Gutenberg with Birgit Pauli-Haack

In this episode, I talk to Birgit Pauli-Haack about the WordPress block editor, Gutenberg. Birgit is the self appointed cheerleader for the Gutenberg project, she runs the Gutenberg Times website and is the host of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. In this episodes we talk about how agencies should think about Gutenberg and what the future of the project looks like.

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Transcript of this episode (automatically generated)

Today I'm really excited to have Birgit Pauli-Haack on the show. Birgit runs her own podcast called Gutenberg Changelog. Gutenberg is of course the code name for the WordPress block editor. And I thought Birgit would be the perfect person to bring on, to talk about blocks. Birgit is also the  founder of Pauli systems.
And you can find her on Twitter at BPH. That's the three-letter Twitter handle right there. Before we begin the episode, I want to tell you a bit about Branch. Branch is my business and the sponsor of this podcast. It's the simplest way to set up automated deployments for your WordPress sites. We've got your back with the recipes for all the common workflows that the WordPress developers need making it super easy and fun, honestly, to build out your deployment pipelines.
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We started this episode by talking about Birgits involvement with Gutenberg. Okay, Birgit, so do you want to tell us how you got involved with Gutenberg? Well, after three years, I'm pretty much the self appointed cheerleader for the product. It seems, but I'm not alone anymore, but in June, 2017, that was the first time I saw the first demo video at WordCamp Europe in Paris.
And I thought this was the biggest innovation since, um, yeah, I have a battle. What you see is what you get editor as developer, as, as content creator and try to teach people things so Gutenberg or the block editors it's called now has been a real revelation for me as that. So I wanted to learn everything I could about it.
And also see what the people in the community did with it. So I collected all the updates that went up many at the first, but then coming closer to what came to us 2017, there were quite a few people experimenting with the block. Editor was building blocks, was making the seams work and all that. My updates were on Storify and Adobe, the owner of story five announced in December, 2017, that they will discontinue story five in may of 2018.
And I said, Oh man. Yeah, again, never build on rented land. Um, so sooner or later, so it turned out. I also have many requests to actually. Build a newsletter around the updates on good Morgan block editor. So it was time to build a website and in January, 2018, couldn't work times came about. And then where I update things, I have a weekly newsletter that goes out on Saturday and noon.
Most of the time, sometimes it's an hour later, sometimes a day later, depending how my weekend goes. And, um, but it's in the 140. Four edition comes out next Saturday. Wow. We also have live Q and A's with people who have a workforce. Yeah. Mostly practitioners or from the Gutenberg team that have worked as good and work and have done new websites or are a publisher that uses it, or it's the block directory team telling us how that came about or it's the theme developers that.
All working on the block-based theme. And once in awhile, update us how this all works. So the video is all, most of the time have a transcript on our website, including also the resources that we mentioned in the conversation. So that's definitely a very good source for someone starting out to just go back and look at those videos.
And then in June, or may. 2019, I was in contact quite a bit with a Maki reign, who is a designer on the team, and I've just flat out, asked him, do you know, every two weeks we have this wonderful updates on a Gutenberg plugin, and we only scratched the surface on, or what's published, but not going deeper into what are the bug fixes?
What are the enhancements? What are the documentation updates and the change log. Came up out the Gutenberg changelog podcast we have now recorded 30 episodes and 9.2, we will record the 31st one, which also will have updates. What will be in replace 5.6 and what we'll be in public beta. We're still on the plugin.
So that's, um, what couldn't work times. Nice. Yeah, that's a lot right there. We shouldn't really call it good and Berg really these days. Right? Or what do you think about that? That was the code name in the beginning. It is the Lakota name. Yeah, kind of because the block editor is actually the official name.
Now, as soon as it's in court, that's the stuff that's emerged into WordPress right now. In WordPress, we don't have to install a plugin that you can use out of the box. And the Gutenberg plugin is where all the development happens and is released. Um, and people who have the plugin installed are pretty much using that to also test new features and give feedback, actually, some of.
The more braver people actually have the Gutenberg plugin on production sites to have the newest features actually tested in production, which is the ultimate test of your risk-taking measures. And it has been pretty stable. Yeah. What comes out and. It wouldn't look plugin unless you go to the experiments, which is a subsection.
So there is a plugin with all the new things that come to the block editor with your posts and pages, and then they'll the experiments in the plugin that you have to turn on. And that's really the place where you can get yourself in trouble. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, I think it would be awesome if we took a step back maybe, and just in a few sentences, just explained what Gutenberg is and how it's different from what was already there.
Because it worked for has already had an editor for adding posts and pages, but now we have Gutenberg or the block editor and maybe the name implies what it is maybe. But, uh, do you want to briefly just explain to people. Just the core differences. Sure. The core difference between the classic editor and the block editor, the classic editor, when you open it up is a white canvas and you have a toolbar on top and you can do any additional magic layouts.
I call them. So if you want to do a cover section on your. Post or page, you would need a plugin. If you want to do a media next to texts, you need a plugin. And if you want a gallery, you could either use the build in gallery from cool or a plugin. So you know where this was going. So the block editor, the tool set for content creators just exploded.
You get blocks. So you have a paragraph blocks. You have a list block, you have a media block, an image block, a video block. Audio blog. Yeah. All kinds of blogs that all help you display your content in a more attractive way than just a ...