23 Aug 2025
WordPress Planet
Gutenberg Times: WordCamp US, more blocks, a new book, Gutenberg 21.4, and WordPress 6.9—Weekend Edition 338
Hi there,
I am thoroughly giddy for WordCamp US. The schedule looks fantastic. A great collection of Keynote speakers with Amy Sample Ward (NTEN), Danny Sullivan (Google), John Maeda (Microsoft), and Adam Gazzaley (Neuroscape at UCSF).
There are in total 44 sessions, covering three overall topics: "Technical WordPress," "Honing your skills," and "AI." Below you'll find a list of block and block theme-related talks you can follow on the livestream or on demand later on.
And when you read this, I am already on my way to Portland.
Yours,
Birgit
WordCamp US talks and workshops on block development and block themes
Staying within the block editor context, here is the list of talks that tackle the latest blocks buzz.
- Joeleen Kennedy: Modernizing at Scale: How FSE Supports Wikimedia's Evolving UX
- Josh Bryant: Reimagining WordPress Editing: How We Embedded Gutenberg Into Our Product Ecosystem
- Seth Rubenstein: Block Composability: The Past and The Future
- Stephanie Stelzer: Coding the Magic: A Developer's Journey Through Aloha
- Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Moving a Website from Classic to a Block Theme
- Anton Plauche: Building Resilient Interfaces by Embracing Fluid Design
- Jemima Abu: A PHP Developer's Guide to ReactJS
- Michelle Schlup Hunt: Building Experiences: Design Systems, User Experience, and Full Site Editing
- Tammie Lister: The System is the Strategy
- Jamie Marsland: Launch Your Personal Portfolio-A Hands-On WordPress Workshop
- Ryan Welcher: The Block Developer Cookbook
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
Jeff Paul posted the members of the Release Squad for WordPress 6.9. It's a mix of community and sponsored contributors. Five squad members are from Automattic; two of them, Jonathen Bossenger and Ryan Welcher are first-timers, paired with longtime contributors on the Triage team and Test team.
In a personal blog post, Exploring work in progress for WordPress 6.9, Anne McCarthy selected a few features on their way to the WordPress 6.9 release and reported on their status. She followed fairly closely the Roadmap 6.9 post and shared updates and discussions that are happening right now, roughly two months away from Beta 1 on October 21.
Rae Morey, The Repository, reported on both publications in WordPress 6.9 Release Squad Named as Features Take Shape.
The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog 119-WordPress 6.8.2 and 6.9, Gutenberg 21.1, 21.2, and 21.3 Releases with Tammie Lister.

If you are listening via Spotify, please leave a comment. If you listen via other podcast apps, please leave a review. It'll help with the distribution.
Release lead Hector Prieto published What's New in Gutenberg 21.4 and highlighted
- DataViews table layout grouping and multi-selecting
- More on DataViews enhancements
- Style shuffling in write mode

In his August edition of the What's new for developers roundup post, Justin Tadlock has a vast array of released or upcoming updates for you to review. He also added three discussions you might want to chime in on if they are relevant to your work.
- Expanding the Core block library? It might be in the cards
- Proposing more theme.json settings control
- Discussion on "composite" blocks
You also learn about Playground updates and Theme related changes and interesting bug fixes. If you only have time to read one post this week, make it this one.
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Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
In previous editions of this newsletter, I mentioned the new Events plugin by Lesley Sim and Ahmed Fouad called EventKoi. It works natively with the block editor, supports recurring + multi-day events, and gives you beautiful calendar views out of the box. They are running a Founding Partner Lifetime Deal from Aug. 25-31 only. Learn more and get on the waitlist now.
Ajit Bohra and the team at LubusIN have shared their super cool Slider Block that they originally used for their own projects! Now, you can get it from the WordPress Plugin Directory, complete with a handy setup guide to help you get started.

The new plugin WPMozo Blocks and Addons by Elicus comes with a set of very fancy blocks like FlipBox, Image Card, Tilted Image, and some more. Each of them has also many design choices. If you need some interactive blocks on your site, it's worth checking out.
Theme Development for Full Site and Blocks
On the Developer Blog, Justin Tadlock wrote a tutorial on how to use a new extensibility feature to add custom social links to the block editor: Registering custom social icons in WordPress 6.9. If you want to test this for yourself before WordPress 6.9 comes out, make sure you install Gutenberg plugin 21.1 or newer.

I used this new feature to add podcast directory icons for my block theme on Gutenberg Times. The plugin will be in the WordPress repository as soon as I figure out this SVN version control thingy. The code is available on GitHub.

In her latest tutorial, Anne Katzeff, ASK Designs, explores the core Gallery block and shows how to arrange multiple images in a grid of rows and columns. She also mentioned the 'click to enlarge' feature. Katzeff then continues comparing the default gallery block with the one provided by Kadence Blocks.

