After a short break, we’ve returned with a new WordPress Watch. In today’s edition, let’s check out a cool new way to share your code in the block editor. We’ll also look at some nice updates to the Gutenberg project – which includes new features for the block editor in the next major release of WordPress. And, there’s some news regarding accessible themes on WordPress.org. Here we go!
Syntax highlighting code in the Block Editor
Up until now, it’s still been kind of a pain to share code with proper syntax highlighting in the Gutenberg block editor. I say up until now because Weston Rutter released a cool plugin that takes care of this wonderfully now.
Weston, who works at the WordPress team at Google, created a plugin that works in a very smart way. It doesn’t require extra JavaScript to be loaded to display the syntax highlighting. And, it works by extending the default WordPress code block. Additionally, you have a whole bunch of options to define what the syntax actually looks like. For instance, if you want it to look like how Github does its highlighting, that’s totally possible!
Interested to learn more? Check out the Syntax-highlighting Code Block plugin page.
WordPress.org themes see accessibility updates
The WordPress Theme Review Team has been pushing the standards towards better quality themes for a while now. One aspect that receives a lot of focus is the accessibility of the themes available on WordPress.org.
For example, the TRT recently announced that all themes will be required to add keyboard navigation. Another example is the requirement to include skip links.
Now, having Accessibility requirements is great, of course, but seeing them implemented by theme authors is where it’s at. I’m really happy to see tweets like this one by Alexander Agnarson from Alx Media, announcing that all of his themes are now making use of skip links. You can check out his themes here.
Gutenberg 6.2
We saw the release of Gutenberg 6.2 and with it came two new features that were added based on community feedback. The Cover & Image+Text blocks now allow for nesting any type of block inside.
Up until now, you could only add three specific elements. Namely, a button, heading, or paragraph block, to the Cover block. This resulted in people hacking their way around these restrictions.
The solution was fairly simple -removing the restrictions was basically all it took- and now users have greater flexibility in creating versatile Cover blocks.