fidzu : WordPress

If you appreciate golf at all, the story of how Tiger Woods won the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach without knowing he was down to his last golf ball because of arcane rules is pretty interesting.

13 Oct 2025 6:36am GMT

In episode 122 of the GT Changelog podcast, host Birgit Pauli-Haack is joined by Beth Soderberg, CEO of bethink Studio, to discuss the latest updates in Gutenberg 21.8 and WordPress 6.9. The conversation kicks off with reminiscing about past WordCamp experiences and transitions into a deep dive on block themes, evolving design tools, and the challenges of adopting new workflows. Beth shares practical insights from her agency work, highlighting the benefits of section and block styles, synced patterns, and strategies for cleaning up legacy code as Gutenberg advances.

The episode covers new features like section styles, the highly anticipated accordion block, and improvements to template management, aimed at making theme and site building more flexible for users and developers. They also talk about experimental features such as PHP-only blocks, block bindings, and upcoming blocks like breadcrumbs and table of contents, which promise to streamline site navigation and content organization.

Birgit and Beth underscore the importance of continuous testing and learning, encouraging listeners-especially those hesitant to adopt block themes-to experiment, seek support, and embrace gradual change. The episode wraps with practical advice, recent security updates, and a look at promising innovations coming to the WordPress ecosystem.

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
  • 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

Calls for Testing WordPress 6.9

• Template management
• Ability to Hide Blocks
• Accordion Block

Community Contributions

• Block Galore by designers and developers using Automattic's Telex
• Moar Blocks

What's Released

• WordPress 6.8.3
• What's new in Gutenberg 21.8? (8 October)

New Blocks still in the works

• Time to Read (m)
• Accordion Block (m)
• Breadcrumbs Block (m)
• Terms Query block (m)
• Dialog Block
• Icon Block
• Stretchy Text
• Tabs Block
• Table of Contents block

= already merged into trunk, as experiments.

Stay in Touch

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hello and welcome to our 122nd episode of the Gutenberg Changelog. In today's episode, we will talk about Gutenberg 21.8 and WordPress 6.9, what we already know about it. And I'm your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at Gutenberg Times, co contributor on the Word Open Source project, and I work as a developer advocate for Automattic. I'm thrilled that I finally have Beth Soderberg join me on the show. Beth is the CEO of Bethink Studio, a special web design and development agency in Alexandria, Virginia, in the U.S. Beth, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Beth Soderberg: Thank you. Welcome. Welcome to my morning. I'm doing great. Good to see you.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So I tried to recollect how we actually met or we met over the last few years, and I think it was the first time we met at the WordCamp New York in 2019.

Beth Soderberg: I think that's right. Ish. I definitely have eaten tacos late at night at WordCamp New York. Okay, so that tracks.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: And I definitely met you sometime before the pandemic, so I'm not sure exactly, but that sounds about right. And then I know we had lunch at WordCamp us when it was in San Diego.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, okay. Nice. Oh, right. We had this.

Beth Soderberg: There was.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: There was a group of women kind of coming together.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, yeah, I saw a table of women. And if I see a table of women at a conference like that, I'm going to sit down at it. And you did exactly the same thing.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Nice. So.

Beth Soderberg: But that's the first time I saw you after the pandemic, for sure.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. And in between, I think we did together the WP Blog Talk virtual conference that was organized by Automattic, but there were a lot of community members in there talking about the Gutenberg and the stage of it and all that.

Beth Soderberg: That was when I realized that I don't like presenting at virtual conferences in front of audiences that you can't see.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it's interesting.

Beth Soderberg: I'm good with Zoom, because you can get some feedback. But the speaking into the void was. I don't know. It could have also been that I wasn't speaking to anyone in real life at the time, so it felt extra weird.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, no. I get it. The pre-recording and then just be there for the live part of it. But we had a great live discussion there.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, I. It was fun. And we actually did the presentation live. I think that could be why later things were recorded, because it was a really weird experience. It was very strange because you knew you were live. You had no idea if even your audio was working, but you just kind of had to keep talking. And, yeah, it's the least feedback I've ever had from anything I've ever spoken at. And I think that not even being sure that the technology was working part. Like, even that level of feedback wasn't there. It was fun. And hopefully next time I do something like that, it will be recorded in advance.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. But it was a. It was a good place talk because it was kind of together with Ellen Bauer, and you had 15 minutes, Ellen had 15 minutes. And I think Bill Erickson was there as well.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: There were three of us.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And every one of you kind of took a different take on the block themes. Yeah. And that was really interesting to kind of. Well, we started out in 2020 with that. Yeah. Now it's five years later, and we finally connected again at WordCamp. Us, because I made it there again.

Beth Soderberg: I know. I was excited to see you. And I think. Yeah, I mean, doing that talk was interesting. I think there's still some divergence around how people are building and how people are utilizing the tools. That set of like 15-minute talks was a really good microcosm of that because each one of us had been actively building with all of the new tools and had a slightly bigger, different approach. I still think there's some divergence there, but we're starting to see some patterns of, like, actual best practices with the new tools, which I think is really exciting. And also it's fun to sort of invent on the fly. Like, okay, how should this work as the people who really are using it with clients right away, what is the standard we want to set? What does and doesn't work? And I think that was still in a time period where we were learning so much about what you could do, what the restrictions were. I know in a lot of what we're going through today, there's like little tiny changes that end up being so impactful. Right. Like, my favorite thing I hated from that time period was it could have been a little earlier, I don't remember. But originally you couldn't set text colors on lists.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Beth Soderberg: Stuff like that. Where it's so small, but when it's missing, it's a big problem.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So, yeah, I think that a lot of work has been put into having consistent design tools for each block that you can control through the theme JSON file and then make it really a unique experience or unique design for your clients. Yeah, that's definitely something there where you don't, oh, I can't do the fonts. Yeah, well, I guess I need to do a variation of it. So there was a lot of coding done to kind of get around those restrictions. How do you feel about kind of ripping out all this additional around coding now that certain things are in core and that are available? Does that kind of trip you up a bit?

Beth Soderberg: I feel great about it and there's not that much I need to rip out. Some of that is because of how I've built things over time. Some of that is because things like the tab block, which I am so excited about, I know it's not ready and all that, but I have a few sites where I have random solutions for that, but I've got them compartmentalized. So pulling them out and putting in something new that makes more sense is going to be easy.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: Because I know, you know, like, especially something like the tabs, they don't appear that often. And the other thing with stuff like that, you can just search the database for the machine name of block to find where you're using it. I do that a lot and sometimes I don't know. I ripped Jetpack out of a site recently because it was only being used for slideshows in like six blog posts. There was no need for it. And it might have been more than six, but still this is a major publishing website that has thousands of posts. They didn't need Jetpack sitting there doing this like a very minor task. And so that's one of my tactics for sure. When I'm going to rip something out. People forget that you can search easily. Not even in the database. You can use the WordPress search. Search.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. For the posts. Yes. Yeah, that's what I do. Yeah. Kind of. You can kind of put the blog name in there and then see which post uses what block, especially the third party blocks. When you find out, okay, I have now three query blocks and core blocks and why am I doing this to me?

Beth Soderberg: Right.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: And I've always been pretty conservative about what I'll add.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: So I think that's part of why it's not super daunting to me. Because if I can make it work with the tools that exist, I will.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: I'm not going to over engineer it just because I could. And that makes it easier to clean up long term.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So I think the last big feature that was introduced to theme development was the section styles. Style variation in one and then the section styles, the smaller things and block styles, now that you can edit them in the global styles. How much do you use about that? Is that something that comes up quite a bit in your work?

Beth Soderberg: I use them a lot. Especially when you're dealing with semantics, I want to give people the ability to have something look the way they want it to look, but also be semantically correct. So especially with things like headings. Right. Having tooling that's easy for an end user to understand to say this should be an H2, but I would like it to look like an H4 without making it an H4 is a game changer. It improves SEO, it improves accessibility, it keeps everything cleaner. And so that kind of tooling, I think when used strategically can really help. When used randomly, you're just going to confuse people. But you know.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, aren't we in the business of confusing people?

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, sometimes. Right.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right. Yeah, no, it's interesting too. So are you using also side styles variations or just the section styles or block styles?

Beth Soderberg: Heavily using block styles. Okay, not so much the whole site variations yet. Yeah, there hasn't. It's again, it's like you want to use the right tool for the right use case and yeah, normally you don't.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Want to change how the site looks.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah. There's only. You kind of need like a site within a site to make that required. And the only thing like that I've been building lately is a voter guide that's like within a site but the voter guide has all the same styling as the rest of the site. Because it's supposed to match.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I've always felt that the style variations are more for theme product developers that want to give more options to modify the theme. For agencies, I didn't see that there are a whole lot of use cases for. For them. I might be wrong, but. Yeah, but you're kind of confirming a little bit my bias here.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, I. I don't know. I look at anything that's coming in that's new. I look at it in terms of strategic utility and there's a bunch of stuff that is super cool but it's just not necessary for my clients. Right. Like it's not the use case for that but for somebody else that could really help. And I've had a few where you end up building this random micro site within the site because some weird reason why they need it. And like that's really what you would use that for. It doesn't happen all that often.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So yeah. Do you apply section styles to your patterns? Yeah, so that. And you give them design choices and they don't have to spend time with kind of reorganize their design just because they want to have a pair of a pink background or a yellow background or something like that.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah. I also, I restrict color palettes, of course, because we don't want anything looking like, you know, we're in the. We're in some sort of sci fi. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Geocities. I'm dating myself now.

Beth Soderberg: It's okay. I told the checker at the grocery store the other day about how I worked at Blockbuster in high school and how that dated me, but it was a good job because you could I had to walk around to put the movies back. So I also use a lot of synced and partially synced blocks to achieve design consistency. So paired together. Because that I have found is really good for editorial teams where you can give them a style guide. And usually I make a page on the inside of the site that's just privately published so that they can see like, okay, we have these patterns to work from. And, you know, this is the human part. You have a discussion about how, yes, you can do all these things, but you should use these things that we've all agreed upon that follow the style guide.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Well, it also makes for production much, much faster when you don't have to make those design decisions. They're already there and then.

