Is there a roadmap for create-block-theme to align with Core updates?

[jaidevel]

First, thanks for this awesome dev tool!

I've used it on several projects over the past 6 months, after deciding to move away from third-party page builders and embrace WordPress Core more fully. Clients love it (!) — and it actually gives us, the developers, more control again. We can guide (or gently force) site owners to stay within the design specs, reducing the chances of them breaking the layout. (Well, some clients always manage to find a way... what can you do?)

I'm curious about the roadmap for this plugin. WordPress Core keeps evolving with new best practices and features that aren't yet reflected in the plugin. For example: saving styles to theme using var:preset|spacing|small instead of var(--wp--preset--spacing--small).

I'd love to see this plugin stay as hot and up-to-date as Core itself, closely tracking the latest best practices in the block theme paradigm. Big +1 for aligning updates with the Core release cycle!

[pbking]

Regarding the best practices of the theme.json files: all of that is more-or-less directly exported from WordPress, so however those attributes are exported is how CBT has always saved it. So, that's kind of up to the Core team to change what is exported. While it could definitely be possible to do some post-processing on the output to align it with changes to best practices that opens up the project even more to the potential of being stale.

Ultimately, the roadmap for CBT is to... not exists I guess. I've generally seen it more as a stop-gap for the tooling that I want Core to have out-of-the-box.

In the meantime (and maybe forever...) that won't happen and CBT can continue to be a place to experiment and improve that tooling.

That said, the plugin does need to see continuous improvement as Core involves, so aside from the theme.json best practices there's always plenty more to focus on.j

Were there other areas that you believe CBT should better align with as Core advances?

[jaidevel]

@pbking Thanks for your clear answer! That makse total sense.

I really like the idea of CBT being a living playground for pushing block theme tooling forward.

Regarding your question:
Besides the theme.json syntax improvements, one thing that comes to mind is better handling of style variations.
Since WordPress Core is pushing style variations more heavily (especially now with the improved Style Book and style switching UX), it would be great if CBT could make it easier to create, edit, and export /styles/*.json variations as part of the workflow.

Also, since WordPress 6.8 introduced the new Styles UX, it's a bit less intuitive to use CBT directly from the editor.
Previously we could access CBT options from the main Styles view — now we have to open a template first and access it from there.
Not a huge issue, but maybe worth considering if there's a way to make the UX a bit more streamlined in the future.

Thanks again for all the work on this awesome tool!

[jaidevel]

@pbking Another awesome addition would be to add filters and actions to key functionality throughout the plugin. Last time i checked there were none.