Since the new WordPress editor was released last December, lots of new improvements happened in the “Gutenberg editor world” and we finally feel ready to give you a little update on what we’ve been working on over the past weeks.

Our themes are Gutenberg-ready

In the first step we prepared Gutenberg-ready updates for all our newer themes (here you can find an overview of our theme updates). In addition, we have decided to retire some of our oldest themes.

I will write a separate blog post regarding our older themes in a few days. For now Bugis, Nilmini, Piha, Nori, Pohutukawa and Kerikeri are no longer available for sale. We will make the themes available on Github soon. This way everyone can use the themes for free and further develop them if needed.

New projects we have been working on

The new Gutenberg editor is a pretty big step into the future for WordPress. Therefore we thought a lot about what is the best way for us to react to these new developments, especially in regard to WordPress themes and WordPress website design.

We asked ourselves what contribution we can make in order to help build modern, fast, durable and beautiful looking websites with WordPress and the new block concept. It became clear to us that we don’t want to lose the control of the layout options available to us and that we will need to create our own collection of Gutenberg blocks.

After a few months of work, the first version of our block plugin is almost ready. The plugin will be a free plugin, which we will publish here on our website and as soon as possible also on WordPress.org.

It is most important to us to create clean, easy to use blocks with all the options that we think are necessary in order to create modern and flexible designs in combination with our themes. I hope you’ll like our work, we can’t wait to share our Gutenberg blocks with you.

Will we also release a new theme?

In addition to the Gutenberg updates for all newer Elmastudio themes and the continuous development of Pukeko (our first Gutenberg-ready theme), we have also started working on a completely new theme. This new theme will be released together with our Gutenberg blocks.

We developed this new theme especially for the new Gutenberg editor and our Elmastudio blocks. The theme will be a freemium theme, so everyone can try and use the new theme in a free standard version.

Pukeko will also get a big theme update with WooCommerce support and support for our own Gutenberg blocks very soon. This new update will allow it to use the Pukeko business page templates without the need of the Elementor page builder plugin. Everything can be build only in the Gutenberg editor.

What is our time schedule?

After a bit of a coding and design marathon over the last weeks we are almost ready to share our new projects with you. The plan is to have all projects released before the WordCamp Europe starts on June 20. It will still take a while until our plugin and our new free theme will be available at WordPress.org, since the review process there can take several weeks or even months for themes. However, we will already make the plugin and theme available on the Elmastudio website for you to use.

We need your feedback

We hope this little update from us is helpful for you. I know that some of you have already waited for news from us. For everyone who is interested in becoming a beta tester for our new theme or our block plugin, please let me know in the comments section (I’ll get back to you next week with more information).

It would be amazing if some of you would like to help us by providing feedback and bug reports to further improve our new WordPress projects.

Image credit: Icon from Flaticon.