Beth Soderberg: Exactly. And you don't have to train people. I mean, the number one thing I see real clients, real site administrators doing weirdly with formatting is inconsistent vertical spacing.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: The tooling is there to make it consistent, but people don't. Even if you train them, they're like, wait a minute, do I pick it at the fourth hash? Or like, which setting is it again? And does that look. And like as much as I can look at spacing on anything and know if it's wrong, many people cannot.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, no, no. Yeah. That's a skill.

Beth Soderberg: It's a skill.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: And many people really. And I found that like syncing those patterns that way and getting. Locking down some of that basic stuff that like, you don't want your end user to be thinking about how much space they need below something.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: Like that's not what they should be ever actively thinking about. So that's how I have approached that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. So far. Yeah. Makes sense. Have you taken a survey of how often your clients actually use the spacer block? Because I found that WordPress.com that's one of the top five blocks used, I.

Beth Soderberg: Have not, but now I'm curious and I. Some of them, I mean you definitely have some, some where it's used more than it should be. But I think that we've avoided some of that and some of it is what we've been able to do recently. Right. A few years ago you had to use it if you were going to get any consistency at all across things. But I think sometimes the patterns and the pattern syncing, that type of thing has dramatically reduced the need to use the spacer block, which is great because the speaker, the spacer block is so annoying on mobile.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that's one thing. It's also, you cannot rip it out when, when you redesign the site or something like that, it's going to be the. In your content.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, yeah. So I mean, I haven't seen similar dislike as it sounds of the spacer block, but when you shrink a screen down suddenly you get wildly different vertical spacing on mobile. And for the average person there is not a straightforward way to make it not do that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: You have to know how to write a workaround for yourself to make it work and that's not great.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So. Yeah, well, yeah, it's good to know. So before we head into our usual sections, is there anything else that you would like to tell people who have not yet done the jump into block themes, why they should do it?

Beth Soderberg: I think, I think that it is, it's a scary jump, and I have always been an early adopter of the new tooling, and so I look at something like that and it freaks me out a little bit. And then I'm like, well, why not? And I just push myself through and I know that I have the liberty of doing that because I've been working independently for almost 10 years. So I am in a lot of ways in control of what is and is not allowed in my environment. I've talked to a few folks who have. They understand how it's working and they, they personally buy in, but their employer does not.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: And so for those folks, I think building up your skill set with your personal site or a personal project so that you can advocate for different things internally. It's very hard to advocate for something that you haven't done and that you don't have hands-on experience with. But you know, the ability to spin up a little like MVP demo of, hey, this is how this would solve a problem that we have systemically is really how you sort of gain permission in those sorts of environments. There's some really good resources out there on learning how to do this. I think that they are much harder to find than they used to be. When I was first learning how to code, it was much easier to find like beginner entry level stuff, to like level yourself up. And now I think fewer people are creating it and I think it's harder to find just because of how it's labeled. Everything starts to look the same because it's all named the same. But I think giving yourself the challenge to - even if you don't understand everything, listening to a podcast like this, listening to a talk that you're finding online, having it playing in the background like it does, seep in to how you think about it. And what will happen is that later you'll encounter the same subject again and you'll be like, oh, wait, that's what they were talking about. And that's how you start to connect the dots when you're learning anything new. And I think the idea that you're going to get somebody who has been building themes the classic way, building themes that are heavily reliant on advanced custom fields, something like that, to just magically one day pick up a whole new set of tools with a whole different way of thinking and be completely comfortable from the get is like ludicrous. That's not going to happen.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah.

Beth Soderberg: But, you know, giving yourself the ability to slowly absorb it, because it is a different way of thinking, it's a completely different way of thinking about how to structure the theme. And for me, that has been the hardest part to learn. Once I figured it out, it was great. But of course, it's always the hardest thing to figure out a new way of thinking. When you say it like that, it's so obvious. But I think people really get down on themselves about it. And I think really just paying attention, reaching out to folks, you know, when you have questions, not being shy about it. What I've figured out over the course of the last, I guess we're almost at eight years of Gutenberg. Yeah, Gutenberg is a month older than my eldest child. So it's very easy for me to keep track of how old it is. But we are in a time period where what I have noticed as an early adopter, when I talk to the other early adopters, everybody is making it up. Everybody is inventing their process, everybody is inventing the " right way." We're starting to congeal on some common things. But it has been a time of innovation. And so being a little bit afraid to stick your toe in. That is so reasonable. And at the same time, when you think about it that way, it becomes less scary to fail in air quotes. Right. Because ultimately, how many light bulbs did Edison make before one worked? Like, it's just, you know, you have to experiment in order to figure out how something works. And I think it is challenging to be mid-career and have to go back to that beginning.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah.

Beth Soderberg: You know, Yeah, I feel a certain.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Confidence that all of a sudden is going away.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, yeah. So. So I. I just think people need to be a little less hard on themselves, push themselves a little, be okay with failing and talk to people, talk to people. Just keep going, Just keep swimming, as the fish say in Finding Nemo.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. All right, so you've listened here to a very experienced theme developer and yeah, it's never going to be easy. You need to start now. What is it, the Chinese proverb to the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. So it's kind of exactly for that. Yeah.

Announcements

So, okay, so we have a few announcements. Now we're going a little bit into the Gutenberg change log message here. We have a few announcements and they're all calls for testing because we get new stuff and. And the testing team is really on top of things. Last week a call for testing was made for the new template management features that are coming to Core, which. have you checked it out, Beth, on what's going to come with that? We talked about it here two weeks ago with Anne Katzeff and it's the tool where you can now have multiple templates with the same slug and of the theme hierarchy and then activate and deactivate the ones that you want to use or not use. So it kind of puts a new layer in there and gets the user a little bit more in control on how the template management actually works and figure that out in there. Because template management is something WordPress users have never done before because it was always a developer designer kind of scope and there was no user interface for it. And now it's here and the confusion is there, but it's also something that can be learned and can be helped with.

Beth Soderberg: I think it's also going to be great for launching changes to live sites where. And you know how to launch code for Gutenberg is a whole other conversation. But the best practice is to keep your live site database as your database of record. Right. And some of what I see with the new template management changes are enabling you to more easily respect that without having weird, momentary blips of your content looking bizarre while you're changing something over on a live site. So I think it's going to be, again, another adjustment in how we think about how we work. But ultimately we'll offer more granular tooling that will allow for the elimination of some of these use cases that haven't always ended up being really strange, where you're like, yeah, should we put up a maintenance message while we're doing this? Because everything is going to look bizarre for the next 20 minutes. That kind of stuff. I think it's going to be good.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It's really good. Yeah. Yeah. And the first version is going to be not perfect and probably have some bugs, but that's why the call for testing is there. So I leave the link in the show notes for you so you can start testing and share your experience with it and also share what still confuses you or what didn't work or where you thought it would work, but it didn't. It's definitely something - conversation needs to happen. And if you are not sure what to do, come into the W in the WordPress Slack into the Outreach channel and there are a lot of people there that will help you figure that out. So if you don't know if it's a bug or you don't, you're not doing it right. I know that's often kind of that with new things. Did I get this right or is it not working? Most people, and I'm one of them, I default to okay, I'm not doing this right. What's happening? And there are two more console testing.

One is on the ability to hide blocks, which is kind of the first iteration of a blocks visibility kind of plugin idea that you can hide and show blocks conditionally. Right now it's only on and off or hide and show. So you could have a block in the editor, but you hide it on the front end. But because you're still working on it or you don't want to, you want to put it in there so your editor knows about it, but it's not going to be pushed to the show version until a certain date or until a certain sale happens or something like that. The instructions for the call for testing are really good and they also show you with little videos how it's supposed to work to kind of offset my am I doing this right or not? Idea. And the other one that I wanted to point out in this podcast is the accordion block calls for testing. That seems to be really settled. Came in 20.5, I think, and had some iterations, especially for those of you who started styling it. You need to double check your references because the name changes in between for the panel and for the items and all that. So call for testing for accordion block and what you can do with it. Have you experimented with the accordion block?

Beth Soderberg: Mm, I'm really excited about it. This is one of the ones that I've been dreaming of for years. It's one of the ones where I had an external plugin where like, the only reason I was using the external plugin was because I needed accordions. The detail block is sort of an approximation, but it's not the same semantically speaking. So I'm excited about this one. This one and Tabs are my two that have been a thorn in my side for years.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I'm also. Well, we can talk about the other blocks that are supposedly come or at least been worked on for Core, even if they don't make it into 6.9 at a later date.

Community Contributions

There's this new AI feature out there, it's called Telex, which is automatic block building AI. And there are a few designers and developers that have actually done some great experimentations with that. One is Tammy Lister. She has started a challenge, kind of the blocktober, meaning every day in October she will build a new block with Telex. And I'll of course share the site in the show notes. She started out with a kind of reaching back into history of computers and started out with an esky Tetris game. And that's when my afternoon, uploaded my afternoon was shot because I got addicted to Tetris again. Yeah. Did you do any experimentations with that?

Beth Soderberg: Nope. That one, I mean, I know about it, I know about Tammy's blocktober. I'm paying attention, but I don't have time to just play with it right now.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, I. I feel the same way. It's kind of letting other people do that. I. I look at what other people do. Yeah. And there's Marco Ivanovich. He's a designer at Automattic. He has some animated icon blocks. They were kind of sparkling and all that. And then he also created a post-it note block where you can put post-its on your site with an image and with a background gradient background. So pretty cool to look at.

And then there was Jeff Paul from Ten Up. He actually also created a game of Pong Hung block that's kind of the tennis kind of back and forth where you need to up. It was just handy as an easy, medium and hard. Yeah, that was another afternoon. I tried to figure it out. Yeah. Juan Margarito, he created a mermaid diagram which is actually a markdown diagram. And then you put the. The diagram code in markdown and then it kind of creates a. A diagram with errors back and forth. Yeah, it's kind of a flow diagram if you want to. So that was really interesting to see. Yeah. Anyway, so I just. Yeah, check it out. If you want to play around with it. It's telex.automattic.com automatic with double T. The second T. Yeah.

