Last month I was on a call with a client’s marketing lead, Sarah, who had run out of patience. Moving to a block theme had been good for performance, but she could not find where the brand’s fonts were managed. Site Editor, then Styles, then Typography, then a few nested panels, just to see what was installed. I did think about hardcoding the @font-face rules into a child theme stylesheet to stop the support tickets. That would have ended the tickets and locked the client out of their own interface, which is the sort of trade that turns into technical debt a year later.
Gutenberg 22.3 landed on December 17 and dealt with exactly that friction. The Gutenberg typography management change adds a dedicated Fonts page: font settings move out of the Global Styles hierarchy and up to the Appearance menu, where the person editing the site will actually find them. The specifics are in the official Gutenberg 22.3 release notes on the Make WordPress core site.
Gutenberg typography management in one place
The Fonts page sits on a reworked routing infrastructure for the Site Editor, which is the part that interests me as a dev. It gives the admin more of a single page application feel. View transitions are wired in, so the zoom and slide animations replace what used to feel like a series of clunky PHP page loads. If you build custom blocks or extend the editor, the routing layer has been close to a black box lately. This release starts opening it up.
The responsive Grid block also got fixed. Setting a specific column count used to mean fighting CSS so the layout did not fall apart on a mobile viewport. With columns defined, the grid is now responsive on its own, which is one less media query to write. If you filter block metadata, you can check for those attributes directly:
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 );The image cropper refactor is the other overdue one. My question when I saw the PR was whether it would hold the aspect ratio this time, and it does. Rotating an image no longer wipes your zoom or ratio settings. That sounds minor until you have spent ten minutes framing a hero image and watched the crop reset. Papercuts like that are why clients quietly stop using the block editor.
What to watch in 22.3
Most of 22.3 points at the “Phase 3” goals of collaboration and workflow. Email notifications for Notes move the editor a step closer to a Google Docs style of collaboration. Three things worth tracking:
- Font management belongs on the new Fonts page for block themes rather than in custom CSS, so the client keeps control of it.
- Grid layouts can lean on the core Grid block for simple responsive work instead of a third-party layout plugin.
- Routing matters if you build custom dashboard extensions, so read up on the Site Editor’s new infrastructure.
Bridging core features and a client’s actual requirements gets complicated fast. If you would rather not spend the week debugging it, and you want the site to keep up with current core standards, drop my team a line. We have probably seen it before.
Is the new routing actually faster on your sites, or is it just more JavaScript to keep an eye on?
