Studio, the local development environment from Automattic, is now available for Windows. It uses the Playground technology.

There is a push in the upcoming WordPress 6.6 release to make Gutenberg styles easier to override, even reducing the specificity down to zero. If I’m reading this correctly, it appears there may be some backwards compatibility issues.

Here is a comprehensive tutorial on creating a block from scratch. It’s fairly advanced and touches a lot of areas. The tutorial is from Ron Huereca and he chose a Gravatar block as an example to demonstrate REST calls and saving attributes.

ACF 6.3 Pro was released. It adds data validation for block fields and the ability to store block data in post meta. They are also bumped up the minimum PHP version to 7.4 and WordPress version to 6.0.

Brian Coords was using the Gutenberg Site Editor and Kevin Geary was using Bricks and ACSS. They were each to have 45-50 minutes to recreate a pre-selected part of the Ghost.org home page.

Brian began by introducing a custom block theme that he prepared for this stream. It was his starter theme where he added colors and maybe some spacing and other presets into theme.json.

I was surprised as I imagined that people would begin by picking a theme, but what we saw is that a custom theme is something a pro site builder might do. This was an “ah ha” moment that explains why pros using the Site Editor don’t understand the frustration others express … because they are working with the Site Builder as a theme developer or power user and using a totally different workflow.

Kevin showed how fast you can go with Bricks together with ACSS. He also talked about how a workflow using classes and CSS variables makes it easier to style consistently and to make changes down the road.

I think that people who were unfamiliar with Bricks and ACSS were just as surprised about this workflow as people who saw building with a custom block theme there were surprised by that approach to the Site Builder. So, there was an element of “what you are used to.” All in all, it was a very interesting session that was hosted by Mark Szymanski and Matt Eastwood.

The WordPress Playground has been gaining traction and its use is expanding. I learned that you can create “blueprints” so that when a Playground instance is launched you can load demo data, plugins, and themes. Here is a central page about blueprints. It has links to a guide for creating your own blueprint as well as to a gallery of blueprints that have already been submitted.

Good news, WS Form has added support for ACPT Custom Post Types and custom fields. You can now use the two together. Here is the announcement, which includes a link to a YouTube video on how to make a WS Form with ACPT and a coupon code for a 20% discount on WS Form.

Here is a developer resource – A searchable directory of WordPress filter and action hooks created by Tiffany Brown.