![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/wordpress.org/news/files/2023/07/patterns-alt-b-dark.png?resize=1024%2C812&ssl=1\")
WordPress 6.3 RC2 is ready for download and testing.
\n\n\n\nThis version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, or run, or test this version on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, you should evaluate RC2 on a test server and site.
\n\n\n\nWhile release candidates are considered ready for final release, additional testing and use by the community can only make it better.
\n\n\n\nWordPress 6.3 is scheduled for release on August 8, 2023 – just two weeks from today.
\n\n\n\nGet an overview of the 6.3 release cycle, check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.3-related posts, review new features in WordPress 6.3, or watch a recorded demo.
\n\n\n\nDevelopers and extenders should review the comprehensive WordPress 6.3 Field Guide for detailed technical notes regarding new features and improvements.
\n\n\n\nSince the RC1 release on July 18, 2023, there have been approximately 15 issues resolved in Editor and Trac.
\n\n\n\nNotable updates for this release include:
\n\n\n\nTesting for issues is a critical part of developing any software, and it’s a meaningful way for anyone to contribute—whether you have experience or not. While testing the upgrade process is essential, trying out new features is too.
\n\n\n\nThe monetary reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities is doubled between the Beta 1 release and the final release candidate (RC). Please follow responsible disclosure practices as detailed in the project’s security practices and policies outlined on the HackerOne page and in the security white paper.
\n\n\n\nYou can test WordPress 6.3 RC2 in three ways:
\n\n\n\nwp core update --version=6.3-RC2Do you build plugins and themes? Your products play an integral role in extending the functionality and value of WordPress for users of all types worldwide.
\n\n\n\nHopefully, you have already tested your themes and plugins with WordPress 6.3 betas by now. With RC2, you will want to continue your testing and update the “Tested up to” version in your plugin’s readme file to 6.3.
\n\n\n\nIf you find compatibility problems, please post detailed information to the support forums.
\n\n\n\nDo you speak a language other than English? ¿Español? Français? Português? Русский? 日本? Help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages.
\n\n\n\nTime is nearly here
WordPress shines thanks to you all
Let’s get testing, dear
Thank you to the contributors who collaborated on this post: @Priethor, @AudrasJb, @DavidBaumwald, @DanSoschin, @JPantani and @Meher.
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\n\n\n\nMore than 100 attendees watched as some of the most anticipated product features were demonstrated, from the brand-new Command Palette to new design tools and more.
\n\n\n\nHere are some of the key takeaways from the 6.3 live product demonstration.
\n\n\n\nOne of the most anticipated features of 6.3 is the Command Palette. It lets you quickly navigate and open different WordPress functions within the post and Site Editor. Access it using a shortcut command (Command + K or Control + K).
\n\n\n\nNow you can browse and edit pages within the Site Editor, providing a more cohesive WordPress experience. A new drafting flow debuts, allowing you to create and publish pages directly within the editor.
\n\n\n\nYou can create and manage all your patterns directly in the Site Editor. Once edited, all synced patterns (previously called Reusable Blocks) will change across a site—a huge time saver when making changes.
\n\n\n\nThis enhancement offers a visual timeline of your site so you can see all the revisions in your site’s history and restore a previous style with just a click.
\n\n\n\nControls for specifying aspect ratios to ensure design integrity, especially when using images in Patterns debut in 6.3, along with new blocks for Footnotes and Details. Easily add footnotes to your content and have them automatically linked to the corresponding text. With the Details block, hide or display content to create spoilers or accordions.
\n\n\n\nWordPress is getting faster with 6.3 as content with images will see speedier load times. Both theme types (Classic and Block) will also benefit from performance improvements. The upcoming hallway hangout is an excellent opportunity to learn more about performance enhancements directly from the WordPress Performance team.
\n\n\n\nThese new features and more await you as Phase 2 of the WordPress Roadmap comes to a close with the 6.3 release.
\n\n\n\nA question and answer session followed the demo, with attendees asking plenty of great questions. The panelists shared links for additional reading regarding many new features—all conveniently added to the end of this post.
\n\n\n\nA big thank you to everyone who helps make WordPress. Contributors power every WordPress release. Without the hundreds of contributors worldwide who help build WordPress, this live product demo wouldn’t have been possible. Thank you for all of your hard work.
\n\n\n\nProps to @richtabor and @annezazu for reviewing this post and to @cbringmann, @meher, and @dansoschin for their logistics support to run the event.
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\n\n\n\nThis version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, you should evaluate RC1 on a test server and site.
\n\n\n\nReaching this part of the release cycle is a key milestone. While release candidates are considered ready for final release, additional testing and use by the community can only make it better.
\n\n\n\nGet an overview of the 6.3 release cycle, check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.3-related posts, and review the new features in WordPress 6.3. Save the date for a live product demo scheduled for Thursday, July 20, 2023, at 16:00 UTC (Zoom link). This live demo will be a great opportunity to join the WordPress community to celebrate the accomplishments of 6.3 and this final chapter of Phase 2.
\n\n\n\nThanks to the many WordPress beta testers, this release contains 40+ (Editor) and 80+ (Trac) updates since the Beta 4 release. Keep it up WordPressers!
\n\n\n\nNotable updates for this release include:
\n\n\n\n_get_block_template_file function and set $area variable (#52708)bulk_edit_posts() function needs an action hook (#28112)Browse the technical details for issues addressed since Beta 4 using these queries:
\n\n\n\nFor a recap of what’s coming in 6.3, please refer to the Beta 2 post, which summarizes key features.
\n\n\n\nYou can also dig into technical information about various components in 6.3:
\n\n\n\nFor a compilation of the dev notes above and more, read the comprehensive WordPress 6.3 Field Guide.
\n\n\n\nTesting for issues is a critical part of developing any software, and it’s a meaningful way for anyone to contribute—whether you have experience or not. While testing the upgrade process is essential, trying out new features is too.
\n\n\n\nThe monetary reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities is doubled between the Beta 1 release and the final release candidate (RC). Please follow responsible disclosure practices as detailed in the project’s security practices and policies outlined on the HackerOne page and in the security white paper.
\n\n\n\nYou can test WordPress 6.3 RC1 in three ways:
\n\n\n\nwp core update --version=6.3-RC1The current target for the final release is August 8, 2023, about three weeks away. Your help testing this version ensures everything in this release is the best.
\n\n\n\nDo you build plugins and themes? Your products play an integral role in extending the functionality and value of WordPress for users of all types worldwide.
\n\n\n\nChances are, you have already been testing your latest themes and plugins with WordPress 6.3 betas. With RC1, you will want to complete your testing and update the “Tested up to” version in your plugin’s readme file to 6.3.
\n\n\n\nIf you find compatibility problems, please post detailed information to the support forums.
\n\n\n\nDo you speak a language other than English? ¿Español? Français? Português? Русский? 日本? Help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages. This release also marks the hard string freeze point of the 6.3 release cycle.
\n\n\n\nRC1 is here
Hold your applause ‘til the end
Download, test, repeat
Thank you to the contributors who collaborated on this post: @DanSoschin, @Meher, and @JPantani.
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\n\n\n\nHave a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording.
\n\n\n\nHost: Josepha Haden Chomphosy
Guests: Mike Schroder
Editor: Dustin Hartzler
Logo: Javier Arce
Production: Nicholas Garofalo
Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod
( Intro music )
\n\n\n\n[00:00:00] Josepha: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks.
\n\n\n\nI’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go.
\n\n\n\n( Intro music continues )
\n\n\n\n[00:00:39] Josepha: We have with us Mike Schroder. They are on the WordPress 6.3 release squad, and I believe, Mike, that your role there is the Core Tech Lead.
\n\n\n\nIs that right?
\n\n\n\n[00:00:50] Mike: Yeah, that’s correct. I’m one of the tech leads along with Andrew Ozz and David Baumwald.
\n\n\n\n[00:00:56] Josepha: Thank you so much for being able to join me today.
\n\n\n\n[00:00:58] Mike: Thanks for inviting me.
\n\n\n\n[00:01:00] Josepha: This is our 6.3 sneak peek, and so it has a little bit of a “What do you wish people knew about the upcoming release?” aspect to it, but it also has like a “What do we find most interesting about the work that we’ve been doing in this release so far?”
\n\n\n\nAs the Core Tech Lead, what currently is like your favorite thing that y’all are getting into the release or the thing that’s the most interesting or happiest to finally be done with it?
\n\n\n\n[00:01:27] Mike: Yeah, I think there are a couple of things. So I was playing around with the release in anticipation for this, and one of the favorite sort of user-facing features that I played with was the live preview for Block themes. And it just makes it feel so intuitive to open up a new Block theme and play around with Styles and different designs and see how it looks.
\n\n\n\nI really enjoyed it, opened it up on my personal site and started messing around with different color palettes and things like that, and it was a lot of fun.
\n\n\n\n[00:01:55] Josepha: Like it’s a live preview, but also with all of the content they already have on your site.
\n\n\n\n[00:01:59] Mike: It does use the templates and so it, it shows some of the live content from the from the homepage, for instance, and some of those blocks, and some of the other areas are editing the templates rather than the live content. But yes, it was neat to play around with it and see my blog content in the background and yeah, some real-time design. That was really fun.
\n\n\n\n[00:02:20] Josepha: And has that been a big focus of the release? Was it something that you and the other Tech Leads both for the Core side and the Editor side just had to focus a lot on in this round of the release?
\n\n\n\n[00:02:33] Mike: So I was not a part of a lot of that work. So I’m not gonna take credit for it. I think that is the culmination, all of those different things together of a lot of the things that the Editor team has been working on for some time. And it was just, it was really refreshing to see it.
\n\n\n\nThe other feature that I had in my head, if it’s okay for me to talk about a second one, is something that has been trying to get landed in Core for quite some time, and that has to do with automatic rollbacks. If plugin updates or theme updates start to happen and then they fail in the middle of that update, then it will automatically restore the previous version of the plugin or theme. And that’s a pretty big improvement over the previous behavior, which could result not as well.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:16] Josepha: Right. Where you would just have a site that was like, “Best of luck to you,” and emails that told you what kind of probably was broken. I shouldn’t be sassy about that. The WSOD protection that we put in really was a huge leap forward for the way that we handled that in the past, but this is great news.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:34] Mike: Yes, I was so excited when that landed, and this is I guess the next part of that. And it’s been, yeah, it’s been in the works for a long time, through testing and there was an entire team that did a lot of work on it in a future plugin. And I’m very excited to see it land.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:49] Josepha: That’s great. That’s one of those things that we hope a WordPress user never has to know exists. Like it’s always our hope that the plugins work perfectly and the themes work perfectly. And so unless something is going really wrong you won’t know that’s a feature. Surely it tells you like, “This didn’t update by the way. Go figure that out.”
\n\n\n\n[00:04:08] Mike: Yeah, the whole idea of this particular feature is to make it feel more like everything is smooth and one site continues to work, and the underpinning of it has been going in for a couple of releases. The whole idea is to make the experience more smooth for users.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:21] Josepha: Cool. That auto rollback actually was not on my radar as a thing to keep an eye out for in this release, so that’s really neat. One of the things that I saw as I was doing, I don’t do any complicated testing. I mostly do like testing of what users would expect with the workflow with my eyeballs and a mouse.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:40] Mike: Well, that’s, that’s wonderful.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:42] Josepha: I’m not doing any of the fancy testing with like code, but one of the things that I saw as I was working through my general, just regular test, my spot check click around test was that it looks like there’s some consolidation, some consolidation of the navigation in the Editor.
\n\n\n\nSo, it had I think maybe Pages and Templates in there before, and now there are five things in there. Do you have a bit of a concept of what went into that, what we’re hoping everybody’s gonna be able to accomplish there now?
\n\n\n\n[00:05:13] Mike: So I, I was not involved as much in the later stages of this, but I was in a couple of the first couple iterations of this particular feature, and I think this is, I don’t want to guess the exact amount of times that this has been sort of reworked so the experience is good for users, there been so much effort that’s gone into helping navigation be a comfortable experience for people to work with within the site editor.
\n\n\n\nAnd what I have heard is that everyone that’s worked on it is very excited that it’s landing and that users will be able to experience it and more easily work with navigation.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:46] Josepha: Yeah, I think that navigation is one of those things, both like creating good navigation as a software designer, but then also as somebody who’s like putting together a website. Good navigation is hard to do. And it’s design where everyone’s, “Good design is invisible,” and we don’t actually mean that.
\n\n\n\nWe don’t mean it’s invisible. We mean it’s not intrusive, it doesn’t get in your way, it acts in the way you think it’s going to act, and it knows or has a good guess about where you’re trying to be, what you’re trying to do in that particular moment on a site. And so like the fact that we’ve had probably hundreds of people working on navigation inside the software is no surprise to me, but I bet it’s gonna be a surprise to a lot of people.
\n\n\n\nThey’ll be like, “It’s like folders, right?” Turns out it’s not.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:33] Mike: Yes, it was, incredibly, incredibly difficult to design. I know there was, the couple instances that I was most involved with, I know there was so much discussion about how folks are used to working with navigation within WordPress and sort of what expectations are for menus and what expectations are for, you know, users both that have been using WordPress for a long time and users who, who are new to WordPress, and the Site Editor. And having all of those considerations from the various stakeholders just makes it a really difficult design problem.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:03] Josepha: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, not for nothing like the WP Admin itself, that dashboard inside the WordPress software, like that’s been due for an update for quite some time. This is the same one that I think we’ve had since 2008, which was also very disruptive in its way. And so like it was a good disruption, but we really haven’t made any substantial changes to it since then. And part of it is because there are so many use cases for WordPress, and we don’t have a good concept of that because we don’t have a lot of tracking in the software. We don’t take anyone’s like data about what field they work in. We don’t do any of that.
\n\n\n\nAnd so it’s hard for us to account for all of the use cases and get a really excellent design for a majority of the people that are gonna be using it. Because like we don’t actually build software for robots around here. Not yet.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:54] Mike: ( laughs ) Yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:55] Josepha: No, I don’t think we’ll ever be robot-building software.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:57] Mike: I doubt it, but I also don’t wanna predict the future. No, I agree. And I think that is absolutely one of the super tricky things about building WordPress. I’m really glad that WordPress doesn’t collect any of that data. And it makes it so that the sort of testing that, that you were talking about, in user studies and things like that, are incredibly helpful for figuring out what the best approaches are.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:21] Josepha: Yeah, absolutely. Since we’re just in the zone of like things that Josepha likes and that she saw, I’m gonna also do this other thing. In one of the last couple of releases, the Style Book came out, which was such an exciting thing for me. It’s great to be able to see whether or not all of the style choices you’ve made in various parts of the admin or in the code, depending on how you’re doing things.
\n\n\n\nIt’s nice to make sure, in one big set, that like everything is coherent. Everything that you thought you changed did get changed and it looks the way that you wanted it to look in concert with everything else in there. And it looked like we now have revisions specific to styles, like styling things across the site, have revisions.
\n\n\n\nIs that right?
\n\n\n\n[00:09:06] Mike: That’s correct.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:07] Josepha: I think that’s a super big deal because as somebody who is just, I’m filled with techno joy. I don’t always want to look at a manual. I just want to do stuff until it breaks and then hope I can fix it. The hoping you can fix it part ( laughs ) can sometimes be really nerve-wracking if what you’re doing is creating a site for a client or you are working on your first big theme and you wanna make sure that’s all together.
\n\n\n\nAnd so style revisions to go along with some of the Editor revisions I think is a great change.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:39] Mike: Same. Absolutely. This is not a feature I have, done too much particular playing with, at this point.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:44] Josepha: You’re a very skilled developer.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:46] Mike: I appreciate that. That’s very kind. I think that adding revisions to anything that folks regularly change in posts or pages is, really important. And making it very easy to get to both make forward changes and also to realize, “Oh, there was this other change that was, you know, there was three clicks ago that I really loved. How do I get back to that? How do I see the history?” And that’s what I love about that sort of feature. Being able to really easily see, “Okay, when did this happen? In what series? How can I jump back and get to that spot that felt right.”
\n\n\n\n[00:10:19] Josepha: Yes. Anytime that we can have that kind of historical layering of things, I think is good. I went to a meetup. I like to go to meetups that are 101 content, because that’s like the folks that really need new refined processes the most. But I went to a 101 meetup a couple years back, and I remember that the presenter was saying like, take a theme that you pretty much like and make some changes until you have a theme that you love.
\n\n\n\nAnd people kept saying like, “Yeah, but what if I break everything?” And he said in the middle of that to everyone, not knowing who I was because who cares? He was like, “Yeah, WordPress is not gonna let you do anything that will completely destroy a theme or completely destroy your site. There’s an undo button and you can just undo it. It’ll be fine.” And I was like, “Yeah, that is true now.”
\n\n\n\n[00:11:15] Mike: I love that.
\n\n\n\nGosh. I mean, I remember when I was playing with my first WordPress site, and even to make really small changes with navigation or with menus, I had to go in and make changes to the PHP code, and none of that was protected.
\n\n\n\n[00:11:31] Josepha: You’re like, “This is free-range me out here.”
\n\n\n\n[00:11:34] Mike: I love, absolutely. I love that is just no longer the case anymore and it’s super easy to go in and play with a theme and make changes without worrying about any of that. And, I mean, I may be a developer, but that’s the way I would prefer. That’s the way I go in and edit my sites now too.
\n\n\n\nIf I wanna mess with a theme, go in, and it was the Customizer and now it’s the Site Editor, and it’s great.
\n\n\n\n[00:11:58] Josepha: Yeah, it’s a leap forward, I think, leap forward.
\n\n\n\nSo another thing that I ran into, I guess it’s two things that I ran into while I was wandering around in there recently, and it’s possible that I ran into these two things because I just personally love them the most, but the Footnotes block looks like it is potentially going to land.
\n\n\n\nI have been so excited about this block for no reason. I have dreams about it. I wish that were not a true statement. I did recently have a dream about it. I dreamt that it didn’t land in the release, and that I went to talk to Ella about it and she was like, “Oh, yeah, publishers have given up on footnotes and they’re just doing end notes now, and so I decided not to ship it.” Like this is a dream I had.
\n\n\n\nAnd so I’m a little worried, but tomorrow I’m gonna be like, “Hey, Ella, friend, what’s happening?” And she’s gonna be like, “Yeah, end notes are where it’s at.”
\n\n\n\nAnd then the other block that I’m personally very excited about is what I like to call the “Spoilers block.” I know it is not “Spoilers”, it’s the called “Details,” but anytime I’ve ever used that after like early, early times in my career, early in my career, I used to call them accordions and I don’t know why, but now I call them “Spoiler blocks.” But I know it’s actually called the “Details block,” where you can put in a piece of information at the top, essentially a title, and then expand it to get more information in there.
\n\n\n\nSo are both of those actually gonna land or am I gonna be heartbroken?
\n\n\n\n[00:13:24] Mike: As far as I’m aware, yes. I know that I haven’t checked recently on the latter, but I was just playing with the Footnotes block, and it’s really cool. I really like the interface. I think that it makes it really simple to add quick footnotes to, anywhere in the site, and everything feels very automated and simple.
\n\n\n\n[00:13:46] Josepha: As someone who every, almost everything that I’ve ever written, I want to have an aside in it, which essentially just becomes a footnote. One of the weirdest parts about Gutenberg at first is that like, the asterisk way of doing it, where you just put one after the word and then put one at the start. The asterisk makes it into a list block, and for a long time you also couldn’t escape it, and so I had to do a lot of fancy footwork to get my footnotes to work for a while, and so I’m excited for that.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:15] Mike: I think I had similar discouraging moments with lists and I was really encouraged by the way the footnotes select, and I’m sure there are other ways to do it too, but select, right-click, footnote, and they all automatically go to the bottom order, all of it. It’s a really smooth process.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:31] Josepha: Yeah. I’m really excited about it. I know that like for the last two or three major releases, a bulk of what we’ve been offering to folks is like, design stuff, and we’re just like, “It’s a bunch of design things,” but this release actually has over 500 different tickets that were marked as features or enhancements that are going into it.
\n\n\n\nAnd so, you and I have talked about seven things so far, but I also understand that there are literally 500 tickets or so that were marked as “feature” or “enhancement.” And so we are definitely not gonna catch everything that goes in there, but there is kind of a group of another group of enhancements to the design tools because of course this wraps up the bulk of phase two so that we can all move into the collaborative editing phase.
\n\n\n\nAnd so like, do you have a sense for, like is this just mostly polish for those design and like image media management kinds of things? Or are there big features that are coming in those also?
\n\n\n\n[00:15:29] Mike: My understanding is that it’s all of the above. I think that there are a lot of new features being added along with polish to those features. And I think the neatest thing is that there are also a lot of enhancements that are focused on bringing all of those things together and making it feel like more of a connected experience. And so I think that’s my favorite part so far in testing that I’ve been doing of, the many, as you mentioned, so many additional new features that, that we’re added this time. And, I have a huge amount of respect for, you know, everyone that works, for the huge amount of folks that work on it across the project.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:07] Josepha: Yeah. Yeah, you’ve given a couple of answers where you were like, “I wasn’t personally involved in that,” but on the one hand, I was like, “Everyone knows that we’re not all personally involved in it,” but on the other hand, not everybody knows how many people touch all of these tickets and features and bugs and tests as we get them ready to be put into the release.
\n\n\n\nLast year, I was super worried that like, post active fear of Covid, and now everyone just like deciding that they’ve done their best and they’re going back out there. Like I was really worried that everyone was gonna be having so much fun out of the house, that they would stop contributing.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:43] Mike: ( laughs )
\n\n\n\n[00:16:44] Josepha: I know, but we actually had one of our most active years for contributors last year, which means that especially for the releases that are coming this year, the people who worked all the way through last year, like almost 2000, I think, contributors, just to code, that’s not even like the contributors who worked on reigniting the community and putting together events, all of those things like all of the other things that we do.
\n\n\n\nIt’s, it is remarkable to me that when we look at any feature it is definitely been looked at or worked on, or at least passed through desks of easily a hundred people, even for small little things. And I just love that, the depth of the work we do.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:29] Mike: Absolutely. Same. I remember wondering about that too, about your same sort of concerns. And it’s been really great to be a part of the community as it’s essentially, as it’s grown together again, I think is maybe the best way I can think of to say it. That’s been quite wonderful.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:46] Josepha: Yeah, absolutely. Mike, this has been an absolutely delightful conversation. Is there anything you would like to leave us with before we move on to our small list of big things today?
\n\n\n\n[00:17:58] Mike: The release candidate for 6.3 comes out tomorrow, and what I would love the most is if anyone in interested in testing, anyone, whether it’s testing exactly like this sort of testing that you were just talking about, with loading the RC and clicking around and seeing what works the best and what doesn’t work and what feels good and what doesn’t, or if it’s testing, if you’re like a plugin or a theme developer, testing with those things to see how things work and looking for backwards compatibility breaks that are unexpected so we can fix them before release.
\n\n\n\nIf you work at a hosting company or you make sites for folks, helping test that to see that it works really well on your platforms for folks that you work with. I think all of those would be super helpful, and there are testing instructions that can be found on the release candidate announcement page.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:43] Josepha: Perfect. Wonderful. Mike, thank you so much for joining me today.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:47] Mike: Thank you so much. I’ve really appreciated the time.
\n\n\n\n( Musical interlude )
\n\n\n\n[00:18:49] Josepha: That brings us now to our small list of big things. It’s actually kind of a big list of big things today. So first on the list is that WordCamp US has a Contributor Day and we need your help. So the WordCamp US Contributor Team has contacted all of the team reps asking for help with a new approach to organizing this year’s Contributor Day.
\n\n\n\nThe hope is to make the initial steps to contribution easier. And so they’re asking teams who will be present to help participate with that process. I will have a link in the show notes to the post that has more information.
\n\n\n\nAlso second thing related also to WordCamp US is that I would like to put out a call for art and music, especially that is related to open source and the freedoms that it brings. So one of the things that makes WordPress so fantastic in the world is not only that like we’re creating opportunities for folks, we’re offering economic, and I don’t know, philosophical freedoms to people, but we frequently do think about that in the vein of, you know, commerce and work and the economy, and we rarely think about it in the obviously related subset of arts and music. And so I also would like to put out a call for any open source related arts or poetry or music that you all have created.
\n\n\n\nI would love to be able to display some of that at WordCamp US this year. I don’t think I have a link quite yet for a call for that, but as soon as I do, I’ll send it out on social media and other places.
\n\n\n\nThe third thing on our small list of big things is that, as Mike mentioned, tomorrow is the RC1 release date for WordPress 6. 3, and you can help us to test that.
\n\n\n\nIt’s always good for us to test any release as it’s working its way through the process, but certainly by the time it gets to RC, that’s when we are pretty sure it’s going to be as stable as possible. We’ve done some soft string freezes and feature freezes-ish. And so that’s about as stable as it’s going to get. And so I encourage everyone to get out and test that as much as possible. And in all the ways that Mike shared.
\n\n\n\nItem number four, we are also reaching a milestone. So, a couple weeks ago, we reached the one year milestone for the start of the Meetup Reactivation Project.
\n\n\n\nWe have about 50% of our Meetup groups reactivated. If you are listening to this and you are a Meetup organizer and you haven’t heard from anyone from WordCamp Central or the community team, I’m going to put a link to the notes, or rather, a link to the post in the notes so that you can also learn more about that.
\n\n\n\nYou don’t have to hear from us in order to get your meetup group going again. But, if you are interested to know what has gone into that process, or always just want to know what’s going on in the community side of things, that’s a good place to start. So there will be a link to that in the show notes as well.
\n\n\n\nNumber five, WordPress event organizers in general, but also anyone. So there are two different events coming up on Thursday, on July 20th.
\n\n\n\nFirst, there is the WP Diversity Workshop. This is added workshop for us to help promote the ideas of building diverse and inclusive WordPress events. And so, this is not necessarily one of those events for people who want to increase their skills in speaking so that they are able to, to speak confidently at a WordPress event. These are for people who are organizing WordPress events and want to make them more inclusive and more diverse from the start. I encourage any organizer to go to it, regardless of whether you’re doing WordPress events or not, but certainly for WordPress events that is something that we care about and want to have included in our entire event series.
\n\n\n\nThe other thing that’s happening on Thursday, because like I said, two things happening on Thursday, is that we have a WordPress 6. 3 live product demo. We’ve been doing these for the last few releases, and you get a couple of people from either the release squad, or like folks who do that kind of developer relations work in WordPress, who sit down and just do a general click-through, a general run through, a public demo of what we expect to land in the release.
\n\n\n\nAnd so that also is on Thursday. I will also have a link for you in the show notes. If you are listening to this not on WordPress.org and you don’t know where the show notes are, don’t worry. The show notes are on WordPress.org. You go to WordPress.org/news/podcast and in the transcript there are show notes that have links to all of these things.
\n\n\n\nAnd that, my friends, is your big, small list of big things. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. Thank you again for my guest, Mike’s, time. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks.
\n\n\n\n( Outtro music )
\n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:30:\"com-wordpress:feed-additions:1\";a:1:{s:7:\"post-id\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:5:\"15398\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:4;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:63:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n \n \n \";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:4:{s:0:\"\";a:6:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:23:\"Designed with WordPress\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:59:\"https://wordpress.org/news/2023/07/designed-with-wordpress/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Fri, 14 Jul 2023 22:33:07 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:8:\"category\";a:3:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:6:\"Design\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}i:1;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:3:\"6.3\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}i:2;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:9:\"Gutenberg\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:35:\"https://wordpress.org/news/?p=15401\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:1:{s:0:\"\";a:1:{s:11:\"isPermaLink\";s:5:\"false\";}}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:342:\"The Gutenberg project has aimed to revolutionize how we manage web content as much as Johannes Gutenberg did the printed word. The project’s roadmap is comprised of four unique phases: With the upcoming release of WordPress 6.3, Phase 2 of the Gutenberg project is coming to a close; a journey worth celebrating. This video is […]\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:15:\"Chloe Bringmann\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:40:\"http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/\";a:1:{s:7:\"encoded\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:4262:\"\nThe Gutenberg project has aimed to revolutionize how we manage web content as much as Johannes Gutenberg did the printed word. The project’s roadmap is comprised of four unique phases:
\n\n\n\nWith the upcoming release of WordPress 6.3, Phase 2 of the Gutenberg project is coming to a close; a journey worth celebrating.
\n\n\n\nThis video is an ode to Gutenberg’s editing and customization phases, celebrating the new design tools and the possibilities they create. The piece encapsulates the exciting steps made in the past that propel the vibrant future of WordPress.
\n\n\n\nEverything showcased in the video is built entirely with the WordPress Editor, using currently available blocks, patterns, and themes. This new era has opened the ability for the design community to contribute to the project directly without depending on developers to translate their ideas into designs. Consider this an invitation for designers to join a new generation that embraces the diverse and expressive capabilities of WordPress.
\n\n\n\nThe work that goes into Gutenberg is a powerful testament to the collaboration of coders, developers, and designers in our community. United, we strive to build WordPress into a realm of significance and lasting impact.
\n\n\n\nVideo credits: Tino Barreiro, Beatriz Fialho, Takashi Irie, Henrique Lamarino, Rich Tabor, Pablo Honey, Matías Ventura, and Holographik.
\n\n\n\nThank you to the post authors Tino Barreiro, Nicholas Garofalo, Dan Soschin, Rich Tabor, and Chloé Bringmann.
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\n\n\n\nThis version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, you should evaluate Beta 4 on a test server and site.
\n\n\n\nGet an overview of the 6.3 release cycle, check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.3-related posts, and review the new features in WordPress 6.3. Also, save the date for a live product demo scheduled for Thursday, July 20, 2023, at 16:00 UTC (Zoom link). This will be a great opportunity to join the WordPress community to celebrate the accomplishments of 6.3 and this final chapter of Phase 2.
\n\n\n\nThanks to the many WordPress beta testers, this release contains 40+ (Editor) and 60+ (Trac) updates since the Beta 3 release. Excellent work, team!
\n\n\n\nNotable updates for this beta release include:
\n\n\n\nBrowse the technical details for issues addressed since Beta 3 using these queries:
\n\n\n\nTesting for issues is a critical part of developing any software, and it’s a meaningful way for anyone to contribute—whether you have experience or not. While testing the upgrade process is essential, trying out new features is too.
\n\n\n\nThe monetary reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities is doubled between the Beta 1 release and the final release candidate (RC). Please follow responsible disclosure practices as detailed in the project’s security practices and policies outlined on the HackerOne page and in the security white paper.
\n\n\n\nYou can test WordPress 6.3 Beta 4 in three ways:
\n\n\n\nwp core update --version=6.3-beta4The current target for the final release is August 8, 2023, about four weeks away. Your help testing this version ensures everything in this release is the best.
\n\n\n\nBeta ships, once more
Up next week, an RC1
6, 3, out the door
Thank you to the contributors who collaborated on this post: @DanSoschin, @Meher, @eidolonnight, and @JPantani.
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Want to learn more about WordPress 6.3, planned for release on August 8, 2023? Join the WordPress community for a first look at 6.3 in action during a live product demonstration.
\n\n\n\n6.3 release squad members, Anne McCarthy and Rich Tabor, will team up with moderator, Nathan Wrigley, to guide attendees through the anticipated highlights of the upcoming release. This event will follow a similar format to the live demo for 6.2.
\n\n\n\nAttendees will see recent improvements to the Site Editor, Patterns, Command Palette, and more. Following the demo, there will be a Q&A session, and you may submit questions in advance via Slack.
\n\n\n\nThursday, July 20, 2023 at 16:00 UTC
Zoom Link | Save this link and use it on July 20 to join the event.
The event will be recorded, archived for on-demand viewing on WordPress.tv, and shared in a recap post shortly afterward.
\n\n\n\nTo learn more about WordPress 6.3, please visit the following resources:
\n\n\n\nProps to our panelists and moderator, and to @jpantani, @meher, @eidolonnight, and @dansoschin for helping prepare this announcement and supporting event logistics.
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\n\n\n\nThis version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it is recommended you evaluate Beta 3 on a test server and site.
\n\n\n\nGet an overview of the 6.3 release cycle, and check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.3-related posts in the coming weeks for further details. Also, save the date for a live product demo tentatively scheduled for Thursday, July 20, 2023 at 16:00 UTC (link TBD). This will be a great opportunity to join the WordPress community to celebrate the accomplishments of 6.3 and this final chapter of Phase 2.
\n\n\n\nThanks to the many WordPress beta testers, this release contains approximately 34 (Site Editor) and 40+ (Trac) updates since the Beta 2 release. Nice work, team!
\n\n\n\nTesters should note that the “Patterns Library” is now simply called Patterns in the UI. Additionally, pattern details now include a sync status and a lock icon is added for theme patterns.
\n\n\n\nBrowse the technical details for issues addressed since Beta 2 using these queries:
\n\n\n\nTesting for issues is a critical part of developing any software, and it’s a meaningful way for anyone to contribute—whether you have experience or not.
\n\n\n\nWhile testing the upgrade process is essential, trying out new features is too. Review the many new features in WordPress 6.3 and focus your testing efforts on those areas in particular.
\n\n\n\nBetween the Beta 1 release and the final release candidate (RC), the monetary reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities is double. Please follow responsible disclosure practices as detailed in the project’s security practices and policies outlined on the HackerOne page and in the security white paper.
\n\n\n\nYou can test WordPress 6.3 Beta 3 in three ways:
\n\n\n\nwp core update --version=6.3-beta3The current target for the final release is August 8, 2023, which is about five weeks away. Your help testing this version ensures everything in this release is the best.
\n\n\n\nBeta three, a peek
Summer here and winter there
A fourth in one week
Thank you to the contributors who collaborated on this post: @DanSoschin, @Meher, @JPantani, @eidolonnight, @davidbaumwald, @priethor, and @DanSoschin for the Haiku.
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\n\n\n\nHave a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording.
\n\n\n\nHost: Josepha Haden Chomphosy
Guests: Alex Kirk
Editor: Dustin Hartzler
Logo: Javier Arce
Production: Brett McSherry and Nicholas Garofalo
Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod
( Intro music )
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:10]
\n\n\n\nHello everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go.
\n\n\n\n( Intro music )
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:39]
\n\n\n\nI have with me Alex Kirk, who is a longtime WordPress contributor and who has been instrumental in recent innovations in the Polyglots’ work. Phase four of the Gutenberg project is native multilingual support, and so I see this work that is being done as instrumental, not only for our global community but in support of what’s to come in that specific roadmap.
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:59]
\n\n\n\nSo without further ado, Alex Kirk, welcome to the WordPress Briefing.
\n\n\n\n[Alex Kirk 00:01:03]
\n\n\n\nHello, how are you doing?
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:05]
\n\n\n\nI’m good. I’m good. Can you, let’s, because I bet that not a lot of people know who you are, can you first start by just telling me a bit about your work with WordPress, and then let us know what GlotPress is, for those of us who don’t know yet?
\n\n\n\n[Alex Kirk 00:01:19]
\n\n\n\nAll right. So, Automattic sponsors me to work in the WordPress project on the Meta team and on the Polyglots team. So I spent time on improving or helping improve the software that powers the translation on WordPress.org. But I also work on the meta team on things like Matrix and evaluating if it would be a good fit for WordPress to switch to Matrix for their chat system.
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:46]
\n\n\n\nSo a lot of really big projects that you work on, all of that kind of stuff that has no easy solutions anymore, is where you are right now. Huh?
\n\n\n\n[Alex Kirk 00:01:56]
\n\n\n\nYeah, there’s no clear path, but it’s our mission to find it. So that’s part of what makes things interesting.
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:05]
\n\n\n\nCool. So for folks who don’t know too much about the Polyglots team or generally translating WordPress, the software, can you let us know a bit about what GlotPress is?
\n\n\n\n[Alex Kirk 00:02:16]
\n\n\n\nRight. So the translation system that powers WordPress.org is called GlotPress. It used to be a standalone software that was developed a couple of years ago, and it was transformed into a WordPress plugin at some point, and now powers the translation that happens on WordPress.org. So we translate WordPress core there from English to other languages, plugins, themes, block patterns, and it all happens through this software called GlotPress. There are a couple GlotPress installations around the world, but I think the WordPress.org one is one of the bigger ones.
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:55]
\n\n\n\nProbably, WordPress.org is pretty, pretty massive. Also, I think it’s great that you said that GlotPress was created a couple of years ago, like that, that indicates to me that you’re working on a really different timescale than a lot of folks are in WordPress.
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:10]
\n\n\n\nSo Alex, tell me a little bit about what it takes to ship translated WordPress software. So, I mean, for people who don’t need translated WordPress, like obviously we don’t have a good idea of what it takes to make sure that WordPress is available in so many languages. So what goes into the work of making sure that that happens?
\n\n\n\n[Alex Kirk 00:03:32]
\n\n\n\nAll right, so typically the WordPress software and plugins and themes are primarily created in English. And for it to be available in other languages, it needs to be translated. And for that to be able to happen, the programmers need to make the software translatable. Basically, they’re providing each English string for the translation software to be available to be transformed, so to speak, into another language and to what it’s being transformed to. This is what the translators do. So they go into the GlotPress software and see the list of texts that need to be translated and translate it to their language that they speak. Typically there is a process around this.
\n\n\n\n[Alex Kirk 00:03:32]
\n\n\n\nSo, we’ve got people who have lots of experience in translation. And specifically in translating WordPress or WordPress plugins. And they’re kind of the, the people who help ensure good quality of translation. So anybody who’s working the WordPress project, so basically who has a WordPress.org account, can come in and address the translation. And that translation enters the system, so to speak, in a waiting state. And then somebody who we promoted to be a Translation Editor will come along and take a look at your translation and will approve it or will give you suggestions how to do the translation in a better way, or come up with maybe even a better translation.
\n\n\n\n[Alex Kirk 00:05:03]
\n\n\n\nYou know, when you have like a small thing that’s just not right, like a missing full stop or something like that. They might just add it for you. And well, as soon as the plugin or software is translated to a certain level of translations those translations will be shipped out to the WordPress installs.
\n\n\n\n[Alex Kirk 00:05:20]
\n\n\n\nSo, for example, for a plugin, you would reach 90% of translated strings. Those translations will then be basically packed up into zip file, a language pack and delivered to each WordPress so that you can have the translations available there.
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:35]
\n\n\n\nAnd is 90% the threshold for plugins only, or is that also the threshold for like themes and the CMS itself?
\n\n\n\n[Alex Kirk 00:05:34]
\n\n\n\nWell. We strive for 100%, I would say.
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:47]
\n\n\n\nGood. ( laughs )
\n\n\n\n[Alex Kirk 00:05:48]
\n\n\n\nAnd, 90% more of a motivational point. To be actually honest, I’m not sure if the threshold is 90% for every project or even if it’s actually 90%. It’s different between different GlotPress installations and it’s basically something that is made as a setting that can be changed. There’s, it’s an arbitrary number. Typically you’d actually want to make sure that the most important strings are translated first. So the ones like, if you look at the whole picture, software usually consists of many parts, many of whom are not encountered by people on a regular basis. For example, error messages that could be like obscure error messages, and you could argue that those might be not as important. Or even sometimes you could even say like, do they need to be translated? Because if you encounter an error message and you search the internet, wouldn’t you probably want everybody to search for the English one to find the solution? But that set-aside, it’s important to have like the headline of the plugin or like the most important strings translated, and typically translating those most important strings will take you to a pretty high percentage so that we can then say it’s good enough to be shipped.
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:02]
\n\n\n\nGotcha. I see, I see. Okay. Well, we talked a bit earlier about GlotPress’s timeline. It has been around for a bit, I know. But with that kind of in mind, have there been any notable changes to GlotPress recently?
\n\n\n\n[Alex Kirk 00:07:19]
\n\n\n\nYeah, so I think for GlotPress there’s been a bit of an up and down over time in terms of engagement and progress on the software. But in, in the recent year, I think we’ve added a couple of things that have been very helpful for translators. So one of them was adding the commenting functionality, so yeah.
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:35]
\n\n\n\nSuper helpful. Shocked it wasn’t there before. Sorry, translators. Sorry, all of our polyglots.
\n\n\n\n[Alex Kirk 00:07:40]
\n\n\n\nWell, it can be like there was when GlotPress was created there, there is like the, a big part of GlotPress are these states, like the waiting state when you enter translation, and then there’s approved state, which basically a translation we say it’s set to current, and there’s all sorts of process around it. So if the software is updated or translation might get fuzzy. But also like, if somebody submits a translation that doesn’t fully conform to what’s the translation editors, or like what the standards of the translation community have been set to, then you would have to need to reject it.
\n\n\n\n[Alex Kirk 00:08:16]
\n\n\n\nAnd that has been something that we felt wasn’t a very good and enticing way of telling people like, we appreciate your work. It wasn’t just quite right, but it’s more of a rejection. So this is how we came up with this like, let’s give people the option to say what was wrong and give them a chance to try again without making them feel rejected.
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:08:38]
\n\n\n\nYeah. Sort of a “No, but…” as opposed to a, just refusal to receive it.
\n\n\n\n[Alex Kirk 00:08:45]
\n\n\n\nAnd other things that we’ve worked on is, like, with the recent search of AI, like getting help from AI on translation and also on reviews. So, there’s some interesting things that you can do with AI in that regard; that one important aspect of translations, it’s also that we’ve got glossaries for each language where people, basically the translation community, identifies certain words they want to translate them the same way every time. And with the AI, you can basically add to the prompt, like, please translate those words to those translations when you give me a translation for that. And as it can change over time, you can always adapt this to the prompt, and that has been proven quite helpful.
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:09:25]
\n\n\n\nThat is great. That’s one of those things I know that AI has been like a really popular thing to talk about. And AI, specifically for translations, I think has caused some concern that maybe we’ll just like translate it all and hope that computers get it right when we know pretty certainly that computers don’t always get the translations right. But that’s not what you’re talking about, right? What you’re suggesting is that AI would suggest what could be translated and what it could be translated to, and then human beings have to confirm that that’s correct, right?
\n\n\n\n[Alex Kirk 00:09:59]
\n\n\n\nThat’s exactly it. So basically, we give suggestions to the translators, and then they can modify a translation before they press save. It’s more of a, like supporting them in getting the translations, like looking up words more quickly and all of that.
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:10:16]
\n\n\n\nThat’s wonderful. So is that the major sort of next step that is coming for GlotPress, or are there other things that we should keep an eye out for in that software?
\n\n\n\n[Alex Kirk 00:10:27]
\n\n\n\nSo one direction that we’ve been taking GlotPress is basically making use of the fact that GlotPress is WordPress plugin now. And you know, typically, you would just use a GlotPress install. So on WordPress.Org, there’s like GlotPress installed, there’s translation projects created, something that we call “translation sets”. So for languages, you want to translate it to, it’s all pre-configured, and if you would install GlotPress to plugin on your own WordPress, it would be empty and not very useful. So what we’ve added is a way for you to basically be able to translate the plugins and themes that you’ve got installed in your WordPress into the language that you’re interested in.
\n\n\n\n[Alex Kirk 00:11:07]
\n\n\n\nSo you might have a non-English website that you want to use certain plugins with, and they might not be fully translated at this point, so obviously, you could go to WordPress.org and help translate them, and that’s the way to, that’s preferred. But you could also now go install GlotPress on your own website and translate there. And then you have the translations there right when you enter them. And you can then contribute those translations back to WordPress.org.
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:11:35]
\n\n\n\nSo that’s with local GlotPress?
\n\n\n\n[Alex Kirk 00:11:37]
\n\n\n\nThat’s something that we call local GlotPress. And you know, since we then have all these translations in the local database, it means we can do even more with those translations. So typically, language packs would be delivered to WordPress, but with local GlotPress, you’ve got like all the GlotPress software there.
\n\n\n\n[Alex Kirk 00:11:56]
\n\n\n\nSo we can do things like inline translation. So, on your own WordPress and wp-admin, for example, we can highlight all the strings that can be translated, and those strings just have to right-click them and enter your translation, and that way, you can basically go about and translate the whole ui, seeing your progress, as you’re making, basically turning the screen from red to green.
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:12:20]
\n\n\n\nYeah. Yeah. So that’s something now that you can do in your local WordPress installation.
\n\n\n\n[Alex Kirk 00:12:26]
\n\n\n\nBasically, it’s completely independent of WordPress.org. We would ask you to contribute the translations back when you have them, but being independent also allows you to translate like premium plugins, which could not be hosted on WordPress.org or doing something like that we call like hyper-local translation. So, for example, I speak Austrian German natively, but even inside Austria, we’ve got different dialects or like special words that we use. And if I wanted to create a website that’s targeted at the Viennese market, for example, I might want to use those specific terms. And this is something I would have to argue for those translations to be accepted on WordPress.org because it’s a, it’s like a very targeted market. But if I have a local GlotPress, I can do those translations there.
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:13:11]
\n\n\n\nThat seems awfully beneficial, especially as dialects. I’ve been having these conversations. I have, in my extended family, many children, and they are all learning languages and one of them has been having kind of thoughts about, like, dialects and how dialects are almost another language. And if so, like how do you know what everybody’s saying when you’re speaking all the same thing, but it’s kind of a little bit it sounds a little bit different.
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:13:37]
\n\n\n\nThat’s certainly a thing in the US, the distinct dialects across our country. And so I imagine that that’s gonna be a really beneficial sort of implementation for countries that have a lot of different regional variations and certainly smaller countries that have technically the same language as somebody else, but a lot of regional differences, regional specific things.
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:14:01]
\n\n\n\nIs that the same or different as the live translations, Translate Live, that we talked about at the WordCamp Europe a couple weeks back?
\n\n\n\n[Alex Kirk 00:14:12]
\n\n\n\nRight. So, Translate Live is kind of the next step after local GlotPress. It’s like this happy marriage between the WordPress Playground and local GlotPress. So the WordPress Playground is also something that has come up a lot. It’s basically a way for you to run WordPress inside a browser window, so in JavaScript. And at first, it seems like mildly interesting, I would say. But when you combine it with other things like local GlotPress, it can lead to really interesting opportunities. So with inline translation, for example, on WordPress.org, you would typically find for every plugin, the UI would look the same. You would have a table of strings, and all that makes you realize you’re translating this certain plugin is that in the header of the page, it says this name of the plugin, but other than that, it can look really all the same.
\n\n\n\n[Alex Kirk 00:15:07]
\n\n\n\nAnd now, with WordPress Playground, you can put up a WordPress and run this plugin inside that Playground. And now, if you add local GlotPress to the picture, you can also do the inline translation of that plugin inside the WordPress Playground. So you’ve got inline translation. We add the glossary so they do make sure that you translate things the same way that they’re expected, and you don’t have to install the plugin.
\n\n\n\n[Alex Kirk 00:15:33]
\n\n\n\nAnd still, you can see what the translations will look like. You can see the strings next to each other, and what I think is most important, you will start with the strings that you see first, which are the most important ones. When you’re in the table view, those strings might be somewhere buried in the middle, and yeah, it’s really hard to see progress if you start with kind of obscure error messages, for example, versus just starting with the things that you see first.
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:16:02]
\n\n\n\nYeah. So, moving translations away from table-based translations where you kind of have to know what you’re looking for. So the Translate Live, along with local GlotPress, along with WP Playground, is going to make it so that it’s easier to see visually what needs to be translated, where, what’s most valuable to translate for your mid users and your end users, basically.
\n\n\n\nYeah?
\n\n\n\n[Alex Kirk 00:16:30]
\n\n\n\nThat, and also like for plug-in authors, it can be really good to see, you know, you can switch the languages in the Playground to another language, and you can quickly see like what’s the state of the translation in this language or in that language. And even things like, you know, Arabic as an RTL language rights to left language. The sidebar will change to the right, and you can also just switch language and see like, what’s my plugin like in this environment. I mean, this is not technically something that’s related to local GlotPress, but in this translation live ui, it’s very easy to change languages and see your plugin in another language.
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:17:06]
\n\n\n\nI mean, it’s not specifically related to, to Translations Live, but also, I think that if we’re saying that WordPress not necessarily is going to lead the way with translations and native multilingual support in our CMS because, of course, it’s still a little bit far out on our roadmap. We certainly have an opportunity to have the best implementation of that.
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:17:27]
\n\n\n\nAnd even if like that specific use case that you’re talking about isn’t related directly to what it is that you are working on for Polyglots and inside GlotPress and all of that, I do see that having more streamlined, more easy to see and access opportunities to like test the way that our software looks across varying environments, especially those that change it substantially from what we typically work in day-to-day for any individual developer or any individual WordPress site implementer.
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:18:00]
\n\n\n\nLike, I think that that is a big step forward for all of us and certainly for anyone who is having to use WordPress as not a native English speaker. And so you say it’s not related, but it still is a big, a big benefit for WordPress overall, I think, to have this kind of work happening so that we can have those benefits to the folks who are using our software.
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:18:22]
\n\n\n\nSo there were a couple of different things that you mentioned over the course of our conversation. We’re gonna put some links to the show notes for all of those. But one thing that you mentioned that just kind of went by, and we never really had an opportunity to talk about it. You talked about the, I think it was GTEs, Global Translation Editors, the folks that are like approved as final approvers of translations. If there is someone who’s listening to this podcast who wants to become a GTE someday, where would they go to do that?
\n\n\n\n[Alex Kirk 00:18:54]
\n\n\n\nSo the path to GTE is a PTE. ( laughs )
\n\n\n\n[Alex Kirk 00:18:59]
\n\n\n\nSo, we’ve got different levels of translation editors. Basically, you start, you could say you start off as a translator, and this is how you can kind of show that you can do good translations or that you’re very firm in your language. And this might make you be noticed in the community.
\n\n\n\n[Alex Kirk 00:19:16]
\n\n\n\nSo we’re always looking for people who like to help with translations. And you might be then promoted to be a Project Translation Editor. Basically, it means that for a single language in a project, you’ll be able to approve translations. So, you’ll be the one who says, like, this translation is a good one and this conforms to the to the rules that we have stated as a translation community.
\n\n\n\n[Alex Kirk 00:19:42]
\n\n\n\nAnd further down the path then is the GTE, where you basically are allowed to approve translations across any project on translate.WordPress.org in your language. And that’s, usually you’ll be in, in that position with other GTEs.
\n\n\n\n[Alex Kirk 00:20:04]
\n\n\n\nSo there is, like, in each community, there is like, we’re people based. We talk about what might be a good translation. We talk to each other, try to find rules that maybe prevent common mistranslations, or set the standards for how we want the software to be translated. And this is something where you get a voice as a translator, but as a GTE, you get into a position where you can actually make the changes or find consensus on how the software should be translated in your language.
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:20:35]
\n\n\n\nAnd if folks are not familiar where the Polyglots team works and meets, where would they find you all?
\n\n\n\n[Alex Kirk 00:20:41]
\n\n\n\nAt make.WordPress.org/polyglots.
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:20:45]
\n\n\n\nPerfect. Alex, this has been such a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for joining me today.
\n\n\n\n[Alex Kirk 00:20:50]
\n\n\n\nThank you very much.
\n\n\n\n( Intermission music )
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:20:59]
\n\n\n\nSo that brings us now to our small list of big things. First, WP Campus 2023 is taking place July 12th through the 14th. That’s a nonprofit three-day conference with topics that focus on the growth of higher education, accessibility, WordPress, and anyone who works in higher education.
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:21:17]
\n\n\n\nIt’s a hybrid event. There is an in-person component on the beautiful campus of Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. I’ll add information about that in our show notes for anyone who would like to join in person or online.
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:21:32]
\n\n\n\nThe second thing is that the mentorship program pilot that I have been talking about a little bit over the last few months has been formally launched.
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:21:39]
\n\n\n\nIf you are interested in contributing more to the project but not sure where to begin, take a look at this comprehensive onboarding experience. It’s cohort-based. It has some personalized one-to-one mentorship. There are guided courses, live workshops, all of that. So read more about it in our show notes and sign up for one-on-one team mentorship.
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:21:59]
\n\n\n\nAnd then, finally, Matt mentioned at WordCamp Europe an idea that he had been thinking of for some time a Make team dashboard that would sort of help define team metrics and help identify for individual contributors what should indicate team health and where they can find the most impactful projects to work on.
