Gutenberg 6.4, WP Local Environment and WP Notify progress

Lots of noteworthy news from WordPress land over the last week. Gutenberg is back on our radar with a new version. I’ll also highlight a new project that’s underway that aims to find a better solution for all those notifications in your WordPress Dashboard. And, there are bonus links. Of course! Let’s dive straight in!

Gutenberg 6.4

The Cover Block saw two new significant functionalities in Gutenberg 6.4. You can now resize the Cover Block and it’s also possible to use a solid color as a background instead of a video or an image.

There are many more small improvements that made it into Gutenberg 6.4 and it’s good to know all of these delightful new features and options will be included in the upcoming WordPress 5.3 release.

WordPress Local Environment progress

At the beginning of August this year, the WordPress Local Environment was introduced. Gary Pendergast gives us an update on the progress of that project on the Make WordPress Core blog. The next step was to make this new development tool available for the Gutenberg development environment.

Go ahead and try out the new Gutenberg Local Environment, and if you come across any issues, please report them over on the Gutenberg repository.

WP Notify progress

One of the most exciting projects currently underway is the WP Notify project. Its aim is to provide much better handling of any and all notifications you can typically find in your WordPress Dashboard.

Jonathan Bossenger has taken the lead on this project and gives us frequent updates over on Make WordPress Core as well. If you haven’t checked out what the idea behind WP Notify is exactly, you should definitely check out his first recap post. You’ll get a good feel of where the project is headed.

New Prevent Search Engines setting

WordPress 5.3 will introduce a new and much better setting to prevent search engines from indexing sites. Our very own Jono Alderson was involved in making this happen. Read more in this introduction post on Make WordPress Core.

Bonus links

• StudioPress released Genesis 3.1 and it has bumped the minimum requirements across the board. It will need WordPress 5.0, PHP 5.6 as a minimum, higher and up-to-date if obviously even better.
• Carrie Dils wrote up a wonderful recap of the biggest changes in the Genesis Framework of late, and how to work with them.
• The WooCommerce Admin plugin I mentioned in a previous roundup, was recently updated and is expected to be merged into the next major WooCommerce version. This would be WooCommerce 3.8.

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