How do you keep up with the Gutenberg project?

I get this question often and have written about this previously nearly four years ago when the site editor and phase 2 work was getting underway. Thanks in part to the immense amount of work the Sources of Truth are, I must keep up to date across many levels. What follows are the varying levels you can too, depending on the time you have and how much you really want to know. It goes from the highest level to the more atomic items. I don’t go completely granular as that feels excessive.

Pathways for information

WordPress.org Roadmap (highest level)

The WordPress.org Roadmap with Four Phases of Gutenberg. This is the highest level overview of the changes coming to WordPress.

Phase 3 kick off

In March 2023, Matías Ventura kicked off phase 3 with a series of posts that capture a large set of work across the project. This breaks down the next phase of Gutenberg (phase 3) and helps give a sense of what’s to come in the future. Expect Overview issues to be created for each of these areas in the next week or so. For now here’s a list:

• Phase 3: Sync Engine and Real-Time Collaboration
• Phase 3: Collaboration > Media Library
• Phase 3: WordPress admin redesign tracking issue
• Phase 3: Explore inline block commenting

Explore labels in Gutenberg’s GitHub repo meant for coordination

• Overview issues contain more context/strategy and narrative, often including multiple tracking issues to accomplish an area of work and existing across numerous releases. Here’s an example from phase 2.
• Tracking issues are more tactical, broken down into individual tasks and areas of work, and exist across a few releases. It should ideally be part of a breakdown from an Overview issue. Here’s an example for layout support.
• Iteration issues are to define iterations of a project in smaller deliverable packages, including the minimum requirements to ship the iteration as a whole in a WordPress release. It reflects more active work and often is pulled out of a list of items in a tracking issue unless the scope is small and it can pull work directly from an Overview. Here’s an example with overrides in synced patterns for 6.6.

I’m actively working on cleaning this up with a few others so expect these to be ever more reliable, clear, and organized. If you spot gaps missing, let me know.

Release Roadmap posts every few months

Release roadmaps are excellent for getting the main points of a release but you must keep in mind not everything will make it. If you want to know where momentum is in the project though, this is a great spot to check. There are releases 3-4 times a year. Each roadmap will link to the labels mentioned in the previous section. In particular, for 6.6, I expect specific iteration issues for each area of work.

Design share on Make Design

Design does an excellent recap of recent design work every two weeks. I think of this as a precursor to what might come and recommend checking it out to get a sense of what designers are thinking about, where work might go, and what’s in flight.

Gutenberg release posts on a biweekly cadence

If you check out this tag on Make Core, you can see what’s new to Gutenberg in each release. A lot of work has gone into leveling up these posts to provide more compelling visuals, descriptions, and highlights. This captures smaller chunks of work that’s actively shipped in the plugin. With each major WordPress release, we bundle 6-10 versions of Gutenberg into Core so this provides an easy way to look back at what’s to come in a release from the Gutenberg side (and is the basis for what I use for the source of truth work.

Weekly Core meeting recaps (most granular level)

Each Core meeting, I work others to provide an update on what’s happening across Gutenberg, both currently and in the future. You can view these notes here each week and expect to see a section there.

I’ll end on that last section as few need to be diving into individual GitHub labels, subscribing to PRs, etc. If that’s you and you want my thoughts there too, leave a comment! Happy to advise.

What I do

I must start by saying I don’t expect others to do this but, because I offer both high level recaps (roadmap posts, sources of truth) and more weekly updates to a few contributor teams (core, accessibility), I have to do some extra digging.

• Each week I try to review all new PRs and issues that were opened since the last week. I pull out anything interesting and throw it into my to do list for the task to “update core and accessibility teams”.
• I review every Gutenberg release post. This means reading through the release posts for every single item, not just the highlights.
• I review every Design share.
• I subscribe to every iteration issue in a release and (probably too many) tracking and overview issues on areas of interest. This means I get an email with any comment or change.
• I subscribe to a wide set of issues and PRs that are of interest, either because I’ve heard lots of feedback around it, am worried about it, or can’t wait to see an update.
• I test and use Gutenberg releases weekly, if not daily. This helps me see how the interface and functionality evolves.

These are all very granular actions and, at this point, are habitual. I have weekly to do list items for them. It’s what helps me run hallway hangouts, share weekly updates for teams, know whether an issue is open, draft roadmap posts, and compile the sources of truth because it all builds up. Not many folks need this level of granularity and spread across the project. For many, I’d recommend starting at the Overview/Tracking/Iteration level and going from there based on what you’re into.

Since this is so routine, it’s hard to know what would be interesting for folks to hear about so I’ll leave it there but know I welcome additional questions.