Announcing GT Changelog Podcast Episode 128: Deep Dive Into Gutenberg 22.7 & WordPress 7.0 Dev Notes!
We’re back with another packed episode of the GT Changelog Podcast! In episode 128, host Birgit Pauli-Haack welcomes JavaScript developer and full-time WordPress contributor Maggie Cabrera for an insightful conversation about all things Gutenberg and WordPress.
In this episode, we unpack the highlights of Gutenberg 22.7, with a special focus on the latest features coming to WordPress 7.0. From the innovative navigation overlays—earning plenty of “oohs” from the community—to the long-awaited pseudo selectors in theme.json, our speakers share behind-the-scenes perspectives on development.
Birgit Pauli-Haack and Maggie Cabrera explore game-changing updates like the new breadcrumbs block, PHP-only block registration, and the emerging real-time collaboration features. They also discuss the vision for my.wordpress.net—WordPress running right in your browser for ultimate digital sovereignty.
Show Notes / Transcript
Show Notes
Special Guest: Maggie Cabrera
My.WordPress.net
WordPress 7.0 Dev Notes
More to come. Get the full list.
What’s released?
What’s in active development or discussed
Tabs: Restructure Tabs Menu and inner blocks
Stay in Touch
Transcript
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Welcome to our 128th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog Podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk about Gutenberg 22.7 version and dive a bit deeper into the dev notes for 7.0 that have been published as we record this on March 12th, 2026. I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and a core contributor for the WordPress open source project sponsored by Automattic. And today, I’m very happy to say Maggie Cabrera joins me on the show. Maggie is a JavaScript developer and theme builder and is contributing full-time to the open source project and also sponsored by Automattic. So welcome to the show, Maggie. How are you today?
Maggie Cabrera: Hi, I’m really good. Thank you for having me again. Really excited.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s been a long time. So maybe a year and a half or even two years. Yeah. Since I’ve been on the channel.
Maggie Cabrera: At least one year. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Oh, and I forgot to mention in the intro that you are also a co-developer. You were a co-developer on the Twenty Twenty-Four theme, which was one of the first full-featured block default themes. And has gotten a lot of workout through the WordPress community because I think that started when, when people started with a default theme and just adjusted things and created that for client work or for private projects. And the others were okay. And I, I really like the Twenty Twenty-three part where we, there was a community push to get more style variations in. That was really cool.
Yeah. I think I need to go back to them to look at those. Again, to get some ideas there.
Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, I think it’s funny looking back at them and how each of those themes and Twenty Twenty-Five too have like different things from it that you could, you would want to reuse today because they haven’t gone out of style really. And hopefully soon we’ll be able to do that kind of thing where you can, you can have multiple themes installed, be able to reuse like patterns or style variations and stuff like that. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And I know that people are actually working on it. There was an idea to have the template management a little bit more safe for people. Ella, I think, was working on it. And she switched the priorities to revisions for 7.0. Yeah.
Maggie Cabrera: Hopefully, maybe 7.1.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I also think that that’s part of it, that you can have multiple templates for the same slug. We talked about it on the show when we talked about 6.9 and what was coming from the Gutenberg. It’s still in Gutenberg, but it’s experimental now and you have to open it up through the experiments tab. But yeah, I’m, I really like that. And then you can reuse patterns. That’s definitely something. Yeah, we’ll see what’s coming down the pipeline.
WordPress 7.0
So for WordPress 7.0, you worked on several features, for instance, bringing the pseudo selectors to the theme.json and patterns for the navigation overlays.
Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And the navigation overlays were really a got a few oohs when I demoed it last night at the meetup in Munich. And it was really cool to see. There were also some tiny things where I said, oh, I didn’t know that they were getting so much excitement out of people. Revisions, of course, was one. And the other one was that you can have a paragraph now create columns. So you have just one setting and you switch it on and then you can have a paragraph display in 2 or 3 columns depending on the site.
Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And that is really cool. Yeah.
