In 2015, WordPress 4.4 introduced a REST API, but one thing that has severely limited its broader use is the lack of authentication capabilities for third-party applications. After considering the benefits and drawbacks of many different types of authentication systems, George Stephanis published a proposal for integrating Application Passwords, into core.

Stephanis highlighted a few of the major benefit that were important factors in the decision to use Application Passwords: the ease of making API requests, ease of revoking credentials, and the ease of requesting API credentials. The project is available as a standalone feature plugin, but Stephanis and his collaborators recommended WordPress merge a pull request that is based off the feature plugin’s codebase.

After WordPress 5.6 core tech lead Helen Hou-Sandi gave the green light for Application Passwords to be merged into core, the developer community responded enthusiastically to the news.

“I am/we are 100% in favor of this,” Joost deValk commented on the proposal. “Opening this up is like opening the dawn of a new era of WordPress based web applications. Suddenly authentication is not something you need to fix when working with the API and you can just build awesome stuff.”

Stephanis’ proposal also mentioned how beneficial a REST API authentication system would be for the Mobile teams‘ contributors who are relying on awkward workarounds while integrating Gutenberg support.

“This would be a first step to replace the use of XMLRPC in the mobile apps and it would allow us to add more features for self hosted users,” Automattic mobile engineer Maxime Biais said.

After the REST API was added to WordPress five years ago, many had the expectation that WordPress-based web applications would start popping up everywhere. Without a reliable authentication system, it wasn’t easy for developers to just get inspired and build something quickly. Application Passwords in WordPress 5.6 will open up a lot of possibilities for those who were previously deterred by the lack of core methods for authenticating third-party access.

Jan Koch, the founder and host of WP Agency Summit, is kicking off his second annual event on October 12. The five-day event will feature 37 speakers from a wide range of backgrounds across the WordPress industry. It is a free virtual event that anyone can attend.

“The focus for the 2020 WP Agency Summit is showing attendees how to bring back the fun into scaling their agencies,” said Koch. “It is all about reducing the daily hustle by teaching how to successfully build and manage teams, how to work with enterprises (allowing for fewer customers but bigger projects), how to build sustainable recurring revenue, and how to position your agency to dominate your niche.”

This year’s event includes three major changes to make the content more accessible to a larger group of people. Each session will be available between October 12 – 16 instead of the previous 48-hour window that attendees had to find time for in 2019.

After the event has concluded, access to the content will be behind a paywall. Koch reduced the price to $77 for lifetime access for those who purchase pre-launch, which will increase to $127 during the event. Last year’s prices ballooned to $497, which meant that it was simply not affordable for many who found it too late.

Some of the proceeds this year are going toward transcribing all the videos so that hearing-impaired users can enjoy the content.

This year’s event will also focus on a virtual networking lounge for attendees. “I’ve seen how well it worked at the WP FeedBack Summit — we even had BobWP record a podcast episode on the fly in that lounge!” said Koch. “I’ve seen many new friendships develop, people connecting with new suppliers or getting themselves booked on podcasts, and sharing experiences about their businesses.”

The lounge will be open during the entirety of the summit, which will allow attendees to jump into the conversation on their own time.

A More Diverse Speaker Lineup

Koch received some backlash for the lack of gender diversity last year. The 2019 event had over 20 speakers from a diverse male lineup. However, only four women from our industry led sessions.

When asked about this issue in 2019, Koch responded, “I recognize this as a problem with my event. The reason I have so much more male than female speakers is quite simple, the current speaker line-up is purely based on connections I had when I started planning for the event. It was a relatively short amount of time for me, so I wasn’t able to build relationships with more female WP experts beforehand.”

The host said he paid attention to the feedback he received. While not hitting the 50/50 split goal he had for 2020’s event, 16 of the 37 speakers are women.

Koch said he strived to get speakers from a wider range of backgrounds. He wanted to bring in both freelancers and multi-million dollar agency owners. He also focused on getting people from multiple countries to represent WordPress agencies.

“I did reach out to around 130 people four months before the event to make new connections,” he said. “The community around the Big Orange Heart (a non-profit for mental well-being) also helped a lot with introducing me to new members of the WP community.”

Koch said he learned two valuable lessons when branching out beyond his existing connections for this year’s event:

Firstly, don’t hesitate to reach out to people you think will never talk to you because they’re running such big companies. For example, I immediately got confirmations from Mario Peshev from Devrix, Brad Touesnard from Delicious Brains, or Marieke van de Rakt from Yoast. When first messaging them, I had little hope they’d set aside time to jump on an interview with me – but they were super supportive and accommodating! The WordPress community really is a welcoming environment if you approach people in a humble way.

Secondly, build connections with sincerity. Do not just focus on what you can get from that connection but how you can help the other person. I know this sounds cheesy and you’ve heard this quite often — but it is true. Once I got the first response from new contacts and explained my goal of connecting fellow WordPress community members virtually, most immediately agreed because they also benefit from new connections and being positioned as a thought-leader in this event.

WP Agency Summit? WP FeedBack Summit?

For readers who recall the Tavern’s coverage of the WP FeedBack Summit earlier this year, the article specifically stated that the WP FeedBack Summit was a continuation of 2019’s WP Agency Summit. The official word at the time from WP FeedBack’s public relations team was the following:

Last year’s event, the WP Agency Summit has been rebranded under the umbrella of WP FeedBack’s brand when Jan Koch the host of last’s year WP Agency Summit joined WP FeedBack as CTO.

Koch said that it was a standalone event and not directly connected to WP Agency Summit but had the same target audience. However, the WP FeedBack Summit did use the previous WP Agency Summit’s stats and data to promote the event.

“The WP FeedBack Summit was hosted under the WP FeedBack brand because I joined their team as CTO in March this year,” he said. “Vito [Peleg] and I had the idea to host a virtual conference around WordPress because of WordCamp Asia being canceled — we wanted to help connect the community online through our summit.

Koch left WP FeedBack soon after the summit ended and is currently back on his own and has a goal of making WP Agency Summit a yearly event.

The new block-based navigation screen is once again delayed after it was originally slated for WordPress 5.5 and then put on deck for 5.6. Contributors have confirmed that it will not be landing in WordPress core until 2021 at the earliest.

“The Navigation screen is still in experimental state in the Gutenberg plugin, so it hasn’t had any significant real-world use and testing yet,” Editor Tech Lead Isabel Brison said. She made the call to remove it from the 5.6 lineup after the feature missed the deadline for bringing it out of the experimental state. It still requires a substantial amount of development work and accessibility feedback before moving forward.

Contributors will focus instead on making sure the Widgets screen gets out the door for 5.6 and plan to pick up again on Navigation towards the end of November.

WordPress 5.6 lead Josepha Haden gave an update this week on the progress of all the anticipated features, including the planned public beta for full-site editing (FSE).

“I don’t expect FSE to be feature complete by the time WP5.6 is released,” Haden said. “What I expect is that FSE will be functional for simple, routine user flows, which we can start testing and iterating on. That feedback will also help us more confidently design and build our complex user flows.”

Frank Klein, an engineer at Human Made, asked in the comments of another update why full-site editing is being tied to 5.6 progress in the first place, since it will still only be available in the plugin at the time of release.

“The main value is that it provides a good checkpoint along the path of FSE’s development,” Kjell Reigstad said. “Full-site editing is very much in progress. It is still experimental, but the general approach is coming into view, and becoming clearer with every plugin release.”

