WordPress.org

WordPress contributors are considering scaling back the planned number of releases in 2021. In a post titled “Making WordPress Releases Easier,” WordPress’ Executive Director, Josepha Haden Chomphosy summarized three years of research on reducing the effort required to have a successful WordPress release:

From my research, the work to automate what we can (and potentially get the project ready for more releases per year) would take 3-4 dedicated developers who are proficient in our backend tools/infrastructure, at least a project manager, 1-2 internal communications people, and probably a year or more of work (if we had all the resources, and they were working at full capacity). This means that 4 major releases is not a viable plan in 2021.

Haden Chomphosy cited a number of challenges, including update fatigue, risk of contributor burnout, a lengthy onboarding process for contributors skilled at doing the administrative work required during a release, and a lack of seasoned core developers to keep the process moving efficiently. She identified a few improvements that could be made in the short-term to improve the experience (mentorship, triage, feature proposals, and better product/processes) but other necessary updates to automation and scaling contributors could take a year or more of work.

The post is open for feedback but the decision to scale back the releases seems to have already been made. Ryan McCue, Director of Product at Human Made, commented with concerns about altering the predictability of WordPress releases and introducing what seems like a last minute change:

The predictability of the release calendar was a major step forward for the project, and for companies and teams (including mine) building on top of core. We have intentionally planned and structured our year ahead with this calendar in mind. Obviously, due to the tentative nature, we weren’t expecting dates to be final, but the overall picture seemed to be fairly clear with smaller shifts expected.

Whether WordPress does one release or twelve a year doesn’t matter hugely to me, but ensuring it’s predictable matters hugely for our planning, communication with clients, and for our day-to-day processes. Seeing this change pretty last moment is not encouraging, and is going to have real repercussions for us.

I sympathise with and understand the limitations of capacity and overhead of releasing more often, but changing this plan needs to be clearly communicated upfront, and with a clear plan that isn’t going to change again.

Haden Chomphosy responded with clarification on the conclusion communicated in her post. Without in-person events, contributors have struggled to keep the project moving at the same pace as before. She said the previous schedule had been made without much input from the contributors who are the most impacted.

“Perhaps the more appropriate way to have stated my conclusion would have been: ‘Barring any major changes to the available contributors and global circumstances, I don’t see how we can ship four releases this year without creating undue strain on the team who currently runs those processes,'” Haden Chomphosy said.

Component maintainers and theme/plugin developers participating in the conversation also confirmed that WordPress’ frequent updates have posed a challenge and that the risk of burnout is real. Entering into year two of a global pandemic has undeniably impacted contributors’ availability and momentum, and Haden Chomphosy’s post seeks feedback on a way forward that will avoid putting WordPress’ dedicated contributors under additional strain.

After this post was published, the release schedule for 2020/2021 was updated to show that release dates for WordPress 5.8 and beyond are yet to be confirmed.

Some stakeholders will undoubtedly be disappointed with the current lack of certainty on release dates for the upcoming year, but the conversation is still open and changes will be communicated as soon as contributors find an acceptable way forward.

Perhaps the fates have stepped in to prove a point. After I wrote a 2,000-word piece on the lack of quality themes in the theme directory, they decided to send a message. Not once, but twice this week, a new WordPress theme has managed to catch my eye. My rational mind knows that it was just a weird twist of timing, but I am not discounting the supernatural.

Design Lab’s sixth theme, Artpop, went live in the theme directory this week. It is marketed as a block-ready WordPress theme for blogs, portfolios, businesses, and WooCommerce shops. For the most part, it has a clean and open design that provides users a lot of wiggle room to build out pages with the block editor.

Simplicity is the name of the game, and Artpop has it in spades. It adds just enough small touches to make some elements pop. Of course, I am a fan of the blockquote style, which is one area that theme authors can leave their signature:

Blockquote design.

The theme is not without a few design issues. The typography does not lend itself well to long-form content, despite being pushed as a blogging theme. With a 760px-wide content area and 16px font-size, comfortable reading is thrown out the window. Sure, it looks good in the demo, but it is not practical in the real world.

Where the theme gets things right is its coverage of block styles. End-users can put together custom layouts that do not look broken. After two years of the block editor being in core, this should be the standard experience with all themes, but I cannot stress how much it isn’t.

I even recreated the “creative” homepage design that ships with the pro version of the theme to see how easy it was. If you would rather work with premade layouts, the upgrade is a mere $30. However, if you know your way around the block editor, you can definitely build the layouts yourself.

Editing creative-style Artpop Pro homepage design.

This is the direction that theme design should be going. Provide all the capabilities in the free product. Upsell the added value of having all these extra layouts/patterns premade and available at the click of the button.

By default, the homepage displays a five-post grid. A large featured post sits in the middle while the others are aligned on either side of it. This unique layout was what immediately drew me into the theme.

Grid-style featured posts.

Users can also choose a carousel of featured posts instead of the grid via the customizer. I am typically not a fan of slider-like sections. However, carousels, where it is clear there are extra posts to view, are sometimes an exception to the rule.

Carousel-style featured posts.

After working with block-based themes and the site editor so much over the past few months, these customizer settings feel ancient — both from a developer and end-user viewpoint. It reminds me to applaud theme authors for the years of work they have put into non-optimal systems. There will be a day when adding these types of layouts do not require nearly as much effort.

The one annoyance with the homepage options is that the theme author created a separate “Homepage” panel, which can easily be confused with the existing core “Homepage Settings” section. There is no good reason to not combine these two and free up some room in the customizer.

I would also like to see just a general cleanup of the theme’s customizer integration. The theme does not have many options, but it has nearly a dozen top-level sections, consuming precious real estate in the customizer.

The biggest downside to the theme is that it adds a customizer control that prints “Try Artpop Pro / Need more options?” to every section it adds. This is in addition to its two top-level upsell sections. The thing that makes it worse, however, is that it is broken. The “Try Artpop Pro” text is meant to be linked, but the theme has a bug that outputs the text followed by a broken link tag, which is only visible in the source code.

There really is no need for 10 upsell links in the customizer, even if eight of them are broken. The theme is nice enough on its own. The links just degrade it.

Aside from a few annoyances, the theme is worth exploring for those in the market for something new. While it is a freemium product, users can get a lot of mileage out of it without upgrading.

Earlier this week, Elementor announced a significant pricing hike coming in March 2021 for new customers:

On March 9th, 2021, Elementor will be adding new Studio and Agency Pro subscription plans and adapting the Expert plan, to best accommodate users’ growing needs. These changes will only apply to new purchases. If you’re on an existing active subscription plan, nothing changes for you.

The most radical change is coming to the Expert plan, which previously offered 1,000 sites for $199/year. The plan has been pared back to support 25 sites. Users who need support for 1,000 websites will need to purchase the Agency plan at $999/year, a 400% increase on the price for what was previously offered under the Expert plan.

Elementor emphasized that customers with an existing active subscription will not be affected by the pricing changes. The company is also giving customers a chance to purchase the current Expert plan ($199/year for 1,000 sites) before it is discontinued before March 9, 2021. Existing customers on the Expert plan have the option to upgrade to the Agency plan at a 50% discount (valid from March 9, 2021 until June 9, 2021).

Over the past 48 hours, Elementor’s announcement has received 270 comments primarily from disgruntled customers. Some of them are opposed to the pricing hikes and others are unclear about what it means for their subscriptions long term. Elementor representatives’ responses to questions on renewal have been studiously unclear.

One customer points out that the announcement does not explicitly say that existing subscriptions will retain the legacy pricing past the end of the billing period for this year. It does not state that existing active subscriptions will remain at the same price indefinitely, nor does it specify a term after which the pricing will go up.

Elementor Evangelist Ben Pines, head of the company’s web creator program, has left the question regarding renewals open, saying he “cannot see into the future.” Customers were left wondering whether the lack of clarity on the future of renewals is a foreshadowing of prices going up after the current billing year.

“No one can predict the future, and offering a lifetime price guarantee is irresponsible for any future-facing company,” Pines told the Tavern. “What we can guarantee for sure is the extent to which we value user loyalty. This is why they have never experienced any price change in 4.5 years. We value our users’ trust, and have taken every step to ensure that our loyal users’ active subscriptions are not affected.”

The company has not confirmed whether existing active subscriptions will be guaranteed the lower pricing forever and reserves the right to eliminate legacy pricing at any point in the future.

In the announcement, Pines said the pricing model for Elementor Pro has hardly changed since it was introduced in 2016 and that it is time to update it to best accommodate customers’ evolving needs. Elementor is now installed on more than 7 million websites and caters to a wide community of users with varying levels of expertise. The new plans have access to 24/7 live chat support and a handful of other benefits, but many customers participating in the comments said they do not require chat support.

The upcoming pricing hike has heightened tensions for customers who feel the dramatic increase is unjustified for the software in its current state. They cited usability issues, persistent bugs, and performance problems that remain unfixed. Additional support features do not make the higher prices more compelling for this segment of the company’s customers.

Some who were disturbed by the radical price increase called for the company to consider creating a middle ground offering for the updated Expert tier.

“I agree that 1,000 websites for $199 is low,” one customer commented. “Many small people will never create 1,000 websites. What bothers me is $199 for 25. Would it be more reasonable if it was $199 for 50, to have some middle ground? Or maybe you do not want the little people around any more.”

A handful of customers commenting were unfazed, noting that anyone who builds 1,000 websites using Elementor and cannot afford $1 per work order should reconsider their business model.

Pricing changes can be a major source of friction for existing customers, as GitLab recently discovered when dropping its Bronze/Starter Tier and imposing a 5x price increase on those features in a higher tier. Although the immediate impact of pricing increases will primarily hit new customers, it’s the existing customers who have been paying for subscriptions for years who have the strongest opinions on the changes.

Raising prices to introduce more value for customers or to account for the increased support burden is a natural evolution for companies that experience rapid growth over a short period of time. Getting existing customers to lock in their auto-renewals by offering legacy pricing is also a strategy for ensuring a more predictable financial future for the company. But Elementor’s lack of clarity regarding term length for the discounted renewal pricing is the primary reason for all the agitation in the comments on the announcement.

Earlier this week, WP Feedback founder Vito Peleg announced the company was changing its brand to Atarim. After 18 months since its launch, it would also be moving toward a complete Saas (Software as a Service) model.

WP Feedback was created as a standalone plugin. The goal was to provide a visual feedback tool that agencies and developers could use to communicate with clients rather than spending time deciphering unclear emails, chat messages, and phone calls.

“Starting as a freelancer and then an agency owner myself, it was always a huge pain to get clients to provide me with the content and design feedback I needed,” said Peleg. “And this led to us building a tool for us that worked extremely well with our workflow, which led to the decision to take this to the market.”

However, over time, the product evolved into something bigger.

“As we started gaining traction, I always kept a pulse on our users (now with over 5,000 freelancers and agencies), and it became clear that a standalone plugin, while it did do the trick, was simply not enough — especially for those that manage multiple websites and clients at the same time,” said Peleg. “It solved a huge part of the problem, but not the workflow in its entirety. There was a clear demand for us to build a centralized area to gather all feedback so we then created our Agency Dashboard — a cloud-based application that allowed our users to gather all the requests from different clients and websites to manage them in a single place.”

Peleg said the Agency Dashboard revealed a more complex problem in the industry. Agencies were patching together several different tools to provide various aspects of their services. These tools were leading to unnecessary friction and slowing down jobs, often adding weeks of additional time.

The team tackled more than they had initially bargained for. In 18 months, they added over 150 features to the WP Feedback platform. Peleg said the project has helped agencies and developers reduce between 50% and 80% of the previous time delivering projects and supporting clients.

In 2020, the WP Feedback’s users marked over 100,000 tasks as complete. Peleg calculates this has saved the industry over five years of unnecessary back and forth.

“The name WP FeedBack continued to position us as what version 1.0 was — a basic visual feedback plugin,” he said. “So along with version 2.0 that is releasing this week, I decided it’s a great opportunity to revamp the whole experience with a rebrand, repositioning, and a whole bunch of new ways that users can use our software to improve their lives.”

Peleg said that nothing is really changing for existing customers other than having access to more tools. It should be a smooth transition for them. The goal now is to attract new customers.

“I also hope that this transition will allow our industry to see the new reality we’re creating for delivering website projects and why it’s insane that a 5-6 days project still takes 6-8 weeks to complete,” he said.

