A very nice, beginner friendly guide to debugging JavaScript.

The WordPress dot org theme directory was refreshed and is now block based. There is no functionality differences to the previous version, but the post said that new features were coming.

Beta 1 for Oxygen 4.9 is available. It adds a right-click menu for common actions, the Advanced Query now supports multiple properties for the orderby parameter, and it is now possible to add arbitrary, custom query parameters using the Advanced Query option.

Here is a table showing the CSS options per Gutenberg block. If you compare it to the list from 6.1, which is linked in the post, it seems that most blocks got 2-3 additional style options.

The theme.json file, which is used in block and hybrid themes, is getting a bump to version 3 in order to account for some default font and spacing size changes.

WordPress has an API for storing and loading options, the Options API. Some changes to the Options API are coming with WordPress 6.6. One of the settings when creating an option is if the option should be auto loaded with each page. Up until now, the default when an option is created was “yes” to auto load it. However, a large amount of auto-loaded data can hurt page performance. The default is being changed to “null” and a ceiling on the size of auto-loaded options is being introduced. These and other changes are discussed in this article on the make blog.

Coming in a month, WordPress 6.6 introduces overrides in synced patterns. This brings a components-like feature to the block editor and is a very useful enhancement. In this article on the developer blog, Nick Diego gives a full walk-through of synced pattern overrides and how to use them.

For Plugin Developers – WordPress 6.6 standardizes the API for extending the Gutenberg editor so that the same API calls work in the content editor and the Site Editor. This should simplify the process of adding Gutenberg support.

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.