In this episode, Birgit Pauli-Haack welcomes Beth Soderberg to discuss key updates in WordPress 7.0 and Gutenberg 22.8. They kick off with small talk about shifting seasons in Munich and Virginia before diving into the new content guidelines in Gutenberg 22.7, focused on standardizing editorial voice across AI and human content contributors. Both speakers express healthy skepticism about AI-generated content, stressing that while AI assists with research and “grunt work” like alt text or excerpts, the core value in writing remains human expertise and review. They caution about automation pitfalls and emphasize validating all AI outputs.
The discussion shifts to the new WordPress AI connectors, which let users connect to services like OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic Claude, and others—including local providers such as Olama and European alternatives like Mistral. Birgit Pauli-Haack explains the evolving infrastructure allowing developers to add and switch connectors with ease, and encourages the community to experiment and test.
A central topic is the release of WordPress 7.0, with a highlight on the increased minimum PHP requirement to 7.4, likely to disrupt agencies with older sites. The admin’s new look-and-feel is poised to confuse some clients, demanding extra support from agencies. Beth Soderberg also celebrates practical improvements: cover block video embeds using external sources, block visibility by screen size, pattern overrides, breadcrumbs block, and streamlined font management. Both speakers note the importance of hidden, friction-reducing features and the advancement of developer-facing infrastructure. The episode closes with a preview of ongoing enhancements in Gutenberg 22.8 and beyond.
Show Notes / Transcript
Editor: Sandy Reed
Logo: Mark Uraine
Production: Birgit Pauli-Haack
Show Notes
Special Guest: Beth Soderberg
Bethink Studio
WordPress.org Profile + Slack
Talks by Beth Soderberg
Gutenberg Changelog #122 – Gutenberg 21.8 and WordPress 6.9
My Process for Building a Custom WordPress Theme in 2025
Bill Erickson,Ellen Bauer, Beth Soderberg: Case Studies – How to Prepare your Theme for Gutenberg
And more
AI in WordPress
Guidelines Lands in Gutenberg 22.7
Call for Testing: Community AI Connector Plugins
AI Provider for OpenRouter
AI Provider for Ollama
AI Provider for Mistral
AI Experiements plugin
WordPress Core and Gutenberg
WordPress 6.9.2 retrospective
WordPress 7.0 RC2
What’s new in Gutenberg 22.8? (25 March)
Dev Notes
Pattern Overrides in WP 7.0
Pattern Editing in WordPress 7.0
Block Visibility in WordPress 7.0
Dimensions Support Enhancements in WordPress 7.0
Custom CSS for Individual Block Instances
New Block Support: Text Indent (textIndent)
Introducing the Connectors API in WordPress 7.0
Introducing the AI Client in WordPress 7.0
Client-Side Abilities API in WordPress 7.0
Stay in Touch
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Transcript
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Welcome to our 129th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. In today’s episode we will talk about WordPress 7.0 and Gutenberg 22.8. I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator of the Gutenberg Times and full-time core contributor for the WordPress open source project sponsored by Automattic. With me today, and I’m really happy about that, is again Beth Soderberg, founder and CEO of Bethink Studio, a full-service boutique agency and of web experts to tackle any project. Beth has been a longtime WordPress theme builder and WordCamp speaker. She’s also been an early adopter of the blog editor and block themes. Beth, how are you today? Welcome to the show.
Beth Soderberg: I am well. How are you today? Thank you for having me.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I’m good, I’m good. We have winter in Munich again. It was spring and now it’s back to winter. So I’m happy to get out of the town for WordCamp Asia next week. So yes, I’m really happy about that.
Beth Soderberg: We’ve been switching from winter to spring every day here. Every day in Virginia. Yep. It’s different every day.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So what’s the weather doing? Well, I don’t know.
Beth Soderberg: No, I’ve had to look every morning because it’s in the last week I’ve been outside in a winter coat and a tank top and rain boots and you just don’t know. You wake up and it’s a surprise.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, it’s the beauty of surprises. But who likes surprises? I want my spring be steady.
Beth Soderberg: Yeah, I agree.
Announcements
Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right, so under the announcements we have one thing that’s that content guidelines landed in Gutenberg 22.7. We didn’t really talk about it with Maggie Cabrera at the last episode, but the WordPress AI team has launched guidelines. They are live experiments in the Gutenberg 22.7 or Gutenberg plugin and this project creates a single source of truth for site standards and ensures that everyone, humans and AI tools, follow the same editorial voice and content rules. By providing this infrastructure layer, WordPress can finally maintain a consistency across content contributors. So that’s so far from the experiment post that I’m definitely going to share in the show notes. When you want to use AI for helping you produce content, you definitely want to store some of the standards somewhere. And the experiment lets you do this on your website in your interface with a nice interface for that. I don’t know how I feel about this because I have been using AI quite a bit in the last two years and some of it was for content creation ideas. But the writing is still kind of mostly a human factor. But it helps me for research and it helps me for learning. So I’m not quite sure how that translates to a WordPress site, but I guess if you have ongoing content reproduction that is more service oriented, then you might want to use the help of LLMs or something like that. What do you think?