How the Service Works

Atarim Agency Dashboard.

There are two sides to Atarim. One is a client-interface plugin installed on each project website; the other is the Agency Dashboard.

“The plugin’s role is to provide a simple experience for clients to provide the content you need, approve the designs and request ongoing support,” said Peleg. “Allowing to visually click any part of the website (including in the wp-admin screens) and just leave a comment. The agency will get an automated screenshot, the screen size, browser version, and a button that will take them directly to the request, logged in, with one click.”

Freelancers or agencies work from within the Agency Dashboard. This serves as a central location for all of the work that happens around client websites.

Technically, WP Feedback has already been a SaaS product with an accompanying plugin since launching its central dashboard early in the product’s history. Version 2.0 completes the transition from a plugin to a full-on SaaS. Feedback and other data are no longer saved to the client websites. Instead, they are hosted via Atarim.

“Over time, we noticed that it created unwanted bloat to the websites that were using our tools extensively, so off-loading all the data and loading it from our side, was the natural route,” said Peleg. “But since this is how the platform was initially built, this was a massive undertaking that I’m very happy that we finally completed.”

The client-interface plugin is built for WordPress. However, the technology stack behind the new Atarim Agency Dashboard is on Laravel and React. The team thought it would be the best framework for speed and to work with as the company continues to scale.

“I’ve been using WordPress myself for more than a decade — so it really comes naturally to me by now,” said Peleg. “The SaaS world is a different animal.”

“One of the biggest challenges was transitioning everything we have built, to be pulled from the cloud as opposed to being stored locally on the client’s site. The ‘cloud migration’ project, as we called it internally, has been a year-long endeavor that, whilst it was developed constantly, was pushed back by our need to support our existing users, our growth, COVID-19, and all the other fires that happen when you’re running a startup.”

WordPress is open source software, maintained by a global network of contributors. There are many examples of how WordPress has changed people’s lives for the better. In this monthly series, we share some of the amazing stories that are lesser-known.

Pooja Derashri shares the story of how she went from being an introvert from a small village in India to becoming a developer and working on international projects, thanks to the WordPress community. 

As her interest grew, Pooja started following some WordPress-based groups on Facebook, where she first heard about conference-style WordPress events known as WordCamps. She later joined her first WordCamp in Ahmedabad, India. This three day event in 2017 opened up a new world—the WordPress community—and what would become a life changing moment. “WordCamp Ahmedabad has one of the best WordPress communities in India,” she said, “and everyone, including organizers and attendees were so humble and welcoming.”

The thirst for learning

A fascination with how things worked and a desire never stop learning were traits that shone through in Pooja from a young age. She moved from Banera, a rural village in India, to a nearby city, where she lived with her uncle while completing her higher education. With her enthusiasm for learning, she decided to become an engineer. When thinking back on that time she says, “Being from a rural background, people in my village tended not to be keen on the idea of sending their girl child to another city for further studies. Fortunately, that was not the case for me because my parents were immensely supportive of me and my interests. They’ve always encouraged me to believe in myself and fulfill my dreams. With their support, I pursued my engineering in electronics and communication.”

Discovering the opportunities in web development 

On completing her engineering training, Pooja was not sure what to do next. One of her friends suggested that she should explore web development. The idea intrigued her, and she sought out learning resources to study. She also secured an internship as a PHP Developer to give herself the chance to learn alongside professionals in the field.

Getting started with WordPress

“I found WordPress surpassed other platforms. The vast knowledge base made it easy for me to learn.” – Pooja

This internship led Pooja to her first job where she discovered a range of content management systems. Her view of the opportunities offered by these systems changed when the manager assigned her a small project using the WordPress platform. 

She recalls: “I found WordPress surpassed other platforms I had worked on earlier. The vast knowledge base made it easy for me to learn.” She soon became comfortable managing WordPress, working with plugins and themes, and wanted to learn it more in-depth.

Pooja soon joined WPVibes as its first team member. Being part of a new startup gave her a lot of experience and a chance to be involved in new processes. As the company expanded they started providing custom plugin development services per the client’s requirement and created some free and paid plugins. Pooja said, “We found it very exciting and productive. Today, we are a team of 10.”

Encouragement from the WordPress community

Contributing to WordPress increases your knowledge

At the event, she was able to listen to speakers from India and abroad, many of whom shared their journey with WordPress and how it had changed their lives. “One of the most inspiring sessions was by Rahul Bansal,” she said. “He talked about contributing to WordPress and giving back to the community. He also explained how contributing to WordPress can help you to enhance your knowledge. It inspired me to contribute to WordPress.”

The WordPress community of Ahmedabad continued to inspire Pooja and her husband Anand Upadhyay, and they later started a Meetup group in their home city of Ajmer as part of their contribution to the community. They continue to be involved in supporting local users through the Ajmer Meetup.

At the next WordCamp Pooja attended, she joined its contributor day, which brings users together to give back to the open source platform and global community. Most of the contributors she met were interested in giving time to the WordPress CMS. She decided to venture into a different path and took her first steps by joining the WordPress TV group, where you can explore videos from WordPress events across the world. She also discovered the joy of translating into her local language, and is a Polyglot contributor for the Hindi language.

In 2019, she was selected as a volunteer for WordCamp Asia in Bangkok, Thailand, and it became an impetus to become even more involved with the community. She was very excited about this role, and to be part of her first WordCamp outside India. Sadly, due to the global COVID pandemic, the event had to be cancelled. Her enthusiasm has not diminished and she is eagerly waiting to support in-person WordCamps in the future and meet even more members of the global community.

Her determination to be part of making WordPress and sharing skills has only increased, which has led to contribute to the WordPress Training team. This team manages lesson plans and prepares content to support people who are training others to use WordPress. The team recently joined a few other teams to launch Learn WordPress, which brings learning materials together for users of all levels, and Pooja contributed to two different teams during the project.

Message to the WordPress Community

Pooja is eager to share her belief in the power for good in the WordPress community. “There is a huge community to help you with your learning, so start learning and try to give back to the community. It doesn’t matter if you are not comfortable with programming, there are many different ways in which you can contribute.” 

“What I have learned in my life is that it doesn’t matter from where you came and what background you have. All that matters is your hard work and positive attitude towards life.”

Read more stories in the People of WordPress series.

Contributors

Thanks to Abha Thakor (@webcommsat) and Nalini Thakor (@nalininonstopnewsuk) for writing this story, and to Surendra Thakor (@sthakor), Josepha Haden (@chanthaboune), Meher Bala (@meher), Chloé Bringmann (@cbringmann), Olga Glekler (@oglekler), Christopher Churchill (@vimes1984), Larissa Murillo (@lmurillom), and Yvette Sonneveld (@yvettesonneveld) for work on the series this month. Thank you also to Pooja Derashri (@webtechpooja) for sharing her #ContributorStory.

WordPress has passed 40% market share of all websites, up from 35.4% in January 2020, as measured by W3Techs. These numbers are derived from the Alexa top 10 million websites, along with the Tranco top 1 million list. By W3Techs’ estimates, every two minutes, another top 10m site starts using WordPress.

Among the top 1,000 sites, WordPress’ market share is even higher at 51.8%, and captures a staggering 66.2% for new sites. In tracking the growth rate over the past 10 years, W3Techs shows WordPress sloping steadily upwards.

Matthias Gelbmann, CEO of W3Techs parent company Q-Success, explained the reasons behind this methodology:

The reason why we don’t count all the websites, is because there are so many domains that are unused or used for dubious purposes. We want to exclude the many millions of parked domains, spam sites and sites that simply have no real content. We are convinced that including all trash domains would make our statistics a lot less useful, as millions of them just run some software stack that auto-generates useless content.

In order to measure the “meaningful web,” W3Techs’ methodology excludes sites with default content pages displayed by Apache, Plesk, and cPanel, expired domains, and account suspended pages. It also excludes sites with the default WordPress message (“Hello world! Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!”).

In January, Squarespace overtook Drupal and Wix to become the 4th most popular CMS with 2.5% market share, trailing Joomla (3.4%), Shopify (5.3%), and WordPress (64.3%). Although most open source CMS’s are now in a gradual decline with proprietary competitors rising, WordPress remains a beacon of free software that continues to sustain its incredible growth.

In a time when some projects are abandoning open source principles when convenient for their business models, WordPress’ success has proven that an unwavering commitment to user freedoms does not have to be at odds with a thriving commercial ecosystem. These user freedoms are fiercely protected by the project’s leadership and passionate community of contributors. As a result, WordPress’ GPL licensing now underpins a multi-billion dollar economy of services, hosting companies, and entrepreneurs who have built their livelihoods using WordPress.

Every year I wonder when the project’s growth might slow down, but end up refreshing W3Techs’ site obsessively for a week in anticipation of another major milestone, as WordPress hovered at 39.9%. Naysayers love to claim that hordes of people will stop using WordPress when major, ambitious changes are proposed. But if W3Techs’ growth tracking is any indication, new website creators and those climbing the ranks to the Alexa top 10 million have not yet gotten tired of being greeted by the message: “Hello world! Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!”

On Monday, GoDaddy officially launched the Hub by GoDaddy Pro, a dashboard that brings together all of its products, pro-specific tools, and solutions. The experience is geared toward website developers and designers, creating a central location to manage their client work.

GoDaddy Pro is not a new service by GoDaddy. The hosting company launched its initial beta in 2015. However, GoDaddy Pro is now offering a fresh experience powered by the Hub. According to Adam Warner, the Global Field Marketing Sr. Manager at GoDaddy, the Hub is being built in collaboration with real-world web designers and developers from their Customer Advisory Board.

The Hub is at hub.godaddy.com. Existing GoDaddy Pro users can opt-in to the new Hub experience. However, they may continue using the legacy experience at pro.godaddy.com. They can also jump between both as needed. Eventually, the Hub will completely replace the legacy experience.

The Hub home screen.

“You can manage all your client projects, sites, and GoDaddy products from within the Hub,” said Warner. “Your clients’ WordPress sites don’t have to be hosted at GoDaddy. The Hub works with all web hosts. You can run one-click WordPress updates, security checks, backups, and other bulk site maintenance work within the Hub. We’ve seen users save an average of three hours per month, per site.”

The Hub allows web developers to access their clients’ GoDaddy products without needing to pass around credentials. Developers can also send a pre-loaded shopping cart or purchase products on their clients’ behalf.

“This makes it easier, and faster, to get a new project up and running,” said Warner. “You don’t have to worry about your client buying the wrong hosting plan or domain. Project management is integrated into the Hub, so you can keep track of client communications and ensure you’re delivering projects on time.”

Part of this journey began when GoDaddy acquired ManageWP and brought its team over in 2016. The acquisition was anything but popular at the time.

“We built the first version of our GoDaddy Pro site management tools on top of ManageWP Orion,” said Warner. “We added new GoDaddy-specific features, like allowing clients to grant delegated access to manage their GoDaddy products. We also included some premium addons for free on GoDaddy-hosted websites. Just like with ManageWP, sites managed in the Hub can be hosted anywhere, not just at GoDaddy.”

The Hub has an interface that feels more Average Joe than tech savant. I half expected to see call-to-action buttons littering the screen, funneling users to every conceivable GoDaddy product, but none were found. Expectations from the GoDaddy of 10 years ago still linger and die hard. However, the company continues to move beyond its old reputation with its free tools and more recent willingness to give back to the open-source community, including its contribution to Five for the Future.

Running a site security check.

“My goal in joining GoDaddy in 2018 was, and still is, to continue my participation in the WordPress and wider web designer and developer (WD&D) communities in order to listen and return feedback internally on how we can best support freelancers in starting, growing, and streamlining their businesses,” said Warner. “GoDaddy Pro (the legacy tool) already existed when I joined GoDaddy, and my mission was to spread the word and offer suggested enhancements based on real-world conversations with freelancers and their specific needs.”

Creating clients, projects, and sites from within the interface is simple. Performance and security checks went well for the one site I have connected. The tests seemed to be spot on in comparison to other tools I have used.

Site performance check.

GoDaddy Pro membership is free. However, the Hub will have premium site maintenance tools in the future. Automated security checks, performance checks, backups, and uptime monitoring are currently free. There is no timetable on when they will be behind a paywall. Some of the premium features will have a downgraded free option when the switch is flipped.

