We’re back with another Blackbird Dev Chat between Megan Rose, Phil Hoyt, and Cory Hughart. In this episode we talk about the WordPress 5.8 release and how that has dramatically affected theme development for us, an update about Advanced Custom Fields and escaping output, a long discussion about what “barrier to entry” really means, some old news by now about one particular Automattic acquisition that happened over a month ago, and a soft announcement about our very own open-source workflow script.

If you have questions about WordPress website development, contributing, or anything else web-related that you’d like to hear us discuss, find us on Twitter as @InTheLoop_WP or send an email to [email protected].

## Links

theme.json: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2021/06/25/introducing-theme-json-in-wordpress-5-8/

Block based themes: https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/how-to-guides/themes/block-theme-overview/

ACF HTML escaping by default: https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/blog/acf-5-10-release-html-escaping-blocks-api-v2-block-preloading-and-more/

Gulp WP: https://github.com/BlackbirdDigital/gulp-wp

Mark Jaquith PHP Gutenberg block: https://twitter.com/markjaquith/status/1432461667187765251?s=20

10up Toolkit: https://github.com/10up/10up-toolkit

ClassicPress: https://www.classicpress.net/

WordCamp US 2021: https://us.wordcamp.org/2021/