Beth Soderberg: I’m skeptical for the same reasons. I think that I have had clients ask for something like this. But the more those clients have actually used AI to create content, the more those very same people who had announced that they were going to create all of their content through AI decide that they are going to use AI for research and then create their content. So the AI in actual practical use has been more about reducing friction in that discovery research phase of writing and less about creating the writing itself until you get to the editing part when it becomes helpful again for grammar. But that actual connecting ideas and proving expertise piece is where AI can’t do it. And you need something, somebody who actually understands what they’re reading to piece together the logic of it.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I can also see, and we will see this in that you use AI to write an excerpt or to give you suggestions for titles or make sure that there’s an alt text on the image. I think these grunt work tasks kind of thing of AI is really helpful, but I think the human ideas are still. Well, humans hallucinate so much better than AI can ever can. Right.
Beth Soderberg: How can we possibly replicate that? And I think there’s also a place for it with things like you mentioned the alt text. Right. Having it generate them all and then validating that it did it correctly is much faster than writing it all yourself. That is where we’re going to see these things actually become practical. Right. There’s a lot of big ideas about it, which makes sense when you’re dealing with a new technology and an innovation in a major workflow. But in actuality, I think that’s more how people are going to use it. And I think if people set it up to automate everything and then never look at it, never validate it, that’s people are just going to get in trouble over that.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Beth Soderberg: And I, you know, I use it a lot to generate fake content so that I can show someone what something will look like knowing that the content I’m showing them is not real. Right. But when you’re dealing with real content, the biggest mistake I’ve seen over and over again, and humans will learn because we always eventually do. But the mistake is not reviewing what AI has done.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. It’s not a replacement. It’s a tool that you need to validate like any other tool you have to do. I can see that if you have a longer text like for 4,000 words or something like that, you could actually use AI to identify the gaps. If a reader goes through it and say, okay, there is a gap because it didn’t explain why something happens. I think those tips are really helpful, especially when you have longer text or you want to focus on one problem and just kind of figure out what’s in scope and out scope. But I think that’s more like an advisory kind of thing and not a doer.
Beth Soderberg: Yeah, validating. Because sometimes I love Grammarly Pro. Grammarly the free version is very annoying, but if you pay it becomes a really useful tool. But even then, the content suggestions it makes, sometimes they tighten up your language and they make it. They add the commas, which is the thing that I don’t do naturally on my own apparently. But sometimes they change the meaning completely.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Beth Soderberg: And that’s when you’re like, nope, thanks for the suggestion. That’s a no.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah.
Beth Soderberg: I think how this type of thing used well, will make people more efficient. But I also can see it creating a mountain of work for somebody who doesn’t actually need to go through all of these ridiculous suggestions about it. And I think that deciding when to use it, when it makes sense, those strategic decisions about how to use it are going to be what makes it either something that really helps somebody in their publishing workflow or really hinders somebody else.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, if you’re a single blog blogger having a little editor go through that and give you some tips that might not be a bad idea, but sometimes. But right. If you have been blogging for many, many years, you don’t need things like that. It changes your voice and it changes the outlook. That’s what the guidelines are actually for that you can create some of the guidelines as it meant to be to help AI to streamline some of that stuff and also to know about what you want to do. And that certainly helps.
Beth Soderberg: Yeah, yeah.
Community Contributions
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Speaking of AI, what I found in so in 7.0 WordPress. So getting closer to that release, there is now a new connectors page that you could connect to an OpenAI to Google Gemini or to Anthropic Cloud from your site. And if you have certain tools that help you with those connections. So there are AI providers for other AI systems like I just discovered three of them. One is the AI provider for Open router or router depending on which English speaking country you go to. It’s a little bit different. So open, I say Router is a service that lets developers use many different AI models like those from Google OpenAI but also others through one simple connection. And the provider was developed by Jonathan Bossenger who is on the AI team and talks about AI on the developer blog. There’s also an AI provider for Ollama, and Ollama is a local system where you can connect local LLMs so you can download an LLM set and Ollama helps you connect that with the task that you want to do. The benefit of Ollama is that it’s on your server and it doesn’t go out to the third-party services, but you still need a provider and connector to it. You can do this on any VPS connection or virtual private server system because you have room and space there to download and add certain things. But it’s definitely important for companies that want to not get data outside of their system.
And the last one is for Europeans. The AI provider for Mistral. Mistral AI is a French AI company founded in 2023 by a former Google DeepMind and Meta researchers and they built and publish large language model and be a respected independent AI in Europe. Speaking of this, what that all comes together is that the AI team and with that Lauri Saarni published a call for testing for community AI connector plugins. There are certain links to the plugins and the connectors, so it would be really cool if you’re interested in that part of it, to actually go ahead and test things and report back what you find and what you didn’t find and how it all works for your site. It’s a totally different approach for working with the site using AI as we discussed. But it might be pretty interesting for developers to connect with all those AI providers and provide services in a plugin or something like that.
