Shaping WordPress: Zoom Out & New Blocks
Welcome to Shaping WordPress, where I share every couple weeks what’s top of my mind and what’s shaping up for WordPress. If you haven’t already, subscribe.
One big thing I’m working on
It’s not uncommon for website builders to offer a perspective that allows you to see more of your site by stacking sections of a page together. In WordPress, these are called “Patterns.”
I envision a similar experience within WordPress, especially as patterns continue to become more and more significant for the WordPress page building experience.
Composing pages with patterns from a zoomed-out view reduces the granularity of editing, while further simplifying selection, rearranging, removing, and styling of entire sections of a page at a time—providing more confidence that a design is coherent and visually appealing.
This is much more than a different perspective, but rather a first iteration towards a “simple mode” for editing sections of a page at a time and composing new pages. On that front, it would be interesting to explore engaging content-only editing as you select a section of a page to edit when zoomed out.
Blocks I’m building
I’ve started sharing the blocks I built for my blog because I find them interesting and believe you might learn something new by checking out the code. Your suggestions for improvement are also welcome—it’s a learning opportunity for both of us.
I recently built a dark mode toggle block and a cards block, each using different techniques to showcase various methods for building WordPress blocks. I also have a video on YouTube where I cover the basics of building a dynamic block with the help of ChatGPT.
There’s a few more blocks I’m working on, including the Comments Avatars block and the Link Card block, both of which you can see on my posts page.
Other bits I’m pushing forward
- I’m still pushing for more consistent root padding so that toggling on content width adds root padding, and patterns don’t need to hard-code padding which disrupts the global styles layout padding functionality. I would appreciate it if you could take a look and see if you notice anything unusual with any existing themes or patterns.
- There’s a good discussion happening around reducing CSS specificity in WordPress 6.6. The goal here is to make it easier for you to override core editor styles, which also supports the section styles effort.
- As a bit of a side-quest, I’ve been working on a few tiny details for the upcoming WordPress 6.6 release, like interface skeleton shadows and simpler block outlines. I’ve been looking forward to cleaning these interface edges for some time now.
WordCamp I’m attending next
I’ll be leading the Design table for Contributor Day and just may be participating in my friend Jamie Marsland’s live, in-person WordPress Speed Build Challenge.
It’ll be one for the books. Will I see you there?
That’s it for now.
If you’re finding this newsletter helpful, please share it with a friend. I’d love to hear your thoughts—feel free to reply here or reach out to me on X/Twitter. Is there anything you want to read more, or less, of? Thanks.
Rich