What's Released - WordPress 6.8.3

Okay. So now we come to the heart of the show, which is what's released. And before we head into Gutenberg 20.8, I wanted to let everybody know WordPress 6. 8.3 is out. It's a security issue. No, it's a security release fixing two security issues. And if you haven't updated yet, please do we wait. Go and update. The two issues were mentioned in the release post. One was data exposure issues and the other one issue and the other one was a cross scripting vulnerability for the nav menus which has been fixed and you are in a secure environment again. But don't forget to update. Yeah. Any thoughts?

Beth Soderberg: Always update. I'm. I'm of the. I'm of the camp. I always update on the security releases right away and then major releases. I always wait and see what happens.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: How long do you wait? How long do you wait?

Beth Soderberg: I usually wait until a point release has come out.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay.

Beth Soderberg: That's usually the trigger but sometimes it's really stable and we're like, well there. I guess there's no point release and it's been three weeks.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So.

Beth Soderberg: I do the same thing with updating like my iPhone. Yeah, I don't. I'm. As much as I am interested in technology, I am also somebody who just recently started using mobile deposit for checks. I'm skeptical.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, I think that makes that an early above to decide where to early adopt and where to be cautious.

Beth Soderberg: That's true. Yeah. My risk tolerance is very high for certain things and very low for other things.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And if it changes my work environment that I need to retrain my muscle memory. I'm opposed to any change, but I recently had to change my Mac updated and they fixed a bug. That's the problem with bug fixes. Yeah. If you, if you have for years known about a workaround and the muscle memory is in. You hate that bug fix that fixes that once and for all. So kind of. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: Anyway, that's a whole other conversation. Moving on.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Thank you.

Gutenberg 21.8

So Gutenberg 21.8 is the second last before 6.9 beta. There's one more coming, that's a 21.9, of course, and that's coming on October 17th. So we are recording this on October 8th and next week we have the last Gutenberg release before 6.9 beta comes. Which means bug fixes, yes. New features, no. From that point on forward to get into Core. Gutenberg 21.8 had 118 PRs by 47 contributors and five people were first time contributors. Congratulations, you got your merge done. That's fantastic. Because I can see that the first one is always a little tricky getting it past the reviewers.

Enhancements

For Gutenberg, we start with the enhancements to the block content. Comments. Block comments is a feature that creates a commenting method for each block in your editor so you and others can add comments to your blocks and have an editorial kind of process going. It's a a lot of PRs made it into that. But the first one that I wanted to point out is a discussion field with trackbacks and comment status aggregated for the post page Quick Edit. So you know, in the Quick edit, are there commenting places? Quick Edit is not the quick edit in the WP admin. It's a quick edit in the design. But that's actually not the commenting. The block commenting thing.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, this is hard to contextualize even looking at the PR, right? Yeah, the PR. I think ultimately it's unifying. It's again, it's one of those things that's unifying design across components to make things more consistent no matter where you find them.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So when you have the new design view, what was missing that you were able to manage trackbacks and comments. So it's not the feature that I just said. It's just getting on par with the previous WP admin kind of thing. Especially for pages. The posts haven't been included yet in these new designs, but for pages, definitely. And if there's a post experiment in Gutenberg where you can have the post view also in the new design view, as the site editor. And that's where this actually comes to pass. So that is kind of labeled wrong in that changelog, but that's okay. We can handle that. Do you want to do the next one?

Beth Soderberg: Sure. So displaying a message when there is no related block, which is the most logical thing you could do with commentary that has no source attached to it anymore.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Anymore.

Beth Soderberg: Anymore, anymore. Right. So again, it's giving context to something so that your actual conversations make sense. And basically what it's doing is just adding a little message that says, hey, your original block was deleted so that somebody reading through it understands and also gives you the ability to…part of why I like this one is because you're going to end up with people who in collaborating with each other are going to remove things. And you want to have a record of the conversation for editorial purposes, but understanding what has happened is a key part of creating that record.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So yeah, definitely you want to have a record of the decision making process for certain things. Yeah. The other one that I wanted to point out is that it now shows the dates of the comments in a more human readable part, like 30 minutes ago or two hours ago or three days ago. So you get a little bit more relation to the timestamps of that. I think there was an option to do this, but I'm not quite sure that you can switch it on and off. But if not. No, it's not. It's the first. It's the first iteration and there are no options.

Beth Soderberg: I think that's coming later.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, but it's. It's known that there will be something like that needed.

Beth Soderberg: Yep. And then the highlighting of the related block. Again, a lot of these changes are improving context indicators and so, you know, this just gives you a clearer sense of what you're connecting to and which thing you're actually talking about with the comments.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So I'm just going to look through. If we missed something new, we can now go right into the block library section and there's a ton of PRs that actually work on the accordion blocks. That's also in the bug fix sections. But I think the most prominent stuff is more like the term description block with the context support. So that if it's in a template or in an archive template that the term description block is more. You can use it in patterns like you can do post title and query title for that. Yeah, the term description block is something that's a little bit of a… I have seen people that are quite adamant that they need the block editor in the category description section for editing the description because I wanted to make it more there. Design it a little bit or make it a little bit more versatile. That's quite interesting because you also can now create a page with all the features that you want on that for a particular category and then just have a query loop on that category displayed on it. So you get around that need to have the term description be a block editor or something like that.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah. I had never thought about that before because theoretically you always could do the latter. Right?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: But you had to have a certain level of technical skill and knowledge to do that. The idea of adding block support to that description opens up possibilities for folks who are not as technical to make modifications in that presentation of the. The term pages. I don't know. I could go either way there.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: I could also create massive. I can see this going very wrong.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I think that's why nobody touched it for now.

Beth Soderberg: That's a new concept to me. But I don't know. My gut says no.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So. And then we get a new block. It's the time to read block. And now it has been in the Guternberg plugin for ages. Similar to the table of content block. But they were to get it into core. There were always kind of missing things or quirkinesses that weren't dealt with. And the time to read had massive accessibility objections because it only had one time that it takes to read a block. Not everybody has that reading skill or is on that level like a lot of people are. English as a second language. They don't. They don't read so fast or dyslexia is pretty. Yeah. It's out there. And they don't read that fast. And so it kind of makes them feel bad about not reading in that 15 minutes kind of thing. What they're doing now is kind of offering a range option. It says it takes one to five minutes or something like that. And which I feel is kind of even for someone who is fast reading but tired is a good indicator. Yeah. That's how long it's going to actually take. And then they added also a word count to it.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, I like that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. When there are word count plugins out there. Word count blocks, plugins out there say that 15 times fast. But I think having a core block that actually offers it option is really cool.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I'm sorry I didn't bold that, but I wanted to talk about it.

Beth Soderberg: No, I agree. I think it's. It's a kinder way to deal with the problem because you're giving people enough information to very quickly self assess without shaming them.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So the next one is part of the Data Views section actually. It's the data forms package. And there's now support for certain form elements validation in the data forms package. So if you use that as a plugin or your settings pages. You now get help from the packages that drive that. I think that's a. Yeah, it's an enhancement for extensibility, for sure.

Beth Soderberg: In the block editor section, block multi selection, disabling transforms and inspector controls.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. That's an interesting one. So when you select multiple blocks, you still get the. Sometimes the options that you can transform them. And for paragraphs, a series of paragraphs. I like it. Because then you have. You can transform them to list views. But if you have a mixture of selected blocks, you don't need transforms or inspectors back the controls. You just probably want to move it or move the selection. Yeah. So I think it's a good way to not confuse people.

Beth Soderberg: Right. And that's a good example of a tiny change from an end user perspective that probably won't be noticed, but will reduce friction for people. All right. In global styling, adding a reset button to our background controls panel. Hooray.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hooray. You don't have to unselect stuff. Yeah. Just click on things and you make it all go away. It's pretty cool. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: And then making the additional CSS UI less prominent, which is great because the less random CSS everywhere, the better.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes. And. Well, it's. I totally agree with that. And that's also the. The justification why they want to put it some. So they're going to hide it. Again, it was hidden on the left hand side of the global styles or styles panel. You always could edit it on the right hand side when the styles panel where sooner or later we probably need to decide if we want to use the left hand side or the right hand side for the styles features. But it now is going to be in the ellipse menu in the header of the styles section. So it says add additional CSS as a menu item on top. So. So you are not going to be. Well, it was there and then it wasn't there. So where is it kind of thing situation. It ended up in the ellipse menu on top of the screen.

Beth Soderberg: Block bindings. I love block bindings.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. There's an experimental feature there.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: To support block attributes from the server side. I haven't completely read through it. I'm not quite sure I understand that. So I would need to go back to the developers and say what's the use case and why you're doing it kind of thing.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think. Did you get something?

Beth Soderberg: I would have to clarify, but my understanding of it is the big thing with block bindings is like which things are supported and which things aren't supported and how that is communicated is improved from doing this.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Doing it service sort of the nugget.

Beth Soderberg: Of truth there. But I think anything like that. I know it's experimental but making block bindings easier and more accessible for people to use anything that helps. That is a good thing.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I think there are two areas where they come from. One is to make block bindings available for more than 14 blocks which has been the case until now. That's one thing. But also to increase extensibility and use have not only blocks use the block bindings but also whole features use the block bindings for external things like the remote block plugin by WordPress VIP USO. Yeah. They also use block bindings to identify the data that comes in and put it into the block editor. But I think it's hard to bring the server side and the client side together with the same information. And this one will have the server side be the moment of truth. No, the source of truth for block bindings. Yeah, it's definitely a late edition. I'm not sure it's going to make it to 6.9. I'm skeptical though. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah. Right. Right. Mode Try adding content roles to navigation blocks is the name of the PR which I think is delightfully named and I. Even the way that this is written is pretty great. I wanted to see how far we can go with just adding content roles to nav link in some menu blocks given the improvements to content only logic we've had. And then it references another pr. The next sentence is I think it's working better now. Whoever this contributor is, I love your writing. Tell the machines.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, that's.

