Last month, I was sitting on a call with a client’s marketing lead who was absolutely fed up. They’d moved to a block theme, which was great for performance, but Sarah—the lead—couldn’t find where to manage the brand’s fonts to save her life. She’d click into the Site Editor, then Styles, then Typography, then dig through nested panels just to see what was installed. It was a total nightmare for her workflow. I actually considered just hardcoding the @font-face rules in a child theme CSS file just to stop the support tickets, but that’s the “lazy dev” fix that creates technical debt later. Trust me on this: you don’t want to be the guy who locks a client out of their own UI.
Then Gutenberg 22.3 dropped on December 17, and it finally addressed this exact friction point. The big win here is the Gutenberg typography management update, specifically the new dedicated Fonts page. Instead of burying font management deep within the Global Styles hierarchy, it’s now a top-level citizen under the Appearance menu. This is a pragmatic shift that treats typography as a core asset rather than a hidden setting. It builds on the work I saw detailed in the official Gutenberg 22.3 release notes over at the Make WordPress core site.
Streamlining Gutenberg Typography Management
The new Fonts page isn’t just a UI facelift; it’s built on a refined routing infrastructure for the Site Editor. As a dev, what I care about is how this improves the SPA (Single Page Application) feel of the admin. They’ve wired in view transitions—those smooth zoom and slide animations—that make navigating the backend feel less like a series of clunky PHP page loads and more like a modern app. If you’ve been building custom blocks or extending the editor, you know that the routing layer has been a bit of a “black box” recently. This release starts opening that up.
Beyond fonts, they finally fixed the responsive Grid block. Previously, if you set a specific number of columns, you often had to fight with CSS to make sure they didn’t look like garbage on a mobile viewport. Now, the grid is natively responsive when columns are defined. It’s one less media query for me to write. Here is how you might programmatically check for those attributes if you are filtering block metadata:
function bbioon_check_grid_responsiveness( $block_content, $block ) {
if ( 'core/grid' === $block['blockName'] ) {
$attributes = $block['attrs'];
// Check if the new responsive column logic is applied
if ( isset( $attributes['columnCount'] ) && ! empty( $attributes['layout']['type'] ) ) {
// Your custom logic for handling responsive grids
error_log( 'Grid block is using responsive columns.' );
}
}
return $block_content;
}
add_filter( 'render_block', 'bbioon_check_grid_responsiveness', 10, 2 );Another “about time” fix is the image cropper refactor. My first thought when I saw the PR was, “Is it actually going to save the aspect ratio this time?” And yeah, it does. Rotating an image no longer resets your zoom levels or ratio settings. It sounds like a small thing, but for a content editor who just spent ten minutes framing a hero image, that reset was a deal-breaker. We’ve all seen clients give up on the block editor because of minor UI papercuts like that.
So, What’s the Real Takeaway?
Gutenberg 22.3 is clearly focused on the “Phase 3” goals of collaboration and workflow. The addition of email notifications for Notes is a clear signal that the editor is moving toward a Google Docs-style collaboration model. Here is what you need to keep on your radar:
- Font Management: Stop hiding font settings in custom CSS; use the new Fonts page for block themes to give clients control.
- Grid Layouts: You can rely more on the core Grid block for simple responsive layouts instead of reaching for a third-party layout plugin.
- Routing: Pay attention to the Site Editor’s new routing infrastructure if you’re building custom dashboard extensions.
Look, this stuff gets complicated fast, especially when you’re trying to bridge the gap between core features and a client’s specific needs. If you’re tired of debugging someone else’s mess and just want your site to work with the latest core standards, drop my team a line. We’ve probably seen it before.
Are you seeing better performance with the new routing, or is it just more JavaScript to manage? Let me know.
Leave a Reply