Blockly v11 is here! + Q2 Announcements

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Maribeth Moffatt

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May 21, 2024, 3:54:19 PMMay 21

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Blockly Newsletter

Q2 2024

Key Highlights & Announcements

Our v11 release is here! This is a big release with many new features supporting customizability. Check out the full release notes on GitHub. You can click on each PR in the “breaking changes” section of the GitHub release to find out if/how they affect you, and what to do about them if they do.

Some highlights from this release:

Custom workspace comment behavior and appearance
Custom draggable behavior
More consistent undo/redo behavior for disabled blocks
Keyboard navigation of flyout buttons
More accurate Generator type definitions
Many more features and bug fixes!

Some notable breaking changes to be aware of:

The colour, multiline input, and angle fields and their associated blocks have been removed from core. They are now available as plugins. If you use these blocks or fields, follow the instructions in the plugin READMEs to install them.
If you install Blockly through npm, we now provide an exports clause to explicitly declare what you can import from our package.
We now provide Blockly as an esmodule if you use Blockly through import statements in JS.
Calling statementToCode or valueToCode on inputs that don't exist will now throw an error instead of returning an empty string.

What’s Ahead

The Blockly Summit will be in-person on June 4-5 at Google in MTV. This external summit is for Blockly developers, product managers, engineers, and CS curriculum designers who work with block-based programming tools. Stay tuned for information about how to watch summit recordings and ask follow-up questions if you are unable to attend in person.
Blockly launched a $5 million fund to support nonprofits who are making coding and computer science education more accessible to students with disabilities. Check out the blog post.

Spotlight

Shoutout to Mike Harvey of Code.org for updating the keyboard-navigation plugin to work with flyout buttons! Mike also added the ability to use custom colors and sizes in the field-bitmap plugin. You can check out both of these changes in our plugin showcase!

Thanks to Richard of MakeCode for collaborating on the workspace comments design and fixing bugs!

Thanks to our new contributors in core Blockly:

@elvisvoer made their first contribution in https://github.com/google/blockly/pull/7854
@devilhyt made their first contribution in https://github.com/google/blockly/pull/7886
@worrycare made their first contribution in https://github.com/google/blockly/pull/7963
@lotusotho made their first contribution in https://github.com/google/blockly/pull/7980
@mikeharv made their first contribution in https://github.com/google/blockly/pull/7852
@riknoll made their first contribution in https://github.com/google/blockly/pull/8053

Help Wanted

We are continually updating our list of issues that would be great for external contributors to pick up! Do you want to practice your open source skills, give back to the library, or simply fix a bug that’s been bothering you personally? Check out these links:

Good First Issues (core, samples): These issues are great for someone either new to open source contribution or new to Blockly in general.
Help Wanted (core, samples): These are issues the core team may not have time to prioritize so they likely won’t get done if the community doesn’t take part. They may be more in-depth than good first issues, but they should still be scoped to be doable if you’re familiar with Blockly.

If you’d like to work on an issue, comment on it so we can assign you. If you get stuck or have questions, you can comment on the issue or in the forum and someone can assist you. And if at any point you decide you don’t want to work on an issue, no problem! Just let us know and we’ll unassign you.