas. So every week I talk to someone about this, I come up with a ridiculously long list of tools of cool stuff to try out or I see posts like this, I’m like, okay, well now. And one thing I do, I share the bookmarks. So I’m kind of like getting those bookmarks reminded me so I can be like, okay, well now I kind of pull these out and then I explore those bookmarks. You can even give it to your agent and have a look at your bookmarks with your agent. You really want to do that? Just saying.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, I talk with my husband about it every day. He. He kind of discovered the. Because his company is kind of using Codex and I’m using more clothes so we kind of can combine it. And now I have found a plugin for Claude for Codex. So I’m kind of your interception is there? Yeah, like the. The movie is kind of where your brain kind of clicks a little bit and then you kind of. Okay, moving on. But yeah, his work is totally different than what I do. But we are using the tools that are there and it’s quite an interesting conversation every time.
Tammie Lister: Yeah, great space to be working in.
What’s Released – Gutenberg 22.9
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely. So now we come to the section of what’s released and we have two Gutenberg plugin releases to talk about. One was 22.9 that was released on April 8th and it has a few things. Many of them were actually for the real time collaboration and some of the bug fixes are still there. But yeah, there’s also a lot of work being done in the component space.
Enhancements
And the WordPress UI package is actually has some empty states for the components and displaying some placeholders content when sections have no data and all that. So that is actually throughout the whole WordPress UI package and interesting for developers who use it. The same with the alert dialogue primitive that you can tab into. And there are a lot of other good things in there. Check out the Storybook for the UI packages. Are you working with those packages?
Tammie Lister: Yeah, to me it’s a general nudge. I think a lot of. So one of the experiences I’ve seen with plugin developers at the moment, not just in the work I do, but in general talking at cloudfest or otherwise, is those that maybe hadn’t used it before now actually we’re talking about like with agentic coding because of the skills and because of the ease that they can point to the skills and there actually is one, they’re starting to be able to use them way more. It’s not no longer a case of go to Storybook, click on a component, be able to pull and then work out from the pace between Figma and that was actually like it seemed easy, but it was quite a gap for people to function in.
And because you can actually use the skill and then you can be like. So one of the plugins I love is Superpowers. It’s a plugin that allows you to do brainstorming. I love brainstorming with the bots. And so I can just be like, okay, this is what I want to do. And now tell me before you do it. I’m a bit of a control freak that way. And then it can kind of come back, but it will. These are the skills I want you to use. Tell me what components you’re going to use. Look at this repo. And you can literally be like, so for me, here’s my. Here’s my dusty plugin. Can you look at my desk? I’m calling my plugin dusty. Can you look at my dusty plugin? Can you come up with my plan of how I would fit these into the dusty plugin that I’ve made? And I’ve done this, some of my older stuff and it’s been like, okay, yes, here’s the newer components that you could do. And I’m like, well, thanks. And it will be able to parse it, come out of a plan. Then you work with it. And that’s. It’s pretty. Very impressive that it can do that and it can pick it. So I think leaning into that being your guide and if you say stay true to. So say like, what is the native use of tabs? What is the native use of these components? It gets it really well. So.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that’s how I approach it too, you know, to kind of point it to the repos and see if you, you don’t have to come up with things. Yeah, it’s kind of.
Tammie Lister: Yeah, yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And that’s also for. For plugin developers who have their own interfaces. Yeah. That they have to maintain.
Tammie Lister: Yeah. You can get rid of like 80% of your interface that you don’t have to maintain. And to a good point, to that often people think, okay, well, it means that I therefore don’t have any personality or I don’t have any style or I don’t have anything. No, no, no. What you can do is you can bring the buttons in. I’m a little bit of a purist about I still want the primary button to be the primary button and I don’t want to like a secondary and all those kinds of things. But you can bring styling into it. You can bring graphics, you can bring headers, you can bring different tonal stuff into it. But just if everybody knows what a primary button is in WordPress, no matter what plugin they’re using, that is fantastic because it’s also already tested by Accessibility Team. If it’s updated, it’s updated for everybody, which is amazing. And yeah, it’s so much easier going forward. And it’s responsive out of the box.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s definitely easier for the user. They don’t have to learn a new interface for every plugin. And if they have.