Reigstad posted an update on what developers can expect regarding block-based theming and the upcoming release, since the topic is closely tied to full-site editing. He emphasized that the infrastructure is already in place and that, despite it still being experimental, future block-based themes should work in a similar way to how they are working now.

“The focus is now shifting towards polishing the user experience: using the site editor to create templates, using the query block, iterating on the post and site blocks, and implementing the Global Styles UI,” Reigstad said.

“The main takeaway is that when 5.6 is released, the full-site editing feature set will look similar to where it is today, with added polish to the UI, and additional features in the Query block.”

Theme authors are entering a new time of uncertainty and transition, but Reigstad reassured the community that themes as we know them today are not on track to be phased out in the immediate future.

“There is currently no plan to deprecate the way themes are built today,” Reigstad said. “Your existing themes will continue to work as they always have for the foreseeable future.” He also encouraged contributors to get involved in an initiative to help theme authors transition to block-based themes. (This project is not targeted for the 5.6 release.)

Developers can follow important FSE project milestones on GitHub, and subscribe to the weekly Gutenberg + Themes updates to track progress on block-based theming. A block-based version of the Twenty Twenty-One theme is in the works and should pick up steam after 5.6 beta 1, expected on October 20.

Munir Kamal shows no signs of slowing down. He continues to push forward with new features for his EditorPlus plugin, which allows end-users to customize the look of the blocks in their posts and pages. He calls it the “no-code style editor for WordPress.”

The latest addition to his plugin? Animation styles for every core block.

My first thought was that this would bloat the plugin with large amounts of unnecessary CSS and JavaScript for what is essentially a few bells and whistles. However, Kamal pulled it off with minimal custom CSS.

Inspired by features from various website builders, he wanted to bring more and more of those things to the core block editor. The animations feature is just another ticked box on a seemingly never-ending checklist of features. And, so far, it’s all still free.

Since we last covered EditorPlus in June, Kamal has added the ability to insert icons via any rich-text area (e.g., paragraphs, lists, etc.). He has also added shape divider, typography, style copying, and responsive editing options for the core WordPress blocks.

How Do Animations Work?

In the version 1.9 release of EditorPlus, Kamal added “entrance” animations. These types of animations happen when a visitor sees the block for the first time on the screen. For example, users could set the Image block to fade into visibility as a reader views the block.

Currently, the plugin adds seven animations:

• Fade
• Slide
• Bounce
• Zoom
• Flip
• Fold
• Roll

Adding a Slide animation for the Cover block text.

Each animation has its own subset of options to control how it behaves on the page. The bounce animation, for example, allows users to select the bounce direction. Other options include duration, delay, speed curve, delay, and repeat. There are enough choices to spend an inordinate amount of time tinkering with the output.

One of the best features of this new feature is that Kamal has included an Animation Player under the block options. By clicking the play button, users can view the animation in action without previewing the post.

Watch a quick video of the Animations feature:

After testing and using each animation, everything seemed to work well. The one downside — and this is not limited to animations — is that applying styles on the block level sometimes does not make sense. In many cases, it would help users to have options to style or animate the items within the block, such as the images in the Gallery block. When I broached the subject with Kamal, he was open to the idea of finding a solution to this in the future.

What Is Next for EditorPlus?

At a certain point, too many block options can almost feel like overkill and become unwieldy. EditorPlus does allow users to disable specific features from its settings screen, which can help get rid of some unwanted options. Kamal said he would like to continue making it more modular so that users can use only the features they need.

“What I plan is to have micro-level feature control for this extension so that a user can switch off individual styling panels like, Typography, Background, etc.,” he said. “Even further, I plan to bring these controls based on the user role as well. So an admin can disable these features for the editor, author, etc.”

That may be a bit down the road though. For now, he wants to focus on adding new features that he already has planned.

“I do plan to add more animation features,” said Kamal. “I got too many ideas, such as scroll-controlled animation, hover animation, text animation, Lottie animation, background animation, animated shape dividers, and more. But, having said that, I will be careful adding only those features that don’t affect page performance much.”

Outside of extra styles and animations for existing blocks, he plans to jump on the block-building train in future releases. EditorPlus users could see accordion, toggle, slider, star rating, and other blocks in an upcoming release.

I’ve been running a photoblog at inphotos.org since 2005 on WordPress. (And thanks to writing this I noticed it’s 15 years old today!)

In that time WordPress has changed dramatically. At first I used Flickr to host my images, but after a short time I hosted the images myself. (Good thing too since Flickr limited free user accounts to 1000 images, so I wrote a script to download the Flickr images I used in posts.)

For quite a long time I used the featured image instead of inserting the image into the post content, but then about two years ago I went back to inserting the photo into the post. Unfortunately that meant the photo was shown twice, once as a featured image, and once in the post content.

The last theme I used supported custom post types, one of which was a photo type that displayed the featured image but hid the post content. It was an ok compromise, but not perfect.

Recently I started using Twenty Twenty, but after 15 years I had a mixture of posts with:

• Featured image with no image in the post.
• Featured image with the same image in the post.

I knew I needed something more flexible. I wanted to hide the featured image if it also appeared in the post content. I procrastinated and never got around to it until this evening when I discovered it was actually quite easy.

Copy the following code into the function.php of your child theme and you’ll be all set! It relies on you having unique filenames for your images. If you don’t then remove the call to basename(), and that may help.

function maybe_remove_featured_image( $html ) {
        if ( $html == '' ) {
                return '';
        }
        $post = get_post();
        $post_thumbnail_id = get_post_thumbnail_id( $post );
        if ( ! $post_thumbnail_id ) {
                return $html;
        }

        $image_url = wp_get_attachment_image_src( $post_thumbnail_id );
        if ( ! $image_url ) {
                return $html;
        }

        $image_filename = basename( parse_url( $image_url[0], PHP_URL_PATH ) );
        if ( strpos( $post->post_content, $image_filename ) ) {
                return '';
        } else {
                return $html;
        }
}
add_filter( 'post_thumbnail_html', 'maybe_remove_featured_image' );

The post_thumbnail_html filter acts on the html generated to display the featured image. My code above gets the filename of the featured image, checks if it’s in the current post and if it is returns a blank string. Feedback welcome if you have a better way of doing this!

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Just a day after launching its new privacy-first web analytics product last week, Cloudflare announced Automatic Platform Optimization (APO) for WordPress. The new service boasts staggering performance improvements for sites that might otherwise be slowed down by shared hosting, slow database lookups, or sluggish plugins:

Our testing… showed a 72% reduction in Time to First Byte (TTFB), 23% reduction to First Contentful Paint, and 13% reduction in Speed Index for desktop users at the 90th percentile, by serving nearly all of your website’s content from Cloudflare’s network. 

APO uses Cloudflare Workers to cache dynamic content and serve the website from its edge network. In most cases this eliminates origin requests and origin processing time. That means visitors requesting your website will get near instant load times. Cloudflare reports that its testing shows APO delivers consistent load times of under 400ms for HTML Time to First Byte (TTFB).

The effects of using APO are similar to hosting static files on a CDN, but without the need to manage a complicated tech stack. Content creators retain their ability to create dynamic websites without any changes to their workflow for the sake of performance.

Version 3.8 of Cloudflare’s official WordPress plugin was recently updated to include support for APO. It detects when users make changes to their content and purges the content stored on Cloudflare’s edge.

The new service is available to Cloudflare users with a single click of a button. APO is included at no cost for existing Cloudflare customers on the Professional, Business, and Enterprise plans. Users on the Free plan can add it to their sites for $5/month. The service is a flat fee and is not metered.

Cloudflare’s announcement has so far been well-received by WordPress professionals and hosting companies and many have already begun testing it.