And if you are not a developer, you can install the AI Experiments plugin that also comes from the core AI team and it will show up on the Connectors page with a link to the plugin and what you can do with it. And it has these things like create an excerpt or check the alt text or create a featured image just so you can kind of get a feel for these kinds of works on the WebPress site. Do you have, do you think you have a need for. To kind of use some of the providers for your agency or for some clients?
Beth Soderberg: I think for some clients it has started. I think that for the agency itself, not yet. We have started to do more writing publicly, but really what we’re doing is turning internal communications to clients into public facing documentation so that we can point to them more easily. So it’s not something we need help with. In the same way, I think for some clients we have started to integrate things like this in an experimental way. Right. And there are, as with anything that’s new, people don’t know how to use these things yet. And I am not against experimenting with a new thing. I love the new stuff, but at the same time I’m cautious about putting new things into a production environment without really making sure that it makes sense. Some of these, in terms of experimentation, like I will install them and actually Grammarly is a great example. It took me several years to decide that I was fine with it because I tried it and it was annoying. And then a few years later I tried it again and it was still annoying. And then one day I realized that it really was like their premium suggestions really were fixing my comma issue, which is a known issue I have with writing and grammar. I just don’t put commas anywhere.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I put them in randomly and so there’s a few commas.
Beth Soderberg: But you know, I experimented with the tool probably three times before I was like, you know what, let me try the premium version and see how that goes. And I tried it and a few days later I was like, yeah, this is actually making my writing better. But it was one of those, like I was monitoring over time if it really made sense with my workflow.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. And that’s how I approach it too.
Beth Soderberg: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s how I felt about these. And I think what’s exciting about it is that the infrastructure to do it is becoming more full fledged. But that does not mean people know how to do it yet.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right.
Beth Soderberg: And so that’s the next step is that experimentation phase collectively of how, what. How can we make these tools that we’ve now created function in the best way.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So I really appreciate that the WordPress core developers think about the plumbing of all these services and putting it all the foundation in to open up that total space for freedom for the developers. And there’s a standard there on how to approach certain. So if you are as a site owner, don’t have a plugin that kind of taps into LMMs and you open up Gemini for it, you couldn’t switch just easily to Claude when you think that’s a better fit for that problem, but the plugin will still work. So that’s actually what this whole connector thing is about. And it just came up as for the AI providers, but actually the connector API is for any external service standard. So a standard for any external service. So if you need the OpenStreetMap on your site and you have an API key, the plugin can actually use the connectors API to monitor those API keys and just put it in there. The plugin doesn’t have to come up with its own interface for that, which a lot of plugin developers did for the last 15 years. Yeah. But now they can could actually throw away that piece of the plugin and just tab into the connectors API and don’t have to maintain that piece of the code.
What’s Released – WordPress 7.0 RC2
But anyway, so that’s kind of the bigger picture behind it. And that’s all coming with WordPress 7.0, which we are now getting to the more practical stuff of WordPress 7.0. So first of all, the WordPress 7.0 release candidate 2 has been published this week. It’s crunch time. The final release is only two weeks away. So if you haven’t tested it, now is really the time to get in there and figure out if your theme plugins and sites actually still work with 7.0, and the developer notes are published. The field guide is in the works and I will continue the list of dev notes in the show Notes like we did the last two episodes. I also know because I have been working on it. The Gutenberg Times Source of Truth is almost done and will be published before this episode actually hits your favorite podcast app. So you get an additional link there. So, Beth, did you get a chance to look over the WordPress 7.0 features? What are the most important ones for you and your fellow agency owners and developers? Is there anything that you are really excited about?
Beth Soderberg: Yes and yes. So the first thing that I think is going to be honestly hugely problematic for a lot of agencies is the change in PHP minimums, because I think that there are. I know that there are a lot of folks sitting on older sites, older themes, maybe they’re stuck at PHP 7.1 and there are old things out there. And I think that this PHP requirement jump is going to catch some people off guard. So it jumps from it’s we’re now requiring 7.4.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Beth Soderberg: And if you do, it’s already 6.9.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right?
Beth Soderberg: Yeah. But I think this is going to hit harder. Okay. Because people are going to want the new stuff. Like there’s a lot in here that is really great and I’m starting with the thing that I think is going to be most disruptive because I think that people are going to want the other stuff, right? And so I think that that’s going to catch some people off guard. The other thing that I think is going to be really important is the new admin look and feel because people have been training their clients for many, many, many, many, many years with what it looks like now. And there is a client education need here because when the admin changes, even in minor ways, you get clients that come back and say, what happened? I don’t know how to do it.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay, Even if nothing changes except the color, right?
Beth Soderberg: Where did it go? Why is this different? And did I do something? Did I write the, that human element of like, hey, you’re okay, it’s gonna look a little different, but I promise you’re gonna be able to do it. Just holler if you have any questions. Right? Because I think that there’s a lot of at least working with long term clients where you become sort of an advisor on the technology rather than a day to day implementer. And for those folks with something like this, I, what I like to do is say, hey, heads up, we are doing, we never do the major core updates right away. I am a let me see how it goes for everyone else.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right.