Maggie Cabrera: Well, anyway, so yeah, the overlay work has been in the making for so long and I’m so excited that that finally made it and I’m really happy with how it ended up looking by the time, like the deadline of the release. I think there will still be follow-ups and stuff, but I think it’s really, really nice. Now I not only worked on the patterns, but I also worked on the whole setup for themers to extend that. So a theme, a themer, but that, that was like previous work, I guess, but it all made it to the release. So a themer will be able to create a template part for the overlay to set up as a default, and also patterns. So you can have your theme will have maybe 5 different overlay patterns and then you’ll select, well, this one is going to be the default and you’ll assign it to the navigation block you want it to have it and you’ll instantly have it as soon as you activate the theme, which is really nice.
I’ve also been tinkering with it on my personal blog. I was like, now that I can have it, I have, because I have Gutenberg on it, I will, yes, yes, I need to put it on and change the colors and center it and put the site logo on it and all this kind of thing. So yeah, I’m really excited about what other people are going to be able to do with it. I think it’s quite flexible and I think it’s, there’s still more work to make it more flexible. Like things we want for people to be able to do something like if they want to make their overlay, like maybe always on, not just on mobile and not have it be full width, maybe only have like half the viewport, in the future, they will be able to do that. Right now there’s only one thing where you can’t really close it by clicking outside of it, which is the thing that we need to fix. But once we have that, the sky’s the limit.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. There was Nick Diego, a year and a half or so ago, wrote a tutorial on the developer blog about how to create mega menus.
Maggie Cabrera: Yes, I remember that. Yeah, yeah, that’s the next step too.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And he had this idea with template parts and then push it into the navigation bar, but of course it wasn’t wired up from core, so he had to do some, some interesting workarounds. And then Mike McAllister with his Ollie Theme Builder, he had a plugin called the Menu Builder and it’s in the repo.
Maggie Cabrera: I think that was a big inspiration when we were working on the navigation overlay.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that’s what I thought. Yeah. And there was a conversation between Mike McAllister and also Matt Mullenweg on Twitter and yeah, how to get this into core and I’m glad it’s now there and it can be, of course, everything can be improved, but—
Maggie Cabrera: Oh yeah, this is V1.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s phase one. Like I explained yesterday. It’s phase one. It’s baby steps. It can’t be fully featured.
Maggie Cabrera: We iterate.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Announcements
So, but today, completely a different thing was an announcement. No, it was yesterday actually that your browser becomes your WordPress. It’s the announcement of my.wordpress.net. It’s a browser-based, signup-free WordPress built on WordPress Playground. And those of you, dear listeners, who know Playground wouldn’t be all surprised how this is gonna work. But it’s just, the site is private across visits because it’s automatically saved in your browser. But it also offers an app catalog and one-click installs for personal CRM and RSS reader. And it’s kind of a prototype for maybe seen as a WordPress democratizing digital sovereignty because you can, you don’t have to put it on a central place.
You have it all on your browser, on your machine, and you can interact with your machine with it. It also has a hook into an AI assistant if you want to, and also some other apps. But the plugin and the WordPress still is what it is. But Matt also posted about it on his personal blog, Matt Mullenweg, under ma.tt, and he calls it the WordPress Everywhere. And outlines the strategy as well. And he can see that this one thing that’s in your browser and only for you can have peer-to-peer sync with another person’s MyWordPress, could have version control and also cloud publishing, which means pushing it to a host or pushing segments of it like single posts to another public website or any way you wanna kind of think about it. But it’s a kind of atomic container, composable units. And you can fully roll back. You can just say, okay, I don’t want it anymore. And then it’s gone. But it shifts. One of the hopes, it shifts from WordPress for millions to WordPress for billions. We’ll see. We’ll talk about it in the next 20 years about it. So, again, so AI will enhance it. And it’s the open source power is really coming to life in that vision. We’ll see if we can get the product also to fulfill all those promises.
I got a chance to try it out in early stages. It’s mainly built by Alex Kirk and he published it and then went on sabbatical. So it’s kind of— what’s this little baby? Yeah, took a little break and it’s a, I think it’s a wonderful proof of concept. It’s a rough experiment, definitely. But I love the app launcher instead of plugins because it’s kind of a different metaphor. Yeah, kind of if you can have this single install additional apps in WordPress, that would be so much more approachable than plugins that need to be installed and find and everything. And it’s a personal note-taking app with many others out there. But this would let you connect your personal ideas with what you’re doing out on the web and bring it in, in certain ways or other. So it kind of, you can kind of put it together. Say if you have a chat with your AI, you can copy paste it into your private WordPress and think about it some more and write about it or add it with other information and resources and just keep your own learning process private. But it’s not in a Google Doc, it’s just out there in the browser. Easy to use because it’s in WordPress. But yeah, there’s so many ideas that I all of a sudden had with that. So I really liked it. It was announced yesterday, so you probably haven’t gotten an opportunity.