WordPress lead developer Mark Jaquith called APO “incredible news for the WordPress world.”

“On sites I manage this is going to lower hosting complexity and easily save hundreds of dollars a month in hosting costs,” Jaquith said.

After running several speed tests from six different locations around the world, early testers at Kinsta got remarkable results using APO:

“By caching static HTML on Cloudflare’s edge network, we saw a 70-300% performance increase. As expected, the testing locations furthest away from Tokyo saw the biggest reduction in load time.

“If your WordPress site uses a traditional CDN that only caches CSS, JS, and images, upgrading to Cloudflare’s WordPress APO is a no-brainer and will help you stay competitive with modern Jamstack and static sites that live on the edge by default.”

George Liu, a “self-confessed page speed addict” and Cloudflare Community MVP, performed a series of detailed tests on the new APO product with his blog. After many comparisons, he found that Cloudoflare’s WordPress plugin with APO turned on delivers results similar to his heavily optimized WordPress blog that uses a custom Cloudflare Worker caching configuration.

“You’ll find that Cloudflare WordPress plugin’s one click Automatic Platform Optimization button does wonders for page speed for the average WordPress user not well versed in page speed optimizations,” Liu said.

“Cloudflare’s WordPress plugin Automatic Platform Optimization will in theory beat all other WordPress caching solutions other than you rolling out your own Cloudflare Worker based caching like I did. So you get a good bang for your buck at US$5/month for Cloudflare’s WordPress plugin APO.”

Liu also warned of some speed bumps with the initial rollout, as Cloudflare’s APO supports a limited set of WordPress cookies for bypassing the Cloudflare CDN cache, leaving certain use cases unsupported. APO does not seem to work on subdomains and users are also reporting that it’s not compatible with other caching plugins. It also disables real visitor IP address detection.

Cloudflare is aware of many of these issues, which have been raised in the comments of the announcement, and is in the process of adding more cookies to the list to bypass caching. Due to some plugin conflicts, APO may not be as plug-and-play as it sounds for some users right now, but the product is very promising and should improve over time with more feedback.

Gutenberg 9.1 made a backward-incompatible change to its theme.json file (experimental-theme.json while full-site editing is under the experimental flag). This is the configuration file that theme developers will need to create as part of their block-based themes. Staying up to date with such changes can be a challenge for theme authors, but Ari Stathopoulos, a Themes Team representative, wrote a full guide for developers.

Jon Quach, a Principal Designer at Automattic, has also been busy creating a tool to help theme authors transition to block-based themes. He recently built a UI-based project called Theme.json Creator that builds out the JSON code for theme authors. Plus, it is up to date with the most recent changes in the Gutenberg plugin.

Tools like these will be what the development community needs as it gets over the inevitable hump of moving away from the traditional theme development paradigm and into a new era where themes are made almost entirely of blocks and a config file.

While plugin development is becoming more complex with the addition of JavaScript, theme development is taking a sharp turn toward its roots of HTML and CSS. We are barreling toward a future in which far more people will be able to create WordPress themes. Even the possibility of sharing pieces of themes (e.g., template parts and patterns) is on the table. This could not only empower theme designers by lowering the barrier to entry, it could also empower some end-users to make the jump into theme building.

However, the theme.json file is one aspect of future theme authorship that is extremely developer-oriented. JSON is a universal format shared between various programming languages. It is meant to be read by machines and is not quite as human-friendly as other formats. As the theme.json file grows to accommodate more configuration options over time, the less friendly it will become to simply typing keys and values in.

It makes sense to build tools to simplify this part of the theme building process.

That is where the Theme.json Creator tool comes in. Theme authors pick and choose the options they want to support and input custom values. Then, the tool spits out everything in properly-formatted JSON.

Using the Theme.json Creator tool.

One big thing the tool does not yet cover is custom CSS variables. This feature is a recent addition to the theme.json specification. It allows theme authors to create any custom property that WordPress will automatically output as CSS. In his announcement post, Stathopoulos covered how to create a typographic scale with custom properties and use those variables for editor features, such as line-height and font-size values.

Currently, Theme.json Creator’s primary focus is on global styles. However, Gutenberg allows theme authors to configure default styles on the block level. For example, theme designers can set the color or typography options for the core Heading block to be different from the default global styles. This provides theme authors with fine-tuned control over every block.

Theme.json Creator does not yet support configuration at this level. However, it would be interesting to see if Quach adds it in the future.

The focus on setting up global styles is a good start for now. This is still an experimental feature. The great thing about it is that it can help theme authors begin to see how one piece of the block-based themes puzzle fits in. It is a starting point for an entirely new method of adding theme support for features when most are accustomed to adding multiple add_theme_support() PHP function calls.

With the direction that theme development seems to be heading, it is easy to imagine that it could evolve into a completely UI-based affair at some point down the line. If templates are made up of blocks and patterns, which anyone can already build with the block editor, and if styles will essentially boil down to a config file, there will be little-to-no programming required to build a basic WordPress theme.

If someone is not already at least jotting down notes for a plugin that allows users to create and package a block-based theme, I would be surprised. For now, Theme.json Creator is removing the need to write code for at least one part of the theme design process.

Jetpack’s highly anticipated 9.0 release has landed, introducing some of the new features the team has previewed over the past week. Users can now publish WordPress posts to Twitter as threads. This new feature is available as part of the Publicize module when you have connected a Twitter account.

Posting Twitter threads is a feature that only works with the block editor, as it takes advantage of how content is naturally split into chunks (blocks).

In the comments on his demo post, Automattic engineer Gary Pendergast gave a more detailed breakdown of the logic Jetpack uses to ensure full sentences aren’t broken up in the tweets.

“With the mental model now being focused on mapping blocks to tweets, it’s much easier to make logical decisions about how to handle each block,” Pendergast said. “So, a paragraph block is the text of a tweet, if the paragraph is too long for a single tweet, it tries to split the paragraph up by sentences. If a sentence is too long, then it resorts to splitting by words. Then, if there’s an embed/image/video/gallery block following that paragraph, we can attach it to the tweet containing that paragraph. There are additional rules for other blocks, but that’s the basic process. It then just iterates over all of the supported blocks in the post.”

Pendergast published his post as thread to demonstrate the new feature in action. The advantage of posting a thread from your WordPress site is that it doesn’t end up getting lost in Twitter’s fast-moving timeline. Most important Twitter threads evaporate from public consciousness almost as soon as they are published. Publishing threads from your website ensures they are better indexed and easier to reference in the future.

Jetpack Adds Loom Block for Embedding Screen Recordings

Loom was added to Jetpack as a new oEmbed provider three weeks ago. The video recording service allows for recording camera, microphone, and desktop simultaneously. The service is especially popular in educational settings. Jetpack 9.0 introduces a new Loom block for embedding recordings.

“Loom is growing in popularity as it is being recommended more and more to assist in distance learning efforts,” Jetpack Director of Innovation Jesse Friedman said. “Now more than ever we want to be able to help those working, learning, and teaching from home. The Loom block was a natural addition to join the other Jetpack video blocks which now include YouTube, TikTok, DailyMotion, and Vimeo.”

Loom’s free tier allows users to record up to 25 videos, but the Pro plan is free for educators. Friedman confirmed that Jetpack does not have any kind of partnership with Loom. The team decided to support the product to assist professionals, educators, and students. Having it available as a block also makes it more convenient for those using P2 for communication.

