Oxygen released version 4.8.3 which is a security update. The security issue addressed is a privilege escalation vulnerability that would allow a user with “contributor” or higher permissions to escalate their privileges to an admin (CVE-2024-4662). This issue impacts anyone that has granted untrusted users Contributor+ access to their WordPress website. It does not affect you if you do not have Contributor+ users on your WordPress website.

Here is a nice design tutorial from Jeffrey Dalrymple. He shows how to create a subtle skeuomorphic (realistic 3d) effect that can be applied to buttons, cards, or other block elements. Elementor is used in the video, but the principles can be used with any builder.

Adam Preiser shares a preview of some quality of life enhancements coming in the free Spectra blocks collection. Some of these enhancements seem to have been inspired by Cwicly. It would be nice if all of them were included in core Gutenberg.

The WordPress org Themes Team is finding that reviewing block themes is much faster. Consequently, team members are helping out in other theme related areas. This was discussed in the latest team meeting along with steps to formalize the changes. One of these changes is to help theme authors transition to block based themes.

Lana Miro, the partnership manager for Crocoblock has written an ebook on the dos and don’ts on building WordPress partnerships. If you are starting a WordPress business then you’ll find some good tips on forming community relationships for promoting your products. The ebook is a free download.

It is good to see some progress on Phase 3 of Gutenberg, the collaboration phase. This is an experimental feature allowing for commenting on blocks, I imagine similar to Google Docs comments.

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.

Congratulations to the organizers of WordCamp Europe. They received the EU Parliament’s Patronage Award. “The European Parliament grants patronage to a limited number of non-profit events that have a clear European dimension and political importance to the Council of Europe. This award is a way for the Parliament to show its moral support for these events, which can increase public interest in the Parliament’s work and EU activities. Patronage is granted to an individual event for the duration of the event, and general information is provided about the organizer.” Google AI overview

It seems they’ve changed with every WordPress release. This article gives a high-level overview of the history and evolution block patterns.