Web developer Elliott Richmond delivers a thirty-year veteran's verdict: "Menus have always had one job… to help people find their way around a website." His manifesto against mega-menu bloat reveals hidden SEO penalties-link dilution, crawlability nightmares, and semantic confusion plague JavaScript-heavy navigation systems. Richmond advocates for WordPress's foundational principle: semantic simplicity over marketing spectacle. The prescription? Five to seven top-level items maximum, unified cross-device structure, and letting content-not navigation-handle conversion duties.
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.
Paulo Carvajal shared in his blog post how to build Blocks That Work Seamlessly with Block Themes and the Site Editor. He covers the paradigm shift where everything becomes blocks, emphasizing the importance of integrating with theme.json
design systems rather than using hard-coded styles. Key topics include responsive design integration, global styles compatibility, block patterns usage, and performance optimization for the evolving WordPress ecosystem.
Carvajal is also working on the block editor book called WordPress Editor and Blocks-A Comprehensive Guide.
In his livestream, Ryan Welcher let you in on Block Deprecation Secrets Only WordPress Experts Know as one of the Block Development Cookbook series. He cooked up a tasty recipe block and walked through the process of updating it with block deprecations-the secret ingredient to keeping your blocks fresh while maintaining compatibility with older content.
Brendan O'Connell started a video series talking about Remote Data Blocks. the plugin by the WordPress VIP team. Using it helps you connect the block editor to external APIs and sync data in real time to blocks. It also auto-registers custom blocks with a custom schema.
- In Part 1, O'Connell gives you an introduction.
- In Part 2 He covers using the plugin with an Airtable.
WordPressVIP also held a webinar highlighting the Remote Data Block. Rae Morey, The Repository, has the report for you. WordPress VIP Demos Its New Enterprise Suite: Remote Blocks and Parse.ly AI Updates
Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don't hesitate to send them via email or
send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.
For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com
23 Aug 2025 1:58am GMT
22 Aug 2025
WordPress Planet
Weston Ruter: Web Performance Milestone
A couple months ago, this blog reached a web performance milestone which I shared on LinkedIn, Bluesky, Mastodon, Twitter:
For the first time ever, I've just seen my blog appear in field metrics from CrUX (Chrome UX Report), albeit in desktop only and for the origin not an individual URL. Baby steps. In any case, Core Web Vitals Assessment: Passed
Yesterday, I checked PageSpeed Insights again, and I was excited to discover that my blog is now also appearing in field metrics for mobile as well! And like desktop, the CWV assessment is also passing for mobile. The eligibility criteria for the CrUX dataset includes that "there must be a large enough number of visitors in order to create a statistically significant dataset." Granted, my site is still only getting enough traffic for origin-level metrics, and I can't see field metrics for the homepage URL specifically, but it's another baby step! (Or maybe a toddler step?)
I've really been trying to double down this summer on tuning every bit of performance possible out of WordPress (on the frontend), using my site as a case study, and I've been sharing my findings in posts here. I hope the site traffic is an indication that the community has found my posts helpful. The learnings are also making their way into Performance Lab feature plugins as well as in performance improvements on the roadmap for WordPress 6.9. I have some more posts that I'm working on. You can subscribe to get them in your inbox.
On August 27th (next Wednesday) at WordCamp US 2025 here in Portland, Oregon, I'm giving a talk called "The Site Speed Frontier with Performance Lab and Beyond" at . I hope to see you there, but it will also be livestreamed and recorded. I'll be blogging an elaborated version of what I have time to share in my talk. (By the way, if you are attending in person, check out My Portland Picks post for what I recommend visitors check out!)
One takeaway I'll be emphasizing in my talk is that we needn't settle with sites merely passing the Core Web Vitals assessment or achieving a "perfect" 100 performance score in Lighthouse. Why be content with a good 2-second LCP when it could be half that or even practically zero? Web performance is a journey, and there's always room for improvement. I can see from my blog's field metrics, for example, that the TTFB is hovering around the threshold between "needs improvement" and "poor". In spite of this, the frontend is so tuned that on mobile the LCP-TTFB in CrUX is 400ms and on desktop it's only 100ms.
I personally love optimizing the performance of WordPress sites, but I get it that this isn't for everyone (nor should it be). By landing our improvements from the Core Performance Team, my hope is that WordPress core (and the ecosystem) will have best practices implemented by default so that site owners needn't worry about performance.
I had to take some PSI screenshots to memorialize the milestone:
Field Data via CrUX


Lab Data via Lighthouse


Where I've shared this on social media if you want to discuss there:
The post Web Performance Milestone appeared first on Weston Ruter.
22 Aug 2025 6:13am GMT
20 Aug 2025
WordPress Planet
Matt: Coyote Card Game
My good friend Tim Ferriss has launched a new card game with the Exploding Kittens folks, I just ordered it and you should do so too. It's a lovely way to share an evening with a few friends.
20 Aug 2025 11:07pm GMT