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:22:20]
\n\n\n\nA post has since been published on make.WordPress.org/meta calling for additional feedback on that idea, so that we have an understanding of what this could be, how the dashboard can kind of come to be. And so stop by and add your thoughts there in the comments.
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:22:38]
\n\n\n\nAnd that, my friends, is your small list of big things.
\n\n\n\n[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:22:42]
\n\n\n\nThanks for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks.
\n\n\n\n( Outro music )
\n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:30:\"com-wordpress:feed-additions:1\";a:1:{s:7:\"post-id\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:5:\"15281\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:9;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:72:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n \n \n \";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:4:{s:0:\"\";a:6:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:32:\"People of WordPress: Allison Dye\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:67:\"https://wordpress.org/news/2023/06/people-of-wordpress-allison-dye/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Fri, 30 Jun 2023 21:23:11 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:8:\"category\";a:6:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:9:\"Community\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}i:1;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:8:\"Features\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}i:2;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:7:\"General\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}i:3;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:10:\"Interviews\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}i:4;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:9:\"HeroPress\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}i:5;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:19:\"People of WordPress\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:35:\"https://wordpress.org/news/?p=15287\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:1:{s:0:\"\";a:1:{s:11:\"isPermaLink\";s:5:\"false\";}}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:121:\"The People of WordPress goes to the US to feature Allison Dye, who uses the software in her work and disability-advocacy.\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:11:\"Abha Thakor\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:40:\"http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/\";a:1:{s:7:\"encoded\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:14691:\"\nA way to escape chronic pain and give a sense of independence, is what using WordPress means for Italian-American Allison Dye. Now as a project manager and social media content manager living in North Carolina, USA, she uses the software in her work and in disability-advocacy.
\n\n\n\nThe People of WordPress series shares inspiring stories of how people’s lives can change for the better through WordPress and its global community of contributors.
\n\n\n\n![\"Allison](\"https://i0.wp.com/wordpress.org/news/files/2023/06/fi-allison-dye.jpg?resize=1024%2C537&ssl=1\")
Allison was first introduced to WordPress when she was 13 years old. Her parents gave her own WordPress website to use, play, test, and try whatever she wanted with it. Her health issues had started when she was eight years old, and being able to express who she was and learn new skills provided an escape she needed.
\n\n\n\nAllison said: “While the technical aspects of my new WordPress website intrigued me, I was more interested in the space it made for me to write. All throughout my childhood I had struggled with chronic pain, fatigue, and other unexplained symptoms. Having a private world I could call my own, I was able to write my story.”
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n“There is something truly amazing about having a place to tell your story.”
\nAllison Dye
Her family faced many doctors, nurse, specialists and hospital visits, but could not get an answer to the difficulties faced by Allison. She said: “I felt like my life and world were out of control. But logging onto my little website and typing away on the computer keys gave me a sense of control. I couldn’t always do things that other kids had the energy to do. But I could get lost in writing for hours. I couldn’t control my life story, but I could write about it.”
\n\n\n\nShe felt it was like writing letters to her future self and would act as a reminder of how strong she had become. Even now when Allison writes on her website, she feels it is writing letters to her past self, expressing reassurance and pride. The practice of writing online continues to help her reflect on how she coped and made it through the difficulties.
\n\n\n\nAllison hoped her early experiences with hospitals and being unwell was just part of being a child, and that in adulthood she would be healthy. She longed for this time.
\n\n\n\nGrowing up did not bring her this dream of a healthier life and an end to chronic pain. In fact, her condition worsened as she went through her teens and at 18 she finally received a diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis.
\n\n\n\n![\"Allison](\"https://i0.wp.com/wordpress.org/news/files/2023/06/allison-2.jpg?resize=768%2C1024&ssl=1\")
This changed what had been conventional job choices, as she was not able to handle a 9 to 5 work schedule. She could not drive herself to work on some days and relied on her mother to help with transport. She knew that she would have to find another way to work and she was determined to find it.
\n\n\n\nShe began writing music and book reviews online, and then moved onto writing blog posts. As they were published she started to receive payment and a sense of power over her life. She said: “WordPress felt familiar, typing on the computer keys felt comfortable, and sharing my words with the world felt surreal.”
\n\n\n\nAllison’s sense of ownership of the software became part of her strength. “I think I believed WordPress was mine somehow. I was learning that WordPress is something that belongs to everyone in some way. And I loved it.”
\n\n\n\nThe confidence using the platform gave Allison led her to find more about what it could do and meet other people who used it. She said: “The thing I love about WordPress is that it’s not just for developers or bloggers or SEO experts. I began to meet more people in the community and was delighted to find people like me, who didn’t know the technical stuff, but were a part of WordPress.”
\n\n\n\nThis global community orbiting around the software gave her an opportunity to meet social media managers, designers, and people from many different areas. She found that ‘there was a place for everyone’. The guiding strength and fascination Allison found and still finds today is in that community. Allison said: “The community felt as important as the rest of everything that makes WordPress what it is. It felt like it was about people and relationships as well as codes and databases.”
\n\n\n\nIn 2020, she was hired by a WordPress company. She said: “I like being a part of a WordPress company, and I love that I contribute to a team that helps people with their websites. I understand the importance of having a space that’s yours. Whether it’s a business or personal site, having a website gives you the power of telling your own story.”
\n\n\n\nWordPress gave Allison a freedom and an independence. She did not have to work a 9 to 5 job, rely on others to drive her on bad days with her MS, nor worry about days when she wanted to stay in her sweatshirts rather than go into an office to work. She said: “I have a 100% remote job which I can do despite the plot twists in my story, thanks to WordPress and the people in it.”
\n\n\n\nWordPress took Allison into the world of project management for a small agency, and this experience was to help guide her path, skills and confidence into the future. She went on to work in content management in WordPress, building pages for awareness campaigns for non profit organizations and small businesses as a contractor. She helps people update their websites, add and edit content, perform basic updates and help them to learn how to use their sites.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n“I tell all my clients to use WordPress because there is really no other solution that can scale as easily for growing organizations and small businesses. I love how WordPress allows them to tell their stories, share their passion, and have a place to call their own on the internet.”
\nAllison Dye
As a fluent English and Italian speaker, Allison is able to support clients in different countries from where she lives. “I love that with WordPress I’m able to support clients remotely. This is thanks to all of the many WordPress contributors, developers, project managers, content writers, and many, many volunteers that work tirelessly to enable people around the world to use WordPress.”
\n\n\n\nAllison also became a certified as an English As A Second Language (ESL) teacher. “My affinity for words and languages allows me to teach passionately and creatively. I’m Italian-American and am fluent in English and Italian. Teaching English allows me to share my passion for communication with others.”
\n\n\n\n![\"Allie](\"https://i0.wp.com/wordpress.org/news/files/2023/06/WPCoffeeTalk-Allie-Dye.png?resize=1024%2C562&ssl=1\")
Allison attributes mentors and supporters in the WordPress community for helping her appreciate she really is part of it. Allison recalled: “It felt unreal. I wasn’t a dev, I don’t know how to code, and yet I got to be a part of it all? I felt like I was a fake. But Kimberly continues to remind me that I’m real, I get to be here, I get to stay, I have a place.”
\n\n\n\nShe was later encouraged to contribute by a WordPress community member to the Big Orange Heart, which aims to support and promote positive well-being and mental health within remote working communities. She said she felt ‘honored typing my words, pieces of my story, and sharing them with a community of people’.
\n\n\n\nShe also joined the WordCamp US 2021 online organizing team.
\n\n\n\nAllison enjoys the fact that in the WordPress community, ‘everyone here is constantly working to be better and do better’.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/wordpress.org/news/files/2023/06/allison-1.jpg?resize=675%2C900&ssl=1\")
Allison was later diagnosed with two additional neurological conditions: Functional Neurological Disorder and Migraine. She said: “If it were not for WordPress I would really be unable to work. But WordPress and its community continue to be a part of my life and I am grateful to everyone who’s helped me along my way. I don’t know where I would even be without it.”
\n\n\n\nShe strives to raise awareness of dynamic disabilities and invisible illnesses like her own through podcasts and social media. She feels that her WordPress friends have helped her both in her professional life and in her wish to be an advocate for others with disabilities too.
Allison hopes reading of her experience will help others who are worried about not progressing in a WordPress career due to health concerns.
\n\n\n\n\n“I hope that it will remind anyone reading this that WordPress is a space for everyone. Healthy or not, developer or not, blogger or not — WordPress belongs to you too.”
\nAllison Dye
Help share these stories of open source contributors and continue to grow the community. Meet more WordPressers in the People of WordPress series.
\n\n\n\nThanks to Allie Dye (@allisondye) for sharing about her adventures in WordPress.
\n\n\n\nProps to Abha Thakor (@webcommsat) and the late Surendra Thakor (@sthakor) for interviews and writing the feature, Meher Bala (@meher) for work on images, and to Meher, Maja Loncan (@mloncar) and Chloe Bringmann (@cbringmann) for reviews.
\n\n\n\nThe People of WordPress series thanks Josepha Haden (@chanthaboune) and Topher DeRosia (@topher1kenobe) for their support.
\n\n\n\n![\"HeroPress](\"https://i0.wp.com/wordpress.org/news/files/2020/03/heropress_logo_180.png?resize=180%2C135&ssl=1\"){kind=logo}
This People of WordPress feature is inspired by an essay originally published on HeroPress.com, a community initiative created by Topher DeRosia. It highlights people in the WordPress community who have overcome barriers and whose stories might otherwise go unheard. #HeroPress
\nJudd from Bright Vessel and Carlos from Britecode share insights and experience in building their WooCommerce Agency stack.
\n>> The post Building Your Agency Stack with Judd Dunagan and Carlos Caneja appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community .
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\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nvideo credit: Gutenberg 16.3 release post\n\n\n\nGutenberg 16.3 adds a sticky header bar on the Patterns page. It also brings the “focus mode” to patterns, which is already available for template parts in the Site Editor but not available when editing patterns. Users may not notice but it provides more a consistent editing interface.
\n\n\n\nThose who have been keenly following the evolution of the Patterns page will notice that the “Theme patterns” heading has been removed and the pattern categories rearranged. Theme and plugin patterns now appear above template parts.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe icon for synced patterns isn’t self evident and some users may need more context. A new tooltip identifies synced patterns as those for which edits will apply anywhere the pattern is used.
\n\n\n\nGutenberg 16.3 includes more than two dozen pattern interface-related fixes, among other editor bug fixes. If you are using and managing patterns frequently, having the Gutenberg plugin installed will enable a better experience with this interface until these updates make their way into core WordPress. Check out the release post for a full list of all the changes and fixes in 16.3.
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Thu, 27 Jul 2023 02:49:22 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"Sarah Gooding\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:2;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:65:\"WPTavern: WordPress 6.3 RC2 Released, Watch the Live Product Demo\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:30:\"https://wptavern.com/?p=147173\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:75:\"https://wptavern.com/wordpress-6-3-rc2-released-watch-the-live-product-demo\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:4061:\"WordPress 6.3 RC2 has been released and is ready for community testing. Since RC1 landed a week ago, 15 changes have come in from the Editor and Trac, including bug fixes for footnotes, internationalization fixes, a missing command for opening the distraction free in the Site Editor, and a few other issues.
\n\n\n\nThis release also brings in work completing the About page and adds a “Get Involved” section, closing a 10-year old ticket that suggested adding a “Contribute” tab to the About page.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe new Get Involved page features both code-based and no-code contribution opportunities with a link to WordPress’ contributor teams.
\n\n\n\nThe video of the WordPress 6.3 Live Product Demo has been published so anyone who was not able to attend can get a preview of what is coming in the next release. Automattic-sponsored contributors Anne McCarthy and Rich Tabor hosted the demo, showing users how to use the new command palette to zip around the editor and manage settings views. They also guide viewers through browsing and editing pages within the Site Editor, managing synced patterns (formerly called Reusable Blocks), and showcased various new blocks and design tools.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCheck out the highlights post for all the links to features referenced in the demo and the Q&A portion of the broadcast.
\n\n\n\nFor those interested in performance improvements coming in 6.3, an upcoming hallway hangout is happening tomorrow Thursday, July 27, 2023 at 11:00 AM EDT. Participants can check the #core-performance Slack channel for the Zoom link before the event. Team leads will cover highlights from the 170+ performance improvements included in 6.3 and will discuss future improvements for 6.4.
\n\n\n\nWordPress’ Training team is calling for volunteers to help with updating and revising existing Learn WordPress resources ahead of the 6.3 release. The team has created a board on their GitHub repository which highlights high priority tasks.
\n\n\n\nWordPress 6.3 RC3 is expected to be released on August 1, and the general release is scheduled for August 8, less than two weeks away. There is still time to find and report some bugs. One easy way is to install the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a local testing site or use a quick throwaway site from services like InstaWP or TasteWP. Bugs can be reported on Trac or via the Alpha/Beta section of the support forums.
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Wed, 26 Jul 2023 19:19:54 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"Sarah Gooding\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:3;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:79:\"WPTavern: #85 – Giulia Laco on the Importance of Typography for Your Websites\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:48:\"https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=147116\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:93:\"https://wptavern.com/podcast/85-giulia-laco-on-the-importance-of-typography-for-your-websites\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:51871:\"Transcript[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case the importance of typography for your websites.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you, and hopefully get you or your idea featured on the show. Head to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash Jukebox, and use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today, we have Giulia Laco. Giulia is a web designer and developer who has been working on the web since the mid 1990s. Her primary interests are web typography and font design. In addition to project development, she’s a consultant and a trainer, mostly working with CSS, web fonts and web typography.
\n\n\n\nThis is the last of our podcasts from WordCamp Europe, 2023. I spoke to Giulia in Athens because she had just finished her presentation entitled “typographic readability in theme design and development”.
\n\n\n\nIn this session, she explored how designers can assist with the readability of websites through careful consideration of the fonts they choose and why they choose them.
\n\n\n\nIt turns out there’s quite a lot to consider. And if you’ve not given this topic much thought in the past, you’ll perhaps learn something new. I certainly did.
\n\n\n\nWe begin the podcast talking through how, at the start of the web, we were making do with a limited range of tools to help us make typographic choices. There were no web fonts available, but that started to change around 2010. Now we have access to hundreds of fonts and need to be mindful that some fonts can pose readability challenges for some users of your website.
\n\n\n\nGiulia talks about the fact that the manner in which we read has changed since the dawn of the internet. Many people now mostly consume small passages of text, which need to be considered in a different way to longer writing.
\n\n\n\nConcentrating upon the letters in the Latin alphabet, we talk about the ways in which readers typically break up words into smaller units, and the fact that the way letters are shaped can make them easier to parse. There’s some technical language here, ligatures X-height, apertures, and more. Which tell us about the shaping and spacing of letters. Giulia explains the current state of research into how these characteristics of fonts can affect readability.
\n\n\n\nWe talk about whether or not there are fonts which are more readable than others. Is there a collection of fonts, which you can use and be confident that you’re going to make it easy for all users of your websites?
\n\n\n\nGiulia talks about how designs need to consider the spaces into which the text is put. Most people have a proclivity for the order in which they view a page. And knowing about this path across the page can help your readers access the text.
\n\n\n\nThe width of the text is also important. You want people to be able to read from side to side without having to move their head. How does this work across different device sizes and what can be said about text, which runs right to left, or top to bottom?
\n\n\n\nWe round off the conversation with Giulia telling us where we can find out more, as well as some of the thought leaders in this space.
\n\n\n\nIt’s a fascinating conversation about a subject that often gets overlooked. Web designers, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Giulia Laco.
\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Giulia Laco. Hello Giulia.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:43] Giulia Laco: Hello.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:43] Nathan Wrigley: It’s very nice to have you on. Giulia is joining me at WordCamp EU in Athens. It’s the last conversation that I’m recording, so very nice to have you on. You are going to be talking to us today about something that I genuinely didn’t know about.
\n\n\n\nThis was a really interesting topic to research from my point of view. You’re going to be talking to us a little bit about typography. That’s based upon a workshop that you did yesterday. How did it go?
\n\n\n\n[00:05:12] Giulia Laco: I’m happy about that. I’m happy to hear that you are interested in typography as well.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:17] Nathan Wrigley: Was it well attended? Did you get your information across? Did people engage with the topic?
\n\n\n\n[00:05:22] Giulia Laco: I think so. I divided people in two groups, developers and designers. So to let them think about typography with the mentality of the others. So that was the point I was trying to have.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:35] Nathan Wrigley: Well, the reason I wanted to talk to you was because when I was looking through the list of presentations and workshops, yours was really different, a topic that I genuinely hadn’t thought about in the way that you’ve made me think about it.
\n\n\n\nBecause whenever I think about typography, I am really just thinking about whether I like a font. So if I go to a website, I just make a quick judgment. Do I like that font? Do I not like that font? But there’s a lot more to it than that, which we’re going to get into. But can you just tell us why you’re interested in this? Do you have a history with working with type? Why are you so fascinated by typography?
\n\n\n\n[00:06:17] Giulia Laco: Okay, well, maybe it’s because I’ve started making websites at the very beginning of the internet era. It was around, mid nineties. And we didn’t have the possibility to use web fonts of any kind on the web. We did what we could with very few tools. Whereas later on in 2009 or 10, we had this great possibility of using web fonts, and I started to get engaged with, with the typography. And that was the time when I was starting typography for the first time actually.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:52] Nathan Wrigley: Are you interested in typography away from the internet? Are you interested in the way that type is presented in books and on paper?
\n\n\n\n[00:07:00] Giulia Laco: Yes, everywhere. On menus as well.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, because when you actually turn your attention to typography, which is what I did after we booked this interview. Text is everywhere, and it’s really, really different wherever you look. So we are sitting in a room. There’s almost no text, but there’s a little bit of text behind you. It has a particular font.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:22] Giulia Laco: Montserrat.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:23] Nathan Wrigley: Montserrat probably, yeah. I’m looking at my computer. It has a font on it. I’ve just been downstairs, looked at a menu. It had three or four fonts on it. Wherever you look, there is text, and usually the typography has been thought about.
\n\n\n\nBut you were talking about typography from the point of view of how can be done better. How can be a problem for some people, and that I didn’t really realize. I knew that people would perhaps struggle to read text because it was too small, or there was a background color, which clashed with the color of the text. But I didn’t realize that the font itself could be a problem. So tell us how it can be a problem. How can some people struggle to read one font but not another?
\n\n\n\n[00:08:08] Giulia Laco: Well, it’s a big question, because, there’s a lot of research about that, recent research on readability. Because very few people read a lot nowadays in each country. So a lot of countries are worried about that.
\n\n\n\nSo there are movements to let people read better by making some tools. And big companies like Adobe, Google are on this concern. They’re concerned about that. So they’re trying to study that subject. The Readability Consortium, a consortium from between these big companies and universities in America.
\n\n\n\nAnd it’s working interdisciplinary. So with psychologists, typographers, graphic designers. And started to focus on what makes text legible. And what they are, as far as I know, they’re saying is that it’s different for everybody. So you test it.
\n\n\n\nAnd so that’s why you need to make tools that help people adjust their texts when they read for long form reading, of course. Not for just a menu or, very few words you are going to read. And they’re trying to do those tools. And maybe it’s difficult for a user to know what they need.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:30] Nathan Wrigley: Right.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:30] Giulia Laco: So, they are working also with AI. Trying to have some patterns and, have some themes, let’s say. So that can adapt to very different kind of people. But they’re trying to reach that patterns by research, not by guessing. So that’s very intereting.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, really interesting. I mean, again, when I was researching this, it suddenly occurred to me that, I have children, they’re grown up largely now. But I remember when they came home from school, at the beginning, their homework was in child-friendly fonts. Let’s put it that way. Often it was something along the lines of comic sans something like that. And it didn’t occur to me at all at the time, I just thought, oh, well it’s a child-friendly font. It’s kind of round and it’s got, you know, there’s no hard edges.
\n\n\n\nI just thought it’s just a pleasant thing to look at. But now that I’m thinking about it, it was probably an easier font for the child to begin to learn to read with. Because all of the letters were clear. There was no confusion between one letter and the other. You know, you couldn’t mistake the L for the I, for example. And I did wonder, you were saying that there’s less people reading than ever. If the typography is a, quotes, difficult font, it may be more difficult to begin learning to read. I don’t know if that’s something that you were trying to say there.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:59] Giulia Laco: Well actually, when a child start reading has a very tough task. And helping that process is important. I remember seeing books in upper case letters only, it was meant to be simpler. But they started only to recognize only one kind of letters. In the Latin alphabet, we have upper case and lower case, and they’re very different because of their history.
\n\n\n\nUppercase letters comes from the engraved Latin letters. Whereas the small, lowercase, comes from calligraphy. So they’re very different origins,. And it’s not the same to learn lowercase a and a lowercase a. Recognizing them as the same letter, the same sound.
\n\n\n\nAnd with sound is also difficult, especially in English, you have so much problem with sounds and letters.
\n\n\n\n[00:11:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I think we have 44 sounds, but only 26 letters.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:02] Giulia Laco: And the combination. When you use a letter and a sound, other languages are much more simpler on that respect.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah again, remarkable. I’d never really given any thought to how different uppercase and lowercase are. But they don’t bear, in some cases they’re quite similar.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:17] Giulia Laco: Yes.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:18] Nathan Wrigley: So an l and a capital L, broadly the same. But something like an a, the capital letter A and the lowercase letter. They’re just utterly different, aren’t they? They’re really, really remarkably different. Oh, that’s fascinating. I hadn’t given any thought. So what makes text legible to a lot of people, or not legible to a lot of people? Are there any kind of guidelines around that?
\n\n\n\n[00:12:41] Giulia Laco: Okay, I will distinguish between legibility and readability. Because, you have this distinction in English and it’s great. We don’t have it in Italian. I guess the legibility comes from lighting as we have for legibilita in Italian. And it’s something that has to do with decoding. So that’s something that has to do with the typeface.
\n\n\n\nWhereas readability is something you want to read, you like to read something, you want to read. And not you’re just trying to decode things. So that’s a big difference, when you start to understand why a text is readable or not. I would say that trying to take a legible font means to have a font with certain characteristics.
\n\n\n\nFor example, it’s let’s say proved that a font with a higher X-height is more legible. I’m talking about running text, the body text for long reading experience. So X-height is basically the medium height of the lower case letters, based on the letter x, that’s why X-height, you see.
\n\n\n\nAnd so for example, I don’t Helvetica has a higher X-height than Times New Roman, for example, if you compare it. And having a higher X-height is a typeface, be more readable.
\n\n\n\nAnd another very important thing is with apertures. Apertures, how can I say, the white space inside the part of the letters that are open. Take a lowercase e in the lower part of the letter. You have this room. If it’s more closed, it’s less legible because it can be taken for an o for example, you see. So Helvetica, for example, is very well used, but it’s not legible as a body copy. Helvetica is wonderful for display type for titles, but not so well for body text.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:42] Nathan Wrigley: So you are saying, so this X-height? So is typically the height of the letter x. So if I put an x next to the letter h, for example, it’s the height of the rounded bit of the letter h?
\n\n\n\n[00:15:55] Giulia Laco: Yes, exactly.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:57] Nathan Wrigley: Or it would be the height of the letter a? Or the rounded bit of the letter p? The more tall that bit is, the more legible it is for most people to read. I had no idea.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:09] Giulia Laco: Well, it’s just one thing because, not only that, because it’s also how you set type. For example, if you have a large X-height, typeface and you set it with a very small space between the lines, the line height, the leading, they say in typography. You don’t take advantage of that highness, you see.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:32] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So if letters are squashed. If one line of letters is compressed, so line height.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:37] Giulia Laco: Mm-hmm.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:37] Nathan Wrigley: Is compressed up against another line of letters beneath it, that makes it more difficult to read because there’s just no room for the letters to breathe, There’s no gap. They’re all just squished together. Okay?
\n\n\n\n[00:15:48] Giulia Laco: But you have to pay attention not to put too much line height. Otherwise you lose the next line when you jump from one line to the other, it’s too far and you can’t find it.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:59] Nathan Wrigley: So this is the eyes ability to go from the end of one line and track, and immediately find the beginning the next line.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:46] Giulia Laco: Yes exactlly.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:47] Nathan Wrigley: I confess I have experienced that problem before, and I hadn’t noticed, until just now, that that was because of that. I’ve definitely had books that I’ve been reading where I’ve struggled to begin the next line, and sometimes repeated the line that I was supposed to be on. Or I’ve skipped a line and missed a line out and only halfway through thought, actually that doesn’t make any sense. Let me go back. I had no idea. But also you are saying that the amount of, what did you call it, the space?
\n\n\n\n[00:16:30] Giulia Laco: Oh, typographers call it leading because it’s comes from lead, lead, lead, I don’t know, of the metal types. With metal types they used to put some space between the lines with some lead. So the lead bars.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:45] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. So they spaced them out with a physical object.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:30] Giulia Laco: Yes, exactly.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:45] Nathan Wrigley: And it was a bar of lead, and the wider the bar of lead, the more space. This is fascinating. But you also mentioned in the letter e for example, the lowercase e, forgive me if I misunderstood. So the bottom half of the letter e, there’s a gap, a little gap, and the amount of gap, if the gap is bigger.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:07] Giulia Laco: That’s the aperture, yes.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:08] Nathan Wrigley: The bigger the gap is, the more you are likely to be able to read it, typically?
\n\n\n\n[00:17:13] Giulia Laco: Yes, because you’re likely to distinguish it from an o.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:16] Nathan Wrigley: Of course.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:17] Giulia Laco: You decode it easiest.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:19] Nathan Wrigley: You keep mentioning Helvetica. Is that a font which has lots of problems? Is that why you mention it, because it’s full of things you can identify?
\n\n\n\n[00:17:26] Giulia Laco: It’s very well known. That’s why I’m mentioning. And very much used. But it’s better to use it as a display type.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:34] Nathan Wrigley: The only thing that I’ve ever had a problem reading, was the thing that I’ve just described where I have skipped a line or gone back and reread the other line. But I’m imagining that you’ve done this talk because there are problems which people experience, which I fortunately, don’t appear to have a problem with. What trips people up? If you were somebody that, I don’t know how to say this correctly. If you are somebody who struggles to read, what are the trip wires, if you know what I mean?
\n\n\n\nWhat are the things in a font could be wrong that make you unable to read it? So you mentioned that the line height, you mentioned the X-height. Is there more to it than that?
\n\n\n\n[00:18:14] Giulia Laco: Well, there might be a lot. One thing that I can think of are ambiguous forms of letters. Let’s take lowercase letters, p and q or b and d. So for these four letters in a sans serif font, for example, are usually with the same shape, just flipped or rotated. That’s said to be a problem with people that experience dyslexia. But it’s actually opinionated because we don’t know exactly how it works. Actually for everybody can be a problem to distinguish between similar shapes.
\n\n\n\nFor example, as you said before, a child who is starting to read, or to write as well, may experience the same problem. No matter if it’s, if there’s a problem of dyslexia or not. So if you are going to avoid these kind of things, you can pick a font, a serif font that generally has different letters, different forms. The four letters I mentioned, typically with small serfis in different parts of the letters so they can be distinguished, for sure.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:27] Nathan Wrigley: Can you, I know it’s probably obvious to most people, but will you just tell people what a serif font is and what it isn’t? You know, if you’ve got a non serif font or serif font, what’s the difference?
\n\n\n\n[00:19:39] Giulia Laco: Let’s take the example of Helvetica and Times New Roman. So maybe it’s easier for people to visualize the difference. Helvetica has straight lines, nothing at the termination of the strokes. Whereas Times New Roman has some small shapes that derive from the calligraphic or the, in that case, for the upper case, the engraving, the instrument that we use to engrave. And so they had this little [feet?] let’s say so, that distinguish the kind of font.
\n\n\n\nAnd the font has a different mood, very different mood. And a lot of other characteristics. There are, well, history of typography is based on that more or less.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:24] Nathan Wrigley: It always feels to me as if a font, a serif font, which has these, I think you use the word where the letter terminates. I’ve never really
\n\n\n\n[00:20:31] Giulia Laco: thought about that. They always look as if they’re more, I don’t know, maybe in a legal document or something like that. They have this feeling of something more powerful or more important or something. It’s quirky that, isn’t it?
\n\n\n\nI’m looking at a Google Doc where I’ve written my show notes and, I don’t see any that. I can’t tell you that either of those fonts are a serif font or a non serif font. I find them both equally easy to read. It doesn’t trip me up at all. But typically, is there a problem for some people with a serif font or a non serif font? Is there one, to catch everybody would it be better to not deploy a serif font or is there just no difference in people’s ability to cope with either?
\n\n\n\nEach font is maybe very different. Most people at the first level, when they start talking about topography, they started to see this difference. But that’s not the main point. Maybe the main point in readability is the rhythm of letters. The rhythm where the white space and the black space, meaning when you have black text on white. They alternate each other.
\n\n\n\nTry to figure out this word, minimum. You’ll have a lot of rhythm. Minimum in, written in lower case letters. You see? So, the rhythm is very, very different. And maybe that’s important in typography, in reading. And is very important for people who struggle with reading, because you don’t interrupt the rhythm. The rhythm helps reading.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:03] Nathan Wrigley: It just sort of bounces along, doesn’t it? If you look at the word minimum, it genuinely has a, it’s almost like a little wave pattern going up and down, isn’t it? That’s fascinating. So what did you call it? Your ability to read it. There was a word you just said. Rhythm, rhythm. So words can have rhythm, and the more rhythm there is, the easier it is to read. So if a font provides rhythm, that’s a good thing.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:24] Giulia Laco: I think so. But it depends also on the purpose. Long reading. I think that’s important. Otherwise it’s different. It’s totally different. I mean concepts with display types because they have a different purpose, you know, text and function. The titles have different purpose. They have to catch the attention. Whereas the long, the body text has to be read, so needs a different kind of attention.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:53] Nathan Wrigley: Right. And are there any guidelines which kind of fonts catch the attention more, and which kind of fonts work better with the body content? You know, where you’re reading long paragraphs and so on? Does it matter or is there one kind of font that you would recommend in each case?
\n\n\n\n[00:23:08] Giulia Laco: Generally, when you buy a font, you’ll have a font that is meant for body text and some other for display type. So if you rely on what the designer, the type designer, has done, you are safe. Otherwise you have to. try. But also if you go on a repository like Google fonts for example, you have this distinction among display types and other kind of types. So it’s quite a common mistake at the beginning to take display type and use it as a body text. And that’s a typographic crime.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:47] Nathan Wrigley: I like it. Typographic crime. That’s great. We’re all of us using our devices more and more. It’s funny that you said that reading is becoming less and less, because it feels like we have text in front of us all the time now. So we’re constantly staring at our mobile phones, and our computers. But when I was a child, if I wasn’t holding book, I probably wasn’t reading.
\n\n\n\nI mean, maybe there was a poster somewhere or something, but I’m surprised that reading is, there’s less desire to read, because it feels like every day I’m reading more or less constantly, you know, I’m scanning Twitter or Facebook or whatever.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:26] Giulia Laco: It’s a new kind of reading, Because we had long form reading for books. Then we have glanceable reading for, I don’t know, street signs. Or maybe a manual in a website. And then we have this, they call it interlude reading. You read when you’ve time, you’re doing, you don’t have a lot of attention, you scroll. And then you have also that the way we read on the web is very different from what we read, elsewhere.
\n\n\n\nFor example, we have this shape, F shaped reading. When we, in a website, eye tracking has shown it quite a lot. You start from the top left where the logo generally is. Then you go on the right, then you go on the left, but a bit bottom, and then a bit, you are just drawing an F more or less, when you read.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:17] Nathan Wrigley: So that’s what the eye typically does when it lands on a webpage.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:20] Giulia Laco: Yes.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:20] Nathan Wrigley: What was that? Top left, top right.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:23] Giulia Laco: Bottom.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:23] Nathan Wrigley: Bottom.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:24] Giulia Laco: A bit in the middle, right. And then bottom again.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:27] Nathan Wrigley: So it makes an, if you were to draw on top of that screen, it coincidentally looks a bit like a capital F.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:32] Giulia Laco: Yes, exactly.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:33] Nathan Wrigley: That’s fascinating.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:34] Giulia Laco: Capital F reading.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:36] Nathan Wrigley: Capital F reading. Presumably that’s on a desktop. On this, I’m not doing that am I? I’m holding up my phone. If I’m looking at a webpage, presumably it’s a different experience. It’s just left to right, left to right, left to right.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:49] Giulia Laco: Also because you are hiding some part of the text with your thumbs. Are you right-handed? Left-handed? It depends what you do. And it change a lot. For example, in the UX design, we generally change some patterns with smartphones because we put some menus at the bottom because the area near the thumb, for example.
\n\n\n\nSo, if it changes where you put your fingers, your changes also where you put your eyes. Focusing in which part of the screen.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s interesting. My experience of the internet is that usually the menu on a mobile device comes at top right. There’s usually some icon.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:28] Giulia Laco: But that’s for convention.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:29] Nathan Wrigley: But what you’ve just described is much more sensible, having the menu the bottom because.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:33] Giulia Laco: I hope it will change soon.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:34] Nathan Wrigley: Because my thumb can just go right to it. It’s just there. Yeah, that’s fascinating. It does matter what device you’re on. But are you using the same? I know that you’ve said that you reposition things like the menu or what have you, but are you using the same font on a desktop as you would be on a mobile device? Is it broadly the same? You don’t need to worry about the view port of a mobile device in terms of the CSS for setting the font. It’s just the same desktop, mobile, tablet, same fonts.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:03] Giulia Laco: From the readability point of view, I would say yes. And it’s for branding. I guess it’s better to have different environments recognizable. Whereas you have to pay attention to licensing. If you buy a font, for example, you put it on an app, you might need a different license. If you’re using open type, open source phones, you are not going to have a problem. But if you buy, if you rent, web fonts, yeah, you might have some problem or you have to check if you can put that web front on an app. You might need a different license.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I hadn’t really thought about that. It’s always quite common in the circle of friends that I have, comic sans is a font, which most of my friends ridicule. They think it’s a childish font. Nobody would put it on a professional website. Are there some fonts like that, which you would just always avoid? Not because they look childish, but because they are largely unreadable.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:00] Giulia Laco: There might be some, for example, well comic sans has a very big history of love and hate, basically of hate actually. But remember the case and presentation of the Higgs Boson?
\n\n\n\n[00:28:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. Was that done in comic sans?
\n\n\n\n[00:28:18] Giulia Laco: Yes. There was a Twitter storm. Okay, you couldn’t use that informal font on a formal presentation, and that raised the topic actually. You have to use the font that is proper to the situation. It’s like clothing. The clothes you wear, it’s like the font you use. It depends on the situation.
\n\n\n\nBut I can understand the feeling that people have when they choose comic sans. And maybe I can suggest something similar, but a bit more proper, or a bit more interesting in that context.
\n\n\n\nThere’s one font. I am on Google fonts repository. That’s called Amantic Small Caps, and it’s a small caps, so it’s a more, it’s not lowercase. But it’s, I think has a similar mood and I would dare it’s quite a new comic sans in the mood. I mean, it has the same mood, in my opinion. I say in my opinion, it’s also because it’s in my culture, it’s very culture dependent. Because it’s based on what you saw, what you associate to those fonts for example.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s really interesting when I travel to the US. The US have a really different set of fonts which they use, especially on government documents, than we have in the UK. And wherever I look, so I don’t know, I buy some sun cream or something like that. The font choice is utterly different from how it would typically look in the UK. And it’s kind of curious, that it’s so obvious to me that that’s an American box. And yet it’s merely a font that tells me that. But I can see it all the time.
\n\n\n\nBut what you’re saying though is you’ve got to use your intuition. There’s no rule for this is a good font, that’s a bad font. It’s really where are you putting it and your own personal preference. There are no fonts which are out of the question because they’re just literally unreadable by a subset of the people, no, you look like you’re about to say something.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:18] Giulia Laco: Well, there might be some fonts that are really illegible, but there are some really nice experiment by a very talented type designers, David Jonathan Ross. He tried to push the boundaries of readability, making good fonts, but making how long you can go to draw a very new kind of letter and still have it readable. So that’s interesting to see. But made by people who know what they do.
\n\n\n\nWhereas if you start, if you look at the, I don’t know, fonts that you can have on a lot of websites, just experiments by people who start. But if you, look at experiments by very good designers, oh, you know what they do.
\n\n\n\n[00:31:06] Nathan Wrigley: You make client websites still. Do you get into this conversation quite a lot with your clients? Is typography something that you bang the drum of?
\n\n\n\n[00:31:14] Giulia Laco: I try to listen as for everything else, to the client and understand what they need. And then I’ll try to suggest what I think is proper. It’s like also for the colour of a website for example. I ask and I give an advice maybe.
\n\n\n\n[00:31:30] Nathan Wrigley: Are there any kind of hard and faster rules for where you, really, it would be unwise to put typography. In our show notes, I was talking about things like is it a bad idea to put, I don’t know, fonts into images.
\n\n\n\nSo you’re overlaying fonts on images. In other words, is it better always to have fonts on a plain background rather than on, let’s say you’ve got a mountain scene or something and you want to write something, you put it onto the image. Is it better to keep the text away from the images? That was just one thought.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:02] Giulia Laco: That’s definitely better. But you have to distinguish between titles and body copy. A title might be, how can I say? It would be okay anyway. It’s only a word. You might have some tricks, for example, reducing the contest of the underground image. As long as you stick with accessibility guidelines, you’re safe for that regard.
\n\n\n\nThere are very good starting point for readability. I mean, I generally say that it’s better to start from accessibility and there are a lot of accessibility guidelines that help with the text. And then you go on and if you have some tools, like a very powerful web font, you can do more. And then you go with type setting and start type setting.
\n\n\n\nWell, for example, you have to stop the line length. That’s very, very important. You don’t have to let your user go through all the screen, a very huge screen to go to the other line, to the second line.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:04] Nathan Wrigley: Is there any guidance about how wide the text line should be? So maybe that’s a, I don’t know, you said using a number pixels is not always the best idea. But is there a character limit, or a word limit typically where the eye can cope with scanning from left to right and then beginning again. Because I’m staring at a Google Doc at the moment and it’s kind of interesting that the Google Doc looks like a piece of paper.
\n\n\n\nAnd they’ve obviously deliberately taken it in. The Google doc could consume the whole width of my monitor, but it doesn’t. They’ve confined it to what looks like a piece of paper, and I presume that’s a convention, just so that my eye doesn’t have to go far left, far right, far left, far right. I could keep my nose pointed at the document and just let my eye do the work, whereas if it went from left to right, I would be moving my neck all the time as well. So is there a guidance of how wide text should be?
\n\n\n\n[00:33:56] Giulia Laco: Typographers, for a long time, had recommended a line length of between 45 and 65 characters per line. It depends for Latin alphabets. The Web Accessibility Guidelines says, I think at the level Triple A. They say that they need 80 characters maximum per line for Latin, I think 40 for languages with ideograms. So they say something about that.
\n\n\n\nAnd it’s very interesting to see that there’s a correlation between this line length and the way we read. The way we read is basically with eye and brain because, it’s a really complex process. But when we read with the eye, we just focus on few letters at the time, maybe six, seven characters. Then we jump to another area of fixation. And so you can do some math. A very good typographer Bruno Maag made that math.
\n\n\n\nAnd he discovered that calculating the number of characters you see in each fixation has a relationship with what typographers said for years, for decades, for centuries actually. So they arrived at the same conclusions. So let’s say 55, 65 characters per line is a good measure.
\n\n\n\n[00:35:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:35:18] Giulia Laco: On the other hand, all these factors are correlated. And especially font size, line height, and line length. Some typographers says that it’s like a triangle of these three elements have to be on balance. So if you change one, you have to change the others. Adapt the others.
\n\n\n\n[00:35:40] Nathan Wrigley: So we’ve just been talking about the left to rightness, the line length. Is there anything about the length of the paragraphs that you use as well? I mean, I’m just used to reading books and obviously they’re confined by the width. The line length is taken account of. But I’m conscious that everything’s broken up into paragraphs and those chunks of meaning have often got little gaps between them. I’m imagining in many cases, paragraphs could go on for pages, but it’s better to break it up and it helps the brain to associate that this is a body of meaning and here’s another body of meaning and so on.
\n\n\n\n[00:36:10] Giulia Laco: Yes. I think absolutely. The basic of our work as web designers actually. So it’s different from what we do on paper, because on screens we have to catch the attention. And so we need to make things very easy for the reader. That’s the purpose. Maybe it’s not always the case that that’s the purpose, but on web design generally, that’s the purpose.
\n\n\n\nSo it’s better to split a paragraph in a few small chunks, let’s say so, and give different, styling and introduce hierarchy as well. So that helps a lot in reading.
\n\n\n\n[00:36:48] Nathan Wrigley: So headings and paragraphs and other headings and so on. You mentioned in the show notes that when you did your workshop, were going to give some helpful CSS to break up the text. Can you just tell us what that was? What helpful CSS did you have?
\n\n\n\n[00:37:02] Giulia Laco: Basically, I would say that’s very important not to use an absolute unit when you set the font size. Where font size is what is more relevant in readability? Because if it’s too small, you can’t read at all. If it’s too big, also so you can’t read it well. So font size is very important and after the responsive web design, we’ve had the responsive web typography. It didn’t come at the same time. Because with responsive web design, we started to make things different for different devices. But we didn’t touch the font size.
\n\n\n\n[00:37:40] Nathan Wrigley: Right, it was just the same. Yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:37:42] Giulia Laco: But it was really important to change the font size. At the beginning I thought that it was important to make smaller font size on smartphones. Because you had a very smaller screen, but that was not the reason I realized later on.
\n\n\n\nAnd the reason is the distance of reading. So when you read something that is near, you don’t need a big font size. You generally keep an iPhone at 20, 30 centimeters of distance from your eye. Whereas if you read to a computer you are 70 centimeter, 80, 1 meter, I don’t know. If you read to a screen in a room, for example, yeah, it’s very, very different.
\n\n\n\nFor example, yesterday I had this at the workshop. I had this CSS Codepen. I realized I had some minimum and maximum font size in my slider. It was perfect for desktop reading. As soon as I was in the room, I said, oh no, I have to change, and I changed it to a different values because of that.
\n\n\n\n[00:38:48] Nathan Wrigley: So, the presentation looked good on your computer, but as soon as it went on the big screen.
\n\n\n\n[00:38:52] Giulia Laco: Okay, the presentation was okay because I knew it in advance. I mean, it was a presentation, but it was in the playground, I realized, yes. And because I had all those values, I was guessing what was reasonable values. But I didn’t test it before on such a big room.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:10] Nathan Wrigley: So I’m guessing that at some point soon we’ll be able to make a link to WordPress TV. It occurs to me that the whole time we’ve been talking about typography, but we’ve probably been concentrating on English. Although it’s a common language, it’s by no means what everybody reads.
\n\n\n\nSo we’re going from top to bottom, left to right. But other parts of the world, let’s say people that read Arabic or Hebrew or Korean or Japanese or Chinese, whatever it is. They’re going in completely different directions, left to right, bottom to top and so on.
\n\n\n\nDo they have similar concerns with their characters? Or is it just uniquely the Latin set of characters which has these problems?
\n\n\n\n[00:39:54] Giulia Laco: I’m sure they have. Also maybe different problems. I’ll distinguish between Arabic to the other languages you mentioned, like Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, for example. They have ideograms. With Arabic it’s quite a calligraphic origin of the way of writing. And they make a lot of use of ligatures. It means it changes the shape of letters according to their combination.
\n\n\n\nWe have ligatures in Latin as well. For example, if you think of f and i, small lowercase letters f and y. Sometimes you have one glyph that put the dot of the i inside the f. And that’s coded inside the file, the font file.
\n\n\n\nSo in Arabic they have a lot of ligatures. And lately I’ve discovered that they also use color for accent. And Google fonts has some new fonts with this characteristic. Color fonts. Do you know color fonts?
\n\n\n\n[00:40:54] Nathan Wrigley: No.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:54] Giulia Laco: They’re very, very new. They’re coming.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:57] Nathan Wrigley: How do you deploy color to. What? You’re going to have to explain that.
\n\n\n\n[00:41:00] Giulia Laco: Well, they have color coded inside the typeface. It’s a new format we can use. And, it’s linked to CSS. It’s not so much ready, but it’s coming. It’s a new technology after variable fonts.
\n\n\n\n[00:41:17] Nathan Wrigley: So certain aspects, certain portions of the letter receive different colors?
\n\n\n\n[00:41:22] Giulia Laco: Yes.
\n\n\n\n[00:41:23] Nathan Wrigley: And it provides, I have to just ask why? Why would you want to have a different portion of the letter in a different color?
\n\n\n\n[00:41:30] Giulia Laco: Apart from Arabic, why not?
\n\n\n\n[00:41:31] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, so it is, it’s just style. It’s not from the point of view of readability or legibility?
\n\n\n\n[00:41:37] Giulia Laco: No. New frontiers of typography.
\n\n\n\n[00:41:39] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that is interesting.
\n\n\n\n[00:41:40] Giulia Laco: But that was one point, but for Arabic might be for readability purpose. That’s why I mentioned it.
\n\n\n\n[00:41:46] Nathan Wrigley: Honestly, this is such a fascinating subject. Unfortunately, we’re running out of time. Where would we go if we’ve been inspired by the talk that you’ve given today to me? Have you got any tips or places, websites to go to? If people are curious, where would you send them?
\n\n\n\n[00:42:03] Giulia Laco: Okay. There are plenty of places and topography has been receiving quite an attention lately on the web. I’m always talking about on the web. But you can start with books from the tradition of typography. There are, I don’t know, from the sacred book of yypography, Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style. That’s a really nice starting point. Well, it’s not only a starting point.
\n\n\n\nErik Spiekermann’s, Stop Stealing Sheep and Find Out How Type Works. It’s very funny name. It has a history. I won’t spoiler it.
\n\n\n\nOr I really, really liked the book by Richard Rutter, that is more on the web. It’s called Web Typography. It’s a manual on that.
\n\n\n\nOr otherwise you can follow Jason Parmental that has been making a lot of experiments. It depends which part are you interested in.
\n\n\n\n[00:42:59] Nathan Wrigley: You’ve given three or four things there. There’s probably something to get teeth into. And what about you? Where would we find you if people have listened to this and quite fancy having a chat with you about all this. Where do you hang out online?
\n\n\n\n[00:43:09] Giulia Laco: Quite everyone. Maybe on LinkedIn, maybe you can reach me there so it’s better.
\n\n\n\n[00:43:14] Nathan Wrigley: I will find your LinkedIn profile and I will link to that in the show notes. So let’s wrap it up there. Giulia, thank you so much for chatting to me today. Honestly, a real eye-opener. I’ve enjoyed that a lot.
\n\n\n\n[00:43:24] Giulia Laco: Thank you. Me too.
\nOn the podcast today we have Giulia Laco.
\n\n\n\nGiulia is a web designer and developer who has been working on the web since the mid 1990s. Her primary interests are web typography & font design. In addition to project development, she is a consultant and a trainer, mostly working with CSS, web fonts and web typography.
\n\n\n\nThis is the last of our podcasts from WordCamp Europe 2023. I spoke to Giulia in Athens because she had just finished her presentation entitled “Typographic readability in theme design & development”.
\n\n\n\nIn this session she explored how designers can assist with the readability of websites through careful consideration of the fonts they choose, and why they choose them.
\n\n\n\nIt turns out there’s quite a lot to consider, and if you’ve not given this topic much thought in the past, you’ll perhaps learn something new.
\n\n\n\nWe begin the podcast talking through how, at the start of the web, we were making do with a limited range of tools to help us make typographic choices. There were no web fonts available, but that started to change around 2010. Now we have access to hundreds of fonts and need to be mindful that some fonts can pose readability challenges for some users of your website.
\n\n\n\nGiulia talks about the fact that the manner in which we read has changed since the dawn of the internet. Many people now mostly consume small passages of text, which need to be considered in a different way to longer writing.
\n\n\n\nConcentrating upon the letters in the Latin alphabet, we talk about the ways in which readers typically break up words into smaller units, and the fact that the way letters are shaped can make them easier to parse. There’s some technical language here, ligatures, X-height, apertures, and more, which tell us about the shaping and spacing of letters. Giulia explains the current state of research into how these characteristics of fonts can affect readability.
\n\n\n\nWe talk about whether or not there are fonts which are more readable than others. Is there a collection of fonts which you can use and be confident that you’re going to make it easy for all users of your websites?
\n\n\n\nGiulia talks about how designs need to consider the spaces into which text is put. Most people have a proclivity for the order in which they view a page, and knowing about this path across the page can help your readers access the text. The width of the text is also important; you want people to be able to read from side to side without having to move their head. How does this work across different device sizes, and what can be said about text which runs from right to left, or top to bottom?
\n\n\n\nWe round off the conversation with Giulia telling us where we can find out more, as well as some of the thought leaders in this space.
\n\n\n\nIt’s a fascinating conversation about a subject that often gets overlooked. Website designers, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nGiulia’s WordCamp Europe 2023 Session “Typographic readability in theme design & development“
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWeb Accessibility Guidelines website
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRobert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style
\n\n\n\nErik Spiekermann’s Stop Stealing Sheep and Find Out How Type Works
\n\n\n\nRichard Rutter’s Web Typography
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Wed, 26 Jul 2023 14:00:00 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:14:\"Nathan Wrigley\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:4;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:53:\"WordPress.org blog: WordPress 6.3 Release Candidate 2\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:35:\"https://wordpress.org/news/?p=15460\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:69:\"https://wordpress.org/news/2023/07/wordpress-6-3-release-candidate-2/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:7320:\"WordPress 6.3 RC2 is ready for download and testing.
\n\n\n\nThis version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, or run, or test this version on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, you should evaluate RC2 on a test server and site.
\n\n\n\nWhile release candidates are considered ready for final release, additional testing and use by the community can only make it better.
\n\n\n\nWordPress 6.3 is scheduled for release on August 8, 2023 – just two weeks from today.
\n\n\n\nGet an overview of the 6.3 release cycle, check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.3-related posts, review new features in WordPress 6.3, or watch a recorded demo.
\n\n\n\nDevelopers and extenders should review the comprehensive WordPress 6.3 Field Guide for detailed technical notes regarding new features and improvements.
\n\n\n\nSince the RC1 release on July 18, 2023, there have been approximately 15 issues resolved in Editor and Trac.
\n\n\n\nNotable updates for this release include:
\n\n\n\nTesting for issues is a critical part of developing any software, and it’s a meaningful way for anyone to contribute—whether you have experience or not. While testing the upgrade process is essential, trying out new features is too.
\n\n\n\nThe monetary reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities is doubled between the Beta 1 release and the final release candidate (RC). Please follow responsible disclosure practices as detailed in the project’s security practices and policies outlined on the HackerOne page and in the security white paper.
\n\n\n\nYou can test WordPress 6.3 RC2 in three ways:
\n\n\n\nwp core update --version=6.3-RC2Do you build plugins and themes? Your products play an integral role in extending the functionality and value of WordPress for users of all types worldwide.
\n\n\n\nHopefully, you have already tested your themes and plugins with WordPress 6.3 betas by now. With RC2, you will want to continue your testing and update the “Tested up to” version in your plugin’s readme file to 6.3.
\n\n\n\nIf you find compatibility problems, please post detailed information to the support forums.
\n\n\n\nDo you speak a language other than English? ¿Español? Français? Português? Русский? 日本? Help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages.
\n\n\n\nTime is nearly here
WordPress shines thanks to you all
Let’s get testing, dear
Thank you to the contributors who collaborated on this post: @Priethor, @AudrasJb, @DavidBaumwald, @DanSoschin, @JPantani and @Meher.