Tammie Lister: Now it’s. Now it’s to this, to the right side, now it’s to the bottom, now it’s to the. No, it’s always. Tabs are here and I think just stabilizing the interface to that. Once we stabilize every experience, we can do some wacky stuff, we can bring some awesome graphics, we can bring some personality back to it, but we have the experience being the same and I think we have to separate maybe the experience from the visual art. And if we do that, we have a thing that works really well, but also is really shockingly beautiful as well.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, yeah. So in the block library we have some additional features. One is that the black ground gradient support can now be combined with the background images. So that’s really cool because then you have an overlay and you can have this really shiny designs there. I love that.
Tammie Lister: Now that seems like that’s a kind of small thing just there. But honestly, that’s a major thing for theme design, being able to have that.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And there is an experimental forms block and if you haven’t tried it yet, you need to open and open up the Gutenberg Plugin Experiments page and check it. But it now also supports hidden fields and that makes it much more feasible to be used in form if you want to put your forms together. And I don’t know if you can. I need to play around with it some more. I haven’t yet. But what happens with the action and where does it go is definitely something that I need to figure out there. Because that’s the biggest part on form plugins that you can. Where does the data go? Yeah. So what else do we have?
Tammie Lister: Commands. I think we go down to the command block, don’t we? Oh, command palette. I see blocks everywhere. Apparently. So on the command palette we have that we add sections to Command palette and introduce recently used functionality. This is such a quality of life.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. Especially when you can get more commands in, you never find it. So the search is really important.
Tammie Lister: This is interesting because I never used to use this. Sorry, confession time. I never used to use this, but I use it all the time now. It’s weird. I think I use it all the time because I use it all the time now on Mac. It is strange and I think it’s just like I now expect everything to have it. It’s. It’s a weird thing. So. Yeah, it makes a lot of functionality to me. Like when it first happened, I was like, nice feature.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I don’t use it. Yeah. But I think I wasn’t going to use it.
Tammie Lister: It was more like. I used to feel that way about voice chat. I’m. I take sometimes some features. I weirdly being that’s my thing, I take a little bit of time to warm up to. But this one I did, I definitely could see the use, but now I. It’s part of my workflow and I can definitely see, like, I find that I know how to hit it and I will hit it and I will use it, so. And I want it in everything now. So.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Nice. Yeah. Just a way of caution. You need to enable that in the experiments page as well. There’s a workflow palette experiment, one of those. It’s getting longer and longer. I still need to write that post that explains all those experiments because there’s no documentation. So. Yeah.
Tammie Lister: Somehow they’re kind of hidden down the back.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, they’re hidden because they’re waiting for feedback. But you can’t give any feedback when you don’t know how it works. So it’s all a little bit circular.
Tammie Lister: Excursion is features.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So. And even the description is like. What does that even mean? Yeah. So. And. And then we go down to the experiments in the changelog and the Post Editor is an experiment for. To look like the Page Editor in the Site Editor. And now it also has some field. Yeah. For excerpts and sticky and. And all that revision.
Tammie Lister: Full fleshed addition to it.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And I have found that certain things don’t work in the Post Editor, but they only work in the Site Editor. So bringing in the Post Editor to the Site Editor would help with some of those features. So there’s another experiment that we talked a little bit about, the previous release, because it came into 22.8. That’s the experimental guidelines. They were called content guidelines. Now they’re only guidelines because it’s clear it’s content and they have been refactored and improved with Typescript. I just wanted to point that out. That’s something that you. When you have agents coming to your website, you can guide them through your guidelines on how. What to do with it and what not to do and all that. So it’s a really good interface to look at. Well, there are a lot of PRs in here, but I think the next one that I want to point out is Gutenberg 23.0.
Gutenberg 23.0
Tammie Lister: Two versions of one.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: One done. And that was only released this week. We are recording this on February of February we’re recording this.
Tammie Lister: I’m not doing March again.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: No March. We are jumping right into April and it’s April 24th. We are recording this. And Gutenberg 23.0 was released on April 22nd. Again. A lot of components updates for WordPress, the UI, they’re really hopping on that. It’s phenomenal.
Tammie Lister: And honestly, I’m just gonna say that is needed. If you’re building stuff, you’re building applications or we’ve been talking about like themes. The theme of this is have fun, build stuff, do things. This is what we need. We need this interface to be our LEGO kit to be able to do that. That’s something like I have way too long a list of things I want to play with and me and Exo are going to have some fun time with all these components. So that’s exactly what people are doing. And the more these components we have, the more fun people can have building. And that’s. That’s the cool thing about this.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, No, I definitely let my AI soon because I’m building a plugin. Right.