Beth Soderberg: Type and then if it seems okay, then I’ll go for it.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So you’re one of the ones who wait for 7.0.1.
Beth Soderberg: Absolutely. Unless it’s been like three weeks and there isn’t one. Yeah, right. So I either wait for a period of time or I wait for a point release. And if there’s a point release, I wait at least 24 hours to make sure there’s not another point release. But point being though, that this is a big enough shift in terms of what people will see and what people can do.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Which part of the admin is actually the one that will disrupt people’s minds.
Beth Soderberg: Just I think it looking different at all.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, okay. So we should never change that. Is that what you’re kind of thinking?
Beth Soderberg: No, we should absolutely change it. But because we have not changed it for many, many, many years, it will be a surprise. And I think that it’s easy as folks who are in these systems every day to be like, wow, they finally fixed that. That’s great. That might be my reaction to many of these changes. Right. But I also know when I log in to pay my credit card. And they’ve changed it all. And even though the buttons are the same, it looks different. I don’t have as much confidence about clicking the button. And there’s this. The vast majority of people who are maintaining the contents on these sites day to day are marketing people, communications people, regular everyday writing people. And they are not sitting there thinking about how the structure of the software works all the time the way we do.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. But they still get their work done.
Beth Soderberg: They still get their work done. What I like to do with clients is just reduce friction by increasing confidence.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Beth Soderberg: Right. And so, like, my message to them is going to be, hey, you need to know that this is going to look different, but your workflow in terms of the things you know how to do is the same. Don’t let it freak you out. You’ve got this. Keep going. Right. But like, just that little bit, because that’s. That is 100% what gets people. It’s the smallest stuff. They just need to know, like, hey, the problem’s not me. Oh, wait, there’s not a problem. It’s fine. And then they’re good.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. It’s the first five seconds. Yeah.
Beth Soderberg: It’s that psychological adjustment. And I think because it hasn’t changed for so long that it’s just going to be something that I mentioned.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Is there anything else that you are really excited about or is it just.
Beth Soderberg: I know. Okay.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Things change. Okay. I don’t like it to change.
Beth Soderberg: Things change. I’m really, really excited about the cover block video embeds.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Beth Soderberg: That is really, really going to reduce the size of things as they load for a lot of websites. And that is fabulous. In addition to improving workflow, all of the things around block visibility by screen size make me really happy. I’m really happy about the changes in the header block. And I’ve been building this into themes for years. And the only thing that makes me nervous about it is that I need to go back and see how it impacts the things I’ve already built that replicate this feature.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: But you mean the navigation overlays?
Beth Soderberg: The navigation overlays. Yeah. Because you’re going to have such increases in both accessibility compliance and SEO optimization just by virtue of having the option to manage your headings visually versus syntactically. So I’m very excited about that. I love that our revisions menu now has visual changes.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Beth Soderberg: Because I know that most people looking at the markup that’s been in there lately are like, I don’t know.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I have to squint so much to look through the code to find things. Yeah.
Beth Soderberg: And then there’s a few exciting changes to the navigation and the better workflows for pattern overrides. Yeah, it was there before, but it was one of those mystery off menu features if it was there, if you knew how to find it.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. Right.
Beth Soderberg: So those are the things I’m most excited about. I think there’s some other cool stuff in there and I am excited about the general infrastructure that we were just referencing that is being solidified with this release. And I think that piece may not be as exciting on the outset because it’s infrastructure. It’s like nonprofits have a hard time funding infrastructure process projects. It’s the same reason. But it lays the groundwork for a whole new level of experimentation. I’m excited to see where that goes and I recognize I think you said it very well a few minutes ago the thoughtfulness to create an extensible infrastructure that has gone into these features in the roadmap and sort of planning moving forward.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: You mentioned the cover block video embeds. That means that you can have a video just to catch up with our listeners. It’s to use a URL to YouTube or to Vimeo and pull that in into a cover block instead of uploading the video to the website because that reduces the cost of hosting and bandwidth for the website. Definitely. And it also you don’t have to maintain the speed and all that on your own server. So it’s always good to offset that into a different service. How are you feeling about the manage the fonts from the appearance menu directly instead of hunting it down under the fonts typography menu on the slobber styles,
Beth Soderberg: I’m feeling really good about that. It remains to be seen for me the biggest issue I have with font management. I am not sure it might be addressed here, but I need to experiment. When you get a font from a total third party non-standard like independent type foundry place getting those integrated, there has still been some friction. So I’m excited about it being easier to find in general. I think that’s great. .
I will be experimenting a little bit with if it reduces friction in some of these more edge cases. Because if you’re using a Google font it’s great and it’s been pretty good for a while. But if you are integrating something from another provider, if it’s a big provider the friction is not as bad. But if it’s like this obscure type foundry that makes like only these little types of historic fonts, which I run into recently, getting it actually integrated properly, it’s really hard because you’re dealing with not the most sophisticated type foundry in terms of the format of their files and they’re not necessarily plugging in as best as the totally optimized stuff from the more common sources. So, yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Is it more a format issue or is it more kind of how it scales in different font sizes and different typography features?