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Tue, 25 Jul 2023 16:43:13 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:10:\"Meher Bala\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:5;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:77:\"WordCamp Central: WordCamp Malaysia 2023 is Looking for Speakers and Sponsors\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:39:\"https://central.wordcamp.org/?p=3240139\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:102:\"https://central.wordcamp.org/news/2023/07/wordcamp-malaysia-2023-is-looking-for-speakers-and-sponsors/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:2991:\"![\"\"](\"https://malaysia.wordcamp.org/2023/files/2023/06/WCMY-2023-Feature-Image-fb.png\")
\n\n\n\nWordCamp Malaysia 2023 is set to take place on 8-9 September 2023 at the Cheras North International Convention Centre (CNICC) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The first ever WordCamp Malaysia promises to be an unforgettable gathering, offering a platform for knowledge sharing, networking, and community building.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/malaysia.wordcamp.org/2023/files/2023/06/CNICC-Cheras-North-International-Convention-Centre-edited.jpg?resize=680%2C382&ssl=1\")
\n\n\n\nSituated near the city center, CNICC provides convenient access to major transportation hubs, allowing attendees to make the most of their time in Kuala Lumpur. With a plethora of nearby amenities and attractions, visitors can immerse themselves in the city’s rich cultural experiences, explore its iconic landmarks, indulge in its diverse culinary scene, and even venture into the nearby natural parks.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/malaysia.wordcamp.org/2023/files/2023/06/IMG_0612.jpg?resize=1024%2C683&ssl=1\")
\n\n\n\nThe organizing team behind WordCamp Malaysia 2023 is actively seeking speakers who can share their valuable insights, expertise, experiences, and inspiring stories with the WordPress community. If you have a passion for WordPress and a desire to contribute to its growth, this is your chance to shine. Interested individuals can submit speaker proposals now. Don’t miss the opportunity to be part of this prestigious event and make an impact on the WordPress community in Malaysia.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/malaysia.wordcamp.org/2023/files/2023/06/HRX00555.jpg?resize=1024%2C683&ssl=1\")
\n\n\n\nIn addition to speakers, WordCamp Malaysia 2023 is also actively seeking sponsors to showcase and elevate their brands and products to the WordPress community in Malaysia. This is an exceptional opportunity for businesses and organizations to gain exposure, connect with a highly engaged audience, and demonstrate their commitment to supporting the WordPress ecosystem. To explore the various sponsorship packages available and learn more about the benefits of becoming a sponsor, interested parties can visit the call for sponsors page.
\n\n\n\nTo stay updated and learn more about WordCamp Malaysia 2023, visit the official website at https://malaysia.wordcamp.org/2023/ . The website will serve as your go-to resource for event details, schedules, ticketing information, speaker profiles, and other important announcements.
\n\n\n\nDon’t miss your chance to be part of WordCamp Malaysia 2023. Submit your speaker proposal or explore sponsorship opportunities today!
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Tue, 25 Jul 2023 12:53:17 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:10:\"Sam Suresh\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:6;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:134:\"WordCamp Central: WordCamp Masaka 2023: Celebrating Inclusion, Diversity, and Innovation with WordPress in Uganda’s Pearl of Africa!\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:39:\"https://central.wordcamp.org/?p=3166793\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:152:\"https://central.wordcamp.org/news/2023/07/wordcamp-masaka-2023-celebrating-inclusion-diversity-and-innovation-with-wordpress-in-ugandas-pearl-of-africa/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:3351:\"WordCamp Masaka 2023 is the inaugural WordCamp event in Uganda’s Greater Masaka region. It will be held on October 6 and 7, 2023, at Equator University of Science and Technology in Masaka City, Uganda. The event is dedicated to celebrating inclusion, diversity and fostering innovation within Uganda’s WordPress community.
\n\n\n\nWordCamp Masaka 2023 will offer a wide range of engaging workshops, informative talks, and student WordPress project showcases designed to cater to attendees of different skill levels. The workshops will provide hands-on learning experiences and practical knowledge to help both beginners and advanced users enhance their WordPress skills. The informative talks will cover a diverse range of topics, providing valuable insights and inspiring discussions. The student WordPress project showcases will offer a platform for attendees to share their WordPress projects, regardless of their skill level, and gain inspiration from the creativity within the community.
\n\n\n\nIn addition to the diverse range of activities, WordCamp Masaka 2023 will include a contributor session dedicated to translating WordPress from English to Luganda. This session will actively engage participants of all skill levels in the translation process, fostering collaboration and empowering Luganda (the most spoken language in Uganda) speakers to access WordPress in their native language.
\n\n\n\nThe full list of speakers, session descriptions, and schedule will be published in early September 2023. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook to get the latest updates.
\n\n\n\nPlease don’t forget to post about this event on your social media handles using the hashtag #WCMasaka.
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Tue, 25 Jul 2023 08:50:19 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:15:\"Ssebuwufu Moses\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:7;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:47:\"WPTavern: Learn How to Use WordPress Playground\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:30:\"https://wptavern.com/?p=147137\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:58:\"https://wptavern.com/learn-how-to-use-wordpress-playground\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:3188:\"WordPress Playground, an experimental project that uses WebAssembly (WASM) to run WordPress in the browser, was number 1 on Hacker News recently and was also featured on TechCrunch. Word is getting around about how easy it is to fire up a sandbox environment in just a few seconds for testing plugins and themes and even different versions of WordPress and PHP.
\n\n\n\nVisiting playground.wordpress.net instantly creates a real WordPress instance with admin access and everything without having to install PHP, MySQL, or Apache. Instead, it runs inside the browser using a SQLite database.
The Playground isn’t just for developers. It also makes it easy for users who would not ordinarily maintain a local development environment to quickly test plugins or themes they find on WordPress.org, or to just explore new WordPress features in a safe place where you can’t break anything.
\n\n\n\nIf you have found it difficult to wrap your head around WordPress Playground, Learn WordPress has published a timely new tutorial called How to start using WordPress Playground. In this 10-minute video, WordPress Playground creator Adam Zieliński offers a quick demonstration of how to install plugins and themes and customize a site, and how to export design work from a customized theme. He also covers how to download the entire site and import it into a new WordPress instance, and guides users through basic compatibility testing of a theme, by switching the WordPress version on the playground site.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDevelopers who want try some more complicated things with this tool can check out the Playground API and learn how to integrate it with an app in five minutes. It’s also useful for previewing pull requests from a repository or setting up a local WordPress development environment using the VisualStudio Code plugin or a CLI tool called wp-now.
Mojeek, a UK-based privacy-oriented search engine, has added Openverse to its image search. For more than 15 years, Mojeek has provided independent, unbiased search without tracking or building profiles on users. It is one of just a handful of genuine search engines that uses its own technology and algorithms, unlike the metasearch engines that syndicate Bing, Google, and Yandex. In October 2022, Mojeek passed a major milestone of having indexed more than 6 billion pages.
\n\n\n\nThe search engine had previously provided Pixabay as the default for its image search with the option to use Bing as an alternative.
\n\n\n\n“We have always wanted to eventually get rid of Bing,” Mojeek Head of Marketing Joshua Long said. “Due to both Microsoft’s API pricing decisions, and informed comments by people using Mojeek to search the web, we recently took that step.”
\n\n\n\nOpenverse’s openly-licensed media was a natural fit for the independent search engine. In 2021, Creative Commons Search was rebranded to Openverse when it came under the umbrella of the WordPress open source project. With more than 700 million Creative Commons licensed and public domain image and audio files, Openverse exceeds Pixabay’s 4 million+ royalty-free and stock images, greatly expanding users’ abilities to search deeper on more topics.
\n\n\n\nAlthough Pixabay is still Mojeek’s default image search provider, users can change their preferences, which are set using a local cookie and contain no personal data.
\n\n\n\n“This addition is a testament to the utility that Openverse brings, as well as the ease and extensibility when it comes to using its API,” Long said.
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Mon, 24 Jul 2023 20:30:07 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"Sarah Gooding\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:9;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:115:\"Do The Woo Community: A Deep Dive into Sales Tax for Agencies and Freelancers with Kate Bacholzky and Roger Walker\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:28:\"https://dothewoo.io/?p=75724\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:66:\"https://dothewoo.io/deep-dive-into-sales-tax-agencies-freelancers/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:464:\"Kate Bacholzky from Avalara and Roger Walker from americaneagle.com take you deep into sales tax for yourself and your clients.
\n>> The post A Deep Dive into Sales Tax for Agencies and Freelancers with Kate Bacholzky and Roger Walker appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community .
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Mon, 24 Jul 2023 09:08:00 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:5:\"BobWP\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:10;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:126:\"Gutenberg Times: All about WordPress 6.3, a breadcrumbs block, design systems and an onboarding wizard – Weekend Edition 262\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:35:\"https://gutenbergtimes.com/?p=24897\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:131:\"https://gutenbergtimes.com/all-about-wordpress-6-3-a-breadcrumbs-block-design-systems-and-an-onboarding-wizard-weekend-edition-262/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:24292:\"Howdy,
\n\n\n\nWordPress 6.3 release candidate has been published and with it the Fieldguide with the array of changes for developers is now available. It’s a lot to digest, so we’ll keep this newsletter short. Or rather focused on the upcoming major release. Pick and choose, depending on what’s important to your work with WordPress.
\n\n\n\nIf you have something on your Wishlist for WordPress 6.4, submit a comment: WordPress 6.4: What’s on your wishlist? (until Aug. 15)
\n\n\n\nBe well and have a fantastic weekend!
\n\n\n\nYours, 💕
Birgit
This week’s product walk through with Anne McCarthy, Rich Tabor and Nathan Wrigley is now available: WordPress 6.3 Live Product Demo – Highlights & Recording.
\n\n\n\nJonathan Patani also published the Q & A from the Project Walk through on the Make Core blog: 6.3 Live Product Demo Q&A. You’ll learn that to add a footnote to a paragraph you just place the cursor where the number should go and use the drop-down menu from the block toolbar. Safe yourself the highlight step. Furthermore, “The revisions show changes for all styles, including changes made when viewing the stylebook.” Those are only two of the 14 questions and answers. You can also find a ton of resources that were shared during the walk-through.
\n\n\n\nFemy Praseeth, release squad member on the docs team, published a Call for volunteers to help with 6.3 end-user documentation. The best advice, I received when starting out in technology was: “If you want to learn anything in technology deeply, you try to explain it to others.” Here is your chance to do both. It’s also a high-impact contribution to the open-source project! As of this writing, there are still 42 tasks in the to-do-column of the project board, waiting for you!
\n\n\n\nOn the WP Briefing Episode 60: Mike Schroder gave a sneak a peek at WordPress 6.3 together with Josepha Haden Chomphosy. All links and transcript are shared on the post.
\n\n\n\nCarlo Daniele at Kinsta did again a wonderful job reporting on the upcoming major WordPress release. What’s New in WordPress 6.3: A Revamped Site Editor, a New Command Palette, Style Revisions, New Blocks, and Much More!
\n\n\n\nDoc Pop at Torque Magazine, invited me to speak with him about WordPress 6.3 and what’s coming to WordPress Phase 3 and WordPress 6.4. Torque Social Hour: Understanding WordPress 6.3 with Birgit Pauli-Haack. We discussed and demoed the new footnotes, Details block, Style Variation revisions, Site Editor updates, Stylebook and more.
\n\n\n\nAnne McCarthy highlights all the accessibility improvements that will come with WordPress 6.3 in this post: WordPress 6.3 Accessibility Improvements,they co-authored with Joe Dolson and Alex Stine, members of the WordPress Accessibility Team
\n\n\n\nJamie Marsland explains WordPress 6.3 explained in 240 seconds, He covers the two new blocks, Footnotes and Details, many of the Pattern changes, aspect ratio for image blocks, enhancements to the Site Editor, Style revision and more.
\n\n\n\nFor all the WordPress News outlets, Anne McCarthy provided a Source of Truth for WordPress 6.3 document, actually it’s more like a book with over 8,000 words. In it, they list every single feature and update that went into the WordPress 6.3 release, so journalists and bloggers can dig deeper into things and obtain the history, discussions, and overall genesis of a change. It’s a mammoth of a post.
\n\n\n\nDave Smith published a video on the upcoming release: WordPress 6.3 features in 6 mins – the power of the Site Editor is finally unleashed! Smith also shared a ton of links to details for the features, if you’d like to take a deeper dive.
\n\n\n\nThe release doc team assembled a huge Fieldguide with all the Dev Notes covering the big and small changes to WordPress. Here is the list of Block editor related Dev Notes:
\n\n\n\nBut wait, there is more, quoted from the Fieldguide.
\n\n\n\nsource attribute is added to Block patterns allowing them to be filtered by that source. (#58622)Themes REST API can now indicate whether a theme supports the Site Editor by adding an is_block_theme property to each theme in the wp/v2/themes API response. (#58123)/wp/v2/global-styles/revisions, has been added to the REST API. (#58524)WP_REST_Templates_Controller has a new modified field for template and template part objects that returns post modified datetime for Templates. (#58540)wp_get_remote_theme_patterns() has been added to query the patterns datum from theme.json and substitutes current usage of private APIs. (#58460)🎙️ Latest episode: Gutenberg Changelog #86 – WordPress 6.3, Gutenberg 16.2 and Phase 3 Collaboration with Sarah Norris as special guest, hosted by Birgit Pauli-Haack
\nSarah Gooding wrote about the latest Gutenberg release: Gutenberg 16.2 Brings Improvements to Pattern Management, Introduces Vertical Text Orientation and highlighted, among other things, the vertical text orientation, illustrated by my tweet. To enable the controls in the typography section, you need to turn it on via the theme.json settings.
\n\n\n\"typography\":{\n \"dropCap\": false,\n \"fluid\": true,\n \"writingMode\":true,\n}\nCode language: JSON / JSON with Comments (json)Emily Shiola also checked out the latest Gutenberg version in her article: What’s New in Gutenberg: The Latest Version (July 2023) and updated her collection of highlights from every Gutenberg release back to Gutenberg 7.0. in November 2019. I bookmarked the post for later to walk down memory lane.
\n\n\n\nNick Diego held a workshop on Builder Basics: Goodbye Reusable Blocks—Hello Synced Patterns (and more) and the recording is now available on WordPress.TV. Reusable blocks are a powerful way to save and reuse content across your site. In WordPress 6.3, reusable blocks will be renamed to “synced patterns.” In this online workshop, Diego explored the new functionality for creating custom patterns and managing them in the Site Editor.
\n\n\n\n\n| \n \n \n ![](\"https://i0.wp.com/gutenbergtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/breadcrumbs-block.jpg?w=652&ssl=1\") In 2009, I announced the release of my first breadcrumbs plugin. It was a one-file PHP script that I’d been using in my themes for around a year, and I… Check it out | \n
In her article: Ollie Theme Previews New Onboarding Wizard in Development, Sarah Gooding reported on Mike McAlister‘s newest work developing an onboarding experience that aims to drastically reduce the amount of time users spend setting up a new site. “McAlister said the interface is all React with largely native WordPress components and a few custom components sprinkled in to handle some of the more unique aspects of the tool.” she wrote.
\n\n\n\nMike McAlister posted about the new onboarding Wizard on hit blog as well: In pursuit of a more intuitive onboarding experience.
\n\n\n\nWith LocalWP it is a straightforward tool to set up a new development site for testing or other purposes on your computer. With blueprints, you and configure a standard set-up with a set of plugins and themes. This week, Brian Gardner Introduced the Frost Blueprint for Local. “A Local Blueprint that draws inspiration from Frost, our open-source WordPress block theme. This Blueprint showcases the power and extensibility of Full Site Editing.” he wrote.
\n\n\n\nJustin Tadlock published the first part of his upcoming Beyond Block Styles series: Using the WordPress scripts package with themes. He walks you through the details of setting up your local development space to get ready for block development. “In Part 2, you’ll learn to design a set of custom block styles. Part 3 will bring it all together into a beautiful and functional editor control. From there, well, you’ll be building some amazing features.” Tadlock wrote.
\n\n\n\nYesterday’s Live Q & A: Design Systems and theme.json with David Bowman, Alec Geatches and Joni Halabi was recorded and is available on YouTube. Shared resources
\n\n\n\n “Keeping up with Gutenberg”
A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test, and Meta team from Jan. 2023 on. Updated by yours truly. The index 2022 is here
In last week’s Twitch stream, Ryan Welcher explored the existing SlotFills for extending WordPress. It’s an longer version of a previous talk at Developer Hours a few weeks ago . He walks you through all the Slotfill existing in the post editor as well as the Site editor. Welcher e also wrote about on the topic on WordPress Developer blog: How to extend WordPress via the SlotFill system and presented at WCUS 2022.
\n\n\n\n\n| \n \n \n ![](\"https://i0.wp.com/gutenbergtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Gutenberg-LiveQA-Adams-Waldstein-Morita-Pauli-Haack.jpg?w=652&ssl=1\") In this YouTube Live Q & A, participants learned how Gutenberg components and scripts can be used outside the block editor to revamp a plugin’s code base. Jason Adams, Director… | \n
Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s master branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.
Have you been using it? Hit reply and let me know.
Questions? Suggestions? Ideas? Don’t hesitate to send them via email or send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.
\n\n\n\nFor questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com
\n\n\n\nFeatured Image: Plants growing out of the blocks at the Acropolis by Courtney Robertson found on WordPress Photos
\n\n\n\nDon’t want to miss the next Weekend Edition?
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nUnless you are some kind of wizard with the block editor, starting a WordPress website from a blank slate can be overwhelming and ultimately defeating. Mike McAlister, maker of the free Ollie theme, is developing an onboarding experience that aims to drastically reduce the amount of time users spend setting up a new site.
\n\n\n\n“I suspect we’re cutting out a half hour or more of finagling a new WordPress site,” McAlister said. “No more wrestling with a blank canvas.”
\n\n\n\nThe Ollie Onboarding Wizard creates a guided setup experience that allows users to add basic site settings, select a color palette, input their brand colors, add a logo and site icon, and move on to creating pages. It eliminates the necessity of hunting all these settings down inside blocks and the Site Editor.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nInstead of having to create pages individually and assign them the correct template or place the right full-page pattern, Ollie onboarding makes it possible for users to simply check which pages they want automatically created.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n“The goal of this wizard is to help WordPress users zoom through a site setup with the Ollie theme and abstract away those annoying and disconnected setup steps we have to do for every site,” McAlister said.
\n\n\n\n“The wizard is also a way to educate users along the way. WordPress is going through a much-needed evolution, but as expected, users are having a tough time with the transition. Change is tough, especially when you power half of the internet. Workflows like this can help.”
\n\n\n\nThe onboarding interface leans heavily towards the design of the Site Editor to make it seem naturally at home inside WordPress. It demonstrates just how nice plugins and themes can look in the admin with a more modern interface, which could soon be a reality once the ambitious admin UI revamp plans are complete.
\n\n\n\n“Months ago, Patrick Posner and I agreed that the future of WordPress is in the new Site Editor view, so that’s where we built this wizard,” McAlister said. “That assumption has since been validated, and because of that, our interface blends in seamlessly with native WordPress.”
\n\n\n\n“This is just a v1, but we’re already planning on how to seamlessly integrate choosing a vertical with curated plugins (eCommerce, landing page, email marketing, etc.) and surfacing pro features to really bring this experience together. This isn’t just a WordPress theme.”
\n\n\n\nMcAlister said the interface is all React with largely native WordPress components and a few custom components sprinkled in to handle some of the more unique aspects of the tool.
\n\n\n\nAfter previewing the onboarding wizard, some people have asked if it will be available as a standalone product. McAlister confirmed that he doesn’t have any plans of productizing it but if there is enough demand he is willing to entertain the idea. Others have asked if there is an API for developers to add their own sections.
\n\n\n\n“No API yet, although with the announcements of the admin overhaul initiative, perhaps one is coming,” McAlister said. “Right now, this is just a custom React layer that mimics the site editor view. It’s built to be flexible though, so if a core solution opens up, we can migrate to that.”
\n\n\n\nMcAlister previewed the wizard on Twitter and in his newsletter, but it’s still in development and not yet available for testing. He plans to launch the Ollie theme on WordPress.org once the wizard is ready for public use.
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\n\n\n\nTable of Contents
\n\n\n\nLena Morita
\n\n\n\nJon Waldstein
\n\n\n\nJason Adams
\n\n\n\nTranscript:
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: So welcome to our 34th Gutenberg Times Live Q&A. My name is Birgit Pauli-Haack, and I’m your host and the publisher of the Gutenberg Times. Thank you all for attending the show and it’s so great to have you. So today as announced, we will discuss how a product company can leverage WordPress built in Gutenberg architecture to take plugin development to new levels.
\n\n\n\nThe team of GiveWP went all in on the approach and discovered new ways to build the new version of GiveWP Plugin. And we have the pleasure to meet two members of the technical team on the show and hear the genesis of the path and you can ask them questions. Before I introduce a panel, a few housekeeping notes. Speaking of questions, for those watching on YouTube, you can use the chat box next to the livestream and pose your questions and also chat with us or include where you’re watching from.
\n\n\n\nI might not go over that very often, but we’ll definitely will look through the questions. And then here on Zoom, use the Q&A bubble on the bottom of the screen or the jet bubble to share your thoughts and questions. Please be kind even if you disagree. This is a family friendly endeavor. If you might be wondering or your internet connection is not stable or you don’t have the time to sit through all of it, the recording will be available on YouTube later today after it’s fully rendered. Then the summary posts will be shared with the shared resources, will be on the Gutenberg Times within the next couple of weeks.
\n\n\n\nSo allow me to introduce our panel for today. Say hello, and let us know where you’re located tonight. I have the feeling that between the panel and the attendees, we span quite a bit of the globe. So I present to you, Jason Adams, director of development of GiveWP.
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: Hi, I’m Jason. It’s good to meet y’all. I am from sunny San Diego, California.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: All right. Yeah. I’ll also present to you Jon Waldstein, the lead developer of GiveWP, and it’s all his fault. Oh, sorry. And then last but not least, my co-host, Lena Morita, who is a JavaScript developer and core contributor to the Gutenberg components and sponsored by Automattic. Hi, Lena.
\n\n\n\nLena Morita: Hi, I’m Lena. I am based in Tokyo, Japan. It’s 2:00 AM right now.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: All right. So good morning, Lena. Good morning, everybody else? Yeah, Jason and Jon, yeah, are both on the West Coast.
\n\n\n\nJon Waldstein: I’m on the East Coast, Rhode Island.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: East Coast, yeah. Rhode Island. Yes, sorry.
\n\n\n\nJon Waldstein: Happy to be here.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, geography can be always a bit tricky for me.
\n\n\n\nSo let’s start at the beginning. Jason and I met at the post status get together at WordCamp US last year and you just had announced, GiveWP just had announced the start of the revamp of the GiveWP plugin, version 3.0. Widely distributed plugin for nonprofits and others to collect donations on website with various add-ons. Then you mentioned that you are building the new version on top of Gutenberg components and WordPress scripts and I found that fascinating. So before we dive in head first, let’s get everyone on the same plate. In short, Jason, what is GiveWP?
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: Yeah, so GiveWP number one donation plugin for WordPress. We have coming up on about 200,000 folks that use GiveWP to connect donations directly from their website, manage their donors and keep their nonprofits, which is largely our audience, running. Doing their day-to-day thing and not having to work too hard to bring in donations on there to keep their work going.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Awesome. Yeah, GiveWP, I used it quite a bit when I was working for the agency, but what made you rethink the current architecture of your plugin?
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: Yeah, so first Give still works very much kind of, you remember the classic editor experience of WordPress where it was it kind of data entry, right? You didn’t design or build your pages, you entered data about your pages, the content and tags and all this other stuff, and then you click publish and then you view on the front end, what did I get? We know that that worked great for decades, but now we’re moving more to a visual era of building things. People want to be able to visualize and have that kind of full more immersed experience. That was our motivator, was wanting to go down that route. We had a lot of ideas for how we wanted to do that, but we had technical debt building as all products do that was making it more and more difficult to go down that path. Yeah, we started to weigh our options of how are we going to go about taking GiveWP to the next level.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Interesting. Yeah, the drag and drop, the visual editing, I think that’s kind of really where Gutenberg shines and having a plugin follow that path. How did you figure out the path forward? Because a revamp normally is really a big project and it’s a multi-year development project, so how did you go about it?
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: Yeah, and we didn’t want to do a start from scratch kind of a thing. We wanted to iteratively build it out. So what’s been nice is that our underlying architecture for donations, donors, none of that’s changing. It’s just our forms. We first explored four years ago just building something proprietary and the reality was, it was not up to the standard that you see in Gutenberg and other sorts of things today. It’s a lot of work. It’s so easy to take for granted just the idea of a block, a thing that you can move up and down. It’s a fluid user interface, inner blocks, blocks inside a block. There’s so many things that are easy to take for granted when you go to set out to build something like this. We were like, “Well, it’s right there in Gutenberg.” And so we started to kind of peel it back and we knew that Gutenberg is not… Gutenberg is in WordPress, WordPress isn’t Gutenberg. You can go to the Gutenberg repository and it’s broken out into tons of packages.
\n\n\n\nWe just started installing stuff and we did what we call spiking, where we’re just trying out an idea for a fixed length of time. I think we gave one of our developers, might have been Jon or our other senior developer on the project, shout out to him, Kyle Johnson, one of them had a week to see what they could do. We were really surprised how much we were able to get up and running. Have the list view of blocks, have the block editor itself, have our own blocks loading, the inspector.
\n\n\n\nIt’s like you have so much that you can get up and running in such a short time that would’ve taken us months to achieve and it’s already so battle tested all of these packages. It’s hard to appreciate how much that’s worth by itself. Of course this is where WordPress is going. We didn’t want to have to reimagine an entirely new user experience and then train our users on how to use that. We wanted somebody to be able to go from working on a page or a post to a form and not have to relearn the whole journey, but to be like, this feels immediately familiar. It’s a little different, but it feels inherently familiar. Reducing that user friction from changing from context to context within WordPress, which I think is really important.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yes, it sounds right, a good path, but there are definitely some hurdles. So what were the first wins that you kind of say when your developer kind of set out, get a week, and then what was it exactly that they set out to do, but then found, “Oh, that is going to be fast to develop that in a week.” Normally development takes about four weeks or five weeks or something like that. Yeah. What are your first wins?
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: Like I said, even the concept of a block, because for us, we have, and I’ll demo this in a moment here, but we have our sections and then our fields go in our sections, like name amount. To just have everything visually there and to have, “I want this field to be down there,” and making that as fluid user experience is not as easy as it sounds. Or we also have sections and fields inside of sections. So this inner block concept and then being able to select which blocks are visible based on what context you’re in. Or I click on a block and that block contextually shows up in the inspector. We achieved all of that within a week and I was like, “We have a lot of work to do.” But just the fact that we could get that far in such a short amount of time, those were the wins that were like, “Well, we don’t want to go reinvent this,” and it already is a familiar user experience, so it would be silly not to do this in short.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So I think that I find it fascinating and when you tried to describe it, I think it would be really helpful for us to have a short demo of the current state of your development so we can actually look at things and then I can see that we might have the first round of audience questions. What will you show us tonight?
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: All right, let’s share my screen and show some stuff. All right. Can y’all see my screen?
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yes, now we can.
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: All right, cool. So this is GiveWP very similar to how it is now, but I have a plugin, what we’re calling our feature plugin right now installed, called NextGen that anybody can actually go test out themselves. We have a landing page for this that we can share the link for that you can just go click spin up a site and it will just spin you up a site and you can be playing with it literally in 15 seconds.
\n\n\n\nLena Morita: I tried this and it was really easy.
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: Yeah, thank you. So let’s see here. So I’ll add a new V3 form as we’re calling it. I won’t get into why it’s V3, but it is. So here you go. It’s funny, when we first showed this to people, it almost had an anticlimactic effect to it where they were like, “Well, what else would it look like?” Because it just fits right within WordPress. It’s like, “Oh, okay.” So you can see we’ve got the list view like you would normally have. We have our various sections, you can see everything within those sections. We’ve got the form itself. So a lot of this is very similar. Now you don’t have the fluid typing interface where you can just add paragraphs and paragraphs. You can’t just click somewhere and start typing. But that’s really neat is that you’re able to constrain how the block editor works, because for us, we don’t want people just typing in the forms. It doesn’t make sense for a form.
\n\n\n\nInstead, people want to do something, like add a text field, and so we can just click on a section and we can add a text field, favorite color, we can mark it required. So I mean, as you see, it’s just Gutenberg. It’s the exact experience somebody would normally expect, but it’s tailored to how our forms work. And for us, we also wanted to do things like, if I come down here, I can only add a section. We wanted all fields to be within sections. So that’s a really subtle thing, that’s really powerful actually, because this is root level blocks here, and a root level block can only be a section. But then when I’m in a section and I want to add fields, well now Gutenberg knows what blocks can go in there and that’s not something we had to build. Gutenberg already has a concept of all of that kind of stuff.
\n\n\n\nSo I can come in here, you can click in and you can have that same… Gutenberg comes with a lot of what they call controls out of the box. So things like, I want to have inline text editing or something like that. That’s not something that you have to build. One other thing that I’ll point out here, is that if I go to add our blocks here, you can see that you have only our blocks. So we didn’t want to open up the form to every block that exists in WordPress. We thought about that, but we had very specific reasons why we didn’t. That’s another thing that’s really neat, is you can think of Gutenberg as creating your own sandbox environment for what you want to build. So you don’t have to think to yourselves like, “Oh my goodness, we have to…” So every block is open to this? No, you can make it limited to only your own fixed list of blocks.
\n\n\n\nThe other thing that is really neat that we’re able to do is add an additional tab over here that we call design. So this is breaking out a bit from what Gutenberg natively does. We wanted folks to have the ability to, in this view, we call it the builder view, which is where you’re focusing on the structure of your form. So it’s kind of a very vanilla, very plain looking, it’s just meant to be very clear. You can see with our donation summary here, it’s not really showing you anything real. It’s purely so that you can do things like I just want to position things where I want to have them in my form. So then you can switch over to the design tab and now we can actually view our form and this is the exact form as it’s going to render in the front end, and you can play around with secondary colors.
\n\n\n\nSo my secondary color in this form design is being used here. I can make this a nice little purple color, I can change the header, I can hide it, show it. You can do all sorts of fun things in here. But I mean that was pretty powerful of just the ability to add an entirely new type of experience within Gutenberg and giving people the ability to preview. For us, because Give forms are fairly widgety, right? We’re not trying to preview the entire page, just one thing, it worked out really nicely to be able to do it right within here.
\n\n\n\nI’m trying to think what else. So the last thing that I’ll point out here, let me publish this. Let’s go to our form. Let’s take a look at it on the front end. Okay, so we’ve got our form here on the front end. I’m going to dive deep into the weeds here, it’s a dev audience, so just track with me. Okay, so typically when you’re working in Gutenberg, the way that we typically think of it saving is it saves as a string version to the post content. So you think of the Gutenberg HTML comments where it includes attributes and stuff about the block. You can load it dynamically and so on and so forth, but it saves to the post content column of the database. Then when you’re rendering the page, you grab that post content and you stick it on your page.
\n\n\n\nNow for us, we didn’t want to just do that. We had to do a heck of a lot more. So if I fill this out, green for anybody who’s wondering. Then let’s throw on our test card, let’s say for five, donate. So I just made a real donation to my Stripe account. So a lot just happened there. That was obviously a lot more than just, “Oh, it looks like a form.” No, it has to actually work like a form. Forms submit data, forms store data. You can see here it’s referring to my favorite color that was stored in the donation meta. So has a lot that it needs to actually do and validate and all of this different stuff. What we did differently, is that when our forms save, so coming back here, so when I click update, it’s actually saving as JSON.
\n\n\n\nSo before Gutenberg turns into the big string that we know it to be, that saved content, it actually first stores as a JSON object. A bunch of blocks, block attributes, and then child blocks and so on and so forth. It’s a very simple structure actually. We’re doing nothing with the string content, we’re using just that JSON, and we built what we’re calling our field API and we’re converting the JSON structure into the field API. So this email address field, here it’s a block and then it gets converted into an email field on the front end, which is meaningful within GiveWP. So in other words, this is purely presentational so to speak and structural and we can convert it in any context we want. That’s a really powerful thing when you think about it, that you can take something like this, structurally speaking, and just convert it into your own API. So the block JSON, it’s focused on how is this all laid out within Gutenberg.
\n\n\n\nWhen we load this page, literally all we’re doing is we’re grabbing that JSON that we save and we’re handing it back to Gutenberg and we say, “Here’s the form,” and that’s it. It just works. Then when we go to save it, we do the conversion and you can actually see that at play. If I just add another text field here, maybe. If I go to design, like that’s showing up here, because just as we’re working within, so even though I didn’t save it, that’s the kind of thing I’m showing there. Even though we didn’t save it, we’re still just grabbing that JSON object and converting it to our field API and rendering it that way.
\n\n\n\nSo I think for a lot of plugin developers and whatnot, I really want them to grasp the concept of Gutenberg is not just a way of being able to lay things out and then you just have to take whatever it gives you and slap it on the page and there you go. It’s like, no, you can use it as a tool for interacting with your user and then you can convert it into whatever context you can imagine. And that’s a pretty powerful thing.
\n\n\n\nI think that’s it for what I had in mind for demo. Anything that anybody wants me to show a little more or poke into here?
\n\n\n\nLena Morita: I have a question. So on the front end, on the actual front end form, how are you adding interactivity? Like the JavaScript parts?
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: Yeah, so the way this works is that, so it takes the Gutenberg JSON, converts it into the field API, and then that is serialized and this is an iframe. Inside the iframe is a React application that’s just running independently. The React application takes in the form and then it connects to things like gateways, other add add-ons, that sort of a thing. But yeah, that’s where it’s coming from. This is just a React application of our own design, built specifically for Give forms.
\n\n\n\nLena Morita: So basically field API converts all that JSON data into actual React components and stuff?
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: The field API is a PHP layer.
\n\n\n\nLena Morita: Oh.
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: It’s pure just PHP objects, but it’s focused. Whereas the Gutenberg API is focused on blocks and child blocks, attributes, that sort of thing. Our field API is focused on how does a form work. So for example, is this a field? Is this field required? What are the validation rules for this field? Does it have any sanitization that needs to happen? So things that you would typically think about from a field or field form perspective, that’s what the field API thinks about.
\n\n\n\nIt was also really important to us that developers could programmatically… So if I want to programmatically move a field, add a field, add a section, do anything, you can do it using our field API in PHP. So you can kind of add a middleman layer between Gutenberg, a programmatic layer to be able to make more adjustments to your form. Then that’ll just show up here. For example, when I submitted this form down here, how does it know that this is a required field and what does that even mean, right? Because it has to validate on the other side. So when we submit this form on the server, it’s grabbing the form again in the structure of the field API, it’s finding the favorite color field, and then it’s checking the validation rules such as, “Hey, this is required,” or “It can only be up to 255 characters,” or whatever else. Does that make sense?
\n\n\n\nLena Morita: Yeah. So wait, the initial render of this form is not in PHP, I think you said this was initially rendered in React, or is it actually a PHP rendered page?
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: I know there’s so many layers.
\n\n\n\nLena Morita: It’s so interesting.
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: It’s no worries. The field API lives in memory and PHP. That can be used both for rendering a form or validating a form or doing any number of things. This form represented in memory and PHP and it knows all the responsibilities of that form. Then we say, “Hey, I want to render that. That’s what I want to do this time.” And so then what it does is it, I think it’ll show you, it serializes everything. I thought it would show here. That’s fine. But anyway, it takes the whole field API structure, the form, all of its internal fields, elements and so on and so forth, serializes that, passes that to the front end, which is received by a React application.
\n\n\n\nLena Morita: Oh, that’s how you hydrate it.
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: Exactly. Yep. The React application is ready to receive a form in the structure of the field API JSON.
\n\n\n\nLena Morita: Yeah, I’m not sure if everybody’s aware, but the interactivity API is kind of an experimental phase in Gutenberg right now. And this is a very hot topic. I feel like it’s on everybody’s minds. How do we hydrate interactive components on the front end? So it’s very intriguing how people have done this before any kind of ready-made abstraction layer.
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: Right. There’s also the difference between, for example, I’m making a page, on my page I’m adding a component. This component is an accordion. It’s presentational, but there is a JavaScript element to it of, I want to be able to make interactivity happen on a presentational level versus what I’m describing here. It’s pretty complex, because there’s both a front end validation and server side validation, and we want them to be the same. There’s a lot of complexity around a form and what the form even does. So for us, our forms don’t just save and entry, our forms actually output into a donation and donor. So trying to capture the lightning in a bottle of boiling this down to interactivities, it’s like, well, it’s doing a lot more than just being interactive. It’s also validating and doing a whole bunch of other stuff.
\n\n\n\nActually, one thing I’ll show here if I switch to our multi-step design, so let’s just update this. Okay, we’ve got a completely different experience here. So now in this one, every single step, so when I do that, you notice there it kind of loaded for a moment in between steps? It’s validating with the server. So every single step is now validated against the server to make sure that everything here is in fact correct.
\n\n\n\nWell, actually I have that differently set. Anyway, so if I were to try to continue, I’m going to get immediate validation feedback from the server. Even if you try to trick the JavaScript and make it not work and validate in the front end, it’s still going to validate on the server. So yeah, it’s a complex piece. So I think the interactivity API and stuff like that is really, really great for a lot of simpler forms of interactivity. But when you’re building what is in effect a small application, I think something like that is still a ways away from covering everything that we need this to do. Does that make sense?
\n\n\n\nLena Morita: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Thank you.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Totally sense for me too. Especially the other pieces, not only the validation of the form, but it’s also the connection with the external services like Stripe and the databases and all of that. Those need to be abstracted too and then kind of come back through the server API I would think, to then push it again to the front end in some other places.
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: Exactly, because we don’t have a fixed list of gateways here. That’s injected. We also have our own add-ons, like fee recovery, form field manager, those add additional blocks and fields and those are injected at different points. It’s a highly customizable system, so there’s a lot going on.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Super. Yeah. Well, do you have any other questions, Lena, to get them to show you something or shall we talk a little bit higher level now?
\n\n\n\nLena Morita: Yeah, we can go higher level.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Well, thank you so much, Jason, for the demo. It’s fascinating, especially how the difference between before and now, because I only know the current version or the version three years ago and what you do now. So it’s a total different beast, I would say, as complexity, but also easy to use.
\n\n\n\nSo just a ballpark, would you say from the code base, how much is actually based on the WordPress components and scripts and how much of that app do you have to rebuild kind of thing? So I would think the field API on PHP, that’s kind of the interface between those two as we saw.
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: Yeah.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Maybe it’s kind of an odd question. Yeah, I get that.
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: Twenty-five percent. I mean a lot. Gutenberg definitely attributes to quite a bit.
\n\n\n\nJon Waldstein: I could take that one.
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: Yeah, go for it, Jon.
\n\n\n\nJon Waldstein: We built the donation form, the new one that you were seeing on the front end, completely from scratch. That whole thing with React serializing or hydrating data from the server, we did that from scratch, because our old forms were just using post types. So everything is server rendered, and it’s a little difficult to add that level of interactivity with React using the old system. So we really built it, the front end, from the ground up. The form builder that Jason was demoing is mostly things you can get from the Gutenberg package. We had to customize a couple things that we had to fork and call our own, mainly the sidebar that you saw where we have that design tab, that’s not something that’s available to us. So we had to create that and implement it on our own. But for the most part, what you’re seeing on the form builder can be achieved from Gutenberg packages.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: So the sidebar, when you say that, I saw the controls that were there, they looked like Gutenberg components, the color, bigger, and the different kind of… Yeah. So that definitely might have come through that. Yeah.
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: We barely invented anything in the inspector.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
\n\n\n\nJon Waldstein: Yeah, and that’s the beautiful thing about using Gutenberg is if you want to create a block in our form builder, there’s nothing different about it than building a WordPress Gutenberg block. And we really wanted to make sure that was the case so that there’s nothing, no crazy documentation that you have to relearn. So we do have a community of developers that interact with GiveWP, external developers, and we want to preserve the customization of the plugin. So if you know how to build a block in WordPress, you’re going to know how to build a block for us as well.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, that’s awesome. Yeah. Well, this is all talking about the good sides, but were there any surprises or challenges that you encountered while you were building that, or are you still encountering? What are the biggest surprises that you’ve found?
\n\n\n\nJon Waldstein: Yeah. Well, we mentioned we had to customize some components like the sidebar. But I think the one I want to mention is GiveWP is not just one plugin. We have a lot of add-ons that extend the functionality of GiveWP, whether it be gateways and different ways to customize your form. We have a lot of things that interact with our main plugin. One of the bigger challenges recently was figuring out how to open up our customized Gutenberg form builder with our add-ons. Now, another shout out to Kyle Johnson, who is a developer on our team who built the first iteration of the form builder. To get things up and running we used just React, Create React App, which ends up bundling all the scripts together into one JavaScript file. So when you load the form builder, you’re just loading a page and it’s just loading that one JavaScript file.
\n\n\n\nWhat we found out later is that in order to load external blocks from our add-ons and other things that are interacting with the form builder, all of these different things are always reacting with certain dependencies like React. They can’t all load Gutenberg at the same time. It’s just not going to work, which is how the post editor works and why WordPress Scripts package came out is that you can extract all the dependencies from your script and let WordPress load those for you. So that was a big kind of structural change we had to make so that we are now relying on WordPress to provide us with Gutenberg, which is actually something we didn’t want to do. We wanted to have full access to the latest version of Gutenberg, but it wasn’t possible for us, because we have add-ons that also need to interact with Gutenberg and React, and they can’t all just be loading their scripts at the same time. It’s just not going to work.
\n\n\n\nLike most of us know, wp_enqueue_scripts, you add an array of dependencies that you want your script to use, and WordPress will load those for you. And that’s how we had to go about loading our form builder and then having add-ons come in and give us a block or give us something to customize the form builder and just let WordPress handle loading external scripts. That was the big one.
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: I’ll add to that.
\n\n\n\nLena Morita: I’m curious.
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: It’s easy to take for granted that the Gutenberg team had to tackle this issue of we’re creating a single React tree. We don’t want everybody to load their own version of React, and it has to all end up in the same place. So I remember when Gutenberg first came out and there’s the Gutenberg elements, they tucked React inside of Gutenberg, why’d they do that? And why did they come out with WP-Scripts that just swaps out for you’re doing at WordPress/components? What actually that does, is it grab it from WP.components. It’s like why is it doing all this? Well, the reality is, they went through all of the hard work of figuring out how to have everybody using the same version of React and loading everything to the same React tree all at the same time from 1,000 different places.
\n\n\n\nThat’s actually a lot harder than it sounds. Once we ran into that, we were like, “Okay.” We just had to switch everything to using WP-Scripts, because we’re like, “It’s just not worth it for us to try to solve the same problem of extensibility that Gutenberg itself has already solved so well.” It has some trade-offs, but it really, as a whole, it actually works quite well. So huge shout out to the Gutenberg team, because originally we actually had the first version of this loading in GitHub pages. It was literally totally standalone, but then we tried to extend it and we’re like, “This is a lot harder than we thought it would be.” Yeah.
\n\n\n\nLena Morita: So speaking of trade-offs, I’m also sympathetic with the major downside of this. As a plug-in developer, you cannot rely on any version being in action at any moment. It’s very hard. Upstream changes can break your app at any moment. You don’t know what versions running. What are some things you’re doing to mitigate this risk I guess?
\n\n\n\nJon Waldstein: We have to manually test it now. Before, if we were loading the latest version of Gutenberg, well, there’s only one instance of that. But since we’re loading Gutenberg from WordPress now, we actually had to bump up our minimum version of WordPress to whatever the version of Gutenberg that we support that comes with WordPress. That’s a major change for us, but it’s necessary.
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: We previously supported back to WordPress 5.0. So this whole thing actually made us come up with an entirely new policy around which versions of WordPress do we support. Before it was like we would support a version of WordPress until we were like, “I guess there’s something that we really need,” then we would bump it up to… We were talking about bumping it up to 5.5 or something like that, but we saw no reason to cut backwards compatibility until we had a specific reason to do so. This whole thing made us realize like, “Oh, we’re really tightly coupled now.” We’re really on the WordPress bandwagon and it’s really important what versions we support.
\n\n\n\nWe didn’t invent this, other plugins are doing this, but we said, “Okay, we’re only going to officially, moving forward, support the latest released version of WordPress and the previous two.” That’s how we’re going to keep ourselves from getting into compatibility hell as new changes roll in that we have to become compatible for. Then that makes it harder and harder to be compatible with older versions. So we’re having to really kind of tighten in on that window. Fortunately, I will say, according to our telemetry, people are actually pretty darn good at staying within the latest or a few most late recent latest versions of WordPress. We don’t have a lot.
\n\n\n\nLena Morita: That’s good to know.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I was thinking so, what is your customer servicing to that? Yeah, because I can see that there are quite a few nonprofits that have not updated their WordPress for a while. But they could stay on your older version of GiveWP because it’s still supported, and you’re not going to cut it out right there.
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: So a good product question there. So our support team is actually very much in support of it. What we’ve found is that typically people fall into one of two camps. One, they’re set it and forget it. They set up their website five years ago, and it works, so don’t touch it, right? And that’s perfectly fine. Or you have people that keep things fairly up to date. You don’t have many people that are in this weird middle space where they update some stuff and not others. And if somebody does reach out to our support team and is having an issue or something, our team is trained. One of the first things they do is they say, “Are you updated?” So it’s not like they’re going to have to suddenly change their tune, because of this new policy. It’s something we’ve already recommended to people for years is, if you’re having a problem, you should start by updating what you have to make sure that… because the problem might be fixed already and you’re just not updated.
\n\n\n\nSo yeah, we’re really not anticipating, and others like the events calendar and others have had this policy for a while, and so I did ask around within the product space, “Hey, was this a pain point for you? Did you notice a decrease in sales or higher churn rate?” The answer was unanimously, “No. No, actually, it’s a very healthy policy to have and it hasn’t caused us problems.”
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So we have one more question from Anton, and I think it goes back quite a few minutes, he was asking about the sidebar if that is accomplished through slot fills.
\n\n\n\nJon Waldstein: That one, no, we actually had to fork that. But I wanted to bring up the isolated block editor, which Lena works on or has worked on, because we’ve been following that project for a little while now. I think at its inception we were also building ours, which our form builder is very similar to how the isolated block editor works. One of the biggest problems was the sidebar customization, which to answer Anton’s previous question, if you were to use isolated block editor now, you can accomplish that with technically a slot fill, because we submitted a feature request to do that, and it was actually added just recently.
\n\n\n\nIt makes it a little bit more feasible to actually switch over to the isolated block editor shortly, because we’re really not doing anything crazy. That was kind of the main thing about using WordPress as dependencies. It’s like we’re really not customizing anything that crazy. We’re just using Gutenberg. We’re not like forking every single thing. We’re loading a bunch of blocks into it and maybe doing some style changes. So it should be pretty reliable. But we are looking at the block editor, the isolated block editor, as a way forward for this. I would suggest it for anyone else looking at this project or looking at something similar to this, because it’s a really easy way to get started.
\n\n\n\nLena Morita: Yeah, I agree.
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: Played around using it and realize like, oh, it has things like undo, redo. We don’t have that right now, but if you use the isolated block editor, you just have it. So yeah, part of our post 3.0 launch roadmap is to switch the isolated block editor, which will also take a lot of complexity off of our plate.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Excellent. Excellent. So I have another question. I’m so happy that I’m privileged to run this show so I can ask all the questions that I want.
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: Go for it.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: You started kind of three, four years ago thinking about it and maybe a year and a half or two years ago, really doing proof of concepts and all that. So put yourself back into the shoes you would start out now, because that would be something that plugin developers might think about. What is it that you would ask of the Gutenberg team to improve or to build on the components or on the scripts so that work is a little easier? Or much easier, not just a little easier.
\n\n\n\nJon Waldstein: Documentation has been a little bit of a struggle for us, especially being like… And we understand we’re no experts at documentation. It’s tough work.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Can you specify a little bit on the documentation? Which piece?
\n\n\n\nJon Waldstein: Well, if you know are going down the path of building your own block editor, there’s very little documentation on there. If there is, it’s a little outdated. We had to do a lot of digging through reading code and finding how to actually pull this thing off that didn’t quite match up with some of the documentation out there. So that was one of the biggest hurdles. Then also some components in Gutenberg are not accessible that we wanted to pull out and use ourselves. So some of those were just not exported. Maybe they’re just internal components. We found ourselves really wanting to, and we did use some of these components, but once we switched over to relying on WordPress to provide us the scripts, we lost some of those, because they’re not available. I would have to come up with a list to give you…
\n\n\n\nLena Morita: With the block editor package? In the block editor package, you mean?
\n\n\n\nJon Waldstein: Yeah, block editor. Maybe some more. We would have to define the path to the actual build component to grab, and sometimes those were missing from the exports. We would often have to fork the whole file, which causes side effects, because it’s relying on some things. So limiting that was tough at first, but we kind of worked around it. I would’ve to come up with a list to figure out which ones are really important to people like us.
\n\n\n\nLena Morita: Yeah, please send me that list. I’m interested. There is something about it.
\n\n\n\nJon Waldstein: Yeah. Some of these would be documented like, “Hey, they’re available,” and then you’d go to use them and they’re just not.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: I know that Ryan Welchers is actually on the path to put example code into the read me files and all that, and he found quite a few that if you want to use that code snippet, you couldn’t, because it didn’t export. So he actually goes through it and while he is updating the documentation to also add the export feature to it. So I didn’t find it yet now quickly, that little issue or the tracking issue of that, but I can certainly share that with you and in the show notes and also with you personally, so you can add to the list so you don’t have to start from scratch. Have you, speaking of documentation, there’s also a separate documentation site that’s called The Storybook for the components. How did that help you?
\n\n\n\nJon Waldstein: That was helpful. I’m not sure how complete it is or how up to date it actually is.
\n\n\n\nLena Morita: It’s getting more complete by the minute.
\n\n\n\nJon Waldstein: Yeah, there were some things on there that were very helpful.
\n\n\n\nLena Morita: It’s really nice right now. We spent a lot of time on it this past year.
\n\n\n\nJon Waldstein: Yeah, I love the idea of that. There’s different documentation sites. We’re not really sure which ones are up-to-date. So maybe add a version to what thing was added, that would be helpful.
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: That’s a really important note, I think. If you go to some documentation sites out there, I think React does this or Stripe does this, where the docs themselves are versioned. That’s really helpful, because otherwise that’s been a part of our struggles. We’ll find some piece of documentation on Gutenberg and we’re like, “Is this old? Is this current?” We just don’t know how to trust it. So we always end up going back to the source code anyway to validate the documentation that we found to make sure that it is in fact still recent.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, totally get that. Especially because the documentation is actually built on top. The automation of the references is actually built on top of the Gutenberg plugin, but it doesn’t tell you that when you look at it. You are looking for something and you find it and then you try it out on WordPress without the plugin and the feature isn’t there yet, because it’s coming. It’s one of the upcoming kind of things. So I totally get this. Yeah.
\n\n\n\nLena Morita: This is on our radar, definitely.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
\n\n\n\nLena Morita: We’ll try to push for this.
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: One other minor thing on the original question I’ll add is, there are still some things in Gutenberg that are hard coded that you can’t really do anything about. One that we’re kind of just hoping nobody notices is if you click on a block and then there’s little header piece of the block there and there’s a contextual menu and options that drops down where you have things like copy styles or paste styles or that sort of a thing, we can’t get rid of that. Copying and pasting styles makes no sense in our context. We looked into it. That’s just hard coded. You can’t get rid of that. It’s just there. I was like, “Oh.” So there are still little pieces like that that you’re just like, “Well, hopefully nobody will notice that.” And then the last thing with Gutenberg that we ran into that is like, “This is interesting,” is well, not the last, another is…
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: I’m sure it’s not the last, yeah.
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: … locked blocks. So that’s kind of an interesting concept where, for example, you have to have an amount field for us. You can’t take that out and still have your form work. So you can lock the block, but then they can go unlock the block. So locking something, it’s more like a pinky promise with the user, like please don’t get rid of this. I think it used to be that locking was like it was done. There was no way to unlock something, and then the UI was added in the list view to be able to unlock things. That was kind of an interesting one of like, “Oh, well, how do you actually enforce that something can’t be removed? You should not be able to delete this.”
