PublishPress Has Acquired the Advanced Gutenberg Plugin (and Theme)

Update: this plugin is now called “PublishPress Blocks”.

---

In February this year, I received an email from the team at JoomUnited. We’ve crossed paths several times over the last decade or more. This time, they had an offer:

“Would you be interested in taking over the Advanced Gutenberg plugin?”

Advanced Gutenberg is a plugin that adds over 20 extra blocks to the Gutenberg interface.

There's also a full layout manager with responsive rows and columns. In the image below, you can see that it’s super-easy to build a form and maps display with just Advanced Gutenberg. Choose a layout (1/4 – 3/4) and then add the form and maps blocks:

Other features of the plugin include block permissions (so you can control who can use each block) and custom styles (so you can create re-usable designs for blocks).

Tristian, Xavier, Damien and the JoomUnited team always do great work and the plugin already has 20,000 active users. But Advanced Gutenberg is interesting for more than only the large userbase.

Advanced Gutenberg fits in perfectly with our goal, which is to help WordPress publishers succeed.

We define “Publishers” as anyone who is not a blogger. Publishers work in teams and carefully plan their content. This includes newspapers, magazines, universities and large companies.

---

Our plans for the new plugin (and theme)

Until now, PublishPress has focused on the admin area of WordPress.

With the addition of Advanced Gutenberg, we're also going to focus on the front-end. We'll keep improving Advanced Gutenberg with a strong focus on publishers. So we'll add blocks that focus on content.

Our plans include blocks such as “Recent News”, “Most Popular News”, “Top Authors” and more. These blocks will have full support for our other plugins, particularly PublishPress Authors.

The JoomUnited team also built an Advanced Gutenberg theme that was optimized for Gutenberg blocks. It is currently about 80% finished. We're going to finish that theme and release it for PublishPress members. Again, it will focus on the needs of publishers, so it will be optimized for sites that publish a lot of content.

Within the next six months, we hope that PublishPress users will be able to download everything you need for a powerful publishing setup:

• Plugins to manage your publishing workflow in the WordPress admin.
• Gutenberg blocks to make your content look great.
• A theme that is designed for publishers and comes with excellent support for Gutenberg and the PublishPress plugins.

---

Summary

We really believe that Phase 3 of the Gutenberg project is going to bring awesome benefits for WordPress publishers.

Phase 3 is due to start next year and may bring collaborative editing, dynamic comments on posts, and more.

Gutenberg fits in with our vision of making WordPress the best choice for publishers. For that reason, we're building the future of PublishPress around Gutenberg.

Thanks so much for using the PublishPress plugins. We'd love to hear your ideas for how to make WordPress publishing better.

Please feel free to leave a comment below or open a support ticket.