Beth Soderberg: Fun times. But I think it'll.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Isabelle Bryson. Yeah, she's been on the podcast before and she's actually worked also on the grid layouts and yeah, she works for Automattic on the team. And the other I think the tri part is okay. We experiment with things. So that's when it says try and then there's also add is kind of definitely need to fix this or add this feature or fix means fix this bug. Yeah. So they have these prefixes on their PRs and the try thing is. Yeah, let's try it out and see what happens. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah. But this one, it looks cool. People should check it out. Components. The text area component. Adding a default resize vertical rule just to make things more make sense visually so that you can move stuff around the way you need to.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And you can control the vertical size of things. That's always a good thing. And then the other component PR is actually adding storybook examples for the fields package. So there's more documentation there for the plugin developers who want to use it. Also of course, for the core developers who are going to use the Fields.

Beth Soderberg: Package for their work patterns, we have a change to the block inspector adding a content tab for section blocks that displays content only descendant blocks. So similar to the existing styles tab, but for content.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And it's up until now it lists the blocks that can be edited in a section pattern or in a content only block. But that's all part of the write mode, and we will see how which part of it actually will come into 6.9. But I think it's very helpful for content creators who use a pattern to just see the pieces that you can edit and not be confused with any styling of that, even if it's only the section styles. And from the PR before and after, you can see that the little drop water drop that's in the block toolbar actually gives you a way to browse through the styles for this particular section. So it's not taking anything away, it's just kind of making it clear where the things the information is going to be for you. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: I think for anyone who might be confused about what we're talking about, look at the pr. The screenshots will help you.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. It's a little bit. Sometimes it's a little bit hard on the podcast to make things come to life on a. In a visual component.

Beth Soderberg: The screenshots make it make sense if you're confused by what we just said.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And the PR we're talking about is 71714. The next one is an easy one, but it's definitely something to talk about for Black Friday and all the WooCommerce stuff. There is now a WordPress gift icon available for content creators and developers. So you can use that. It comes from a WooCommerce team, but they contributed to Core so anybody can use it.

New API

The next thing I want to point out was the block API has now the block visibility, control support and the ui. That's the part where the underlying architecture for the hide and show of blocks I think it is. And that also is the foundation for when you. Later on we will have the conditional Hide and seek. No hide and show. Yeah. When you want to say okay, I want it for logged in users or not. I want it for people who come from Twitter or not. These kinds of conditionals, they're not yet in there. For that you still need the block visibility plugin by Nick Diego. So I think we have one more. No. Yeah, there's an accordion block also in write mode. We hide the add button in write mode so you can add an additional accordion block in write mode. But I'm not quite sure that's particularly helpful for a content creator. But time will tell.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, that could go either way.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it's a 5050 kind of thing. You do it right for 50 people and the others are going to hate you for that.

Bug Fix

And then one bug fix I wanted to point out there is a bug in the pattern override. Some users might have found it is that editing was allowed on non-enabled override blocks which kind of defeated the purpose, but it's now fixed. So there's another experiment. I don't know how that comes about, but the PR definitely has some interesting conversations.

Experiments

There is allow registering PHP only blocks. What do you say for that?

Beth Soderberg: I say I think this is gonna be, this is gonna be so much bigger than it sounds.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes.

Beth Soderberg: Because basically what you're doing is you're enabling developers to create blocks using only PHP. So you're opening up the can of worms about who knows PHP and who knows JavaScript and are we gatekeeping by moving everything to JavaScript and blah blah.

But then you're also changing the structure in a way that might make things less portable between projects. So I don't know.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, it's definitely an experiment.

Beth Soderberg: That's true. I think, you know, and I. One of the things I have noticed, there is a developer on my team that I have been mentoring for years and really started learning WordPress specifically post Gutenberg. And what's fascinating about watching her is that she struggles with some of the traditional ways of doing things, but can do them the new way. Right. So for somebody like that this might be terrible, you know, and I. It just becomes a context thing about what you know and how you've been progressing with different skills along the way if you've completely forgotten PHP or you know, various things. So I, I don't know, I think this, this one is going to be a much bigger deal than I think.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I think so too. And there will be restrictions to that and I think the documentation will show that because it actually uses something the server side render component that actually was not considered best practice to use until now and the registration of PHP only blocks will actually use the server render component. So I think there is also something a little bit of a movement in the core contributing ranks about that. And it definitely needs some more. Yeah. Experimenting with it and exploration and. But it's in there. One listened and maybe there's something that can be pushed to the finish line outside the experiments. All the developers out there who were waiting for something like this go have at it.

Beth Soderberg: Oh. Interesting to see what people do.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, me too. And I added a. The label needs developer documentation and a project manager on the team also removed it because it's experimental. So the developers that created it have some leeway in backwards compatibility. And it's experimental. It means it's not documented. You cannot build on it. You need to be part of the experiment spirit about it to use it and not rely on it. That it's going to be working like that for the foreseeable future. So yeah. It's also that caveat on it. Just wanted to point it out.

Beth Soderberg: I just saw that that's important because you're going to have somebody who goes off and builds a whole new thing on it and then in two weeks it'll break.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Which. Yeah. Any plugin developer that built plugins for Gutenberg has been doing kind of living through that for multiple years now. Yeah. So. But that's 21.8 release with quite a few new features and the final release will be today on October 10th.

What's in Active Development or Discussed

And now we are coming to the section where we talk a little bit about what's in development and discuss. And there are new blocks in the works and we know this because Matthias has. Matthias Ventura has published that discussion about new blocks that were previously thought about plug into territory. And now quite a few theme developers think that they are held back with their designs if there are not more additional blocks in core because then now they can style it in their themes and make it available on templates and all that. So Justin Tadlock also did an opinion piece on the Gutenberg Times for it about four weeks ago. I can link it again in the show notes. But we are getting new blocks and the ones that have been merged they're not entirely out of experiments yet. Time to read. And we talked about it because it just was merged. We also talked about the accordion block that was merged a while ago and still in experiments. But there are two. Oh, we also talked about the terms query block that has been merged but we haven't talked about the breadcrumbs block. And I'm really excited about that because it felt such a need in the template area that people are getting so confused where am I? And I have a better map and I have breadcrumbs and all that. Yeah, it's such a useful tool and I'm looking forward to get that tested. And yeah, watch out on the test team. They're putting some more calls for testing together to get this all in the hands of people who want to help with making it better.

Beth Soderberg: I'm excited about the breadcrumbs block too. That's another one where I've had to do sort of weird things to make things work over time and it's going to be nice to not have to do the weird things.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I was using Justin Tadock's breadcrumbs block that he developed and he had some thoughts in this VR on how broad or restricted this new. This first version is going to be. And I think we all going to like it because depending on the context you can get additional. The breadcrumbs will change. And I really like that.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, I've. I've used his plugin too. I forget which one it was. There's a few independent plugins for breadcrumbs and my team has run into some weird edge cases of what they will do depending on your content structure. So I think that's part of why the scope of the breadcrumbs block being limited at first makes so much sense, because the complexity of what you're actually trying to do from a templating level, depending on where you are in a site and how your site is structured can get incredibly complex. I don't remember which plugin it was, but we had a site. It may have been the Voter Guide. The Voter Guide within the site that completely killed everything. Like something about the logic of where we were just. And we had to use a different plugin just for that one site to make it work.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: I might have even re. Ended up doing something sort of manual instead. I don't remember. But those plugins have been incredibly useful, but are also prone to edge case weirdness. Basically generating navigation on the fly. And if you don't know where you are within the structure of the site from a structural standpoint, or if someone has made some odd decisions about where they're putting things or how their hierarchy works, you're going to end up with a really confusing breadcrumb.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. And sometimes you don't have the controls to actually make changes. It's just all this black box kind of mystery mute kind of thing again. Yeah, yeah. And I. While we're running a little bit out of time or short on time, I just wanted to mention there's also a dialogue block in the works. There's an icon block in the works. My favorite one is the stretchy text. It sounds so weird, but it actually makes sense. It's text that stretches over a certain container and it's flexible depending on how the container works. So you could do this for hero sections, all that. And then here's your bestest favorite. The tabs block is in the works. And then also my favorite is a table of contents block. Because I have these long posts all the time and I want to do the table of contents block. But it had some weird issues. That's why it's not in Core yet. And they're trying to figure that out how that all can be done. It's now attempted to be a dynamic one and allow usage outside of the post or page that is actually referring to. But for instance, in a template, you could put it in a single post template in the sidebar and you will always have a table of content for your posts. So I think that's a really good use case for pages, when you have landing pages or tutorial pages or documentation pages that you don't have to fiddle with it while you're creating the content. And it's just there in the template.

Beth Soderberg: This is one where my weird workaround for it. There's one of the SEO plugins has a table of contents block built into it. I forget which one offhand, but I've used that before to get this type of functionality.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: Because it. Sometimes you really just need it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

So that's it. That is the Gutenberg changelog 122. Thank you so much for being with me on this, Beth. And it was great to chat with you and talk about block themes and all these good things. Block style stuff. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: Thanks for having me. It was fun.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Dear listeners, as always, the show notes will be published on the gutenbergtimes.com/podcast. This is 122. I already said that. But if you have questions or suggestions or news you want us to include, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com that's changelog@gutenbergtimes.com and I forgot a question for you, Beth. And that is if people want to get in touch with you, what is a good place to do that?

Beth Soderberg: You can find me in the WordPress slack under my name, Beth Soderberg. And then you can find me at work at our website, which is Bethink.studio or bethinkstudio.com. but you know, it's really fun when you can get the non.coms to work with your name.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So. Yes, all right. So I'll list of course, all those contact information, more in the show notes.

And thank you all for listening. Thank you for being here and see you when I'll see you back. Well, in two weeks. Goodbye, and have a good time.

12 Oct 2025 10:58am GMT

I've been trying to find time in my calendar to attend more WordCamps as I love meeting WordPressers all over the world. The stars aligned, and I'll be swinging by WordCamp Canada next week. They've put together an amazing program, including open web pioneer and inventor Dave Winer, so I'm looking forward to checking out the sessions. I wish I could go to every WordCamp, like I used to! I've been recording videos and messages for those I can't physically attend. Ottawa is also great as the only other commercial board I'm on is Field Effect.