Beth Soderberg: It’s a format issue with the font files themselves. And so I think some of it is probably an education piece for people who make fonts, but I also know that most developers don’t know that much about how fonts are made. And so when you put those two things together, you create some problems. But I think this is a huge step towards getting to the point of being able to solve the edge cases. Right. Because right now finding where you manage the fonts is difficult.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right? Yeah, totally. Yeah.
Beth Soderberg: We’re going in a great direction, getting into the nitty gritty of which font providers are supported and that I think that’s the next step from here, personally, because I do think there’s a homogeny that started from a type standpoint around everyone’s using Google fonts because they. It’s easy.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. But it’s also problematic for European sites.
Beth Soderberg: Yeah, right, yeah. Because the different requirements over whether you’re hosting the font files or Google is hosting the font files, like, then you’re getting all into all of these legal technicalities of where the font is and who owns it. And I’m glad I’m not a lawyer.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, me too. So, all right, so there are a few developer goodies coming, so to speak, down the pipeline. The PHP-only block registrations and then the pattern overrides for custom blocks that you already mentioned. Those. I think there are a few smaller stuff like the HTML block enhancements where you can put the CSS separately from the JavaScript and the HTML. You could actually kind of create your own little app there, depending on what privileges you have. I found that there are some problems when you don’t have admin privileges. The HTML block really gets scrambled, but that’s an overall kind of problem with the capabilities, I think. Yeah.
Beth Soderberg: Oh, I forgot the breadcrumbs block. That. That’ll help a lot of things.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So. Yeah, yeah. I’m also sure that a lot of agencies and site owners already had that problem solved through like for instance, the Yoast SEO plugin had already programs for many, many years. Yeah, yeah.
Beth Soderberg: But I like my websites to be as lean and efficient as possible. And this feels like when, for a long time I was using Coblox for accordions. Right. And in the beginning, coblox had a lot of things that Core didn’t. And so you were using a bunch of things. And eventually it became that I was only using the accordion everywhere. And then one day it became possible to do the equivalent in Core and I was like, great, I can get rid of this plugin that’s only doing this one thing, but has all this other stuff. And I think that’s what makes me excited about this. Yeah. You can do it through Yoast. There’s a number of ways to do it. There’s some independent breadcrumbs block plugins that are really good.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I know that Justin Tadlock had a very good breadcrumbs plugin and he was advising on the core implementation there.
Beth Soderberg: Yeah, right. Yeah. And I’ve used Justin Tadlock’s breadcrumbs plugin for a long time, and I’m not going to rip it out of something just because it’s there. It works. It’s good. But for something else where, like, you only have this one thing that you’re really using in this big suite of plugins. Yoast is one of them. Jetpack is one of them. Any sort of like cadence blocks, code blocks, any collection of a large number of things when you’re only using one of them, you should be considering the idea that maybe you shouldn’t use it at all. And that’s what makes me excited about the ability to do this through Core, because it allows for some of that extra bloat to be stripped away in some circumstances.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. All right. Anything else that you want to kind of cover on 7.0 for your agency of developing theme building needs?
Beth Soderberg: I think that the PHP-only block registration, we sort of glanced over it, but I think that’s a very exciting big deal. It opens up, you know, the whole challenge. I think from a developer standpoint, the whole time with Gutenberg has been, how do I level up to do this new thing? How do I level up to do this new thing? And this opens that door wider. And anything that we are doing to open that door wider is great. Similarly, there’s a few things in here that are just really tiny that I think will help people. They’re not like, again, reducing friction. So little enhancements to the query loop, adding some new navigation stuff that is just really tiny, but really Helpful dimension support for width and height. That sounds crazy, right? Like it’s little tiny stuff that reduces friction and stuff. So there’s more of that in here. Like the concept of the grid block being responsive is really great.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, it was responsive before, but there was a setting where it wasn’t and that’s kind of changed now, right? Yeah.
Beth Soderberg: So, yeah, I just. There’s a lot of hidden goodies in here that reduce friction. I do think the biggest things to look out for are if your themes are compatible, if your plugins are compatible, and if you have built in things that replicate some of this functionality. How does that work? Because we’re starting to enter, at least for how I’ve been building themes, a zone where things I have done historically to account for some of these needs are being subsumed by core, which is great. I just don’t know how it’s going to work. So, you know, I think that’s going to be different for everyone in terms of which things it is. But hopefully, and I say hopefully because I know that we have a unified development philosophy about how we build our themes and there’s sort of a continuous logical thread for our themes as they’re built over time. Hopefully agencies who have an internal logic to how they have been building themes can look at this list and say we should look at how we do that and make sure it still works. Yeah, right. Because there’s also going to be agencies where they have a mishmash of things and they don’t know and it’s going to be a one off for each site to see what happens. And you know, that goes for anybody who’s inherited themes too.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, but that’s also for any of the WordPress releases. Yeah, you have to go through a certain testing phase there.
