The State of the Word Tokyo – a very professional presentation. Matias Ventura’s portion presenting the progress of Gutenberg is very good. They will be adding mobile responsive capabilities.

Stellar Spark is going on now. You don’t need to register. Here is the schedule page and there are links in it to the two streams, so you can drop in on the current presentations.

During Matt Mullenweg’s Summer Update at WordCamp EU he listed eleven principles for guiding the future of WordPress. In this article James Giroux reviews the list and provides his take on them.

Matt Mullenweg’s keynote presentation from WordCamp Europe has been released. It has some interesting topics. The WordPress Playground got a number of mentions. Overall, one of the main take-aways is that he wants to open WordPress for more innovation and creativity.

An interesting question and answer session with WordCamp EU attendees. An interesting reveal in the Q&A is that there are some attempts to manipulate the statistics at the top, for the most popular plugins.

This was interesting. Ben Ritner from Kadence used Kadence Theme and Kadence Blocks to create the home page of the Rolling Stone website. Justin Tadlock used Gutenberg for the challenge. They had 30 minutes to see how far they could get. It seemed like Ben was going a little faster and smoother. I was surprised that Justin didn’t work in the Site Editor, but in a page. He brought his own custom theme.

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.

Work is beginning on WordPress 6.6 and there was a “Hallway Hangout” today going over some of the work being done on Gutenberg and the Site Editor.

Advanced Custom Fields wins the Torque Plugin Madness competition for the third time. Congrats to the ACF team.