Exploring work in progress for WordPress 6.9

With the roadmap and release squad set, I’m already excitedly digging into what’s in progress for 6.9 ahead of attending WordCamp US. To make some of this behind the scenes fun more visible, I thought I’d try something new and share a quick update now that we’re coming up on a month since the roadmap was shared and we’re roughly two months away from beta 1 (62 days to be exact). If you’re wanting to get a sense of the current work in progress too, this post is for you. Note that I won’t cover every piece of 6.9’s roadmap so, if you want to go deeper, I recommend looking at the links shared under each top level item in the roadmap to learn more. I also won’t be overly explaining each feature so again refer to the roadmap for more context. I welcome questions and comments though! For much of these, I’m using the Playground Gutenberg PR previewer and Playground with Gutenberg installed.

Ability to hide blocks

A PR is underway to bring this functionality to Gutenberg with lots of work from Aki along with some latest design thinking shared in the overall issue itself. I’m particularly interested in how we can reuse a similar experience as the block locking flow as this feels like a similar, more advanced feature we need to have the right amount of friction for as it materially changes how one interacts with the blocks. Here’s a quick look at the current in progress PR so both get excited and expect things to change (especially around the visibility of a hidden block in the editor). The flow I’m trying to show is around someone testing a few different designs next to each other to get a sense of which might work best:

While writing this post and testing this PR, I was able to comment with feedback as I ran into some oddness when duplicating a hidden block and navigating between them, visibility wise. Again, this is a great way to give feedback and shape what’s being created at this stage once an initial version has landed.

Command Palette everywhere

The first iteration of this has shipped and will be included in Gutenberg 21.5 thanks to great work led by Aki. When this lands in the next Gutenberg release, please try it out and give feedback, in particular around what new commands are needed and how we can better organize the search results of the commands. Especially when we have more commands to cover more actions and plugins extend those options further, we’re likely going to need to iterate on what’s currently there. There are a few issues related to this:

• Add context to post type commands/consider bringing back more context to names of commands to make it easy to know what each command does at a glance.
• Consider adding keyword support for searching to ensure the right results are shown.
• Add support for identifying third party commands as more folks will likely adopt this paradigm.

What’s shown below is how the experience exists across different parts of the WordPress experience including wp-admin, the site editor, and post editor. The entirety of the flow is important to show in this case as we expand where it’s available and ideally the usefulness of it across all areas.

Even in making this quick video, I ended up opening two feature requests (Add “Site Editor” and “Editor” options & Add “Dashboard” option to return to wp admin) so please help use and test this!

Block commenting

As of this week, new issues have been opened and the work broken down to the scope of this release. Excited to see work get underway to iterate on what’s been started! Here’s a quick demo of what’s currently in place as an experiment in the Gutenberg plugin. In it, I used commenting as I would in a Google doc when writing a longer post, leaving little notes for myself scattered about. You’ll see the current flow is rudimentary but functional. Note that to test this feature you need to use the latest version of Gutenberg and turn on in Gutenberg > Experiments the Collaboration: add block level comments option.

Simplified site editing

A big part of implementing a simplified site editing experience is ensuring key blocks have strong default options for what is and isn’t editable. A few blocks in particular are trickier than others: query loop block and the navigation block. For the latter, there are a few PRs underway to begin offering a solution, including Explore Alternative Navigation Block Write Mode UX via Content Panel and Navigation Block: Make selectable in Write Mode. Both of these are two different ways to approach the same problem. Note that to test these options you need to both preview the PR and turn on in Gutenberg > Experiments the Simplified site editing option.

Here’s a look at the first option:

Here’s a look at the second:

Once more in testing this, I left a bit of feedback on the latter PR, including around removing the ability to bold or italicized menu items as styling in that way doesn’t make sense for this more simplified mode.

Expanded template management

The main PR powering this functionality remains underway and is in a great state to help provide early testing. What’s more recent is a new discussion around providing a template versioning system that “would allow plugins and themes to safely update their block templates without breaking existing sites.” I’m very keen to see where this discussion and proposal ends up as it’s a problem that’s come up when talking to a wide range of folks from plugin authors, theme authors, and agencies. If this problem sounds familiar, please chime in and follow along! For the following demo, I kept it simple and showed activating/deactivating templates but keep in mind this PR does a lot more including resolving some issues with revisions, adding the ability to create a template without immediately activating it, and ensuring custom templates are retained when switching themes.

We’ll need a lot of testing and feedback when this PR lands so stay tuned here.

Various dev updates

Block bindings

A new filter was added, block_bindings_supported_attributes_{$block_type}, that allows extenders to customize which of a given block’s attributes are supported by Block Bindings.

HTML API

• WP_HTML_Processor::serialize_token() landed in trunk for WordPress 6.9. This makes it possible to extract a normalized version of a token inside a document.
• wp_is_valid_utf8() landed in trunk for WordPress 6.9, providing a fast and universal spec-compliant UTF-8 validation. 

Abilities API

In the dedicated repo for the Abilities API, various PRs have been merged including Implement server-side registry for Abilities API, Add REST API controllers for Abilities API, and scaffold plugin entrypoint and tooling for setting up essential tooling and infrastructure. This culminates in a draft PR that tests how the proposed implementation for the Abilities API integrates with WordPress Core.

Interactivity API

From the last update on the iteration issue, “work for the initialization logic review and for supporting lazy-loaded derived state is in progress.”