Maggie Cabrera: Yeah. Yeah. I’m gonna definitely check it out. Sounds really interesting.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Definitely do that. Yeah. TechCrunch also had, and I will share all the links in the show notes. TechCrunch also had a little report about it. So yeah, check it out. Of course, it’s the first version as always in WordPress and it’s baby steps, right?
Dev Notes
Now with WordPress beta 4 being out, the first dev notes appear on the Make blog. And there are quite a few that are about the block editor. The first breadcrumbs block is coming to WordPress 7.0. And the dev note talks about the block filters. Yeah, learn how to use it with two PHP filters or customize it. And with the trail terms and also the taxonomy terms, the interface is actually more like, okay, we will, we will find out where your page is. Is it a subpage of a page section or is it a post in a category? And we put the things that we know about it into the breadcrumbs. And there’s a, you can have a home link in there and you can have the current page also in the trail if you want to. But that’s kind of, so yeah, I share the dev notes in, in the show notes, like we’re talking about all 6 or 7 of them. So yeah. But, um, have you worked with the breadcrumbs block?
Maggie Cabrera: No, I had a time when I was working on WooCommerce theme development for a little while. And I knew that that was needed and I think Woo had its own little solution. So I’m really happy to see that there’s something coming to core. That definitely helps for any use case, not just the commerce side. So yeah, definitely need it. Will help SEO and everything. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. There were quite a few plugins out there. I think SEO had it already in there. So, but I’m not quite sure they were all block-based. So having a block in there and you can actually put ’em on any page. Yeah. You don’t have to put ’em in the template. So yeah, you can connect with. Have the visitor not getting lost so much on your big, big, big website. The next one, we already mentioned that that’s the customizable navigation overlays. And see developers learn how to register and bundle the new navigation overlay and customize that. That’s what you said for the mobile navigation. Yeah, the overlay, when I demoed it yesterday, it had always used as overlay. As a navigation, so the default navigation will never show. You always show the overlay, but that’s kind of full page and then you have to close it. Yeah, you mentioned that already. Yeah. So how would theme developers register and bundle then?
Maggie Cabrera: So there’s, there’s a couple of options. So they can just do patterns and tag them as core slash, I think navigation overlay. I think it’s on the dev note. And that would have those patterns show on the sidebar when you create a new one. And right now you, we only have the ones that are coming from core, but if a theme bundles a few patterns more, you’ll see them too. But you can also, as a themer, decide, well, I want to not only bundle patterns, but also decide right away that the header that I’ve designed will have a specific overlay and they can decide which one and link it.
By having the attribute to the navigation block specifically. And if you want to have 4 headers for a website, for a theme, and each one of them is going to have a different overlay, you can absolutely do that. So it’s, you’re not tied to just one for the whole website. You can decide on a per-block basis. So it’s really nice.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Awesome.
Maggie Cabrera: If a theme doesn’t want to do that, or you’re using a theme that it’s older than this feature, but you still want to use the navigation overlay, you can only need to click on the navigation block. And go to the settings and click on the— there’s an overlay on this, on the inspector on the sidebar. You can create a new overlay and it will automatically give you the simple one. That’s just your navigation block and the close button with a white background. And you can customize it or use one of the bundle patterns that came with the feature.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Is it possible to switch out those patterns?
Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, the same way you can for when you create a new page and it will show you all the, on the sidebar or this popup that tells you all the different patterns that come with your theme, you can completely replace them.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Okay.
Maggie Cabrera: Same that you do with the query block and all these kinds of things.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. So I think a lot of theme developers are going to try it out and maybe have an update to their themes.
Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, I can’t wait to see what they come up with.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So the next dev note is about the changes interactivity API. And that’s pretty much a new watch function, or that’s implementing a new watch function for the server-side state URL and populate cleaner patterns for side effects and navigation tracking. And there’s also the state.navigation is going to be deprecated. So watch out for those deprecation notices in the console log. Another dev note covers all the changes on the data views, the data form, and the field API. And there are some substantial updates in the API with new layouts, validation rules, grouping options for the table, and then picker improvements. And yeah, the whole package, I think it’s now in the version 13 or so for the data views. So it’s pretty great to use for plugin pages.