“While some adjacent programs (e.g. GoDaddy Reseller program, Pro subscription) may have associated costs or fees, GoDaddy Pro’s integrated project management, site management, and client management tools are free,” said Warner.

The commitment to offering the management tools for free is undoubtedly a good thing. Thus far, I like what I am seeing with the new Hub experience.

The Gatsby source WordPress plugin, Gatsby Cloud’s official WordPress integration, has been marked stable as of v4 and has been released to the public. The plugin sources data from WordPress for headless setups that use Gatsby on the frontend. It is a complete rewrite of Gatsby’s previous source plugin and works in combination with the WPGatsby plugin to integrate content preview and incremental builds from Gatsby Cloud. 

After going into public beta last year, the new source plugin was updated to enable the following:

• Users add a WPGraphQL-enabled endpoint to gain access to WordPress content in Gatsby’s data layer for use in React templates
• Optimizes links and images within the content HTML with gatsby-image and gatsby-link
• Restricts image processing and optimization to images referenced in published content, so large media libraries don’t slow down build times
• Automatically enables access to data from any WPGraphQL extension, integrating the site with other WordPress plugins

WPGraphQL is required as part of the setup. It turns any site into a GraphQL server, making the content easier to fetch. For the past 18 months, Gatsby has supported the development and maintenance of WPGraphQL to a stable 1.0 release. WP Engine recently hired its maintainer, Jason Bahl, to continue funding the project and expand on its own headless WordPress initiatives. This ensures that WPGraphQL will continue to have a strong future for use in decoupled projects.

“During the beta period, we were excited to see developer teams we admire adopt the Gatsby WordPress integration for their projects,” Gatsby marketing manager Hashim Warren said. “Teams from Facebook, Bluehost, and Apollo used Gatsby’s WordPress integration to create accessible, scalable, and easy-to-update web experiences.” All of these sites and more were using Gatsby + WPGraphQL in production before the new Gatsby Source WordPress plugin was officially stable, so it has been tested extensively during the beta period.

The rewritten plugin is better at bridging the gap to make Gatsby frontends less of a trade-off for developers who are working with editorial teams. It improves build times to be under 10 seconds for medium-sized sites.

The complexity of editing and rebuilding Gatsby sites has been one of the chief deterrents for content creators adopting headless architecture. It imposes a more complicated workflow that the Gatsby Cloud product is designed to fix. This is how Gatsby monetizes its WordPress integration – by making the workflow more like what traditional WordPress provides out of the box.

In recruiting potential headless customers, Gatsby emphasized the lower hosting costs of its stack. Gatsby Cloud is free for small, personal sites but limits users to 100 Real-Time Edits/month. In fact, all of the commercial plans have upper limits on the number of editors and how many times users can perform real-time edits.

Decoupled architecture still falls squarely within the realm of developers. Gatsby’s Cloud product is one way that developers who choose Gatsby for the frontend can make their sites more user-friendly for editorial teams. Developers who are interested in exploring the new integration can get a quick start by checking out Gatsby’s official WordPress starter.

George Mamadashvili’s Bookmark Card block is the sort of simple plugin that is easy to overlook. It is one of those plugins that suffers from the lack of block discoverability in WordPress at the moment. Like many other one-off blocks, you don’t know you need it until you need it.

The plugin is essentially an embed block, but it is not specific to one website or service like Twitter and YouTube. Instead, it allows users to add a “card” for any URL in their content.

Mamadashvili has previously worked as a developer on several blocks for the Sorta Brilliant brand, which sported some of my favorite block-related plugins, such as Emoji Conbini. Unfortunately, those plugins are no longer in the WordPress directory at the request of the owner, Nick Hamze.

However, Mamadashvili has continued building separately. Yesterday, he launched Toggles, a block for creating FAQs, hiding spoilers, and adding simple accordion elements..

I have had his Bookmark Card block literally bookmarked for a few months, just now finally giving it the overdue trial run that it deserves.

The name of the plugin brings me back a few years. There was once a time when bookmarks were a common feature of the web. Entire sites were dedicated to managing them, and some people created their own bookmark pages on their WordPress sites. Some were mere blogrolls. Others were more advanced galleries with images. Even the “link” post format archive in WordPress has served as a bookmark system.

The idea of bookmarks is about preserving pieces of the web that interests us. So, I opened my dusty old recipe folder in Chrome and started putting together a recipes page for fun, hoping for some inspiration in my culinary pursuits.

Horizontal-style Bookmark Card blocks.

I enjoy this recipe page a lot more than the plain links hidden away in my Google bookmarks. I suppose I could get even more creative and break everything down by category on different pages.

The Bookmark Card block currently ships with two styles. The horizontal style, shown above, places the image to the right of the card content. The default style, shown below, adds the image at the top. Users can also try combinations with other blocks for unique looks, such as adding cards to the Columns block.

Columns of Bookmark Card blocks.

The plugin can be useful in many contexts. Users can add URLs that are not supported via the regular embed blocks. They may also enjoy the shared card style for all of their embedded links.

Future Ideas for the Plugin

The simplicity of Bookmark Card is part of its allure. However, it is also overly simple in some respects. The only option it provides is the choice between a vertical and horizontal card style. This limits its potential, especially if the default design does not match the user’s theme.

The plugin does not need a plethora of options. However, it could use some basics. Text and background colors are a must. Base typography options, such as selecting the font size, would be nice-to-have features. Integration with the Gutenberg plugin’s newer border-radius component would work well with this type of block. Like all blocks I test or use, I also ask that plugin developers add support for wide and full-width alignments.

A few additional styles or layout options would help. For example, a horizontal style that moves the image to the left of the card content would be a good option.

The plugin, which is currently at version 1.0, is a good starting point. However, it could be much better with just a handful of extras in future updates.

WordPress 5.7 Beta 2 is now available for testing!

This software is still in development, so it’s not recommended to run this version on a production site. Consider setting up a test site to play with it.

You can test the WordPress 5.7 Beta 2 in two ways:

• Install/activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (select the Bleeding edge channel and the Beta/RC Only stream)
• Direct download the beta version here (zip).

The current target for final release is March 9, 2021. That’s just four weeks away, so your help is vital to making sure that the final release is as good as it can be.

Some Highlights

Since Beta 1, 38 bugs have been fixed. Here is a summary of some of the included changes:

• Italicized text has been removed to improve accessibility and readability (#47326)
• Pause any playing media when closing the the media modal (#48562)
• Add Content-Security-Policy script loaders (#39941)
• Several fixes for the Twenty Twenty-One theme (#50454, #52432, #52433, #52473, #52477, #52374)
• Gutenberg editor support for custom spacing (#51760)
• Resolved Menu UI issues on medium-large screen sizes (#49576)
• Admin UI color palette: ensure that all interactive elements have an appropriate contrast ratio (#52402)

How You Can Help

Watch the Make WordPress Core blog for 5.7-related developer notes in the coming weeks, which will break down these and other changes in greater detail.

So far, contributors have fixed 157 tickets in WordPress 5.7, including 68 new features and enhancements, and more bug fixes are on the way.

Do some testing!

Testing for bugs is a vital part of polishing the release during the beta stage and a great way to contribute.

If you think you’ve found a bug, please post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. We would love to hear from you! If you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on WordPress Trac. That’s also where you can find a list of known bugs.

Props to @audrasjb, @hellofromtonya, @francina and @desrosj for your peer revisions!

WP Engine is deepening its investment in headless WordPress with the creation of a new team dedicated to furthering the technology developers rely on when opting for this architecture. The company has hired WPGraphQL creator and maintainer Jason Bahl as part of this new team and will be investing in more engineers and other roles to support decoupled setups.

For the past 18 months, Gatsby has funded Bahl’s time on WPGraphQL’s maintenance and development. During that time, the project had 53 releases, went from ~15,000 installs reported on Packagist.org to more than 85,000, and launched the plugin on WordPress.org with more than 8,000 installs active today and a 5-star average rating. The community around the project is also growing and has contributed more than 30 plugins to the library of WPGraphQL extensions.

“Gatsby’s investment in WPGraphQL signaled that it wasn’t just a hobby project, but was solving real problems for real users, and users should have confidence using it in their projects,” Bahl said.

After Gatsby started transitioning Bahl to work more on other Gatsby integrations, such as Contentful and Shopify, it translated into less time to work on WordPress and WPGraphQL. This prompted him to seek out another employer where he could prioritize working on headless WordPress.

“I feel right now is a unique time in history where more investment in WordPress as a headless CMS can change the future of WordPress,” Bahl said. “I believe WordPress is now more respected as a viable option for a headless CMS and that with the momentum of WPGraphQL, technologies like Gatsby, NextJS, and others, I need to spend more time focusing on WPGraphQL and headless WordPress, and not less time.”

Bahl found WP Engine at the right time and will be focusing on maintaining WPGraphQL and working on wider headless WordPress initiatives.

“We’re going to be investing in headless WordPress, both in expanding our existing business as well as giving back to the community, as we have done for the past eleven years,” WP Engine founder and CTO Jason Cohen said.

“We’re already seeing some customers moving to headless.  While we don’t see the majority of WordPress sites doing that anytime soon, we do want to invest in those who are.”

In the meantime, WP Engine is creating a Headless WordPress Framework that is in the early stages of development. The framework uses WPGraphQL and provides a plugin, a set of npm packages, and guides for creating headless WordPress sites using Next.js.

“GraphQL as a protocol offers a lot of advantages over REST, which is why it is being used so much, even by players outside of WordPress, like Gatsby,” Cohen said. “GraphQL includes type-safe schemas, is more discoverable, is easier to federate, and because it allows the clients so much flexibility in what data it wants (and does not want), it often results in fewer back-and-forth calls between client and server, while reducing the data being transferred to only that which the client actually needs. Because of the advantages of GraphQL, we believe a mature GraphQL API for WordPress will empower developers and site owners to move faster and with more confidence when they choose to go headless with WordPress.”

Bahl said WP Engine’s investment in headless WordPress isn’t limited to him continuing work on WPGraphQL. The company plans to hire more engineers for projects aimed at reducing the friction that developers and businesses experience when using WordPress as a headless CMS.

“I believe that WP Engine’s investment in this space will allow WPGraphQL to grow and mature faster than ever before, as I will be part of a larger team working to make WordPress the best it can be,” Bahl said.

Single post view.

Empt Lite, the latest theme by Rough Pixels, landed in the WordPress theme directory today. Like most of the company’s prior work, the design is on par with the best free themes currently available.

I have come to disregard that icky feeling whenever I see “Lite” attached to a theme name, at least when it falls under the Rough Pixels brand. The company does not deal in the stripped-down lite themes I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. Empt Lite is one of those rare themes that does not downgrade the experience with the free version. Most additional features in the pro version seem to be value-adds for users who need something extra. There is almost an honesty to it. Users can get a feel for the theme quality before deciding to hand over money for the commercial version.

Some pro features probably do not make sense as an upsell in the long run. WordPress’s upcoming Full Site Editing (FSE) could make them obsolete. For example, an option for customizing archive titles will be easy to accomplish in the site editor. An “about me” widget will not be a great upsell a year from now. However, custom patterns for an “about me” section might make more sense.

This is assuming the theme developer goes down the block-based theme path in the months to come. Looking at theme releases in 2021 needs to be done with an eye toward how they might function in an FSE world. This includes what freemium-based theme companies are upselling. Some will likely need to change tactics in time.

The one missing feature that I would like to see Rough Pixels include in this theme and others is custom block patterns. They are already covering all of their bases with block editor styles. Now that patterns have been in WordPress since version 5.5, it is time to keep building on the work already in place. This is also an opportunity to transition toward selling design-based upgrades. Put together some custom pattern packages and see what type of feedback customers provide.

Theme Features

In essence, Empt Lite is mostly a standard blogging theme. Where it shines is its support of the block editor.

Wide-aligned Cover block.

One of the surest signs of a theme author doing their due diligence with block styles is to test a full-aligned Cover block with text afterward. If the text butts against the Cover, the theme probably has numerous other issues. If there is spacing between the two, the theme author likely took the time to test almost all WordPress blocks in various scenarios. I promise you this test works 90% of the time. Empt Lite passed this test and my entire block-testing suite with ease.

The feature that immediately caught my eye was the gallery-style blog layout. Rather than the typical top-aligned or masonry-type grids, the theme employs an offset style reminiscent of the Twenty Twenty-One theme’s image and gallery patterns. The effect is achieved by using varying featured image orientations, which the theme aligns to the middle. It is a break from the monotony of typical layouts.

