Gutenberg Times: WordPress 6.8, Studio updates, Customize Embeds, and other Theme Design notes — Weekend Edition 320

Hi there,

That was quite a long pause in February. Did you miss me? I am back now and have a ton of great updates, videos, tutorials, and products for you in this newsletter. I won’t catch up on everything that was going on in the last four () weeks. Most of it is fairly timeless.

So how have you been? What have you been working on? Hit reply and clue me in! I missed you and your emails.

Have a fantastic weekend!

Yours,
Birgit

Table of Contents

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

We had a few Gutenberg plugin releases and WordPress 6.8 is progressing nicely.

WordPress 6.8

WordPress 6.8 release cycle goes into the hot phase. WordPress 6.8 Beta 1 was released this week and is, in general, characterized as a polish release, with user enhancements throughout incorporated into the latest Gutenberg updates. “WordPress 6.8 brings a luster and gloss that only a polish release can.” Jeffrey Paul, release co-coordinator wrote in the release post. WordPress 6.8 RC1 is scheduled for March 25, 2025, that’s also the time around which the Fieldguide will be published. The final release will be on April 15, 2025.

Test team rep, Krupa Nanda, published the Help test WordPress 6.8. This release offers a chance to find and report bugs while learning about the new features in WordPress’s next major version. Nanda’s instructions and short videos help you understand how these new features work.

Gutenberg Plugin releases

Jessica Lyschik posted a summary of two Gutenberg plugin releases. In What’s new in Gutenberg 20.1 and 20.2? she highlighted:

Content preview for pages in DataViews
Menu name shown in list view
Color pickers in Navigation, Social Icons and Post Featured Image get Clear control
Content block: color options for headings added

Fabian Kägy published the release post What’s new in Gutenberg 20.3? (18 February) and highlighted two new updates:

Ignore sticky posts in query loop
Add social icon block variation for Discord

Gutenberg 20.4 is now available for testing. It marks the last Gutenberg version to make it into the upcoming WordPress major release.

Latest episode: Jessica Lyschik and I chatted through the latest Gutenberg plugin releases 20.2, 20.3 and 20.4, talked about our WordCamp Asia experience and the upcoming WordPress 6.8 release. Gutenberg Changelog 115 episode will come out over the weekend.

Jessica Lyschik and Birgit Pauli-Haack recording Gutenberg Changelog 115

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

It’s been a while since we saw a new plugin with a collection of Blocks makes it into the plugin repository. Thanks to WP Weekly‘s Davinder Singh Kainth, for discovering it. It’s called Frontis Blocks and created by the team called WP Messiah (What a name! ) and provides 27 Blocks. It’s works with all themes, among them the Frontis theme by the same developers.

Bud Kraus shares in his blog post for Hostinger How to customize WooCommerce templates with Gutenberg blocks. He explains the shopper journey and how to access and change templates like the Product Catalog, Single Product, Cart, and Checkout pages. Customization involves adding or changing blocks in these templates. However, some templates, like Cart and Checkout, have limited options to keep them functional. The tutorial shows WooCommerce’s move towards an editing experience that allows non-programmers to customize their online stores.

Get inspiration from the Automattic Special Projects team, that just published their new site. You can browse a selected list of projects and learn how they built it. You’ll find on the list Seth Godin’s blog, the Buckminster Fuller Institute or Noma. The team also started sharing their tools, the plugins, and blocks they built and open-sourced. I am particularly intrigued by the Accordion block and the infinite scroll query loop variation.

Speaking of tools, the ClassAct plugin by Dave Ryan might be useful for theme developers and Sitebuilder. It’s a microplugin for acting on Additional CSS classes per-block in the WordPress Editor. On X (former Twitter), Ryan shared a video of how it will show up in your block’s sidebar.

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

Henrique Iamarino, WordPress Theme designer at Automattic, discusses a new approach to designing WordPress themes in his article Beyond Templates: Reimagining WordPress Theme Design. He focuses on moving away from old, static templates to more flexible and dynamic design systems. The article highlights the need to give users tools for greater customization and creativity in creating websites. By changing the design process, Automattic aims to make WordPress themes more adaptable and user-focused while ensuring they are accessible and easy to use.