As anticipated, Jetpack 9.0 also provides a seamless transition necessary to ensure Instagram and Facebook embeds will continue working after Facebook drops unauthenticated oEmbed support on October 24. The Jetpack team reports that it “partnered with Facebook” to make sure these embeds continue to work with the WordPress.com REST API.

David Bisset makes his podcast debut for Post Status, as he interviews Joost de Valk, Founder and Chief Product Officer of Yoast, and discusses all things WordPress marketshare related.

Links

• His blog, joost.blog
• Yoast
• On Twitter @jdevalk
• June 2020 CMS marketshare report

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Just one month after publicly announcing its acquisition of Restrict Content Pro (RCP), iThemes purchased WPComplete for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition is for the product, website, and customers only.

Paul Jarvis and Zack Gilbert created the WPComplete plugin in 2016. However, it has outgrown what the duo could maintain and support alone. After the transition period in which the new owners take over, the two will step away from the project.

In essence, WPComplete is a “course completion” plugin. Site owners can create online courses while allowing students/users to mark their work as completed. It also gives students a way to track their progress through courses, which can often boost the potential for them to finish.

“Paul and Jack believe a key to their success has been their ability to keep their team small and manageable,” wrote Matt Danner, the COO at iThemes, in the announcement. “The growth of WPComplete has presented a number of challenges for a team of two people, so the decision was made to start looking towards alternative ownership solutions that could continue to grow WPComplete and provide it with a stable team. iThemes is a perfect fit.”

iThemes customers who have a Plugin Suite or Toolkit membership will get automatic access to the pro version of the WPComplete plugin. For current WPComplete users, Danner said everything should be “business as usual.” However, iThemes has assigned a few of its team members to work on the product and site, so customers should see some new faces.

RCP and WPComplete are obviously complementary products. RCP is a membership plugin that allows site owners to restrict content based on that membership. WPComplete allows site members to mark lessons or coursework as completed. “We’ll be rolling out a new bundle later this month that combines both RCP and WPComplete for course and membership creators to take advantage of these two plugins,” said AJ Morris, the Product Innovation and Marketing Manager at iThemes.

WPComplete is still a young product. The free version of the plugin currently has 2,000+ active installs and a solid 4.7 rating on WordPress.org. If marketed as an extension of the RCP plugin, it automatically puts it in front of the eyes of 1,000s of more potential customers. It should be much easier to grow the plugin as part of a membership bundle.

iThemes is making some bold moves in the membership space. It will be interesting to see if the company makes any other acquisitions that could strengthen its product line and help it become more dominant. There is still a ton of room for growth in the membership segment of the market. There is also the potential for integrations with other major plugins.

“Adding WPComplete to the iThemes product lineup also allows us to move more quickly on some plans we have for Restrict Content Pro,” said Danner in the initial announcement. He also vaguely mentioned a couple of ideas the team had in the works but did not go into detail.

With a little prodding, Morris provided some insight into what they are planning for the immediate future. The biggest first step is tackling integration with the block editor. Currently, WPComplete uses shortcodes. The team’s next step is likely to begin with creating block equivalents for those shortcodes.

“After that, we’ve touched on a few deeper integrations with Restrict Content Pro, like the possibility to restrict courses to memberships,” said Morris.

The iThemes team does not plan to stop with WPComplete as part of its product lineup. One of the goals is to use the plugin for the iThemes website itself.

“We always try to eat our own dogfood when we can,” said Morris. “You’ll see that with RCP and WPComplete early next year as we look to integrate them into our iThemes Training membership.”

I have been eagerly awaiting the moment when I could install a theme and truly test Gutenberg’s full-site editing feature. By and large, each time I have tested it over the past few months, the experience has felt utterly broken. This is why I have remained skeptical of seeing the feature land in WordPress 5.6 this December.

The Q theme by Ari Stathopoulos is the first theme that seems to be a decent working example. Whether that is a stroke of luck with timing or that this particular theme is simply built correctly is hard to tell — Stathopoulos is a team rep for the Themes Team. Gutenberg 9.1 dropped last week with continued work toward site editing.

Q is as experimental as it gets. The Themes Team put out an open call for experimental, block-based themes as far back as March this year. However, not many have taken the team up on this offer. If approved, Q stands to be the first block-based theme to go live in the official WordPress directory. It still has to work its way through the standard review process, awaiting its turn in the coming weeks.

On the whole, full-site editing remains a frustrating and confusing experience. I still remain skeptical about its readiness, even in beta form, to show off to the world in WordPress 5.6.

However, Q is an interesting theme to explore at this point for both end-users and theme developers. Users can install it and start tinkering with the site editing screen via the Gutenberg plugin. Developers can learn how global styles, templates, and template parts fit together from a working theme.

Using the Site Editor

Editing a single post in the site editor.

The Q theme requires the Gutenberg plugin and its full-site editing mode to be enabled. Generally, requiring a plugin is not allowed for themes in the directory. However, experimental Gutenberg themes are allowed to bypass this guideline.

Stathopoulos pointed out that the theme is highly experimental and should not be used on a production site. However, he is hopeful that it will get more eyes focused on full-site editing.

He mentioned that several items are broken, such as category archives not showing the correct posts. This is a current limitation of the Query block in Gutenberg. However, one of the best ways to find and recognize these types of issues is to have a theme that stays up with the pace of development.

Currently, the site editor feels like it is biting off more than it can chew. Not only can users edit the layout and design of the page, but they can also directly edit existing post content — don’t try this at home unless you are willing for your post titles to get switched to the hyphenated slug. Should the site editor be handling the double-duty of design and content editing? If so, should design and content editing be handled in separate locations in the long term or be merged into one feature?

It feels raw. It is not geared toward users at this point.

The bright spot with the site editor is the current progress on template parts in the editor. Template parts are essentially “modules” that handle one part of the page. For example, the typical theme will have a header and footer template part. Currently, end-users can insert custom template parts or switch one template part for another. This opens a world of possibilities, such as users choosing between multiple header designs (template parts) for their sites.

Switching the header template part.

The downside to the entire template system is that it seems so divorced from the site editor that it is hard to believe the average user would understand what is going on. Templates and template parts reside under the Appearance menu in the admin. The Site Editor is a separate, top-level menu item. Without any preexisting knowledge of how these pieces work together, it can be confusing.

Template parts worked for me in the site editor from the outset. However, they did not work on the front end at first. I continually received the “template part not found” message for hours. Then, at some point — whether through magic or a random save that pulled everything together — the feature began to output the previously-missing header and footer template parts.

Glimpse Into the Future of Theme Development

The Q theme has a scant few style rules, which it loads directly in the <head> section of the site in lieu of adding an extra stylesheet. It relies on the stock Gutenberg block styles on the front end with a few minor overrides. Most other custom styles are handled via the global styles system, which pulls from the theme’s experimental-theme.json config file (will be theme.json in the future).

It begs the question of whether themes will necessarily need much in the way of CSS when full-site editing lands.

If WordPress allows users to configure most styles via block options and global styles overrides, themes may not need much more than their config files. After that, it would come down to registering custom block styles and patterns.

If this is the future that we are headed toward, anyone could essentially create a WordPress theme. And, those pieces, such as template parts and patterns, could all be shared between any site. In that future, themes may simply not matter anymore.

Last year, Mike Schinkel proposed deprecating the theme system altogether and replacing it with web components.

“Rather than look for a theme that has all the features one needs — which I have found always limits the choices to zero — a site owner could look for the components and modules they need and then assemble their site from those modules,” he said. “They could pick a header, a footer, a home-page hero, a set of article cards, a pricing module, and so on.”