Beth Soderberg: Yeah, I think that’s true. And I think some of this is honestly that it’s been a while since we’ve had a major release and so the quantity of little things feels more.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely.
Beth Soderberg: And I think that’s part of why my reaction is this way, because I haven’t had this thought process.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: At least five months.
Beth Soderberg: At least.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, six months. Nine came out December 2nd.
Beth Soderberg: Right. And so as somebody who was used to the four times a year cadence, it is longer and what’s packed into it is greater. And so I don’t think that’s necessarily bad, but it is an adjustment in terms of absolutely how you review things and what you’re looking for. And it’s more of a. This one feels more like a surprise. Not that it is a surprise, but it feels more like a surprise because it is not on this schedule that I had come to expect. Right. And I think we’re getting towards a new schedule, which is really great. But until we are all psychologically adjusted to whatever that new schedule is, it’s going to be a slightly bigger task to review because there’s more. And psychologically it’s going to be like, oh, right, I guess that’s happening and you’re, you know, you got to go do it. Yeah. So I just think it’s just. There’s a little more and the timing is not as predictable.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And I think that the break that was in Twenty Twenty-Five kind of skewed that anyway. Yeah. So we had an April 25, we had a release, and then the last. The next one wasn’t until December. Yeah. So there were eight months that kind of 15 Gutenberg plugin releases. It didn’t feel that much that it is now in 7.0, because that was just kind of coming up out of that pause. And now there’s a real excitement about the Real Time collaboration. There’s excitement about AI. Yeah. So, yeah, it feels that there are quite a few heavy new features in there that also kind of drown out some of the really quality of life things that we have been waiting for quite a bit here.
Beth Soderberg: Right. Yeah. And I. I think it’s like coming back from a long vacation, like, oh, ooh, this is really exciting, you know, but that’s how. That’s how it feels and it’s good. But it is, absolutely. I think that Twenty Twenty-Five, you didn’t have to be as vigilant because it wasn’t happening.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yep, it was a good break.
Beth Soderberg: I think everyone needed it. Honestly, I think everyone really needed it. I know I needed it. But it is, you know, getting back into the. The groove of things is. Is where we are now.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So. Yeah.
Beth Soderberg: For which I am thankful, but it’s still an adjustment.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Me too. Yeah. And now with 7.0 kind of out the door almost. Yeah.
Gutenberg 22.8
We are looking at Gutenberg 22.8 that has been released. Was released this week also kind of what comes into 7.1. It’s already starting and people are discussing things. So although there were quite a few PRs that were either all part of the new WordPress UI package that hasn’t been merged into Core yet, or it’s bug fixes for the connectors or the Real time collaboration for 7.0, so some of the PRs are actually backported to the release candidates and the beta to the release candidates.
But let’s talk about some of the things that will not be in 7.0, but definitely in 7.1 and what’s new in the Gutenberg plugin. So the first thing is the navigation support for the current menu item. So in theme JSON, meaning when you have a navigation and you’re on a current page that’s part of the navigation, how do you signal that you are at the current page right now in the navigation? And that has been missing for quite a while or people have just did some CSS workaround of that, but now you can actually style that in theme JSON. And so this is cool. What’s also cool is that there is an interface for the states like Hover Focus current. I’m not sure if that’s going to be in there, but it’s also part of making the navigation and the hover states and the pseudo support that comes into 7.0, but now it comes also to the interface. So that’s pretty cool.
Beth Soderberg: That’s my favorite part.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Which one?
Beth Soderberg: The navigation stuff again. The interface around the navigation has gotten a lot better in various iterations of Gutenberg, but there’s still some stuff that you’d think you would be able to do that you can’t. And that’s what some of this is filling in.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: There have been some great work. Some of it gets into 7.0 and some of it is still ongoing. So I really like the navigation that’s actually in 7.0, that you can create pages and publish them and have them in the navigation in one workflow kind of thing. You don’t have to get out of it. You may have to think about it. You just kind of create the page and then you fill it in with content later.
Beth Soderberg: Yeah. And I’ve seen that in other systems. I don’t remember what that is. One of those things where some of these changes, you’re like, you know, I saw that once somewhere. Was it Joomla? Was it Drupal? Was it whatever? I don’t know. But I liked it. And now it’s here. And that’s good.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely.
Beth Soderberg: And that’s how I feel about that because I do appreciate the tiny little decisions that are being considered here by the core team because it seems very small. But the amount of friction you’re reducing and the amount of time you’re saving for people is huge.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s huge. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s millions of millions of site owners that kind of have advantage. Yeah. Do you want to take the next
Beth Soderberg: thing, the tabs menu. So I think this is going to be fun too. So basically we’ve got a refactor of the tabs menu block. So it’s basically making this more efficient and making some templating changes to how the tabs block works. And if you look at the actual PR for it, there’s really good, very detailed descriptions of how. So it’s making it very clear of it’s no longer using the template block duplicated in PHP and instead it’s rendering with per tab context.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right.