Maggie Cabrera: Yeah. Oh yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And sites. So you don’t have to make any of the design decisions and keep up with— Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Your components, those are really stable.
Maggie Cabrera: Yes, they are.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And it is really fun and Claude code can really work with them. Just need to make sure that it’s kind of looking at the right version. So, and then there is a PHP only block registration. A lot of people, PHP developers—
Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, very excited about this.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Are excited about this. Yeah. Yeah, it has all the, all the details in the dev note about auto-register and also how you can with the auto-registration, you also can get all the inspector controls on the sidebar. If you enable the support for that. And I will share this also in the show notes. Brian Welcher has on his private or personal blog, wrote a whole tutorial on how to create a block like that and kind of walk you through step by step. I’m sure he also did a live stream on it. Or multiple, but I think that’s both of them. You can kind of look at the livestream on YouTube. So a lot of developers are really excited about that.
Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And the next one is about the pseudo-element support for blocks and their variation in theme.json. And Maggie, you worked on that. How does it work?
Maggie Cabrera: Yeah. So this is basically just working on top of what we already have, like The theme developers can already define via theme.json support for hover, focus, focus visible, and all of these states for their blocks, like the buttons block, uh, on theme.json. But we have variations for blocks, and in particular on the buttons block, we have like the outline variation. And you could, on theme.json, change the background color for hover on your default button block, but if someone decides to use the outline, there is no way without using manually CSS to change the hover for the outline. So this, this little change adds that feature, but I think I wanted to talk about what’s coming up that’s not making it to 7.0, but we’ll make it for the next one, which we’re finally Hang on.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I have a question to the hover block theme.json. So I could do hover and focus changes also to other blocks than buttons? Is that what you’re selling? Or only to the button style variations?
Maggie Cabrera: Only for the way it worked before is you could do it for button blocks and elements and links, blocks and elements. Well, there’s no link blocks, so the link element. You could do that. Now you can also do it on the variations. So if you have a variation that’s created by core or one that you create yourself, you can also add hover for it. That’s what’s coming up.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So what’s coming up now?
Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, what’s coming up is we’re finally merged, I think it was yesterday, the UI for controlling adding that hover using the editor and not only theme.json. So if you, if you have your button block. You just go on the site editor, go to global styles, and you’ll have on the top right, you’ll have a dropdown that will let you see all the different states that your button can be in.
And you select from that dropdown, like hover, and then change anything, change color, change typography, change font size. You can even, we’ve even tested that you can change and put it on your hover.
You can change the right mode and put it so it’s vertical instead of horizontal. When you hover your button, it suddenly flips and it becomes horizontal.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Wants, wants my attention. Wants my attention. Yeah.
Maggie Cabrera: Don’t follow that advice. Probably very not accessible.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. But that’s cool because a lot of people are just designing with the site editor and having all that UI is really important to have that. Yes.
Maggie Cabrera: I think it was one of the issues that had more comments in Gutenberg, the issue, the pattern issue that I was asking for those controls.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. I imagine. Yeah. But that’s not coming in 7.0. Just clarify.
Maggie Cabrera: That’s, that’s coming on the next Gutenberg release. So you will talk about this on the next changelog.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes. Yes. It will come to Gutenberg 22.8. Yeah, it’s already merged, so it’s in the milestone. So yeah, you have to wait another 2 weeks, but yeah, okay.
Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And the next dev note is all about real-time collaboration, the block editor. It’s essential reading for plugin developers and to learn how the classic Meta Box disabled the collaboration mode by default and how to use the sync providers filter to customize your your transport layer, because right now it’s all on HTTP and it’s kind of reduced to just, I think, 2 people or 3 people just to make it also available to shared hosting. But if you have VS Virtual Hosting or Virtual Boxes or your own servers, you can actually switch out the providers and have more people being on there in collaboration. And there are some pitfalls or unintended block insertion side effects that need to be kind of looked at, not only for plugin developers, but also for site owners and agency developers. So that’s definitely a very important dev note to read. Speaking of side effects, have you done any collaborative editing yet?