Offset, gallery-style layout.

This gallery style does require that every post have a featured image. Posts without them simply disappear from the blog and archive pages, but not completely. These posts leave empty gaps, throwing off the layout. Their titles appear when hovering over seemingly-random spots on the page. There is also an empty <figure> tag in the source code. These are obviously bugs. If the theme author wants to support posts without featured images, the easiest solution would be to add a fallback.

Users who love to customize their theme and make it their own will find enough theme options to whet their appetites. Whether it is colors and typography or post meta and the nine sidebars, the theme has settings to cover it. Outside of the gallery blog layout, none of the customizer options seemed groundbreaking.

If anything, I look forward to the day when theme authors do not have to build all of these options and relegate them to the site editor. Rough Pixels and others put so much custom code behind the customizer that it feels like a waste of development hours in the long term. FSE cannot get here soon enough.

The theme has a few noticeable issues, but they are relatively trivial.

The mouse cursor is set to “pointer” when hovering a post featured image, even when that image is not linked. Yes, I unsuccessfully attempted to click a featured image multiple times, wondering why it was doing nothing.

The wide-layout for single posts provides plenty of breathing room for custom layouts. However, the default font-size, set to 17px, is too small for comfortable long-form reading. There is an option to customize the size, but it applies to the text across the entire site and not just the post content on single views. Making it larger creates the opposite problem on non-single pages. When a project is billed as a blog theme, words-per-line matter. Nailing the typography is a must, even when it is on an alternative layout option. Outside of this one case, the theme gets the defaults right.

The default quote style can make the text tough to read. The quote icon in the background bleeds too much into the foreground. I love the style; the color just needs to be dialed back while letting the text take center stage. The theme provides an option for changing the blockquote icon’s color. I suggest tinkering with it.

Blockquote style.

Overall, this is one of the better themes to land in the WordPress theme directory in the past few months. Recreating the theme’s demo requires almost no fuss. The typography is on-point for a blogging theme, and it works well with the block editor.

Excited to welcome Parse.ly to the Automattic family, in an acquisition that’s closing today. They’ll be joining our enterprise group, WPVIP. The deal has been nicely covered in the Wall Street Journal and Axios. As a bonus, here’s Parse.ly co-founder Andrew Montalenti’s first comment on this blog, in 2012.

Great article, Matt. I wrote about this on my blog — Fully Distributed Teams: Are They Viable?

http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2012/05/14/distributed-teams

In it, I drew the distinction between “horizontally scaled” teams, in which physical offices are connected to remote workers via satellite (home or commercial) offices, and “fully distributed” teams where, as you said, “the creative center and soul of the organization on the internet, and not in an office.”

At Parse.ly, we’re only a couple years old but have been operating on the distributed team model, with ~13 fully distributed employees, and it’s working well. Always glad to hear stories about how Automattic has scaled it to 10X our size.

And, likewise, we blow some of our office space savings on camaraderie-building retreats; our most recent one was in New York, see [here] and [here.]

Version 9.9 of the Gutenberg plugin landed earlier today. While it includes several minor UI improvements, the biggest user-facing change is the inclusion of icon and background color options for the Social Links block. Theme authors can now add support for rounded image borders. They are also faced with a breaking change to their theme JSON files.

WordPress 5.7 Beta 1 was released earlier this week. The final 5.7 release will include features from Gutenberg 9.9 back down to 9.3. Only bug fixes from upcoming plugin updates should be ported into WordPress during the rest of the development cycle.

The development team squashed over 30 bugs in the latest plugin update. It also includes several enhancements and API updates. Plugin developers can now override the block category when registering variations, which should help with discoverability.

Full Site Editing and other experimental work continued as usual. One item that theme authors should keep an eye on is the initial groundwork for additional border options. The experimental feature for adding border colors, styles, and widths for blocks has long been on the wish list of many. I expect that the team will start slowly rolling out block support and a UI in coming versions.

Color Options for Social Links

Icon and background colors for Social Links.

Users can now change the icon color and background in the Social Links block. This change allows the user to customize the colors for all icons in the links list. The “logos only” block style does not support a background color.

The missing piece is the ability to set individual icon colors and their hover colors. One of the use cases in theme design is to provide a solid-colored group of icons that change to the brand colors on hover or focus. The only way to do this from the user’s end is via individual icon color options. Even the ability to set the icon hover color for the entire block is still unavailable.

Branding guidelines were mentioned as a concern with the current color options, but that concern is outside the scope of WordPress’s responsibility (see longer analysis regarding logos). Many brands also have alternate colors they allow, which are not possible to use without icon-specific colors.

Setting the background and text color for all icons at once is a step in the right direction, but the block editor is still not matching what theme authors are doing in traditional theme design. These missing features are blockers for the eventual adoption of Full Site Editing.

Rounded Border Support for Themes

Border radius setting for the Image block.

Theme authors can now opt into border-radius support for images. Support comes in two forms. One is a setting to allow end-users to customize the border-radius via the block options sidebar. The second is setting a default border-radius value for all images.

The Gutenberg team first added border-radius support to the Group block in version 9.8. Currently, only the Group and Image blocks support the feature.

The following theme JSON code will add settings and styles support. Note the new format change, which is covered in the next section.

{
    "settings": {
        "core/image": {
            "border": {
                "customRadius": true
            }
        }
    },
    "styles": {
        "core/image": {
            "border" : {
                "radius": "10px"
            }
        }
    }
}

New Theme JSON File Format

Gutenberg 9.9 introduces two breaking changes to the experimental-theme.json file, which will eventually be renamed to theme.json once it is out of the experimental stage. This file allows theme authors to configure custom styles and settings for the block system. Any themes currently using the pre-9.9 format will need to be updated.

The first change makes settings and styles top-level keys in the file. The second change renames and splits the global key to defaults and root. defaults deal with default values and styles while root handles the site root block.

Ari Stathopoulos wrote a tutorial for theme authors to update their themes on the Make Themes blog.

“The rationale for this change is that the use cases for theme.json have grown beyond initially considered, and the vision is now being able to absorb a lot of things that themes declare at the moment via other means,” wrote Andrés Maneiro, the creator of both tickets. “Some examples are registering (and translate?) custom templates, declare theme metadata that is currently stored in the stylesheet, declare stylesheet paths, etc.”

He also shared a vision of what the format might look like:

{
    "name": "TwentyTwentyOne",
    "description": "...",
    "customTemplates": ...,
    "textDomain": ...,
    "version": 1,
    "settings": {
            "global": { ... },
            "core/paragraph": { ... }
    },
    "styles": {
            "global": { ... },
            "core/paragraph": { ... }
    }
}

For users, this data might not make much sense. However, any theme author should be able to recognize the significance of potentially moving metadata that is currently stored in their theme’s style.css through a non-standard system that WordPress has used for ages. Eventually moving that data to a standard format, JSON, would give WordPress flexibility to shed some of its legacy baggage.

WordPress themes currently have a hard requirement of including a style.css file. We could well be on our way to building WordPress themes that have no need for a stylesheet at all. The future of FSE is likely one in which CSS is all handled through the Global Styles system with the theme’s default values set via the theme.json file. If a theme has no styles, it does not make sense to hold onto the style.css file.

However, this change is not merely limited to that possibility. The new format is cleaner and better prepared for future additions.

Newspack, a project funded by the Google News initiative and WordPress.com, has published a showcase of 60 news sites running on the platform. WordPress.com announced its plans to build the Newspack CMS two years ago and successfully signed on more than 50 sites in the first year. The cloud-based platform is open source and highly customized to generate revenue for small to medium-sized publications.

Early adopters include the Austin Weekly News, Mississippi Today, Hong Kong Free Press, Oklahoma Watch, Bangor Daily News, The Oaklandside, and many other watchdog publications serving their communities with vital local news coverage.

The showcase was created using the Raindrop bookmark manager, which allows viewers to search for a specific site and see all the various homepages at a glance. The diversity of the publications is striking, but clicking through to their websites it’s clear that most of them share an intimate connection with their communities that might otherwise have evaporated in the post-print news era.

Newspack stands out as an affordable, open source alternative to proprietary systems. Publishers generally pay $500-$2,000/month using a sliding scale based on their annual revenue. The tools they are given are open and designed to help create economically sustainable journalism. It’s not surprising that a community has sprung up around the product, as small publishers share many of the same issues. A dedicated Slack workspace. facilitates conversation and collaboration for more than 150 editors, designers, product and business people who are all using the same building blocks to run their publications.

In 2020, thirteen Newspack publications were awarded a total of more than $1 million in grants from the Facebook Journalism Program’s relief effort for local news due to Covid-19. Publishing online at a low cost on WordPress has helped many of these publications weather the pandemic, instead of being forced to consolidate or shutter.

In May, 2020, analysts from News Revenue Hub published a study examining how Newspack-powered newsrooms are interacting with WordPress. A few key findings showed that Newspack users may require more assistance in managing their sites, which leverage the block editor and come with more than 50 pre-configured plugins:

The role of Newspack in reducing or replacing the need for website management-related technical resources is unclear, and depends greatly on an individual newsroom’s technical knowledge and resources.

Potential improvements going forward should focus on providing deeper, more standardized education and documentation to broad groups of users.

The report concluded that “Newspack has established itself as a valuable tool for newsrooms, as well as a valuable method for building sites collaboratively,” but warns that the project may face challenges in scaling the hands-on support that pilot newsrooms received in the early stages. More revenue-generating features are still being developed but overall participating newsrooms had a high rate of satisfaction with the platform.

GitHub output of Theme Review Action.

Automation. It is one of those dreams in the minds of many reviewers from the Themes Team. If there was a tool to take care of 90% of the issues, the team could focus on the 10% not easily found by automated scripts.

Enter the Theme Review Action project. Steve Dufresne, a WordPress Meta team contributor, put out a call for testing and feedback of the new project on Monday.

“If we could combine some of the existing code analysis tools, automate away some of the manual testing and open them up to more development workflows, could we improve theme quality, alleviate pressure on manual testing, and speed up the theme review process?” asked Dufresne.

The project currently runs several test suites, including the current Theme Check plugin. Theme authors can run the texts by running the NPX command in their theme folder, adding it as an action on GitHub, or cloning and running it locally. Running via NPX is not currently supported on Windows.

Right now, theme authors are needed. Regardless of whether you are building themes for the directory, clients, third-party marketplaces, or a theme shop, this is an opportunity to give back to WordPress. It is also an opportunity to improve the tools that you could benefit from as a theme developer in the long term. Automated theme tests help the entire theme ecosystem.

“Theme authors need to be open to this and understand that it is not all about requirements,” said Carolina Nymark, a Themes Team representative. “It is about improving theme quality.”

The project was, in part, informed by a Themes Team proposal in early 2020. Denis Žoljom identified three problems the team was fighting against:

• People don’t like to read requirements or handbooks.
• Some of the issues that are popping up are repetitive and could be caught automatically.
• Reviewing themes in Trac is really cumbersome.

The proposal’s focus was on moving reviews to GitHub, focusing on the third point. However, the Theme Review Action project could be the start of handling one or more issues.

The obvious solution is that the project can be automated. However, because the Theme Review Action project can be set as a GitHub Action, it leaves room for the team’s GitHub review proposal.

“Two things I mentioned to Steve — and these are my opinions –, is that we need checks that run on theme upload and on live themes, and we need a long-term solution,” said Nymark. “There have been attempts to automate testing before that have not been followed through, and without a plan for how the tool will be used, I am worried about spending time on it.”

The team had hoped that the Theme Sniffer project would lead to more automation at one point. It is hard to get hopes up after previous goals never came to fruition.

“I too have a similar concern where the project might not get enough adoption to make it to .ORG checking, and that is one of the reasons (other than just being super busy) that I haven’t been able to prioritize looking at [Theme Review Action],” said Themes Team rep William Patton.

While the team and some theme authors still use the Theme Sniffer, the UI leaves a lot to be desired. Nymark pointed out that it was hard for theme authors to distinguish between the baseline requirements and recommendations.

“To display messages from automated tools that are not strictly requirements is very difficult to get right,” she said. “For example, if a tool started reporting CSS linting errors for the WordPress CSS coding standards, many people would find that too opinionated and limiting.”