The more I tinker with full-site editing, the more it feels like that is the lane that it will ultimately merge into. Imagine a future where end-users could pick and choose the pieces they wanted and simply have it look right on the front end.

It is exciting to think about that possibility. Both Schinkel and I have more of a background in programming than we do in design. It makes sense from that sort of analytical mindset to put everything into neat, reusable boxes because reuse is a cornerstone of smart programming.

However, I worry about the state of design in such a system with so many replaceable parts. Will designers be able to take holistic approaches to theme development, creating truly intricate pieces of art? Will that system essentially create a web of cookie-cutter sites? Or, will designers simply find ways to think outside the box while within the constraints of the block system?

The greater Jamstack community is coming together on October 6-7, 2020, for a virtual conference. Organizers expect more than 15,000 attendees from around the globe over a two-day span that includes keynotes, sessions, interactive topic tables, workshops, speaker Q&As, and networking opportunities.

Matt Mullenweg will be joining Netlify CEO Matt Biilmann on day 1 at 12PM PDT for a fireside chat moderated by CSS-Tricks Creator Chris Coyier. The chat will go deeper on recent topics of contention, including developer sentiment, complexity, security, and performance. Coyier also plans to discuss how the Jamstack and WordPress communities intersect through headless implementations of the CMS.

A provocative post from TheNewStack at the end of August quoted Mullenweg as saying that “JAMstack is a regression for the vast majority of the people adopting it.” This sparked multiple heated exchanges across blogs and social media. Biilimann, who originally coined the term “Jamstack,” wrote a response to Mullenweg’s remarks, hailing “the end of the WordPress era.”

Live conversations tend to be more cordial than shots fired across the blogosphere. It will be interesting to see if Biilimann cares to join Stackbit CEO Ohad Eder-Pressman in his wager that Jamstack will become the predominant architecture for the web by 2025. The fireside chat should be recorded, in case you cannot catch the live session. Recordings of talks from the previous virtual Jamstack event held in May are available on YouTube.

Today is the last call for registration. Many of the workshops have already sold out, but tickets to the regular sessions on October 6 are still available. Sign up on the event website to get your free ticket.

Gutenberg 9.1 was released to the public on Wednesday. The team announced over 200 commits from 77 contributors in its release post yesterday. One of the biggest changes to the interface was the addition of a new dropdown selector for block pattern categories. The team also reverted the block-based widgets section in the customizer and added an image size control to the Media & Text block.

One of the main focuses of this release was improving the block-based widgets editor. The feature was taken out of the experimental stage in Gutenberg 8.9 and continues to improve. The widgets screen now uses the same inserter UI as the post-editing screen. However, users can currently only insert regular blocks. Patterns and reusable blocks are still not included.

Theme authors can now control aspects of the block editor via a custom theme.json file. This is part of the ongoing Global Styles project, which will allow theme authors to configure features for their users.

The development team has also added an explicit box-sizing style rule to the Cover and Group blocks. This is to avoid any potential issues with the new padding/spacing options. Theme authors who rely on the block editor styles should test their themes to make sure this change does not break anything.

Better Pattern Organization

New block patterns UI in the inserter.

I have been calling for the return of the tabbed pattern categories since Gutenberg 8.0, which was a regression from previous versions. For 11 versions, users have had to scroll and scroll and scroll through every block pattern just to find the one they wanted. The development team has sought to address this issue by using a category dropdown selector. When selecting a specific category, its patterns will appear.

At first, I was unsure about this method over the old tabbed method. However, after some use, it feels like the right direction.

As more and more theme and plugin authors add block pattern categories to users’ sites, the dropdown is a more sensible route. Even tabs could become unwieldy over time. The dropdown better organizes the list of categories and makes the UI cleaner. More than anything, I am enjoying the experience and look forward to this eventually landing in WordPress 5.6 later this year.

Customizer Widgets Reverted

Reverted widgets panel in the customizer.

On the subject of WordPress 5.6, one of its flagship features has been hitting some roadblocks. Block-based widgets are expected to land in core with the December release, but the team just reverted part of the feature. They had to remove the widgets block editor from the customizer they added just two major releases ago.

It was for the best. The customizer’s block-based widgets editor was fundamentally broken. It was not ready for primetime and should have remained in the experimental stage until it was somewhat usable.

“I will approve this since the current state of the customizer in the Gutenberg plugin is broken, and there is no clear path forward about how to fix that,” wrote Andrei Draganescu in the reversion ticket. “With this patch, the normal widgets can still be edited in the customizer and the block ones don’t break it anymore. This is NOT to mean that we won’t proceed with fixing the block editor in the customizer, that is still an ongoing discussion.”

The current state of editing widgets via the customizer is at least workable with this change. If end-users add a block via the admin-side widgets editor, it will merely appear as an uneditable, faux widget named “Block” in the customizer. They will need to edit blocks via the normal widgets screen.

There is no way that WordPress can ship the current solution when 5.6 rolls out. However, we are still two months out. This leaves plenty of time for a fix, but Draganescu’s note that “there is no clear path forward” may make some people a bit uneasy at this stage of development.

Control Image Size for Media & Text

Image size dropdown selector for the Media & Text block.

One of the bright spots in this update is the addition of an image size control to the Media & Text block. Like the normal Image block, end-users can choose from any registered image size created for their uploaded image.

This is a feature I have been looking forward to in particular. Previously, using the full-sized image often made the page weight a bit heftier than necessary. It is also nice to go along with themes that register sizes for both landscape and portrait orientations, giving users more options.

This month was characterized by some exciting announcements from the WordPress core team! Read on to catch up with all the WordPress news and updates from September. 

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WordPress 5.5.1 Launch

On September 1, the  Core team released WordPress 5.5.1. This maintenance release included several bug fixes for both core and the editor, and many other enhancements. You can update to the latest version directly from your WordPress dashboard or download it directly from WordPress.org. The next major release will be version 5.6.

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

Gutenberg 9.1, 9.0, and 8.9 are out

The core team launched version 9.0 of the Gutenberg plugin on September 16, and version 9.1 on September 30. Version 9.0 features some useful enhancements — like a new look for the navigation screen (with drag and drop support in the list view) and modifications to the query block (including search, filtering by author, and support for tags). Version 9.1 adds improvements to global styles, along with improvements for the UI and several blocks. Version 8.9 of Gutenberg, which came out earlier in September, enables the block-based widgets feature (also known as block areas, and was previously available in the experiments section) by default — replacing the default WordPress widgets to the plugin. You can find out more about the Gutenberg roadmap in the What’s next in Gutenberg blog post.

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.

Twenty Twenty One is the WordPress 5.6 default theme

Twenty Twenty One, the brand new default theme for WordPress 5.6, has been announced! Twenty Twenty One is designed to be a blank canvas for the block editor, and will adopt a straightforward, yet refined, design. The theme has a limited color palette: a pastel green background color, two shades of dark grey for text, and a native set of system fonts. Twenty Twenty One will use a modified version of the Seedlet theme as its base. It will have a comprehensive system of nested CSS variables to make child theming easier, a native support for global styles, and full site editing. 

Follow the Make/Core blog if you wish to contribute to Twenty Twenty One. There will be weekly meetings every Monday at 15:00 UTC and triage sessions every Friday at 15:00 UTC in the #core-themes Slack channel. Theme development will happen on GitHub. 