Maggie Cabrera: No, I’ve not.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: On your website?
Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, no.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s really cool, but I got into some trouble yesterday. When I was demoing. Of course, live demo is always the interesting part, right? I got the notification that I lost the connection to the server. And although it was only me in there, so it couldn’t have been. And so it was a little bit, I need to track it down for maybe a bug report, but could also be the technology in the room because we had some Beamer issues and it wouldn’t show up, wouldn’t show the dropdowns. It was interesting.
Yeah, I was trying to show off the aspect ratio dropdowns for the gallery block, and it would only show the active one, but not the rest of it. It’s kind of very weird. I was talking and sooner or later they let me know that they don’t see anything, but it was kind of weird.
But anyway, so, and then the iframed editor changes for WordPress 7.0. There wasn’t a post earlier that 7.0 brings automatic iframing post editor, but that has been moved to 7.1. So you have a little bit of a grace period, plugin developers, because those blocks that are in version 1 or version 2 of blocks.json trigger that the post editor is not iframed. And the iframed version is actually really helpful when you want to separate concerns from the block editor and from the rest of the admin. But the big part is also not only meta boxes is not this problem there, but it’s the version. And we have not seen all the things that may go wrong are actually only theoretical. We have not seen it yet. So, but we still need to do some more testing. And if it’s now in the Gutenberg plugin, so if you want to test it, that would be really cool to see if your site or some of the blocks that you have from earlier block collection.
That are still on your website, make sure you test it and see if anything breaks. And if it does, let us know wherever you can. You can comment on the Gutenberg times, you can comment on the Make.blog or on GitHub, anywhere you want in the Slack channel. There’s an outreach channel is a good place to post those as well. So yeah, we definitely need some wider testing with the Gutenberg plugin and what happens with the blocks on the earlier version of blocks. And I will do. Some testing when I get back from my travels.
And that’s probably what I’m going to do at Contributor Day in WordCamp Asia is testing some of the old plugins. I have still on my website somewhere on the Gutenberg times, I have a list of 100 plugins and some of them, I think 40 of them were block collections. So I’m going to install them all and see if they break or maybe have Playground write some automation for that. Yeah, we’ll see how that works. But that’s definitely what I’m gonna aim for. Yeah.
Dev notes, we are, we are kind of a little bit in the know. There are 7 more dev notes coming to, for WordPress 7. They will all be released for the field guide, which is coming out with the release candidate 1. Not the same day, but maybe a day later. And that’s about the block visibility and the pattern editing. Who knew we are now supporting Unicode in email addresses? And then some simplified HTML5 tags in WordPress, then the new block support for text indent.
Maggie Cabrera: Oh yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Which is kind of nice too. And then the custom CSS for individual block instance in WordPress 7.0 and the dimension support enhancement that come to WordPress. So those are dev notes coming up.
What’s Released
And we are now going into what’s released. And this week was a little bit of a release galore. So there was WordPress 6.9.2 that came out as a security release. And that had one bug that kind of for a few sites had a whitespace, a blank page on the front end. And that was fixed within hours to 6.9.3. But that coincided with having a release for 7.0 beta 4.
Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And that was kind of all one after another. And once it went out, it was found out that there were 3 security, 3 of the 10 security fixes that were in 6.9.2 didn’t actually make it into 6.9.3. They made it into beta 4. So that’s kind of when you have these clashes of versions, something happens. And so they had to create another 6.9 point release, the number 4. But it’s really amazing how much goes into some of the releases.
Maggie Cabrera: Yeah. They work so fast too. It’s amazing. It’s really impressive.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And how you can do this one after another. There were 2 a day and then it’s really amazing. Great work for the other contributors.
Maggie Cabrera: Amazing. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Into the night and they were handing it off from one person to the next because the time zones changed.
Maggie Cabrera:
No stress.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s like a release relay.
Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, yeah. Like a well-oiled machine.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it was, yeah. But still some hiccups in there, so.
Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, always.
Gutenberg 22.7
Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right, so now we come to Gutenberg 22.7. We were all waiting for that, right?
