Gutenberg Times: State of the Word, WordPress 6.9, Forms styling, Interactivity API, and more — Weekend Edition 348

Hi there,

Next week is Release Candidate 1 week! Subscribe to the Make Core Blog, if you haven’t yet, to get all the Dev Notes and the Fieldguide notifications. “String freeze” is this state of the release called until the final release on December 2, 2025. It’s also the start of the last four weeks when the wonderful translators of the Polyglots team work to bring the new version to many dozens of languages.

This week was busy, too, though. I hope you enjoy all the good things below.

Yours,
Birgit

WordPress 6.9 is not the only major WordPress event on December 2, 2025. On this day, Matt Mullenweg‘s annual keynote, State of the Word, will be livestreamed from San Francisco, CA. It will take place around noon Pacific Time and will be recorded so the other half of the World can watch it on the rerun, so to speak. Being there in person is also possible with limited seating. You can request a ticket on the landing page. You might find a watch party near you or you can register your own party.

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

Carlos Bravo released Gutenberg 22.0, and in his post What’s new in Gutenberg 22.0? (5 November), he noted “Typically, the Gutenberg release following a WordPress point release focuses on core quality and bug fixes over new enhancements. As such, this will be a relatively quiet release.” He highlighted two things, both already slated for WordPress 7.0 and later.

1. Real-time Collaboration: Post Meta Synchronization
2. A new theme package

Anne McCarthy published an Update on Phase 3: Collaboration efforts (Nov 2025) and noted that WordPress Phase 3 focuses on making teamwork easier.

• Real-time collaboration lets multiple authors edit content simultaneously without conflicts.
• Block Notes, arriving in WordPress 6.9, allows users to add comments directly on content blocks.
• Behind the scenes, WordPress is rebuilding admin screens with new DataView and DataForm tools, which organize and display information better while letting developers customize them easily across different admin pages.

Rae Morey expands on this update in her article, Real-Time Collaboration Flagged for WordPress 7.0 Amid Ongoing Technical Challenges and includes additional information about the VIP plugin as well as this year’s progress.

Ellen Bauer joined me from New Zealand to record the next podcast episode with me Gutenberg Changelog #124. We talked a lot about WordPress 6.9, WordCamps, Block Themes and more. It’ll arrive at your favorite podcast app over the weekend.

The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #123 – WordPress 6.9 and Gutenberg 21.9 with Isabel Brison, core contributor. and JavaScript developer at Automattic.

WordPress 6.9

WordPress 6.9 Beta 4 is now available for testing. As always, the post shows you four different ways how you can start with your testing sessions.

Contributors decided on punting the enhanced template management features to WordPress 7.0. A few issues surfaced during testing sessions that can’t be resolved in the remaining time before string freeze with Release Candidate 1.

WordPress 6.9 Release Candidate 1 is scheduled for November 11, 2025, and so are the Dev Notes, updates for developers about the relevant changes:

• Interactivity API
• Abilities API
• Block Bindings API
• Streaming Block Parser
• Modernizing UTF-8 support
• Updates to the HTML API

JuanMa Garrido and Jonathan Bossenger, developer advocates at Automattic, invite you to join them for a Developer Hour: WordPress 6.9: developer updates on November 13, 2025, at 10 am UTC – It’s a bit early for US timezone’s though. The session will be recorded and appear shortly after on WordPressTV.

Styling form elements with the Block editor becomes much easier. Justin Tadlock posted a tutorial on the WordPress Developer Blog on How WordPress 6.9 gives forms a theme.json makeover. WordPress 6.9 introduces theme.json support for form styling on text inputs and select dropdowns, enabling designers to apply border, color, shadow, and spacing properties globally. However, focus states, labels, checkboxes, and other form elements still require custom CSS. This is just the beginning. Contributors are working on releasing more form styling options in the future.

Other articles on WordPress 6.9 features to come:

• Styling accordions in WordPress 6.9
• Border radius size presets in WordPress 6.9
• Registering custom social icons in WordPress 6.9

Dave Smith, core contributor on Gutenberg, explains in his video WordPress 6.9 FIXES Navigation Links the main change to the Navigation block in WordPress 6.9. Now the navigation links are dynamic and adopt automatically when you change a slug.

Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners

Steve Burge, Publish Press, announced the new version of Gutenberg Blocks (v 3.5.2). It brings a new feature to the block editor. “You can just create your own styles for any block.” A socalled Style builder is now available to create these style all no-code.

Velda Christiansen, member of the training team and support engineer at Automattic, held another workshop to teach WordPress users about Landing Pages, Posts & More: Strategies for a Stronger Site. It was a workshop on WordPress content strategies, demonstrating how to create effective landing pages through template customization. Christiansen addressed attendees’ technical questions and concluded by discussing hosting, email strategies, monetization options, and resources for further learning.

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

Iliana Mustafa, Digital Marketing Manager at HumanMade, shared by Why we embraced FSE for our own website redesign. “One of the biggest wins of the redesign has been how much ownership our marketing and content team now has over the site.” She wrote.

Johanne Courtright addressed a challenge with forms: providing styling controls for Gravity Forms in the block editor. In her blog post Making Gravity Forms Inputs Play Nice with Block Themes, she outlines her method, which includes converting Gravity Forms buttons to standard WordPress block buttons using PHP, applying scalable input styling with CSS custom properties, and offering nine color customization options in Gutenberg. This system keeps form input elements intact while enhancing Gravity Forms’ structure, allowing for proportional scaling through font-size changes and easy use as standalone styles or complete plugin integration.

On the WPTavern Jukebox, Nathan Wrigley interviewed Joshua Bryant on How Dow Jones Is Supercharging WordPress Editorial Workflows. They discussed how Dow Jones decoupled Gutenberg from WordPress Admin, embedding it into a standalone React application to accelerate breaking news publication. Bryant explained that Dow Jones operates Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and MarketWatch on WordPress Multisite but needed faster editorial workflows for time-sensitive content. He emphasized that discovering WordPress’s global WP object handling was challenging but revealed how well-engineered WordPress truly is.

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.

Carlo Daniele, Kinsta, helps you unlock new possibilities with the WordPress Interactivity API. “This API enables you to create blocks that react in real time to user interactions, allowing you to create rich user experiences and make your sites attractive, dynamic, and engaging.”, he wrote Daniele guides readers through the WordPress Interactivity API by explaining its core concepts, breaking down technical file structures, and then demonstrating practical application by building an interactive shopping cart block from scratch. He moves from theory to hands-on implementation with code examples and visual aids.

JuanMa Garrido introduced A DataViews-powered explorer for the Abilities API on his personal blog. He created an Abilities Dashboard prototype that combines WordPress’s Abilities API with DataViews, a React component system.

The Abilities API allows plugins to describe their capabilities in a machine-readable format for AI tools and automation. Building on Tammie Lister’s Abilities Explorer plugin, Garrido developed a client-side dashboard using DataViews, aligning with modern WordPress admin interfaces. His project demonstrates how DataViews can effectively display and interact with Abilities data, serving as a reference for this emerging intersection of AI and data management in WordPress.

Troy Chaplin, web developer from Ottawa, shared the Snippet: Limiting allowed blocks without breaking the Site Editor on the WordPress Developer Blog. “By scoping the allowed_block_types_all filter to post types and editor context, you keep the best of both worlds: editorial consistency for authors and full creative control for designers. A small change, but one that can save hours of confusion down the road.” he wrote in his conclusion.

Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don’t hesitate to send them via email or
send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.

For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com