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WordPress.org News Showcase Hosting Extend Themes Plugins Patterns Blocks Openverse ↗ ︎ Learn Learn WordPress Documentation Forums Developers WordPress.tv ↗ ︎ Community Make WordPress Photo Directory Five for the Future Events Job Board ↗ ︎ About About WordPress Enterprise Gutenberg ↗ ︎ Swag Store ↗ ︎ Get WordPress Search in WordPress.org Get WordPress WordPress Planet May 14, 2024 BuddyPress : BuddyPress 12.5.0 Maintenance Release Immediately available is BuddyPress 12.5.0 . This maintenance release fixes 8 bugs. , and then you have three-dot menus on the bottom of each card that gives you immediate actions that you can take with a page. One of them is rename a page, give it a new title, even if it’s a no-title page kind of thing. It’s an easy way to fix headlines and all that. I really like it for the new admin sections there. Sarah Norris : Another update to that page view that you’ve just been talking about is well, updating the index view. I think these changes are all related to the DataViews project. There’s some really good work going in here. It brings there the list of pages to the new DataViews section. Birgit Pauli-Haack: The List View, so you have on the left-hand side, you have the navigation that is in the dark background, and then the List View shows you each page with a thumbnail or something like that in the title. Then when you click on it, it opens up another panel where you can see the whole page. It’s also quite interesting for the workflow that was, you never were able to do that in WordPress before. It was always you had to click on it and then it opens it again. This is much smoother and you can browse all the pages quite easily and to see how they look. It seems to be magical that they actually display the front-end view of the page in the editor, so it’s really cool. Sarah Norris: Instead of having to click into a page, wait for a page reload and then click another one and wait for another reload. It’s now right there. Birgit Pauli-Haack : Yeah, right there. The same, we see that for the pattern pages, there’s now also a table layout where you can see the patterns and then it opens it up. Then the content schema for pattern editing view. I wasn’t quite sure what that was. Sarah Norris: It’s when you can name blocks in a pattern, and then when you come out to the pattern view when you’re inserting a pattern, you’ll be able to see a content panel. Then those name blocks will show in that content panel. It’s probably good if you watch the video, the handy video that’s on the PR. It probably does a better explanation. It’s going to be good. Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, that helps me quite a bit because sometimes you see paragraph heading, paragraph heading, heading, heading, image. Sarah Norris: Yeah, exactly. Birgit Pauli-Haack: You don’t know exactly where you’re on the page, but if things have a name you know, Okay, I’m in the right section where I want to change things in the List View. The List View is, I’m obviously not creating too much content because the List View is not part of my muscle memory. When I was demoing things from the theme and how things are changed, I never opened up the List View and people asked me behind that. The List View is always open, how to navigate the whole pages and all that. It’s definitely a change in muscle memory to open that up because the List View wasn’t really helpful in the first few years of the Block Editor, so I didn’t develop that. Okay, next. Next is a background UI controls that are now really extensive. You can have, what was it? The focus on the image. You can have a tiled background image on things and you can have a section, but this is set for the top level. Sarah Norris: Yes, I think so. Well, so I think it’s related to the top level, the new top-level background image setting. As we tend to do in Gutenberg, we’ll add the setting, the new style setting to theme JSON. Then this PR I think that we’re looking at is adding the UI controls. This surfaces it in the editor. This is, again, it’s very close to theming. It really elevates what you can do for themes. Again, this would’ve just been, you would’ve had to do it with code and probably custom CSS. Birgit Pauli-Haack: Now you can, through the editor, you can change the background position, you can change the repeat, yes or no, or the background size of it, does it cover the whole thing, or there’s another one restrained. You can just upload the image there. I like background images, it gives so much more dimensions and layers to the Block Editor. Sarah Norris: Yeah, it does. I really love web designs that use a big full-size background image. That’s the kind of design I like. I’m really pleased to see this come to the editor. We’ll see. Birgit Pauli-Haack: There’s something that the DataViews, and I know it was there before that you can clear out customizations to templates, but now you also get a confirmation modal. I have learned that when you want to do, so some people wanted to switch out the theme, no, the updates of the theme doesn’t update templates at all when they were previously changed because the user changes trump the theme changes. When you update a theme on your site and you want the new changes coming in on templates for themes, you need to clear out the customizations beforehand. It’s a little bit of a quirk right now, and I don’t know how to solve this because of the hierarchy of changes, but maybe the Create Block theme. I don’t know if that’s a scope for that as well, but it’s something users and theme developers need to get their head around that, that’s actually what’s happening. Sarah Norris: Yeah, exactly. Maybe a good solution here for the first case, it’d just be to surface what’s going on and try and explain to people just different levels of saving and this is how it works, like the template hierarchy, you just have to get used to that. Maybe there’s a first step of just telling people where things are being saved. I think this change helps you be less unintentionally destructive as well, because resetting things, it’s just, Oh, I didn’t realize I was going to clear everything.” Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, you’re so right. Well, there are people who don’t press a button because they fear that they set up a nuclear bomb, but some people are just clicking around and saying, Oh, I didn’t do anything,” but it all made it disappear. For them, it’s the next step as kind of have a confirmation modal, so you can think twice about what you’re doing there. Sarah Norris: The next one we’ve got is related to the List View you just mentioned. I think this makes it much easier to navigate. It’s adding keyboard shortcut to collapse List View items, but excluding the focused items. You’ve got the List View on the left-hand side and say you do have a lot of content, unlike Birgit, depending on the length, I think it can be challenging to navigate just because it’s another scrollable section. Adding this keyboard shortcut makes it much easier to collapse nested groups, basically. Yeah, it’s a good addition. Again, it’s probably good to watch the video. Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s definitely also a good quality of life kind of thing. I think that was for the enhancement of 18.1, Gutenberg plugin updates, 18.1. Accessibility There’s one thing that is available was an accessibility change for the DataViews that you can update. It has updated keyboard navigation in the list layout, so you can navigate through that through your keyboard, which is very important, so you don’t have to wait for the screen reader to announce everything. Then how do you get there? By keyboard. That’s a good thing. I think that was it for 18.1. Gutenberg 18.2 We can now immediately go into the change law of 18.2, and that was a mammoth release with 234 individual PRs by 56 contributors. Four of them completely new, but it also was that large because there were two more days on the release. It wasn’t released on a Wednesday, it was released on a...