Enhancements
So the enhancements are starting not with block library. Right now, the first thing on the changelog is that phpMyAdmin is now supported by the wp-env Playground runtime. So you can then have access to the database right from your Playground wp-env local environment, which is really cool because then, yeah, you have the whole thing. It still is SQL, but it’s the phpMyAdmin, what we all love and used to for the last 20 years. Yeah. To connect with the database. What’s also in 22.7 is the connectors screen. That has been backported already to WordPress 7.0. And that is the single place where you can connect your website to external services. It starts with AI provider, but it’s not going to stop there. It’s any service that you have to connect to to get data in or get data out. You can put to the connector screen and also plugins can use it to organize the handoff of keys, API keys and connectors, security, no, we have public keys and all that, or securities. And what also happens is that the providers that are connected with prefix with AI will also register with the WP AI client. So then a plugin can push prompts to an AI that is connected if there is one available. So it’s really interesting how that comes to pass. I have on my list to do kind of how you write a plugin to connect to an OpenWeather app. Just get the free key and then have your, the weather around be displayed on a website. I think that’s a nice example tutorial that we could do. Yeah. And the next one?
Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, the next one’s a playlist block, which is ramping up, it’s getting the waveform player visualization where Benny has been implementing this open source visualizer instead of creating one that we need to maintain and applied it to the playlist block, which is, I think it’s, I don’t know if it’s going to make it. No, it’s, it’s going to be for 7.1 then.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Maggie Cabrera: Yeah. And it’s looking really, really nice. I can’t wait to. To have this for themes. I was just looking into the original playlist because I kind of like to do this kind of thing, which is look at all the issues that we’re closing our— and it’s from— it’s, uh, issue 805. Oh wow, 2017. So we’re doing that in 2026, which is great. Honestly, I like it. Yeah. So yeah, and it’s looking so good. I love it. I can’t wait. I have a bunch of friends from the Sevilla community who are podcasters, and I can’t wait to see what they can make with it.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, and I’m definitely going to put it also on the Good Mythical Times. Oh yeah, for sure.
Maggie Cabrera: For sure. You let us know if it fails or—
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh yeah, of course. I have opinions. I travel. Go for it. Yeah. I also know that, so our team, which is Justin Tadlock, Ryan Welcher, Jonathan Bossinger, Juan Margarito, we are all working on a showcase for a band website. And I know that Justin does the theme for it and he has already built with the playlist block and it looks amazing on those band websites when we have albums and all that. I don’t know when we will release it, but it’s definitely going to be for education of developers to kind of see how interactivity API works, how some of the theme features work with that. And yeah, it’s going to be really cool. Just as a side note there. Yeah, there were a few blocks that hadn’t had a text-align block support added to it, or they had their own implementation. And there was a big push in Gutenberg to make it available for all the blocks that have text in there. To, to do the text align things.
Maggie Cabrera: Yeah. Yeah. Those code quality changes really make a difference on it.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So there were 5 more in 22.7. Uh, 22.6 had 8 blocks that were going in there. So I’m not sure they made it all to 7.0. No, no, they were not.
Maggie Cabrera: We have many blocks. So that’s painstaking work, honestly.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. It’s taking work. Yeah. And it comes in when it comes in. So, and then there’s also the previews of style variation transforms. So you can say, okay, I want to transform certain sections into a different style variation. Now there’s a little preview so people are not surprised what’s happening. Yeah. Yeah. People don’t like surprises. If they don’t click with, they don’t know what’s gonna happen.
Maggie Cabrera: Yeah. Now we can also enable style variations. Transforms for blocks that are in content-only mode. If you’re editing a pattern that has an image and you want to change to the variation with around the corners or something, you can do it within the UI of content-only.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. I saw that yesterday. Yeah. That, that’s, that’s actually pretty cool.
Maggie Cabrera: And there’s another change coming up. Yeah. The block supports, you can define CSS for blocks based on feature selectors. This is kind of like a complicated one that it’s setting up. A lot of flexibility for blocks.
