The Gutenberg Update

After two months of weekend work, I’m very happy that all of my WordPress themes now feature support for Gutenberg – the new editing experience in WordPress.

Ever since the plans for a new editing experience in WordPress started taking shape into Gutenberg, I knew that I had a lot of theme updates in my future. Editor styles for Gutenberg would need to be added. I would need to check that the existing entry content styles worked with the new Gutenberg formatting options. Finally, I would need to add styling for all of the new blocks introduced in Gutenberg. It’s not a ton of work, but I would need to do it not once, but 18 times – once for each of my themes on WordPress.org.

I didn’t relish the task, so I kept pushing it down the todo list. I pushed it from spring to summer, and from summer to fall. I pushed it until the November 20th release date was announced, at which point I realized that I couldn’t keep pushing it anymore. I got to work. With the upload of version 1.11 of Sullivan this morning, that work is finally done. All of my themes have now been updated with Gutenberg support.

What’s included?

The Gutenberg updates of my themes include the following:

  • Gutenberg editor styles, with layout, typography and colors matching the theme
  • Custom font sizes and color palette in the editor
  • Styling for the blocks introduced in Gutenberg
  • Additional style updates to make the new alignment options work for all elements

There are no custom blocks or other fancy stuff to be found in the updates, but if you’re running one of my themes, you should be able to update to WordPress 5.0 and start using Gutenberg without any hitches, in the editor or on the front-end. If you plan to keep using the classic editor, things should look mostly the same after you install the update. The old editor styles for TinyMCE are still there, as is the styles for the non-Gutenberg content elements.

It’s been more than five years since I released my first theme, Lingonberry, on WordPress.org. Looking through the code in those early themes is simultaneously encouraging (I’ve learned some things!) and depressing (I knew nothing!), so I took the Gutenberg updates as an opportunity to dust off my old themes a bit.

The non-Gutenberg adjustments include:

  • Overall code cleanup
  • Better support for PHP versions older than 5.5
  • Accessibility and localization improvements
  • Various style tweaks and bug fixes

According to Github, the updates consist of 17,525 lines of code added or modified. If you’re interested in exactly what has changed in each theme, you can find the changelog for the most recent version of each one in the list below. If you want even more details, you can view a diff for each update in the Theme Reviews Trac.

Changelogs

It’s easy for niggles to slip by when you’re doing this many updates in this short amount of time, so if you’re using one of my themes and run into any issues after the updates, please let me know through the WordPress.org support forum for the theme in question.

The past couple of weekends have been gruelling, but knowing that my themes will be ready for WordPress 5.0 – whether it hits the November 20th release date or not – was worth it. Here’s to another five years. 🍻