11 Oct 2025 3:35pm GMT

Sorry everybody, my @photomatt on Twitter has been hacked, I'm trying to regain account access, but it is not currently in my control. Update: Thank you to the fine teams at X/Twitter and Nikita Bier, my account has been recovered. Just for future reference, I will never promote cryptocurrencies or similar investments. If you see anything from me or WordPress claiming that, be highly skeptical. Invest in open source, public stocks, and great companies like Automattic.

11 Oct 2025 12:34am GMT

Howdy,

After meeting so many people at WordCamp Gdynia, on the plane and then on the train, I caught a nasty cold and struggled all week. I call this stage mushbrain, and everything becomes much harder, especially reading comprehension suffers. I am over it now, though. It also wasn't the first time that I sounded horsey on a podcast episode.

It's the time of year now here in Munich when the days get shorter and the weather is cold, drissly and overcast. A time when snow would brighten the sights, with its whiteness covering partly the darkgray, dark brown background.

Enjoy again this weekend edition and stay healthy.

Yours,
Birgit

Table of Contents

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

Gutenberg 21.8 is now available and release lead Carlos Bravo hightlighed in his release post What's new in Gutenberg 21.8? (8 October)

1. Block Visibility Control Support and UI
2. Block Comments Improvements
3. Accordion and Time To Read Blocks

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This week Gutenberg Changelog 122 recording, Beth Soderberg, lead developer at Bethink.studio and I chatted about the release and other WordPress topics around Block themes and on going change. The episode arrive at your favorite podcast app over the weekend. You can conclude from this photo, that we definitely had fun and you would be right.

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It was JuanMa Garrido's turn to write the monthly roundup post What's new for developers? (October 2025) on the WordPress Developer Blog. The 21.6, 21.7, and 21.8 Gutenberg releases add features for developers. The Command Palette now works throughout the admin, the new Terms Query block makes taxonomy layouts easier, and Block Visibility controls allow for conditional display. Notes (that's how we call Block Comments now) improve team collaboration, while content-only editing maintains design integrity during client handoffs.

Help testing new features for WordPress 6.9

Release test co-leads Krupa Nanda and Jonathan Bossenger, published several calls for testing in preparation in WordPress of the 6.9 release. Each of the post has a detailed description of the feature, and instructions on how to test is with specific scenarios. It's much easier to follow along with any of the calls for testing, to also learn what's new in the next release.

Help test changes to template management is probably the most elaborate call for testing, as template management received a completely new feature, and it needs to be working for many different use cases, and has consquences on existing sites.

Call for Testing: Ability to Hide Blocks for this feature it's the bare minimum of a new feature, that will be in future releases see some refinement and extensiblity.

Call for Testing: Accordion Block lets you dive into a whole new block, many users asked for an several plugins are already available for. Now it will come to core.

Your time spent on testing the new features for WordPress 6.9, has a lot of impact, as the bugs found now, make the release the best it can be for millions of other users.

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

Lesley Sim informed us that EventKoi Lite is now available from the WordPress Plugin Repository. I mentioned the premium version before, Event Koi is modern, WordPress events calendar. Create single or multi-day events and display month, week, or list views via blocks (or shortcodes).

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Mike McAlister announced a new product: OlliePro Extensions on Bluesky. He mentions: Animations, advanced grid + column controls, keyboard shortcuts, and more. Watch the vidoe Introducing Ollie Pro Extensions - Supercharge Your WordPress Block Editor

All controls are seamlessly integrated with the Core editor sitebar sections. Mark Howells-Mead commented in the WordPress Slack #outreach channel: " I'm very impressed with how he's been able to integrate the little add-ons many of us are integrating to our own projects, but in such a seamless way by extending core controls." McAlister shared an example Gist on GitHub.

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David McCan took a deep dive into the world of Block plugins. In this blog post Performance of Third Party Blocks and Core Compared he tries to answer the questions many site builders and owners have: "Can you add the features Gutenberg is missing yet still be performant like core?". McCan tested ten third-party Gutenberg block plugins with WordPress core, specifically focusing on performance.

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Matt Medeiros, WPMinute, took the Mega Menu Designer, also made by Mike McAlister, out for the spin. He shared his thoughts in the Video How to Build Mega Menus with WordPress Blocks. He provides a detailed walkthrough calls it "Perfect for anyone looking to enhance their website's navigation experience." As reported earlier the plugin is available for free in the WordPress plugin repository.

Rae Morey, publisher or The Repository, reported Ollie's Menu Designer Flagged for Core, With Automattic Developers Set to Help Shepherd It. Automattic's Anne McCarthy says developers are preparing to review Ollie's Menu Designer for inclusion in the Gutenberg plugin, marking the start of a collaborative push to bring the plugin's features into WordPress. This follows WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg's suggestion that the menu functionality should be part of core. Details and links in Moery's article.

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Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

This episode of Greyd Conversations show, Switching to FSE from a pagebuilder, covers the story of Buro Staal, a smal dutch agency, which switched from Elementor to Full site editing cold turkey. Greyd's host Sandra Kurze and agency owner Rosanne van Staalduinen shared why and how her agency switched and the lessons learned along the way.

The biggest hurdles were limited functionality of navigation block, not able to create Mega Menus, and the need for controls for mobile sites and responsiveness. So they augmented their tech stack with Kadence Blocks and Ollie Pro theme.

"Keeping up with Gutenberg - Index 2025"
A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test, and Meta team from Jan. 2024 on. Updated by yours truly. The previous years are also available: 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor

Ryan Welcher published another recipe from his Blockdevelopment Cook Book on YouTube. How To Make A Simple Fade In Effect Fast. "In this recipe, we're adding a little flair by loading custom JavaScript and CSS for the Cover and Image blocks to create a smooth fade-in effect as they scroll into view. To keep things efficient, we'll only enqueue these files when the blocks are actually on the page."

What's new in and around Playground

Nick Diego announces that WordPress Studio version 1.6.0 now supports Blueprints, which are lightweight JSON files that predefine site configurations for quick and consistent setup. Instead of starting with empty sites or using large snapshots, teams can create portable recipes specifying WordPress versions, plugins, and settings. Studio offers three featured blueprints for quick starts, development, and commerce, while users can also upload custom blueprints. The feature integrates into the standard site creation flow and helps streamline workflows for solo developers and teams alike.

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Playground documentation now has Ask AI button, to get help finding and understanding feature sets and APIs.

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Ajit Bohra of Lubus shared on X "The Visual BluePrint Builder for Playground is shaping up nicely. All the latest updates are in, and it's feeling solid. Stable version coming soon, but you can already check it out and start building visually." A blueprint builder with blocks, how nice. You can test it via this Playground link. The code is available on GitHub.

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Jamie Marsland also tries to make it easier to create blueprints for Playground sites and open up the WordPress in a browser tool for a broader audience. Details in his post Introducing Pootle Playground - My Experimental WordPress Blueprint Builder.

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Adam Zielinski created an online PHP code editor using Playground. It allows developers to test PHP snippets quickly in their browser. The tool supports WordPress functions, enables switching between PHP and WordPress versions, and allows sharing code configurations through links. Built with WordPress Playground, it runs entirely client-side with network access and popular PHP extensions included. He's currently experimenting with adding CLI and file browser capabilities to support composer packages and frameworks like Laravel or Symfony.

Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg's master branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.

Now also available via WordPress Playground. There is no need for a test site locally or on a server. Have you been using it? Email me with your experience

Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don't hesitate to send them via email or
send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.

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For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com

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Featured Image: Free colorful building blocks image by Rawpixel

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10 Oct 2025 11:35pm GMT

I'd like to introduce you to Jeremy Kranz. With his career as an investor at Intel Capital, then GIC, which is the sovereign wealth fund of Singapore rumored to manage over $700B, to now running his own fund Sentinel Global, he has had a front-row seat to investments in industry changing companies such as ByteDance (which became TikTok), Alibaba, Uber, DoorDash, Zoom, DJI (which changed the drone industry and argubly modern warfare), and many more I'm probably not even aware of.

When I first met Jeremy in 2014, I was amazed that a late-stage financial investor could understand Open Source so well, and he immediately grokked what Automattic was doing in a way that I think has little parallel in the world. (Today, it reminds me of Joseph Jacks at OSS Capital.) Deven Perekh of Insight Partners led Automattic's 1.16B valuation Series C round, making us one of only forty "unicorns" (private companies valued over a billion dollars) at the time, and one of the reasons they beat out others as the lead of the round was that GIC/Jeremy was a LP of Insight so they could directly co-invest. GIC is so intensely private I couldn't even mention them in the announcement at the time even though they were the catalyst for the round. Since then, Jeremy has become a close friend and advisor, and he even took me to my first Grateful Dead concert.

Eleven years later, this is his first podcast! Jeremy shares incredible alpha around China, AI and its adoption in the enterprise, how asset allocation is evolving, and at the end, a beautiful tie together of the Grateful Dead and Open Source.

10 Oct 2025 7:30pm GMT

I was reminded today of the profound marketing influence of Kathy Sierra, who was a pretty prolific blogger and speaker back in the day. I would summarize her thesis as such: Your best marketing and communication should talk about how you make your users awesome, not how you're awesome. If you'd like to check out some of her talks, she spoke at WordCamp in 2008, at Business of Software in 2013, and at Mind the Product in 2015.

10 Oct 2025 1:22am GMT

In this episode, Mark chats with Aurelio Volle from WPUmbrella about his journey in creating a WordPress management tool, maintaining customer focus, and the importance of community and transparency in business growth.

09 Oct 2025 10:47am GMT

One of the cooler companies I've seen in a while is LumaField, which does industrial CT scanning, as they describe it.

Industrial X-ray CT (Computed Tomography) works on the same basic principle as medical CT, taking hundreds of X-ray images from different angles to capture the internal and external structure of objects in three dimensions.

In addition to providing amazing graphics of these scans, they also gather some valuable data. Their Lumafield Battery Quality Report does a deep dive into lithium ion battery manufacturing, showing the wild differences between different brands.

I love this stuff, whether you call it QA, evals, testing, or whatever, it reminds me of Ray Dalio's Principle to embrace reality and deal with it.

09 Oct 2025 6:24am GMT

Transcript

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case teaching and using WordPress with low vision.