Enhancements
But anyway, so in the block library, there’s one thing to point out that I selected was that the search block has a fix now and the color settings actually apply also to the input fields when the button is disabled. Because sometimes you don’t need a button, but you need the color settings to persist. The tabs block got a few changes. It was actually refactored from the previous version. That’s why it didn’t make it to WordPress 7.0. So contributors are really working on it to get it ready for 7.1. Yeah, we definitely have some more when it gets to. Out of experiment.
Tammie Lister: Very wanted block.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s a wanted block for everybody. Yeah, or change them. And Here is the. In 23.0 was the name change from the Guidelines Experiments component to. From content guidelines to Guidelines. And it’s out of experimentation.
Tammie Lister: Shortcuts for moving blocks via tool tips. Maybe you can explain this one. I don’t think I’ve kind of seen this one in Block Editor.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, the space shortcuts for moving Blocks via tool tips. Yeah.
Tammie Lister: Oh, okay. That’s kind of cool. So it’s actually just kind of visualizing the shortcuts, which is really good. So you actually get the shortcuts rather than having to bring up the shortcut panel. Oh, okay. That’s super good. So I kind of didn’t see that one. I love that. I love finding sneak surprises of cool stuff. I’m just saying, like that is also the cool thing about all these releases. Sometimes you find one that’s pretty cool.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And they’re buried through all the technology one. Yeah. Yeah. So I was at, in. At the meetup in Salzburg and this week and it’s only an hour and a half from here with. With a train. I love going by train. So I did some work. One of the features that people are really talk to or kind of that talk to them is actually the columns block in a paragraph. What’s in 7.0 where you can just highlight the paragraph block and then say give me columns and then you can put it in two columns. And that’s just so, so easy because you don’t have to fiddle around with columns. With the columns block, you don’t have to measure which one is faster because it does it automatically. So that’s a really nice feature.
Tammie Lister: And quality of life things is things we always would do. And it just. When the editor does expectations of what you would do, that’s when it’s next level. And it’s also refinement. It shows maturity of the editor, maturity of using it and also listening to user feedback.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. And the other. So we didn’t talk about it, but I don’t want to prolong this, but do you have a favorite feature from Webpoint 7.0 apart from the real time collaboration and the AI connectors?
Tammie Lister: Apart from real time collaboration and the AI, you’re just picking all like my favorite children and then take. Can I actually go a little bit wide and include.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Tammie Lister: Any tiny little quality of life bug fix? Because I think any track ticket we manage to close or quality of life bug fix that comes in that and we don’t necessarily highlight them. And I know we’re talking about features and we’re talking about stuff like that. That. But I would also say apart from that, anything in Storybook or that say or a component or anything like that, that that is going to be my favorite because it just means that we can build more cool stuff. But honestly, like yeah, it’s. It’s not a feature but it’s like any tickets we closed Anything we improved that isn’t visible or seen, that’s amazing for me.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So what really got the people excited about 7.0 is the new revisions panel with 23.0 in Gutenberg. It also comes to templates, template parts and to patterns, which is really kind of going through the whole editor and edit screen where you can have the revision screen screen.
Tammie Lister: I am very happy to see that gone because that slider needs to be buried. Bless it. It is old. We did it a while ago and
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, it definitely needed to go. But I think the implementation interface.
Tammie Lister: Not an interface of today. We can debate what the interface today is, but it is not that.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, I like that it’s it. It knows about blocks and it has these night color changes and you can. You actually can do it in the block editor. You don’t have to go out of that and come in again.
Tammie Lister: You have to go do it. I’m all for being in different frames of mind thinking when you can move to different spaces, but no, no, not in this one.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So yeah, I pointed that out. It’s coming, people, even if you missed it in 7.0.
