The 19th issue of the WP Perspectives Newsletter has been published. There are currently nine Gutenberg block collections that work in the Site Editor. In this issue I rank and group them in relation to their support for dynamic data and also list some comparison points.

This 6.4 retrospective survey had some interesting responses that gives insight into the release process and possible changes.

Block Theme Development – There is a cool plugin called Create Block Theme that allows you to export a new theme or a child theme based on site styles and templates created using the Site Editor.

There have been a couple of improvements to the plugin which include the ability to select, preview, and manage theme fonts, and changes to make it easier to export. These changes are shown in this short video by Jonathan Bossenger.

DeliciousBrains has an in-depth tutorial on installing WordPress in a subdirectory.

Block themes get their settings from the theme.json file and classic themes can use them also. Jamie Marsland has published a good resource article about the theme.json file. He does a walk-through of the theme.json file for the Twenty Twenty-Four theme and explains the various sections and settings.

For PHP developers – New features and improvements in PHP 8.3.

A change was made in WordPress 6.4 to how the main loop is handled in block themes. This might impact blocks that use the query loop.

WooCommerce team is going all in on the “blockification” of WooCommerce. To help in communicating these changes they have started to share monthly updates, or “extensibility snaps.” I noticed from the comments in the October update that it appears that 3rd party developers may need to re-integrate their plugins to work with the new blocks.

Creating Block Themes – A section has been added to the Them Handbook on block templating. It shows how the WordPress block template system works, how to build custom templates and parts and include them in a theme.