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Further Reading:

• WordPress plugin authors can now opt into confirming plugin updates via email. This feature will allow plugin authors to approve any plugin updates over email before release.
• September was the busiest month for online WordCamps so far, with seven events taking place: WordCamp Ogijima Online, WordCamp Colombia Online, WordCamp Asheville, NC USA, WordCamp São Paulo, Brazil, WordCamp Virginia Beach, WordCamp Lima Peru, and WordCamp Philadelphia, PA, USA. You can find live stream recaps of these events on their websites. The camps are also in the process of uploading their videos to WordPress.tv. Check out the WordCamp Schedule to follow upcoming online WordCamps!
• The Themes team has added a delist feature to the themes directory. The feature will allow a theme to be temporarily hidden from search, while still making it available. The team may delist themes if they violate the Theme Directory guidelines. 
• The Themes Team has also released its new web fonts Loader project. The webfonts loader will allow theme developers to load web fonts from the user’s site, rather than through a third-party CDN. The project lives in the team’s GitHub repository.
• The Support team is discussing the level of control users should have over their support forum topics. The team is thinking of allowing users to archive their topics and lengthen time-to-edit to remove any semi-sensitive data. In a separate, but related, post, Support team members have started discussing how to curb support requests for commercial products.
• The Mobile team came up with a proposal for dual licensing Gutenberg under GPL 2.0 and MPL (Mozilla Public License) 2.0, so that non-WordPress software developers can potentially use it for their projects.  
• Since Facebook and Instagram are deprecating oEmbeds, the Core Team will be removing Facebook and Instagram’s oEmbed endpoints from WordPress core code. 
• Following extensive discussion, the Documentation team has tentatively decided to allow external and commercial links in the WordPress documentation. The team aims to publish a formal proposal that will be left open for feedback before finalizing it.
• Members of the Polyglots and Marketing teams are celebrating the International Translation Day for WordPress over the week of September 28 – October 4! Community members can join or organize translation events, or contribute to WordPress core, theme, or plugin translations during this period. 
• WP Accessibility day — a 24-hour global online event dedicated to addressing website accessibility in WordPress, is being held on October 2. The event is open for all and has experts from all over the world as speakers.

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

In pursuit of “democratizing web analytics,” Cloudflare announced it is launching privacy-first analytics as a new standalone product. The company is entering a market that has been dominated by Google Analytics for years but with a major differentiating feature – it will not track individual users by a cookie or IP address to show unique visits.

Cloudflare Web Analytics defines a visit as “a successful page view that has an HTTP referer that doesn’t match the hostname of the request.” It’s not the same as Google’s “unique” metric, and Cloudflare says it may differ from other reporting tools. Weeding out bots from the total traffic numbers is a nascent feature that Cloudflare is improving as part of its Bot Management product.

Cloudflare Web Analytics is launching with features that are largely similar to Google Analytics but with some unique ways of zooming into different traffic segments and time ranges to see where traffic is originating from.

“The most popular analytics services available were built to help ad-supported sites sell more ads,” Cloudflare product manager Jon Levine said. “But, a lot of websites don’t have ads. So if you use those services, you’re giving up the privacy of your users in order to understand how what you’ve put online is performing.

“Cloudflare’s business has never been built around tracking users or selling advertising. We don’t want to know what you do on the Internet — it’s not our business.”

Paying customers on the Pro, Biz, and Enterprise plans can access their analytics from their dashboards immediately. Cloudflare is also offering the product for free as JavaScript-based analytics for users who are not currently customers. Those who want access to the free plan can sign up for the waitlist.

From October 5 through October 9, the first Page Builder Summit will open its virtual doors to all attendees for free. Nathan Wrigley, the podcaster behind WP Builds, and Anchen le Roux, the founder and lead developer of Simply Digital Design, are hosting the five-day online event that focuses on the vast ecosystem of page builders for WordPress.

The summit will include 35 sessions spread out over the event schedule. Each session will last around 30 minutes, so it will be easy to pop in and watch one in your downtime. Sessions will cover a range of builders, including the default WordPress block editor, Elementor, Beaver Builder, Oxygen, Brizy, and Divi.

“It’s an event specifically for users of WordPress page builders, or those curious about what they can do,” said Wrigley. “I feel like a page builder style interface for creating websites is the future for our industry. WordPress itself is moving in this direction with the block editor (a.k.a. Gutenberg). With that in mind, it seemed like a good idea to create a dedicated event to share knowledge about this side of WordPress. We’ve tried to include presentations from as many page builders as we could.”

Wrigley made sure to point out that it is not all geared toward developers, discussing the inner-workings of builders. Some of the sessions focus on marketing, optimization, and conversion, which provides a wider range of topics for potential attendees.

The summit hosts created an online quiz for those who are unsure about which sessions to watch.

There is a small catch. The sessions will be freely available only from the time they begin and the following 24 hours. After that, accessing the videos will come at a premium. Attendees can gain lifetime access to the PowerPack for $47 if they purchase within 15 minutes of signing up. Then, prices will rise to $97 until the event kicks off on October 5. Beyond, the price jumps to $147. The lifetime access includes access to the presentations, transcripts, a workbook, and other bonuses from the speakers.

For those unsure about forking over the cash, they can still watch the sessions during the 24-hour window.

The proceeds from the event will go out to paying affiliate commissions to speakers and partners. Some of it will go into planning and investing in a second summit down the road.

“Both myself and Nathan have specific charities that we want to donate to after the event,” said le Roux. “It was part of our goals to be able to do this, but we didn’t want to make this an official contribution.”

Why a Page Builder Summit?

Both Wrigley and le Roux have their preferred builders. But, the goal of the summit is to offer a wide look at the tools available and help freelancers and agencies better streamline their businesses and create happier clients.

“I’ve been a user of page builders for many years, but only at the point where they truly showed in the editing interface something that almost perfectly reflected what the end-user would see did I get really immersed,” said Wrigley. “Having come from a background in which I built entire websites from a collection of text files (HTML, CSS, PHP, etc.), I was fascinated that we’d reached a point where the learning curve for building a good website was significantly reduced.”

He pointed out that it is not always so simple though. While the same level of coding skills may not be necessary, people must figure out how to navigate their preferred page builder, which can come with its own learning curve.

“You need to learn their way of doing things and how to achieve your design choices,” he said. “It’s always going to work out better if you know the code, but the WordPress mission of democratizing publishing certainly seems to align quite nicely with the adoption of tools, like page builders, which mean that once-difficult tasks are now easier.”

For le Roux, her interest in hosting the Page Builder Summit falls back to her design studio.

“As a developer, my main reason for switching to page builders was around streamlining and creating more efficient but quality websites in the shortest amount of time,” she said. “Especially now that we focus on day rates, creating the best possible website that clients would love fast would not have been possible without page builders.”

The Hosts’ Go-To Builders

“We prefer using Beaver Builder with Themer at Simply Digital Design,” said le Roux. “We use Gutenberg for blog posts or where possible with custom post types or LMS software. However, we’ve also taken on a few Elementor projects where that’s the client’s preferred option.”

Wrigley uses some of the same tools. His main work is on the WP Builds website where he hosts podcasts.

“I have used Beaver Builder’s Themer to create templates for specific layouts, but for content creation within those layouts I’m using the block editor,” said Wrigley. “My content is mainly text and the WordPress editor is utterly remarkable in this situation. I kept the classic editor installed for a few months after WordPress 5.0 came about, but I soon realized that this was folly and that the editing interface of Gutenberg is superior. The ability to insert and move text, buttons, etc. is such a joy to work with, and the iterations that have been made in the last two years make it, in my opinion, the best text editing experience on the web.”

Wrigley sees a future in which the WordPress block editor takes over much of the work that page builders are currently handling. However, that future is “still over the horizon.”