\n\n\n\nThen the other thing that we found that was interesting with locked blocks, is that if you have a locked block in one as a child block, so we have our two sections, if I have my amount block up here, when it’s locked, I can’t move it. So you can’t take it out of this section and move it into this section. If you drag and drop, it just will do nothing. So there’s just little itty-bitty things like that that kind of pop up. So the concept of what locked means in Gutenberg is a little bit, you kind of just got to play with it to find out what does lock even mean?
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah.
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: It’s not clear and consistent, I would say.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. So in the last few versions of WordPress, there were server-side filters as well as client-side filters to customize your blocks and to curate the experience and switch off interfaces and all that through PHP filters or server side or JavaScript filters. Have you been able to mitigate some of the problems that you saw before?
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: With the locked stuff that we talked about?
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So Nick Diego just posted on the developer blog a new… So how to modify theme.json data, which is kind of part of it. Yeah, that’s the style part, but it’s also block styling. Oh, I can share it here. Whoops.
\n\n\n\nJon Waldstein: Oh, I’ll mention one. I’ll shout out to one filter that we just found extremely useful is the JavaScript filters for registering a block type, which really was amazing because now we can have core blocks. Let’s take the amount field or something, and we can have an add-on come in and add more settings or attributes to that block using the register block type. There’s a couple other filters for doing that where you can add things to a block that wasn’t there before. That’s new to me that you could do that natively, but for us, that was huge.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: It’s a little late in the game. Yeah. Yeah, I’m sorry, but we are getting to the end of our show. It was only scheduled for an hour. I think we could talk another two hours. I feel that way. And I don’t know, Lena probably has even more questions for you.
\n\n\n\nLena Morita: Definitely. So many questions.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: But it was such a great experience to have you on the show and to share some of the secrets that you encountered and how you made it all work for yourself. We will have some resources in the show notes.
\n\n\n\nAt this point, I only have two more questions for you all three. So do you have any announcement that you wouldn’t get in before or you want people to keep in mind? We can go around Jason, Jon, and Lena. The second question is, if people want to get in touch with you, what would be the best way? So you can answer one of the questions, both questions or none.
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: Yeah, so keep an eye out for Give 3.0 that will be landing at the beginning of Q3 is what we’re aiming for right now. You can go to the landing page, I provided the link for that and go spin it up and test it out yourself. We’re updating that. So as we roll out new internal versions of what we’re calling next gen, which is our 3.0, we’re updating that and we actually have it all set up. So if you do have that installed locally and we roll out a version, you can update it just like you would any other plugin and continue to test out, provide feedback. So we love getting feedback from folks on this. You can also reach out to me personally at jason.adams@givewp.com, or you can find me on Twitter as Jason.Adams.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Excellent. Yeah. Thank you, Jon?
\n\n\n\nJon Waldstein: Yeah, and I’ll mention for any other developers that are interested, what we’ve demoed and what we’re showing is completely public. You could go on GitHub and look at all of this code that we wrote. It took us over a year. I think we’re coming up on a year and a half or something, maybe a little less than that, but a lot of work has gone into it. If you want to see actually what we’re doing, come on to GitHub and if you want to ask some questions, you could start a discussion on GiveWP, or we have a Canny board for additional feedback. If you were to go to the landing page and actually play around with this thing, you can actually provide feedback and we’ll take all the feedback into consideration for the future of GiveWP. And if you want to get in touch with me, I’m on Twitter, Jon Waldstein and jon@givewp.com if you want to send me an email.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Excellent. And Lena?
\n\n\n\nLena Morita: Yeah, I guess for me, I mentioned I work on the work path components package and me and the team that works on it, we really, really are always looking for new contributors. So if anyone’s interested in contributing back, we love working with new contributors. We are highly engaging and we collaborate a lot. So if anybody’s interested, just pick up an issue or I don’t know, ping me and we’ll help you find a fun, good issue to work on. You can find me on Twitter at Mirka, M-I-R-K-A. Same ID on GitHub.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Excellent. Yeah. And so my link or my answer is that we will do another live Q&A in two weeks actually, but on Friday, on Friday, July 21st. We’ll talk about design systems and theme.json. I know that there are large agencies and large entities like universities, and so they all have a design system. They have corporate design, and they need all the websites kind of to follow that. The WordPress VIPs team built a bridge between Figma and theme.json. I hope I get the people who created that on the show. We will have some demos there, of course. We also will talk with Joni Halabi, who is the web developer at Georgetown University, and she also has, as a university, big design systems and how she works with patterns. So it’s a great show and I hope you will join us again there.
\n\n\n\nSo a big thank you to our viewers and to Anton for the great questions. If you have more questions, you can always send them to me via email. That’s pauli@gutenbergtimes.com. P-A-U-L-I at gutenbergtimes.com. Recording, as I mentioned, will be available in a few minutes on the YouTube channel, and we’ll publish a transcript in a couple of weeks on gutenbergtimes.com.
\n\n\n\nThanks again to Jason, Jon, and Lena for being here. It’s been a privilege to have you on the show, and it was a great joy talking to you. Be well and goodbye and good luck. Take care.
\n\n\n\nJason Adams: Thank you.
\n\n\n\nLena Morita: Thank you.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Thank you.
\n\n\n\nJon Waldstein: Bye.
\n\n\n\nLena Morita: Bye.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Bye, everyone.
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Fri, 21 Jul 2023 23:50:52 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:18:\"Birgit Pauli-Haack\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:13;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:118:\"WPTavern: WordPress Contributors Demand Transparency and Objective Guidelines for Listings on Recommended Hosting Page\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:30:\"https://wptavern.com/?p=147073\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:129:\"https://wptavern.com/wordpress-contributors-demand-transparency-and-objective-guidelines-for-listings-on-recommended-hosting-page\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:6958:\"WordPress’ Recommended Hosting page is a hotly contested piece of online real estate, and has recently come into focus again following the removal of SiteGround from the listings. When the change was highlighted during a recent Meta team meeting, Audrey Capital-sponsored contributor Samuel “Otto” Wood said, “Matt asked me to remove SiteGround because that page is getting revamped. I know no more than that.” Bluehost and Dreamhost are the only two hosts remaining on the page at this time.
\n\n\n\nThe process for being listed on the Recommended Hosting page has historically been shrouded in secrecy, causing contributors to speculate that large sums of money were required. Although the current criteria is posted on the page, the process of getting listed and de-listed is not transparent. It’s not clear if and how the criteria is being applied, as it states that listings are “completely arbitrary:”
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWe’ll be looking at this list several times a year, so keep an eye out for us re-opening the survey for hosts to submit themselves for inclusion. Listing is completely arbitrary, but includes criteria like: contributions to WordPress.org, size of customer base, ease of WP auto-install and auto-upgrades, avoiding GPL violations, design, tone, historical perception, using the correct logo, capitalizing WordPress correctly, not blaming us if you have a security issue, and up-to-date system software.
\n
WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg has recently hinted at the possibility of re-opening the survey, inviting contributors in WordPress’ Hosting Slack channel to weigh in on questions or data the survey should collect “to help us discern who we recommend.” He linked to questions from the survey used in 2016 when the page was updated to include Bluehost, DreamHost, Flywheel, and SiteGround.
\n\n\n\nThe new draft for the survey states: “It’s time to loop back and give every host an opportunity to be on the recommended page, and also make it international because we never really got recommended hosts in non-English countries right.”
\n\n\n\nThe WordPress Hosting team has been working on a related effort called “Project Bedrock” that aims to create a directory in which any hosting company that meets a series of predefined requirements can appear as recommended hosting or compatible with the WordPress CMS.
\n\n\n\n“Yes, project bedrock is a goal,” Hosting team rep Javier Casares said. “Some months ago we left the project in stand-by to create a pre-version of the project, creating a list of hosting companies inside the Make/Hosting, a ‘everyone can be on the list’ (if criteria) as a complement for the /hosting), but the idea is that /hosting, this pre-project or the project should have the same criteria (the base).
\n\n\n\n“We know Matt is the responsible for the /hosting, our idea is creating a ‘longer list’ for the Hosting Handbook / page at Make/hosting. The idea is having the same criteria. So, both are complementary.”
\n\n\n\nAlthough contributors to the project view it as complementary to the official recommendations, it may be confusing for WordPress to have multiple similar hosting resources with the same criteria but different listings. These appear to be conflicting efforts that have a lot of overlap but may ultimately be at odds with the goal of simplifying the host selection process for new WordPress users who don’t know which ones to consider.
\n\n\n\nCasares suggested a few technical criteria that the survey should focus on, including PHP versions, database versions, SSH access, automatic updates, one-click WordPress installation, free TLS certificates, backup, and more.
\n\n\n\nThe 2023 survey is still in the early stages in draft form. WordPress Hosting team contributors suggested that requirements for revamping the page would be a good topic for discussion at WordCamp US’ upcoming Community Summit next month.
\n\n\n\nIn the Post Status hosting channel, Namecheap co-founder Matt Russell suggested Mullenweg leverage WPHostingBenchmarks performance data.
\n\n\n\n“[WPHostingBenchmarks is] probably the most open, fairest, and long-term performance evaluation in the WP space,” Russell said. He also recommended Mullenweg revamp the page as more of a directory with options to select budget, regions/country, and more.
\n\n\n\nReview Signal founder Kevin Ohashi, who publishes the WPHostingBenchmarks site, shared concerns about transparency that he has had since the last time the page was updated:
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWho is reviewing this information? What criteria will be used in evaluating them? I know last time you said you were involved, as were other folks from Automattic. Automattic is a competitor in the hosting space, and no matter the hat being worn, there is some concern over sharing sensitive business info with a competitor.
\n\n\n\nGetting listed on that page is likely worth millions of dollars to any company in terms of business generated. I think the process and criteria should be transparent and clear from the beginning. I also think who is involved with evaluating should be known beforehand as well. At least give companies, and consumers, the information they deserve to evaluate participating and the outcome.
\n
Ohashi recommends that no person employed by a hosting company should be involved in the evaluation of submissions. This would eliminate bias from competitors in the space trying to suppress those they deem to be a threat.
\n\n\n\n“I’d like to see more ethics and accountability, a code of ethics for any company getting listed would be a positive in my mind,” Ohashi said. “Companies should be competing on quality and product, not on astroturfing, deceptive billing practices and other shady behavior we often see in the space. In my benchmarks, I push measuring default performance because I believe that benefits the greatest number of customers. I think there’s an opportunity to push for a better ecosystem here and would love to see you take it.”
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Fri, 21 Jul 2023 21:42:22 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"Sarah Gooding\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:14;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:82:\"WordPress.org blog: WordPress 6.3 Live Product Demo – Highlights & Recording\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:35:\"https://wordpress.org/news/?p=15445\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:88:\"https://wordpress.org/news/2023/07/wordpress-6-3-live-product-demo-highlights-recording/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:7537:\"WordPress 6.3 ships on August 8th! For a sneak peek of what’s to come, members of the 6.3 release squad, Anne McCarthy and Rich Tabor, held a live demo moderated by Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nMore than 100 attendees watched as some of the most anticipated product features were demonstrated, from the brand-new Command Palette to new design tools and more.
\n\n\n\n6.3 Live Product Demo\n\n\n\nHere are some of the key takeaways from the 6.3 live product demonstration.
\n\n\n\nOne of the most anticipated features of 6.3 is the Command Palette. It lets you quickly navigate and open different WordPress functions within the post and Site Editor. Access it using a shortcut command (Command + K or Control + K).
\n\n\n\nNow you can browse and edit pages within the Site Editor, providing a more cohesive WordPress experience. A new drafting flow debuts, allowing you to create and publish pages directly within the editor.
\n\n\n\nYou can create and manage all your patterns directly in the Site Editor. Once edited, all synced patterns (previously called Reusable Blocks) will change across a site—a huge time saver when making changes.
\n\n\n\nThis enhancement offers a visual timeline of your site so you can see all the revisions in your site’s history and restore a previous style with just a click.
\n\n\n\nControls for specifying aspect ratios to ensure design integrity, especially when using images in Patterns debut in 6.3, along with new blocks for Footnotes and Details. Easily add footnotes to your content and have them automatically linked to the corresponding text. With the Details block, hide or display content to create spoilers or accordions.
\n\n\n\nWordPress is getting faster with 6.3 as content with images will see speedier load times. Both theme types (Classic and Block) will also benefit from performance improvements. The upcoming hallway hangout is an excellent opportunity to learn more about performance enhancements directly from the WordPress Performance team.
\n\n\n\nThese new features and more await you as Phase 2 of the WordPress Roadmap comes to a close with the 6.3 release.
\n\n\n\nA question and answer session followed the demo, with attendees asking plenty of great questions. The panelists shared links for additional reading regarding many new features—all conveniently added to the end of this post.
\n\n\n\nA big thank you to everyone who helps make WordPress. Contributors power every WordPress release. Without the hundreds of contributors worldwide who help build WordPress, this live product demo wouldn’t have been possible. Thank you for all of your hard work.
\n\n\n\nProps to @richtabor and @annezazu for reviewing this post and to @cbringmann, @meher, and @dansoschin for their logistics support to run the event.
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Fri, 21 Jul 2023 19:26:26 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:16:\"Jonathan Pantani\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:15;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:79:\"Do The Woo Community: The Friday Show, What Makes the Do the Woo Podcast Unique\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:28:\"https://dothewoo.io/?p=75699\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:57:\"https://dothewoo.io/what-makes-do-the-woo-podcast-unique/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:417:\"Do the Woo podcast has grown into a hybrid of a podcast, community and network. A podcast for the community, by the community.
\n>> The post The Friday Show, What Makes the Do the Woo Podcast Unique appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community .
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Sponsor: WordPress.comBuild and manage professional sites with secure managed hosting on WordPress.com.
\n\n\n\nBeautiful themes, built-in SEO, and payment tools, and access to over 50,000 plugins. Everything you need for your business, plus 24/7 support from WordPress experts.
\n![\"WordPress.com\"](\"https://poststatus.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/wpcom-wmark-black_sponsor23-752x752.png\")
\n\n![\"🔗\"](\"https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f517.png\")
Mentioned in the show:![\"🐦\"](\"https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f426.png\")
You can follow Post Status and our guests on Twitter:The Post Status Draft podcast is geared toward WordPress professionals, with interviews, news, and deep analysis. ![\"📝\"](\"https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f4dd.png\")
Browse our archives, and don’t forget to subscribe via iTunes, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Stitcher, Simplecast, or RSS. ![\"🎧\"](\"https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f3a7.png\")
Cory Miller (00:00:02) – Hey everybody. Welcome back to Post Status Draft. Got another great interview in our agency Journey series and I’m talking with JJ Toothman, a member of Post Status and JJ, Hey, thanks for coming on post this draft and talking about your agency journey story.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:00:18) – Hey, thanks for having me. Cory. It’s great to be here. Um, really appreciate everything you do for post status and for the community. So I’m happy to be, um, you know, a member of both. So.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:00:32) – Awesome. Well, we’ve gotten to get to know each other over the last, like, I’d say, what, eight months and hear about some of the work that your agency does. It’s super, super exciting. But can you tell me about the agency where it is now? Team clients kind of work. You kind of do.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:00:50) – There’s my dog and wife.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:00:54) – Great introduction.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:00:55) – Yeah. Um, so the. So my company is Lone Rock Point and I am located outside of Boston, Massachusetts, in a town called Sudbury.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:01:09) – Um, if you know the Revolutionary War history, you remember the Battle of Lexington and Concord and Sudbury borders. Concord. I live about five miles from where Paul Revere was captured at the end of his famous ride to tell everybody the British were coming. Oh, wow. Lone Rock Point. We have grown it to 16 people. You know, 12 of those people are full time. And there’s a handful of of, of part timers. Um, the were distributed all over the place. Uh, I’ve got, you know, some of us are in California, Texas. Uh, Michigan. There’s a few people in around Grand Rapids. There’s people in Florida, a few people around Asheville, North Carolina. And we definitely, you know, adopted a remote first, you know, virtual kind of organization, organizational structure from the very beginning. You know, when when the pandemic happened in 2020, we didn’t miss a beat. You know, our the people that we were working with, you know, just it just continued.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:02:29) – It’s weird to look back on that time and think about the, you know, ways that we were able to grow during that time in a period where so many small businesses were were, you know, struggling. But, you know, look back on that time and think about like we, you know, we were, you know, going remote, being virtual. That wasn’t a problem for us. We were ready to do that for the very beginning. And the people we were worked with, like just we just kept working on it, kept asking for more from us. It was actually a period of growth for us. We probably went from, you know, at the beginning of. You know, spring 2020, we were around four people and 4 or 5, and now we’re 16. We became a WordPress agency approximately 15, 16 months ago. Um, and we joined WordPress is kind of a continuation of our work with the public sector when I started my company in 2016. Um, you know that we can talk about the genesis of that, but it was, you know, I was had come from a federal government contracting world and I’ve been working for big companies like Raytheon, um, Perot Systems, Dell and, you know, decided that, you know, I wanted to start my own company, you know, had this, you know, the proverbial entrepreneurial itch that most entrepreneurs feel and just kind of wanted to try that out.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:04:02) – So I started to serve this company and wanted to start working. There were two customers that I wanted to work with from the very beginning, and one of those was NASA, which is it’s hard for me to talk about my own journey and the work that we’re doing without connecting to the long history I have working with with NASA. So I use that relationship and that relationship capital that I’ve built, you know, from starting working with them back in as early as 2001. Well, one of my first clients and then one of my second clients, big clients was Automattic. Some people over there that had built relationships over the years came to me and said, Hey, you know a lot about, you know, this public sector world, you know, federal government contracting. Can you help us, you know, with kind of get into that vertical and so help them with some some business strategy around that? I helped them with some security compliance, things they needed to be aware of. And then that relation, you know, that work kind of matured a little bit and kind of ran its course a little bit.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:05:15) – And then, you know, as they as WordPress VIP, you know, kind of solidified its it’s standing and it’s got themselves into what’s called the Fedramp marketplace. You know, they came to me and said, Hey, you should, you know, your company, you should we should continue working together. You should join the WordPress Agency partnership program. And that’s something I did, you know, specifically because of our shared interest in working together on public sector opportunities. And, um, you know, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s really what my company is doing right now is, you know, Lone Rock Point. We are, we’re definitely exploring that intersection of WordPress and public SpaC, public sector, predominantly the federal level of that. You know, there’s a lot of state and municipal stuff opportunities there as well. Um, but we’re, you know, the, the kind of the, when you think of like WordPress and public sector, what I want people to come out of that connection with is is Lone Rock point and so that’s you know that’s work we’re doing with and and work we’re doing with NASA and it’s going we’ve been working on some projects from NASA for the past few years.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:06:31) – And it’s it’s really rewarding work. It’s good to feel like you’re contributing to. You know, we’re not civil servants, but we’re definitely kind of contributing to. You know, putting the taxpayer dollars to work, being good stewards of taxpayer money. And we think WordPress has a a role in that.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:06:54) – Excellent. Well, there’s a lot here I want to unpack, but it’s so compelling. Congratulations on your success. Congratulations on what you’ve done in the public sector to take WordPress there. I love hearing stories like yours and our other members doing good work in our world. And I get to I think I’ve told you, I get to brag, Hey, I know the people working on these projects, you know, which is pretty fantastic, and taking WordPress to the Enterprise, but Public sector Spaces is really fantastic as WordPress grows. So okay, I want to I want to thank you for telling us kind of what Lone Lone Rock Point does today. So I heard in there 2016. So I, I had assumed, as we had talked for because of the kind of work you’re doing, you had been doing this particular agency type work for a long time.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:07:49) – But wow, that’s why I say congrats one, Congratulations on your success. But like it’s pretty fast timeline to be able to get to doing an agency to doing this kind of work, I think. But can you take me back like before 2016, you said you were doing enterprise or. Yeah, public sector government, government contracting work. What were you doing before the agency?
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:08:10) – Before. Before I founded my agency. Yeah. Yeah. So I was, I was a software developer, web application developer. I got hired by Raytheon to work on a contract they had with NASA Ames Research Center. And back in 2001, actually, the thing that the opportunity that kind of brought me into that world was that’s when they first started thinking about like, what do they have to do about website accessibility? So they brought me in there to kind of help, you know, help, you know, mature what they were doing around all that kind of stuff. And it’s been interesting to see what the what where was thinking about this over the last couple of weeks.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:08:57) – You know, when I first started working at NASA Ames and started talking about website accessibility and looking at all the various websites and web applications that was that were running at Ames Research Center, which is one of the, you know, field centers that’s part of the the NASA enterprise. Um, there was people were really just they were really resistant to it. They were trying to. They were trying to check the box on it quite a bit. You know, they were just like, What’s the minimum I have to do to, like, just check the box on this and so I can move on. Like it really the the optics of how important that was and just it just being the generally the right thing to do, forget the whole legal requirements of it all that really just wasn’t cemented. And here we are, you know, 20 plus years later where, you know, that’s that’s kind of like at the core of what is happening definitely in the public sector, but in the web in general, just like this, this strong emphasis on making it accessible and available to everybody.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:10:00) – You know, I saw how that started, you know, 20 years ago. And it’s it was not the same temperature, both from various from developers, designers, project managers, you know, that whole thing is shifted in very positive ways over the last couple of decades. So I was a software developer there working on various, um, you know, web applications, internal business process type applications, looking at accessibility improvements. Um, and then just kind of grew things over the years, you know, you know, started, you know, started rising the ranks a little bit, like getting opportunities to understand how government projects actually work, how it works, which is a pretty thing. I started participating in proposals that big companies like Dell were doing and responding to government RFPs, which are massive undertakings unto themselves, um, understanding compliance and security regulations that exist in government, in government, and really just kind of understanding how these governments, these government agencies and, you know, as individual as they kind of have their own ecosystems unto themselves, that’s probably not, you know, unique to all various massive, you know, corporate enterprises.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:11:29) – You know, we talk a little bit about the WordPress ecosystem now, but these these federal government agencies, they all have their own ecosystems around it. And then they’re also operating in this big federal thing where there’s kind of like this. Um, Jennifer Palka just wrote this great book called Recoding America, and she calls this term friendly fire. So where there’s like things where like the Office of Management, the OMB and General Services Administrations and other offices and agencies within the executive branch and other parts of government are putting together governance and policy around it and how the web should work. Um, and it creates all this types of, you know, these, this guidance and guardrails that you have to adhere to. So that becomes like kind of a larger ecosystem unto itself. So, you know, starting to understand how to work within that type of, um, you know, those types of scenarios and guardrails and boundaries and knowing how to interoperate it all just became, you know, something that started gaining more experience with and more exposure to with and, you know, think it’s been a big, you know, that knowledge is a big part of like why, you know, my company’s positioned and why we’ve achieved some success.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:12:44) – You know, working and and gaining some credibility in parts of the public sector and procuring our relationship with with WordPress VIP and, you know, expanding our own opportunities within itself. Yeah, it’s exciting. It’s challenging. Exhausting at times, but it’s also exciting and rewarding.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:13:04) – Yeah. Yeah. I can’t imagine. So just just for clarity. So you’re working full time at Raytheon or were you contract as a software?
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:13:12) – So a contract means you’re you’re you’re like you’re kind of embedded, so you’re a full time employee and you’re your government contractor working on a contract that, you know, a company like Raytheon or Dell or Booz Allen or Lockheed Martin has with the federal government to deliver services abilities that are part of their requirements.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:13:39) – Okay. Okay. That totally makes sense. So what was that catalytic moment when you’re like, Hey, I’m gonna do this for myself, I’m gonna start my agency?
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:13:46) – Yeah.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:13:47) – So prompted that. Um.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:13:50) – A couple of things. So I left NASA for a while and I went and worked for a company, a music ticketing startup called Ticket Fly.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:13:58) – I helped them, like, basically create a network of websites for small independent music venues, um, and help those music venues talk about, you know, what shows were coming, how to buy tickets, you know, when the on sale dates were and all the other, you know, all that content that is basically all about converting into ticket sales. And so I was with was, you know, with them when they were really small. And, you know, it was definitely the startup world and that was really exciting. It was also a bad time for my life. I just had like my my second child and like my work life balance was it was it was pretty bad. Um, you know, working at a small startup like that. So ended up going back to NASA. Um, you know, and just trying to, like, find my footing a little bit. I also wanted to leave California and move relocate back to the East Coast. And I knew that was, you know, being in a place, a large organization like that would offer some flexibility like that.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:15:05) – Um, but then, you know, I would say around a decade, you know, ten years ago. I started having this, you know, I started having that entrepreneurial itch again. I started thinking about, like, how fun it was to, you know, move fast at ticket fly and wanted that that feeling again. And so I started, you know, I explored a couple of like side hustles, you know, some small little independent web projects. One of them was like a newsletter to help families spend more time outdoors. And they didn’t really take off. They didn’t really get get some traction. And what I mean by that, it wasn’t necessarily traction from a, you know, where we’re making revenue or gaining customers. We were just like just the balance of of, you know, trying to do do that type of initiative while, you know, having a full time job and also like, you know, having a growing family and all that kind of stuff. And then in but was it was clear that.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:16:06) – You know, I was exploring something. And, you know, again, that desire to to like be in more, you know, control of of of my destiny, so to speak, and be entrepreneurial is something I just couldn’t I couldn’t get rid of completely. And it wasn’t happening within big companies like Dell in the way that I wanted to know. I really wanted to be, you know, in control of a lot of decisions that wasn’t in control of, um, and, you know, that’s why people start their own things and, you know, be founders of companies. And, you know, I had dinner with a friend of mine who was also in the government contracting space. He’s like, you know, you’ve been thinking about. And he told me he’s like, You’ve been thinking about all these little product ideas, these digital product ideas, like, you know, just just start a services business, you know, like and that will satisfy your need or the desire. You have to be entrepreneurial and, you know, like, you know, look at balance sheets and think about marketing and, you know, attracting talent and retaining talent and stuff like that.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:17:12) – And he was right. He was like, You know what? That’s a really good idea. And within 120 days, I’d like set the wheels in motion to, you know, start Lone Rock Point. Um, and, you know, we, we went from there. So it started in the fall of I started the company in the fall of 2016. It was just me for, you know, a year. And then it was like me and a virtual assistant for like another year. And I, you know, I started under this like this umbrella of like, digital transformation consulting. At the time, I was doing a lot of work with the public sector around cloud transformations. So people were were operating applications and on premise data centers and starting to make that migration into things like Amazon Web Services. And so working out a lot of change management type type projects associated with that. And it all kind of just fit under this like big umbrella of digital and cloud transformation, which, to be totally honest with you, is, is is too vague and too broad and borderline meaningless.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:18:25) – You know, if you ask ten different people what digital transformation is, you’re probably going to get ten different definitions of it. Yeah. And so it’s really hard to like, you know, grow a services business out that way is really just like me being a consultant at that point. Um, and it wasn’t until like started niching down into, you know what, like let’s just do this WordPress thing, you know, was I was delivering, um, you know, whitepapers and providing analysis of like how what people should do with like their, their inventory of web applications and advising them on what is and what platforms they should be using. And a lot of times ended up started like you know, making recommendations around WordPress oriented applications, sometimes just building WordPress sites, sometimes using WordPress as an application framework. Um, in over the, in the time I’ve been with NASA. I’ve used WordPress with them and a lot of different ways. We’ve done it in a WordPress network multi-site kind of way for allowing smaller NASA missions and programs and projects to, you know, have their own websites where they all communicate what they’re up to and what their findings are and share what they learned with, you know, with, with interested stakeholders and visitors to their sites.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:19:55) – Um, there, there’s been some internal things where needed to like communicate various services as it had to various corners of the agency. So we did like a WooCommerce thing where people can go to a web application, a website and just pick what, what services they want. Like I need, I need some Amazon cloud storage or processing or, you know, EC2 units. And they could apply, they could add all those things to a cart and then say, check out and, you know, check, you know, do a checkout with that and just start getting services provided to them that way. So um, and then, you know, over time it just became clear that like, this is, I keep recommending this, like there’s growth opportunity for me here and then, you know, niching down to being like, we’re going to be a WordPress, a more traditional WordPress agency is really when, you know, the growth started happening and the opportunity started becoming a little bit. And it isn’t just like strategic consulting, it became the execution part of it as well.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:21:00) – And the tactics part of it too, and the tactics and execution. We’re all oriented for the most of the time.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:21:06) – Yeah, I’d love to hear these stories because you got, you know, a big career in enterprise and public sector, you know, with your Raytheon and NASA days and then entrepreneurial hit. Okay, want to do this and then seeing you know when you say NASA and WordPress, it just seems like those things should always go together, you know, and that’s what really compelling to me is seeing WordPress more on the public sector enterprise. And now there’s really big institutions in in the US federal government anyway, probably around the world too, but that are starting to use WordPress more and more and leverage it and see that opportunity. Um, so I love kind of how those intersection of things happen. So that lone rock point would kind of exist and grow and then you hit your I was going to ask the question when the WordPress come into play, but you pretty much answered it. So like your 2 or 3 or so, it seems like, hey, we’re going to drill down.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:22:04) – And then when you mention WooCommerce that like that use case for an internal tool within a big organization like that to procure and get resources and things, that’s so compelling. You know, most of my.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:22:17) – Career that like, people just wanted that checkout expert, They wanted that. They wanted that experience of like, I want X, Y and Z, I want to add it to the cart and I want to tell you that I want it. And we just, you know, WooCommerce has that option to, you know, just do check payments, right? Which removes the credit card processing out of it. And so we kind of adapted that to, all right, we’re going to send this order to somebody who can fulfill that order via this WooCommerce WordPress system. Um, and, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s, you know, it’s using the WordPress ecosystem at its best, like using it almost kind of as Legos and want this part of it. I want that part of it. I want to, I want to glue them together in this way.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:22:58) – And it’s, you know, kind of a no code kind of way around WordPress to solve some, you know, some very simple, narrow use cases. But, you know, my, my journey with WordPress, you know, starts way back in 2007 at my first stint with at Ames Research Center. Um, you know, I was working with all these various scientists and researchers and they just like need a place to like publish my, my research findings and publish my data and, and they, they all one, they all had the same, um. You know, requirements and needs. At the highest level, it’s like I just need a place to put it. And I want to I want to be able to manage it myself in a way. And I don’t know. I don’t know how to don’t know how to code. I don’t know. I don’t have anybody on my team who knows HTML. And so that, you know, that basically introduced the concept of like content management systems into all this back in 2007.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:24:03) – And, you know, we were looking at things like wikis at the time and, and then discovered WordPress and around that and just the user experience of someone just, you know, managing their content with that type of, you know, WordPress, CMS, this is like version 2.0 of WordPress, you know, back when they added pages in addition to posts was the real thing. That’s like, oh, this is what this satisfies what everyone’s looking for. They want an easy place just to log into. And you know, they all some of them wanted to start blogging. Some of them wanted to start blogging without knowing that they wanted to start blogging. They just want to share what they know and tell their stories. Um, and then back in 2007, I created this is also the Web 2.0 era where, you know, your blogging was, was kind of heavy in the lexicon back then. And I was I did one of NASA’s first official public blogs on WordPress and, and kind of grew with WordPress, you know, from there that led to the ticket fly work.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:25:13) – And so WordPress was kind of always in my DNA, even when wasn’t, you know, it wasn’t like a defined part of what I was, you know, of my, my role description. But my role was in some cases to be strategic and provide advice and provide some roadmaps. And, you know, how do we do things? Give us some give us some guidance here. And a lot of times just said like, well, you don’t have to create a custom bespoke application for this. Just use a content management system like WordPress, you know, teach your users how to how to how to manage using WordPress themselves. And and you go from there. So and the WordPress ecosystem is what makes all that happen mean there’s all these different, you know, there’s all these different plugins and themes and you just kind of integrate it all together, um, you know, in a unique way. And you have a great solution architecture, depending on how you put it together.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:26:08) – What you’re talking kind of way back.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:26:11) – But you know, remember a lot of the solutions that we have now didn’t exist. So, you know, big organizations were having to do like the the internal resourcing that you’re talking about. They’d have to custom code those things or build them because they didn’t exist off the shelf. Then you fast forward and you go, you could take WooCommerce save. I can’t even imagine how much time to kind of do git to feature like, you know, par with that and then take that open source solution and then utilize it and just customize with a with a great agency like you all to figure out what their exact needs are. So it’s it’s great to see how everything has fast forward to. Well, we touched on this. I know we’re going to have more conversations down the road. And and I want to talk more about the public sector and enterprise. And I know we’re talking and we’re going to have some great conversations in the next couple of months about this, because I know you’re passionate about it, about the public sector and bringing WordPress to the public sector, but we’ll save that for another time.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:27:07) – I don’t want to spoil too much of that, but I appreciate so much the journey and what you’re doing. So thank you for telling us that. That’s, that’s that’s incredible. Um, okay. What are you excited about today? What are you excited about today and the future going forward and what you’re doing with the agency and your team and the work you’re doing?
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:27:27) – Yeah. So a few years ago, the government, Pervez passed a Congress passed an act called the Integrated Digital Experience Act. And within that act is basically it tells all these federal agencies how to modernize their website. So, you know. Obvious things like improve accessibility. They have to be accessible. They have to work on mobile. They. They. You have to have like good search. They should. People should be able to find content there. They also need to be based on user research and user needs. So they’re all logical things within. You know, public sector and it’s all so I’m really excited about that. Be something that initiates or triggers a lot of the work that I’ve been doing for the last couple of years.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:28:26) – And so for the last few years I’ve been working on a web modernization project with NASA. It exists for a couple of reasons. It exists. One, because of that idea act. It also exists because NASA has a couple of thousand websites and they don’t want there to be a couple of thousand websites. They want all that information in one website. So we’ve been doing a lot of work with them. You know, that started back in kind of mid 2000, late 2000, and it started with, hey, what should be using for its main, you know, web source, major web properties. And so I spent a year taking a look at the landscape of you know, of all the available CMS’s that are out there, you know, Drupal source site, Adobe Experience manager and then some new newer ones like Wagtail. And then there’s even we even took a look at, you know, some of the software as a service type solutions like Contentful and just trying to understand the pros and cons of Elda.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:29:38) – And so we spent a year taking a look at the CMS landscape and acquiring data for it, acquiring evidence of it. And while in my heart, you know, being a WordPress guy, I knew like, you know, WordPress makes a lot of sense here. You know, we it’s still there was a lot of benefit for me to kind of like take a look at like what, you know, all the driving factors for making a decision like that were, um, and you know at the end of it WordPress like was the, the solution, the CMS that NASA wanted to invest in for the future. And that’s what we’ve been working on for the last couple of years. So for the last couple of years we’ve been working on a couple of big. Uh, NASA WordPress projects. And a lot of, you know, I talked a lot about how I’ve been using WordPress and a no code kind of way. This is not a no code kind of way. There was a lot of Gutenberg custom development here.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:30:34) – It’s the, it’s, it’s the project that has everything like, you know, an emphasis on SEO, an emphasis on accessibility. There’s a new atomic design system that was created for this. And so the seeing the marriage of an atomic design system and Gutenberg, you know, come to bring all that stuff to life has been really, really exciting. And I’m excited to like for, for, you know, people, you know, interested in what NASA is up to and people interested in WordPress to see the fruits of all this labor that we’ve been working on for the last couple of years and it’s all coming in the next few months. And yeah, so I’m really excited to share that with you and share that with other people in the community.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:31:19) – Yeah, that’s excellent. So I want to take just a minute in sidebar because you did this whole year, you know, one of seeing what’s out there, seeing what the options are. And I love that you’ve done some deep, deep research for big organizations trying to make a big, important decision on it.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:31:36) – Um, I’m just curious what we’re couple takeaways. As you just surveyed the landscape. You know, we love WordPress. We understand, you know, we, we support WordPress, but, but we know that there’s a lot of stuff out there. Um, but I’m curious, what, what did the landscape look like? Where were some of the things you saw when you looked at the other platforms you mentioned like Wagtail? I hadn’t heard that one before. I’ve heard of Contentful for instance, and of course Drupal. But what, what were a couple of the takeaways on that year of investigation out there?
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:32:08) – So the I, I would say that there are two major, maybe three major differentiators that separated WordPress from the rest from the rest of the pack. If you will. Um, you know, there’s a lot of great content management systems out there. You know, they all do the same thing or try to do people the same. They try to make it easy for people to publish information onto the web and make it easy for others to consume it.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:32:35) – But the differentiators from WordPress versus the other CMS that we were looking at were number one. A lot of again, it had a lot of it had to do with the ecosystem. WordPress was the only CMS that had real time analysis tools around SEO. So and accessibility to kind of try to improve those situations before the point of publishing. So Yoast is the obvious example. So Yoast, you know, we’ve all been exposed to Yoast. Yoast allows you to allows the content creator user to be authoring and editing content and getting some real time analysis about how friendly or compatible, whatever the term you want to use it is before the point of publish. There’s accessibility tools out there that do the same things that are kind of integrated within the WordPress Admin WordPress dashboard that allow that content creator user to like, you know, when it’s in draft format to analyze. Do I have accessibly accessible content that I’m about to publish in here and make live other CMS didn’t have that baked in. You know, there’s WordPress plugins that do these things.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:33:51) – Um, we could even, we even have the ability to prevent publishing until certain excessively thresholds and SEO optimization thresholds are met. That was really, really attractive. All the most of the majority of the other solutions are you publish it first it’s live and then you can go back and check it and then you kind of have to retrofit it. I’ve been working in enterprises enough to know that that doesn’t happen once it’s published, Once it’s out there, people are generally going to move on. They’re not going to do the analysis of like, All right, how do I go back and improve this thing? So you really got to you really got to catch those things early and often. Um, you know, up front in the, in the content publishing lifecycle. So that was one of the big differentiators was that and that again, that’s all a product of the WordPress ecosystem and the innovation that comes out of that ecosystem. The other one was just kind of like the resources around this. So we all, you know, you can take for a grain of salt like, you know, the the whole thing about, you know, WordPress powers, 40% of the web, you know, that kind of stuff.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:34:57) – But there is some byproduct of that. And that is there’s a lot of people using it. There’s a lot of people building it. There’s a lot of people developing on it. There’s a lot of people extending on. There’s a lot of knowledge being shared around that. One of the things I did was I went in the stack overflow and compared WordPress with other CMS’s and just being like, How many conversations are happening around this thing, you know, that we’re looking at? And it was, you know, what you expected, the ability for, you know, to be able to. Try to solve a problem by getting by by, you know, interfacing or sponging up knowledge that was already contributed back in some way, you know, via via StackOverflow or, you know, other places on the Web, other groups, Slack channels, etcetera, that exists in WordPress in a way that it doesn’t exist in these other, you know, CMS products. You know, the if you want to if you want to get developer knowledge around Adobe Experience Manager, you for for the most part there are some Adobe experience manager specialists out there, but for the most part you got to go to Adobe for it.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:36:02) – Um. Uh, you know, same thing with sorts. There’s not there’s not a huge community of sort site developers out there. So for a place like NASA, you know, resource acquisition becomes a problem. Like, where are they going to find talent for that? Yeah. And you know, again, WordPress, you know, kind of is head and shoulders above the rest in that area. Um, and then, you know, this whole concept of WordPress is for everyone to like that. That rang true in all this research too. Like it’s more than just developer community. There’s user communities out there that are also sharing their knowledge here. Um, you know, there’s all these kinds of like, there’s, there’s solutions for learning WordPress that are provided by the communities and multiple companies with the community that add a lot of value within the equals. So it’s not just like the software ecosystem, but it’s like, you know, the kind of service ecosystem to that exist within WordPress. Um, and then honestly, like, you know, portability matters to, um, you know, there’s, for the most part, like I really just wanted public sector to adopt open source.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:37:11) – You know, that’s the first decision I want, I want them to do is just, just, you know, make an open source decision. And then you’ve done that. You know, you’re in a good you’re in a better place than picking a commercial, you know, bespoke solution. You know, And then, you know, once you get past that hurdle now, you know, the obvious open source can cannot exist. And you know, the user experience of WordPress and that whole concept of WordPress being for everyone and being considering everyone, depending on who you are, really rings true and is a differentiator as well.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:37:50) – Well, that’s excellent. And that rings true. You know, I’m curious because as I talked to more enterprise agencies, all of you out there in the world interfacing with clients, with their needs, what they actually are trying to get done. That’s really, really great to hear and it’s reflective of the community. I think sometimes they’ve been in the community like you as long as we have.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:38:10) – I take some of those things for granted. So I think that’s that’s excellent. Well, JJ, thanks so much for the time today. I know you just got back from a big trip and you’ve got work to pile out, but I appreciate you coming on the podcast and sharing your agency journey, and I look forward to our next conversation, sharing the good work you’re doing with WordPress in our world. That too.
\n\n\n\nJ.J. Toothman (00:38:31) – Corey Thanks for having me.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:38:34) – All right. Thanks, everybody, for being here today. And we’ll talk to you. We’ll see. We’ll talk to you. We’ll hear from you. They’ll listen to us soon.
\nThis article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Thu, 20 Jul 2023 18:47:02 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:11:\"Cory Miller\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:17;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:68:\"Post Status: WordPress 6.3 RC1 • Field Guide • Gutenberg Phase 3\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:32:\"https://poststatus.com/?p=149937\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:71:\"https://poststatus.com/wordpress-6-3-rc1-field-guide-gutenberg-phase-3/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:26527:\"WordPress 6.3 will arrive on August 8, so there isn’t much time left for testing compatibility. Whether you are a plugin or theme maintainer or managing clients’ websites, now is the time to test the latest features. Mike Schroder shares their most anticipated feature with auto-rollbacks coming.
Collaborative editing is coming to WordPress, but what might that look like? A much-needed refresh of the Admin dashboard will also arrive as we expand Gutenberg from posts and pages through themes and now to additional parts of WordPress. Rather than voicing your opinions after such large overhauls ship, now is the time to read through the Phase 3 ideas and provide insights.
![\"🚀\"](\"https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f680.png\")
WordPress 6.3 Release Candidate 1 Sneak a Peek at WP 6.3 with Mike Schroder![\"🧑🏽💻\"](\"https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f9d1-1f3fd-200d-1f4bb.png\")
Help Test WordPress 6.3
3⃣ Gutenberg Phase 3![\"📚\"](\"https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f4da.png\")
WordPress 6.3 Field Guide
>
>
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This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Thu, 20 Jul 2023 12:50:44 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:18:\"Courtney Robertson\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:18;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:77:\"Do The Woo Community: Woo AgencyChat Live with Judd Dunagan and Carlos Caneja\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:28:\"https://dothewoo.io/?p=75689\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:76:\"https://dothewoo.io/woo-agencychat-live-with-judd-dunagan-and-carlos-caneja/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:410:\"Judd from Bright Vessel and Carlos from Britecode have a conversation around WooCommerce agency life.
\n>> The post Woo AgencyChat Live with Judd Dunagan and Carlos Caneja appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community .
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Thu, 20 Jul 2023 09:56:47 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:5:\"BobWP\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:19;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:94:\"Do The Woo Community: WooCommerce Agency Growth and the Power of Subscriptions with Kenn Kelly\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:28:\"https://dothewoo.io/?p=75674\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:93:\"https://dothewoo.io/woocommerce-agency-growth-and-the-power-of-subscriptions-with-kenn-kelly/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:471:\"Kenn Kelly from Never Settle joins us as he shares his story of his agency, their passion for supporting a cause and so much Woo.
\n>> The post WooCommerce Agency Growth and the Power of Subscriptions with Kenn Kelly appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community .
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Thu, 20 Jul 2023 08:50:00 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:5:\"BobWP\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:20;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:66:\"WPTavern: #84 – Aaron Reimann on WordPress’ First Twenty Years\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:48:\"https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=147025\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:77:\"https://wptavern.com/podcast/84-aaron-reimann-on-wordpress-first-twenty-years\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:54997:\"Transcript[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case a history of WordPress’s important moments.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today we have Aaron Reimann. Aaron is a PHP developer who started working with WordPress in 2008. He’s currently running ClockworkWP, a design, development and hosting shop. He’s built sites for companies of all shapes and sizes ranging from small nonprofits to Fortune 100 companies.
\n\n\n\nHe’s been an organizer for WordCamp Atlanta and the Atlanta WordPress meetup, and he also speaks regularly at events throughout the WordPress community, including WordCamp Europe, 2023 which is where this podcast was recorded.
\n\n\n\nAaron gave a presentation at the event called ‘where did we come from?’ In that session, he spoke about something which we don’t often dwell upon, WordPress’ history. In the technology space we’re always looking towards the future. What new features are being worked on? What’s in the latest version of WordPress. So this is an opportunity to gaze back over the previous 20 years and see just how far WordPress has come.
\n\n\n\nWe do this by looking at some of the more important milestones in the WordPress landscape. Which features were added that allowed the CMS to become the success that it now is.
\n\n\n\nBack in the early days, WordPress’ success was anything but certain. There were a set of rival CMS platforms all vying for the attention of developers and website builders. Joomla and Drupal may be familiar names, but there were many others as well. All of these platforms, WordPress included, had their strengths and weaknesses. And at the time it seemed like any of them could become the dominant CMS.
\n\n\n\nWe discuss what might have been the key things which set WordPress apart, and made it the pick for many people who needed an online presence. The fact that WordPress was easy to install, and easy on the eye, were certainly important.
\n\n\n\nThen there’s the advent of the plugin architecture within WordPress. It’s fair to say that a vanilla version of WordPress will get you many of the features you need to get a website up and running. But if you want to do more then it’s likely that you’ll be relying on plugins. The fact that you could install and update from a growing range of plugins made WordPress indispensable. Able to create websites for almost any purpose.
\n\n\n\nThen there’s themes. It’s nice to have a functioning website, but it’s nicer still to have a functioning website which looks great. Themes enabled non-designers to make an impact online and made an entire industry for those who could turn their hand to theme creation.
\n\n\n\nAnother pivotal moment was when custom fields were added into core, you were no longer bound by simply adding content to your posts and, later, pages. You could now create complex websites in which all sorts of data could be manipulated and displayed. WordPress now had all the hallmarks of a fully fledged CMS.
\n\n\n\nThen there’s Gutenberg in WordPress’ more recent past. Aaron is not yet completely sold on Gutenberg, still preferring the page builder that he’s grown accustomed to. But no discussion of WordPress’ first 20 years would be complete without a mention of this important change.
\n\n\n\nThen there’s the community of people who made and continue to make the software. Without the people there would be no WordPress.
\n\n\n\nWe round off the discussion, talking about the fact that there appears to be a very high chance that WordPress will still be around in another 20 years. Will it still be the popular choice for website building? Who knows, but it’ll be fun to see what the future holds.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading over to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast. Where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Aaron Reimann.
\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Aaron Reimann.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:30] Aaron Reimann: Correct.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:30] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Very nice to have you with us. How you doing?
\n\n\n\n[00:05:33] Aaron Reimann: Well actually, I guess that just by default I want to say, yeah I’m doing great. I am doing great, but I am jet lagged. We landed from, came from Atlanta to Athens. Landed on Monday, and I’m, I think I’m just now getting back to normal, but I’m still just a little, little tired.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:46] Nathan Wrigley: Well, you’re very brave if you are suffering from jet lag. You’ve just had the bit of WordCamp Europe, which for you at least anyway, was going to be the most challenging.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:53] Aaron Reimann: Right.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:53] Nathan Wrigley: You had a presentation, workshop?
\n\n\n\n[00:05:56] Aaron Reimann: Presentation.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:56] Nathan Wrigley: Presentation, and it was all about, well, the subject that we’re going to talk about. Tell us how that went.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:01] Aaron Reimann: I think it went well. Of course, I’m biased and I was a little blinded by the lights while I was talking on stage. But I think it went well. Some people had some good questions at the end, and then some of the people that weren’t exactly willing to ask the questions in front of everyone, I had a few people ask questions afterwards and two of them you know, said this was great. I wanted to know the history of WordPress and I’m new. I thought that was really good.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s perfect. Great introduction. So we’re going to talk about the history of WordPress, but just before we do that, probably to give us a bit of orientation and information about you, just tell us a little bit about your background, your relationship with WordPress.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:36] Aaron Reimann: Okay. I’ve been a web developer since 1996, which I know dates me quite a bit. I started using WordPress in 2005, I think it was version 1.5.5 or something like that. And I only used it for a blog and I just kind of dumped my brain on the blog. Ran it for about three years, and it wasn’t until 2008, until I really started digging into WordPress. But in 2008 I quit my job. I was an IT guy, maintaining servers and computers and stuff like that and quit my job.
\n\n\n\nStarted an agency with a friend of mine. Didn’t know what I was doing. But I had to figure out what platform do I want to use, and we’ll probably get into that. But ever since 2008 I’ve been using WordPress, and I’ve been running an agency. I sold, my business partner sold our agency in 2019, and then started a new company. I used basically the same contracts and things like that. When I started my business in 2008, I didn’t know what I was doing. Doing the reset in 2019. I had a process and a and knew how to run an agency. So it was much easier the second go round.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:49] Nathan Wrigley: So anybody that’s been using WordPress from one point anything, you really have been there from pretty early on.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:56] Aaron Reimann: Pretty early on.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:56] Nathan Wrigley: And used it a lot with, presumably with different clients for different applications. So the purpose of this conversation is to talk around the history of WordPress. This is kind of perfect because we are right up against the 20th anniversary. Software has managed to keep going for 20 years, which is pretty amazing. Just that is pretty amazing.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:13] Aaron Reimann: I’m sure we could probably sit there and just list them. This project died. This one died. This one died. I mean it’s common.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:19] Nathan Wrigley: But for some reason WordPress kept going. I’m going to begin the podcast interview with whole history of CMSs around the time that you began. Because it wasn’t really clear that WordPress was going to take the spot that it did. I think it’s fair to say now, if you were describing this as a race, it would be fair to say that WordPress won the CMS race?
\n\n\n\n[00:08:42] Aaron Reimann: Absolutely.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:43] Nathan Wrigley: But back then, back in the early 20 somethings, there was quite a few rivals. There was a few projects that could easily have taken off. They had the same open source ethos in many cases, some of them not so. Some of them you had to pay for and so on. So I just wondered if you’ve got any stories to tell or information about projects that you’ve used with other CMSs, like Drupal or Joomla, or Expression Engine, whatever it may be.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:04] Aaron Reimann: Yeah. So in 2008, I actually started using CMS Made Simple, because I saw it as easier than WordPress and more featured than WordPress. But WordPress is one of those things where once you get the ball rolling WordPress became unstoppable because it had so many more people joining and adding to the community. Which means more plugins, more features, more everything.
\n\n\n\nAnd so I dropped CMS Made Simple after building about three websites I think. I wound up dropping that to use WordPress. And I also had a business partner that wasn’t technical at all, and he really liked the fact that he could, I don’t know if it was cPanel or some kind of hosting platform. Gave him a one button push to install WordPress, and so he could start working on a website and he didn’t have to do anything technical. And I think that probably has had a big effect on WordPress because it just became so easy to install.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I genuinely thought that at the time, at least I was using different platforms. I came to WordPress in probably about 2015. So a long time after you and I played with all these other ones. And in many cases I felt that the features that they offered were superior. But the one thing that separated them from WordPress, the one thing that I should probably say, the one thing that separated WordPress from them, was the UI.
\n\n\n\nI felt that the UI was much more straightforward to use. It was actually quite beautiful. It hasn’t changed much in those years. It was just easier on the eye. It was much more straightforward. Dare I say it, there were less options, which might be a good thing or a bad thing.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:43] Aaron Reimann: I would agree with you. I think things like anytime I had to work on Joomla, I think it was around 2008 or so, Mambo I don’t know what the argument was, but all the developers dropped and started Joomla and Joomla became the thing, and Mambo died. Or Mamba, I don’t remember how to pronounce it.
\n\n\n\nBut any time I had to log into a Joomla site, it was a mess. I looked at it and I didn’t know exactly where to go. WordPress, even with version as I demonstrated today in my talk, version 7, 0.7.1, it was really simple. You log in there, there actually wasn’t even a dashboard at the beginning. You just log in and boom, you are right in the editor to create a post.
