Gutenberg is a Node.js-based project, built primarily in JavaScript. Be sure to have Node.js installed first. You should be running a Node version matching the current active LTS release or newer for this plugin to work correctly. You can check your Node.js version by typing node -v in the Terminal prompt.
You should also have the latest release of npm installed, npm is a separate project from Node.js and is updated frequently. If you've just installed Node.js which includes a version of npm within the installation you most likely will need to also update your npm install. To update npm, type this into your terminal: npm install npm@latest -g
To test the plugin, or to contribute to it, you can clone this repository and build the plugin files using Node. How you do that depends on whether you're developing locally or uploading the plugin to a remote host.
First, you need a WordPress Environment to run the plugin on. The quickest way to get up and running is to use the provided docker setup. Just install docker on your machine and run ./bin/setup-local-env.sh.
The WordPress installation should be available at http://localhost:8888 (username: admin, password: password).
Inside the "docker" directory, you can use any docker command to interact with your containers.
Alternatively, you can use your own local WordPress environment and clone this repository right into your wp-content/plugins directory.
Next, open a terminal (or if on Windows, a command prompt) and navigate to the repository you cloned. Now type npm install to get the dependencies all set up. Then you can type npm run dev in your terminal or command prompt to keep the plugin building in the background as you work on it.
Open a terminal (or if on Windows, a command prompt) and navigate to the repository you cloned. Now type npm install to get the dependencies all set up. Once that finishes, you can type npm run build. You can now upload the entire repository to your wp-content/plugins directory on your webserver and activate the plugin from the WordPress admin.
You can also type npm run package-plugin which will run the two commands above and create a zip file automatically for you which you can use to install Gutenberg through the WordPress admin.
A good workflow is to work directly in this repo, branch off master, and submit your changes as a pull request.
Ideally name your branches with prefixes and descriptions, like this: [type]/[change]. A good prefix would be:
add/= add a new featuretry/= experimental feature, "tentatively add"update/= update an existing feature
For example, add/gallery-block means you're working on adding a new gallery block.
You can pick among all the tickets, or some of the ones labelled Good First Issue.
Gutenberg contains both PHP and JavaScript code, and encourages testing and code style linting for both. It also incorporates end-to-end testing using Cypress. You can find out more details in Testing Overview document.
If you'd like to contribute to the design or front-end, feel free to contribute to tickets labelled Design. We could use your thoughtful replies, mockups, animatics, sketches, doodles. Proposed changes are best done as minimal and specific iterations on the work that precedes it so we can compare. If you use Sketch, you can grab the source file for the mockups (updated April 6th).
Documentation is automatically synced from master to the Gutenberg Documentation Website every 15 minutes.
To add a new documentation page, you'll have to create a Markdown file in the docs folder and add an item to the manifest file.