“I’m excited about this future though, and we’ve got a few crystal ball-gazing presentations; trying to work out what that future might look like,” he said.

Jetpack 9.0, coming on October 6, will debut a new feature that allows users to share blog posts as Twitter threads in multiples tweets. A recent version of Jetpack introduced the ability to import and unroll tweetstorms for publishing inside a post. The 9.0 release will run it back the other way so the content originates in WordPress, yet still reaps all the same benefits of circulation on Twitter as a thread.

The new Twitter threads feature is being added as part of Jetpack’s Publicize module under the Twitter settings. After linking up a Twitter account, the Jetpack sidebar options for Publicize allow users to publish to Twitter as a link to the blog or a set of threaded tweets. It’s not just limited to text content – the threads feature will also upload and attach any images and videos included in the post.

When first introduced to the idea of publishing a Twitter thread from WordPress, I wondered if threads might lose their trademark pithy punch, since users aren’t forced to keep each segment to the standard length of a tweet. Would each tweet be separated in an odd, unreadable way? The Jetpack team anticipated this, so the thread option adds more information to the block editor to show where the paragraphs will be split into multiple tweets.

“Threads are wildly underused on Twitter,” Gary Pendergast said in a post introducing the feature. “I think a big part of that is the UI for writing threads: while it’s suited to writing a thread as a series of related tweet-sized chunks, it doesn’t lend itself to writing, revising, and editing anything more complex.” The tool Pendergast has been working on for Jetpack gives users the best of both worlds.

In response to a comment requesting Automattic “concentrate on tools to get people off social media,” Pendergast said, “If we’re also able to improve the quality of conversations on social media, I think it’d be remiss of us to not do so.” He also credits IndieWeb discussions on Tweetstorms and POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) as inspirations for the feature.

For years, blogging advocates have tried to convince those who post lengthy tweetstorms to switch to a publishing medium that is more suitable to the length of their thoughts. The problem is that Twitter users lose so much of the immediate feedback and momentum that their thoughts would have generated when composed as a tweetstorm.

Instead of lecturing people about how they should really be blogging instead of tweetstorming, Jetpack is taking a fresh approach by enabling full content ownership with effortless social syndication. You can test out the experience for yourself by adding the Jetpack Beta Testers plugin and running the 9.0 RC version on your site.

I love your articles. And now, in the middle of the WordPress revolution, I realized I’m constantly searching for an answer regarding WP these days.

So many things are being said, so many previsions of the future, problems, etc., but, right now, I think I, as a designer, just want to understand one thing that seemed answered already but it’s never clear:

Is WordPress a good choice to build a client’s template where he just has to insert the info that will show in the frontend where I want to? And he doesn’t have to worry about formatting blocks? I love blocks, don’t get me wrong, but will normal templating end?

I just think that having a super CMS, HTML, CSS, and being able to play with a database with ACF is so powerful, that I’m wondering if it’s lost. After so much reading, I still don’t understand if this paradigm is going to disappear.

Right now, I don’t know if it’s best to stop making websites as I used to and adopt block patterns instead.

Ricardo

WordPress is definitely changing. Over the past two years, we have seen much of it reshaped into something different from the previous decade and more. However, this is not new. WordPress has always been a constantly-changing platform. It just feels far too different this time around, almost foreign to many. The platform had to make a leap. Otherwise, it would have started falling behind.

And, it is a big ask of the existing community to come along with it, to take that leap together.

It can be scary as a developer whose livelihood has depended on things working a certain way or who has built tools and systems around pre-block WordPress. Many freelancers and agencies had their world turned upside down with the launch of the block editor. It is perfectly OK to feel a bit lost.

Now, it is time for a little tough love. It has been two years. As a professional, you need to have a plan in place already. Whether that is an educational plan for yourself or a transitional plan for your clients, you should already be tackling projects that leverage the block editor. If you are at a point where you have not been building with blocks, you are now behind. However, you can still catch up and continue advancing in your WordPress career.

There are so many changes coming down the pipeline that anyone who plans to develop for WordPress will be in continual education mode for years to come.

When building for clients, the biggest thing to remember is that it is not about you. It is about getting something into the hands of your clients that addresses their specific needs. Freelancers and agencies need to often be the Jacks and Jills of all trades. Sometimes, this even means having a backup CMS or two that you can use that are not named WordPress. It helps to be well-rounded enough to jump around when needed, especially if you are not at a point in your career where you can demand specific work and pass on jobs that would put food on the table.

It is also easy to look at every job as a nail and WordPress as the hammer. Or, even specific plugins as the tool that will always get the job done. I have seen developers in the past rely on tools like ACF, CMB2, or Meta Box but could not code a custom metadata solution when necessary to save their life. Sometimes a bigger toolbox is necessary.

Every WordPress developer needs a solid, foundational understanding of the languages that WordPress uses. Gone are the days of skating by on HTML, CSS, and PHP knowledge. You need to learn JavaScript deeply. Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress, was not joking around when he said this back in 2015. It holds true more and more each day. In another five years, it will tough to be a developer in the WordPress world without knowing JavaScript, at least for backend work.

It also depends on what types of sites you are building. If you are primarily handling front-end design, you will likely be able to get by with a lower skill level. You will just need to know the “WordPress way” of building themes.

Within the next year, you should be able to build just about any theme design with decent CSS and HTML knowledge along with an understanding of how the block system works. Full-site editing and block-based themes will change how we build the front end of the web. It is going to be a challenging transition at first, especially for those of us who are steeped in traditional theme development, but client sites will often be far easier to build. I highly recommend the twice-monthly block-based themes meetings if your focus is on the front end.

Block Templates

Based on your question, I am going to make some assumptions. You have a history of essentially building out meta boxes via ACF where the client just pops in their data. Then, you format that data on the front end. You are likely mixing this with custom post types (CPTs). This is a fairly common scenario.

One of the great things about the block system is that you can lock the post editor for individual CPTs. WordPress already has you covered with its block templates feature, which allows you to define just what a post should look like. You can set up which blocks you want to appear and have the client drop their content in. At the moment, this feature is limited to the post type level. However, it should grow more robust over time, particularly when it works alongside the traditional “page templates” system.

Block templates are a powerful tool in the ol’ toolbox that will come in handy when building client sites.

Block Patterns

You do not have to stop making websites as you are accustomed to at the moment. However, you should start leveraging new block features as they become available and make sense for a specific project. I am a fanatic when it comes to block patterns, so my bias will definitely show.

The biggest thing with block patterns and clients is education. For the uninitiated, you will need to spend some time teaching them how to insert a pattern and how it can be used to their advantage. That is the hurdle you must jump.

For many of the users that I have seen introduced to well-designed patterns, they have fallen in love with the feature. Even many who were reluctant to switch to the block editor became far more comfortable working with it after learning how patterns worked. This is not the case for every user or client, but it has been a good introduction point to the block editor for many.

To answer your question regarding patterns: yes, you should absolutely begin to adopt them.

ACF Is Evolving

Because you are accustomed to ACF, you should be aware that the framework is evolving to keep up with the block editor. Version 5.8.0 introduced a PHP framework for creating custom blocks over a year ago. And, it has been improving ever since. There are even projects like ACF Blocks, which will provide even more tools for your arsenal.

It is important to learn from what some of the larger agencies are doing. Read up on how WebDevStudios is tackling block development. The company also has an open-source block library for ACF.

Solving Problems

Your job as a developer is to be a problem solver. Whatever system you are building with is merely a part of your toolset. You need to be able to solve issues regardless of what tool you are using. At the end of the day, it is just code. If you can learn HTML, you can learn CSS. If you can learn those, you can learn PHP. And, if you can manage PHP, you can certainly pick up JavaScript.