\n\n\n\nPeople don’t have to sit there and think, how do I use this? It’s one of those things where like my mom could write a blog post. It was that simple. Whereas Joomla or Drupal, there’s a few more layers before you get into what you’re trying to get into.
\n\n\n\n[00:11:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s interesting. A lot of the rival platforms, they decided for more complexity. So they could, in effect, they could probably out of the box achieve more complicated things. But it turns out that plugins, as well probably come onto a bit later, plugins kind of stepped in and fixed that problem for us anyway.
\n\n\n\n[00:11:55] Aaron Reimann: Absolutely.
\n\n\n\n[00:11:56] Nathan Wrigley: So WordPress is 20 years old. The next thing that we’ve written down on our shared show notes is the milestones, if you like, during those past 20 years. There are certain things which happened in that past 20 years, which are probably more significant. I mean, there’s probably literally thousands of things that we could talk about, little tiny things. Some of them are much bigger bumps in the road. Things that really changed WordPress.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:15] Aaron Reimann: There’s probably a ton of them too, that I am not even aware of. Even though I’ve been in the community for so long. I’m focused on my use case of WordPress where I build marketing sites basically. I mean we write some plugins and do that, but mostly we focus on marketing sites. And I’m sure there’s a ton of things that I’m not even aware of that has happened that it doesn’t affect me, so I didn’t pay attention to it.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, but there certainly have been some big bumps. We’ve listed out a few here that between us, I think we think are significant. The first one, now we may not get this in the right order, it may be very well that some of these came prior to other ones.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:52] Aaron Reimann: It’s fresh in my head, so I probably will get it right. I think.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:55] Nathan Wrigley: You lead off then.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:56] Aaron Reimann: Well, if I remember correctly, going from 0.7.1 to 1.0, the only thing that really was added. They cleaned it up a little bit. It had less references to b2. If you look at the first version, all the files started with b2.
\n\n\n\n[00:13:11] Nathan Wrigley: We should say what b2 is.
\n\n\n\n[00:13:13] Aaron Reimann: That, might be helpful. So WordPress is a fork of b2/cafelog. I think I’m saying that correctly.
\n\n\n\n[00:13:21] Nathan Wrigley: That’s correct, yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:13:23] Aaron Reimann: Okay, and so everything was prefixed with b2, in the first version of WordPress and 1.0, there’s only three files that were prefixed with b2, and they were, I think XML-RPC files, or XML feeds or something like that.
\n\n\n\nBut everything got a lot cleaner. And so with 1.0 is where it, to me it looks more like WordPress. And then with 1.2 is when we got the plugin framework. And then in 1.5 is when we got themes. And those to me, I think we could probably talk the rest of the show about those two things. Probably shouldn’t, but we could.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:01] Nathan Wrigley: I think themes and plugins, plugins in particular, I think are where, for me at least, a lot of the magic has lay. A lot of the success is down to third party developers and the plugin architecture of WordPress. WordPress’s mission to democratize publishing is laudable, and it would be lovely, but a bare bones version of WordPress, a vanilla version of WordPress will only get you so far if you want something complicated. So the ability to open up WordPress to plugin developers was pretty seismic, I think.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:30] Aaron Reimann: Yeah, I agree. With plugins also comes with bloat, which is the thing that I run into, and I mentioned it on my talk. Someone asked me a plugin question and I said the worst site I ever worked on, I logged in once and I said, I’m not going to work on this site because there were 104 active plugins, active. There were some inactive ones there. I said I’m afraid to edit anything. So plugins are a blessing. And if you don’t know enough about what that can do to your site, it becomes a curse.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I’ve had similar experiences where, there’s just simply too much on there. And for WordPress’s promise to make it possible for almost anybody to create a website, maintain a website, update a website, that can be difficult. Because there is no indication anywhere that if you’re adding more plugins, you’re adding more bloat. You’re adding more time for pages to load because there’s things going on in the background.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:24] Aaron Reimann: It’s creating more tables in the database, and that is one of the things that you’ll see. People will have a live website and they’ll try a bunch of plugins and they’ll try five or six plugins, and it’s leaving these little imprints mostly, maybe in the files, but mostly in the database.
\n\n\n\nIt creates tables, but there’s no cleanup. That’s a problem. And then when, five years later when you’re trying to migrate the site, you see all these tables and you’re like, why are these tables, do they, are they in use? Can I delete ’em? Stuff like that. It’s just, it just comes with lack of knowledge.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:57] Nathan Wrigley: I guess, if you had to have a seesaw of whether plugins were a good thing or a bad thing. I think for me, definitely it’s heavily weighted on the side of they’re a good thing. You’re right, they can be overused and what have you may be put in functionality that really you don’t actually need just because you want to play with it.
\n\n\n\nBut the ability to turn a pretty basic blogging platform as it was, into something which could do literally anything that the internet allows is pretty compelling. And that, for me, the plugin and theme, more plugin in my mind.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:30] Aaron Reimann: Yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:30] Nathan Wrigley: But the plugin and theme architecture is one of the key pieces for its popularity and success.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:36] Aaron Reimann: Yeah. I think that theming though is super important. As much as I don’t like some of the theming shops that are out there. I’m not naming names or anything like that. But a lot of those themes that people would purchase, they were bloated. They would come in with five custom post types that they don’t need, but people would see my website can look this pretty. I like what that screenshot of that theme looks like and people would buy it. It’s eye candy, and I don’t know if Drupal and Joomla, they don’t have anything like that.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:09] Nathan Wrigley: Certainly not on the same scale. There are theming engines in there, but no. And it became very commercial, didn’t it as well. You were able to purchase themes for really quite extraordinarily cheap prices.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:21] Aaron Reimann: Right.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:21] Nathan Wrigley: And again, sometimes I think a blessing and a curse because I tried all of these things, guilty as charged. Tried downloading themes, and then realized that I had to take out more than I, I’d see something and think, oh, that’s exactly what I want. I would download the theme, use the theme, and then figure out. It was more work to remove the bits that I didn’t need, but it still worked. And for me, it drew me into the WordPress ecosystem.
\n\n\n\nThen I learned that’s not for me. I’d like something more bare bones. So that’s the way I went, but it got me into it, which was the important part. So, yeah, themes as well then. Okay, what else? After themes and plugins, what else have we got?
\n\n\n\n[00:17:56] Aaron Reimann: Themes and plugins. And then I think it was in 2.9, the functionality was in 2.9, but it wasn’t documented and it came out in 3.0, were the custom post types. And the custom post types were a game changer for me because before, let’s take press releases. A client wants to have their press releases separate from their blog. The only way you could do that before was to create a category in your blog and make it not show up with the blog, but show up over here. And you feel like you’re just trying to hack something together, to make it fit.
\n\n\n\nAnd then when custom post types came out, it was amazing to me because it allowed us where, yeah, we can do that. You know, a client say I need to have this type of content show. Like, we can do that. It wasn’t trying to rig something that was impossible anymore.
\n\n\n\nAnd we use custom post types almost every site that we build. It’s just a, it’s a no-brainer. They say we need a way to do X and we’re like, okay, custom post type. We use that more than anything else probably.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:02] Nathan Wrigley: It’s interesting because we were talking earlier about things like Joomla and Drupal. I can’t speak to Joomla because I didn’t really use it, but Drupal even inversions significantly before the era that we’re now talking about, that kind of functionality was built into the core of the platform.
\n\n\n\nAnd because I was a user of Drupal when I came to WordPress, and it wasn’t immediately obvious in any part of the UI how to create a custom post type, and I know that you can do that. I had to figure out how to do it. In many cases, I think people will install some plugin, which takes care of that, but you can obviously do that in different ways.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:33] Aaron Reimann: Like, three different ways to do it.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:35] Nathan Wrigley: I do remember scratching my head thinking, where’s the button? Where’s the button for the, whatever it’s called. And it turns out it was custom post type. But then figuring out, okay, you can do this and you can create metadata around those and you can separate your website up. Like you said, this is the portfolio aspect of the website. And these are the, these are the other bits of the website.
\n\n\n\nYeah, that’s really important. And it essentially, it turned it from a blogging platform into more of a, well, a fully featured CMS. In fact, I’d say you can’t really talk about it being a CMS until custom post types.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:03] Aaron Reimann: I say that made it a platform. It’s a platform. Where In 2006 and 2007, I was learning Ruby on Rails. And I realized every time I was creating something in Ruby on Rails, I needed to create, I had to figure out a way for people to log in. So that’s a module basically, that you’d have to install, and all these little pieces. And then I looked at WordPress and I’m like, oh, WordPress has all these things. And so to me, WordPress became in 3.0, just became a platform where if you’re smart enough, if you know how to develop plugins, you can make it do anything you want it to do. Which is awesome.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:40] Nathan Wrigley: Anybody who’s been using WordPress for a small amount, well not even a small amount of time, a fairly long amount of time. But certainly when you began using it, this feature didn’t exist. And it strikes me as so bizarre that you couldn’t create pages at at the beginning.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:54] Aaron Reimann: Oh, right, right.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:56] Nathan Wrigley: I mean, it was a blog roll, it was a blogging platform, so everything was a post.
\n\n\n\nBut tell us about that, because that also is a fairly significant thing. You could create pieces of static content, which are not in some sort of hierarchy with other pieces of content, and that, again, crucial, important step.
\n\n\n\n[00:21:09] Aaron Reimann: Yeah, and to be honest, I’m kind of going in the back of my head. I probably, maybe 15% of the websites that we build use the blog. That’s probably a high number for us. Most of our clients don’t want a blog. They don’t see the value. And sometimes I think, you probably should have a blog, and try to push them. It’s a way to create content. If it’s a marketing site and their goal is for someone to push the button, fill out this form, and that’s the call to action. You don’t need a blog, but what would you do without pages?
\n\n\n\nSo, that really, that kind of predates me. I always had pages with 1.5. I used it, All I had for my blog was I had one page that was a contact page. I mean, that’s it. But I needed that. I couldn’t have a blog post about my contact information because it’ll get lost in the shuffle.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:01] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of interesting that, well, I’ve read a post recently, I can’t remember where, if I can summon up where it was, I will add it into the show notes. But I read a piece recently, which describes what you’ve just been talking about, this 15% or less. The person writing the post essentially said, can we make it so that the blog, the posts are an option? So it’s toggleable. So you download WordPress and you enable or disable all of the blogging functionality. So the posts menu disappears, and actually would clean up a lot of the interface.
\n\n\n\nAnd in the sites that you are describing, building where it’s page, page, page, page, custom post type, whatever. That might be quite a neat feature, but it’s curious that it is totally the opposite of how the thing began. It began that way, and yet it has morphed. My use is the same as your use. It’s all about the pages. And quite often clients will say, I will create a blog, and you know, it never gets beyond the first post.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:55] Aaron Reimann: They’ll write one or two and then it just, it disappears. I try to always try to tell them, if you’re going to start this, you can’t stop. It just makes you look bad when you, your most recent blog post was five years ago. At least go in and change the date, do something. It is interesting that we don’t have much of a use case for blogs and I don’t think I host a single web, I also do hosting. I host probably about 300 websites and I don’t think any of them are just a blog. All of them are WordPress installs that’s page focussed, that maybe, maybe has a blog. So it is interesting how it completely shifted and that’s probably true for the majority.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think so. That seems to fit. I’m not suggesting that we get rid of that functionality. It’s crucial, but it’s kind of interesting. Just that blog post, it was interesting to me that you could switch that off. And they also showed what the UI might look like when all of the different things that are attached to WordPress’ post functionality. If you remove those from the UI, it does become a little bit easier for a novice who’s got no intention of using a blog to manage.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:00] Aaron Reimann: I remember when I was first trying to theme, I was trying to figure out what are the differences between pages and posts. I just couldn’t figure it out for a little, I kept getting confused. Should this be a post or should this be a page? Then I just realized, okay, so posts are chronological, it’s date based, and pages are not. And I’m like, okay, that makes sense. Have you’ve looked at the hierarchy graphic?
\n\n\n\n[00:24:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:24] Aaron Reimann: If you’re listening to this and you don’t, you’re not familiar with that and you make themes, you’re missing a big golden nugget of information because the hierarchy page, it’s awesome. It’s really cool and it’s gotten more complex as things progressed.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:38] Nathan Wrigley: So we have pages, we’ve done custom post types. We’ve done the beginning of the platform, with its rivals there. One other thing which we haven’t touched on, which I think we should is Gutenberg. That’s been a very, very big push for WordPress over the last three or four years?
\n\n\n\n[00:24:53] Aaron Reimann: Five.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:53] Nathan Wrigley: Five.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:54] Aaron Reimann: It’s been five years. It was released, sound like a know-it-all. It’s just, I only know this stuff because I just did a, did a talk about it. 2018, 5.0, is when it came out. It seems like it would’ve been just a couple years ago.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:07] Nathan Wrigley: Right, it really does.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:08] Aaron Reimann: We’re coming up on, I think five years of Gutenberg.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:11] Nathan Wrigley: It was a radical change. It really did upend the way that you create content. For some people it’s highly desirable. It allows them to do all sorts of things that they were not able to do. And it puts the, if you like, page building type functionality in front of people without the need to download any kind of plugin.
\n\n\n\nBut from the shared show notes that we’ve got, it’s one of the things in the last 20 years roadmap, which you are not entirely sold on.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:38] Aaron Reimann: Not yet. So I’ve got a project, we’re going to be starting in the fall where I’m going to be using Gutenberg. The reason why we’re going to be using Gutenberg for pages and posts is I’m going to need this website to last me 10 or 15 years with content. Most websites that we build, it’s a marketing site. It’s going to get rebuilt, redesigned or whatever in three or four years, where if the page builder goes kaputs, you know, and disappears, no big deal, we’ll just, when we rebuild the site, we’ll just pick a better page builder.
\n\n\n\nIn this case, this is going to be, this is for a state project and it’s going to be, the content needs to last 10 years or so. And to me, at that point, that’s where, okay, I’ve gotta use Gutenberg because I know Gutenberg, because that was the chosen way to do it. I’m going to stick with that, and that’s going to be good for my client for this specific case.
\n\n\n\nIn the day-to-day stuff, simple marketing websites, it would be hard for me to go to a client and say, here’s Gutenberg and you can edit the pages using this. It’s a lot more overwhelming than, I’m a big Beaver Builder fan. And every client that we hand over the site, we give them these little videos. Here’s how you edit this. We record it and give it to ’em. So they’re able to see how to do it. They’ve got a video on how to do it, and it’s, to me, just Beaver Builder is, it’s so easy.
\n\n\n\nAnd so that’s why I’ve, still haven’t jumped, you know, on that bandwagon yet. I know I’m going to have to you know, at some point. So, it’s a hard shift for me.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I can well understand when it’s shipped in version five, the UI looks broadly the same as it does today, but the things that you could do with it then.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:22] Aaron Reimann: A lot more.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:24] Nathan Wrigley: Well, you can really do a lot more now, but it also felt that it was extremely limiting at the time it was released. I wonder if we could rewind history and replay that moment in time, I do wonder if perhaps more features should have been added so that the experience was much more obvious.
\n\n\n\nIn other words, maybe it should have been an opt-in thing for a period of time, rather than, here’s Word Press 5.0, it’s now the default, and I wonder what your thoughts are on that. That it should be some kind of toggleable on, off thing?
\n\n\n\n[00:27:53] Aaron Reimann: I have no problem with, I like diversity when it comes, just options with things. I love the fact that the Elementor people that are here. Obviously that’s a plugin that’s very, very popular, but no one’s forced to use it. You know, you can use whichever one you want and, knock on wood, right, and hope that that will continue. Where WordPress doesn’t get so Gutenberg focussed where Beaver Builder and Elementor and Divi and all those, can’t work on WordPress. At that point then there’ll probably be some forking of some projects, which would be kind of interesting.
\n\n\n\nBut I think it probably came out a little too early, in the aspect of it was the chosen choice, but I don’t think people had much of a choice. I mean it seems like it was decided, and you kind of had to start using it. And then you have the Classic Editor plugin becomes extremely popular. All of a sudden there’s what, 6 million? I don’t know, it seemed like it was five or 6 million active installs for that, because that was a big, we’re not interested in Gutenberg. We tried it. We didn’t like it.
\n\n\n\nIt’s different now. If it were released today, you know, where it has a lot more features, we wouldn’t have had so much of a, should I use the word backlash? I mean it, I don’t know if it was a backlash. I know in my WordPress community in Atlanta, Georgia, nobody embraced it. It was too abrupt.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:20] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s fair to say that in the time that I’ve been a user of WordPress, the stories that got generated, the amount of time that was given over to talking about it. It’s like nothing else. It was really, kind of bifurcated the community. There were those that loved it, and there were those that didn’t like it. And I think you’re right, it’s definitely matured and it’s got to the point now where I think a lot of people have just, they’ve gotten on with it and they’re using it.
\n\n\n\nBut interestingly, like you, you’re still able to use the tools that you liked and trusted prior to that as well anyway.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:49] Aaron Reimann: Right. And I tell people, when you’re editing a page, you’re going to be using Beaver Builder, and when you are blogging, you’ll be using this new thing called Gutenberg. And they’re okay with that, because they’re not trying to, it’s a post, right? So I mean, it’s going to have text and pictures and not much else.
\n\n\n\nWe’re not trying to build functionality like a slider or anything crazy in there. I don’t even know, is that even in, I hope that’s not in Gutenberg. I think using it just for a blog, you’re not going to push the limits of Gutenberg. Like I’ve said, I’m going to have to start doing it, because I know it is the future.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:27] Nathan Wrigley: So far we’ve talked entirely really about WordPress as a piece of software, but yet here we are at WordCamp in Europe, Athens in particular. You’ve just presented in front of a bunch of people, so you probably have a much greater idea of the magnitude of this event. If you just walk downstairs, I know this is going to be hard to get across in the audio, but it really is a giant event. It’s truly enormous.
\n\n\n\nSo I wanted to get into the community side of things, and whether or not, when you think the word WordPress, do you generally think of just software, the piece of software that you download from the internet? Or do you also have the community of WordPress in your head when you are thinking about that over the last 20 years?
\n\n\n\n[00:31:03] Aaron Reimann: I started using WordPress in 2008 and I went to my first WordCamp, I don’t know if it was 2012 or 13. I think it was 12, in Nashville. And that is where I just fell in love with the community, because nowhere else in the world have I been able to just ask people, the people are just so willing to help.
\n\n\n\nSo if you’re a newbie or you need someone, you’re trying to figure out how do you fix this plugin, or add this functionality and you’re at a WordCamp. People are, they’ll jump in and just start, oh, maybe you should do this. I mean people are extremely helpful. That’s where I started falling in love with WordPress as far as the community.
\n\n\n\nAnd since then I’ve spoken at 20 plus WordCamps. Mostly in the southeast, US. It’s something that I don’t think is replicated anywhere else. For a little while I was in the Rails, Ruby on Rails world. They don’t have a community like that. The PHP community in Atlanta at least is it’s good, but it’s still not, and in Atlanta pre covid, we had 14 active meetups in the Atlanta area. It was extremely popular, and our WordCamp that we used to have every year, we would have 650 people there. And the only reason why it was 650, limited at 650 is because the venue that we used, that’s all we could do.
\n\n\n\nThe community, at least in Atlanta, it’s been incredible. I’ve made friends there. Now we’re planning WordCamp Atlanta, and, you know, every Friday we’re on a call. Talking to these people that have become my friends over the past 10 years, which is really cool.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:45] Nathan Wrigley: I can’t disassociate the piece of software from the community now. In my head when I say WordPress, those two things are inextricably linked. And I think the fact that WordPress is able to be used by a whole different swathe of people. So you’ve obviously got the really technical people who enjoy the code, there’s all of that.
\n\n\n\nAnd then there’s the people who are into their SEO and marketing, and who knows what. There’s a million different pathways. And the fact that they can all combine in an event like this. The talks are not limited to one subject. There really is a broad spectrum of things on offer.
\n\n\n\nI think it is pretty special. I don’t know, I don’t quite know what the secret sauce was there that made that happen. But it did happen, and it is pretty unique. I think you hit the nail on the head. I’ve yet to encounter another community that’s loosely based around software that is quite as welcoming. It’s amazing.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:32] Aaron Reimann: Where these people become your friends, that’s weird. And this being at WordCamp Europe, I haven’t seen people since 2019, and I’m running into people and it’s great. I’m remembering people’s names, you know, which sometimes I don’t do great at, but it’s awesome. And it sounds kind of cheesy, but you have friends and brothers and sisters, you know, it’s a really cool thing.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:56] Nathan Wrigley: If you’re listening to this podcast episode and you never have attended any kind of WordPress event, I would say give one a try. It is definitely worth it. And if the first one doesn’t hit your expectations, give a few more a try, and see what happens. Because I can absolutely identify with what you’ve said. It’s embedded in my life. Lots of long-term friendships. And with people that I definitely, definitely would never have met. And who now I consider to be my good friends.
\n\n\n\nSo over the last 20 years, WordPress, if you look at the graph, so on the one hand we’ve got the years running, and then on the other we’ve got the usage data. The line just keeps going up. 2011 is higher than 2010. 2013 is higher than 2012. We keep talking about this figure of roughly 40 something, 43, 42, it hovers around there, percent of the web. So it’s seemingly experienced more or less unstoppable growth.
\n\n\n\nWhat do we think about the next 20 years? Do you think there’s a plateau at which one platform like WordPress can reach, and then we just have to meter our expectations and say, well, that’s as far as one can expect it to go? Or are we after, I don’t know, 86%, double?
\n\n\n\n[00:35:02] Aaron Reimann: Has it not plateaued? I feel like it has plateaued, and I can’t tell you why. I don’t know why it’s plateaued. I can just give you general ideas. There’s still some people that will never use WordPress. They’ll say, oh, I see it in the news. It’s hacked all the time. And it’s like, it’s not hacked. It’s WordPress core is secure. It’s hosting issues, not updating things, or a plugin that’s not updated.
\n\n\n\nBut there’s always going to be, you’re going to get the stigma from certain groups of people, that are never going to want to use that. And then there’s people that are going to want to use different, they don’t want to use PHP. If they’re going to build, they’re not going to until WordPress is no longer PHP based, you know. I think it’s not going to be able to surpass that, because of the fact that there are other technologies out there that aren’t compatible with that stack.
\n\n\n\n[00:35:55] Nathan Wrigley: I guess it’s impossible for something to keep growing exponentially, because at some point there’s just a natural limit. There’s other people who will be interested in other things. It’s amazing that it got, even if it did stay where it is or possibly decline, it’s pretty remarkable that it got where it did in 20 years. So I think we can all be content with where it is right now anyway.
\n\n\n\n[00:36:14] Aaron Reimann: Yeah, well I ended my talk telling people that chances are, even if WordPress were to stop today, I don’t know what would, cause, you know, where everyone’s like, we don’t want to build on WordPress anymore. I probably will still retire fixing WordPress sites because there are so many millions of sites that are out there that are going to linger for years on end.
\n\n\n\nI’ll be able to make a little money off of maintaining WordPress sites 20 years from now. Which is pretty cool. And I think about like Cold Fusion. I know Cold Fusion, I think they got an update a couple years ago or maybe a year ago or something like that.
\n\n\n\nThere’s still Cole Fusion sites, which Cold Fusion to me died in 2007 or, or something like that. But it’s still lingering. And I think if WordPress stopped today, we’d have a very similar thing. Where I could still make a living off of WordPress. Which is a cool feeling, I guess.
\n\n\n\n[00:37:05] Nathan Wrigley: The rise of WordPress, if you drill down into the statistics, you just look over the last, let’s say eight years. It’s risen remarkably quickly. It’s got faster and faster towards this 43 or whatever it may be, percent. It feels like if you drill down into the data that page builders were a big part of that. And I do wonder, we were talking a moment ago about Gutenberg, and I wonder if in the future, I wonder what that dynamic will do? If the page builders all get consumed or Gutenberg eats their launch.
\n\n\n\nI don’t know what’s going to happen there, but I thought that was a curious thing to tease out of this. That the growth that we’ve had recently, probably in large part can be attributed to page builders, and the ability to create pages, and all of that relatively easily inside the UI. I don’t really have any thoughts on how that will carry on?
\n\n\n\n[00:37:53] Aaron Reimann: I would definitely agree with you. I kind of went down the path of, I first used Visual Composer, probably like 2015 or so. I was like, that’s a cool idea. It seemed buggy to me, but once I tried Beaver Builder, I was sold. And I think once people realize, for example, a couple weeks ago I built a website for my brother. And he just needed something pretty simple, but I showed him using a page builder. I said, I built the header and footer, and I said, here’s how you put content in. And he built the other pages. He did, change it, upload the images and stuff like that. He knows nothing about computers.
\n\n\n\nSo the page builders have definitely made it where you don’t need a developer. I mean, obviously for something more complex, if you need some kind of functionality to talk to some third party API, yeah you’re going to need a developer. But I mean, if all you’re trying to do is display content, the page builders have just made it so easy. Beyond easy.
\n\n\n\n[00:38:52] Nathan Wrigley: I do wonder in the future, it seems like every podcast that I record at the minute ends up at this question, what AI will do to WordPress. And I know that we didn’t discuss this in our show notes, but it’s interesting, Page builders made it fairly straightforward for non-technical people to, what you see is what you get. And it truly did that. It literally almost pixel for pixel. It was exactly what you were looking at before you click publish.
\n\n\n\nAnd I wonder what’s going to happen to WordPress with AI, and whether or not the job in the future will be entirely different for people like you. Whether it will be more talking to an interface and telling it, no move left. Make that red. Get me a picture of a cat over there.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:33] Aaron Reimann: I don’t know man. I watched Terminator 2, when I was 15 and I’m not interested. And I think people are going to be using it to write their term papers and, you know, all that. It’s interesting, I think, I don’t know, have me back in five years. We’ll figure out was this a good thing or a bad thing? I’m not using, ChatGPT much. I’ve tinkered with it, but I can’t, I haven’t put it into my, day-to-day yet.
\n\n\n\nI’m talking to a developer friend of mine. He is, at his company, they’re making them learn how to use it because it’s going to, not replace them, but it’s going to make them more powerful and make them quicker and be able to build things faster. And I think that’s where we get to look forward to. You know, until the robots take over. We’ll see.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. We’ll have you back in five years and we’ll see. We’ve really gone around the whole subject, but I was wondering over the last 20 years, if you had any wishlist things that you wish had gone into WordPress. If you could rewind and say, wouldn’t it have been good to put that in, to slot that in, in year five or seven. Honestly you can make anything you like up here. Really interesting just to get your insight.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:41] Aaron Reimann: Yeah. I don’t, because of the fact that I’ve always been a, I shouldn’t say always because I don’t write code anymore, but I, you know, I had 15 years of writing code and I now have people that write code for me at my company. And anything that WordPress couldn’t do, we just built it. So I needed WordPress to be stable and be a core where it gives us a login. Something that gives us pages and posts, just the real basics and everything else we can build, which is pretty awesome. I love it.
\n\n\n\n[00:41:13] Nathan Wrigley: That’s a perfect place to end it, I think. Aaron, If there’s a URL you want to drop or a Twitter handle or someplace that people can get in touch with you to talk about this, what would we do?
\n\n\n\n[00:41:22] Aaron Reimann: My company is clockworkwp.com, and then my Twitter handle is @reimann, so A R E I M A N N.
\n\n\n\n[00:41:32] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much for talking to us on the podcast today. I really appreciate it.
\n\n\n\n[00:41:35] Aaron Reimann: All right. Thank you.
\nOn the podcast today we have Aaron Reimann.
\n\n\n\nAaron is a PHP developer who started working with WordPress in 2008. He is currently running ClockworkWP, a design, development and hosting shop. He’s built sites for companies of all shapes and sizes, ranging from small nonprofits to Fortune 100 companies. He’s been an organiser for WordCamp Atlanta and the Atlanta WordPress Meetup. He also speaks regularly at events throughout the WordPress community, including WordCamp Europe 2023 where this podcast was recorded.
\n\n\n\nAaron gave a presentation at the event called ‘Where did we come from?’ In that session he spoke about something which we don’t often dwell upon, WordPress’ history. In the technology space we’re always looking towards the future. What new features are being worked on? What’s in the latest version of WordPress? So this is an opportunity to gaze back over the previous twenty years and see just how far WordPress has come.
\n\n\n\nWe do this by looking at some of the more important milestones in the WordPress landscape. Which features were added that allowed the CMS to become the success that it now is.
\n\n\n\nBack in the early days WordPress’ success was anything but certain. There were a set of rival CMS platforms all vying for the attention of developers and website builders. Joomla and Drupal may be familiar names, but there were many others as well. All of these platforms, WordPress included, had their strengths and weaknesses, and at that time it seemed like any of them could become the dominant CMS.
\n\n\n\nWe discuss what might have been the key things which set WordPress apart, and made it the pick for many people who needed an online presence. The fact that WordPress was easy to install, and easy on the eye were certainly important.
\n\n\n\nThen there’s the advent of the plugin architecture within WordPress. It’s fair to say that a vanilla version of WordPress will get you many of the features you need to get a website up and running, but if you want to do more, then it’s likely that you’ll be relying on plugins. The fact that you could install and update from a growing range of plugins made WordPress indispensable; able to create websites for almost any purpose.
\n\n\n\nThen there’s themes. It’s nice to have a functioning website, but it’s nicer still to have a functioning website which looks great. Themes enabled non-designers to make an impact online, and made an entire industry for those who could turn their hand to theme creation.
\n\n\n\nAnother pivotal moment was when custom fields were added into Core. You were no longer bound by simply adding content to your posts and, later, pages. You could now create complex websites in which all sorts of data could be manipulated and displayed. WordPress now had all the hallmarks of a fully fledged CMS.
\n\n\n\nThen there’s Gutenberg in WordPress’ more recent past. Aaron is not yet completely sold on Gutenberg, still preferring the page builder that he’s grown accustomed to, but no discussion of WordPress’ first twenty years would be complete without a mention of this important change.
\n\n\n\nThen there’s the community of people who made, and continue to make, the software. Without the people, there would be no WordPress.
\n\n\n\nWe round off the discussion talking about the fact that there appears to be a very high chance that WordPress will still be around in another twenty years. Will it still be the popular choice for website building? Who knows, but it’ll be fun to see what the future holds.
\n\n\n\nAaron’s talk at WordCamp Europe 2023
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCustom Post Type WordPress release 3.0
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Wed, 19 Jul 2023 14:00:00 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:14:\"Nathan Wrigley\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:21;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:73:\"Do The Woo Community: Three Major Considerations on Shaping an AI Feature\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:28:\"https://dothewoo.io/?p=75656\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:72:\"https://dothewoo.io/three-major-considerations-on-shaping-an-ai-feature/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:406:\"Dan Walmsley shares when contemplating how to shape a feature, there\'s at least three major considerations
\n>> The post Three Major Considerations on Shaping an AI Feature appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community .
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Wed, 19 Jul 2023 08:41:00 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:5:\"BobWP\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:22;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:26:\"Matt: Chorus and WordPress\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:22:\"https://ma.tt/?p=91542\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:43:\"https://ma.tt/2023/07/chorus-and-wordpress/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:2611:\"I woke up this morning to a lot of people sending me the link to today’s Axios story reporting that Vox Media (which includes The Verge, New York Magazine, Polygon, and many other outlets) is moving from its proprietary CMS, Chorus, to WordPress VIP, Automattic’s open source solution for large publishers.
\n\n\n\nThis is very exciting—not just for the obvious reasons, but because I’ve been a fan and reader of Vox since they started. As a tool-maker, one of the greatest honors is when fantastic people choose your tools to practice their craft. I’m also sure their feedback will make WordPress better! Vox Media folks, if there were any Chorus features you loved, drop them in the comments and we’ll make sure they can become a plugin or get baked into WP core. And if anyone has built amazing features in other CMSes you’d like to see in WordPress, we’re hiring!
\n\n\n\nAs I said in my recent conversation with Dries Buytaert and Mike Little celebrating WordPress’ 20th anniversary, and with a hat tip to Fight Club, I believe that on a long enough timeline, the survival rate of proprietary software drops to zero. I don’t fault anyone for starting a CMS—I’ve been guilty of that myself a half-dozen times, not counting WordPress—but while something custom-built may seem better for your needs in the beginning, that never lasts. Unless you invest heavily in engineering (like tens of millions per year), the steady improvement of a healthy open source community, like the tens of thousands of developers working on WordPress every day, will eventually catch and surpass any proprietary system.
\n\n\n\nNot all open source projects achieve the famed positive flywheel; it takes decades, and most will fail in the process. The ones that reach exit velocity, though, become part of the fabric of civilization. At that point, it makes more sense to build on top of them rather than recreate the wheel. You’ll still get where you’re going, it’ll just be a smoother, faster ride.
\n\n\n\n(Midjourney prompt: A chorus of people using WordPress.)
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Tue, 18 Jul 2023 22:40:09 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:4:\"Matt\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:23;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:67:\"Gutenberg Times: Introducing the Breadcrumbs WordPress Block Plugin\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:35:\"https://gutenbergtimes.com/?p=24884\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:78:\"https://gutenbergtimes.com/introducing-the-breadcrumbs-wordpress-block-plugin/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:6503:\"In 2009, I announced the release of my first breadcrumbs plugin. It was a one-file PHP script that I’d been using in my themes for around a year, and I wanted to contribute it to the larger WordPress community in the form of a plugin. Over the past 14 years, this original script has changed multiple times.
\n\n\n\nToday, I am happy to announce a new version of it. This time as a block plugin: X3P0: Breadcrumbs.
\n\n\n\nI submitted it to the official WordPress plugin directory last week, and it should eventually make it there. There’s currently around a two-month waiting period for plugin reviews, and I wanted to get this into the community’s hands a bit sooner than that. You can snag a copy from the Releases page on the plugin’s GitHub repository.
\n\n\n\nThe goal for this block was to offer a simple interface that anyone could use instead of having to interact with a complex PHP script.
\n\n\n\nAside from the standard design tools (e.g., colors, dimensions, border, etc.), the block offers a handful of custom options in version 1.0. The first is the ability to customize how the home “crumb” works:
\n\n\n\nThe icon picker lets you choose from a range of home icons and emoji. You can also show/hide the “Home” label.
\n\n\n\nNext to it in the toolbar is a separator picker, which lets you choose the icon or symbol that sits between each breadcrumb:
\n\n\n\nThe block boasts a couple of extra options for conditionally hiding the breadcrumbs on the site homepage and whether the last breadcrumb item should be visible.
\n\n\n\nI’d love for you to give the plugin a spin and let me know what you think. There are many ways that I believe the plugin could be even better, but I’d rather get your feedback first.
\n\n\n\nOne early version of this block did dynamically populate the breadcrumbs in the Post Editor. But this block is primarily meant to be used in templates in the Site Editor. Like other template-specific blocks, there’s no way to populate the data (which is dynamic) until the block is rendered on the front end. So placeholders make sense.
\n\n\n\nI opted to keep the output the same between the Post Editor and Site Editor so that the experience would be consistent regardless of where the block was inserted. Plus, this keeps the code lighter, which is always a win in my book.
\n\n\n\nAbsolutely. The block is just a wrapper around a PHP class, and you can call it directly from your classic theme’s PHP templates:
\n\n\n![\"GitHub](\"https://img.shields.io/github/downloads/bph/gutenberg/total?style=for-the-badge\")
if ( class_exists( \'X3P0\\Breadcrumbs\\Trail\' ) ) {\n \\X3P0\\Breadcrumbs\\Trail::display();\n} Code language: PHP (php)Alternatively, you can parse and output the block:
\n\n\n echo do_blocks( \'<!-- wp:x3p0/breadcrumbs /-->\' ); Code language: PHP (php)The PHP under the hood of the plugin is highly configurable. There’s around two dozen options and a few filter hooks that allow developers to change how nearly every aspect of the breadcrumb trail is output.
\n\n\n\nBut just dumping each of those options into the interface would likely make a terrible user experience.
\n\n\n\nFor version 1.0, at least, I took the less is more approach to block settings. This will give me time to both listen to feedback on what’s actually needed and to evaluate how those options would be best integrated into the UI in the future.
\n\n\n\nYes…Probably.
\n\n\n\nBreadcrumb trail structures can range from fairly simple to extremely complex. The plugin tries to handle each scenario it comes across as gracefully as possible by default.
\n\n\n\nAgain, as I introduce more of the plugin settings from the PHP side into the block itself, this will open it up for more editor-based customization.
\n\n\n\nThere is a three-year-old ticket requesting a breadcrumbs block in core WordPress, and there is also some early work in a pull request. I feel like we’ll eventually have a core block, but there is no guarantee on when that will happen.
\n\n\n\nA core block could take a while since it would need to consider extensibility before becoming a feature-complete implementation. There are several breadcrumb solutions, and each have their own take on what the resulting output should be.
\n\n\n\nIf/When it happens, I’ll reevaluate what this means for this plugin. It may be better to migrate it as a variation on the core block or for it to continue being a standalone implementation. As they say, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.
\n\n\n\nI’m also happy for core to borrow any (or all) code needed from my plugin—the great thing about the GPL is that we can do cool things like share code.
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Tue, 18 Jul 2023 18:25:29 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:14:\"Justin Tadlock\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:24;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:53:\"WordPress.org blog: WordPress 6.3 Release Candidate 1\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:35:\"https://wordpress.org/news/?p=15431\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:69:\"https://wordpress.org/news/2023/07/wordpress-6-3-release-candidate-1/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:11275:\"WordPress 6.3 RC1 is ready for download and testing.
\n\n\n\nThis version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, you should evaluate RC1 on a test server and site.
\n\n\n\nReaching this part of the release cycle is a key milestone. While release candidates are considered ready for final release, additional testing and use by the community can only make it better.
\n\n\n\nGet an overview of the 6.3 release cycle, check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.3-related posts, and review the new features in WordPress 6.3. Save the date for a live product demo scheduled for Thursday, July 20, 2023, at 16:00 UTC (Zoom link). This live demo will be a great opportunity to join the WordPress community to celebrate the accomplishments of 6.3 and this final chapter of Phase 2.
\n\n\n\nThanks to the many WordPress beta testers, this release contains 40+ (Editor) and 80+ (Trac) updates since the Beta 4 release. Keep it up WordPressers!
\n\n\n\nNotable updates for this release include:
\n\n\n\n_get_block_template_file function and set $area variable (#52708)bulk_edit_posts() function needs an action hook (#28112)Browse the technical details for issues addressed since Beta 4 using these queries:
\n\n\n\nFor a recap of what’s coming in 6.3, please refer to the Beta 2 post, which summarizes key features.
\n\n\n\nYou can also dig into technical information about various components in 6.3:
\n\n\n\nFor a compilation of the dev notes above and more, read the comprehensive WordPress 6.3 Field Guide.
\n\n\n\nTesting for issues is a critical part of developing any software, and it’s a meaningful way for anyone to contribute—whether you have experience or not. While testing the upgrade process is essential, trying out new features is too.
\n\n\n\nThe monetary reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities is doubled between the Beta 1 release and the final release candidate (RC). Please follow responsible disclosure practices as detailed in the project’s security practices and policies outlined on the HackerOne page and in the security white paper.
\n\n\n\nYou can test WordPress 6.3 RC1 in three ways:
\n\n\n\nwp core update --version=6.3-RC1The current target for the final release is August 8, 2023, about three weeks away. Your help testing this version ensures everything in this release is the best.
\n\n\n\nDo you build plugins and themes? Your products play an integral role in extending the functionality and value of WordPress for users of all types worldwide.
\n\n\n\nChances are, you have already been testing your latest themes and plugins with WordPress 6.3 betas. With RC1, you will want to complete your testing and update the “Tested up to” version in your plugin’s readme file to 6.3.
\n\n\n\nIf you find compatibility problems, please post detailed information to the support forums.
\n\n\n\nDo you speak a language other than English? ¿Español? Français? Português? Русский? 日本? Help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages. This release also marks the hard string freeze point of the 6.3 release cycle.
\n\n\n\nRC1 is here
Hold your applause ‘til the end
Download, test, repeat
Thank you to the contributors who collaborated on this post: @DanSoschin, @Meher, and @JPantani.
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\n>> The post Welcome Tammie Lister Back to the Do the Woo Host Team appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community .
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Tue, 18 Jul 2023 08:59:32 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:5:\"BobWP\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:26;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:57:\"WPTavern: WordCamp US 2023 Contributor Day Signup Is Open\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:30:\"https://wptavern.com/?p=146996\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:68:\"https://wptavern.com/wordcamp-us-2023-contributor-day-signup-is-open\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:1586:\"WordCamp US 2023 is happening next month in National Harbor, Maryland. The Contributor Day will kick off the event on Thursday, August 24, preceding the conference days. It is open to any attendee, including those who have never contributed before and seasoned contributors alike. There are many technical and non-technical ways to contribute to WordPress.
\n\n\n\nThose who are not able to attend WordCamp US are also welcome to join the event virtually via the the #contributor-day Slack channel. New contributors attending in person will begin at 8:30 AM EST and returning contributors will join at 9:30. A guide will be present in the Slack channel at 10 AM EST to help virtual contributors.
\n\n\n\nRecommendations for preparing for Contributor Day are on the event page, along with a list and description of all the Make WordPress teams that contributors can elect to join.
\n\n\n\nThe sign up form is now open for everyone who plans to attend the event in person. It includes the opportunity to give feedback on anticipated accessibility needs and meal preferences for the lunch provided during the event. Contributors will also be asked to select their preferred contributor team(s) during sign up so organizers can be prepared with team leads available.
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Mon, 17 Jul 2023 21:52:19 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"Sarah Gooding\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:27;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:104:\"WPTavern: Gutenberg 16.2 Brings Improvements to Pattern Management, Introduces Vertical Text Orientation\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:30:\"https://wptavern.com/?p=146972\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:114:\"https://wptavern.com/gutenberg-16-2-brings-improvements-to-pattern-management-introduces-vertical-text-orientation\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:3740:\"Gutenberg 16.2 was released with a number of important changes to pattern management. Most notably, Reusable blocks have been renamed to Patterns, and the Library section of the Site Editor has been renamed to Patterns.
\n\n\n\nThis release also introduces a sync status on the pattern details screen to give more information to site owners when managing patterns. The custom patterns label has been changed to “My Patterns” in the Patterns sidebar. A new lock icon designates theme patterns as unable to be edited or modified. All of these changes were cherry-picked from this version of Gutenberg and are included in the upcoming WordPress 6.3 major release, as of Beta 3.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nGutenberg 16.2 introduces a vertical text orientation, which can be applied using a block’s typography settings. At this time the feature is only available when the theme author opts in for the theme to support it, but it may be expanded in the feature.
\n\n\n\n“This new feature is a first step towards full support of vertically written languages as well as for decorative purposes in website design,” Automattic-sponsored Gutenberg contributor Bernie Reiter said in the release post.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFootnotes, which were introduced in Gutenberg 16.1, received several usability improvements in this release. The first iteration was bare bones with the footnotes created automatically and then inserted at the bottom of the content. This update makes a Footnotes block available in the block inserter, so users can place it again in case it gets deleted.
\n\n\n\nOther notable improvements in Gutenberg 16.2 include the following:
\n\n\n\nIt also appears the Gutenberg team is preparing for the eventual deprecation of TinyMCE.
\n\n\n\n“We’ve added a new Gutenberg Experiment to explore a potential path towards the deprecation of TinyMCE,” Reiter said. “When enabled, it prevents loading TinyMCE assets and Classic blocks by default, only enabling them if usage is detected. The update also handles scenarios where posts contain Classic blocks or users input raw HTML, offering conversion options or reloading to use the Classic block.”
\n\n\n\nCheck out the Gutenberg 16.2 release post for more details on the enhancements and bug fixes included in this release.
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Mon, 17 Jul 2023 19:55:35 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"Sarah Gooding\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:28;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:107:\"WordPress.org blog: WP Briefing: Episode 60: Sneak a Peek at WordPress 6.3 with Special Guest Mike Schroder\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:53:\"https://wordpress.org/news/?post_type=podcast&p=15398\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:109:\"https://wordpress.org/news/2023/07/episode-60-sneak-a-peek-at-wordpress-6-3-with-special-guest-mike-schroder/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31370:\"Join WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy and Core Tech Lead Mike Schroder as they discuss their favorite new features and enhancements coming in WordPress 6.3.
\n\n\n\nHave a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording.
\n\n\n\nHost: Josepha Haden Chomphosy
Guests: Mike Schroder
Editor: Dustin Hartzler
Logo: Javier Arce
Production: Nicholas Garofalo
Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod
( Intro music )
\n\n\n\n[00:00:00] Josepha: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks.
\n\n\n\nI’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go.
\n\n\n\n( Intro music continues )
\n\n\n\n[00:00:39] Josepha: We have with us Mike Schroder. They are on the WordPress 6.3 release squad, and I believe, Mike, that your role there is the Core Tech Lead.
\n\n\n\nIs that right?
\n\n\n\n[00:00:50] Mike: Yeah, that’s correct. I’m one of the tech leads along with Andrew Ozz and David Baumwald.
\n\n\n\n[00:00:56] Josepha: Thank you so much for being able to join me today.
\n\n\n\n[00:00:58] Mike: Thanks for inviting me.
\n\n\n\n[00:01:00] Josepha: This is our 6.3 sneak peek, and so it has a little bit of a “What do you wish people knew about the upcoming release?” aspect to it, but it also has like a “What do we find most interesting about the work that we’ve been doing in this release so far?”
\n\n\n\nAs the Core Tech Lead, what currently is like your favorite thing that y’all are getting into the release or the thing that’s the most interesting or happiest to finally be done with it?
\n\n\n\n[00:01:27] Mike: Yeah, I think there are a couple of things. So I was playing around with the release in anticipation for this, and one of the favorite sort of user-facing features that I played with was the live preview for Block themes. And it just makes it feel so intuitive to open up a new Block theme and play around with Styles and different designs and see how it looks.
\n\n\n\nI really enjoyed it, opened it up on my personal site and started messing around with different color palettes and things like that, and it was a lot of fun.
\n\n\n\n[00:01:55] Josepha: Like it’s a live preview, but also with all of the content they already have on your site.
\n\n\n\n[00:01:59] Mike: It does use the templates and so it, it shows some of the live content from the from the homepage, for instance, and some of those blocks, and some of the other areas are editing the templates rather than the live content. But yes, it was neat to play around with it and see my blog content in the background and yeah, some real-time design. That was really fun.
\n\n\n\n[00:02:20] Josepha: And has that been a big focus of the release? Was it something that you and the other Tech Leads both for the Core side and the Editor side just had to focus a lot on in this round of the release?
\n\n\n\n[00:02:33] Mike: So I was not a part of a lot of that work. So I’m not gonna take credit for it. I think that is the culmination, all of those different things together of a lot of the things that the Editor team has been working on for some time. And it was just, it was really refreshing to see it.
\n\n\n\nThe other feature that I had in my head, if it’s okay for me to talk about a second one, is something that has been trying to get landed in Core for quite some time, and that has to do with automatic rollbacks. If plugin updates or theme updates start to happen and then they fail in the middle of that update, then it will automatically restore the previous version of the plugin or theme. And that’s a pretty big improvement over the previous behavior, which could result not as well.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:16] Josepha: Right. Where you would just have a site that was like, “Best of luck to you,” and emails that told you what kind of probably was broken. I shouldn’t be sassy about that. The WSOD protection that we put in really was a huge leap forward for the way that we handled that in the past, but this is great news.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:34] Mike: Yes, I was so excited when that landed, and this is I guess the next part of that. And it’s been, yeah, it’s been in the works for a long time, through testing and there was an entire team that did a lot of work on it in a future plugin. And I’m very excited to see it land.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:49] Josepha: That’s great. That’s one of those things that we hope a WordPress user never has to know exists. Like it’s always our hope that the plugins work perfectly and the themes work perfectly. And so unless something is going really wrong you won’t know that’s a feature. Surely it tells you like, “This didn’t update by the way. Go figure that out.”
\n\n\n\n[00:04:08] Mike: Yeah, the whole idea of this particular feature is to make it feel more like everything is smooth and one site continues to work, and the underpinning of it has been going in for a couple of releases. The whole idea is to make the experience more smooth for users.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:21] Josepha: Cool. That auto rollback actually was not on my radar as a thing to keep an eye out for in this release, so that’s really neat. One of the things that I saw as I was doing, I don’t do any complicated testing. I mostly do like testing of what users would expect with the workflow with my eyeballs and a mouse.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:40] Mike: Well, that’s, that’s wonderful.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:42] Josepha: I’m not doing any of the fancy testing with like code, but one of the things that I saw as I was working through my general, just regular test, my spot check click around test was that it looks like there’s some consolidation, some consolidation of the navigation in the Editor.
\n\n\n\nSo, it had I think maybe Pages and Templates in there before, and now there are five things in there. Do you have a bit of a concept of what went into that, what we’re hoping everybody’s gonna be able to accomplish there now?
\n\n\n\n[00:05:13] Mike: So I, I was not involved as much in the later stages of this, but I was in a couple of the first couple iterations of this particular feature, and I think this is, I don’t want to guess the exact amount of times that this has been sort of reworked so the experience is good for users, there been so much effort that’s gone into helping navigation be a comfortable experience for people to work with within the site editor.
\n\n\n\nAnd what I have heard is that everyone that’s worked on it is very excited that it’s landing and that users will be able to experience it and more easily work with navigation.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:46] Josepha: Yeah, I think that navigation is one of those things, both like creating good navigation as a software designer, but then also as somebody who’s like putting together a website. Good navigation is hard to do. And it’s design where everyone’s, “Good design is invisible,” and we don’t actually mean that.
\n\n\n\nWe don’t mean it’s invisible. We mean it’s not intrusive, it doesn’t get in your way, it acts in the way you think it’s going to act, and it knows or has a good guess about where you’re trying to be, what you’re trying to do in that particular moment on a site. And so like the fact that we’ve had probably hundreds of people working on navigation inside the software is no surprise to me, but I bet it’s gonna be a surprise to a lot of people.
\n\n\n\nThey’ll be like, “It’s like folders, right?” Turns out it’s not.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:33] Mike: Yes, it was, incredibly, incredibly difficult to design. I know there was, the couple instances that I was most involved with, I know there was so much discussion about how folks are used to working with navigation within WordPress and sort of what expectations are for menus and what expectations are for, you know, users both that have been using WordPress for a long time and users who, who are new to WordPress, and the Site Editor. And having all of those considerations from the various stakeholders just makes it a really difficult design problem.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:03] Josepha: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, not for nothing like the WP Admin itself, that dashboard inside the WordPress software, like that’s been due for an update for quite some time. This is the same one that I think we’ve had since 2008, which was also very disruptive in its way. And so like it was a good disruption, but we really haven’t made any substantial changes to it since then. And part of it is because there are so many use cases for WordPress, and we don’t have a good concept of that because we don’t have a lot of tracking in the software. We don’t take anyone’s like data about what field they work in. We don’t do any of that.
\n\n\n\nAnd so it’s hard for us to account for all of the use cases and get a really excellent design for a majority of the people that are gonna be using it. Because like we don’t actually build software for robots around here. Not yet.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:54] Mike: ( laughs ) Yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:55] Josepha: No, I don’t think we’ll ever be robot-building software.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:57] Mike: I doubt it, but I also don’t wanna predict the future. No, I agree. And I think that is absolutely one of the super tricky things about building WordPress. I’m really glad that WordPress doesn’t collect any of that data. And it makes it so that the sort of testing that, that you were talking about, in user studies and things like that, are incredibly helpful for figuring out what the best approaches are.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:21] Josepha: Yeah, absolutely. Since we’re just in the zone of like things that Josepha likes and that she saw, I’m gonna also do this other thing. In one of the last couple of releases, the Style Book came out, which was such an exciting thing for me. It’s great to be able to see whether or not all of the style choices you’ve made in various parts of the admin or in the code, depending on how you’re doing things.