Bud Kraus had an awesome month! In his Kinsta post, he shared how to Build a block theme using the Create Block Theme plugin. This plugin is a must-have for whipping up WordPress block themes. You can start from scratch, clone something you like, or create child themes, all within the WordPress Site Editor. It lets you save theme changes, play around with style variations, and even export your themes as zip files. Plus, you can tweak theme metadata, check out the theme.json file, and reset your theme whenever you need to.

“Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2024”
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

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.

James Le Page, AI lead at Automattic, has worked on the Excalidraw Block. It is a custom WordPress block that allows users to embed an Excalidraw editor directly into the post editor. This block provides a seamless way to create and edit diagrams within WordPress. On X (former twitter) LePage posted a short video to show off the block’s capabilities. The code is available on GitHub put needs a build step to install it successfully on your WordPress site.

JuanMa Garrido wrote about his Understanding how WordPress Hooks work from a Stack Trace. He shared how to use stack traces to analyze WordPress hooks, helping developers see how hooks work, find errors, and improve their use in plugins and themes. By looking at stack traces, developers can track function calls, identify triggered hooks, and fix plugin conflicts. This method is essential for troubleshooting complex WordPress sites where multiple hooks operate at once, ensuring everything works well together and aiding in debugging custom code related to hooks.

In his the video “Cooking with AI: Creating New Recipes with Cursor AI“, Ryan Welcher set out to improve his use of AI tools for developers in 2025. Specifically, he’s setting up Cursor AI to help him generate new recipes for the Block Developer Cookbook more quickly and with better examples.

Aslam Multani of Multidots recently published How to Develop Custom Gutenberg Blocks for WordPress: A Step-by-Step Guide. This blog post explains how to create custom Gutenberg blocks, covering everything from setting up your development environment to debugging block code. It starts by detailing what Gutenberg blocks are and the requirements, such as having a local WordPress installation and knowledge of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, PHP, and WordPress plugin development.
To make a custom block, it suggests using the create-block tool to set up a new plugin and explains the necessary file structure, including build/, src/, edit.js, save.js, and block.json. The post guides you through installing the block plugin and automating the build process with npm start, highlighting the functions of Edit and Save and using the RichText component for user interaction.
It also covers customization options like adding support for color and spacing, setting default properties in block.json, and creating nested blocks with the InnerBlocks component. Lastly, it touches on internationalization (i18n) using the __() function and provides an example of a testimonials block to demonstrate these ideas. However, it misses discussing when to use different tools, such as block styles or variations, before creating a Custom Block.

A new version of the local development tool, Studio, was released: Introducing Preview Sites: Pushing the Limits of Collaboration with Studio. The WordPress.com blog post highlights upgrades to “Demo Sites,” now “Preview Sites,” enhancing local development and simplifying sharing with clients and teammates. Key improvements include:

Increased Storage: Expanded from 250 MB to 2 GB.
More Sites: Doubling from 5 to 10 preview sites.
Personalized URLs: Shorter, user-specific URLs.
Timeline: Available for seven days post-update.

The name change to “Preview Sites” emphasizes their role in showcasing work-in-progress and collaboration. Enhanced Preview Sites are available to all Studio users, with existing Demo Sites converting automatically.

WordPress Developer Blog

Two new post on the Developer Blog might catch your attention:

Troy Chaplin took on the monthly round up What’s new for developers? (February 2025). The post mentioned WordPress 6.7.2 with bug fixes and enhancements, and took a look ahead to WordPress 6.8’s data view and performance improvements. Gutenberg celebrated its 8th birthday with versions 20.1 and 20.2, introducing enhancements to blocks and UI customization. Updates include improvements to the Navigation, Page List, and Social Links blocks.

Róbert Mészáros guides you through his tutorial on how to customize WordPress embeds to match your theme. He discusses different ways to adjust WordPress embeds to fit a site’s theme and branding, covering basic CSS styling, advanced changes like modifying excerpts, ensuring uniform image formats, adding features like a “like” button or publication date, and creating custom embed templates. The article also reviews the history of WordPress embeds, the default embed view, and loading template files from a plugin, encouraging developers to try these options and enhance WordPress embeds.

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