WordPress Gutenberg 22.7 Adds AI-Powered Publishing Tools
▼ Summary
– Gutenberg 22.7 introduces custom CSS selectors for block developers, allowing Global Styles to target specific inner elements of a block.
– The update adds a live preview for style variation transforms on core blocks, letting users see changes before applying them.
– A new “Connectors” admin page is added for managing AI keys and credentials, though it is currently experimental.
– A new “Content Guidelines” feature provides a central place to define site-wide content rules, serving as a foundation for AI and human consistency.
– Real-time collaboration is now enabled by default to align with WordPress 7.0, while respecting any existing user preferences.
The latest release of the WordPress Gutenberg editor, version 22.7, introduces a suite of enhancements designed to refine the user experience and lay a crucial foundation for upcoming artificial intelligence integrations. This update focuses on providing developers with greater control over styling and offers users more intuitive previews, all while establishing new administrative tools to manage AI connections and content standards. These changes collectively prepare the platform for a more intelligent and consistent publishing workflow in the future.
For those building custom blocks, a significant improvement arrives with the ability to define custom CSS selectors within the block.json file. This advancement means Global Styles can now target specific inner elements of a block, such as a particular link or span tag, rather than being confined to styling only the block’s outermost container. This grants developers much finer-grained control over the appearance of complex block structures directly through the site’s global styling system.
Users working with core blocks will notice a more visual and immediate editing process. The editor now provides a live preview for style variation transforms on blocks like Heading, Image, Paragraph, and Button. This allows you to see exactly how a different style will affect the block’s appearance before you officially apply the change, reducing guesswork and streamlining design decisions. This preview functionality is also extended to patterns when using the contentOnly editor mode.
A major portion of this update is geared toward the future of AI-assisted publishing. A new “Connectors” admin page has been added under Settings, providing a centralized location for users to view and manage their AI service keys and credentials. This experimental feature also includes extension hooks, allowing third-party plugins to integrate their own AI connectors into this unified interface.
Perhaps the most forward-thinking addition is the Content Guidelines feature. This acts as a centralized repository within WordPress where site owners can define and manage comprehensive content rules. These guidelines cover aspects like brand voice, structural rules, image standards, accessibility requirements, and linking policies. By moving these standards from external documents into WordPress itself, the feature ensures they are discoverable and actionable. This system creates a single source of truth for content standards, promoting consistency across all authors and, critically, providing essential guardrails and context for AI tools. The feature includes capabilities for importing, exporting, and revising guidelines, making them portable across different sites and environments.
Finally, to align with the upcoming WordPress 7.0, Real-Time Collaboration is now enabled by default in the editor. This change will not override a user’s previous explicit choice to disable the feature. Alongside these headline additions, Gutenberg 22.7 includes a variety of other bug fixes and performance improvements.
(Source: Search Engine Journal)