Theme authors, the group that reaps the most financial and reputational benefits from the theme directory, have often been reluctant to chip in. Few companies spare an employee to perform reviews or work on tools that developers and the team need. Calls for testing, feedback, and discussion often go unanswered, leaving a select few to do the lion’s share of the work. For this project to be successful and not feel like something foisted upon them down the road, theme developers need to be in the mix.

In the first episode of the WP Briefing podcast, WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy talked about focusing on automation as one of this year’s goals. If there is one team that could use such tools, it would be the Themes Team.

A new report from eQAfy, a company that collects and analyzes data about higher education websites, has benchmarked which content management systems US institutions are using. The report is a snapshot of data from December 2020, sourced from the National Center for Education Statistics IPEDS database. After scanning a list of 4,000 active institutions, EQAfy’s headless browser was able to detect the CMS for 3,359 homepages (83.8%).

A market leading group of 12 content management systems made up 90% of the homepages eQAfy detected, including four open source solutions and eight proprietary solutions. WordPress captures 40.8% of the market, followed by Drupal at 19.1%, as measured across all institution types (public, private for profit, and private non-profit), levels (2-year and 4-year), and sizes.

WordPress’ estimated market share for public institutions came in at 27%, and is much higher in the private for-profit institutions category at 55%.

Looking at 2-year public higher education institutions by student population, WordPress falls to #3 at just 18.3%. Drupal leads the pack in that category with 29.2%, and proprietary CMS’s take up the rest of the market. WordPress does much better in the category of 4-year private for-profit higher education institutions, capturing a staggering 75% of the market.

When examining CMS suppliers for institutions by size, WordPress is the overall market leader but does far better in the smallest institutional size categories, with waning dominance in the large to very large categories.

The report has more interesting data comparisons across different categories if you want to dig deeper. It’s important to note that eQAfy only collected the main websites for these institutions, which may not be representative of the CMS that powers the schools’ ancillary websites. They are often created using a combination of platforms. This report covers only which CMS the schools preferred to use for the face of their institutions.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy, the Executive Director of WordPress, posted a follow-up to her outline of the upcoming year. Questions mounted about what a minimum viable product (MVP) looked like for Full Site Editing (FSE), which is expected to be ready in the Gutenberg plugin in April. The core team is also shooting for a June launch of FSE in WordPress when it ships WordPress 5.8.

These seem like lofty goals, but members of the WordPress development and business community were left asking, “What is an MVP for FSE?” This is not a new question. Whether it is the swift pace of development, a communication breakdown, or so much of the project being hidden behind layer upon layer of GitHub issues, it can be hard to follow. There is no big webpage that spells out each step in minute detail of where the project is going. Information can sometimes feel scattered. This can give pause to third-party developers and business owners who need to know what to expect to update their products.

Joost de Valk, the CPO of Yoast, voiced his frustration with the process in the comments. We later discussed this in more detail.

“I think FSE will change what a theme is, and, if it gets executed properly, will make it far easier to build a theme, as themes will be much smaller,” he said. “That brings the burden onto the community to come up with reliable methods of styling though, and conventions on class names or similar, to make styling work everywhere. I currently don’t understand what is even considered as MVP for Full Site Editing, nor do I see any discussions about how it’ll work with themes not purpose built for it, and that worries me.”

He shares some of the same concerns as others in the community who feel like there is no process in place for an MVP.

“And there is no such thing,” he said. “Vision without execution is just hallucination.”

Chomphosy said that she was aware of the interconnectedness. “I also see that the information we have published isn’t in a tidy and followable post that would help people make good decisions on behalf of 39% of the web,” she said.

She pointed to a ticket that lists six (now seven) milestones. Each of those milestones, when taken together, represent where FSE needs to be for an MVP.

“Together they outline an architecture that allows the expression of a full theme using blocks and an editor capable of customizing that theme,” she wrote. “The MVP should make it possible to build a version of the Twenty Twenty-One theme, using only blocks, without any coding knowledge.“

The following is a breakdown of the milestones that need to reach completion before we see the first version of FSE land in WordPress:

Milestone 1: Infrastructure and UI

Perhaps the most crucial part of FSE is a workable site editor. Merging the WordPress templating system into a cohesive UI is the foundation of the project. The underlying infrastructure handles how templates and template parts work. At this point, this foundation is in a reliable spot. It is all the features that build upon it that need more work. This milestone also includes getting the site-editing interface in place and handling multi-entity saving.

The final leg of the milestone allows users to edit templates from within the post editor, effectively switching between content and design editing. The FSE Outreach Program recently tested this feature to garner feedback after Gutenberg 9.6.

Milestone 2: Browsing

This milestone covers all of the work for navigating the UI of the site editor. There are many moving parts, such as switching between pages, templates, template parts, global styles, and more. Users must know which element they are working on.

This is the only milestone marked as completed. However, there is an open ticket for exploring the idea of a “browsing” mode alongside the edit and select modes.

Milestone 3: Styling

For the most part, this milestone centers on the upcoming Global Styles system. The system creates a hierarchy of how styles are applied to blocks from theme defaults to global user modifications, down to per-block style options.

While much of the work is complete for an MVP, there are dozens of feature tickets in the backlog. This is also an area where the block system is years behind third-party page builders. Expect to see long-term feature additions based on post-launch feedback.

Milestone 4: Theme Blocks

Theme authors should keep a close eye on this ticket. The only way that block-based themes become a reality for most theme developers is if all template tags have a corresponding block in the site editor. Or, at least if the most-used template tags do. Some of these functions are no longer applicable in the block editor. Theme developers should make sure they have the blocks they need to recreate anything they are building today.

Admittedly, I am sad to see that blocks for Bookmarks/Links are unlikely to be moving forward. While the feature is deprecated, I am still nostalgic about the good ol’ blogroll days. Maybe this would be best left a plugin. A revival of the Link Manager plugin could be in order.

Milestone 5: Query Block

The Query block and its corresponding Loop block are, in some ways, the most essential pieces of Full Site Editing. They handle what posts are loaded and how they are displayed. The feature is one of the more complex puzzles to solve. The Gutenberg development team has continued iterating on it for months, and it is now at a good baseline. However, it has miles to go before it can seriously handle all the things that theme authors need to do with it.

Right now, the Query block only handles a handful of options for customizing the query. The team needs to determine what controls should be available in the sidebar for end-users and integrate the blocks with patterns for different types of post-list displays.

Milestone 6: Navigation Block

Aside from the Query block, Navigation is the only other block that requires its own milestone. Navigation menu issues have plagued the WordPress project for well over a decade. It is one of the hardest things to get right. While nav menus in WordPress today are generally easy to work with, their design is not customizable by the end-user. The output is wholly at the theme author’s discretion. Catering to the array of possible menu designs theme authors might want and making it customizable for the end-user is likely one of the toughest problems for the Gutenberg project.

There are at least a couple of dozen sub-tickets that need contributors. Even then, it could be several versions later before the Navigation block is ready for the more complex patterns used in some themes today.

Milestone 7: Gradual Adoption

After the first six milestones representing the MVP are completed, WordPress needs a way to allow end-users and theme authors to gradually adopt FSE. Primarily, this would be a mix of block-based templates and traditional PHP-based templates. Developers should be allowed to update their themes without changing them wholesale, potentially leaving segments of their user base behind.

Block-based widgets and navigation screens also fall under this milestone. Both features were punted to future releases after failing to land in 2020. However, these will be stepping stones for users who are not quite ready to switch to FSE or are unable to because of their theme.

WordPress 5.6.1 is now available!

This maintenance release features 20 bug fixes as well as 7 issues fixed for the block editor. These bugs affect WordPress version 5.6, so you’ll want to upgrade.

You can download WordPress 5.6.1 directly, or visit the Dashboard → Updates screen and click Update Now. If your sites support automatic background updates, they’ve already started the update process.

WordPress 5.6.1 is a short-cycle maintenance release. The next major release will be version 5.7.

To see a full list of changes, you can browse the list on Trac, read the 5.6.1 RC1 post, or visit the 5.6.1 documentation page.

Thanks and props!

The 5.6.1 release was led by @audrasjb, @desrosj, @sergeybiryukov and @whyisjake. Thanks to @metalandcoffee and @hellofromtonya for running bug scrubs, @planningwrite and @davidbaumwald for their help on the release post.

Props to everyone who helped make WordPress 5.6.1 happen:

aaribaud, Aaron D. Campbell, Ahmed Saeed, Andrew Ozz, Anthony Burchell, archon810, Ari Stathopoulos, Ayesh Karunaratne, basscan, carloscastilloadhoc, Carolina Nymark, celendesign, Christopher Finke, Copons, Dan Farrow, Daniel Richards, david.binda, Denis Yanchevskiy, Dilip Bheda, Dominik Schilling, Ebonie Butler, Felix Arntz, Florian TIAR, Garrett Hyder, gKibria, Greg Ziółkowski, Helen Hou-Sandi, Ian Dunn, ifnoob, Isabel Brison, Ismail El Korchi, Jake Spurlock, James Huff, Jason LeMahieu (MadtownLems), Jb Audras, John Blackbourn, Jonathan Desrosiers, Jonathan Stegall, Jorge Costa, Josepha, Justin Ahinon, Kai Hao, Kelly Choyce-Dwan, Kjell Reigstad, Konstantinos Xenos, litemotiv, lucasbustamante, Mahdi Akrami, majhajob, Manzur Ahammed, Marius L. J., Matt Wiebe, Maxime Pertici, Mel Choyce-Dwan, Michael Babker, Mukesh Panchal, NicolasKulka, Nik Tsekouras, oakesjosh, Peter Wilson, Prem Tiwari, Riad Benguella, Richard Tape, Robert Anderson, Rodrigo Primo, SeBsZ, Sergey Biryukov, Slava Abakumov, Stephen Bernhardt, t-p, Takashi Kitajima, Tanvirul Haque, thorlentz, Timothy Jacobs, Toni Viemerö, Tony A, Tonya Mork, transl8or, and Vlad T.

WordPress 5.7 Beta 1 was released this week on schedule and is ready for wider testing. This release will introduce 68 new features and enhancements, dozens of bug fixes, and versions 9.3 – 9.9 of the Gutenberg plugin.

A few of the highlights expected in 5.7 include the following:

• Lazy-load iframes: When WordPress 5.4 added lazy loading for images, contributors discussed extending this to iframes as well. Now that the loading attribute on iframe tags has been added to the HTML standard, it will be supported in core in 5.7.
• Streamlined migration from HTTP to HTTPS: WordPress can now detect if a user’s hosting environment supports HTTPS and enables a one-click update process, handling mixed content rewrites where possible.
• Standardize colors used in WP-Admin CSS to a single palette: WordPress is implementing a CSS custom properties system that will make it easier to add custom color schemes.
• Ongoing cleanup after update to jQuery 3.5.1
• New Robots API: This new API allows developers to centrally manage the content of the robots meta tag injected into the page, and includes a setting to toggle whether search engines are allowed to display large media from the site. By default, a max-image-preview:large robots directive which will be injected into the robots meta tag based on the new setting.

These features need testing, along with the host of updates rolling over from the Gutenberg plugin. The editor is getting the most visible enhancements in 5.7, with features like dragging blocks and block patterns from the inserter into the canvas, major improvements to the buttons block, new social icons, and much more.

The official release is expected in just under five weeks on March 9, 2021. Testing is a critical part of the process for making WordPress better with each update. The easiest way to get in on that is to install the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (set to the Bleeding edge channel and the Beta/RC Only stream), or download and install the zip of the beta version.

For WordPress, 2021 started on a high note. Read on to learn about updates from last month. 

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WordPress release updates

WordPress project executive director — Josepha Haden (@chanthaboune) shared big picture goals for WordPress in 2021. Highlights include shipping  Full Site Editing  — first on the Gutenberg plugin in April 2021  and later in core (with WordPress 5.8), improved learning opportunities on learn.wordpress.org, and better tooling for contributors. As per the updated WordPress roadmap, WordPress version 5.7 is planned to launch in March 2021 and WordPress 5.8 in June 2021. Some related updates:

• Contributor teams are working on an updated admin color palette for WordPress 5.7 that will be more accessible and easy to read. 
• The Core team is working on a proposal to align WordPress release cycles with industry standards. 
• WordPress 5.6.1 Release Candidate 1 is out. This release is set to launch by February 3, 2021. Questions and answers for WordPress 5.6 are now available on GitHub. Contact the #marketing channel in the WordPress Slack, if you would like to contribute.
• The WordPress 5.7 Beta 1 release is out! Download the zip file or use the beta tester plugin to test it out. 

