WordPress Roundup, January/February 2022

About a week or so prior to the release of WordPress 5.9, I had the privilege of participating in a recent Meetup led by the Boulder WordPress community, aptly titled “What’s coming in WordPress 5.9”. A few of the featured speakers were Abha Thakor, Brian Gardner, Birgit Pauli-Haack, and Courtney Robertson. The session focused on a couple of core themes, primarily what WordPress contribution looks like near release time, improvements to the WordPress Block Editing experience, the new FSE (Full Site Editing) paradigm, and additional design tools included in the 5.9 release.

The session was chock full of information and resources, and I came away from it feeling optimistic in terms of where WordPress was headed from an end-user standpoint (yay for my clients!) and daunted from a designer and developer’s standpoint. This is not the WordPress of 10 years ago, even if a lot of elements are still recognizably similar.

Here’s a video of the meetup:

The meetup included a fantastic Google doc full of links to equally fantastic resources. I’m pulling some out and including a few of my own below:

• The WordPress 5.9 Field Guide
• The WordPress Block Pattern Repo
• The WordPress Block Theme Knowledgebase Article
• The WordPress Navigation Block Knowledgebase Article
• What’s new in WordPress 5.9 – a Reading list on Full-Site Editing and Block Themes.
• Pattern Inspiration
• Blockmeister Pattern Builder
• The Block Pattern Builder
• Sharing Approaches for FSE Feature Adoption
• The State of Child Themes
• WordPress Mega Meetup 0011 – Block Patterns
• How to Create Low-Code Block Patterns

Aurooba Ahmed, who is quickly becoming another of my favorite people in the WordPress space, created a handy video tutorial on how to create/add multiple WordPress blocks to a single plugin easily with wordpress/scripts, using the WordPress create-block command.