And I’ve been using personally this option, this feature on a change that recently made it that I haven’t talked about it yet here, but I think it will make it also on the next changelog, which is I, we’ve added for the navigation link, the possibility to style the current item. And the reason why this PR by Aaron is, well, this feature in general by Aaron is useful is that, so what this does is basically lets you define a CSS selector that’s specific to a feature. So right now, block.json allows you to, before it used to only allow you to define like a selector for your block, that’s what theme.json would target, but some features need something specific. In the case for the current navigation, we want to target the navigation link only if it has the current menu item class too. So now you can go on block.json and say, when we’re using the feature current, we want this CSS selector to be the one that we’re using. So that is really flexible and allows for so many things that you can do with global styles and blocks.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I think that was for custom blocks. You only could have a selector for the wrapper of the block. But the inner blocks you weren’t able to target without CSS chasing.
Maggie Cabrera: But it’s not only that, like, in the case of the navigation, it’s not about the wrapper only, but also because it’s a very dynamic block that changes depending on the state it’s in. It will change its classes. If you’re visiting a specific page, it will have this current menu item class. So if you can target only that, that’s very useful.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think we need some little tutorial about that.
Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think, well, that will definitely, like the current menu item will definitely have a dev note for 7.1.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. But that’s awesome. Thank you so much for pointing that out.
Bug Fixes
The next one is that the grid block improved visualizer is now responsive. The visualizer’s responsiveness has been approved. I wasn’t quite sure which one was going. The grid block also got a little bit of an improvement for 7.0, but that we already talked about it when, when I was going with Jessica, I think last, last episode. But I really like how the grid block is now. You can define a minimum width of your columns. And then if you, even if it’s a custom one, it kind of will then be responsive and stack the whole thing. On your mobile. So it’s much easier to do. Yeah.
Maggie Cabrera: So strong grid.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. The grid block gets better and better. And I hope there is some time for some contributors to work on it for the 7.1 and 7.2, because it’s so helpful to have that also in template parts and patterns and all that. So the PHP-only blocks now have boundary attributes, values. In the inspector controls that wasn’t before that. Now you can see it in the— so they can be changed and automatically added to the custom block that is registered with PHP. And with the Gutenberg 22.7, the real-time collaboration is actually enabled by default.
Maggie Cabrera: So it’s getting out of experiment then.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It was already out of experiment. But it was actually opt-in.
Maggie Cabrera: Before.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, I see, I see. And now they switched it to opt out.
Maggie Cabrera: Okay.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: The space is the same. You go to the general settings into writing, and then it’s, I think, the third option from the top. You can disable it if you want to, if it gets into your way like it did yesterday at my demo. I disabled it and it was always fine. I’m just repeating it so I can remember to file a bug report and test this again. Yeah. What’s next?
Maggie Cabrera: You can disable multiple collaborators if meta boxes are present.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And it’s not the, that you can, it will disable multiple collaborators when meta boxes are present. You’re right. Because they, it clashes.
Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It clashes because the saving of the meta box and auto saving, they’re not in sync. So you might lose content from the meta boxes. In that, so it’s automatically disabled there.
Experiments
There’s an experiment in Gutenberg. It’s called the Content Guidelines, and it comes through the WordPress AI team. They were exploring Content Guidelines as a Gutenberg experiment, as a dedicated structured place inside WordPress to cover your site’s voice, tone, image, and copy standards. And it works with the REST API and custom post types and has an UI to manage that, but you need to enable it in your experiments page. It also has block-level guidelines and import and export on the vision history. So what it does, it’s not, it isn’t for AI only, but AI, if you have an AI assistant that works with your website, the content guidelines are actually helping that AI to match your tone, to match your your standards, your guidelines, standards, your publishing standards, your pre-publish checklist and all that. But also when an AI comes and goes to your website, then it will know, have more information about your website that’s more in-depth than what it knows from just scrolling it.
Maggie Cabrera: Yeah. Makes sense.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So it supports sitewide categories. Like the site, the copy, the images, and additional, and then the block level stuff. That’s kind of in the changelog of 22.7 as an experiment. And I don’t know where it’s going, but we will see how once it’s tested and more people have to chime in to see if it makes it out of experiments or when it makes, not if, when.
Maggie Cabrera: Yeah. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s really interesting to see that. Yeah. Kind of all of a sudden you have a second layer of concern. It’s not only SEO, it’s AEO, and then you have your own assistants kind of go in and do stuff. Yeah.
Maggie Cabrera: It’s important to have default solution for this because WordPress is so extended. There needs to be something that everyone can build on upon. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely. That’s actually the, the philosophy of the AI team is to, to build the plumbing.