Want to be involved in the next release? You can help build WordPress Core by following the Core team blog and joining the #core channel in the Making WordPress Slack group.

Proposal to return to in-person WordPress events in safe locations

The Community team is discussing an updated proposal to create a decision-making checklist for meetup organizers. The proposal is aimed at locations that have more effectively contained COVID-19 (such as New Zealand and Taiwan, for instance) so that local meetup groups in these areas can organize safe, in-person events. According to the proposal, in-person meetup organizers should review local/global health instructions based on resources and complete a checklist — which recommends whether to organize an event or not based on the organizer’s inputs and other factors. Compulsory safety precautions should be taken for any in-person meetup, and participants/organizers can share event feedback with WordCamp Central. The proposal is still being discussed, so if you have any thoughts, please share them in the comments. Please note: WordPress meetups and WordCamps are still online at this time and will continue to remain online until further notice.

Want to get involved with the Community team? Follow the Community blog, or join them in the #community-events channel in the Making WordPress Slack group. To organize a local WordPress community event, visit the handbook page. 

Gutenberg 9.7 and 9.8

Contributor teams released Gutenberg Version 9.7 on January 6th and Version 9.8 on January 20th. Version 9.7 allows users to drag block patterns from the inserter right into a desired position within the editor. It also has a new block variations feature and several improvements to reusable blocks. Version 9.6 makes the spacer block semi-transparent, adds a variation icon to the block switcher, adds site editor content to an iframe, and stabilizes Full Site Editing (FSE) by removing the auto drafts feature.

Want to get involved in building Gutenberg? Follow the Core team blog, contribute to Gutenberg on GitHub, and join the #core-editor channel in the Making WordPress Slack group. You can find out more about the Gutenberg roadmap in the latest What’s next in Gutenberg blog post.

Inviting Learn WordPress Contributors

Contributor teams working on the Learn WordPress initiative are asking for new workshop presenters and discussion group facilitators. The Training Team is recruiting volunteers for the Learn WordPress handbook and has put up a call for testing for the slides plugin to identify a simplified way to present slides. The Polyglots Team has floated a proposal to translate Learn WordPress. The Meta Team is exploring the possibility of making Learn WordPress (and wordpress.org) COPPA-compliant to host workshops aimed at kids.

Want to contribute to the Training team? Follow the Training team blog, or join them in the #training channel in the Make WordPress Slack. 

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Further Reading

• Round 1 of the Full Site Editing (FSE) outreach program has wrapped up. As a result, gaps were identified in the Gutenberg 9.6 template-switching experience – you can follow the issues in GitHub. You can follow issues in GitHub and submit questions to the team. The program identified gaps in the current template-switching experience that shipped with Gutenberg 9.6. You can follow the issues reported in GitHub. Do you have questions about the FSE program? You can now submit them here as part of the outreach program.
• People of WordPress — A cross-team initiative led by the Marketing team to highlight WordPress contributors is back with a post featuring Thelma Muelte of Zimbabwe. If you are an active contributor to a WordPress.org team or a local WordCamp, contact the Marketing Team with the #ContributorStory tag to be featured in the series.
• Joseph Haden (@chanthaboune) launched a podcast titled WP Briefing which is aimed at WordPress users, builders, and contributors of all levels. The podcast – which is available on all major platforms, will include overviews of WordPress philosophy, community success stories, and major updates. 
• The Plugin team has added a requirement that plugins in the WordPress repository must not make changes to the default auto-update settings on a site. The only exception to this requirement is for those plugins that manage auto-updates.
• WordCamp India 2021 — a regional online WordCamp has begun. It’s running over three weekends and started with Multilingual workshop sessions on January 30 and 31. The workshops can be found on the event site and will soon be featured on Learn WordPress. Tickets are still available for the event —which will have a contribution event on February 6-7, followed by sessions on February 13th and 14th. 
• The WordPress Foundation has invited applications for online do_action hackathons and encouraged folks to organize online open-source workshops in 2021.
• The Themes Team shared a post on the usage of the “Report this theme” button in 2020. The team is also looking for maintainers for its Theme unit test.
• The Meta Team has launched an initiative to facilitate automated theme testing and is requesting feedback.
• Members of the Core Team are considering a “stale bot” to close out stale issues in the Gutenberg GitHub repository.

Have a story that we should include in the next “Month in WordPress” post? Please submit it using this form.

My path to WordPress is, like so many stories, a twisty road lined with both struggle and good fortune. And yet, when I reflect on what led me here, it simply comes down to the common threads that bind us together as a community: the desire to make meaningful connections, the ability to do amazing things together, and the very human comfort that comes with knowing that I belong here.

It starts here

Just before I made my way into this world, my parents immigrated from Taipei, Taiwan to San Diego, USA. Growing up, I held a level of pride in being first generation which warred against a long list of discomforts that, as a kid, I couldn’t fully comprehend. That unlike my school mates, I rarely saw my extended family. That my English didn’t sound like that of my Californian friends, nor did my Mandarin mirror my Taiwanese cousins’. That cultural norms at friends’ homes were diametric experiences from my home.

I realize that this sounds like I had a challenging, confusing childhood, but I assure you that I had a good time growing up. My folks are loving and made sure I had opportunities whenever possible. I always have had wonderful friends who generously share their lives and love my quirks. And, I have a brother who, despite being far smarter than I will ever be, still puts up with my big sister act.

My point is that, it was painfully clear to me where I couldn’t fit in. Like many third culture kids, my perplexing cultural foundation had a profound impact on my values, and created importance around the concept of belonging, something I still hold to this day, and which pushed me along my way to WordPress.

The twisty road

I was terrible at college. I had no sense of what I wanted to do with my life, and drifted from major to major until I found myself entirely broke and rudderless. It was 2010, and with minimal job experience and 45 credits short of a degree, I desperately applied for jobs, taking the first that offered me a full time position.

It was a pivotal moment in my life. The job gave me purpose, and I actually felt like I was good at something for a change. I worked closely with my boss and mentor, a highly regarded commercial real estate advisor with a warm heart and penchant for dad jokes. What set him apart was his belief in community values: the importance of education, humility, empathy, good stewardship, qualities that made him a respected leader in many circles. Over the ensuing years, I would finish my degree. But the lessons that meant the most were learned by following my mentor’s example, and would later translate well to open source leadership.

Meanwhile, I began volunteering with renewed passion: sorting clothes at homeless shelters, working on literacy programs, teaching English at the library, serving meals, maintaining trails, building homes. I fund raised and coordinated volunteer events. Eventually, I joined advisory boards and committees of a few nonprofits, and became enamored of the strategic, thoughtful work that came with these roles.

Building homes in Estelí, Nicaragua. One of my favorite volunteer memories!

Ideas around positive change and impact through community initiatives blossomed in my mind. Driven by strongly held values, I continued to help and was welcomed at every turn. I learned that it was people who could create spaces in which anyone, everyone could belong and add value by virtue of being a unique, enthusiastic human being. I wanted to create these spaces.

Finding WordPress

Now, it is a true story that I also found my way to WordPress through my partner, and that WordPress brought us together. We met through a mutual friend, and when I realized that he could build me a website, I asked him to do so for work. Arguably, one of my first experiences with WordPress could be described either as sharing what my site required with my developer, or innocently flirting with my future partner. The joke I like to tease him with is that I needed someone to maintain the site, so I married him.

The other truth was that, after eight years of volunteering and lessons in leadership, my passion had turned to community building. I wanted a career in creating sustainable communities where people were openly welcomed, and members tangibly feel that they belong and experience joy in their participation.

Simultaneously, working with my WordPress site also reinforced my sense of belonging to something bigger. Despite not having any technical background (y’all, my degree is in English), I was able to not just publish with WordPress, but have a functional site that worked incredibly well for my purposes. I saw WordPress as a way for anyone to have a voice online, and as a result, I was also drawn to the idea of creating these tools that non-developers, like myself, could use in an increasingly online world.

By that point, my WordPress developer had become my fiancé, and he once again suggested a WordPress-based solution, this time for my career needs. Just before we married, he forwarded a job opportunity with Automattic as a sponsored community organizer within the WordPress open source project. It was a perfect match.

And that is how, in 2018, after going through the standard Automattic interview process (another story that I’m happy to share with anyone interested) I found myself a community organizer for the WordPress Project.

Where do we go now?

I’ve only been in my current role for two and a half years, but during this time, my belief in the power of resilient communities has only grown, fortified by supporting meetup and WordCamp organizers, bolstered by working on diversity initiatives, and humbled by opportunities to serve teams as their lead, mentor, or member. I’ve met and worked with so many phenomenal community members, full of passion and creativity, and have loved every minute of what we do together.

The WordCamp US 2019 team. I miss you all so much!

More than anything, what excites me the most is that we still have so much more we can achieve together. Personally, I also still have much to learn, about community growth, about WordPress, and about every individual who seeks to add WordPress to their story.

In seeking out where I belong, I found WordPress, and I discovered that the way forward was to create spaces for others – I invite you to do that with me.

The post Discover Where You Belong appeared first on HeroPress.

I learned something novel about how the ice age happened from this Freakishly Strong Base post by Morgan Housel:

The prevailing idea before [Wladimir] Köppen was that ice ages occur when the earth’s tilt supercharges the wrath of cold winters. Köppen showed that wasn’t the case. Instead, moderately cool summers are the culprit.

It begins when a summer never gets warm enough to melt the previous winter’s snow. The leftover ice base makes it easier for snow to accumulate the following winter, which increases the odds of snow sticking around in the following summer, which attracts even more accumulation the following winter. Perpetual snow reflects more of the sun’s rays, which exacerbates cooling, which brings more snowfall, and on and on.

You start with a thin layer of snow left over from a cool summer that no one pays much attention to, and after a few tens of thousands of years the entire earth is covered in miles-thick ice.

Fascinating! The blog goes on to apply the idea to that strong base, accumulating a bit at a time, to investing and business. The power of compounding seems appropriate to share on the day Jeff Bezos announced his retirement.

I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Charlie Munger, which is also how the article ends:

‘The first rule of compounding: never interrupt it unnecessarily.’

Charlie Munger

The iceberg photo is one I took near Svalbard in 2011.

WordPress 5.7 Beta 1 is now available for testing!

This software is still in development, so it’s not recommended to run this version on a production site. Consider setting up a test site to play with the new version.

You can test the WordPress 5.7 Beta 1 in two ways:

• Install/activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (select the Bleeding edge channel and the Beta/RC Only stream)
• Direct download the beta version here (zip).

The current target for final release is March 9, 2021. That’s just five weeks away, so your help is vital to making sure that the final release is as good as it can be.

So what’s new?

Improvements in Core

Lazy-load iframes
Now you can enable lazy-loading of iframes by adding the loading="lazy" attribute to iframe tags on the front-end. 

Migrating from HTTP to HTTPS is streamlined
Switching a WordPress site from HTTP to HTTPS has proven to be a pain for all involved. While on the surface, the Site Address and WordPress Address have to be updated, content with embedded HTTP URLs remains unchanged in the database. With this release, migrating a site to HTTPS is now a one-click interaction. URLs in the database are automatically replaced when the Site and WordPress Address are both using HTTPS.  Also, Site Health now includes an HTTPS status check.

Standardize colors used in WP-Admin CSS to a single palette
This change collapses all colors used in the CSS to one of the available shades of blue, green, red, yellow, grey, black, and white. The palette makes it simpler than ever to build components your users can read, because half the range gives you great contrast with white type and a half with black, according to current accessibility guidelines.

Ongoing cleanup after update to jQuery 3.5.1
jQuery deprecations in WordPress Core and bundled themes show up a lot less often, and the notifications make more sense to the user.

New Robots API
The new Robots API allows the filter directives to be included in the ‘robots’ meta tag. Also, the directive max-image-preview:large is now included by default to allow large image previews to be displayed in search engines (unless the blog is marked as not being public).

