Block Protocol Announces New WordPress Plugin Coming in 2023 – WP Tavern

Block Protocol, a project launched earlier this year to build a general-purpose block system, has announced that it will launch a new WordPress plugin in early 2023. It will allow users to embed Gutenberg-compatible interactive blocks. Considering WordPress’s footprint on the web (W3Tech estimates 43%), the plugin is an important milestone on the project’s roadmap to support more interoperable and open network of.

The Block Protocol plugin will enable users to access a global registry of interoperable blocks. These include interactive blocks for plotting, GitHub pull request overviews, timers, calculations, and more. After installation, users will see these blocks in the inserter. The latest version of blocks is always available to users without the need to update the plugin. The creators of Block Protocol have also released some new blocks along with plugins, including an OpenAI DALL-E-powered block for image generation and a GPT-powered block for text generation.

The announcement comes days after Matt Mullenweg’s State of the World 2022 speech, in which he was asked about Gutenberg’s possible collaboration with the Block Protocol project.

“Sometimes developers don’t like working together on the same thing,” Mullenweg said in response to this question. “So that’s part of the reason why there are 200 CMSs and things like that. Sometimes there might be a stylistic or technical change, and when you look at it, you’re like, ‘I can’t use this thing that exists. I’m going to Start something different. I think it’s a bit like what’s happening with Gutenberg and the blockchain protocol.”

Mullenweg confirmed that the projects have been in communication, but no agreement has been reached.

“They felt that some things, whether it was Gutenberg’s choices or the way we developed things, were incompatible with the way they saw things happen,” he said. “We’ll see what happens in the future. We’re trying to make it CMS-agnostic so it can be embedded in anything and re-skinned, like you can see in the Tumblr example, it can be completely different. We Everything that’s done is open, so I hope wherever they end up, if there’s a translation layer or something like that, you can embed Gutenberg blocks.”

Mullenweg is optimistic about the possibility of interoperability between the Gutenberg and Block Protocol specifications, allowing users to copy and paste blocks between applications.

“Maybe they created something really cool that was open source,” he said. “Then we were like, ‘Oh, let’s take this to Gutenberg,’ so innovation can flow both ways, which is sometimes only possible by starting from scratch.”

Since the Block Protocol project is open source and designed to be an open protocol, Mullenweg said he sees it “like a cousin project” and hopes that WordPress will integrate more in the future.

“If not, that’s okay,” he said. “Maybe it’s just an alternative ecosystem to try out new ideas or things that we might reject, they can try. Then we’ll see how it gets adopted by users.”

The first draft of the block protocol specification was incubated by the HASH team, an open source data, modeling and simulation platform. HASH is using a beta protocol. The current version of the specification will be deprecated starting with v0.3, which is expected to be released with the WordPress plugin in February 2023.

HASH CEO David Wilkinson said: “I obviously can’t speak to Automattic’s official thoughts on the blockchain protocol, but we are energized by the continued interest of the community.”

“Thanks to the open architecture of WordPress, we can first validate the block protocol as a plugin, allowing today’s users to access block protocol blocks in WordPress and build blocks themselves, not only for WordPress, but also for HASH and other blocks protocol embedders, and. Over time, we think the value of having a standard way to write blocks that work across applications will become self-evident.”

Wilkinson says WordPress is the most requested CMS for Block Protocol users because it’s the most widely used, but he also has a personal connection to the software.

“WordPress is close to me, and I love it,” he said. “I built my first website on it, worked on it for the better part of my life(!), and have great respect for the organization and operation behind it. It’s an obvious platform.”

The Block Protocol team has received over 50 requests for support from users of block-based applications, and the project is currently being voted on to help determine the next application on the roadmap.

While the Block Protocol and Project Gutenberg haven’t found an acceptable way to combine their efforts, WordPress users will get the best of both worlds with a new plugin coming soon. Currently, access to Block Protocol’s Block Center doesn’t offer any functionality over core WordPress and other native block plugins. Adding OpenAI-powered blocks will help make it more attractive, and the protocol’s ability to work across applications may lead to more interesting blocks in the future.

Block Protocol is currently recruiting beta testers for a new WordPress plugin. Those who are interested can sign up for early access.