WordCamp US is an annual large-scale event that gathers enthusiasts, developers, designers, and users from around the world, to talk, learn, and share WordPress experiences.
I’ve never been to Portland, but I’m looking forward to it!
WordPress
Insights on new releases, themes, plugins, blocks, and tips for building better with WordPress. Let’s build a better web.
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The road towards WordPress 6.5
WordPress 6.5, scheduled to land on March 26th, 2024, is actively underway. My friend Anne shared Roadmap to 6.5 on the Make WordPress blog, detailing the ambitious goals for the first major release of next year.
The marquee planned additions are the font library, colorways, patterns for classic themes, data views for templates and patterns, more robust revisions, the Interactivity API, custom fields, and block binding APIs. Lots to look forward to!
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Exploring color and typography presets
I recently worked with Ben Dwyer on an exploration to surface a WordPress block theme’s existing colors and typesets within the site editor. He made a video detailing the effort—give it a watch, it’s pretty cool.
What I like best is that any theme using variations inherit this capability right off. Folks can then choose any combination of color or typography among the variations.
What do you think?
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Behind the scenes of Twenty Twenty-Four
I had the pleasure of working with so many great folks to bring the Twenty Twenty-Four default WordPress theme to fruition.
In this post shared on automattic.design, I chatted with designer Beatriz Fialho and code wrangler Maggie Cabrera on how Twenty Twenty-Four was designed and engineered to be the most best out-of-the-box WordPress experience to date.
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Evolving the command palette
My friend and colleague Anne McCarthy recently published a guide on what’s landing in this next iteration of the command palette. This next iteration of the WordPress Command Palette is looking so nice. New commands, a polished interface, and more accessible — what more can you ask for?
And if you’re a plugin developer, lean into Riad Benguella’s WordPress Command Palette API post to add your own commands, and peruse the core commands, straight from the source. Some days it feels like WordPress 6.3 just landed, but 6.4 is shaping up quite nicely. Onward!
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WordPress 6.3
WordPress 6.3 is packed with new features and loads of enhancements to help you publish faster with WordPress. Here’s my take on the most interesting parts of this release.
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Why WordPress
I ran into this Twitter thread on “how WordPress is all wrong for your SMB site in 2023”. Well, here’s my counter. If you’re not using WordPress for your site in 2023, you’re probably doing it wrong. Here’s why WordPress is probably right for you.
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Colorways
Consistency. That’s the name of the game when it comes to designing a website. And having a way to design, and apply, like-styling to whole sets of blocks is a huge step towards publishing pages with consistency and speed.
So I explored an idea I’m calling Colorways — a “simple mode” for stylizing page content. You design a few “mini themes” essentially, where background, heading, text, and button colors are established. This would happen within the custom theme.json object (for now), providing a group of CSS variables for applying styles to these groups of blocks.
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WordPress as a design tool
Last week I challenged myself to take one pattern, from one theme, and morph it multiple times—only using the design controls block editor. It’s kind of like CSS Zen Garden, but without CSS—just out-of-the-box WordPress design tooling.
One theme. One pattern. Seven ways.
No additional blocks, nor custom CSS between scenes—just designing in the good ol’ WordPress block editor.
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Content-only block editing
As WordPress blocks—and therefore patterns—continue to expand in scope, the need for a simplified editing experience is more present than ever. Sure, the new tooling is nice — like fluid typography, new spacing controls, element hover color support, padding, layout, etc — but it’s also quite a lot to take in.
Cue the new template locking mechanism for making only content blocks (text and images) editable within a pattern, landing in the upcoming WordPress 6.1 release.
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Fluid typography and block themes
Last year I shared a piece on fluid typography, in particular on adopting a fluid type scale within WordPress block themes, using the CSS clamp() function. The method I experimented with is interesting in that it uses a type scale, then calculates the fluid type values for each font size within the theme’s theme.json file.
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Wei WordPress theme
Introducing Wei. Tell your story and share your thoughts with a minimal WordPress block theme, inspired by pure simplicity. Embracing clean type, beautifully bold color schemes, and color-matched featured images, Wei puts your words first — in a delightful and creative fashion.
Wei is a stripped down, minimalistic block theme with a single column layout. It gives a lot, and asks for little in return.
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WordPress theme style variations
Style variations are a new feature of block themes, recently landing in WordPress 6.0. They’re just one part of the new era of WordPress theming that we’re looking at, with the introduction of Full Site Editing. These style variations are alternate design pre-sets for a theme, enabling you to quickly apply a new look and feel to your site—all within a single theme. Too good to be true? Actually, no.
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A new era of WordPress themes
We all knew the landscape of WordPress themes was shifting with the introduction of Gutenberg. What we didn’t know, was by how much.
With the arrival of the anticipated Full Site Editing experience into WordPress 5.9, themes are starting to look very different.
This new class of block-based WordPress themes arguably introduces the biggest change to themes, since well… themes existed. These themes are built entirely with blocks. That is, the headers, footers, blogroll, and page templates — literally every aspect of the theme. If it’s on the page, it’s a block.
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Introducing Wabi, a new theme
Share your authentic self with Wabi, a WordPress block theme designed to help you tell your story best. Wabi foregrounds the simplistic design language of storytelling through clean lines, beautiful typography and a dynamic accent color system — making it a brilliant theme for writers and publishers.
