The Meta Box team shared a 2023 retrospective and plans for 2024. This year they intend to focus on improving MB Blocks, MB Relationships, and MB Custom Table.

The latest version of the Gutenberg plugin, 17.8, includes basic grid support. This version of Gutenberg (and this feature) won’t be in 6.5.

Anne McCarthy again – About a week ago she posted an article on her personal blog titled Overlapping Problems, which surfaced a number of rough spots with the content editor and site editor experiences.

Yesterday she hosted a Hallway Hangout which was attended by a broad spectrum of contributors, users, agency owners, etc. One thing that is interesting about this is that the Hallway Hangout functioned in an open-ended fashion to allow people to share their frustrations and suggestions.

The Make post has a summary of topics discussed and the full discussion is available with a YouTube video at the top of the post.

Beginning in May 2020, Automattic sponsored Anne McCarthy to run the FSE Outreach program. The idea was to encourage WordPress users to try new features and also to be a conduit to get non-core user feedback to the core team. The program has been a success, both in terms of providing better communication, but also as a tool for bettering community relations.

Now Anne is moving on to other tasks and the outreach program, which was originally seen as temporary, is being given a more permanent status as part of the testing team. Birgit Pauli-Haack will be the new lead.

Looks like Automattic is going to sell user blog, website and Tumblr content to OpenAI.

Performant Translations – Yet another set of features slated to be included in WordPress 6.5 are a number of big performance improvements with internationalization. Up to now these improvements have been being tested via a feature plugin.

Also included in this article on the Make blog is information on a new translation file format which you may begin seeing.

Cwicly has been out for more than two years, but I find that I am still in evaluation mode. My sense is that I’m not the only one. Cwicly has so many great features, so why aren’t more people using it? I take a look at one set of possible reasons in this article.

Creating and managing block patterns is pretty straightforward. Here is a tutorial on the process.