Tammie Lister: So your favorite feature coming. Because you asked me mine. So is that your favorite apart from AI and apart from collaborative energy? Because you’re not allowed to pick those either.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: If I click that. Yeah. Well, I like that. You can have now video backgrounds in external video URLs for cover. For the cover block is really cool. And I like the revisions. It’s definitely the. Yeah, because I did the Source of Truth and there’s all the things in there. But I looked at the revisions and it was 64 and I said, oh, it can handle that. That’s awesome. IT can handle 64 revisions in the block editor in the first thing. Yeah. So I also like the Source of Truth. Where is it? Here it is. I need the list in front of me so you kind of remember what’s coming. WordPress 7.0 and my Internet just gave out. No, Tammy is still here. Can’t be the Internet. Oh, I definitely like the breadcrumbs block. Yeah, that’s really cool.
Tammie Lister: Yeah. And that actually really. Because many times you’ve had to hack around it using like the navigation block or doing something really funky.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And. And you need a plugin for that. Yeah. And it’s such a.
Tammie Lister: Literally I’ve seen people use the navigation and then just do like a port of it into a plugin or something like that. That’s what they’ve kind of taken or hard They’ve just done some weird stuff. I’ve seen some weird combinations break. So having a native one is really good.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Really good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then the other one was the gallery lightbox that it actually has navigation now. Yeah. You can go through back and forth. Yes. So it was kind of missing from the last implementation, but yeah. So that’s pretty much it. It’s kind of. I. I like all of it. But yeah, those are the. The favorite ones.
Tammie Lister: So it’s honestly like. I think that’s the thing. Not picking the two. That is going to be good. But for me it’s captive editing. Again, not with humans.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I. I only excluded it because we talked about it before already.
Tammie Lister: I know. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And. And it kind of. Yeah, yeah. So what’s that?
Tammie Lister: That’s going to be interesting to. To see in demos. Right. Rather than having to have two people on stage doing it, we’re going to be able to see in demos like having non humans.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. You know. No, I definitely want to try Gary Bendergast plugin to kind of figure out how I can use that to my. Because I’m in WordPress all the time with the good work times and I need some help there. Yeah. So. And I had a few workflows kind of with how do I find stuff and all that already and like a research. So. Right.
Tammie Lister: I have a first draft in for you could get the change logs, pull them in first of all.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, we can. So but what’s also.
What’s in Active Development or Discussed
And now we come to the what’s in active development and discussed and one of them is the media editor experiment that a group of contributors are working on. That’s a new component. It started with the image cropper. Yeah. Kind of have a better image cropper that kind of. Because the one that we have where it just kind of enlarge it and then kind of figure it out where to go. Yeah. I need a drag and drop kind of thing to crop things.
Tammie Lister: And also that the native cropper doesn’t always work.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. Yeah, yeah. So Ramon and Andrew are working on that and they had. They have it. It’s still a PR that’s not yet merged, but you can test it in Playground and I hope you can test it in Playground now. I think they wanted to put it in today and. And hook it up to the experiment page so you can test it. But it’s when you’re on an image block and you click then on the cropping tool, it opens up a new modal and then you can do all. You can rotate. You can enlarge and resize it, and you can crop it and you can do all kinds of things. Okay, it’s merged now. Excellent. Thank you. So I’ll merge.
Tammie Lister: So I think it’s still experimental, but it is merged. So even better than Playground. It is merged and you can try it on experimental. I think based on what I’m looking at on the PR, that’s what it
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Looks like, but it’s not in 23.0 yet. It’s because it was merged after. Yeah.
Tammie Lister: She says in a big voice.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: A big voice. It’s in 23.1. Yeah.
Tammie Lister: Oh, yes. Okay. Try to remember numbering. That would be good. 23.1. I went straight to 24.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, but it’s going. But you can test it through the Gutenberg nightly because that’s already in the playground. So it’s really cool. It’s so early that people want to need some input from the users. So go and play with it. And with that, we’re coming to the end. It’s been a wonderful experience with you, Tammie. Thank you so much. Is there anything that you want to talk about that you didn’t get to. Because I restricted you.
Tammie Lister: You did not restrict me at all. Thank you so much.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right, well, how can people find you when they want to look for
Tammie Lister: You as normal, comatose to all the things. And I look forward to seeing whoever’s going to WordCamp Europe as well.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Awesome. Awesome. So, as always, the show notes will be published in GutenbergTimes.com podcast. This is episode 130. And if you have any questions or suggestions or news that you want us to include, send them to changelogutenbergtimes.com that’s an email address changelogutenbergtimes.com so I thank you all for listening. It was good to be with you, Tammie, and thank you for your time. And this is goodbye until the next time. Bye.
Tammie Lister: Bye. Bye.