If you'd like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you'd like us to feature on the podcast, I'm keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Bud Kraus. Bud was diagnosed with mascular degeneration, a condition often associated with old age, when he was 37. Affecting both eyes, this gradually eroded his central vision, making it difficult for him to see straight ahead, recognize faces, drive or read.

Despite these challenges, Bud's peripheral vision remained intact, sparing him the need for a cane or guide dog, and allowing him to continue to navigate daily life. Through perseverance and adaptation, Bud continues to live fully, facing the hurdles of vision loss with resilience and optimism.

Bud opens up the podcast by talking about his experience living with legal blindness, how his central vision loss has shaped everything from everyday activities to his professional routines. He explains the practical ways he adapts his devices and workflow, including tweaks to operating system settings, using screen zoom functions, and relying on pattern recognition to teach coding, write tutorials, and even host his Seriously, Bud? podcast. His unique perspective sheds light on the often overlooked nuances of accessibility, reminding us that every user interacts with technology differently.

Bud also chats about the broader impact of accessibility in the WordPress space, from frustrations with hard to navigate interfaces, to the importance of not excluding users who may become your audience or customers. His reflections reveal how living with low vision pushed him beyond mere acceptance, helping him discover new opportunities, hone his teaching skills, and even find humour in daily challenges.

Bud's story serves as a powerful reminder of the importance of designing with empathy, embracing adaptation, and viewing accessibility, not just as a technical requirement, but as a source of creativity and connection. It's full of real world tips, personal anecdotes, and a dose of inspiration.

Whether you're a designer, developer, educator, or simply passionate about building a more inclusive web, this episode is for you.

If you're interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you'll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Bud Kraus.

I am joined on the podcast by Bud Kraus. Hello, Bud.

[00:03:35] Bud Kraus: Hello, Nathan. Thanks for having me.

[00:03:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you're very welcome. This is not the first time we've spoken, but it is the first time we've spoken at an event because we're both at WordCamp US in Portland, it's 2025. We're in a corridor, so I've got to say at the very outset, if it ends up being quite noisy, there's not a lot we can do about that. But we've done our best. We've found a nice quiet little alcove, and we're going to be chatting today to Bud about his experience online. Before we do that, Bud, do you mind just telling us a little bit about yourself? Give us your potted bio, if you like.

[00:04:01] Bud Kraus: Yeah, sure. So I create WordPress content for WordPress businesses, articles, blog posts, tutorials, videos, and I am the host of the podcast called Seriously, Bud?

[00:04:14] Nathan Wrigley: And the talk that you're doing at WordCamp US, which I guess you haven't yet done, because we're on the first day of presentations and it's fairly early on. You haven't done it, right?

[00:04:23] Bud Kraus: No, I actually, no, I haven't done it yet, but I've done this a couple times, so this is not my first time doing this talk.

[00:04:29] Nathan Wrigley: So you know how it's going to go. It's called using low vision as my tool to help me teach WordPress. Now, that kind of leads us into the subject at hand really. We're going to be talking about how it is that your experience of the web may differ from other people.

Are you willing to just tell us a little bit about your experience in the offline world as well as the online world? What is it that you are dealing with on a day-to-day basis?

[00:04:50] Bud Kraus: Sure. So I have macular degeneration, which is a condition of old age, which I got when I was 37. And it's the leading cause of legal blindness in the United States. It's a destruction of your central vision.

I have the condition in both eyes, which means I really have it. And it makes it very hard for me to see straight ahead, recognise faces, reading. I can't drive a car, which is okay. So anything that's straight ahead.

Now, my peripheral vision's perfectly intact, so that means I don't need to have a seeing eye dog or a cane, or I don't bump into things because the peripheral vision's fine. But the very fine vision that we all use to see straight ahead, like to thread a needle, that's what I'm missing.

[00:05:30] Nathan Wrigley: So are you able to describe what you are seeing in that area. And is it like the central portion of your site?

[00:05:38] Bud Kraus: It is the exact central portion of my sight. So I tend to see elliptically, which means I move my eyes around to get a better picture. Like, when I'm looking at you right now, I'm moving my eyes around so I can see better because of the destruction of the centre part of my vision.

[00:05:52] Nathan Wrigley: And does that rule out certain tasks? So for example, you mentioned reading there. Obviously I do not have what you have, and so it's a given to me that when I'm staring as I am doing at the moment at my laptop, my eyes, the bullseye, if you like, of my eyes go straight to the letter looking at. And for me, it's hard to imagine deploying my peripheral vision to do that, but can you, for example, do things like reading or is that out of the?

[00:06:16] Bud Kraus: You can't, peripheral vision is not a, it's not even close to being a perfect substitute for central vision. So the answer is no. You cannot read with peripheral vision. You cannot understand. You can see, but you can't understand. And it just makes things difficult.

[00:06:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So how does that affect your real life? So obviously you mentioned things like being unable to drive a car or things like that. Is there anything else that might give us a frame of reference for just how profound it is?

[00:06:44] Bud Kraus: Well, I like to look at it differently. So I have a different approach to this. So when I first was diagnosed with this when I was 37, I thought, oh, this is the worst thing that could ever happen. And that makes sense, but it is not the worst thing that could ever happen.

And having lived with this for quite a long time now, I look at this not as a curse, but as a blessing. Because what it's done is allow me to have so many different opportunities, experiences, ideas, thoughts, whatever that I would've not otherwise had.

So that process of going, it's the grief process when you start from, you know, this is the most horrible thing in the world, to acceptance. I'm actually beyond acceptance. It's like, I like this. This is okay with me. And do I wish it on other people? No, I don't. But like I said, it's not the end of the world. There are conditions and diseases that are far worse than this.

So I do think of, and in fact in my talk that I'm giving, at the end I talk about why this is a blessing and not a curse. I mean, like for example, you can get as inebriated as you want at parties because you're not going to be driving the car home. So there's lots of that, okay. Or you don't see your friends get older because you can't see the detail on their face. When I go in a grocery store, I don't see all the junk food, so that's good. Is it inconvenient? Yes. Do I have a hard time finding people at a large event like this? Yes. But I manage.

[00:08:09] Nathan Wrigley: So in the wider world, you can obviously deploy your peripheral vision. So we're sitting in a, I don't know, it's maybe this room's about 10 meters by 10 meters. There's a lot of space. Whereas the thing that we're talking about, WordPress, building websites and so on, it's usually this constrained little, well, let's say rectangle. It could be something that we're holding our hands, a mobile phone or a computer, laptop, something like that. How does your situation, how does it get impacted by this then? Are you doing this peripheral vision, glancing left and right and trying to figure out what's going on? Or do you have other tools, mechanisms, things that you deploy?

[00:08:39] Bud Kraus: I do, and that's what my talk is about. So, for example, I've taught WordPress and I taught coding for a long time. And people say, well, how do you do that if you can't see?

Well, one thing is I'm always very prepared. So when I go into a class, I can't wing it. I just have to know exactly what I'm going to be doing. And in code there's a lot of patterns and I recognise patterns.

And, yes, I do use Zoom. I use audio. I use touch. Now, touch is not really relevant here, but I'm able to, with the technology as good as it has become for me, I'm able to Zoom in and out of the screen and I'm able to read things out loud. And then I have to do a fair amount of memory. But that's okay.

[00:09:22] Nathan Wrigley: So do you have adaptations that you make, let's say for example, you go out today and you purchase a new computer, do you have adaptations that you make on an operating system level?

[00:09:30] Bud Kraus: Yeah, I do.

[00:09:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I'm curious to hear about these because I make no modifications when I purchase, so tell me more.

[00:09:35] Bud Kraus: Yeah, good question. So one of the things I do, and I'll be demonstrating, is my resolution is a low resolution, meaning 1024 by 768 would be low today. In the olden days, that would be high. But it makes the screen, it makes it easier for me to see the screen. And then I make all kinds of adjustments to make icons bigger, letters bigger, so that it's just works for me. And yeah, I don't have a problem with it.

Now, it does cause me to do things maybe a little slower because it's just harder for me to maybe find something. But I think I mentioned that patterns is a very important thing to me. So if I'm going to a website and they change the UI totally around, that's going to be a pain in the neck for me, because then I have to relearn where everything is.

It's sort of like changing the furniture if you were blind, I mean, really blind, which most people aren't. So I'm legally blind but, you know, I'm not like lights out blind. If you change where things are, then it's going to make things very difficult for me, whether it's in the real world or in the virtual world. I have to relearn everything.

[00:10:35] Nathan Wrigley: A sort of curious question that's just occurred to me. When you buy a new computer, is there a process whereby you have to combat the regular default icon size and default tech size, just for a moment in order to wrangle it into the version of the OS that you need?

[00:10:50] Bud Kraus: You're absolutely right. So if you're booting up for the first time, it's a hole in the whole process, which is at least the last time I did, which is there's no audio, there's no nothing, and you're seeing like little tiny print to, you know, configure the language and the location and the time and all that stuff that you do when you work with a computer for the first time. That is a real problem, yeah.

[00:11:11] Nathan Wrigley: You would imagine that there'd be some mechanism to invoke that as the first thing that happens?

[00:11:17] Bud Kraus: I think so.

[00:11:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's interesting.

Okay, so we've talked about the wider world. We've talked about a computer that you may modify. Let's get onto the bit which we are all here for, which is WordPress. Are there any adjustments or tools, or this could extend to the browser, so it may be browser tools, what have you, but for the internet, let's say, what are the modifications that you are making to make your life possible there?

[00:11:37] Bud Kraus: You know, I don't think there's anything really any different than anybody else makes. I mean, the biggest thing is I will either zoom in or out of a webpage. And it's really funny because, if you're using a certain screen size with a certain resolution, things can get very hard to work with. I don't think enough companies, like I'm thinking of even LinkedIn, for example, that I was using today. Sorry to call them out, but it's just like their chat areas were just really, I just had to do all kinds of crazy things to actually see the text. And then the text was really small.

I think because I'm a stress case, that they don't always test down to my level. And I think it's, I just accept it. But that's the way it is, I guess. But I think that you don't want to exclude people from anything really, because they may be your customer. And if I can't buy something because it's really hard to do, and that is something, I don't know if I've ever talked to you about it, but other people, that if I am discouraged from buying something because it's just, the UI is just too hard to work with, I'll just find an alternative. I will. Or I'll ask my wife.