Maggie Cabrera: Defaults.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And defaults. So plugins can build on top of it and there is a standard there. So that’s kind of really cool.
Documentation
So when we have a few documentation items that we wanna point out, well, because that’s always a little bit different.
Maggie Cabrera: Always important to keep documentation up to date.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely. Yeah.
Maggie Cabrera: Now more than ever.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. With all the new things coming in. So there is a theme.json schema for the icon block. And then the documentation for the content role and the list view block supports. So custom blocks as well as theme can add the content role to things, patterns, template parts, templates.
Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It also has an improved parameter documentation for the icon block and updated README for data views, data forms, and the field API.
Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, with all those changes.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: All the changes.
Maggie Cabrera: Like the meme, all the changes.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: All the changes. All the changes. Yeah. We like changes. Changes are hard, but we like them. Yeah. So I think that’s the essence of what’s in the changelog for Gutenberg 22.7.
What’s in Active Development or Discussed
I have just one item that I wanted to touch base on with Maggie today, with you about what’s in development and discuss. Touched on some of it, but the tabs block unfortunately didn’t make it in 7.0. It’s on its way to get into 7.1 and it was so close.
Maggie Cabrera: It really was. Yeah. It was a little bit of a pity that it didn’t make it, but I mean, so the thing was another contributor, I think it was Aki, was reviewing the block when we were trying to stabilize it and he raised important concerns and we sat down and looked at it and thought, yeah, I think this, we think the structure of the block is not correct right now. And this is really important to get right because once it’s there, it just needs to stay. And this would have been a mess if we had to backtrack that. So yeah, that, those concerns have been mostly addressed in a PR. I think I have the link for you here.
You can share it later. And there’s a bunch of follow-ups coming after that, which means that the tabs is not only going to be like in a really good state, but also it’s going to come with more things. One of those things is what I was talking before. That I was working on the current menu item, the ability of adding the, what we’re calling states for blocks or elements. In the case of the current menu item, like the state of where a nav link is the current one that we’re visiting. And in the case of the tabs, which tab you have currently open, we will be able to assign a tab as current and be able to style it as such. First via theme.json and then hopefully also for 7.1 with, uh, our new UI for states.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Awesome. Yeah.
Maggie Cabrera: Really excited for all of that. Everything’s linked. Everything works together.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it has to. Yeah. I think the concern was that it didn’t follow the usual how other blocks were built.
Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It would kind of confuse not only contributors, but also those who kind of want to extend it. Seth Rubenstein worked on it quite a bit and he actually had to bow out just before 7.0 for his own priorities. And I’m glad that you picked it up though. Sarah picked it up.
Maggie Cabrera: It was Sarah mainly. I was just reviewing and—
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Sarah, you said?
Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.
I was reviewing and supporting her, but it’s been Sarah’s work since she picked it up.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So that’s coming and we definitely will talk about it some more on other releases and also have a call for testing. It won’t be an official one, but I will make it to test it. Yeah. So, but now go back to testing 7.0, what’s coming to a WordPress instance near you in a month, roughly in a month, April 9th. And it will be released. There will be a release panel at WordCamp Asia Contributor Day. So quite a few from the release squad are going to Mumbai. To be on that panel, and I will see everybody there. I think it’s after my workshop on theme development is actually after lunch, so we were all gonna sleep in my workshop. I’m really happy.
Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, catch up with that when you have it, when you, when you’ve done it, because I’m not going to WordCamp Asia, but I want to see your workshop.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right. Okay. Yeah. Well, we’ll see. It’s the first workshop that I do on theme development, so it’s going to be maybe a hit and miss. We’ll see.
Maggie Cabrera: Sure, you’ll do fine.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: As always, dear listeners, this is the end and the show notes will be published on gutenbergtimes.com/podcast. This is episode 128, 128. And if you have questions and suggestions or news you want us to include, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. That’s changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. And Maggie Cabrera, thank you so much for being here. And being such a great resource and talk about all the good things that you work on.
Maggie Cabrera: Thank you for having me.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely. And thanks for listening and goodbye for now. Bye-bye.
Maggie Cabrera: Bye.
The next step for the security team is to backport the 6.9.4 fixes to older version for WordPress, all the way back to WordPress 4.7.. It’s a huge job and it needs to be diligently executed. 
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