Beth Soderberg: And that’s like all gobbledygook to some listeners. Maybe, but like really what it’s doing is making it more efficient and making it more extensible from a code perspective.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And also for theme developers.
Beth Soderberg: Yeah, right. And making it more possible again, opening that door a little wider for more people to be able to work within the code infrastructure. Because that has been the thing that’s been the biggest challenge in terms of developer adoption of Gutenberg.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And the refactor was also necessary to bring it in line with the approach for the accordion block so that certain methods and certain functions can be replicated in a similar way for the TAPS block. I was actually sad to hear that very early that it won’t make it into 7.0, but I think that was one of the reasons where they said, okay, let’s, let’s see if we can kind of align it a little bit more with the accordion block. And it’s no surprise that Sarah Norris, who has been a guest here at the Changelog quite a bit, she also created the accordion block and she has been now instrumental on the restructure of the tabs menu and inner blocks to get it in line and we have make it more streamlined for developers and theme builders.
Beth Soderberg: The one thing to add that is an exciting piece for especially theme developers is the addition of anchor support for the tabs. So that’ll help a lot in terms of things like navigation structures and feasibility. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And also to kind of interlink different pages. You can link to some of the tabs if it’s interesting enough. Yeah. So I know that WooCommerce is using that for their products template. So they have built their own one back then and now they get a little bit closer to core, which makes it more extensible and also appreciative they don’t have to maintain the code for it.
Beth Soderberg: Yep, absolutely.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Which is quite a bit. So right now I’m fishing around on my computer to find my notes again. So here we are. All right,
Beth Soderberg: the next one, the showing one’s own presence and collaborative editing sessions is I think existentially important and just is really going to help this UI experience from the baseline that’s being released in 7.0.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So yeah, I’m pretty sure that it will actually come to 7.0. That made it into the release. That’s good. So the next piece is the one that you can have the site logo and icon screen in the design panel. So in the site editor there’s another menu item now to update the site logo and the icon screen directly from the site editor. So you don’t have to go out into the settings page and upload everything that you need or into the site logo block or header. You can do it right there from, from the menu. So it’s really an interesting update to change the site logo and the site icon directly in the design site editor.
Beth Soderberg: It’s reducing friction. I think that there’s a workflow confusion. There’s the customizer that has become this vestigial organ that sometimes you need, sometimes you don’t need. Where’s this? Wait a minute, where do I add css? Is it over here? Is it over here? Is it over here? Could it be here? And I think that we’re pruning what we need to do through alternate interfaces through changes like this. And the more we can streamline, the better because the biggest confusion I’ve seen is actually with brand new or like more junior developers who do not know the quote old way. And so the idea that it’s even there, like they’ll get stuck because they can’t figure out where it could possibly be coming from. And then some old timer is like, oh, it’s over here in this menu that you can’t see anymore.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Or yeah. So the site icon at the site logo has been a hidden place and only until now it’s kind of coming into the forefront. Yes. So the next thing is another one for the collaboration. I just wanted to point out that by default the collaboration on shared hosting is only. It’s limited to two users and there is also a method for the hosts to either enable that or disable the real time collaboration. So it might not be as obvious when you go on your site and looking for it. You might not be able to get real time collaboration out of the box. You might need to connect with your host to let that enabled because it’s such an additional load on a server. That certain server configurations are not meant for it to be in yet. So if you’re on a virtual private host, I think I mentioned it before, it wouldn’t. It was a different scenario. But it’s probably easier to get the collaboration working than if you are on a shared hosting with 10,000 websites on a. On a server where the hosting company will probably restrict that.
Beth Soderberg: Yeah, I think that there’s going to be a lot of shifts in hosting, either requirements, configuration, pricing options, etc. as a result of all of these changes. And I don’t know what they’re going to be yet, but we do need to collectively remember that the AI features, the collaboration components, all of those things are resource intensive and are going to shift how hosting is being utilized and therefore the hosts are going to need to respond in order to account for the actual cost of that change. So I think that’s a big unknown right now and I think it’s, you know, there’s a few hosts where they’re locking in pricing for a few years, which is cool, but at the same time I’m like, I don’t know, in three years is this going to be enough to pay for that? What will it be in three years?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Beth Soderberg: So I think there’s a shift coming there and I am not gonna even pretend to know enough about all the details to know exactly how that’s going to play out, but I think that there’s enough shift in what types of resources we need from our hosting that there will be a shift. There has to be, because it’s just so much more resource intensive than what we’ve been doing in the past collectively.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And that is in line with what you said at the beginning, that the PHP requirements. Yeah, it always is also contributing to that because all the newer features. So there might be a. You can’t upload upgrade to 7.0 until you update your PHP. That’s totally sure.