Improvements in the Editor

• Inserter drag and drop: Blocks and block patterns can now be dragged directly from the inserter into the post canvas.
• Full height alignment: Blocks such as the Cover block now can have an option to expand to fill the entire viewport.
• Block variations: The icon and description of a block variation is now shown in the block inspector, and a new dropdown in the block inspector lets you switch between block variations.
• Reusable blocks: Several enhancements to the usability and stability of reusable blocks have been made, and reusable blocks are now saved at the same time that the post is saved.
• Buttons block: The Buttons block now supports vertical alignments, and you can set the width of a button to a preset percentage.
• Social Icons block: You can now change the size of the icons in the Social Icons block.
• Font size in more places: You can now change the font size in the List and Code blocks.
• Many many other enhancements and bug fixes. To see all of the features for each release in detail check out the Gutenberg release posts: 9.3, 9.4, 9.5, 9.6, 9.7, 9.8, and 9.9.

How You Can Help

Watch the Make WordPress Core blog for 5.7-related developer notes in the coming weeks, which will break down these and other changes in greater detail.

So far, contributors have fixed 143 tickets in WordPress 5.7, including 68 new features and enhancements, and more bug fixes are on the way.

Do some testing!

Testing for bugs is a vital part of polishing the release during the beta stage and a great way to contribute.

If you think you’ve found a bug, please post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. We would love to hear from you! If you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on WordPress Trac. That’s also where you can find a list of known bugs.

Props to @hellofromtonya, @sarahricker, @webcommsat, @marybaum, @jeffpaul, and @audrasjb for your peer revisions and @desrosj, @davidbaumwald, @cbringmann, and @chanthaboune for final review on this exciting news.

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New Year, new goals
Each day, one small step
It’s the little things…

Using CSS custom properties for the WordPress admin color scheme system is listed for the WordPress 5.7 milestone. It feels low-key enough that most would pass it over as a simple upgrade to keep up with the times. However, this feature can create ripples that spread and benefit the ecosystem in the years to come.

Kirsty Burgoine, a front-end developer at Human Made, announced the introduction of CSS custom properties for the WordPress admin. The initial work landed in a ticket for iterating on the admin color schemes. The first stage reduced the color palette from 199 colors down to 99, creating a more reasonable list to work from.

WordPress color palette by Kelly Choyce-Dwan.

The second stage will look at how to implement a CSS custom properties system that makes sense. That means doing the dreaded work of naming things. The Core CSS team is currently looking for feedback on how to best handle property names going forward and are open to alternative implementation suggestions.

Once custom properties are in place, the new system could open a world of possibilities in the long term.

Thinking Ahead

My hopes of having WordPress admin themes have lived and died on each piece of news around custom color schemes, imaginative mockups, and the general hype of projects that never lived up to their promise. I may well be getting my hopes up again.

Developers have been able to register custom admin color schemes since WordPress 2.5, but it was never an ideal system.

One of my favorite plugins is Admin Color Schemes, which is maintained by designers from the core WordPress team. It adds several schemes for users to choose from.

Cruise scheme from the Admin Color Schemes plugin.

Sass, which is used to generate the admin color schemes in core today, has simplified the process. However, third-party developers still need to make sure their custom schemes remain updated between WordPress versions. The system is not built to protect against future compatibility issues.

CSS custom properties change the game. With their widespread use and compatibility with modern browsers, custom admin theming — at least color scheming — is much more of a reality.

I have not been this excited about the possibility of something new since Tung Do released his short-lived DP Dashboard plugin in 2013. Now, a few days shy of eight years since its initial beta testing phase, I once again have some hope.

Original beta design of the DP Dashboard plugin.

Given the little wisdom I have accumulated over the years, I now see that completely custom admin themes never led to the right path. I am happy we never went down it. Administration UIs need to work consistently for users and adapt to changes over time. Custom themes were a maintenance nightmare every time WordPress added a feature. However, a system built on CSS custom properties means that customizations do not break — or break far less often — as the software’s UI evolves.

While the focus right now is on color schemes, nothing is stopping WordPress from moving onto other features in the future. It is possible to set up a global styles system for designers to skin the admin in all kinds of interesting ways without breaking anything. Minor options like the border-radius of buttons, font-family choices, or heading font-sizes would be easy to roll in over time.

As the block system continues to replace parts of the WordPress admin, custom admin skins will be far easier to maintain. Because everything in the block system is built as a component, it better future-proofs against back-compatibility issues.

There is a long and winding path toward a feature-complete admin skinning system. However, it is not outside the realm of possibility.

I look forward to the day when theme authors can easily roll out admin designs that match the front end. Perhaps integration with the block system’s theme.json is a possibility. I would not mind seeing a separate admin theme directory in the future either. The use case may be too niche at this point, but it never hurts to keep the idea in the back of everyone’s mind.

If nothing else, the move to custom properties lets the team clean up the admin CSS and makes it easier to add custom color schemes. That is a win for the WordPress project.

The next major release of WordPress will make it much easier for users to migrate their sites from HTTP to HTTPS. It introduces new capabilities to detect if the user’s hosting environment has support for HTTPS and provides a one-click update process, handling mixed content rewrites where possible.

“A major pain point in WordPress has been the migration of a WordPress site from HTTP to HTTPS: While changing the Site Address and WordPress Address to use HTTPS is trivial, updating references to the old URLs in existing content is not,” WordPress Core Committer Felix Arntz said in the ticket proposing the feature. “It cannot be accomplished within core UI and requires use of more advanced tools, such as WP-CLI or plugins like Better Search Replace, which is a no-go for most users.”

In WordPress 5.6, there is no clear guidance in the Site Health screen about how to migrate to HTTPS, even though it shows as an issue. The user would need to learn more about how to update it manually, starting with changing the site URLs.

In WordPress 5.7, if HTTPS is supported, the Site Health Status screen will notify users and guide them with a new button that updates the site with a single click. It also migrates the site content on the fly to use HTTPS for URLs. Arntz recorded a video demo of the update:

This change also comes with new environment variables and filters that allow hosting providers to change the URLs linked in the HTTPS status check in Site Health, so they can more effectively manage it for their customers’ hosting options. This is similar to how hosts can modify URLs for updating the PHP version, which has had a positive impact on getting sites running on supported versions of PHP.

It’s important to note that the streamlined HTTP to HTTPS migration in 5.7 does not handle updating content in the database. Also, if a site’s URLs are controlled by constants, the update is not possible to complete automatically. In these instances, the HTTPS status check on the Site Health screen will inform the user why the site would need to be manually updated.

More technical details are available in the ticket and commit message, and a dev note should be forthcoming.

WordPress’ block management interface was introduced in Gutenberg 5.3, released in March 2019, and is due for an update. In case you haven’t explored the editor’s Tools menu, the block manager setting allows you to select which blocks will be shown or hidden in the block inserter.

Last week, Automattic engineer Nik Tsekouras opened a new issue in the Gutenberg repository for tracking block manager enhancements. A few planned enhancements are already on deck, including moving the block manager into the Preferences Modal, redesigning it to use panels, and adding support for toggling block variations on and off.

The updated Preferences Modal is expected in the Gutenberg 9.9 milestone, which will be included in WordPress 5.7. (Gutenberg versions 9.3 – 9.9 will be rolled into the release.) Moving the block manager into its future home inside the Preferences modal will be completed in a follow-up PR, since it needs to be refactored to use the panels design. Tsekouras shared a gif of the design plan for this update:

In the discussion on the tracking issue, Birgit Pauli-Haack requested that the updated block manager also include information about how many times each particular block is used on the site. She described a common scenario where this feature could be helpful:

We recently took a site live were multiple team members collaborated designing the site and adding content, each aiming for the best outcome with blocks.

Some installed additional blocks from plugins to test and provide options or just do a proof of concept.

Before we took the site live, we noticed there are now 148 blocks available over 4 additional plugins + core.

We now have no way to find out which blocks were used over 40 pages and posts. I looked at a few Block managers plugins and none seems to be able to provide an answer to a fairly basic question:
Which blocks did we actually use throughout the site?

We would need the information to decide on which plugin can we safely uninstall.and which should we keep.

A revamp of Block managers could – and should- provide an answer.

The Find My Blocks plugin, created by Eddy Sims, offers a more advanced version of what Pauli-Haack is requesting. It has its own dedicated settings page for displaying a list of the block types in use on the site, along with the number of times each has been used, posts/pages where the blocks are in use, if it is a reusable block, a nested block, and much more information. Pauli-Haack suggests the block manager simply show the number of instances where the block is in use.

As the block editor becomes more widely adopted, it is going to become imperative for users to be able to see, at a glance, the number of instances where a block is in use. Right now, even those who adopted the block editor right away haven’t been using it for more than a few years. Long term, after years of adding blocks, people are going to need more information when managing them, and they may not know about utility plugins like Find My Blocks.

Discussion is still open on the topic Pauli-Haack raised regarding block manager enhancements. You can subscribe to the new block manager enhancements tracking issue if you want to follow the progress on updates coming in the next few months.

True to its name, the first WP Briefing podcast lasted just over 12 minutes. Josepha Haden Chomphosy, the Executive Director of WordPress, jump-started the second month of 2021 with a show that should arrive on the our doorstep every two weeks. With what seems to be overwhelming positive support on Twitter, the podcast was welcomed by the WordPress community.

This will be different from many other podcasts in the WordPress ecosystem. It will not cater specifically to a developer audience. Chomphosy also said there would be no hot-takes on Twitter. “Just bite-sized chunks about the WordPress OSS project and the how/why around what it does.”

The show promises to be short. And, because it will only come around every fortnight, it gives people time to keep up to date at their leisure.

“You can think of this as a sort of WordPress appreciation for any level — and honestly, all levels of WordPress awareness,” said Chomphosy of the podcast’s purpose. “Bite-sized insights into what makes it all work. “

Chomphosy will be running the show every couple of weeks and plans to follow a specific format of three segments:

1. An easy-to-digest overview of a cool WP philosophy.
2. A highlight of a community success story or a noteworthy contributor.
3. A small list of big things to know about (or do) in the coming weeks.

Guest speakers may join the show from time to time to cover specific topics when their expertise is warranted.

A common theme in the past few years, particularly as the pace of block development has quickened, is that many people find it hard to keep up with the project. Even those who are neck-deep in WordPress development can feel a little lost at times. A podcast built on the idea of keeping the community in the loop may even be a bit overdue.

“It’s been on my list of needs since late 2017, but hasn’t been my highest priority during that time,” said Chomphosy. “It’s been years since WordPress has been small enough for any single, part-time contributor to keep track of what’s next. Contributors across the project are doing excellent work to communicate efficiently about the work we’re all focused on, but it never hurts to lend some clarification where possible.”

The Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin currently powers the podcast. The plugin is developed by Castos, which is a podcasting host and analytics service. It has over 20,000 active installs and a 4.8-star rating.

Chomphosy said they chose Seriously Simple Podcasting because the WP Briefing crew was already familiar with it. “I didn’t want to ask folks to learn an entirely new software while we’re still working out the process.”

The first episode focused on an introduction to WP Briefing. The overview segment covered three trends in action from Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word 2020 address. Dave Loodts was this week’s success story after sharing how he “blindly” chose a career in freelance web development and is still going strong after 15 years (congrats, Dave!). Chomphosy wrapped up the podcast with notes on Full Site Editing, Learn WordPress, and automation tools to help contributor teams.

It is definitely worth a listen if you can spare a few minutes. I am excited to see where this project goes in the future and see how it helps keep more of the community in the loop.

If I had one feature request, it would be for the development team to put the podcast player in the WordPress embed, which is easy enough to do with a custom embed template. This would let bloggers embed the show on their pages and share it with more people.

However, there may be ways to embed it via third-party services down the road. “It just went live and we’re working on getting it listed everywhere,” said Automattician Marcus Kazmierczak in response to whether it would be on Google Podcasts or Spotify. “Hopefully it’ll be showing up shortly.”

Update: the embed now includes the audio player:

The WordPress.org theme directory is becoming little more than a crippleware distributor. I suppose it was inevitable given its reach, which can be worth $1,000s/month for theme authors.

Justin Tadlock via Twitter

As I think back on that tweet from 2019, I realize how unfair it was to refer to the themes coming into the directory as “crippleware.” At the time, I was a part of the Themes Team (formerly the Theme Review Team). However, there were real cases of crippleware submitted to the directory when I wrote that.

To define crippleware: some themes blocked core WordPress features and made them available via the “pro” versions. It was one of the more blatant abuses of the free themes directory I had seen for a profit.