\n\n\n\nIt’s nice to make sure, in one big set, that like everything is coherent. Everything that you thought you changed did get changed and it looks the way that you wanted it to look in concert with everything else in there. And it looked like we now have revisions specific to styles, like styling things across the site, have revisions.
\n\n\n\nIs that right?
\n\n\n\n[00:09:06] Mike: That’s correct.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:07] Josepha: I think that’s a super big deal because as somebody who is just, I’m filled with techno joy. I don’t always want to look at a manual. I just want to do stuff until it breaks and then hope I can fix it. The hoping you can fix it part ( laughs ) can sometimes be really nerve-wracking if what you’re doing is creating a site for a client or you are working on your first big theme and you wanna make sure that’s all together.
\n\n\n\nAnd so style revisions to go along with some of the Editor revisions I think is a great change.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:39] Mike: Same. Absolutely. This is not a feature I have, done too much particular playing with, at this point.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:44] Josepha: You’re a very skilled developer.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:46] Mike: I appreciate that. That’s very kind. I think that adding revisions to anything that folks regularly change in posts or pages is, really important. And making it very easy to get to both make forward changes and also to realize, “Oh, there was this other change that was, you know, there was three clicks ago that I really loved. How do I get back to that? How do I see the history?” And that’s what I love about that sort of feature. Being able to really easily see, “Okay, when did this happen? In what series? How can I jump back and get to that spot that felt right.”
\n\n\n\n[00:10:19] Josepha: Yes. Anytime that we can have that kind of historical layering of things, I think is good. I went to a meetup. I like to go to meetups that are 101 content, because that’s like the folks that really need new refined processes the most. But I went to a 101 meetup a couple years back, and I remember that the presenter was saying like, take a theme that you pretty much like and make some changes until you have a theme that you love.
\n\n\n\nAnd people kept saying like, “Yeah, but what if I break everything?” And he said in the middle of that to everyone, not knowing who I was because who cares? He was like, “Yeah, WordPress is not gonna let you do anything that will completely destroy a theme or completely destroy your site. There’s an undo button and you can just undo it. It’ll be fine.” And I was like, “Yeah, that is true now.”
\n\n\n\n[00:11:15] Mike: I love that.
\n\n\n\nGosh. I mean, I remember when I was playing with my first WordPress site, and even to make really small changes with navigation or with menus, I had to go in and make changes to the PHP code, and none of that was protected.
\n\n\n\n[00:11:31] Josepha: You’re like, “This is free-range me out here.”
\n\n\n\n[00:11:34] Mike: I love, absolutely. I love that is just no longer the case anymore and it’s super easy to go in and play with a theme and make changes without worrying about any of that. And, I mean, I may be a developer, but that’s the way I would prefer. That’s the way I go in and edit my sites now too.
\n\n\n\nIf I wanna mess with a theme, go in, and it was the Customizer and now it’s the Site Editor, and it’s great.
\n\n\n\n[00:11:58] Josepha: Yeah, it’s a leap forward, I think, leap forward.
\n\n\n\nSo another thing that I ran into, I guess it’s two things that I ran into while I was wandering around in there recently, and it’s possible that I ran into these two things because I just personally love them the most, but the Footnotes block looks like it is potentially going to land.
\n\n\n\nI have been so excited about this block for no reason. I have dreams about it. I wish that were not a true statement. I did recently have a dream about it. I dreamt that it didn’t land in the release, and that I went to talk to Ella about it and she was like, “Oh, yeah, publishers have given up on footnotes and they’re just doing end notes now, and so I decided not to ship it.” Like this is a dream I had.
\n\n\n\nAnd so I’m a little worried, but tomorrow I’m gonna be like, “Hey, Ella, friend, what’s happening?” And she’s gonna be like, “Yeah, end notes are where it’s at.”
\n\n\n\nAnd then the other block that I’m personally very excited about is what I like to call the “Spoilers block.” I know it is not “Spoilers”, it’s the called “Details,” but anytime I’ve ever used that after like early, early times in my career, early in my career, I used to call them accordions and I don’t know why, but now I call them “Spoiler blocks.” But I know it’s actually called the “Details block,” where you can put in a piece of information at the top, essentially a title, and then expand it to get more information in there.
\n\n\n\nSo are both of those actually gonna land or am I gonna be heartbroken?
\n\n\n\n[00:13:24] Mike: As far as I’m aware, yes. I know that I haven’t checked recently on the latter, but I was just playing with the Footnotes block, and it’s really cool. I really like the interface. I think that it makes it really simple to add quick footnotes to, anywhere in the site, and everything feels very automated and simple.
\n\n\n\n[00:13:46] Josepha: As someone who every, almost everything that I’ve ever written, I want to have an aside in it, which essentially just becomes a footnote. One of the weirdest parts about Gutenberg at first is that like, the asterisk way of doing it, where you just put one after the word and then put one at the start. The asterisk makes it into a list block, and for a long time you also couldn’t escape it, and so I had to do a lot of fancy footwork to get my footnotes to work for a while, and so I’m excited for that.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:15] Mike: I think I had similar discouraging moments with lists and I was really encouraged by the way the footnotes select, and I’m sure there are other ways to do it too, but select, right-click, footnote, and they all automatically go to the bottom order, all of it. It’s a really smooth process.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:31] Josepha: Yeah. I’m really excited about it. I know that like for the last two or three major releases, a bulk of what we’ve been offering to folks is like, design stuff, and we’re just like, “It’s a bunch of design things,” but this release actually has over 500 different tickets that were marked as features or enhancements that are going into it.
\n\n\n\nAnd so, you and I have talked about seven things so far, but I also understand that there are literally 500 tickets or so that were marked as “feature” or “enhancement.” And so we are definitely not gonna catch everything that goes in there, but there is kind of a group of another group of enhancements to the design tools because of course this wraps up the bulk of phase two so that we can all move into the collaborative editing phase.
\n\n\n\nAnd so like, do you have a sense for, like is this just mostly polish for those design and like image media management kinds of things? Or are there big features that are coming in those also?
\n\n\n\n[00:15:29] Mike: My understanding is that it’s all of the above. I think that there are a lot of new features being added along with polish to those features. And I think the neatest thing is that there are also a lot of enhancements that are focused on bringing all of those things together and making it feel like more of a connected experience. And so I think that’s my favorite part so far in testing that I’ve been doing of, the many, as you mentioned, so many additional new features that, that we’re added this time. And, I have a huge amount of respect for, you know, everyone that works, for the huge amount of folks that work on it across the project.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:07] Josepha: Yeah. Yeah, you’ve given a couple of answers where you were like, “I wasn’t personally involved in that,” but on the one hand, I was like, “Everyone knows that we’re not all personally involved in it,” but on the other hand, not everybody knows how many people touch all of these tickets and features and bugs and tests as we get them ready to be put into the release.
\n\n\n\nLast year, I was super worried that like, post active fear of Covid, and now everyone just like deciding that they’ve done their best and they’re going back out there. Like I was really worried that everyone was gonna be having so much fun out of the house, that they would stop contributing.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:43] Mike: ( laughs )
\n\n\n\n[00:16:44] Josepha: I know, but we actually had one of our most active years for contributors last year, which means that especially for the releases that are coming this year, the people who worked all the way through last year, like almost 2000, I think, contributors, just to code, that’s not even like the contributors who worked on reigniting the community and putting together events, all of those things like all of the other things that we do.
\n\n\n\nIt’s, it is remarkable to me that when we look at any feature it is definitely been looked at or worked on, or at least passed through desks of easily a hundred people, even for small little things. And I just love that, the depth of the work we do.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:29] Mike: Absolutely. Same. I remember wondering about that too, about your same sort of concerns. And it’s been really great to be a part of the community as it’s essentially, as it’s grown together again, I think is maybe the best way I can think of to say it. That’s been quite wonderful.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:46] Josepha: Yeah, absolutely. Mike, this has been an absolutely delightful conversation. Is there anything you would like to leave us with before we move on to our small list of big things today?
\n\n\n\n[00:17:58] Mike: The release candidate for 6.3 comes out tomorrow, and what I would love the most is if anyone in interested in testing, anyone, whether it’s testing exactly like this sort of testing that you were just talking about, with loading the RC and clicking around and seeing what works the best and what doesn’t work and what feels good and what doesn’t, or if it’s testing, if you’re like a plugin or a theme developer, testing with those things to see how things work and looking for backwards compatibility breaks that are unexpected so we can fix them before release.
\n\n\n\nIf you work at a hosting company or you make sites for folks, helping test that to see that it works really well on your platforms for folks that you work with. I think all of those would be super helpful, and there are testing instructions that can be found on the release candidate announcement page.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:43] Josepha: Perfect. Wonderful. Mike, thank you so much for joining me today.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:47] Mike: Thank you so much. I’ve really appreciated the time.
\n\n\n\n( Musical interlude )
\n\n\n\n[00:18:49] Josepha: That brings us now to our small list of big things. It’s actually kind of a big list of big things today. So first on the list is that WordCamp US has a Contributor Day and we need your help. So the WordCamp US Contributor Team has contacted all of the team reps asking for help with a new approach to organizing this year’s Contributor Day.
\n\n\n\nThe hope is to make the initial steps to contribution easier. And so they’re asking teams who will be present to help participate with that process. I will have a link in the show notes to the post that has more information.
\n\n\n\nAlso second thing related also to WordCamp US is that I would like to put out a call for art and music, especially that is related to open source and the freedoms that it brings. So one of the things that makes WordPress so fantastic in the world is not only that like we’re creating opportunities for folks, we’re offering economic, and I don’t know, philosophical freedoms to people, but we frequently do think about that in the vein of, you know, commerce and work and the economy, and we rarely think about it in the obviously related subset of arts and music. And so I also would like to put out a call for any open source related arts or poetry or music that you all have created.
\n\n\n\nI would love to be able to display some of that at WordCamp US this year. I don’t think I have a link quite yet for a call for that, but as soon as I do, I’ll send it out on social media and other places.
\n\n\n\nThe third thing on our small list of big things is that, as Mike mentioned, tomorrow is the RC1 release date for WordPress 6. 3, and you can help us to test that.
\n\n\n\nIt’s always good for us to test any release as it’s working its way through the process, but certainly by the time it gets to RC, that’s when we are pretty sure it’s going to be as stable as possible. We’ve done some soft string freezes and feature freezes-ish. And so that’s about as stable as it’s going to get. And so I encourage everyone to get out and test that as much as possible. And in all the ways that Mike shared.
\n\n\n\nItem number four, we are also reaching a milestone. So, a couple weeks ago, we reached the one year milestone for the start of the Meetup Reactivation Project.
\n\n\n\nWe have about 50% of our Meetup groups reactivated. If you are listening to this and you are a Meetup organizer and you haven’t heard from anyone from WordCamp Central or the community team, I’m going to put a link to the notes, or rather, a link to the post in the notes so that you can also learn more about that.
\n\n\n\nYou don’t have to hear from us in order to get your meetup group going again. But, if you are interested to know what has gone into that process, or always just want to know what’s going on in the community side of things, that’s a good place to start. So there will be a link to that in the show notes as well.
\n\n\n\nNumber five, WordPress event organizers in general, but also anyone. So there are two different events coming up on Thursday, on July 20th.
\n\n\n\nFirst, there is the WP Diversity Workshop. This is added workshop for us to help promote the ideas of building diverse and inclusive WordPress events. And so, this is not necessarily one of those events for people who want to increase their skills in speaking so that they are able to, to speak confidently at a WordPress event. These are for people who are organizing WordPress events and want to make them more inclusive and more diverse from the start. I encourage any organizer to go to it, regardless of whether you’re doing WordPress events or not, but certainly for WordPress events that is something that we care about and want to have included in our entire event series.
\n\n\n\nThe other thing that’s happening on Thursday, because like I said, two things happening on Thursday, is that we have a WordPress 6. 3 live product demo. We’ve been doing these for the last few releases, and you get a couple of people from either the release squad, or like folks who do that kind of developer relations work in WordPress, who sit down and just do a general click-through, a general run through, a public demo of what we expect to land in the release.
\n\n\n\nAnd so that also is on Thursday. I will also have a link for you in the show notes. If you are listening to this not on WordPress.org and you don’t know where the show notes are, don’t worry. The show notes are on WordPress.org. You go to WordPress.org/news/podcast and in the transcript there are show notes that have links to all of these things.
\n\n\n\nAnd that, my friends, is your big, small list of big things. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. Thank you again for my guest, Mike’s, time. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks.
\n\n\n\n( Outtro music )
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\n>> The post WCUS 2023, What Are You Looking Forward To? appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community .
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Mon, 17 Jul 2023 11:34:00 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:5:\"BobWP\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:30;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:100:\"Gutenberg Times: Gutenberg Changelog #86 – WordPress 6.3, Gutenberg 16.2 and Phase 3 Collaboration\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:53:\"https://gutenbergtimes.com/?post_type=podcast&p=24845\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:90:\"https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-86-wordpress-phase-3-collaboration/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:58807:\"Sarah Norris, JavaScript developer and 6.4 editor tech co-lead joined Birgit Pauli-Haack on the Gutenberg Changelog for the first time. They discussed WordPress 6.3, Gutenberg 16.2 and Phase 3 Collaboration
\n\n\n\nAdd a summary/excerpt here
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nShow Notes
\n\n\n\nJavaScript Developer 6.4 editor tech co-lead
\n\n\n\nStay in Touch
\n\n\n\nTranscript
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Hello and welcome to our 86th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. And today’s episode will talk about Beta 4 6.3, Gutenberg 16.2, and the first posts about what to expect for phase three on Gutenberg. And I’m your host Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and WordPress developer advocate, also full-time co-contributor to the WordPress Opensource Project. And I’m here with my friend and colleague, Sarah Norris, JavaScript developer on the themes team, core contributor and co-tech lead for the release in 6.4. So that’s in November, but we are starting now. Sarah and I danced a good two hours at the Pride Party in Athens, and we had great fun. I haven’t danced that long for decades, so thank you so much for joining me on the show today, Sarah. So, how are you?
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: I’m good, thank you. Thank you so much for having me. That pride party was super fun. It’s a beautiful setting on a rooftop bar in Athens. Yeah, beautiful weather and I got so many steps in, I tripled my step goal.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I did too, but not as much as I did the first day I was in Athens when I went up the Acropolis twice.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Twice, yes. That’s a big hill to climb twice.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: So, if you do it twice, you get a lot of steps in. I think that was the day I had 17,000 or so.
\n\n\n\nSo, you’re working on the Gutenberg Project. And so, when you think about 6.3, what excites you the most about what’s coming up next month?
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yeah. There’s so many exciting updates, especially around enhancing the UX of the site editor in particular, which is super exciting. So, one of my favorites is the command palette, because it allows people to search for different parts of the site, like navigation, pages, style variations, templates, and it’s similar to Spotlight on a Mac or using Alfred. So, it’s a really quick way to access different areas of the site without you having to search through different menus. That’s a really cool update.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that’s a cool feature. Yeah, I like it too because now I don’t have to figure out which of the different editors I have to use to do stuff, so I cannot just ask that command palette. Yeah, open my page, or open a post, or edit a template, or something like that. Yeah, it’s really cool.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Another thing I’m excited about is the updates to the site editor sidebar. So, currently in 6.2 we’ve only got a list of templates and template parts, but 6.3, it’s going to look a lot different. Oh, well, it’s going to look similar, but there’s going to be a lot more items. So we’re introducing… there’s navigation styles, pages, patterns as well. So, I guess similar to the command palette, it gives you a lot more options to access those other features quickly. So, if you are already in the site editor context, you’ve got more options to get to other areas a lot quickly.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, I like that too. Especially the part where I can edit my page content together with my page templates, so I can just switch that and say, “Oh, that’s a template, I want to do for…” Yeah and, “Oh, and now I need to fix something on one of the pages,” and I can do it all from the site editor. I wish I could also do posts from there, but I guess maybe that’s coming, maybe not. Yeah.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yeah, maybe it’s coming.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Anything else?
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yes, so I guess specifically on the pattern section, this is now where template parts are going to live. So, sometimes I guess if people are already using the editor and the following along with updates, this can be a little bit maybe confusing or it’s just like, “Oh, I’ve just got used to template parts. Now they’re patterns.” But I think it’s a really good change for new users because it’s less terms to use templates to template, and then there’s patterns. And especially with this refocus on patterns, it’s a single word we can now use. So, maybe we had a few other words before. And so yeah, any reduction in terms is a win.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Yeah, that’s in line with also renaming reusable blocks to pattern. They’re sync patterns now. And then template parts are patterns. They are reused, but they’re reused in the templates. So, I think what will round it all up later on is when we have partial sync patterns. So, when you use a pattern on a page and you want to change the styling or the color that it kind of changes overall the patterns of all the time that you use that pattern, but with different content. So yeah, that is still a piece that’s missing, but I think the foundation needed to be there with kind of figuring out it’s all the same, just a little bit different. Reusable blocks and patterns and template parts, they’re all the same soup. It’s just different flavors. Yeah.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yes. Exactly. Yes.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: And I think you’re right. For a new person coming to WordPress, it’s much easier to figure out.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yeah. And anything we can do to speed up that understanding as well, it really helps gives you a boost to understanding how to use the site editor. I think it also… that this refocus on patterns helps building block themes much easier as well. And it highlights how we can create a variety of different layouts across themes. So, patterns they can be just part of one theme, but other patterns can be part of any number of themes as well. And it really highlights how themes are a collective of different aspects rather than just a single topic asset as they might have been in the past. And yeah, I love that. I’m really looking forward to different people trying that out.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And having certain parts of your site being your site, not depending on the theme, I think that’s the next level that wasn’t before possible in WordPress. Yeah. So, it’s an interesting… that templates can be different from the theme, and that kind of blows my mind right there.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yes. It’s a whole new layer.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Whole new layer and whole new complexity. But yeah, I like it because for a user, it doesn’t really matter if it’s a theme-related pattern or their own pattern. But they will be surprised when all of a sudden it goes away.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yes, exactly.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: The theme, yeah.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, now that’s different. Yeah, it won’t go away. Yeah.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Anything else that excites you?
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yes, there is something actually that I really wanted to mention. So, for Beta 4 that’s just been released, there’s some major performance boosts. So, they’re all going to come out with 6.3. So, there’s some major performance boosts, both classic and block themes. And for both client side and service side, it means a significant boost for the largest content for Paint or the LCP metric, which is basically when the page’s main content has likely been loaded. So with 6.3, there’s going to be a reduced LCP of 26% for block themes and 19% classic themes. Yeah, so that’s massive.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, that’s pretty big.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Exactly. Yeah. But it matters so much as well, because it’s so many websites this will roll out to. Yeah, I really wanted to highlight it because it’s something to really shout about and celebrate.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So, when you upgrade to 6.3, all of a sudden your sites are faster, almost 20%, even if you’re on a classic theme. So yeah, that’s definitely a boost. And you don’t have to do anything. It’s all for free.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It’s automatic, automatically performance boost.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Depending, of course, what plugins you use and what the theme does, but yeah.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yeah, yeah, base level, base level performance.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Base level. Base level, yeah. There are always edge cases and we need to be aware of those and that they might happen. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, that’s a lot of things to come. I really like that the footnotes block made it into 6.3. It was a little late on that, but it definitely comes, and there is a certain corner in our community that actually has been waiting for that for many, many years. So, now it’s here.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yes. Yeah. That will be major for certain aspects of certain different types of articles that people use WordPress for. Yeah, footnotes, I can imagine people have been waiting for that for such a long time. So yes, it’s great.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Some of them are still kind of hand-coding all the pieces together.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Right.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: So, in a similar way, and I wanted to highlight a community contribution from Justin Tadlock. He has had a plugin in the repo for a long, long time that deals with breadcrumbs, and he migrated that into that it’s block-based now. So, you can have a breadcrumb block for your pages and archives, and it automatically will pick up the hierarchy of the nested pages, and you can change text color background, link color, and including the hover state, and also adjust the padding on the margins. And it has been submitted to the plugin repo. But yeah, there appears to be a two-month waiting time for new plugins to get approved. So, we will share it in the show notes the link to the GitHub repo, where you can just download the ZIP file from there. But I tested it, and I really like it. It helps me organize some of my test sites quite a bit.
\n\n\n\nAnd Justin Tadlock has been in the community for many, many years, so his code is solid. Yeah. So, I share that with you. I wish there was something similar in core, but this is the next best thing. So, let us know what you think about it.
\n\n\n\nBeta 4 of WordPress 6.3
\n\n\n\nSo, that brings us to our section, What’s Released, and as you mentioned, Sarah… Sarah, mentioned it before, the WordPress 6.3 Beta 4 was released this week, and it’s really coming down to the wire. So, if you haven’t tested your plugins, themes, and other customizations of your website, you should start testing now, because you have less than a month to fix things if they break. The final release is August 8th, and today we are recording on July 14th. Oh, by the way, happy Bastille Day in France. Yeah, so get on the testing part, and I have been saying this for now for weeks, but the more you test, the more we can find the bugs now and we can release a better product. Yeah. So, have you been testing WordPress 6.3 Beta 4?
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yes, I have. Yes. Yeah, I’ve got the Beta plugin installed, and yeah, I make sure I’m up-to-date default testing.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I have websites, one website that is actually using nightly, and when it’s release time, the Beta and release candidates in production. So, I know immediately when something doesn’t work as I do with the Gutenberg nightly that I use in production on certain sites.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Living on the edge.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Welcome to the life on the edge. But I actually hear that Matt Mullenweg is using the WordPress nightly on his blog as well, so in production.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yes.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: So yeah, there’s a lot of trust coming out of the team, and it’s well warranted. The team that is releasing 6.3 has been stellar, like all the other ones. And there was a little hiccup for Beta 1, but Beta 4 was smooth. It was done in 58 minutes. That, I think, is a record. Well, it’s definitely very, very fast. Sometimes it takes about 90 minutes, so it comes really down to the wire. So, if you find something, say something.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yeah, definitely. Well, I think what’s really impressive, when you’re doing the Beta parties and with the testing, usually the bugs are found… And I’m touching wood as well, because I don’t want to tempt fate to any large… but the bugs that are found, they’re either hard to replicate or hard to find. So, they’re small bugs, and I think that’s a kudos to the team that are involved in that the bugs aren’t that visible. There’s rare cases, but generally speaking… So, I think if you’re helping to test as well, even if you find a bug that you think maybe it doesn’t matter too much, just mention it because that’s what the team is looking for. They’re usually the bugs that are… Like I’m looking at the change hub for Gutenberg, and the bug fixes. They’re all the little edge cases to make sure it’s really polished. Yeah, I’m always impressed with that. There’s no really major visible bugs. It’s always the little ones.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s always the little one. And then, it’s also what kind of gets it done. Well, it’s like everything else in life. It’s the little things that make you happy and that make you aggravated.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Exactly.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And that brings us to Gutenberg 16.2 release that happened this week. There were a hundred, again, 184 PRs committed by 47 contributors. That’s a lot of change coming in in two weeks period, given that 16.1 had 255 PRs to go through. So Sarah, you’re in luck; you only got two-thirds of what we did last year.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yeah, that’s true. I should be grateful.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Do you want to start, get us in there?
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yes. Yeah, so the first one we’re looking at, so this is rename reusable blocks to patterns. Yes. So, this is renaming reusable blocks to sync patterns. So, this is to align with the new editor terminology that I guess we’ve just touched on. So yeah, so a sync pattern is any change made to one pattern that gets deployed to all instances of that pattern across your site. And then the opposite would be an unsync pattern. And so, they’re included in the inserter with all your other patterns, but changes to these patterns will not be reflected throughout the site. And then, that means you can customize each instance of that pattern. Yeah, again, it’s a wording, a terminology update, but I think it really aids the UX of the site editor in general.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, but what it also brings, and I’m very delighted to say, is that you now can actually create patterns on your site. Up until now, you were reliant on themes or on the community patterns from the pattern directory to get patterns, or you had to write them in PHP and then upload it to your site. But now you have the same interface or the same workflow with which you created reusable blocks or now sync patterns you can now also use to create unsync patterns. So, you have much more… the user has much more freedom to create some reusable blocks and some reusable sections of the site that can then be further customized or not. Yeah so, I think there were a lot of people waiting for that part because not everybody touches code or has somebody around that can touch code. So, doing it in the interface is really… that’s actually the big win from the name change.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yeah, yeah, exactly. That’s exactly it. And yeah, anything that helps the low-code or no-code ability around the site editor is fantastic. It really opens up WordPress to so many new users, and I’m really looking forward to seeing hopefully just personally more designers using WordPress as well, because there’s so many beautiful designs out there already. So yeah, I’m really looking forward to beautiful design patterns increasing as well.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, me too. And I saw in the theme directory just as a side, quite a few new themes, block themes, that were done by contributors that haven’t done a theme before or that haven’t even contributed before. And that is such a great development with that. I really love that to see, even if it’s simple or to get the feet wet and get through the whole process of getting into the theme directory. I think that’s another hurdle by itself, but once they made it, it’s much easier to get the second, third, and fourth theme into the directory. But that was just a side note. So the next feature from 16.2, I’m doing it again, 16.2 is the rename of command center to command palette. It’s not a new feature, but it’s kind of the name change is really following what…
\n\n\n\nThere was a big discussion on GitHub, and I think that is where the most consensus came around, that command palette is something that is translatable, is relatable, even for non-native English speakers. And we talked about it, how excited we are about it, both the renaming of the reusable block to patterns and the rename of the command palette. It all will be in 6.3. So, when people ask me what features from Gutenberg will be in 6.3, I would say 15.2 release to 16.1, but I think that’s a lie. I think it’s 16.2 beta sections from 16.2 Gutenberg release that all actually made it into 6.3, especially the whole thing around the site editor library, and the sync, and all that. Yeah.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Right. Yeah, I think it’s a good name change as well. I think it’s a term that should be localized fairly easily. It’s important. Okay. So, this is the library adding sync status to the pattern details screen, and so this is really cool that can be expanded on in the future to include more details as well. So, this shows the sync status of a pattern on the pattern details screen. So, it’s either going to say not sync or fully synced currently at the moment. But this can be expanded to include further details about the pattern, things like the author who made the pattern, maybe where the pattern’s being used across the site, so things like template names or pages or posts. So yeah, I’m really excited about the potential here, but also the feature that’s being added in 6.3, it’s super helpful, just the information being there so easily. It’s great. Yeah.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, so there was for a while, the last item on the menu in the site editor on the left-hand side was called Library, and had template parts and had patterns. And that has also been changed to patterns, because everything that’s in there is actually, per se, a pattern and Library was too big. There were thoughts that maybe they put the fonts in there or some styles or something like that, but that didn’t pan out. It kind of is all… It’s the second shoulder for the patterns, and everything else will be in a different heading there. So it’s the reusable blocks, the sync patterns, the template parts as well as the unsync patterns. Yes.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yes. Yeah.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: And there will be a section in that menu item called My Patterns. So, these are the customized patterns that you did that were created with the UI and on site. They’re not coming from scenes, they’re not coming from plugins, they’re not coming from code. They come from your interaction with the interface, and you build them all yourself. So, it’s all yours. It says My Patterns, but it’s yours. It’s kind of funny.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yeah. Again, that’s another really good UX terminology update that I think helps, but I guess primarily new users, because unfortunately if you’ve been used to the terms, you get reuse to the terms, but that’s all good. It’s part of working in an open project with lots of different iterations all the time. And new users, they get the benefit.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. I don’t know. With a 20-year-old project, how long does it take until you are not a new user anymore, or how many new users does it take to take over the majority, but then longer than… Well anyway, so any user will have an advantage about it. For some of us, we need to relearn things, but we have an active mind, and we can relearn things because these are small changes. It’s just a little vocabulary kind of thing.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yes, exactly.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Speaking of which, we are not done with the name changes, are we?
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: No, no. There’s another one, but another really good one as well. So yes, there’s been a change, changing the Home template name to Blog Home. So, this one is for templates and touches on something that’s been around a little bit longer than patterns, I suppose. So, the name Home suggests that the template will display the site homepage. So, this is true when the reading settings of the site are configured to display the latest posts on the front page, but if there’s a static front page, then the home template will display the post page, not the homepage. So, this is where the confusion lies and has for a long time as well. But for block themes, it’s more easily surfaced, especially to people who aren’t deep in the code.
\n\n\n\nSo, the renaming of the home template in the site to Blog Home is a lot more descriptive what it’s actually being used for, whilst the template file name is still home.html. So, that still is a parallel of home.php. And so, it’s still exactly the same in the template hierarchy. It’s just the visual name that’s been changed. But again, I think it’s particularly useful for low-code or no-code users. It’s much easier to understand, and it just reemphasizes that it’s going to be used for the blog and not always the homepage. We’re not completely fixing anything here, but it’s certainly the start of hopefully addressing this issue that’s been resurfaced to no-code is basically… So yeah, I’m really excited to see if this does help and see what journey it takes us down into addressing the homepage confusion. It existed for a while.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And the way you explained it, I actually understood.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Cool.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: And I finally got the trigger that, “Oh, okay, now I got it.” But now the question for you, if I use the setting that I want a static page, then it just displays the page, right, from the page template that I designate as the front page, as the homepage.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yes. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you just have to be aware that that’s changing a template. And again, we could probably add some additional helper functionality in the site editor to help people understand that, because currently you have to jump out into the WP Admin, into the settings section, yeah, into the settings. So yes, I think we could maybe surface that in different areas, but then when I start to think about it, it also gets more confusing. But I’m sure we’ll figure out a way to make it make sense, because there’s additional confusion as well with the existence of the frontpage.html template, and that takes precedence over any other template to be the front page.
\n\n\n\nAnd so, obviously you can use that to your advantage if you want to be a really opinionated theme and say, “This is always going to be the front page. This is definitely the prettiest version of the patterns I can put together.” But then, because it’s so opinionated, always is the front page, it can be confusing to users who are trying to not make it the front page. So, there’s just additional legwork or additional click to get around it not being that template.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. And then there is a front-page.html.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yes. Yes. That’s the one I’m talking about. But yes, there’s also index. So, there’s home.html, which is the one that’s been visually renamed. There’s front-page.html, which is the one you just mentioned, and then there’s also index.html, which to anyone who’s worked with the web before, it’s hopefully the most easy to understand because it’s the index. But again, to non-coders, it’s just a third thing that could also be your front page, and that’s always the default. If nothing else exists, it’s index. But yeah, I understand how it can be really confusing. I mean, if you’ve ever looked at the WordPress template hierarchy page in the documentation, I think it’s fantastic because a really good visual map, but then the first time I saw it, I was like, “Oh, wow, there’s a lot of mapping going on here. There’s a lot of different options to choose from.”
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, indeed. Indeed.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: It’s a good challenge to have, I think, in the site editor. Yeah, I think we can fix it in many different ways. And yeah, we’ll get there.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, and you just reminded me, we have on the developer blog, one of the early posts was about the template hierarchy.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Oh yes, I remember. Yes.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yes.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yeah, it was a really good post.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: … demystifying home and post templates in WordPress theme development. And I’m kind of putting that link into the show notes fully knowing that it was before the name change.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yes. I think that’s okay.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: We need to review the post, so we can make sure that that’s the same with a new name change there. Cool. Yeah, that was an excellent article by Daisy Olsen, and had some great examples and screenshots there. Yeah. Excellent. So, what else?
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: I think the next thing was introducing more welcome guides. So again, I think this is a really good UX update. So, this is adding welcome guides to the page content focus and template focus, so the little well-designed models that pop up when you jump into different areas of the site editor. I think it’s easy for you users to be confused on… what you mentioned before… new users to be confused on whether they’re editing a page, editing a template, how the template influences the page, and vice versa, and which context they’re used in. So yes, so this is a great way to introduce people to the differences.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s also a good way for those of us who are new to this new site editor experience, and that’s also a new user, but for the first four years we were kind of trained to just click away the welcome guides because it hasn’t had anything new and it didn’t remember our choices. So it will come back, but it’s coming back with new content. So, read it a little bit because it helps you get over that hurdle, “Where am I and what am I doing,” quite easily and has some nice animations in there. I really like them, and they are hidden under the acronym NUX, and yeah, that’s new user experience. I always thought there was something like NPM and NPX and NUX. It’s all the same JavaScript library kind of thing. No, it isn’t. It’s new user experience.
\n\n\n\nSo, I read over it quite fast until I saw the words “welcome guide,” and I said, “Oh, there’s new content there.” And I checked it out and I really like it. And I learned a bit. If you want to get started quickly and not have to read through all the changelog and all the posts that are coming out, use the welcome guides. But we hopped over off something on themes, like add border and theme support, border theme support and link color theme support. That is a new thing that, actually, it was fixed in WordPress core, but needed to be synced up with the Gutenberg plugin. And you said you worked on it. What exactly had happened?
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yeah, I’m not sure what you’d call it, if it’s not a back foot. It’s like a forward foot.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: It’s a sync. It’s a sync.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: A sync.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: A kitchen sink. It’s a sink.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yes, sink. Yes. So, this is previously the border and link theme support. They were named experimental. So, this update basically takes out the experimental. Yeah, that’s essentially it. But yeah, it’s a really good update because I think the word experimental can be scary to anyone who’s included APIs in new plugins or themes. So yeah, just the fact that it’s not there anymore is brilliant.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, and that’s the support you said in theme.json for link color and that quite a bit. So, you have a UI for link color and border theme, border radios, border size, and border of the sides. So, you could have a left side and a bottom side border, but you don’t have a border on the left side or a right side and a top side or something like that. Yeah, so it’s really cool. The next thing is really cool and it’s not coming to 6.3. You need 16.2 to get it, and that’s that the typography, you can get some text orientation in a paragraph to go vertical.
\n\n\n\nOf course, you’re not going to do this for whole full paragraphs with multiple lines. You probably do this for a header or for a subheader or something like that. It’s not going to be in the heading block, but it’s in the paragraph block. But you need to enable it in the theme.json at all. And then it’s only available for paragraph blocks, so it’s still the early iteration, but I find it really cool. So, because it’s not in the heading, you could just change the font size of it to be a little bit bigger. You make it vertical, and then you can place it next to a paragraph in a group block row, and then you have some interesting layouts that you can play with. I find it really fascinating.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yeah, it is a really cool change. I remember a site I made years ago, probably 20 years ago, where I was playing around with text being vertical instead of horizontal, and it makes for some really interesting design capabilities. Yeah, it’s a really cool update. It’s also enabled on post navigation links as well, as well as the paragraph block, so the next and previous post, because we can maybe…
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, cool.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yeah, lots of design flexibility with those, because I guess they’re usually on the sides. So yeah, that aids going vertical as well as horizontal.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, nice. Yes. Oh, I didn’t know that. Yeah. Excellent. Yeah, must have missed it when I read the PR. Yeah, you could also do it next to an image or something like that. And you have full control over background, margins, color, so it really puts it to use in your designs and makes something amazing.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yes. Next up is the range control, so adding support for large 40-pixel number input size. So, I think this is a really nice visual update to the range control component in the editor, which helps land the UI for all components, because I think quite a lot of other components have been using this size. So yeah, it brings the range control into line and it affects the visual spacing around the number input for the range control. So, it’s much easier to read and use, and especially if it’s scanning to lots of components and settings, then yeah, it’s much more easier to read now.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And plugin developers can use it in their plugins as well. These are components that are available to any developer who uses the components, and now it’s an additional attribute for there to have some bigger numbers in there.
\n\n\n\nSo, the next thing is a new API and it makes the new “register, insert a media” category API extensible, so other plugin developers can use it to organize the media categories. So, this is probably one of the things that people waited for almost 20 years about, that there is a hook to insert media categories into WordPress. Have you played around with it? Do you know how it works?
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: I haven’t played around with it, but I’ve read the updates though. I think it’s a great update, especially for plugin developers, because it allows them to register their own media categories. Then they’ll be displayed in the inserter, so it’s perfect for plugins that are adding custom blocks. Extensibility is at the heart of WordPress as well, so I think this is a really good example of that.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Excellent. Yeah, so that brings us to one of the major changes, to TinyMCE deprecation. But don’t get scared; you still can use it. This change sets the path for the TinyMCE deprecation to update the experiments with a strategy to get the TinyMCE and the classic block not loaded automatically, but only when it needs to load. That definitely has a performance improvement. And right now it’s an experiment and needs to be tested, especially with the extensibility that is around TinyMCE that has been in WordPress for almost 20 years. But it’s also contained in classic blocks, and so the question is how it’s going to behave with whatever’s in the classic blocks and for Gutenberg. So, it’s not quite clear to me what the end goal is, but I think that is pretty much the end goal, to have TinyMCE not load automatically, but load only when it really needs to be loaded.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yeah, I think that’s the end goal to fully deprecated TinyMCE, which would be a massive boost to the performance of the editor, which is really great to hear. I was playing with this before… Plus, a common use case for the classic editor was to insert HTML using the code editor rather than the visual editor, so how you can switch between the code and the visual editor. So this is still possible, but if you use the code editor to do this with this experiment enabled, you’ll see a warning that says you’re trying to use a deprecated classic block.
\n\n\n\nBut what’s really cool is that it gives you the choice to convert the HTML to a custom HTML block, so using the new editor, or you can refresh the page to use the classic block if you prefer to do that. So, it gives you the option to do both, but converting to the custom HTML block is so quick. You just click the button, and it’s immediately there, and it just works as it was before. I think that’s really impressive, and I think it’ll help aid the transition to using the block editor as well.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think we all need a little help once in a while to see how the good things are. To make it totally clear, WordPress is not abandoning TinyMCE. If you’re using the classic editor, you will still have access to it. It will be backwards compatible, and it’s just that the classic block in Gutenberg is maybe on the way out with a TinyMCE. But it’s a start of an experiment. So, it could be another year or two, or maybe only half a year depending on how the experiments go. But yeah, try it out and see what you think about it. In the changelog, there’s the PR, but if you want to write it down on the podcast, it’s 50387. That’s the PR that deals with it. And there was a lot of discussion there as well, but I found it important that we talk about it. I am pretty sure it’s not the last time that we will talk about it.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: It’s the beginning.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: It’s the beginning. It’s the beginning of an experiment. What else was in 16.2 that we wanted to talk about? There’s a lot of bug fixes. There’s quite a few. Also, just a polish of copy and icons and all that. Global Stars Revision API. That is all for 6.3. I think we’re done. Are we?
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yes, I think so. Yeah, there are a lot of bug fixes though. I noticed there’s quite a lot of things like spacing updates to get a lot of the editor components in line, which it sounds like really tiny updates, but when you add them all together, I think it really aids the experience of the editor and it really makes a big difference, a good update.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. If you get more clarity and more consistency in the design, that definitely makes a difference.
\n\n\n\nYeah. So, I’m stopping just for a little bit at the documentation for the developers. There has been a push from Ryan Welcher to update some of the package documentation and add examples to the packages, so you know how they can be used and get started on using them without having to go through the source course and figure it out how you’re actually going to do the API there. And in this release, there was examples to the rich text package, to the keyboard shortcut package, and to the customized widget package. And I’m sure he’s working on more. There is a tracking issue in Gutenberg repo for these kind of updates. Another push on documentation is to add READMEs to some of the components that don’t have them because the examples and the README are automatically added to the handbook of the block editor. And if it’s in code, then automatically it will show up in the documentation.
\n\n\n\nSo, that’s definitely a great developer experience update, and it can only do one at a time, but sooner or later we all get through that.
\n\n\n\nAll right, and the last thing I wanted to mention is there will be revisions of your style variations or your global styles. 6.3, the revisions for styles will be in there or are already in there. So, when you change some of your styles and you say, “Okay, the one that I did yesterday, I would like better,” you will be able to go back to that particular moment in time in your revisions and make that the current one. The team was also working on giving the same revision treatment to template customization, but that didn’t work well enough to get into 6.3. So, that is something that will be in 6.4. Template revisions are not yet; they’re still experimental. You can get them in 16.2 and work with them, but they did not make it into 6.3.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: I think the style revisions are a really neat update, and actually the whole way you can view the style book now as well.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Oh yeah, that’s a real cool thing. Yeah.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yeah, it’s very cool, how fast you can preview the styles. But I really love how you can just switch the style book, and I don’t often hear it talked about that much. I think it’s a perfect way to test your theme. If you just open the style book, you can test so many aspects of a theme. And I think 6.3 is really highlighting how you can do this.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And there’s one other thing, it’s that you can preview themes. So, if you have downloaded a theme, a block theme, but you haven’t activated yet, you can actually preview that and also see it in the style book, so you see how your blocks behave with a new theme. I think that’s really cool. You can also see how your pages behave if you have certain designs on some pages or posts. Yeah, so the preview, that’s kind of getting feature parity almost with a customizer that was for classic themes where you also could do previews of themes with your own content. I think for many, many years that was really missing here in Gutenberg, and I really love that that’s coming to 6.3.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yeah, it’s very cool.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: And that is the changelog of 16.2.
\n\n\n\nWe have a big section in the What’s Active Development and Discussed because Matias Ventura has started thinking very deeply about the Gutenberg phase three. He published in March a more global high-level kind of approach on that, and now he published seven or five or six… Six. Six posts on certain aspects of it. So, he covers real time collaboration, outlines the concurrent collaboration and shares edits that he envisions or that it’s not only him, it’s the whole team, kind of what they’re going to work on. And then the workflows, he discussed requirements for full publishing workflow that’s async in comparison to sync where both… where sync means two people can edit the same thing at the same time and the system is handling all the edits and async workflows means, “Okay, I go in today. Tomorrow my editor has some comments and I go in back and kind of work through the comments,” similar like Google Drive, but the whole content team.
\n\n\n\nSo in most of the bigger sites, it’s not just one person publishing, it’s not just the writers publishing. It’s a whole team of media people, of video people, and they all need access to certain things and be part of the workflow and connect with each other. Right now, they do it outside of WordPress and somebody brings it all together, but we all hope so much to do this in WordPress. So, that’s the section of the workflows.
\n\n\n\nAnd then we talked about it already with the styles and templates, the whole system of revisions, which is a little bit archaic right now. It helps you, but it doesn’t know anything about blocks, and that will get a full overhaul of the current system making blocks aware and having all the data layers available for revision so editors and admins can see things.
\n\n\n\nAnd the fourth one was something that a lot of people really want is an overhaul of the media library with media management capabilities and unifying the interface between the block editor, and the media library, and then also of course improve the overall media workflows. So, dive into those. We have links for all of them in the show notes. Then there are two more that came out this week. Those four were last week, and this week came two more. One is about block libraries and then one about the admin design. So, I did not get into reading all of it. I skimmed a lot, but how are you doing with catching up with the new things?
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yeah, I’m trying to stay up-to-date. I’m also skimming a lot. The new admin design really caught my eye though, because again, I think it really helps to bring everything in line into the same design using the same design system. It just really makes everything look polished. I’m so proud to work on such a good product like this when it’s all coming together, and I’m really looking forward to the admin update. I’m sure so many people are as well looking forward to another redesign.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Apart from that, it really looks dated like 15 years ago. So, when you look at the designs… And I will also share an article by Sarah Gooding from the WP Tavern, where she actually captures a part of the conversation that happens on the post. So, each one of those posts, it’s not only reading through the post that Matias did, each one of them has between 15 and 25 or 40 comments where the whole contributors come together and have an input there. And you can too. And Sarah Gooding did a great job in summarizing the main points of the support that an admin support will get from the developer community, especially the screenshot that… Well, for me it means I saw a screenshot from a plugin settings page, and you come from something like the site editor where it says plugins or the list of plugins, and then you click on it.
\n\n\n\nAnd then the plugin has its own space with menu on the left menu on tabs on top, and so it feels like its own app, but with the same interfaces that Gutenberg is using or the block editor is using, or by that point, when that comes out, WordPress is using. So, it all will be more polished as you said. It will be more modern, but it will also be more contained, keeping the cognitive load that you have when you have too many things that you can click on that kind of overwhelms you. You can focus on that plugin settings and that plugins app, and it will be a similar experience than the block editors now.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yeah, that’s exactly it. I think it really helps with the user experience. It’s perfect. I’m really looking forward to it.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, me too. And we had a live Q&A with the developers from Give WP; that’s a very strong plugin with millions of users that allows nonprofits to collect donations on their website. And they are coming out with a revamp of their plugin using WordPress components and scripts and making it the same interface like the block editor, but you’re creating your own forms. So they have no additional… There’s no additional training necessary to get what each interface items does. You have the dropdowns that you know from the sidebar from the block editor, you have the inserter from the block editor, and you have the design tools that you need from the block editor. And they did a great job.
\n\n\n\nAnd Jason Adams and John Waldstein, they did a great demo about the stage of their revamp right now. And we have a great discussion with also Lena Morita who was on the show. She is actually a developer on the components team. It was a great conversation. So, I’ll leave a link in the show notes for you if you missed it, and you shouldn’t have missed it, of course, so you can get a record… We recorded it and the post with all the additional links there in the YouTube description. So, you can follow up along that.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Around the realtime collaboration as well, Riyad posted a really good post on the core blog as well. But yeah, maybe it’d be good to look to that as well if you’re more interested in the technical detail around realtime.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. He just posted it yesterday, I think, where he dives really into the architecture of the real time collaboration, because two years ago actually he did some experiments with a site called sblocks.com, where you could have two versions of the same post and then with different browsers, you could kind of edit it, and it was all there. And you could actually share it. I don’t know what happened with that, but so he has some great insights in how that’s going to work and we’ll leave that also in the show notes.
\n\n\n\nAnd then, this is just an announcement. If you are listening to this on the weekend and early next week, there will be another live Q&A on July 21st, and that’s with David Bowman and Alex Geatches and Joni Halabig. And we are talking about design systems and how they work with the theme.json.
\n\n\n\nSo, David and Alex, they are working on the WordPress VIP side of automatic, and they have built a bridge between Figma design system, token system, and the theme.json. And so, as a site manager or designer, you can keep in sync those two systems and don’t have to recreate things in theme.json, because there’s a rich plugin that does all the settings and the variables and all that for you for your next WordPress theme. So, spinning up a new site within the design system shouldn’t be too hard. So, check it in, check in with us on July 21st, 1700 UTC. The link is on the front page of the Gutenberg Times homepage. Of course, we have it also in the show notes. And if you listen to that after July 21st, it will be on YouTube under livestreams, so you can watch the recording there as well.
\n\n\n\nWell, this was a lot of announcements, so do you have anything that you want to announce? Well, you will be a 6.4 editor co-lead, tech lead for the editor.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yes.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: But you also work on themes, right?
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yeah.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: So, there is also a new default theme coming. Do you know anything about that? Do we have some rumors or some secrets we can share?
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yes. Well, I know it was really exciting. I think we’re going to be looking at how we handle post formats. There are ways to do it at the moment, but I don’t think they’re obvious. They’re not easy. So, I think maybe a focus of the new default theme will be to focus on post formats to help things… Podcast websites would be a good example. Yeah, that’s really exciting, because I imagine a lot of people have probably waited for that functionality as well.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. That has been a little bit neglected a bit.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yes.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: … over all the Gutenberg excitement. Yes, of course. Yeah. All right, so when people want to get in contact with you, Sarah, where can they connect with you or best connect with you?
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yes, so mikachan is my username on most formats, or mikachan_ where mikachan’s already been taken. And I’m on LinkedIn and all the usual places. So yeah, you can find me easily.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: All right, so mikachan, what is that?
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Oh, it’s a really old username I’ve heard since I was a kid, basically. It’s just an anime reference. I was an anime fan. I used to build fan sites using WordPress actually when I was a kid.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: So, you stopped building fan sites now?
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yeah. So yeah, it’s a little disappointing, isn’t it? Fan sites aren’t really a thing anymore. Maybe they should be. I think we should bring fan sites back.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Well, thank you so much. It was great fun to have you on the show, and I’m looking forward to working with you also on the 6.4 release, because we will probably connect quite a bit because Anne and I will be on the editor triage team.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yes, exactly.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: So, we’ll give you other things to shovel through.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Yeah, I’m really looking forward to working with you too. Thank you so much for having me.
\n\n\n\nBirgit Pauli-Haack: All right, Sarah. All right. Thank you so much. Bye-bye.
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris: Bye.
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Sun, 16 Jul 2023 10:16:12 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:19:\"Gutenberg Changelog\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:31;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:117:\"Gutenberg Times: Advanced patterns, collaboration, underrepresented-gender led WordPress 6.4—Weekend Edition 261\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:35:\"https://gutenbergtimes.com/?p=24798\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:151:\"https://gutenbergtimes.com/advanced-patterns-collaboration-designed-with-wordpress-video-underrepresented-gender-led-wordpress-6-4-weekend-edition-261/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:21829:\"Howdy,
\n\n\n\nThere is so much going on in the WordPress space: The next major release is less than four weeks away, Community Summit and WordCamp US will happen next month, the 6.4 release is getting started and while contributors are polishing, fixing and cleaning up the Site Editor, others are already working on Phase 3.
\n\n\n\nAnd next month I will be on vacation starting August 5th, 2023. Yes, for the first time in six years, I will miss WordCamp US, and seeing my WordPress friends. Lots of FOMO will come my way.
\n\n\n\nThursday, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, release lead of WordPress 6.4, kicked off the first Zoom meeting of the all-underrepresented-gender release squad to work on the next major release.
\n\n\n\nIt was lovely to see all the faces of the wonderful people. 6.4 Beta 1 is scheduled for September 26, 2023. It’s not that long until a ton of great new features will come to WordPress in November. It will bring a bit of Phase 3, a lot of polish for Phase 2, the Interactivity API, the fonts API and the interface to manage fonts for the site. I’ll watch the Make Core blog for Chomphosy’s ‘official’ Roadmap for 6.4.
\n\n\n\nAlright, that’s about the future. The first Dev Notes for WordPress 6.3 have already been published. And I hope to see you all at the Live Q & A next Friday! It’s going to be mind-blowing! Really.
\n\n\n\nHave a wonderful weekend and start into the next week!
\n\n\n\nYours, 💕
Birgit
PS: If you are new to Gutenberg Times and are interested in how it all began and became what it is now, Nadia Maya Ardiani interviewed me for Hostinger’s WordPress Experts blog.
\n\n\n\nNext Live Q & A: Design Systems and Theme.json on July 21, 2023
\n\n\n\nDavid Bowman and and Alec Geatches from WordPress VIP will show off how they keep design systems developed in Figma and themes in WordPress in synch and their workflows streamlined. Joni Halabi, senior developer from Georgetown University will join me as co-host.
\n\n\n\nWordPress 6.3 Beta 4 came out this week. It’s really coming down to the wire. If you haven’t tested your plugins, themes and other customization of your website, you should start now. You got less than a month to fix if something breaks.
\n\n\n\nNext week, the squad will release WordPress 6.3 RC 1, and with it the Fieldguide with the accompanying Dev Notes.
\n\n\n\nAnne McCarthy published three videos to show off great features coming to WordPress with the next version.
\n\n\n\nThis is also a reminder on the WordPress 6.3 Live Product Demo on July 20th, 2023 at 16:00 UTC (12 pm EDT / 18:00 CEST) with Rich Tabor and Anne McCarthy. There will be a Q&A session, and you may submit questions in advance via the #walkthrough channel on WordPress Make Slack.
\n\n\n\nLeonardus Nugraha, co-lead on the docs release team published WordPress 6.3: What’s Coming In the Next Major Update for Hostinger’s blog.
\n\n\n\nPaul Taylor of Big Bite also What’s new in WordPress 6.3 and sized up the second major release of 2023, which includes key improvements across page speeds, accessibility, and the editing experience.
\n\n\n\nGutenberg 16.2 was released and release manager Bernie Reiter highlighted in the release post What’s new in Gutenberg 16.2? (12 July)
\n\n\n\nSarah Norris, JavaScript developer and 6.4 editor tech co-lead joined me on the Gutenberg Changelog for the first time, and we discussed Gutenberg 16.2, WordPress 6.3, also 6.4 and Phase 3. It was a great joy and we had great fun recording and chatting. The episode 86 will arrive at our favorite podcast app over the weekend.
