A couple of WordPress 6.5 release blockers surfaced, one related to the Font Library and the other related to Synced Pattern Overrides. Here is a discussion of the issues, together with the decisions. The short version is that the Font Library will be included in 6.5 and Synced Pattern Overrides will be pushed to 6.6.

Beyond these two issues, the discussion brings to light future plans for block themes. There are plans for “composability” for block themes. From Wikipedia: “Composability is a system design principle that deals with the inter-relationships of components. A highly composable system provides components that can be selected and assembled in various combinations to satisfy specific user requirements.” The news here is that the plan is to allow block themes to be split into components and allow users to swap components (such as fonts) without changing themes.

For Theme Developers – Justin Tadlock has a tutorial on how to add page and template starter patterns to your theme.

The 5th installment in Adam Lowe’s series on creating block themes was released. This video is on the shorter side and looks at using a child theme.

For Block Theme developers – Brian Coords looks at the possibilities for tracking block theme changes.

The Theme Handbook is undergoing a significant overhaul in 2024, with a focus on modern block theme development. The project aims to refresh the handbook content and has made substantial progress, publishing or drafting almost two-thirds of the new material.

Adam Lowe has started a video series about building block themes. The first video has a nice walk-through of the Site Editor and overview of block themes. This series looks to be a great resource for people interested in the Site Editor and block themes. Highly recommended.

Here is a good comparison / contrasting look at classic and block themes.

The Theme Team at WordPress org has developed a draft proposal of guidelines for a theme onboarding process. This follows the discussions about the original onboarding wizard from the Ollie Theme that was moved to a plugin.

Block Theme Development – There is a cool plugin called Create Block Theme that allows you to export a new theme or a child theme based on site styles and templates created using the Site Editor.

There have been a couple of improvements to the plugin which include the ability to select, preview, and manage theme fonts, and changes to make it easier to export. These changes are shown in this short video by Jonathan Bossenger.