However, the term does not represent the majority of themes submitted. Most of what we see today are “lite” themes. Some of them are well-designed themes that provide value to end-users at no cost. Others are stripped-down versions of what you would typically see from a starter theme. While they are fully functional — the Themes Team’s rules have been strict on this requirement — the real value of the theme is in the upsell.

This is not the start of an anti-commercial theme rant. When WordPress developers and agencies are successful, it benefits the whole ecosystem. But, how do we balance that with providing value — which is subjective, I know — to the free theme directory? How do we transition the theme directory to something flowing with more artistic or even experimental ideas?

Guidelines and Stumbling Blocks

Matt Mullenweg, WordPress co-founder and project lead, posted the following on the Post Status Slack two weeks ago:

The .org theme directory is particularly bad when you compare it to any half-decent commercial theme marketing page, or the designs available on other site building services or Themeforest directories. The .org theme directory rules and update mechanism have driven out creative contributions, it’s largely crowded out by upsell motived contributions.

There is a lot to unpack in his statement. I agree with most of it. The Themes Team agrees with at least some of it. However, its members lack direct control over the system outside of the guidelines.

“I actually agree with this in a sense,” said Themes Team rep William Patton. “Creativity has not prospered in the directory, and I think a large part of it is the barrier of entry. ‘Don’t do bad things’ is the overarching guideline for the theme directory, but that can be viewed very subjectively. If it were the only guideline we would see a lot of things that might not be best suited here. If we want to encourage creativity then more freedom to express it would likely be a good way to start bringing it back. However, it can be hard to know where the line should be placed.”

The team sometimes gets pulled in two different directions. When the project lead asks for things to be more open, many members rally around that idea. On the other hand, the call for stricter accessibility requirements, for example, are popular with others in the community. It is a choice between two ends of the spectrum that are tough to pull together as the gatekeepers to the official directory.

“Why couldn’t it be more like the plugin directory?” asked Mullenweg. “That has all the same potential issues and has been working pretty well. I’d like it to work just like the plugin directory, with direct access for authors, and most reviews being post-review vs. pre-review.”

The Themes Team is not against the idea. More than anything, they just need the help to make any significant change.

“Having the themes directory work like the plugins directory would be great!” said Themes Team rep Ari Stathopoulos. “And, in fact, it’s something we’ve all been asking for years, but there are many technical challenges because they are built fundamentally differently. Plugin authors have access to their plugin’s SVN while themes don’t. Theme reviews are public while plugin reviews are private and closed. There would need to be lots of changes in systems and meta. Not to mention that, as far as I know, plugins don’t do post-reviews, they do pre-reviews the first time a plugin is uploaded and post-reviews for updates (which is exactly what happens in themes too).”

The team has created tickets, asked for help, and have generally awaited a champion to push innovative ideas — or any ideas — forward. Seven-year-old ticket to support the standard readme files available to plugins? No takers as of yet. Allowing block-based themes to be uploaded? Maybe we can make that happen sometime soon.

The guidelines are likely less crippling than the outdated Trac review system, uploading ZIP files for updates (which Mullenweg mentioned), the limitation of a style.css header for the theme description, and the lackluster theme previewer.

Theme review system on Trac.

For the most part, nearly every guideline has been put in place in hindsight. The team finds consistent abuse or issues and course-corrects.

“I don’t think that Matt’s idea of a creative theme is a theme that is not secure or not compatible with GPL,” said team repo Carolina Nymark. “Creativity is not limited by being asked to sanitize options. It is not limited by making sure that your theme can be translated. If the reviewers saw creative, beautiful themes that lacked in some other aspect like basic accessibility, then the team could help explain to the theme author what kind of changes are necessary. But that is not the kind of themes that are being submitted.”

Financial Incentive

In the mid-2000s, the average theme developer could get away with building an entire theme on a lazy weekend afternoon. WordPress was far less complicated. Theme development was not a race to the bottom, bundling every feature imaginable.

Today, we live in the era of the multi-purpose theme. To soar to the top of the popular list, most themes need to handle everything from being the online face of a pizza restaurant to masonry grids for artist portfolios. They also either need good luck, name recognition, or good marketing. That is the reality for the average theme developers trying to make a name for themselves.

It makes for boring themes in a free theme directory. If the theme author has any financial motivation behind creating a WordPress theme, they need to bundle the nicer features into a paid package.

As Eric Karkovack wrote in his piece for Speckyboy, Are High-Quality Free WordPress Themes a Thing of the Past?, “Money changed the equation.”

There is not much incentive to push a free theme out to the directory just for fun. Most themers are spending a month or more of their time in today’s ecosystem to build a theme. The days of the weekend-afternoon project seem all but gone.

Even releasing a theme to give back can often be a letdown. There is little chance of any name recognition as the developer’s creation is swamped by the hordes of lite themes in control of the directory. There is no way for unknown players to get any exposure through the directory except in the brief moments their theme lands in the latest themes list. It is that one make-or-break moment that could potentially help best the algorithm and slip into the nearly unattainable popular list.

In comparison to Themeforest, the WordPress.org directory is lacking. Themeforest is inviting to users because it provides the backend tools for theme authors to market their themes. They can load up custom demos, provide screenshots, use a modern categorization system, and provide all sorts of extra data to end-users. They’re in the business of selling a product to users.

WordPress themes on ThemeForest

While WordPress.org may be free, it should still be selling the promise of a beautiful website to its users. I have always said it, the themes available on WordPress.org are the face of WordPress.

Users deserve better. Theme authors deserve better tools to make it happen.

Even with better tools and a better-designed directory in place, there is no guarantee of an uptick of creative contributions or a better overall balance that keeps pure upsells in check.

“I think that due to the reach a theme or plugin that becomes popular quickly commands, monetization is a necessity to be able to properly ‘support’ such an endeavor,” said Joost de Valk, CPO of Yoast, in response to Mullenweg’s statement on Post Stats. “I think the community also ‘demands’ a certain stability and a certain level of support that is simply unfeasible to expect from any non paid contributor. Because WordPress.org has no way of doing that monetization ‘on platform,’ this is what you end up with.”

He also argued that something akin to an app store would make things like the “balkanization from non-G-based site builders” less attractive to theme authors. Such a store has little or no chance of becoming a reality.

“I think we first need to agree on what the theme directory should be,” he said. “We need a ‘mission statement,’ of sorts. And I think we probably need less control than we currently have, be much more like the plugin directory. But if we have a vision of what it should be, then we could work towards that.”

There is an opportunity to turn things around. Full Site Editing will leave ample room for releasing creative, fully-featured themes with upsells. There is plenty of reason to be excited about pattern design and template packs, better value-adds for theme authors who want to upsell. The problem is going to be getting authors to abandon traditional themes and explore new terrain.

Changes Are Coming, Maybe, Hopefully

Popular listing on the WordPress theme directory.

For some, this is a song and dance they already know the lyrics and steps to. It is a years-long conversation that has netted little in return.

However, the WordPress.org theme directory may be forced to change one way or another. Block-based themes are not arriving in some distant future; they are knocking at the door. Full Site Editing is slated to land in WordPress 5.8 this June.

With this change, the WordPress.org theme directory needs to be prepared. Even with a move today, it will be a mad scramble to get systems ready in a handful of months. If waiting for the last minute, it is just asking for chaos. Block-based themes should already be allowed to be uploaded, for example.

As we saw earlier this week, Automattic launched its Blank Canvas theme. It is designed to work on single-page websites. It does not support commenting out of the box, which is a requirement for inclusion into the official directory.

Block-based themes will forever change the system. In the past, traditional themes needed to cover all their bases, integrating with every front-end feature of WordPress. In the future, that is not necessarily the case. Because everything will be built from blocks and users will have direct access to customize those blocks, a theme has no need to cover everything. The user can add and remove features at their leisure. The review guidelines need to be molded for this future.

Full Site Editing almost seems purpose-built for outside-the-box theme designers. Whether it is a simple, one-page wedding invitation or an author’s book landing page, there are more possibilities upcoming than there ever were in the past. And, these things will be far easier to build on the theme-design side of things. It will remove a lot of burden from developers and from the Themes Team during reviews.

“Regarding the FSE themes: to be honest all my hopes are there,” said Stathopoulos. “They are very different, and it’s a fresh start for the repository. New theme paradigm, a different set of rules (with of course some overlap for basic things), and a new way of doing things and thinking about themes. However, if they are presented in the same way in the same repo we have now, then nothing will change. the theme repo needs to change, and there’s no way around that. But that’s a decision that will have to be made from the WordPress leadership and implemented by meta.”

As always, I remain optimistic about the future of WordPress themes, hoping for the ushering in of a new era. I get the sense that the Themes Team shares some of that enthusiasm, at least cautiously so. More than anything, they need the community, particularly theme authors, to chip in and shape that vision of what the WordPress theme directory should be.

Perhaps today, the stars are nearing alignment. Mullenweg plans to chat with the team and gather feedback in the coming weeks.

This week GitLab announced a pricing change that eliminates its Bronze/Starter tier in favor of a three-tier subscription model. The Starter tier, previously offered at $4/month, included features like single-team project management, next day business support, and 2,000 CI/CD minutes.

GitLab Pricing prior to Jan 26, 2021 Update

GitLab’s updated pricing page shows the benefits that were included in the Starter plan are now only available in the Premium tier at a 5x price increase, introducing a larger gap between free accounts and paying customers. The change specifically impacts those who were happy to pay for a few extras but don’t need the full array of premium features.

GitLab is offering to transition customers at a discount, where existing customers have the option to renew at the current price for an additional year or upgrade to Premium at a discount. The company also makes a case for the free tier, which it says includes 89% of the features in Bronze/Starter, with 450 new features added last year.

“The Bronze/Starter tier does not meet the hurdle rate that GitLab expects from a tier and is limiting us from investing to improve GitLab for all customers,” GitLab co-founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij said. “Ending availability of the Bronze/Starter tier will help us accelerate development on customers’ priority needs such as improving usability, availability, performance, and delivering enterprise-grade security and compliance.”

It makes sense that GitLab is turning its attention to factors like “hurdle rate,” as Sijbrandij told CNBC that he’s still looking to take the company public after a late 2020 employee share sale, which valued the company at $6 billion. GitLab passed $150 million in annual recurring revenue in 2020, but is tightening up its subscription model as the company tailors commercial offerings for those who need DevOps features.

GitLab did not share the pricing update announcement on Twitter, perhaps in anticipation of how controversial it would be. The company posted the link in the GitLab forums where customers expressed disappointment in the change.

“We are currently paying Bronze level because there are some features that we find interesting,” Riccardo Padovani said. He specifically referenced issue weights, iterations, multiple issue assignees, and issue dependencies.

“These features are now in the premium level. We were not interested in the previous ‘silver’ level. On the long term, this is basically a 5 times price increase. Being a vocal supporter of GitLab in my company, I am not happy about this, at all.”

One customer said the change “feels like a bit of a kick in the teeth,” while another noted that GitLab’s mid-tier offering costs just one dollar less than GitHub’s enterprise plan. Many of GitLab’s existing Starter tier customers have a large number of users who are not developers and do not have access to code or pipeline features. They are supporting staff who check bug reports or project management teams that create issues. Without the ability to pay per user role, upgrading every seat in the team to Premium doesn’t make sense for these types of use cases.

Customers who had recently convinced their organizations to go with GitLab, along with those who have invested time developing processes around the Starter tier features, are some of the most vocal opponents to the change. Some found the announcement off-putting, as it made it seem like paying Starter plan customers were actually costing GitLab money, requiring the tier to be eliminated. Many expressed that they only signed up for the tier to support GitLab and that they only used a handful of the features.

“It’s worth pointing out that you say that ‘many Bronze/Starter customers adopted Gitlab just for source code management,’ – yes – that’s exactly what we use Gitlab for,” one customer said. “We don’t use CI, Issue Tracking, or any other features offered even in the free version, but we do want to have a couple of the SCM features offered in the Bronze/Starter tier. Do you really think that customers like us that are only looking for SCM are going to pay more for unnecessary features?”

The GitLab employees in the thread seemed ready to defend the decision against the onslaught of criticism. While a few said they will take customers’ concerns and feedback under consideration, most were prepared to assure critics that the decision was made “through extensive research,” which likely leaves those most affected further alienated, if the 5x cost increase didn’t already make the decision for them. Bronze/Starter tier customers who are still examining their options can find the various transition paths in the pricing change announcement.