[00:12:39] Nathan Wrigley: I guess you're in a curious space as well in that we hear a lot in the accessibility space about things like screen readers and those kind of assistive technologies. I guess you are not deploying those because you have enough sight to not have that as a, something to lean upon.

[00:12:54] Bud Kraus: Yeah, that's exactly right. I have not, and don't use JAWS or any of those big fancy screen reader technologies. I just use what's built into the macOS and I just highlight the text and I press a button and it reads. I think it's called voiceover, or it's text to speech, or whatever it is. And it's in the accessibility part of the settings.

I don't use technology beyond what I need it for. It's just overkill. What do I, those are complicated systems to master, so I stay away from that because they don't need it.

[00:13:22] Nathan Wrigley: So when you are building websites, is there anything unique about the way that you do that? Is there any sort of, again, a tool that you deploy? Or maybe you are relying on other human beings to sort of cast their eye over it a second time after you've done the work. I don't know, just talk us through that whole thing.

[00:13:37] Bud Kraus: Well, I don't make websites. No, I have, okay. I've done everything, but I don't make websites because I don't like to make websites. It's not because of my vision. But yes, if I am working, in the past like I have, I would ask people to help me with, particularly with colour because I have a very, I think I have a poor colour palette. And I think that's either, it's because of me. So I have to ask, does this go good with this?

It's just something that I, either I'm not good at, or I'm not interested, or my vision, or whatever it is. So I do have a problem with colour in that regard. But because of the technology and the tools that are built in, it's not as difficult as one might think.

[00:14:15] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting. Yeah, okay. We'll get into that. But you do make a podcast, and there's lots and lots of different spinning wheels that have to done there. You know, you've got to book people onto the show, you've got to have calendars, you've got to have posts and pages and things like that on the website. Is there anything uniquely interesting about, I understand the process of making a website from my perspective, there anything that would be different to my process than would be for yours?

[00:14:36] Bud Kraus: Yes, I think one thing I could think of is like a lot of times I won't, let's say in WordPress, you can write into the editor, you could write a page or a post right into the Gutenberg, the block editor. I choose not to do that. What I do is use a notepad, or not notepad, what is it for a Mac? I forgot.

[00:14:53] Nathan Wrigley: TextEdit.

[00:14:54] Bud Kraus: Yes, TextEdit. Thanks. I'll use that and I'll have the font blown up bigger than normal, and I'll just edit in there, and then I'll just take that and then I'll copy that and paste that into WordPress. It's just easier for me to do it that way. So I just like it that way. You know, everybody has their own little thing. That's my little thing. And I think it's because of my vision.

[00:15:14] Nathan Wrigley: And in terms of kind of getting the recording software to work and things like that, how do those UIs function for you?

[00:15:19] Bud Kraus: Yeah, pretty good. The problem I have with learning something new and complicated is that, I think it's like everybody, quite frankly, I get confused and try to figure out where's what. And like I was using, I use Descript, and it just took me quite a while to figure out, how do I do this? How do I do that? But like anything else, once I learn it, it's pretty solid and it gets easier.

Now I do tend to blow things up to make it bigger. And my wife is always telling me, I can't use your computer because stuff is too big. Now, I don't think it's too big, but she does. And when I look at other people's computers, then I realise, no, it's bigger than theirs.

[00:15:53] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so we're in the era of Gutenberg. It sounds like you've been using WordPress for a fairly long time, presumably before Gutenberg. What's your opinion on whether or not that was a move in the right direction? In other words, is it favorable? Is it more straightforward for you to create a post? I know that you said in the scenario for a podcast, you're writing it elsewhere and copying and pasting it in. But with other things like, I don't know, laying out content and writing paragraphs and things, do you think it's a good experience? Did we go in the right direction there?

[00:16:18] Bud Kraus: That's a very hard question for me to answer. I'll answer it in a couple of different ways. One, as far as accessibility goes, I'm no expert in this. I am not an accessibility expert. Am I a stakeholder? We all are. But I can't answer it in that regard.

But from a more technical standpoint, because I write technical articles for Kinsta, Hostinger, others, that I find it to be difficult. I know I was told it's not supposed to be easy, so it certainly doesn't match the easy. Yeah, and that has nothing to do with my vision. It's just, I feel it's just complicated, even though I've learned quite a bit of the technical side of this stuff. I'm not trying to be cute here, but I'm trying to be cute, and I just can't answer that question that's going to provide any value so.

[00:17:06] Nathan Wrigley: I was kind of wondering if there was a thing which, if you could click your fingers and make it appear in the Block Editor or the Gutenberg interface, which you would, and I don't know that you've got got an answer to that.

[00:17:15] Bud Kraus: I, let me think. No, I don't think so. No. And I use Elementor too. So I think from a logic standpoint, Elementor seems to be easier for me. What I just don't like is a lot of confusion. Too much information built into a UI is a real problem for me.

Nathan, the funny thing is I feel like I have a special filter on the world that other people don't have. This is another one of these blessings, that gives me the ability to understand what works and what doesn't work without having to ask somebody because it's just built in.

Now, the thing about disability or this field in general, which is huge, it's very idiosyncratic. So my setup is good for me, but it may not work for somebody else. And it's very hard to, as those who keep accessibility in mind, and hopefully it's everybody. It's a very difficult subject because how do we design our systems, our content so that the greatest number of people can access this information, or whatever, on the largest number of devices. I mean, that's what accessibility to me is about.

[00:18:24] Nathan Wrigley: It's curious that you said, I think you said at the beginning that your condition is one which will deteriorate over time.

[00:18:31] Bud Kraus: Well, macular degeneration, generally, can get worse over time. But fortunately, for reasons that we don't need to get into, since 1992 it's been very stable, which I'm really fortunate because trust me, I don't want it to get any worse than this. I don't need another, that much of a blessing.

[00:18:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I was wondering from that, whether or not the accessibility side of WordPress is something that you lean into. Do you attend those kind of, I don't know, WP Accessibility Day, those kind of events?

[00:18:59] Bud Kraus: No, it just doesn't really interest me. You know, back in like 1999, 2000, I was teaching a course at Pratt Institute in New York called Accessible Web Design. And it was way ahead of its time. And the concepts I was teaching were basically concepts because the browsers and technology just wasn't there yet. So you'd have to say, well, one day, and one day did happen in large measure.

And then I started realising, I just didn't want to like make a career out of teaching this or testing or, you know, I started to meet people in the field and I just said, I don't really like this. I mean, just because I'm, I have a disability doesn't mean I have to like the field of accessible design, you know, accessibility.

[00:19:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's interesting. You are wearing a WordCamp Montclair t-shirt, which kind of tells me that not only are you attending this event, WordCamp US, but you're also attending other ones as well. Is that a big part of your life? If it is, how accessible are things like this event? Do you come here fully expecting of yourself that you'll have a full experience the same way that everybody else does?

[00:19:59] Bud Kraus: Well, I have a good experience, but it is not the same way everybody else does. For example, I can't see the screens at all. And when they're doing stuff, the slides, I'm just listening, okay. It's sort of like, I watch TV a lot that way too. I hear things. Unless I got really close, I'm not going to be able to see what's on the screen. If I took a picture of something that's really important, yeah, that'll help.

But generally speaking, that doesn't work for me. And then it could be kind of a, yes, I've gone to many WordCamps, but they're all sort of the same in terms of the issues. And I don't even think of them as issues anymore. I just think of it as like, we're all different. This is the way I'm different. And talking about this stuff, quite frankly is like talking about being right-handed. Would you do an interview of me being right-handed?

[00:20:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, fascinating. I guess, from my perspective, because I just don't, I can't prize that open my own life, it's really intriguing to sort of try to have some sort of understanding of how it differs from my experience to your experience. And I guess for you it's, this is how I live.

[00:20:58] Bud Kraus: Yeah. But Nathan, you know, vision is a spectrum. It's a continuum. It isn't just everybody looks at things the same way. No. So I don't think, alright, I'm like sort of on one end of the spectrum, I get it, but everybody looks at things differently. And I don't mean that figuratively, I mean that literally. So I don't think of it anymore much as a handicap, you know, other than the fact that, yeah, that's a pain in the neck sometimes. And sometimes you find yourself doing some foolish things.

And I think the hardest thing for me at these events is that I won't know who I'm talking to until about five minutes after I'm talking to them, and I figured out by looking at their shape, stuff like that, that I can, oh, I'm talking to Nathan Wrigley, or your accent, or something like that.

[00:21:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. You're obviously quite keen on the sort of education side of things though because you're writing tutorials. I'll link in the show notes to one that you wrote for Smashing Magazine, which is no mean feat. Getting in there is really rather impressive. So well done for that.

But you're also obviously turning up two events like this. And it sounds from what you said as if this is content that you've done before. So very keen on that, even though it may be talking about, you were describing there, it's like talking about whether you're right-handed. You've put together this presentation in which you're going to share these different bits and pieces about how you make amendments and adjustments to WordPress and the operating system and so on. So do you enjoy the education side of it?

[00:22:16] Bud Kraus: Oh, absolutely. I'm a teacher at heart. I mean, you know, that's what I've been doing for 25 years. And even in the writings that I do, they're basically, it's a different way of teaching. Now the talk that I'm giving though here, the funny thing is, as I've said, I'm sort of like cool to the idea to be honest about it. There are other talks I'd rather give than this one, but this is the talk that everybody seems to be interested in. And I get that.

And when you come up with a topic called using low vision is a tool to help me teach WordPress, that's a winner because you got two things in there that everybody loves. One, we love disability, and two, we love teaching WordPress. So two weird things got put into one title.

[00:22:57] Nathan Wrigley: It's a hit.

[00:22:58] Bud Kraus: It got to be a hit, right.

[00:22:59] Nathan Wrigley: What would be the presentation that you would do?

[00:23:01] Bud Kraus: Ah. The one that I'm threatening to do instead of this one, because I keep saying, I don't wanna do this one, let me do another one. There's two.

One is, burnt out on web design, what your future career could be, which is my story.