\n\n\n\n🎙️ Latest episode: Gutenberg Changelog #86 – WordPress 6.3, Gutenberg 16.2 and Phase 3 Collaboration with Sarah Norris as special guest, hosted by Birgit Pauli-Haack
\nLast week, Matias Ventura published four posts covering various aspects that will be considered for Phase 3 of the Gutenberg Project. This week, the series continued with one article on Block Library and the other one about the Admin Design.
\n\n\n\nRiad Benguella did a deeper dive into the architecture of developing for Real Collaboration in content creation. To accomplish this, Benguella proposes a Data synch engine, so developers on the project and those extending WordPress with plugins don’t need to know much about where the date is coming from or going. The technical solution for this is a “conflict-free replicated data type” (CRDT) and the most promising open-source framework to implement it in a web application is YJS.
\n\n\n\nThe six posts about Gutenberg Phase 3 have been out for a few days. The most excitement gathered Matias post on the new Admin Design. Sarah Gooding followed the discussion and summarized it in her article: WordPress Plans Ambitious Admin UI Revamp with Design System, Galvanizing Broad Support from the Developer Community.
\n\n\n\nNick Schäferhoff reported about the Real-time collaboration aspect for Gutenberg Phase 3: Real-Time Collaboration in WordPress: Here’s What to Expect. He not only gives you an overview from last week’s posts, he also help us understand why it’s important to expand WordPress in this way: “Seeing as many websites and content strategies are run by teams, giving people tools to collaborate directly in the environment they are working in would go a long way in making the creation process more seamless.” Schäfterhoff wrote. Towards the end of his post, he shared links to project where you can start experiencing a collaborative approach, starting with Asblocks by Riad Benguella.
\n\n\n\nThe video Designed with WordPress “is an ode to the editing and customization phases of our roadmap, and the beauty they can bring to your designs. It celebrates the tools and the possibilities they create. It encapsulates the exciting steps made in the past that propel the vibrant future of WordPress” It is so beautiful! Take a few moments and enjoy the sheer beauty.
\n\n\n\nWe discussed the Block Editor and WordPress 6.3 on the 260th episode of This Week in WordPress. It was a great pleasure and joy to talk again to Nathan Wrigley, and Michelle Frechette and to meet Katie Keith. “How many times can we say patterns?” Answer: A lot.
\n\n\n\n… and when you read Anne McCarthy’s post below, you also will know why!
\n\n\n\nIn their latest post, Core Editor Improvement: Advancing the power of Patterns, Anne McCarthy covers new features, big and small, coming to WordPress 6.3 that impact the experience of creating and using patterns. You can explore these features if you’re using Gutenberg 16.2 except the ability to rename and duplicate custom patterns coming to 16.3.
\n\n\n\nIn the latest Learn WordPress workshop, Bud Kraus Demystified the Navigation Block and showed you how to set up your site’s navigation now and in the future. How you build menus for your website had changed considerably and this is a great workshop to learn, what you have to relearn and unlearn 🙂
\n\n\n\nJustin Tadlock migrated one of his long-time plugins to also work with the site editor as a block: Breadcrumbs. You can now add a breadcrumb block to your pages and posts and archives, and it will automatically pick up the hierarchy and nested pages. You can change text color, background, and link color, including the hover state and adjust the padding and the margins. The plugin, I hear, has been submitted to the plugin repository, but there appears to be a 2-months waiting time to get approved. You can use it now by grabbing it from the GitHub repository.
\n\n\n\nIsabel Brison, co Editor Tech lead on the 6.3 release, published the first Dev Note from the Gutenberg project: Layout updates in the editor for WordPress 6.3. You learn more about the changes to layout support, CSS specificity, the new Grid type, to post template and spacer block of the Site editor.
\n\n\n\n “Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2022”
A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test and Meta team from Jan. 2021 on. Updated by yours truly. The index 2020 is here
Mary Baum posted her the first post on the WordPress Developer Blog. Make your site’s typography make a statement is the first post of a series of six tackling the ins and outs of typography in general and specifically for designers using WordPress and its site editor as a design tool. As the new #nocode site editor also attracts new designers and those without a long career in design, this series will help everyone to level up and build attractive, readable and fast websites.
\n\n\n\nOn the WordPress Developer Blog, Justin Tadlock published What’s new for developers? (July 2023). The sixth edition of a monthly roundup that showcases features that are specific to theme and plugin developers. The latest updates are focused on the upcoming WordPress 6.3 release.
\n\n\n\nEric Karkovack interviewed Riad Benguella about the Command Palette coming to WordPress 6.3 next month: A Closer Look at the WordPress Command Palette. “It opens up a world of possibilities. Imagine being able to change the price of a WooCommerce product without having to edit its post. Or you might display the latest entries from your contact form. The potential time savings could add up. Suddenly, what used to require dozens of clicks could be reduced to a few keywords.” Karkowack wrote.
\n\n\n\nAsked about the next steps for the feature, Benguella answered: “Right now, the Command Palette is available in the Site Editor and the post editor. But we need to add it to more pages and more contexts to take advantage of its capabilities. For instance, when a block is selected, we may offer contextual commands to manipulate and interact with that block.”
\n\n\n\nThe next WordPress Developer Hours will take place on July 26, 2023, at 11 am EDT / 15:00 UTC and will cover the topic of Styling Blocks. It will have two presentations: Two demos/presentation:
\n\n\n\nNeed a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s master branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.
Have you been using it? Hit reply and let me know.
Questions? Suggestions? Ideas? Don’t hesitate to send them via email or send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.
\n\n\n\nFor questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com
\n\n\n\nFeatured Image: Haus der Kunst in Munich, Germany exhibits art by Hamid Zenati. Photo by Birgit Pauli-Haack
\n\n\n\nDon’t want to miss the next Weekend Edition?
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Gutenberg project has aimed to revolutionize how we manage web content as much as Johannes Gutenberg did the printed word. The project’s roadmap is comprised of four unique phases:
\n\n\n\nWith the upcoming release of WordPress 6.3, Phase 2 of the Gutenberg project is coming to a close; a journey worth celebrating.
\n\n\n\nThis video is an ode to Gutenberg’s editing and customization phases, celebrating the new design tools and the possibilities they create. The piece encapsulates the exciting steps made in the past that propel the vibrant future of WordPress.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEverything showcased in the video is built entirely with the WordPress Editor, using currently available blocks, patterns, and themes. This new era has opened the ability for the design community to contribute to the project directly without depending on developers to translate their ideas into designs. Consider this an invitation for designers to join a new generation that embraces the diverse and expressive capabilities of WordPress.
\n\n\n\nThe work that goes into Gutenberg is a powerful testament to the collaboration of coders, developers, and designers in our community. United, we strive to build WordPress into a realm of significance and lasting impact.
\n\n\n\nVideo credits: Tino Barreiro, Beatriz Fialho, Takashi Irie, Henrique Lamarino, Rich Tabor, Pablo Honey, Matías Ventura, and Holographik.
\n\n\n\nThank you to the post authors Tino Barreiro, Nicholas Garofalo, Dan Soschin, Rich Tabor, and Chloé Bringmann.
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Fri, 14 Jul 2023 22:33:07 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:15:\"Chloe Bringmann\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:33;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:55:\"WPTavern: WordPress 6.3 to Introduce a Development Mode\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:30:\"https://wptavern.com/?p=146917\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:66:\"https://wptavern.com/wordpress-6-3-to-introduce-a-development-mode\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:2441:\"As the dev notes for the upcoming WordPress 6.3 release are rolling out, there are so many exciting features that have not yet been highlighted. The new development mode, initiated by declaring the WP_DEVELOPMENT_MODE constant, is one that will be particularly useful for theme developers initially.
“The development mode configured on a site defines the kind of development work that the site is being used for,” Google-sponsored WordPress Core Committer Felix Arntz said. This mode is not recommended for production sites.
\n\n\n\nThe possible values for the WP_DEVELOPMENT_MODE constant include core, plugin, theme, all, or an empty string (which is the default). The “all” value is applicable to sites where all three aspects may be modified, such as a client website in progress.
“There are currently only a few use-cases in WordPress core which are determined by the development mode, but this will likely increase in the future,” Arntz said. “Most usage today relates to theme.json caching.”
Since the cache is usually only invalidated when the theme is updated, it can become cumbersome to developers who are actively modifying theme.json and have to manually invalidate it to see their changes. This caching functionality is bypassed when the value is set to “theme.”
\n\n\n\nAlthough the WP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE constant seems similar to the new developer mode, it specifically denotes whether the environment is development, staging, or production but does not specify what type of development is being done.
\n\n\n\n“It is likely that you will only use the WP_DEVELOPMENT_MODE constant on a site where WP_DEBUG is enabled and WP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE is either ‘development’ or ‘local,’ since it is not advised for development to occur directly against staging or production environments,” Arntz said.
For more details on when and how to use Developer Mode, and code samples for checking if development mode is active on a site, developers can refer to the dev note published to the make.wordpress.org/core blog.
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Fri, 14 Jul 2023 22:23:03 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"Sarah Gooding\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:34;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:83:\"WPTavern: Bluehost Launches WonderSuite Product with AI-Powered Site-Building Guide\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:30:\"https://wptavern.com/?p=146781\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:94:\"https://wptavern.com/bluehost-launches-wondersuite-product-with-ai-powered-site-building-guide\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:3937:\"Bluehost launched its new WonderSuite product this week, which introduces a setup and site creation experience guided by AI. In September 2022, the hosting company debuted its managed WooCommerce packages after acquiring YITH, a WordPress plugin company with more than 100 WooCommerce extensions. The new WonderSuite product is included in all Bluehost WordPress hosting plans and is not specific to online stores.
\n\n\n\nWonderSuite brings together solutions from YITH and Yoast and integrates them into a new unified design that is based on Yoast’s open source React component library. This interface was introduced as an update in Yoast 20.0 with mixed feedback. Although many users reacted positively to the modern design, some are not keen on plugins building their own UI in the admin. Bluehost is using this component library to streamline and unify the UI for its various products inside the admin.
\n\n\n\nWonderSuite is aimed at small and medium-sized businesses, agencies, and freelancers who are just getting online. The major update here is the WonderStart onboarding experience that asks the user specific questions and then populates other parts of the website building process with their answers. For example, social media handles will automatically sent to SEO optimization and added to the social buttons block.
\n\n\n\nBluehost also pulls the WonderStart data into the WonderBlocks, which are used to create a library of block patterns and page templates using images and suggested text based on the user’s entries during onboarding. All of this works with the block-based YITH Wonder Theme, which is free on WordPress.org and active on more than 10,000 sites.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWonder theme users have access to some patterns and templates but Bluehost customers have more designs available to them in combination with WonderBlocks. Those hosting with Bluehost who don’t want to use the default Wonder Theme will can still use the WonderBlocks pattern library with any block-based theme.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBluehost is one example of a host that is putting AI to use inside the admin. The new WonderHelp section is an AI-powered guide that users can tap into during the site-building process. Users can ask it to create a blog and the feature will provide a guide inside the site builder with instructions for what to do on each page.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe company is working on a feature called WonderAssist that is anticipated later in 2023. It will provide AI-powered content generation with relevant copy, product descriptions, and SEO-friendly excerpts integrated with the other parts of WonderSuite.
\n\n\n\nBluehost’s e-commerce customers also have access to WonderCart, which provides a collection of cross-sell and upsell features, along with promotional and discount options inside a single, unified interface, instead of spread across multiple plugins and tools.
\n\n\n\nExisting Bluehost customers can find the updated plugin in their WordPress sites with the new products available. Onboarding is currently only available for users starting new websites but a representative said they are working on creating a path that allows existing customers to re-route through the onboarding experience.
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Fri, 14 Jul 2023 20:33:36 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"Sarah Gooding\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:35;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:66:\"Do The Woo Community: The Do the Woo Friday Show with Vova Feldman\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:28:\"https://dothewoo.io/?p=75567\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:65:\"https://dothewoo.io/the-do-the-woo-friday-show-with-vova-feldman/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:418:\"In today\'s show Vova Feldman co-hosts as we chat about all things when it comes to WordPress and WooCommerce builders comfort zone.
\n>> The post The Do the Woo Friday Show with Vova Feldman appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community .
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Fri, 14 Jul 2023 07:51:00 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:5:\"BobWP\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:36;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:126:\"WPTavern: WordPress Plans Ambitious Admin UI Revamp with Design System, Galvanizing Broad Support from the Developer Community\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:30:\"https://wptavern.com/?p=146844\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:136:\"https://wptavern.com/wordpress-plans-ambitious-admin-ui-revamp-with-design-system-galvanizing-broad-support-from-the-developer-community\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:6354:\"WordPress’ admin is on deck for a long-awaited makeover after Gutenberg lead architect Matías Ventura published plans for a revamped admin design as part of the Phase 3: Collaboration road map.
\n\n\n\n“As WordPress turns twenty years old, the overall aim of this work is to improve upon this experience at a foundational design level, giving plugins and users more control over the navigation while ensuring each WordPress experience is recognizable, intuitive, accessible, and delightful,” Ventura said.
\n\n\n\nHis post is a follow-up to some earlier admin concepts he published a year ago which evolves the admin towards more fluid browsing and editing flows. This is similar to the block editor design that positions the admin frame as a shell that wraps around a canvas that contains the content in a zoomed state. Instead of users clicking back to access navigation tools, the tools remain present but outside of the canvas view.
\n\n\n\nAlthough contributors have not yet officially produced any designs for the project, Ventura shared a light version of an admin concept.
\n\n\n\nOne aspect of the proposed plans that has energized the developer community is the prospect of the admin getting rebuilt with an extensible design system.
\n\n\n\n“This effort is also an opportunity to formalize the design primitives and interaction paradigms that are part of the UI component system begun in wordpress/components,” Ventura said.
“A crucial aspect is to ensure WordPress itself is built with the same pieces and APIs that plugin authors can use. Aside from color themes, our set of primitive components also need to work in dense environments like the editor, as well as environments that need more breathing room and focus like admin sections. Density, clarity, usability, and accessibility are paramount.”
\n\n\n\nThe admin design concepts have renewed developers’ excitement about the future of WordPress, but they are also hoping this revamp will solve several long-standing problems with the interface.
\n\n\n\nOne recurring theme in the feedback was the need to find a way to curb the pollution of top-level menus and the out of control admin notices, which are hijacked by plugin developers in the absence of a standard notification system.
\n\n\n\n“It’s really about aligning APIs, ensuring we have semantic descriptions of capabilities, and offering the right levels of controls for both plugins and users,” Ventura said.
\n\n\n\n“I know it’s a fairly limited example, but there’s a nice balance in the ability to pin or unpin plugin sidebars on the editor, from the perspective that plugins can be opinionated, and users can still interact with those opinions.”
\n\n\n\nAnother challenge that concerns developers is ensuring the new design adequately accommodates WordPress sites with large numbers of posts, pages, categories, menus, comments, and other things that can easily overwhelm a UI that was intended to be simplified.
\n\n\n\n“As part of leveraging the components across the admin interface, we need to address functional gaps (like table and list views, bulk editing operations, etc) and assist plugin needs for anything that might not be already addressed that should be addressed,” Ventura said. “Ultimately, the design library needs to be showcased in the wordpress.org website as a clear resource for people building upon WordPress.”
\n\n\n\nDevelopers who participated in the comments were optimistic about the project and reacted positively to the concepts Ventura shared.
\n\n\n\n“I often say, white space is where the magic happens,” WordPress designer and developer Brian Gardner said.
\n\n\n\n“The light admin concept is breathtaking and gets me even more excited than I am now about the future of WordPress.”
\n\n\n\nSeveral developers commented on how eagerly they are awaiting an update to a modern UI that reduces the number of page refreshes.
\n\n\n\n“Wow! It’s gonna be amazing!” WPMarmite founder Alex Borto said. “A complete admin fluid browsing experience is much needed. I dream of navigating through the admin area without any page loads!”
\n\n\n\nFor years, WordPress developers have been expected to try to match WordPress’ dated admin UI on their settings pages and the Yoast SEO plugin drew criticism when it released version 20.0 with a new modern interface. Many users are not keen on plugins building their own UI in the admin, as it can make things more confusing. Having a standard set of UI components would make things easier for developers who are extending WordPress.
\n\n\n\n“This gives me great optimism about securing the next 20 years of WordPress’s success,” WordPress developer Mike McAlister said. “The fact that you can do anything with WordPress is incredible, it’s probably our biggest strength.
\n\n\n\n“But without standardized design patterns for the admin, we’ve seen that devolve into a UI/UX headache with plugin and theme developers baking their own experiences inside WordPress. Reining this in and creating a unified experience for everyone to buy into will not only make it easier on product creators, it will also be a huge win for users.”
\n\n\n\nVentura said this document is just an outline of the admin design project and that it will be followed up with more in-depth design explorations further down the road.
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Fri, 14 Jul 2023 03:09:10 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"Sarah Gooding\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:37;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:96:\"Post Status: WordPress 6.3 Beta 4 • Help Test • DEIB New Team Proposal • Gutenberg Phase 3\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:32:\"https://poststatus.com/?p=149842\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:77:\"https://poststatus.com/wordpress-6-3-beta-4-help-test-deib-new-team-proposal/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:22623:\"WordPress 6.3 is less than one month away. Get started testing now and tune in for the live product demo.
As we head into WordPress 6.4’s kickoff, it’s time to set our sights on Gutenberg Phase 3: Collaborative Editing. Your feedback to the ideas presented is important.
The first cohort of New Contributor Mentorship Program has also begun. There is clearly more interest than capacity to staff in this first group, which is a very encouraging sight.
β WordPress 6.3 Beta 4![\"📺\"](\"https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f4fa.png\")
6.3 Live Product Demo Help Test WordPress 6.3
3⃣ Gutenberg Phase 3![\"👩🏻🏫\"](\"https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f469-1f3fb-200d-1f3eb.png\")
Contributor Mentorship Program!
>
>
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\n\n\n\nBeautiful themes, built-in SEO, and payment tools, and access to over 50,000 plugins. Everything you need for your business, plus 24/7 support from WordPress experts.
\n\n\n Mentioned in the show: You can follow Post Status and our guests on Twitter:The Post Status Draft podcast is geared toward WordPress professionals, with interviews, news, and deep analysis.
Browse our archives, and don’t forget to subscribe via iTunes, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Stitcher, Simplecast, or RSS.
Cory Miller (00:00:00) – All right. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Post Edits Draft. We’ve got another interview in our series on agency journeys. And I’m talking to a long time friend of mine, Rob Carnes, who has been very active in post. It’s been to a bunch of our meetups and I’m really excited to share his story today. So Rob, thanks for being on The Post podcast.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:00:21) – My pleasure, Corey. Glad to be here.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:00:24) – Well, Rob, let’s dive in. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your agency today. Name and what you do. What kind of work primarily you do for your clients.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:00:34) – Okay, So my name is Rob Cairns. I’m in the greater Toronto area of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I should tell you, before I got into running an agency, I have a very tech heavy background which a lot of agency owners don’t have. So I come out of an enterprise healthcare environment, doing servers, doing all kinds of cool stuff to support one of Toronto’s biggest hospitals.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:00:58) – Before that I was actually an old time COBOL programmer. There’s probably a word that you haven’t heard in a long, long time, and I spent some time in the financial industry, so I’ve got a bit of a business background. And then I jumped into agency life because, you know, I always tell the story. I never planned to be in marketing because I had a marketing professor in school back in the 80s who came in the class, and her whole thing was, Oh, I’m good. I’m here because I want my summers off. And I said, I swore then in there I’d never be a marketer if you paid me money to. Well, I lied. So, yeah. And I run I run an agency that’s WordPress focused. A lot of it is WordPress security stuff right now and some builds and then a lot of email marketing and consulting these days. That’s kind of where I’m at.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:01:50) – Yeah. And what’s your agency name?
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:01:53) – Stunning digital marketing.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:01:55) – And what’s the website for your.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:01:58) – Digital marketing is the agency site and digital marketing.info is like my Linktree site. It’s got links to everything I do on the web and where you can find me.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:02:09) – Excellent. Excellent. Well, I know as I’ve gotten to know you through some of the meetups, too, I hear more and more about the work you do, and it always impresses me. You’re like, Hey, is anybody worried about this particular update? And and I know you managed quite a few sites and it always I always like lean in when you talk about that because it’s at the heart of what a lot of agency work, particularly at post is that our agencies do is that beast of maintaining WordPress across multiple WordPress client sites. Well, great. Thank you for that. So tell me a little bit about how you got there. I heard a little preface of that, but I wanted to start out with where you are today. Um, and then talk about how you got there. That’s always the compelling part of these Journey series to me is what happened before.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:02:59) – So this is today and then what? What’s a little snippet of how what led up to where you are today?
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:03:06) – So where I am today was kind of how I got there was us working in healthcare. I wasn’t happy, I’ll tell you that now. I was working probably 60 to 70 hours a week at the time. So this is going back 14 years ago was when we started and I was extremely unhappy and somebody said to me, So why don’t you just go? And I said, Well, I’ve been here 21 years, so if they want to get rid of me, it’s going to cost some lots of money to get rid of me. So let’s force the hand and see where it goes. Well, 14 years ago, my dad was sick with pancreatic cancer at the time he actually passed away July 8th, the anniversary that’s coming up. And they decided, knowing I was going to be taking some time off, they decided we need to we’re going to make some changes and you can go away.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:03:56) – And at that point, I was already building WordPress websites on the side. So I just kind of transitioned to what I was doing on the side full time. Now here’s where it got interesting. I decided really quickly only building the website, it’s only part of getting it out there. You still got a market that site and you got to do it properly. So I made a decision then and there. I was going to build a full stack marketing agency. I’ve taken some courses, a lot of courses. One of my mentors in this space is a gentleman by the name of Paul Tobey, who I’m founder of. Paul. Toby’s actually the father of Adrian Toby, the founder of Groundhog, who you know. So that’s.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:04:40) – Love.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:04:40) – Adrian Yeah, love Adrian, Love. His dad saw his dad in January, actually, and we sat in his house and listened to him play some jazz tunes for us where we were visiting and and then transitioned in and at one time was offering all kinds of services and then just realized some of these are just don’t want to do so I just kind of niche down and got out of what I didn’t want to do so.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:05:10) – Got you. So how long ago did you go? Full time with the business?
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:05:16) – 14 years ago.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:05:18) – 14 years ago. Okay. That’s awesome. We were going strong about the same time.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:05:22) – Yeah, about same time. And you. And you and I connected, I think the first time about 14 years ago when I was in the headway community. And you were running the items community. And you’d be proud to know two of the products in my security stack back up by the in 19 security are still there to this day so.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:05:40) – Oh that’s fantastic to hear. Well, okay, So I’m really curious. Was there a point when you were like, doing this on the side? What was that juncture when you’re like, okay, I’m going to do this full time? A lot of the stories we hear, I hear in It’s My Own is some event. Something helped kind of catalyze the process to become a full time entrepreneur. And so I’m curious. So not happy, of course. And then, hey, I think you might have mentioned this just a second ago, but I want to make sure I’m clear on it.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:06:13) – So was there event that kind of like, okay, I’m doing this full time, this is the only thing I’m doing.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:06:18) – So my as I say, my dad was battling pancreatic cancer at the time. Oh, right. Yeah. I went on three weeks vacation after I was on the corporate project, number one, and amassing overtime like nothing. And I walked back in on a Monday morning. I got a call from the director’s secretary at 10 a.m. and say, Director won’t see you in a boardroom at 3:00. And the boardroom was not the normal boardroom for meetings. So I just kind of put my feet up and said, okay, I know how this day’s going to play out. Welcome back from vacation for me. And believe it or not, I actually shipped everything personal home from work at lunchtime in a cab because I saw the writing on the wall. I’d seen it on the wall for a while. Yeah. Then I get, um, I get called in and the director says, Do you know why you’re here? I said, So you’re going to let me go, so let’s just get it over with.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:07:16) – And the h.r. Manager turned to me and said, how do you how do you feel about all this? And my response at the time was, my lawyer will tell you at 9:00 tomorrow morning. Now you’re like no other comment.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:07:27) – Now at this time, you were already doing things on the side, though, right? Yeah, I think that’s important to note in the story because, you know, some of these events that happen, but you were already kind of testing the waters, building some kind of side hustle side gig on the side. So you didn’t just, you know, jump out into the ether. You had something kind of built up. Were you doing work for like client? I mean, friends? How did the the side gig kind of start parallel to that side gig?
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:07:59) – Actually, it’s really interesting you ask that question. Being in tech, I’m like a resource in my family and you can appreciate that. So I did go to the let’s send an email to let’s ask the question.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:08:13) – And I actually got fed up with family, believe it or not, and I wrote a website at that time was HTML and said, by the way, here’s all the family pictures from the event last week because I was also the manager of all that digital stuff. And by the way, here’s links to all the questions you guys asked me and nobody’s allowed to ask me a question until you go to these links and and actually do your own homework. So that was my start into domains and all of that and web stuff. And the other thing that started it was this is going back to the days of dial and dialing Internet providers, if we remember those days. Yep. And trauma, they were a dime a dozen. So I used to switch providers, i.e. email services more than most people because I get fed up with one dial in provider and I cancel. I go to another one, I cancel, I go to another one, I cancel. So I finally said, Forget this, I’m going to register a domain which I still have to this day.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:09:15) – And then that was kind of my foray in. And then after doing static sites, I realized WordPress was the way to go and that’s what kind of opened the door.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:09:24) – So what was your introduction to WordPress? What kind of time period did you start using?
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:09:28) – WordPress would have been about 16, 15 years ago. 16 years ago?
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:09:32) – Yeah, right. Right. In its first early heyday for sure. That’s about the same time I got started with WordPress, this cool platform that you didn’t have to manage with all these HTML top software and updated 100 pages you could do with one click. Essentially this concept of content management system was really, really crazy and awesome.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:09:53) – We all remember the famous five minute WordPress install where our our hosting providers didn’t have a one click installer like stop flashes or any of them. We had to do it ourselves, right?
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:10:05) – And yeah, we did it. I mean, I’m trying to remember when I did that, if it was FTP, you know, putting it on the server.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:10:14) – Yeah, I’m trying to think back about that. I use soft tactless quite a bit in the early days, but that was magical back then. If you think about it, it’s like I want the ability to do build a website and I don’t have to learn too many technical logistics. I remember googling. What does FTP mean? That was one of our first post that I themes because I was like, if I have this question, I bet you a bunch of other people have this question. But yeah, WordPress made it easy.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:10:40) – Yeah. I have to tell you a funny story. You appreciate being over it. I think so. I had a client years ago. It was Australian, one of my first big clients, and he didn’t see the spending the money on something like backup buddy. So the silly client came back to me and said, So write me the documentation process of tobacco and restore a website menu and document it out. And the story goes that the cost to him paying for that documentation at the time would have cost him more than a yearly license for backup money.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:11:12) – Well, even or not. So needless to say, he became a backup buddy. Pretty convert pretty quickly. Corey.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:11:20) – So. Well, okay, so you go full time with the agency starting to do on work. I know somewhere in there was like, Hey, there’s more to just the actual website build. There’s marketing different parts around the website. Um, as you look back, you know, 15 years now, what were some of the catalytic events that help you in your agency, personal professional, WordPress, all these things. If you look back where like 3 or 4 of the things that really made the difference in your agency to where you’re now, I know you’ve been doing this a long time. I know you’ve been able to have freedom of life to do different things in your life as part of the business part of WordPress, which is always the magic, I think, WordPress. But if you look back, what are those couple of things that kind of stand out?
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:12:06) – Um, a couple of things.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:12:07) – One is I come from a family of entrepreneurs, so my mother is 78 years old, still alive and still selling houses, believe it or not. As a real estate agent, my aunt who passed away at 92, was one of the top real estate brokers for Century 21 in the Farmington, Detroit area for many, many years. First successful. I come from a family who’s done business on their own, so that helps. My father was a CFO for an insurance broker, so that helps. That helped install some money sense into me and some business sense into me. I’m also a lifelong learner. So you and I have talked over the years about how much reading I do or how much listening to other podcasts. I do believe it or not, my own podcast is not on my podcast player backdrop. I’m busy listening to everybody else’s because think you got to get a variety of point. And then kind of just people along the way. People like yourself. People like Paul. Toby Paul was a big catalyst for giving me credit and saying, you know, more than like 75% of the world.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:13:21) – Just go after it. So Paul was really good for me around mindset more than just technical stuff, so that was good. And then things like in my life recognizing and you and I have had this conversation about mental health challenges and the whole pearls around that. You’ve been through it. I’ve been through it. We’ve talked about it very candidly together over the years. That has helped. Am probably. 200% more mental health. Healthy today in my 50s and was in my 30s. I would say that, you know.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:13:58) – I think I want to say ditto. I think I think so.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:14:02) – And then surrounding yourself with the right people and people like yourself, people like post others group people like, you know, people outside of the post group, people you can go to and say, Hey, I just need an ear or, Hey, I’m stuck on something technical. I should know doing that. And then kind of. A big part of all this was deciding a number of years ago that I’m such a security junkie and I always was, even when I was in health care, and I need to dive into the security space and put my time and money there.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:14:38) – And that was a big part of it, too. And that’s how that came to birth. You mentioned, I imagine, websites as of yesterday’s count 418, believe it or not, just from an update in security perspective and growing by the day. So.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:14:53) – It’s it’s for sure become a thing in a good part of our industry and community that there’s agencies like yours and I’ve talked to a lot that that are recognized WordPress is awesome. There’s a lot of things that go into it as far as keeping those things updated. So somebody goes, Oh, I built it, you know, I built the baseball field, Field of Dreams. It’s there. Cool. Everybody’s going to come to it. There’s two sides of the coin that’s really interesting with your story. One is that updates security. Part of it got to keep the field maintained. The other side is the marketing part. I found this fascinating because you’ve got this to blend of marketing and the really the maintenance said that includes this big topic called security.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:15:37) – Yep, it’s true. And like one of the biggest things I think agency owners don’t do well is they don’t manage their own mailing lists, let alone their client mailing lists. And email marketing has become one of my strengths over the years and think that is a big deal because the only thing you really own is your website. In your mailing list. Everything is kind of what we call rented land or other people’s land in the rules change by the day and it gets to be awful.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:16:07) – So yeah, yeah, it’s, it’s interesting. I’ve talked to a lot of people. I think a lot of the WordPress community saw one thing from my work at things, but I go, you know, one want to know the key to what we built. There’s a lot of keys, right? But one of the big keys, especially marketing, was email marketing. And I love how you said website, what you really own, the website and email address. You don’t even own the rankings. You got to keep working on those things.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:16:32) – You got to you don’t even necessarily on the traffic. You got to keep working on those things. But when you have the what click for me with email marketing, was this old school, now old school concept of direct marketing when people used to go door to door and still do of course, to sell something to that person directly. And I think that was when it clicked for me is email is direct marketing where I don’t control the algorithms and whatever tech billionaire is going to buy another of the social media platforms. But if I consistently build I was actually talking to entrepreneur last week about this, just she’s just getting started with the physical product. And I said, Hey, you know, all the jazz and the sexiness is out on the social media platforms. However, it’s a great way to get started, push them, funnel them into an email where you can still to date in 2023, directly market. It still works, but so many are adverse to it or don’t do the work to keep up their keep up, grow, maintain their email lists and use them properly.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:17:37) – And to segment them properly. Mean the big issue is. So I’ll give you an example. I have an email list that’s running about 7500 active right now. I’ve probably got, if you count people have an open stuff in like the last 60 days and probably closer to 1200. So the key is not to send emails to your host, send them to the 7500 that are active and then every six months touch base with the other people once in a while, like because honestly, that’s waste of time and money. Like don’t put your emphasis there, but you segment your list and figure out what people want from you and who’s going to open stuff. And as a result, on that 7500, I run an open rate of about listeners about 62% on a regular basis. Which is incredible.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:18:29) – Yeah, indeed. And it all takes work. Websites, take work, emails take a work to properly do it well. So. So you know, a couple of the things I’m interested in. The last 15 years or so you’ve been doing, this is what you’ve seen kind of transition the evolution of WordPress you know, from and websites within that.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:18:53) – So you know how WordPress has gone in the last 15 years. Where do you think it is now? Where do you think it’s going in the future, what your clients are seeing and value in as part of having a great web presence? And I’m curious your thoughts on those two things. So the underlying technology has grown 15 years. We just celebrated 20th anniversary of WordPress, which is just fascinating to me. Um, and then, you know, this, this changing perception, I think growing, valuing perception of websites, the value of having a WordPress type website.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:19:29) – So there’s a couple of things. When we all started with WordPress, you and I, it was basically a blogging platform and now we’re building these whole robust membership sites, e-commerce sites, we’re building all this stuff and it’s incredible. And people say, Oh, why don’t you go to an e-commerce platform? Well, I have to tell you, I picked up the paper today, this morning before we jumped on this call. Corey and Shopify, who we all know is one of the big e-commerce products, is in trouble with the Canadian government because they refuse to hand over shopping records to the tax people so they can go after individuals.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:20:10) – And the cool thing about WordPress is that’s all self contained. So as we get into this privacy era, everything’s within your dashboard and you can even buy marketing solutions like Groundhog Adrian, Toby or Fluent CRM, another one that resides right inside that dashboard which protects your privacy and puts you in control. And I think that’s the whole thing about WordPress. The other big thing I’ve seen is a big change in the hosting space. And you’ll agree with me, um, what’s old is good and what hosting companies have reinvented themselves in the last while. And two I like to point out to is one over at New fold and we both of us have a mutual friend there in the name of Dave Ryan at Neufeld. So Dave and his team, I’ve had many dealings with them. They were the old endurance and they came out of that. And they’re trying to reinvent themselves by running around and buying plug ins like they bought Yoast and they bought it and doing things like that. And then important for new fold, they’ve become more community aware than they’ve ever become before.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:21:19) – So this was not the idea of eight years ago or nine years ago. I can guarantee that. And they’ve changed. And then you take somebody like her friends up at GoDaddy and, you know, I know that team pretty well for work I’ve done, and they’ve reinvented themselves. They’ve come out of the ashes of the Danica Patrick ads, as we call them. Remember those? Could you see a sexist ad like that flying in today’s society? I don’t think so.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:21:50) – No. We’ve evolved past that for sure for for better.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:21:55) – But they’ve also reinvented themselves. And then even in a hosting space, you got companies like Liquid Web and WP Engine and Cloud, and then you’ve got companies that were leaders that have kind of dropped off. And a company I throw into a group like that is Siteground think, you know. Ten years. Five years ago, they were great. And then somethings kind of happened. So things go cyclical. Um, in terms of the technology more, it’s worth mentioning where we’ve gone.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:22:25) – So we’ve gone from coding and WordPress with plugins to page builders and your team and I think this is one of the first with, with your builder product, right? And themes to, to build sites. And then we got into things like headway, which we all know the story of what happened there and they were part of their problems. They were miles ahead of their time and just not adapted. And then we got into the traditional page builders like the Beaver Builders, the Yeah, Elementor, the bricks, that kind of stuff, which is prominent now. And now we’re headed to this magical thing called blocks. And you know, there’s a couple block ecosystems. The one I use is cadence. I’ve been all in with Cadence for a couple of years now. So there’s evolution, that spot. And I think we’re we’re starting to see more is WordPress is becoming more than just a publishing platform. Automattic owns Tumblr, Automattic owns pocket casts, one of the biggest pocket podcast players out there. They own the day One journal, which is a journaling app, um, would encourage anybody out there who needs a journaling product to go get it.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:23:45) – It’s worth every penny of it, like honestly. So they’re trying to democratize that whole, the whole solution. So, so a lot that’s gone on in 20. Um.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:23:59) – Yeah, there’s a whole history there and everything you talked about. I think what stands out was the hosting industry. It’s definitely evolved, grown and a lot of money has come into WordPress hosting space in particular. You talk about new Fold in Endurance, for instance, like it’s turned over, been sold and bought so many acquisitions in the space and for good reason, because WordPress is a great platform for millions of people to build their website on. So but you know, there’s a trend there too, which is you talked about the reinvention and kind of coming out of stuff. What I’ve seen in 15 years plus years or so is. Yeah, it starts out good. Trying to claim her to get new customers. New clients, show them, you know, help them with their stuff. And it seems a lot of cyclical ness of like, okay, they reached this point where now they’re trying to really all the hosting companies, I would say, should make a profit.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:25:02) – But then there’s a swath that like, okay, increasingly trying to make it more profitable to understand part of business. However, then you see customer service and support start to kind of fade with some of that and then you get this whole, okay, they’re going down and then going up. And I’ve I’m not going to name the names, but there’s a lot there where you see the cyclical up and down of that hosting side, which isn’t always healthy for WordPress either. I get it as a business part. What they need to do for their shareholders, partners, all that kind of stuff. But it’s definitely changed from like 2008 when I think this was on a shared hosting plan for like, I don’t know, $5 a month or $10 a month at like HostGator. And it’s I’ve kind of bemoaned it some because what the effect now is the experience for the WordPress user, those people that are your clients that are using their website and there’s that up and down. They’ve had to ride some of that and it’s always not good thing for the health of the ecosystem.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:26:06) – It’s true. And the other thing I should add to to this discussion is I think the team up at Automattic, the parent company of WordPress, has been much more receptive to comments, suggestions than ever before. And I know some people don’t feel that way, but I think we’re in really good hands with Josepha being the executive director of the WordPress project, you know, and things like that. And I know on the Gutenberg side I’ve gotten to know Matthias Venture, The Gutenberg lead a little bit and, and people like our friends Polly Hack or people like Jessica Frick over at Percival, which is an automatic company. People like that have put us in pretty good hands, frankly.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:26:52) – Yeah, my personal opinion is automatic has long term commitment to the industry and I’m really proud to have them as sponsors a lot of automatic and post status and for good reason. But you know a long term commitment to like they have had the opportunity for many years to really really monetize what WordPress is and have held back. I think this is only my personal opinion.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:27:18) – No facts really share other’s leadership there. But get go have had a long term commitment because they believe in open source, they believe in the open web and the ecosystem is healthy. When you have a diverse set of people offering services and products to that, so you get great performance. Obviously they know WordPress inside and out and then the support and those are the things that have that kind of wane over time. In any hosting company that I’ve been, that I’ve been around, I’ve had I’ve been a customer at many of the ones you talked about had clients and friends at many of the ones that you talked about. And but the consistency, I think, is what matters overall. So I agree with you. Agree. Um, okay. So we’ve talked about a whole lot of stuff. Now I want to talk I want to ask this specific question related to your clients. What are you hearing from your clients about WordPress, how they’re using their websites? Because I love talking to our agency owners because tip of the spear for me is the people out there doing the work.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:28:20) – For those people using WordPress, they might not even know or care that there’s this open source platform underneath it all. But what are you hearing from your clients about what WordPress and working with the websites?
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:28:32) – Yeah, there’s a couple things. I don’t think my clients care what’s under the hood. So by that mean they don’t care if it’s a WordPress site, if it’s a custom site, if it’s something else, as long as it gives them the results they want. So one of the things I’ve been pushing in the community for the last ten years is don’t sell the solution. Sell what it brings you. I’m a big one. Outcome or something, not how you get there. And if anybody doesn’t believe that, I suggest you go look up a guy by the name of Simon Sinek. Start with why is his book and find his Ted talk and watch it and watch it again. So sell the the what you get out of it. So that’s the first one. I also think clients hate to say are dropping the security ball big time right now.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:29:21) – I’m working on a site right now where the client couldn’t find their backup that they were sending to a cloud drive for six days and they took them six days to find out where they put that backup. So one of the things I find with my clients is you have to help them manage their digital assets or their digital stuff, and even more so in small businesses. What happens if the business owner gets run over by a truck tomorrow? What happens if he dies tomorrow? Do you have a succession plan for your business? Do you know how to handle that? Most people don’t. So that’s a problem. And then the other thing is, I think a lot of people flock to WordPress because frankly, what are we powering now? 45% in the Internet, 50% somewhere in there. And I think that alone is a selling thing. That’s attraction. Thing is WordPress is open source. It can’t be secure the security holes every month. Well, guess what? Microsoft Windows plugs security holes on the first Tuesday every month called Patch Tuesday.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:30:27) – And the whole business world runs on Windows more than that. Right. And they’re still plugging holes. Security is a trust factor, not a it happened or it didn’t happen.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:30:37) – So I like that because security is a non-essential part of the digital our digital world, particularly our Internet, it’s a part of it. The real question is how are the people or companies behind that making sure it’s always secure. I remember talking to a security expert. I don’t know, it’s been eight years now and they said it’s not a matter this is one that just all they do is security and they go, it’s not a matter of if we’ll get hacked, it’s when and what we’re doing continually. And I go, that’s part of the digital age. That’s where we’re at. So I love that emphasis from your point. It’s just not when it’s if. And what are you doing in the meantime to help proactively do that?
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:31:19) – And I’ll take that one more. Corey I have a saying in my business that’s not if you’ll be hacked, it’s when you’ll be hacked.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:31:25) – And how do you recover where I take it? So I kind of look at this mess I’ve been dealing with, and a big part of the problem was the client didn’t have a site updated, the client didn’t have the PHP version updated, the client couldn’t find the backup. You see where this is going? Yep. And it’s we got to take care of those assets and we got to treat them like the they’re important. So that’s that.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:31:52) – Just like you would lock your car or your house at night or your car if you’re driving into the supermarket or the grocery store, whatever that is, you’d lock your car because, you know, you do those things. We don’t even think about those things. They’re so embedded now and we need to be doing that. I love this message. We need to be doing that with our digital assets.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:32:11) – We’re a mutual friend of ours. You know, Kathy’s N over at K very well. And I turned to Cathy in January and said, I’m going to make you a prediction.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:32:20) – And she said, Oh, I don’t like your predictions are usually right. And I said, I’m going to declare 2023 as a year of the vulnerability, the first week of January. And that was coming out of the whole LastPass debacle that happened. And we all know about that one. And sure enough, and I think it’s partially awareness, but I think there’s a multitude of factors and it’s kind of played out that way. The other thing I’m hearing from clients is clients don’t realize that websites have to have a budget attached to them for their business. So marketing budget and they say, Oh, we do it in house. And I say, okay, so what’s your hourly rate worth? Oh, it’s worth $40 an hour. How many hours a month do you do? Oh five. So your marketing budget is 40 times five. So that’s the other thing. Business has got to take this stuff seriously and start to budget for.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:33:17) – I love that Social Security and then budget, and that’s the mindset.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:33:21) – So, you know, a lot of the conversations I’ve been having is the recognition from clients that their website is not just valuable, it’s an integral part of how they do business. Covid accelerated a lot of that. I think it’s like, Hey, we got so many physical location, bricks and mortar type businesses realizing when you can’t actually see a person face to face. So I have two way of a way to be able to do business. So I love that it’s integral. So security, part of life budgeting, you need to budget for it just like you would any other part of your businesses in the essential part of your business. And so many of the agency owners have talked to here at Post Status, they the clients are recognizing that it’s in some of the instances, I would say more like a B2B. They see it’s at a very, very valuable part of their overall sales strategy and they value it deeply. Some run their whole operations or half operations, you know, and items and post those two, we run our whole operation through online space so it feels foreign.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:34:26) – But that’s not the way business is traditionally. It’s, you know, you go to a store, you travel, you walk, you ride in a horse and buggy or a car to get to. Things have changed. And that seems like what I’m hearing, too, is that mindset needs a change of like this is all a part of business domains, websites, all the platforms you might be on, all as important as that door that opens up into your business.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:34:51) – 100% and then look at the criticality of it. So, for example, if you’re an e-commerce site that’s making 30,000 US a day profit, then you need a different level of support than somebody that’s got a brochure site that is out there just to be the face of their business. So you got to think about things like that, too. Very much so.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:35:12) – Okay, so security and budget. Anything else on your mind about when you when you’re working with clients and how they’re valuing their websites? Any perspectives you have to share there too.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:35:22) – I think a lot of clients in this day and age are unrealistic and think that’s the world we live in. So it’s a very much an I want it now world. It’s I want it yesterday. There’s no patience out there like to tell you I don’t think clients are any different.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:35:39) – So. Yeah. So it’s the physical part of business, which I have a friend that has a restaurant supply business and I understand how like when you’re, you know, stove or cooktop is down, they can’t sell. And then now that okay, got to have it now. And that service side is pretty intense for them. I can see that now being applied to the business is where they see it as essential. I want to say that’s a good part, but when it comes with some mindset change of okay, we need to be able to budget for that and pay for that and, and knowing like in the middle of the night or whatever it is to have that kind of service turnaround is not always possible or realistic.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:36:27) – And communication is a big part of it too. I don’t think some clients communicate well, don’t think some agencies communicate well. Like, for example, I’m going on vacation next Wednesday. Yay me, I’ve already sent out an email to my entire client was saying, By the way, the only thing I’ll deal with while I’m away is a website down issue. Everything else sits till I get home and just tell them upfront. Now, they might not like to hear it, but that’s you’re allowed to take time off. You’re allowed to recharge.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:36:58) – The good communication, getting ahead of it to manage those expectations? Yeah, absolutely vital. All right, Rob. Well, anything else you want to share that you’re excited about, that you’re working on or doing?
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:37:10) – I think the big thing is the security side of it. Think, think. We just got to be aware and and make sure you’re aware and if and if anybody needs help agencies otherwise reach out, be glad to help them and be involved in the community.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:37:25) – That’s a big part of what you and I do. You do not repost status. As you know, I co-manage a large LinkedIn group with Courtney Robertson. I’ve got a podcast that’s, you know, it’s good for business awareness, but it’s also good for the community too. So get involved. The community. Somebody if you can go to a word camp, go says the guy who’s got no time to go to work. Camps right now have not been to a five check by I missed word camp Buffalo Oh boy did I take stuff for not being on that one because that was a that’s an hour and a half away. I didn’t go to Montclair this weekend because, again, I’ve got conflicts. And the other thing is, look after you and your family and look after how you feel. Look after your health. Because if you don’t do that, you can’t run your business. So keep that.
\n\n\n\nCory Miller (00:38:14) – Absolutely. Well, thanks, Rob, for being on post staff. Appreciate your work in the community and what you do with WordPress out in the world to our story.
\n\n\n\nRob Cairns (00:38:22) – Thanks for having me.
\nThis article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Thu, 13 Jul 2023 15:15:28 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:11:\"Cory Miller\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:39;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:60:\"Do The Woo Community: What Impact Will AI Have on eCommerce?\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:28:\"https://dothewoo.io/?p=75552\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:58:\"https://dothewoo.io/what-impact-will-ai-have-on-ecommerce/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:436:\"AI is here to stay so I asked the community about the impact on eCommerce. Listen in to Patrick Rauland, Remkus de Vries, Katie Keith, Kelly Muro and Scott Bowler.
\n>> The post What Impact Will AI Have on eCommerce? appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community .
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Thu, 13 Jul 2023 07:56:00 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:5:\"BobWP\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:40;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:99:\"WPTavern: All-In-One Security Plugin Patches Sensitive Data Exposure Vulnerability in Version 5.2.0\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:30:\"https://wptavern.com/?p=146818\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:110:\"https://wptavern.com/all-in-one-security-plugin-patches-sensitive-data-exposure-vulnerability-in-version-5-2-0\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:2543:\"All-In-One Security (AIOS), a plugin active on more than a million WordPress sites, was found to be logging plaintext passwords from login attempts in the database and has patched the security issue in version 5.2.0.
\n\n\n\nIn a post titled “Cleartext passwords written to aiowps_audit_log” published to the plugin’s support forum two weeks and five days ago, @c0ntr07 reported the issue:
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nI was absolutely shocked that a security plugin is making such a basic security 101 error (not to mention being out of compliance with NIST 800-63-3, ISO27000, CIS, HIPAA, GDPR, ….)
\n\n\n\nHow can I stop the logging of clear text passwords?
\n\n\n\nHow can this be fixed so we don’t fail the upcoming security review and audit by our third-party compliance auditors?
\n
A support representative from AIOS confirmed that it was a known bug in the last release and offered a development copy of a zip file with a fix. It took more than two weeks for the patch to be published.
\n\n\n\nIn version 5.2.0, released on July 10, 2023, AIOS included the following security updates in the plugin’s changelog:
\n\n\n\nUsers are advised to update to version 5.2.0+ immediately in order to secure their sites. At the time of publishing, almost no users have updated to 5.2.0+, leaving hundreds of thousands of users who are running 5.1.9 still vulnerable.
\n\n\n\n“So far the developer haven’t even told the users to change all passwords,” Patchstack CEO Oliver Sild said in response to the issue on Twitter. “Due to the scale, we will 100% see hackers harvest the credentials from the logs of compromised sites that run (or has run) this plugin.
\n\n\n\n“We have also sent out vulnerability alert to all Patchstack users. Hopefully the Updraft team will do the same and will tell their security plugin users to clean those logs ASAP and ask all the site users to change the passwords where ever they used the same combinations.”
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Wed, 12 Jul 2023 22:33:57 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"Sarah Gooding\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:41;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:64:\"Akismet: How to Add a Contact Form to WordPress (and Block Spam)\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:27:\"http://akismet.com/?p=95555\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:59:\"https://akismet.com/blog/how-to-add-wordpress-contact-form/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:32612:\"While you can try your best to answer every visitor’s question directly on your site, some will inevitably have questions and need to reach out for help. Or maybe a member of the press wants to set up an interview. Perhaps qualified job candidates want to get in touch.
\n\n\n\nWhatever the reason, it’s usually a good idea to have a means of contact through your site.
\n\n\n\nLuckily, you can add a contact form in WordPress to make it a quick and easy process for visitors to reach out. And you can even include special fields to help identify the purpose of each inquiry and respond quickly and effectively.
\n\n\n\nIn this post, we’ll discuss nine simple steps to add a contact form in WordPress. And we’ll tell you about the best ways to prevent fake spam submissions from clogging your inbox. Then, we’ll address the most frequently asked questions concerning contact forms.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe easiest way to add a contact form to your website is to use a WordPress plugin that simplifies the process. You can find tons of free (and paid) options that offer a similar type of service. But, most premium plugins come not only with a simple contact form template, but additional options and advanced features.
\n\n\n\nContact Form 7 is a popular choice. While it comes with a steep learning curve for beginners, the tool is free and can be installed on an unlimited number of sites. In addition, it’s important to note that this plugin doesn’t store or save contact form submissions unless you add a second tool called Flamingo.
\n\n\n\n![\"Contact](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image7-1.png\")
\n\n\n\nYou can also accept file uploads, display a confirmation message upon submission, and extend the plugin with several add-ons.
\n\n\n\nBut, if you’re looking for a straightforward WordPress contact form plugin that’s quick to learn, Jetpack’s an excellent choice.
\n\n\n\n![\"Jetpack](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image6-1.png\")
\n\n\n\nIt’s a super beginner-friendly tool, since it enables you to add the Form block to your page in the same way that you’d use any other WordPress block. Even better, you get tons of configuration options.
\n\n\n\nFor instance, you’re able to change the confirmation message and redirect users after submission. Additionally, you can continue to edit and reorder the layout of your form even after you’ve added fields to your page.
\n\n\n\nPlus, Jetpack also has a WordPress comment feature and integrates seamlessly with anti-spam tools like Akismet, enabling you to protect your site from any illegitimate or malicious form submissions.
\n\n\n\nSince Jetpack is a free plugin, you can install and activate it right within the WordPress dashboard. Simply head to Plugins → Add New. Then, search for “Jetpack”.
\n\n\n\n![\"Jetpack](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image16.png\")
\n\n\n\nHere, it’s the first option that you can see, so go ahead and click on Install Now. This may take a few seconds. Then, select Activate.
\n\n\n\nAt this point, you’re able to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account. If you don’t have a WordPress.com account, it’s quick (and free) to set one up. Then, you can unlock the full potential of the Jetpack tool on your website.
\n\n\n\nNow that you have Jetpack installed on your site, you’re ready to create a new contact form. You can open an existing page to edit or, if you want to create a dedicated contact page, create a new page by going to Pages → Add New within your WordPress dashboard.
\n\n\n\nNow, just as you normally would, add a WordPress block to your page by clicking on the + icon. Search for “form” and choose the green Form block.