Beth Soderberg: Yeah. And I’ve read that somewhere. Somewhere I did read that there’ll be security releases on 6.9 for sites that can’t go, you know. But then you end up with a situation where you’re gonna. How many sites are gonna be stuck on 6.9 forever?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: But that has been a problem. Yeah. Because the security team is actually backporting, although officially the release is only supported to 6.8 or something like that, but security team actually backported all the security updates that came with 6.3 or 6.4 to 4 point something. WordPress 4 point something is probably 15 years old. So it’s still getting security updates. So that definitely is a backwards compatibility promise that even the security team there. It takes a lot of time to backport that. And John Blackburn, one of the leads on the security team, has actually done a retrospective of the latest security updates because you saw that too. It was a. It’s kind of a galore of releases. 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 7.4 beta. Yeah, it kind of was in within three days, I think there were four releases.
Beth Soderberg: It was a lot. Yes. All at once.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I had a meetup here in Munich and we talked about it. I think the day the 6.4 came out that they were saying, well, is it all hacked or what happened here? Kind of how often do I have to update my WordPress site in a day? And he did a nice retrospective or explaining what happened and what was the reason for that. I’ll link it in the show notes if you’re interested. To listeners, it will probably be a little bit less prominent because of all the death notes that came out, but it’s on the blog on Core.
Beth Soderberg: I’m going to go back and listen to that because that hit during a particularly busy time, just for me personally in general. And so it was a little whiplashy to be like what is going on over there? And I think it will be good to be able to go back and just review so that I am aware moving forward of what exactly happened there.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And back to Gutenberg 22.8. I mentioned it before. There is a feature that implements the state UI for sudo selectors in the global styles. Maggie Cabrera mentioned that in the last episode. It’s now available in the Gutenberg plugin so you can test it out. It gives you a. In the global styles on the right hand side you can select the design for your pseudo selectors like hover and focus and all that. It’s really cool. Hover, focus, Focus, visible and active. Yeah, so you can change all those settings for buttons, for instance. And you don’t have to use theme JSON for it anymore. So this is pretty cool.
Beth Soderberg: Yes. And then this one, I think this is fascinating. There is a PR adding client side navigation block with interactive features. That just sounds really fun to experiment with. So what it’s doing is adding a variant to the Create Block interactive template that allows you to add client side navigation. So this is starting to support the again supporting the infrastructure that exists with actual tooling and UI to use it. So the way that it describes it, this variant provides a self contained working example that mirrors real world patterns, query parameter navigation for pagination, search results, filtered archives and works immediately after scaffolding with no posts or setup required. That’s really cool. That’s a really nerdy and very arcane and wonderful. So I’m excited about that.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And that variant is for the Create block scaffolding feature, if I understood this correctly. Yeah, it’s a create block latest. So if you create a custom block, you can have the variant for your client side navigation and scaffold that up. That’s really cool. Yeah. Well, our developer advocacy team, we are working on a so-called showcase for all the good things that you could do with a website or theme, including some of the interactivity API features. And we will probably release that someday in the next two months I would think. And it will be a music site with albums and musicians and artists and using the tabs and using the playlist and block and then also kind of have some interesting changes in the theme. So it’s for custom post types and all that. So it’s going to be really cool. I know that Juan Ma Garrido who put the client side navigation template into the gray block scaffolding, he’s also creating a plugin to have the music play even if you navigate away from that page that had the list of the music. So it’s kind of really interesting to see. So you could use it for video and music. So things stay on the forefront on your browser even if you look at other pages on the website. So that’s one of the features.
Beth Soderberg: The person, the, the part of me that likes to listen to podcasts from the website themselves really appreciates this.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So I, I definitely, once it’s out, I definitely gonna adopt it for the good changelog podcast.
Beth Soderberg: Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So I think always through, we are through with booked. Yeah.
Beth Soderberg: Lots of little, little things, but those are the big exciting things, I think.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And there were actually 38 PRs that were backported as bug fixes to 7.0. So it’s still an ongoing work that is coming out in two weeks and people are still fixing it.
All right, well, I wish you and your agency all the best for that release that all the things that come in don’t disrupt your work or the work of your clients.
Beth Soderberg: We have a list. We know where to look for the problem.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Excellent. Yeah. Well, I’m so happy that you were on the show with me. And as always, dear listeners, the show notes will be published on GutenbergTimes.com podcast this is episode 129 and if you have questions and suggestions or news you want us to include, send them to changelogutenbergtimes.com that’s changelogutenbergtimes.com so thank you for listening and I wish you all a great weekend. Well, or next week. And also toy, toy for the WordPress 7.0 release updates. We will hear each other again in four weeks once I get back from WordCamp Asia. And then we’ll tackle what’s coming in 7.1 and what has been in. Good work. Plugin 22.9 and 23.0.
Thank you so much. Beth Soderberg, it was wonderful to have you and your perspective and your opinions on the show.
Beth Soderberg: Thank you for having me. It was great to be here and to see you again and I wish you safe travels on all of your continuing travels.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Thank you. All right. Yeah, and you take care. And I’ll put in the show notes how people can connect with you.
Beth Soderberg: Sounds good.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Of course. All right, you take care. Bye Bye.
Beth Soderberg: Bye bye. Thanks, everybody.
