The WooCommerce team has been working this year on a block-based theme as a successor to Storefront. It was apparently called “Purple.” It was about ready for release when the Woo team pulled it. They decided instead of include the patterns, templates and style variations in the WooCommerce plugin.

The most recent Kadence Live was a good session. If you are new to Kadence Pro theme and blocks then watch the first half as there is an overview of some of the things you can do with Kadence elements. The link here is for the second half where Ben talks about FSE and what’s coming in Kadence Blocks 4. There is some frank talk about FSE and some of why it is in the shape it is. The main event though is about global styles and how CSS is being handled in basically a two level process – advanced CSS options (variables) in the Style Book reflected in easy to use controls in the editor. Some nice stuff in the UI also.

In this video Tomi Harvanek talks about a free tool that designers all too often overlook.

Meta Box has added the ability to reorder posts, pages, and Custom Post Type articles without the need for an additional plugin. This feature is available in their Custom Post Type extension.

Jamie Marsland suggests that it is time for the WordPress project to shift direction and become something like an open source Lovable.

This article by Russell Beswick is an advanced developer discussion of Web Components and Shadow DOM. It will be of value to those working with Web Components and Shadow DOM, but for others it may not be of much interest.

Wes Theron created a video on how to use the Gutenberg core Group block. This video might be of interest to new users or those unfamiliar with working in Gutenberg.

We have now an overview of WordPress 6.9, which is targeting December 2nd for release. There are a lot of areas where improvements are planned, some of them are for developers and others will be user facing. Simplified editing and collaborative commenting are two of the more major areas.

It is good to see ElegantThemes creating this type of tutorial so that their users will be ready to make full use of Divi 5.