Gutenberg Phase 3 Update: Real-Time Collaboration, Asynchronous Collaboration, and Backend Redesign

in the wake of Gutenberg Phase 3 Update: Real-Time Collaboration, Asynchronous Collaboration, and Backend RedesignPhase 3 of the roadmap sees WordPress moving towards a more efficient content collaboration and management process. The core goals of this phase are to improve the way creators and teams work together by facilitating seamless collaboration, optimizing the user experience, and streamlining the content management process. Here's a high-level overview of the key progress and future plans for phase three.

Real-time collaboration

Over the past few months, after successful initial experiments, Kevin Jahns, author of Yjs, a popular framework for building collaborative applications, was sponsored by Automattic to work on real-time collaboration. He started this work with some research and conversations. Recently(math.) genusHe put together some prototypes before sharing a full proposal on how to proceed. The work is currently in a robust experimental phase with no final methodology. The next step is to incorporate the preliminary methodology into the PR so that people can provide feedback and discuss it openly. 

Below is a demo showing the synchronization of content relying only on the HTTP API, with the autosave interval set to 3 seconds. Since it relies on the HTTP API, this demo applies to all WordPress instances:

More demos can be seen in the recent update, including adding y-webrtc to the experience to show how real-time collaboration can work for users who can establish a peer-to-peer WebRTC connection.

Asynchronous collaboration: inline annotations

Block-level inline commentsThe initial experiments with Gutenberg 19.6 together, the first of many asynchronous collaboration upgrades. Currently, another iteration of this initial featureAlready in the planning stages.to further refine the current experience. The goal is to get early feedback and iterate quickly to implement this new feature in an upcoming major release of WordPress. Below is an overview of the near-term design planned for the next release, which includes adding a comment, posting a comment, toggling the visual effect of viewing resolved comments, and the results view when viewing resolved comments:

Administrator Redesign: DataView and DataForm

DataViews were a foundational component of the initial overall management design effort. By design, these views were built only in the site editor, with some branching work including new, separate post experience experiments using DataViews, and an early media library supported by a DataView proof of concept.  

As the next step in the initial development of DataViews, the newerDataForm APIIt was later introduced in Gutenberg 18.8 to reduce the expected duplication of form creation in DataViews. Since then, the work has been progressive, with the DataViews and DataForm components influencing each other's development. They can be viewed in their respective Storybook views:DataViewsrespond in singingDataFormThe

Both components were created with extensibility in mind! Plugin and agent developers can now start using the DataViews component for WordPress customization, with two different developer blog tutorials to help you get started:Using Data Views to Display and Interact with Data in Pluginsas well asActions in the Data View: Adding Images to the Media Library. For a more in-depth look.Watch the recent hallway party, in which these two components are introduced and community members are actively working on them. As these components evolve, there is a constant focus on extensibility. The following describes how DataViews can be used with DataForm and provides easy options for quick editing within a page: