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.

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.

Joost on the fear marketing of WordPress security.

Today the LifterLMS team announced a new page builder called Aircraft. Digging into the announcement I see that Aircraft is actually a set of attractive Gutenberg patterns designed for LMS sites. This is a clever idea and I imagine we will see more companies offering pattern packs.