And the other one is, show me the money, how to get sponsors to financially help with your podcast, event, whatever. I like that topic, show me the money.

[00:23:24] Nathan Wrigley: Paraphrasing, just a minute, what are the nuggets? Because I'm curious about that one.

[00:23:27] Bud Kraus: Oh, come on. You could teach me, okay?

[00:23:30] Nathan Wrigley: What are the nuggets in there though?

[00:23:32] Bud Kraus: Well, in my case with my podcast, I've been sort of lucky in that they came to me and said, we'd like to sponsor you. Which is a shock because when I started the podcast a year and a half ago, or actually the idea was, it's now two years old, I said, I didn't care if anybody ever listened, I didn't care if anybody ever sponsored. And then of course, over time, I did care.

But I never thought of my show ever being sponsored. I said, I'll just do it. And then I started realising, hey, this takes a lot of time, should get paid for this. And, you know, I feel just, if I have a second or two say how fortunate I am to be a part of all of this because at my advanced age, to be in this community with such smart, brilliant, whatever, people that are friendly. When I talk to people my age who are generally retired or retiring and, their world gets smaller and mine gets bigger.

[00:24:24] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's interesting.

[00:24:25] Bud Kraus: So I'm really, really lucky about that.

[00:24:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I don't know what your age is, but I am of a certain age, and I'm kind of feeling at the moment that there's this whole thing which everybody wants to talk about, which is AI. And I'm kind of feeling as if that train has already, you know, that ship has sailed for me. Can't invest all of the time and what have you to learn all of the different bits and pieces. It's like there's another bus coming. I don't know what you think about that.

[00:24:47] Bud Kraus: Well, I'll tell you what it is, for me, it's been a career extender, because I am now writing at a level for Kinsta, technical articles that I could not otherwise write. And because of my use of, and if you will, mastery of AI, I've been able to code things that I could not do before. So I've always had sort of, for the longest time, because I taught great foundation of HTML, CSS, some JavaScript, whatever. So I know this stuff, okay.

But to elevate that knowledge, to create stuff now that is much more complicated, sort of like junior development oriented stuff or maybe a little bit beyond that. That is amazing. And it's because of AI.

[00:25:28] Nathan Wrigley: That's fascinating.

[00:25:30] Bud Kraus: It's extending what I can do.

[00:25:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you feel like you've got a new lease of life there.

[00:25:34] Bud Kraus: Yeah, a bit. So I don't have to keep writing the same things over and over about how to create a post. You know, I've done that. I want to be challenged to learn new things, and AI is helping me do that. And we're teaching AI, and AI is teaching us. So it's really cool.

[00:25:49] Nathan Wrigley: Your presentation, is it today or tomorrow?

[00:25:51] Bud Kraus: Well, it's tomorrow.

[00:25:53] Nathan Wrigley: I was going to say, you're looking very calm for somebody that has a presentation later today.

[00:25:56] Bud Kraus: Well, you know, I've been around the block. I'm not going to be nervous. Now what I do have to do is I've got to do some more memorisation. And that's what I talked about always being prepared. I just can't go in there and read the slides. It's not going to happen. So I have to really know what the slides are, what the order is, and what the words are on the screen. I don't have to read those words, but I have to know the ideas behind all this.

[00:26:16] Nathan Wrigley: So in some sense, you've memorised it more or less. Oh, that's interesting. So you've really applied thought to every, more or less, every sentence that comes out of your mouth.

[00:26:24] Bud Kraus: Basically.

[00:26:25] Nathan Wrigley: But you don't get nervous.

[00:26:26] Bud Kraus: We're with friends.

[00:26:28] Nathan Wrigley: I would get so nervous.

[00:26:29] Bud Kraus: At least I like to think so.

[00:26:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. No, I agree. Every time I've been to a presentation, even when the person delivering it has been quite nervous, there's always been a very positive sentiment in the room.

[00:26:39] Bud Kraus: I'll tell you why I don't get nervous, I don't see their faces.

[00:26:41] Nathan Wrigley: Oh.

[00:26:42] Bud Kraus: So if you don't see their faces. There's so many advantages of vision impairment. I know it sounds crazy, but if you don't see their faces, then you don't see their reactions. Now, of course, that's a negative too. But then you don't get nervous.

[00:26:55] Nathan Wrigley: Absolutely fascinating. Well, I wish you the best of luck with it. It will be out on wordpress.tv at some point. Typically now they come out really soon. These flagship events, they turn them around really quickly.

[00:27:06] Bud Kraus: Well, I don't know when this is coming out, but this is going to be live streamed around the world.

[00:27:09] Nathan Wrigley: Is it?

[00:27:10] Bud Kraus: Yeah. So one person can watch.

[00:27:11] Nathan Wrigley: The point being, dear listener, that if you've enjoyed this episode and you want to follow on the talk, the presentation that Bud has given at WordCamp US, by the way, maybe the quickest way to do that is to just Google, either WordCamp US 2025. Or Google, using low vision as my tool to help me teach WordPress. That's the other short circuit if you like. You'll be able to see exactly what it is that Bud delivered.

I have no further questions, so unless you've got something to add, I will say thank you very much for chatting to me.

[00:27:40] Bud Kraus: Well, thank you Nathan. And you know I'm a big fan of what you do and thanks for having me on.

[00:27:43] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much.

On the podcast today we have Bud Kraus.

Bud was diagnosed with macular degeneration, a condition often associated with old age, when he was 37. Affecting both eyes, this gradually eroded his central vision, making it difficult for him to see straight ahead, recognize faces, drive or read. Despite these challenges, Bud's peripheral vision remained intact, sparing him the need for a cane or guide dog, and allowing him to continue to navigate daily life. Through perseverance and adaptation, Bud continues to live fully, facing the hurdles of vision loss with resilience and optimism.

Bud opens up the podcast by talking about his experience living with legal blindness, how his central vision loss has shaped everything from everyday activities to his professional routines. He explains the practical ways he adapts his devices and workflow, including tweaks to operating system settings, using screen zoom functions, and relying on pattern recognition to teach coding, write tutorials, and even host his Seriously, Bud podcast. His unique perspective sheds light on the often-overlooked nuances of accessibility, reminding us that every user interacts with technology differently.

Bud also chats about the broader impact of accessibility in the WordPress space, from frustrations with hard-to-navigate interfaces to the importance of not excluding users who may become your audience or customers. His reflections reveal how living with low vision pushed him beyond mere acceptance, helping him discover new opportunities, hone his teaching skills, and even find humour in daily challenges.

Bud's story serves as a powerful reminder of the importance of designing with empathy, embracing adaptation, and viewing accessibility not just as a technical requirement, but as a source of creativity and connection. It's full of real-world tips, personal anecdotes, and a dose of inspiration.

Whether you're a designer, developer, educator, or simply passionate about building a more inclusive web, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Using Low Vision As My Tool To Help Me Teach WordPress, Bud's presentation at WordCamp US 2025

JAWS, Job Access With Speech software

Pratt Institute

Descript

Using Low Vision As My Tool To Help Me Teach WordPress, Bud's post on Smashing Magazine

08 Oct 2025 2:00pm GMT

Using WooCommerce and open source to take kitchen baking into an online cake business, embracing cake in a jar and building a vibrant brand with community support.

08 Oct 2025 12:41pm GMT

Two of my favorite humans, Tim Ferriss and Pablos Holman, had a great interview together.

Pablos has a great new book out, and Audrey Capital is a happy LP in his Deep Future fund. Of my many hacker friends, Pablos is probably the most public.

07 Oct 2025 1:36pm GMT

Matthias Pfefferle discusses the Fediverse's origins and evolution with Evan Prodromou, highlighting decentralized social networks, protocols, privacy, and the future of federated systems.

07 Oct 2025 11:12am GMT

Beeper has a fun set of September updates, adding support for Google Voice, LinkedIn now runs on-device, typing indicators for Google Messages and Instagram, full Telegram custom emoji support, and more.

06 Oct 2025 6:22pm GMT

Dave Winer talks about the open web's basics, emphasizing that linking is crucial for real connection. Platforms limiting links miss out on that vibrant web experience.

06 Oct 2025 12:49pm GMT

Another month has turned just like the leaves as autumn settles in. I was lucky enough to get time to focus thanks to sponsors, here is what I did within WordPress.

August reflections

It's worth noting I am aware that August didn't have a month post, this was due to travelling back from being at WordCamp US. This post is a merged month in many sense as the theme has maintained the same as September saw solidifying of what I was doing.

A new team

The Core Program team was announced and I will be the first team rep. This was a huge part of this month as required setting up and focus. I am beyond excited what this means.

I am thrilled to say BigScoots is sponsoring me to cover some time focusing on the Core Program team and thankful for the opportunity to go to sponsors and highlight where I am needed most.

Focusing on AI and editor

Relating to the last section a little, Greyd are now going to be sponsoring me to focus both on Core AI and also on Core Editor. This combination allows me to focus even more my contributions where they can be effective.

This split focus will add to ServMask's sponsorship of me within Core AI already to give me extra time within that area.

Areas of contribution

My split this month was given a new focus thanks to being a team rep for a new team announced, Core Program. Beyond that, top areas were:

• 'Needs design': adding design to Core AI experiments.
• Triage: focused on 6.9 design issues, unblocking and also giving feedback.
• Program team work: establishing team and getting goals brewing. Weekly posts here.
• Core AI: focusing on roadmaps.

Sharing the journey

I got to share a few things this month, I also got to attend LoopConf and speak about AI at the local WP London meetup the night before:

• The sparkle paradox: specifically fuelled the designs I worked on for Experiments.
• Spoke at WPLDN about 'When the Interface doesn't matter anymore'.

Upcoming plans for contribution

October is already shaping up to be busy with Core Program and the 6.9 release.

• Triage: focus on 6.9, but I don't want to ignore the ancient and inactive trac log. This month triage won't be my main focus but more about unblocking
• Core AI: feedback and iterations for experiments and program work on abilities. I would also love to work on the documentation and handbook if time.
  • I had some awesome fun working on the issues for experiments. # # # #
• Core Program: shape goals collaboratively, goals will be posted weekly on #core-program in Slack.

Sponsors this month

06 Oct 2025 9:06am GMT