\n\n\n\n![\"adding](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image28.png\")
\n\n\n\nYou’ll then be able to select a template for your form. Jetpack currently supports contact forms, registration forms, feedback forms, and more. For this tutorial, we’ll use the Contact Form.
\n\n\n\n![\"selecting](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image17.png\")
\n\n\n\nThis will create a basic contact form. Your contact form template will be visible on your page, with Name, Email, and Message fields, along with a submission button.
\n\n\n\n![\"default](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image4-1.png\")
\n\n\n\nNow, click on Save or Publish to update your page.
\n\n\n\nAs we mentioned above, the default Jetpack contact form fields include Name, Email, and Message. But, you can customize the form fields if you’d like.
\n\n\n\nTo do so, simply click on the specific form field that you want to change. Then, select the field icon in the toolbar above.
\n\n\n\nFor example, if you’re changing the Name field, this icon will be labeled Name Field.
\n\n\n\n![\"editing](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image14-1.png\")
\n\n\n\nAt this point, you’ll see a whole list of Jetpack fields that you can replace your Name field with.
\n\n\n\n![\"list](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image20.png\")
\n\n\n\nYou might like to swap the default fields for a website URL field, date picker, phone number field, checkboxes, dropdowns, etc.
\n\n\n\nTo make the change, simply click on the new field that you want to add to your form. Then, edit the field label by typing a new name in the text area.
\n\n\n\n![\"adding](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image1-1.png\")
\n\n\n\nNow, you can also make certain fields a requirement for your visitors to complete. To do this, select your field and click on the asterisk icon in the toolbar.
\n\n\n\nOr, you can disable this feature by clicking on it a second time. This will make the field optional, and you’ll see that the (required) text beside the Name field has disappeared.
\n\n\n\n![\"making](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image37.png\")
\n\n\n\nTo add an extra field to your form, access the WordPress blocks by clicking on the blue + icon to the left of your screen. Then, search for “Jetpack” to view all the Jetpack form fields.
\n\n\n\nNow, simply drag your new field into position.
\n\n\n\n![\"adding](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image19.png\")
\n\n\n\nIf you want to reorder your existing fields, use the arrows in the toolbar to move fields up or down.
\n\n\n\n![\"moving](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image35.png\")
\n\n\n\nNow, click on Publish or Save to update your contact form.
\n\n\n\nNow that you’ve customized the fields of your contact form, it’s time to configure the form settings. This way, you can determine the email address where form submissions should be sent. Additionally, you can display a thank you message to visitors that complete your form.
\n\n\n\nTo access your form settings, click on your Form block. It’s important to make sure that you’ve selected the entire form and not just one of your form fields. Now, in the Block settings to your right, you should find the configuration options.
\n\n\n\nAt the very top of your menu, you’ll see Manage Responses. Since you’re just building your form now, you won’t need this yet. But in the future, you can simply click on View Form Responses to view and filter form submissions in your dashboard.
\n\n\n\n![\"editing](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image32.png\")
\n\n\n\nNow, let’s move on to your Submission Settings. Here, you’ll be able to change your form display message. Simply use the On Submission dropdown box to choose Show a custom text message.
\n\n\n\nThen, in the Message Text box, you can type your thank you message.
\n\n\n\n![\"editing](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image36.png\")
\n\n\n\nAlternatively, you can use the On Submission dropdown menu to choose Redirect to another website. Then, paste the URL in the Redirect Address box.
\n\n\n\n![\"editing](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image29.png\")
\n\n\n\nYou can also set the email address where form submissions should be sent in the Email Connection tab.
\n\n\n\n![\"email](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image26.jpg\")
\n\n\n\nHere, simply add your email address to receive submissions in your inbox. You can also choose a custom email subject line for these messages. When you’re ready, click on Publish to update your form.
\n\n\n\nAt this point, you’ve created a new contact form, configured your form settings, and customized your field selections. Now you’re all set to style your form by adjusting elements like colors, fonts, sizing, and more.
\n\n\n\nTo access the stylistic settings, select one of your form fields. Then, navigate to the Block settings. Starting out in the Field Settings, you can adjust the specific field width using the available options.
\n\n\n\nFor example, you might want the name and email field to appear on the same line. In which case, you can change each fields’ width to 50% so that both fit on a single line.
\n\n\n\n![\"changing](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image24.png\")
\n\n\n\nKeep in mind that you can use the Sync fields style toggle to make sure that all fields update with the stylistic changes that you make in this section. This enables you to easily create a cohesive look.
\n\n\n\nNow, under Color, you can set new colors for the field background, field text, label text, and border. It’s important to maintain a contrast between the background and text so that users can clearly see what they type.
\n\n\n\nBut, you can get creative with the combinations, or match the form colors to the rest of your website’s branding.
\n\n\n\n![\"form](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image9-2.png\")
\n\n\n\nIt’s also easy to change the text size and line height of your fields under Input Field Styles. Meanwhile, Label Styles is where you can make the same changes to your field labels.
\n\n\n\nIf you scroll down to Advanced, you’re able to add custom CSS to apply greater stylistic changes to your form. Again, select Publish to update the form with the styles.
\n\n\n\nImplementing a contact form on your WordPress website has tons of worthwhile benefits. Still, it does open up your website to one major risk — spam. Not only can spammers and bots interact with your form, they can also target the email addresses that visitors supply in your form fields.
\n\n\n\nThat’s why it’s a good idea to install an anti-spam plugin to prevent spam on your form. Akismet Anti-Spam is an excellent option, developed by Automattic (the team behind WordPress.com).
\n\n\n\n![\"Akismet](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image25.png\")
\n\n\n\nIt integrates seamlessly with the platform as well as plenty of plugins like Jetpack. The Akismet features work automatically, blocking spam with a 99.99 percent accuracy rate.
\n\n\n\nTo get started with Akismet, you’ll need an API key. You can get a free API key if you’re running a personal blog, but for business and commercial sites, you’ll need a paid subscription.
\n\n\n\nOr, you can get access to Akismet with some of Jetpack’s plans like Jetpack Security, Jetpack Complete, or Jetpack Starter. Once you’ve purchased your package, all you need to do is connect your WordPress site to Jetpack.
\n\n\n\nAkismet will be activated immediately, but you can check that the plugin is enabled by going to Settings → Akismet Anti-spam from your WordPress admin area.
\n\n\n\n![\"Akismet](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image11-1.png\")
\n\n\n\nHere, you can see whether the plugin is active and view the number of spam comments that the tool has blocked. Additionally, you can configure your Akismet settings to display a privacy notice and manage spam more effectively.
\n\n\n\nProtecting your forms from spammers and bots using Akismet is ideal because it enables you to do so without impacting the user experience.
\n\n\n\nWhile some sites try using CAPTCHAs as an alternative, this should be avoided. That’s because this adds unnecessary steps to the process and can deter visitors from filling out your form (more on this later).
\n\n\n\nNow that you’ve got your contact form ready, let’s take a look at some of the ways that you can add it to your website. For instance, you can add your form to a page. Or, you can add it to your header, footer, or sidebar.
\n\n\n\nThe easiest way to add your contact form to your website is to add it to one of your pages. As we’ve discussed, this is super simple to do with Jetpack, since you can add a form as a WordPress block.
\n\n\n\nAll you need to do is add a new page to your site or open an existing one to edit. Then, click on the + icon to add a new block and search for “form”.
\n\n\n\nNow, add the Form block to your website and select the Contact Form template. Here, you’ll see the default Jetpack form fields including Name, Email, and Message.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThen, you can configure your form settings to display a thank you message to visitors and specify the email address where you want to receive form submissions. Plus, you can apply styles to the layout to change the color and size of the form.
\n\n\n\nYou can check out how to do this in the main section of the tutorial in steps 4, 5, and 6. But at this point, click on Publish to save your contact form to your page.
\n\n\n\nThe easiest way to add a contact form to your header, footer, or sidebar is to use the Site Editor. In the past, you’d only be able to unlock this level of functionality using custom code, or with plugins.
\n\n\n\nBut for some time now, the Site Editor has made it easy to get your site looking exactly the way you want. The one caveat is that to use the Site Editor, you’ll need to activate a block theme. These themes are composed entirely of WordPress blocks, enabling greater flexibility.
\n\n\n\nOnce you’ve activated a block theme, you can open the Site Editor by heading to Appearance → Editor in your dashboard. Then, click on Template Parts.
\n\n\n\nHere, you can click on any template part, but we’re going to select Header.
\n\n\n\n![\"template](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image27.png\")
\n\n\n\nNext, click on the pencil icon to launch your header in the editor.
\n\n\n\n![\"WordPress](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image12-1.png\")
\n\n\n\nNow, click on the + icon to add a new block to your header. Select the Jetpack Form block.
\n\n\n\n![\"adding](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image2-1.png\")
\n\n\n\nThen, choose Contact Form. Now, you should see the WordPress contact form template appear in your theme’s header.
\n\n\n\n![\"default](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image8-2.png\")
\n\n\n\nTo the right of the editor, you can configure and customize your form using the instructions in steps 4, 5, and 6 of the main tutorial in this article. Meanwhile, you can edit and add fields via the toolbar.
\n\n\n\nFor example, since you have limited space, you might make your form super simple, getting rid of unnecessary fields.
\n\n\n\n![\"a](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image18.png\")
\n\n\n\nAdditionally, you can reduce the size of fields so that you can make your contact form fit nicely within your website header.
\n\n\n\nAs mentioned above, the easiest way to add a WordPress contact form to your header, footer, or sidebar is to use the Site Editor. This is recommended since the Site Editor enables you to edit templates and template parts without code (or additional plugins).
\n\n\n\nBut, if you don’t want to make the switch to a block theme, you can still add a contact form to your header, footer, or sidebar.
\n\n\n\nFirst, you’ll need to open the WordPress Customizer, so navigate to Appearance → Customize in your dashboard. Now, click on Widgets.
\n\n\n\n![\"opening](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image30.png\")
\n\n\n\nThe widget areas that you can edit depends on the theme you’re using. For instance, some themes might give you access to your header while others only let you tweak your sidebar or footer.
\n\n\n\nClick on your preferred widget area (like your footer) and then select the + icon to add a new block.
\n\n\n\n![\"editing](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image5-1.png\")
\n\n\n\nHere, find the Jetpack Form block and add it to the footer. You should now see the default form layout appear in your footer.
\n\n\n\n![\"adding](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image22.png\")
\n\n\n\nTo the left of your screen, select the Contact Form template and your footer will update instantly.
\n\n\n\n![\"editing](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image33.png\")
\n\n\n\nThen, you can change or add fields and mark fields as required using the toolbar. Plus, if you select the entire form block, you can select Show more settings.
\n\n\n\nHere, you can configure a thank you message, manage form submissions, and apply stylistic settings to your form. For full details, check out sections 4, 5, and 6 of the main tutorial.
\n\n\n\nAt this stage, it’s important to test your form to make sure that it’s working properly. To do this, first make sure to save your latest changes. Then, click on Publish to make your form accessible to users online.
\n\n\n\nNow, you’ll need to log out of WordPress and view your website on the front end. Once you’ve logged out successfully, open a new browser window and enter your site’s URL.
\n\n\n\nIf you’ve added your form to a page, you’ll need to enter the specific page URL. But, if you’ve added a contact form to your header or footer, just type your general web address.
\n\n\n\nNow, locate your contact form on your site.
\n\n\n\n![\"contact](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image34.png\")
\n\n\n\nThis will show how your form currently appears to visitors. To test it thoroughly, enter your own details and click on the Contact Us button.
\n\n\n\n![\"form](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image3-1.png\")
\n\n\n\nNow, you should be able to see the custom thank you message that you set up in step 5 of the tutorial.
\n\n\n\n![\"thank](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image23.png\")
\n\n\n\nYou can log back into WordPress to view the form submission. As discussed, you’ll find this information by clicking on the View Form Responses button within the editor where you created the form.
\n\n\n\nAlternatively, you can also access form submissions by going to Feedback → Form Responses in your dashboard.
\n\n\n\n![\"viewing](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image10-1.png\")
\n\n\n\nHere, you should see the test response that you submitted.
\n\n\n\nAlthough we’ve tried to show you a highly comprehensive guide to adding a contact form in WordPress, you might still have some questions. So, let’s take a look at some of the most frequently asked questions (and answers) regarding this topic.
\n\n\n\nYes. There are plenty of free contact form plugins for WordPress including Contact Form 7 and Jetpack. While Contact Form 7 is a great choice for more experienced users to create advanced forms, Jetpack is the best content form plugin for beginners. It’s super simple to install and configure your forms. Plus, you can enable Akismet spam protection to prevent spam submissions on your form.
\n\n\n\nBy far, the easiest way to create a contact form in WordPress is with a plugin like Jetpack. This is because a dedicated WordPress form plugin gives you access to an intuitive form builder. This way, you can design your form visually, dragging fields where they need to sit on your page.
\n\n\n\nBut, if you don’t want to use a contact form plugin, you can do it yourself using WordPress core functionality. This method is only suitable for advanced users that have some knowledge of CSS, HTML and PHP.
\n\n\n\nAdditionally, you’ll be required to code all the error handling and form field validation if you decide to create a contact form without a plugin. This makes the manual route far more complex and time-consuming than the alternative.
\n\n\n\nThere are tons of ways to optimize your WordPress contact form conversion rate. For example, you can limit the number of form fields. Then, when visitors see that your form is super quick and easy to complete, they may be more likely to convert.
\n\n\n\nAdditionally, it’s important to make your form layout simple and clear. Plus, it’s a good idea to check that your forms are mobile-friendly. This is especially vital since over 60 percent of the global population uses a mobile device to go online.
\n\n\n\nThe easiest way to prevent spam submissions on your contact forms is to use an AI-powered solution like Akismet. Not only does Akismet block spam with 99.99 percent accuracy, it also enables you to maintain a smooth user experience (as opposed to alternatives like CAPTCHA).
\n\n\n\nWhile Akismet works seamlessly with Jetpack Forms, you can install the plugin on any website (regardless of your preferred contact form plugin). All you need to do is head to Plugins → Add New.
\n\n\n\nThen, search for “Akismet”. Once you find Akismet Anti-Spam: Spam Protection, simply click on Install Now → Activate.
\n\n\n\nIf you decide to add a contact form in WordPress using Jetpack, you’ll see the Akismet Anti-Spam link appear beneath the Jetpack tab of your WordPress dashboard.
\n\n\n\nThen, you can set up your Akismet account, or enter the API supplied with your Jetpack plan.
\n\n\n\nSome website owners like to implement CAPTCHA to protect against bots. This involves adding extra steps to prevent spammers and bots from completing your forms. For instance, users might need to complete tasks, solve equations, or answer questions.
\n\n\n\nBut, there are some reasons why you should avoid CAPTCHA, and instead, opt for a more user-friendly alternative. For starters, these additional steps create greater friction since they require more time and effort from legitimate visitors who want to complete your form.
\n\n\n\nThis can explain why Moz found that CAPTCHA can lead to a notable drop in conversions. Meanwhile, ConvertKit discovered that you can preserve a positive user experience (UX) by using Akismet.
\n\n\n\nAkismet is developed by Automattic (the same team behind WordPress.com). This AI-powered solution offers a non-intrusive way to block spam on your contact forms.
\n\n\n\nAkismet is an easy-to-use complete solution for spam detection and prevention. Not only will the plugin block spam on your contact forms, but it will also detect and block spam from all the comment forms on your site.
\n\n\n\nAkismet is developed by the same team that created WordPress.com. Therefore, it works seamlessly with the platform. Better yet, rather than disrupt the UX, Akismet is a spam solution that works automatically, in the background of your site.
\n\n\n\n![\"Akismet](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image31.png\")
\n\n\n\nIf you aren’t using Akismet, you’ll likely rely on solutions like CAPTCHA or reCAPTCHA. These protocols can hinder your form conversion rate since they demand more time and effort from your visitors.
\n\n\n\nWhat’s more, Akismet blocks spam with a 99.99 percent accuracy rate.
\n\n\n\n![\"stats](\"https://akismet455732288.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/image13-1.png\")
\n\n\n\nAs you can see, over a hundred million websites actively use Akismet. It’s one of the most popular anti-spam solutions out there.
\n\n\n\nPlus, Akismet is trusted by some of the biggest companies in the world, including Microsoft, ConvertKit, Bluehost, and WordPress.com. What’s more, there are plenty of plans to choose from, so you’re sure to find an ideal solution for your website needs.
\n\n\n\nWithout a contact form, your website visitors might have to go through a lengthy, complex process to ask you a simple question. This can be frustrating and lead to a negative user experience.
\n\n\n\nFortunately, you can improve your WordPress website by adding a simple contact form. The easiest way to get started is with a contact form plugin like Jetpack.
\n\n\n\nUsing the Jetpack Form block, you can easily customize your form’s appearance, generate a thank you page, or redirect users upon submission. Plus, you can protect your business and your customers by using an anti-spam plugin like Akismet.
\n\n\n\nAkismet enables you to prevent spam in your comments and forms, without interfering with the user experience. Better yet, it’s super simple to install and configure, since it works automatically. You’ll also get access to a feature that outright blocks spam, saving you disk space and speeding up your site. Check out our Enterprise solution today!
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Wed, 12 Jul 2023 21:45:03 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:12:\"Kathryn Marr\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:42;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:86:\"WPTavern: WordPress Selects Inaugural Cohort to Launch Experimental Mentorship Program\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:30:\"https://wptavern.com/?p=146772\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:97:\"https://wptavern.com/wordpress-selects-inaugural-cohort-to-launch-experimental-mentorship-program\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:3392:\"WordPress’ Community Team kicked off its experimental mentorship program this week, announcing that the inaugural cohort has been assigned to a group of mentors who will guide them forward on project contribution across various teams.
\n\n\n\n“Our mentors offer 1:1 support to each contributor in our cohort,” Automattic-sponsored Community Team contributor Hari Shanker R said. “These mentors check-in with mentees each week to offer them support and guidance on the program and to answer any questions that they may have.”
\n\n\n\nMentees graduate from the program after completing self-directed courses, participating in “learn-up” sessions, selecting a contributor team, and making an initial contribution to the team. Optionally, mentors may guide their mentees through a three-month contribution plan. The goal is to create new ongoing contributors through the program.
\n\n\n\nA group of 13 mentees have been selected from 50 applications and will participate across eight teams, including Core, Training, Community, Documentation, Photos, Test, Polyglots, and Support.
\n\n\n\n“While our group is not in a position to assign mentors to everyone, the activities and tasks of our cohort will be shared in the newly-formed #contributor-mentorship channel of the Make/WordPress Slack, where interested folks can join most of our contributing sessions and onboarding sessions which will also be shared widely with our community.”
\n\n\n\nOther open source projects, such as Drupal, have supported mentoring programs that have been used to successfully engage new contributors at events, inspire more collaboration, and foster a learning environment.
\n\n\n\nEarlier this year the Linux Foundation published a report from a recent study on Mentorship in Open Source. It surveyed more than 100 mentees from the LFX Mentorship graduating class of 2020 and 2021, and 99% reported the program was beneficial. Nearly half of the graduates (47%) said it helped them get a job.
\n\n\n\nThe report explores the additional benefits of mentorship programs beyond increasing contribution to the open source project itself. Quality mentorship programs can have an economic and career impact on mentees, as well as increase diversity across the project and help new contributors get more connected to the community.
\n\n\n\nWordPress’ Community team has already invested time from 22 facilitators and 13 mentors in getting the program launched. The structure offers a somewhat more formal experience similar to a short internship, but it’s still in the early stages and may change based on feedback from participants.
\n\n\n\n“This program is an experiment—our hope is to learn as much as possible from the same to improve mentorship in the WordPress project and to support and empower more contributors,” Shanker said.
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Wed, 12 Jul 2023 21:09:00 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"Sarah Gooding\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:43;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:76:\"WPTavern: #83 – Carrie Dils on How to Internationalise Your WordPress Code\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:48:\"https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=146699\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:90:\"https://wptavern.com/podcast/83-carrie-dils-on-how-to-internationalise-your-wordpress-code\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:37653:\"Transcript[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case how to internationalize your WordPress code.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea featured on the show. Head to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox. And use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today we have Carrie Dils. Carrie is a WordPress loving freelance developer with modern 20 years experience in web development and full scope WordPress projects. She teaches WordPress and front-end development courses for LinkedIn learning and blogs regularly about WordPress, and the business of freelancing.
\n\n\n\nThis is another of the podcast interviews, which were recorded at WordCamp Europe in Athens. It took place soon after Carrie had completed her workshop at the event. This workshop was entitled international appeal, making your themes and plugins translatable.
\n\n\n\nWordCamp workshops are practical hands-on sessions. Carrie’s intention here was to make the audience aware of ways in which they could translate their code into other languages. Specifically it was to assist developers in localising their themes and plugins so that they could be consumed and understood by a wider audience. It covered translation functions for PHP and JavaScript, and a foundational understanding of how the process of localization works.
\n\n\n\nWe started the podcast with some orientation, getting to grips with what internationalisation is in the context of WordPress. Carrie explains that there are workflows already available for developers to use to translate their plugins and themes. This enables their clients or customers to switch between languages in the admin interface so that they can understand more about what they’re doing.
\n\n\n\nCarrie talks about the fact that, although she’s not aware of any legal compulsion to carry out this internationalisation work, it’s very useful for consumers of your code. They will be able to rely on a language that’s familiar to them, and not always have to fall back on English. We get into the weeds a little as Carrie explains the foundations of how the translations actually work, and how developers can tap into this.
\n\n\n\nThe fact that WordPress is so popular means that it’s in a great position to make the internet a more inclusive space. Part of that is making people from all over the world. Understand how WordPress, and the tools built on top of it, works.
\n\n\n\nCarrie says that it’s not about trying to translate every part of your plugin into the 200 plus languages which WordPress supports. It’s more about doing what you can, when you can, for those people who can benefit from it.
\n\n\n\nCarrie’s talk will at some point make it onto wordpress.tv, so you can see it there for yourself, but until that’s available she lays out some of the places where you can go to get support around this subject. The plugin and theme handbooks are an ideal place to start that journey.
\n\n\n\nWe get into a chat about which languages are spoken most widely and how Carrie thinks about which languages to pick. If your resources are limited. She points out that as a developer, you’re building in the capability to have your code translated, and the actual work of making those translations can be handled by others if your code is created correctly.
\n\n\n\nGiven that AI is always a hot topic, we digress a little towards the end about how the work of translations is likely to become more automated as large language models take on the burden of translating content and assisting in the writing of code.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re a developer who is curious about making your code available to a wider audience through internationalisation, this podcast is for you.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Carrie Dils.
\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast today by Carrie Dils. Hello, Carrie.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:12] Carrie Dils: Howdy, howdy.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:13] Nathan Wrigley: We are in Athens at the WordCamp EU celebration, 2023. Carrie’s just walked into the room and told me that she’s finished her workshop. How did it go?
\n\n\n\n[00:05:24] Carrie Dils: It went well. The rooms are kind of set up classroom style, well with desk like these that we’ve got sitting in front of us, so attendees could bust out their laptops and get on the wifi and participate. And it was small enough that acoustically, if they had questions and weren’t miced, it was okay.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. What’s the difference between a workshop and a presentation?
\n\n\n\n[00:05:42] Carrie Dils: Well, so in theory a workshop is meant to be more hands-on, practical. Whereas a presentation is just sort of receiving information, a workshop might be actually doing something with the information that you’re getting. Workshops came in two flavors, a fifty minute and a, I guess roughly two times that, so a two hour workshop.
\n\n\n\nI was in a 50 minute slot and it’s a little difficult to do anything truly interactive, and I wasn’t sure how many attendees there would be. So mine was probably closer to presentation and workshop, but I tried to throw in some interactive elements.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:20] Nathan Wrigley: You were one of the early ones as well, so at least you’ve got it out the way. You can now enjoy the rest of the conference.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:26] Carrie Dils: Right, right.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:27] Nathan Wrigley: What was the subject?
\n\n\n\n[00:06:28] Carrie Dils: Internationalization in WordPress. So making your plugins and your themes translatable. So basically from a coding perspective, there are functions that you can use so that if someone wanted to take all of the text strings from a theme or a plugin, and translate them into another language, they could do that.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:51] Nathan Wrigley: So this was a talk specifically aimed at theme developers and plugin developers, as opposed to sort of end users who might use a plugin to translate their own site.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:59] Carrie Dils: Right. So the internationalization, which you might commonly hear that, with the word localization. So think of internationalization is the piece that a developer does when creating a theme or plugin. Localization is the process of then translating it into other languages.
\n\n\n\nNot to be confused with multilingual websites, where the actual content of a website is translated into other language. That’s actually a different process.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:26] Nathan Wrigley: So is this then a process of assisting developers to ensure that their products are usable by people all over the world?
\n\n\n\n[00:07:36] Carrie Dils: Exactly. So imagine, when I first started using WordPress. I didn’t know any better and you needed to do something and you just edited files directly, like edit the core files directly, edit the theme file directly. And I very quickly learned the first time I pushed that update button that it’s not meant to do that.
\n\n\n\nBut if you want to think about translating the software into other languages, it’s impractical to go make a duplicate code base just to change, forget your password as an English phrase into say a Spanish or a German translation of that. You don’t need to copy all of WordPress just to change that one bit of text. So the way it is written with these translation functions enables others to then go in and grab those strings without touching the original code base.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Do you know if there’s any jurisdictional, legal requirements to do this? So if you’re launching a product into the WordPress space, you are basically launching a product throughout the planet. Anybody can buy it anywhere. And the only two examples that cropped up into my head were, for example, in Canada where I believe everything has to be translated into French and English. If you are selling something there, if you put up signage or what have you.
\n\n\n\nAnd also in the UK, if you’re in Wales, Welsh and English would be another example. I didn’t know if there were guidelines around that. If you are a plugin developer, theme developer, whatever you are doing in the WordPress space where you potentially might be breaking law in different parts of the world?
\n\n\n\n[00:09:05] Carrie Dils: That’s a great question. To my knowledge the answer is no. There are no legal requirements. It’s not like accessibility where there are laws around site accessibility. Really because we’re not necessarily talking in the case, the examples you’re giving, that’s the end user. End user facing copy. Whereas this is more behind the scenes. So imagine what you would see in WP admin, that sort of thing.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:30] Nathan Wrigley: So I guess you had to get into the thick of the code, and put coding examples up to demonstrate. And I’m also guessing that most of this is built into WordPress. You are just leveraging things that are already there, or maybe not. Maybe you are extending the functionality that ships with WordPress.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:45] Carrie Dils: No, and it actually goes beyond WordPress. I’m going to get real nerdy on you. There is something called gettext and it is open source. It’s licensed under, GNU. I can’t say GNU without thinking of Gary Gnu that does the news from Giggle Snort Hotel. Now I’m showing my age. If you’re listening to this and are not familiar with that, this was children’s programming in the seventies.
\n\n\n\nSo anyways Gary Gnu has the news, and there is something called gettext. And this is a sort of universally recognized system for writing translatable code. WordPress uses gettext and has its own kind of wrapper functions around that. So what we’re talking about is not, while there are functions that are unique to the WordPress ecosystem, the concept of internationalizing your code goes well beyond WordPress, and WordPress uses gettext, which is what most software languages use.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:41] Nathan Wrigley: I’m guessing the fact that you’ve done a talk about it indicates that you think it’s not being used as often as it perhaps should be?
\n\n\n\n[00:10:49] Carrie Dils: So I’m always going to come at things from a education, knowledge is power perspective. It’s quite possible that people may be listening to this and have already used, seen translation functions, and just didn’t know what they were.
\n\n\n\nFor instance, if you see a double underscore, parenthesis and then some string of text in there, well, that double underscore parenthesis is a translation function. So it’s less about trying to convince people to use it, more educating that it exists and what are the reasons that it’s important to use it.
\n\n\n\nSo WordPress powers over 40% of the web, I think around 43% at last count. Interestingly, if you go to wordpress.org/stats, s t a t s, there’s lots of details there about WordPress installs, and one of those is what language is WordPress, what locale is being used. And I think it’s around 55% are not in English.
\n\n\n\nSo WordPress is global software. It’s used all around the world. And I love especially talking about this topic at WordCamp Europe, where we have so many languages, and cultures represented. And making WordPress available in around 200 different locales. And that’s the job of the Polyglots team. So if you go to make.wordpress.org, the Polyglots team is who’s in charge for making WordPress translatable.
\n\n\n\nAnd it’s of course volunteers from all of these different locales that are bringing it to life in their language. But if you’ve ever gone to say the settings page of your WordPress admin, there’s a little box that says what language would you like your site in? If you were to choose another language, one of those 200 languages that exist, then everything in the admin will be displayed in that locale.
\n\n\n\nThe education piece is that it is global. It is used around the world and the process of internationalizing your code is what makes it possible to have your code exist in other languages.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:55] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s really easy to think about the fact that, well you and I both obviously native English speakers. More or less everything that I’ve ever endeavored to do with WordPress has been in English. If a plugin comes, or a theme comes and everything is displayed in English, I’m entirely happy. That’s fine by me. But I guess we are excluding a bunch of people for whom that obstacle is simply too high.
\n\n\n\nYou’ll be presented with a bunch of options. Some of it probably in quite technical language, and if the developer hasn’t made the effort to translate it into some additional languages, I’m guessing in most cases, you’re not advocating while it’s 200 or nothing.
\n\n\n\n[00:13:33] Carrie Dils: Right.
\n\n\n\n[00:13:33] Nathan Wrigley: Maybe pick some low hanging fruit if you like. That’s just part of the job of WordPress. If we are going to endeavor to be truly international, that work has to be done. But how did you get interested in this? How come you are doing a presentation about this particular subject given the panoply of things that you could have picked?
\n\n\n\n[00:13:50] Carrie Dils: So I’ve been working with WordPress for over a decade now, and early into that I was introduced at, it was WordCamp Austin, actually, I think 2013 or 14. I was introduced to the idea of web accessibility, and specifically what accessibility looks like in WordPress. And if somebody’s listening and they’re not familiar, accessibility is basically writing both from a code perspective and from a design and presentation, really soup to nuts, your website. Making it accessible for anyone to use regardless of what kind of device they’re on, if they’re on a laptop, a mobile phone or a screen reader.
\n\n\n\nSo making the web accessible and I was just so glad somebody told me that that was something that was important, because I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
\n\n\n\nSo extend that idea that the mission of WordPress is to democratize publishing. Well, how do you democratize publishing to someone who doesn’t speak English and sees software, to your point, we’re happy when it’s, when it’s in English. But if you’re seeing all these technical words or, you know, whatever it is. You’re walking through the WP admin experience and it’s not in a language that you’re comfortable navigating, well then your power to publish is diminished.
\n\n\n\nSo I think of it in terms of, or I guess that’s where I got interested in it, is sort of, I don’t know that most people would consider it a branch of accessibility, but in my mind it’s related.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:23] Nathan Wrigley: So let’s imagine that I’ve been listening to this and found it persuasive. Okay, I’ve got a plugin, I’ve got a theme, what have you. But I’ve made no effort to translate anything. And I think, okay, I should. I should begin this journey. How straightforward is it? Does WordPress provide the tools and the infrastructure and the file types and whatever else is going on? Is it fairly easy to drop into this? Is there documentation which is up to date to make it straightforward? Or is this one of those impossibly difficult to find pieces of documentation? And if it’s easy to find, where is it?
\n\n\n\n[00:15:53] Carrie Dils: That’s a great question, and it’s easy to find. So if you go toward wordpress.org, there’s the plugin handbook, and there’s also the theme handbook. And both of those handbooks have sections on how to internationalize your code.
\n\n\n\nSo I’m going to take your question a step further. As someone who is creating products to be distributed maybe for, you know, you’re selling your theme or your plugin. Writing your code in a way that it can be translated into other languages, increases your user base. It makes it accessible to people in other places, right?
\n\n\n\nSo as the plugin or theme developer, I don’t necessarily have to go, my job is to write my code in a way that it can be translated. Other people can do their translations. I don’t have to necessarily ship my code with a ton of translations.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:45] Nathan Wrigley: So you are not suggesting that the burden to get these 200 languages out there is always going to be on the shoulders of the developer. You could ship something and let the community take it over. If this was an important plugin that you developed, which it turns out 40% of all WordPress websites wish to use, it could be a community effort to do that?
\n\n\n\n[00:17:02] Carrie Dils: Absolutely. If your customer base is international, then you might want to ship it, you know, with language packs, or the translations for, the locales where your customers live. That would just be common sense.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:15] Nathan Wrigley: It’s a little bit off piste, which languages would you say, matter is the wrong word, but do you know what I mean? So obviously English has become the lingua franca of WordPress. By default Most things happen in English. And we come to this event, and although we are in Athens, everything’s largely in English.
\n\n\n\nWhat are the languages which seem to dominate internationally that you would say, okay, if you’re a developer and you wish to get your things translated, do these ones first, because you’ll have the biggest reach. Now obviously if your product is designed for Hungarian users, probably Hungarian’s the first one to go for. But broadly speaking, if you’re just trying to open it up to the world, English, and then where do we go from there?
\n\n\n\n[00:17:55] Carrie Dils: Well, as I was doing some research for my session, I was looking statistically, I think about 13% and please, anybody listening to this that says she is very wrong right now. I acknowledge that I am probably very wrong right now. But I’m going to say it’s maybe 13% of the world’s population speaks English. Making it one of the largest, but not the largest. And again, I’m sure I’m about to say something wrong, I think Chinese, specifically Cantonese.
\n\n\n\nTo your question, I’m not entirely sure. I think it would be more about what market are you trying to go after. I had the experience, maybe seven or eight years ago, of releasing a commercial theme. One of the goals I was trying to accomplish was, one, to create a theme that was accessible, and two, to create a theme that was translation ready.
\n\n\n\nAnd it was a learning experience for me, and I was able to collaborate. I put out a call to my network, to friends that don’t speak English natively, and asked them for translations. So I ended up shipping my theme with, I want to say eight to ten different translations ready to roll. And some of those, this was the particularly interesting bit for me, some of those are scripts that read right to left, versus read left to right, like English.
\n\n\n\nSo depending on, I’m about to blow your mind, Nathan. Depending on the language, you may need to make layout changes to the front end of the site. So imagine you’ve got a content right sidebar for a site. Well, if you are switching to a right to left script like Hebrew, or Arabic. You would then detect if the language was loaded in one of these RTL scripts and reverse the layout accordingly. So there’s like a separate CSS file for rTL scripts. Isn’t that kind of fascinating?
\n\n\n\n[00:19:55] Nathan Wrigley: That is really fascinating actually, and also probably quite a bit of additional work. That’s my next question actually. We live in a very commercial WordPress now. I think if you and I were having this conversation 10 years ago, the whole commercial side of WordPress was far less significant. There’s now a lot of money tied up in WordPress. And you alluded earlier to this, you said that you could, you can open up your plugin, theme, whatever it may be, to a wider audience.
\n\n\n\nSo I guess somebody listening to this might want to know, okay, how much work is this and what’s the payback? Is it easy to do this? If I pick these two or three popular languages, will I be able to achieve this in a matter of days? Do I need to employ professional transcribers or translators. And will I receive a return on by investment? Like I said, this question probably wouldn’t have occurred 10 years ago. Do you understand the motivation for this might be quite low on the pecking order?
\n\n\n\n[00:20:44] Carrie Dils: Yes. So it’s relatively low effort, Nathan. So think of, as developers, there are best practices for the way that we write code. Maybe it’s the way that we structure our comment. I mean, there are actually WordPress coding standards for how things should be formatted and all of that.
\n\n\n\nSo using translation functions in your code is really just the best practice. It’s low effort to do as a developer. It’s very approachable. And again, the burden of doing the translations into other languages, you don’t necessarily have to do that piece, but of course that, if you know that you have a user base in a particular locale, it would probably behoove you to provide those translations out of the gate with your product.
\n\n\n\nBut in terms of what’s the return, I’m not entirely sure. I don’t have any statistics that speak to that. But certainly from a goodwill aspect, that is there. And also, take away some of the arrogance factor, acknowledging that there are users that may be using your product that are not native English speakers.
\n\n\n\nSo just providing that as part of your code base is a pretty, I don’t want to say easy, because that’s an overused word. It depends on who you are if it’s easy. But if you are already a WordPress developer used to writing code, chances are you’ve copy and pasted a translation function, or a texturing that was wrapped in a translation function and maybe you didn’t know that’s what it was.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:14] Nathan Wrigley: It is June in 2023, so it’s impossible to have a conversation without the words AI. Will there be a place for AI in this? Because it does seem, the burden may not be the coding side. It may literally be, well we haven’t got the finances to get the text translated. We don’t have any expertise in that area, and we don’t know people who can speak Hebrew, Arabic, whatever.
\n\n\n\nSo there’s a cost to that. I’m just wondering if that might well be brought down by things like AI. I’m thinking, you know, you can throw things into Google Translate and out it comes with the correct answer. I just wonder what your thoughts are on that. Whether that’s going to assist this endeavor.
\n\n\n\nI mean, I can imagine, I can really imagine a future in which we go to ChatGPT, or some variant thereof, and say translate my site’s admin area into Hungarian, for example. And it will wrap all the functions correctly and do it all for you. That sounds like a, possible future.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:08] Carrie Dils: I think so I have done zero experimentation in that regard, but I don’t see why it couldn’t. Because you can train AI, right? So if you’re training it on specifically what these functions are, and how you use them. I don’t know why it couldn’t take and theoretically generate both the code. And then on the translation side, to your point, Google Translate already exists. I think the issue right now at least at this stage with AI translations, you lose context.
\n\n\n\nSo imagine, I gave this example in my workshop, so the word lead, L E A D in English has multiple meanings. I could be leading a presentation. I could get a sales lead for my product. I could have my dog on a leash, and it’s called a lead. So if you were just to tell Google Translate, hey translate the word lead into these 10 languages, who knows. There’s a reason for the phrase lost in translation. So I think probably that’s the first shortcoming I could see with the current state of affairs. Obviously, I think that could be addressed and would be really interesting to see what the applications are with AI.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it just feels like a fairly decent shortcut. In that, given everything that we’ve said before about how it would be, well, I’m going to use the word honorable. It would be an honorable thing to do to translate your plugin into the 200 plus languages that WordPress can accept.
\n\n\n\nNow, I realize in most cases that’s probably off the table. But if technology could assist in that effort, and you did have the time to double check to make sure that lead meant lead and not lead, if you know what I mean. Then that seems like a win-win because there’s just no downside to that.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:53] Carrie Dils: Exactly. Nobody ever cried because your site was faster or more accessible. Yeah, so it’s doing that. There’s not really a downside to it.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:02] Nathan Wrigley: Where would you direct us? I’m a plugin developer, a theme developer. You have mentioned the handbook, but I wonder if there’s other things out there. So there might be, I don’t know, YouTube channels or other documentation, maybe some books or something that you’ve written. I don’t know. Is there anything else that you would point people towards? And I will include whatever you say into the show notes so people can just click.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:21] Carrie Dils: I can provide you with a handful of articles on my site that I’ve written. I also have a class if I, just shameless plug, a course on LinkedIn learning on this topic, where I’m teaching more specifically exactly what these translation functions are. When you would use them, et cetera.
\n\n\n\nAnd I also met a gentleman this morning, Toby, whose last name I didn’t catch, but he’s presenting tomorrow on the same topic. And then of course in theory the workshop will end up on TV?
\n\n\n\n[00:25:51] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So by the time this podcast episode airs, typically, the WordPress TV won’t have caught up to that, but should it change at some point in the future, I will make the effort to update the show notes.
\n\n\n\nAnother thing which people have in mind when we talk about translations in WordPress is Gutenberg’s stage four. Now, I realize there’s not a perfect overlap here because that’s more about changing the, well, my understanding, at least anyway, is that’s more about changing the content.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:16] Carrie Dils: Yes.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:16] Nathan Wrigley: How do you feel more broadly, the WordPress project more generally, in terms of accessibility and being able to read it in different languages? I know that’s a way off. It feels like three, phase three that we’re in at the moment could take decade or more to actually finish. I mean, it’s quite complicated, the concurrent editing, I think.
\n\n\n\nBut are you fairly bullish that WordPress is going to be at the vanguard of this in the future? I know that we’ve been talking about the internals, the plugins and what have you, but broadly speaking, on the front end, how do you feel about phase four?
\n\n\n\n[00:26:46] Carrie Dils: I won’t overstep my bounds and pretend like I know more than I do about it. That said, when Matt laid out the four phases of Gutenberg, however many years ago that was. The project has continued to follow that roadmap, albeit maybe not at the quickest clip. So I have faith that will happen.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:04] Carrie Dils: At some point in the future. And that that works towards the WordPress mission of democratizing publishing. I don’t know exactly what, practically speaking, what shape that takes.
\n\n\n\nOh, here’s a resource for you, and people who would know. Polyglots, I mentioned them earlier, the Make WordPress team. They have a Slack channel. They have weekly meetings. If you were to go to the Polyglot section on wordpress.org, that would probably be the place to tune in and, they would have much better information than me.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:34] Nathan Wrigley: Carrie, you’ve been very helpful. You’ve provided me with a question. I know that you wanted to mention that there’s been some updates recently. Well not recently, fairly long time ago, five years I think you mentioned, in the way that you can actually implement these things. You mentioned that it was only possible in PHP until five years ago, something like that. But now you can do this in JavaScript if that’s your thing. Talk to us about that.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:55] Carrie Dils: Yes. So earlier I mentioned the gettext library, sort of the standard for writing translation functions. And that’s common across many programming languages. WordPress is written primarily in PHP and JavaScript. And up until WordPress 5.0, there was no mechanism for translating JavaScript, only for translating strings that were included in PHP files.
\n\n\n\nSo now, behold. If you love JavaScript and you love to learn JavaScript deeply, now you can also learn to translate, or include translatable strings in, your JavaScript. And they’re actually, it’s a subset of the functions that are available in PHP, but they work identically.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:37] Nathan Wrigley: And so all of that’s again, in the documentation. If we go to the resources in the show notes, we’ll be able to find all of that.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:42] Carrie Dils: Absolutely, yes. The handbooks are really, it might take you a little bit of digging around or jumping, jumping around pages, but yes.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:51] Nathan Wrigley: Carrie, thank you so much for talking to us today. Before we part ways, if somebody has listened to this, is interested, wants to find out more, but wants to come directly to you, how do they do that?
\n\n\n\n[00:29:01] Carrie Dils: Twitter is probably where I hang out the most, and my handle is super simple, c d i l s.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:09] Nathan Wrigley: You got in early.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:10] Carrie Dils: Yes, I’ve been on for quite a while. And then I’m also on Mastodon, on the wpbuilds.social @cdils.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:18] Nathan Wrigley: Carrie Dils, really appreciate you talking to us today. Thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of the conference.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:24] Carrie Dils: Thank you, Nathan. Great chatting with you.
\nOn the podcast today we have Carrie Dils.
\n\n\n\nCarrie is a WordPress-loving freelance developer with more than twenty years experience in web development, and full-scope WordPress projects. She teaches WordPress and front-end development courses for LinkedIn Learning, and blogs regularly about WordPress and the business of freelancing.
\n\n\n\nThis is another of the podcast interviews which were recorded at WordCamp Europe in Athens. It took place soon after Carrie had completed her workshop at the event. This workshop was entitled ‘International Appeal: Making Your Themes and Plugins Translatable’.
\n\n\n\nWordCamp workshops are practical, hands-on, sessions. Carrie’s intention here was to make the audience aware of ways in which they could translate their code into other languages. Specifically it was to assist developers in localising their themes and plugins so that they could be consumed and understood by a wider audience. It covered translation functions for PHP and JavaScript, and a foundational understanding of how the process of localisation works.
\n\n\n\nWe started the podcast with some orientation; getting to grips with what internationalisation is in the context of WordPress. Carrie explains that there are workflows already available for developers to use to translate their plugins and themes. This enables their clients or customers to switch between languages in the admin interface so that they can understand more about what they’re doing.
\n\n\n\nCarrie talks about the fact that, although she’s not aware of any legal compulsion to carry out this internationalisation work, it’s very useful for consumers of your code. They will be able to rely on a language that’s familiar to them, and not always have to fall back on English. We get into the weeds a little as Carrie explains the foundations of how the translations actually work, and how developers can tap into this.
\n\n\n\nThe fact that WordPress is so popular means that it’s in a great position to make the internet a more inclusive space. Part of that is making people from all over the world understand how WordPress, and the tools built on top of it, works. Carrie says that it’s not about trying to translate every part of your plugin into the two hundred plus languages which WordPress supports, it’s more about doing what you can, when you can, for those people who can benefit from it.
\n\n\n\nCarrie’s talk will at some point make it onto WordPress.tv so you can see it for yourself, but until that’s available she lays out some of the places where you can go to get support around this subject. The plugin and theme handbooks are an ideal place to start that journey.
\n\n\n\nWe get into a chat about which languages are spoken most widely, and how Carrie thinks about which languages to pick if your resources are limited. She points out that as a developer you’re building in the capability to have your code translated, and the actual work of making those translations can be handled by others if your code is created correctly.
\n\n\n\nGiven that AI is always a hot topic, we digress a little towards the end about how the work of translations is likely to become more automated as large language models take on the burden of translating content and assisting in the writing of code.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re a developer who is curious about making your code available to a wider audience through internationalisation, this podcast is for you.
\n\n\n\nLinkedIn Learning course by Carrie
\n\n\n\nTor-Björn Fjellner’s WCEU presentation
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\n>> The post New Sponsorship Opportunity, WordCamp Media Friend appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community .
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\n\n\n\nWPPS will feature 10 panelists speaking on best practices for managing and optimizing the performance of WordPress publishing sites. Panelists have been selected from high performance teams at The Boston Globe, Forbes, Multidots, WordPress.com VIP, Parse.ly, and other publishers.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe schedule includes four 40-minute sessions over the span of four hours:
\n\n\n\nThese sessions will be aimed at editorial and content strategists, SEO specialists, ad tech and integration professionals, and others working in the publishing industry.
\n\n\n\nWPPS is free and attendees can register on the event’s website. Unlike many other virtual events, the organizers do not plan to record the sessions so those who are interested will need to watch them live. Participants will have the opportunity to ask questions and have them answered by the panel. Those who are unable to attend live can sign up on the website to receive an ebook with the panelists’ recommended WordPress best practices that were shared at the event.
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\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWordPress developer Brian Coords pointed out the fix on Twitter today. It’s a delightful bit of good news for anyone who works regularly with the Site Editor and becomes annoyed by how long it takes to click through to the applicable template. WordPress is now more context aware, delivering site editors to the correct template directly from the admin bar.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe update applies to posts, pages, archives, 404 templates, front page, and anywhere the user happens to be on the frontend. Check out the Gutenberg issue and the related WordPress Trac ticket for more technical details on how contributors arrived at this implementation.
\n\n\n\nThis small fix is important because it removes the requirement for the user to have to know the name of the template they intend to edit. It’s now as easy as clicking directly from the frontend. The more WordPress can reduce friction and the need to have special knowledge in order to edit templates, the more accessible it becomes as a design tool for someone who is just starting out and has no framework for the idea of underlying templates.
\n\n\n\nWordPress 6.3 is on track to be released with this fix on August 8, 2023. Beta 4 landed today with 40+ (Editor) and 60+ (Trac) updates since Beta 3, and RC 1 is expected next week.
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Tue, 11 Jul 2023 21:59:20 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"Sarah Gooding\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:47;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:40:\"WordPress.org blog: WordPress 6.3 Beta 4\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:35:\"https://wordpress.org/news/?p=15386\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:56:\"https://wordpress.org/news/2023/07/wordpress-6-3-beta-4/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:5669:\"WordPress 6.3 Beta 4 is ready for download and testing.
\n\n\n\nThis version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, you should evaluate Beta 4 on a test server and site.
\n\n\n\nGet an overview of the 6.3 release cycle, check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.3-related posts, and review the new features in WordPress 6.3. Also, save the date for a live product demo scheduled for Thursday, July 20, 2023, at 16:00 UTC (Zoom link). This will be a great opportunity to join the WordPress community to celebrate the accomplishments of 6.3 and this final chapter of Phase 2.
\n\n\n\nThanks to the many WordPress beta testers, this release contains 40+ (Editor) and 60+ (Trac) updates since the Beta 3 release. Excellent work, team!
\n\n\n\nNotable updates for this beta release include:
\n\n\n\nBrowse the technical details for issues addressed since Beta 3 using these queries:
\n\n\n\nTesting for issues is a critical part of developing any software, and it’s a meaningful way for anyone to contribute—whether you have experience or not. While testing the upgrade process is essential, trying out new features is too.
\n\n\n\nThe monetary reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities is doubled between the Beta 1 release and the final release candidate (RC). Please follow responsible disclosure practices as detailed in the project’s security practices and policies outlined on the HackerOne page and in the security white paper.
\n\n\n\nYou can test WordPress 6.3 Beta 4 in three ways:
\n\n\n\nwp core update --version=6.3-beta4The current target for the final release is August 8, 2023, about four weeks away. Your help testing this version ensures everything in this release is the best.
\n\n\n\nBeta ships, once more
Up next week, an RC1
6, 3, out the door
Thank you to the contributors who collaborated on this post: @DanSoschin, @Meher, @eidolonnight, and @JPantani.
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\n>> The post Pulling the Curtain Back on WordPress, Woo and AI with Dave Lockie and Dan Walmsley appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community .
\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Tue, 11 Jul 2023 07:48:58 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:5:\"BobWP\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:49;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:126:\"WPTavern: MalCare, Blogvault, and WPRemote Plugins Patch Vulnerabilities Allowing Site Takeover Through Stolen API Credentials\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:30:\"https://wptavern.com/?p=146708\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:135:\"https://wptavern.com/malcare-blogvault-and-wpremote-plugins-patch-vulnerabilities-allowing-site-takeover-through-stolen-api-credentials\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:3105:\"Snicco, a WordPress security services provider, has published an advisory on a vulnerability in the MalCare plugin, which is active on more than 300,000 sites.
\n\n\n\n“MalCare uses broken cryptography to authenticate API requests from its remote servers to connected WordPress sites,” WordPress security researcher Calvin Alkan said.
\n\n\n\n“Requests are authentication by comparing a shared secret stored as plaintext in the WordPress database to the one provided by MalCare’s remote application.
\n\n\n\n“This can allow attackers to completely take over the site because they can impersonate MalCare’s remote application and perform any implemented action.”
\n\n\n\nThese potential malicious actions include creating rogue admin users, uploading random files to the site, and installing and removing plugins.
\n\n\n\nExploitation requires a pre-condition to be met, such as a site with a SQL injection vulnerability in a plugin, theme, or WordPress core, or a database compromised at the hosting level, or subject to another vulnerability that allows the attacker to read or update WordPress options.
\n\n\n\n“MalCare has received the full details of this vulnerability three months before this public release, and despite us offering (free) help, they subtly dismissed it because ‘supposedly’ this is the industry standard for API authentication,” Alkan said.
“Furthermore, concerns were raised, because the vulnerability requires a pre-condition that on its own, would be a vulnerability.”
Two days after Snicco published the security advisory with the proof of concept, MalCare pushed a patch in version 5.16 on July 8, 2023, along with a notice on the plugin’s blog:
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn the rare situation, where a site has a pre-existing, high severity SQL injection vulnerability, an attacker might be able to read the MalCare key. To address such issues, we are further strengthening our authentication systems.
\n\n\n\nAuthentication is a critical system and any improvements must be done in a careful manner. We have reviewed various plugins and best practices in our ecosystem to come up with our solution.
\n\n\n\nIn light of the current public discourse, we are expediting the update of our plugin. We will initiate a rollout by EOD.
\n
MalCare reports that its users have seen no evidence of the vulnerability being exploited.
\n\n\n\nSnicco noted that the same vulnerability also exists in WPRemote (20k installs) and Blogvault (100k installs) plugins, as they share the same code. Users of either of these plugins or the MalCare plugin should update to the latest versions as soon as possible now that the vulnerability advisory and proof of concept have been published.
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