WordPress 5.0 is on the horizon, and nothing in WP history has faced as much backlash as the inclusion of Gutenberg in WP 5.0 core. While the powers that be in the core development team portray Gutenberg as the light at the end of the tunnel, an overwhelming number of developers and users are of the opinion that the light is that of an oncoming freight train rather than one of hope.
I have written about my initial impressions about Gutenberg in the past and I will not endeavour to do so again. I do want to voice my disappointment with the poor quality of support and documentation around Gutenberg, though. On the one hand WP wants everyone to embrace Gutenberg with open arms. And on the other, it has made it extremely difficult for advanced plugins to operate with Gutenberg. Issues and support queries go unanswered for weeks if not months, there are JS errors that pop up in the JS console, and the code doesn’t do what the documentation says it should.
In any case, Gutenberg WP 5.0 is scheduled to be released on 27th November, and if it does, well, that is what this post is about. Version 2.10 of Photonic has just been released and this is what is included:
- Gutenberg Support:
Just in case it wasn’t clear from all that I have written above, this release has Gutenberg support. Do see the documentation before you attempt to use “Convert to blocks” though. Also refer to the dashboard menu item, Photonic → Prepare for Gutenberg. - Shortcode Replacement:
Gutenberg implementation necessitated that users should be able to change existing Photonic-specificgalleryto another shortcode before attempting to “Convert to blocks”. For this purpose there is a shortcode replacement utility bundled under Photonic → Prepare for Gutenberg. - Advanced Settings:
I have added a new sub-section under Photonic → Settings → Generic Options, called “Advanced”. Under this:- I have moved the SSL and performance logging options there.
- I have added an option to increase the cURL timeout for cases where the connection between a server to the photo provider is slow.
- I have also added an option to turn on debug tracing. So far this only helps print out the entire response in the interactive workflow.
- I have put in some performance optimization to make calls to Flickr collections in parallel. This helps reduce the time taken to fetch a collection.
- Bug Fixes:
The following bugs have been fixed:- The default album search by user was failing for SmugMug galleries. This should be alright now.
- I have also fixed an issue where the
layout='strip-above'setting was not working for the slideshow layouts.
Hope you enjoy this release of Photonic!