A decade or two from now, you will need to learn something else to stay relevant in your career. Web technology changes. You must change with it. Always consider yourself a student and continue your education. Surround yourself and learn from those who are more advanced than you. Emulate, borrow, and steal good ideas. Use what you have learned to make them great.

There is no answer I can give that will be perfect for every scenario. Each client is unique, and you will need to decide the best direction for each.

However, yes, you should already be on the path to building with a block-first mindset if you plan to continue working with WordPress for the long haul. Immerse yourself in the system. Read, study, and build something any chance you get.

This is the first post in the Ask the Bartender series. Have a question of your own? Shoot it over.

Custom page pattern from the Twentig plugin.

I am often on the hunt for those hidden gems when it comes to block-related plugins. I like to see the interesting places that plugin authors venture. That is why it came as a surprise when someone recommended I check out the Twentig plugin a few days ago. Somehow, it has flown under my radar for months. And, it has managed to do this while being one of the more interesting plugins for WordPress I have seen in the past year.

Twentig is a plugin that essentially gives superpowers to the default Twenty Twenty theme. Diane and Yann Collet are the sibling co-founders and brains behind the plugin.

While I have been generally a fan of Twenty Twenty since it was first bundled in core, it was almost a bit of a letdown in some ways. It was supposed to be the theme that truly showcased what the block editor could do — and it does a fine job of styling the default blocks — but there was a lot of potential left on the table. The Twentig plugin turns Twenty Twenty into something worthier of a showcase for the block editor. It is that missing piece, that extra mile in which WordPress should be marching its default themes.

While the new Twenty Twenty-One default theme is just around the corner, Twentig is breathing new life into the past year’s theme. The developers behind the plugin are still fixing bugs and bringing new features users.

Of its 34 reviews on WordPress.org, Twentig has earned a solid five-star rating. That is a nice score for a plugin with only 4,000 active installations. As I said, it has flown under the radar a bit, but the users who have found it have obviously discovered something that adds those extra touches to their sites they need.

What Does Twentig Do?

It is a toolbox for Twenty Twenty. The headline feature is its block editor features, such as custom patterns and page layouts. It also offers a slew of customizer options that allow end-users to put their own design spin on the default theme. However, my interest is primarily in how it extends the block editor.

Let’s get this out of the way up front. Twentig’s one downside is that it adds a significant amount of additional CSS on top of the already-heavy Twenty Twenty and block editor styles. I will blame the current lack of a full design system from WordPress on most of this. Styling for the block editor can easily bloat a stylesheet. Adding an extra 100+ kb per page load might be a blocker for some who would like to try the plugin. Users will need to weigh the trade-offs between the additional features and the added page size.

The thing that makes Twentig special is its extensive patterns and pages library, which offers one-click access to hundreds of layouts specifically catered to the Twenty Twenty theme.

Inserting one of the hero patterns.

It took me a few minutes to figure out how to access the patterns — mainly because I did not read the manual. I expected to find them mixed in with the core patterns inserter. However, the plugin adds a new sidebar panel to the editor, which users can access by clicking the “tw” icon. After seeing the list of options, I can understand why they probably would not fit into WordPress’s limited block and patterns inserter UI.

It would be easier to list what the plugin does not have than to go through each of the custom patterns and pages.

The one thing that truly sets this plugin apart from the dozens of other block-library types of plugins is that there are no hiccups with the design. Almost every similar plugin or tool I have tested has had CSS conflicts with themes because they are trying to be a tool for every user. Twentig specifically targets the Twenty Twenty theme, which means it does not have to worry about whether it looks good with the other thousands of themes out there. It has one job, which is to extend its preferred theme, and it does it with well-designed block output.

The other aspect of this is that it does not introduce new blocks. Every pattern and page layout option uses the core WordPress blocks, which includes everything from hero sections to testimonials to pricing tables to event listings. And more.

Twentig does not stop adding features to the block editor with custom patterns. The useful and sometimes fun bits are on the individual block level, and I have yet to explore everything. I continue to discover new settings each time I open my editor.

Whether it is custom pullquote styles, a photo image frame, or an inner border tweak to the Cover block (shown below), the plugin adds little extras that push what users can do with their content.

Inner border style for the Cover block.

Each block also gets some basic top and bottom margin options, which comes in handy when laying out a page. At this point, I am simply looking forward to discovering features I have yet to find.

Areas Themes Should Explore

One of the things I dislike about many of these features being within the Twentig plugin is that I would like to see them within the Twenty Twenty theme instead. Obviously not every feature belongs in the theme — some features firmly land in plugin territory. The default WordPress themes should also leave some room for plugin authors to explore. But, shipping some of the more prominent patterns and styles with Twenty Twenty would make a more robust experience for the average end-user looking to get the most out of blocks.

Block patterns were not a core WordPress feature when Twenty Twenty landed. However, for the upcoming Twenty Twenty-One theme, which is expected to bundle some unique patterns, the design team should explore what the Twentig plugin has brought to the current default. That is the direction that theme development should be heading, and theme developers can learn a lot by stealing borrowing from this plugin.

Facebook and Instagram are dropping unauthenticated oEmbed support on October 24. WordPress will be removing both Facebook and Instagram as oEmbed providers in an upcoming release. After evaluating third-party solutions, WordPress VIP is recommending its partners enable Jetpack’s Shortcode Embeds module. Jetpack will be shipping the update in its 9.0 release, which is anticipated to land prior to the October 24th deadline.

The module is being updated to provide a seamless transition for users who might otherwise be negatively impacted by Facebook’s upcoming API change. WordPress contributors have run some simulations but are not yet sure what will happen to the display for previously embedded content.

“It is possible that they change the contents of the JS file to manipulate cached embeds, perhaps to display a warning that the site is using an old method to embed content or that the request is not properly authenticated,” Jonathan Desrosiers commented on the trac ticket for removing the oEmbed providers.

WordPress.com VIP roughly outlined what users can expect if they do not enable a solution to begin authenticating oEmbeds:

By default, WordPress caches oEmbed contents in post metadata. These embeds will continue to display in previously-published content. If you edit older posts in the Block Editor, regardless of whether you update the post by saving changes, the embeds in the post will no longer be cached and will stop displaying. If you view these older posts using the Classic Editor, so long as the post is not re-saved, the embeds will continue to function and display properly. If you update the post content, the embed will cease functioning unless you have a mitigation installed.

Although WordPress VIP recommends using the Jetpack module as the best solution, self-hosted WordPress users may want to investigate other options if they are not already using Jetpack. oEmbed Plus is a free plugin created specifically for solving the problem of WordPress dropping Facebook and Instagram as oEmbed providers but it is more work to set up and configure. It requires users to register as a Facebook developer and create an app to get API credentials.

W3C has selected Craft CMS over Statamic for its redesign project, after dropping WordPress from consideration in an earlier round of elimination:

In the end, our decision mostly came down to available resources. Craft had already committed to reach AA compliance in Craft 4 (it is currently on version 3.5, the release of version 4 is planned for April 2021). They had also arranged for an external agency to provide them with accessibility issues to tackle weekly. In the end, they decided instead to hire an in-house accessibility specialist to perform assessments and assist the development team in adopting accessibility patterns in the long run.

W3C CMS Selection Report

Last week we published a post urging W3C to revisit Gutenberg for a fair shake against the proprietary CMS’s or consider adopting another open source option. During the selection process, Studio 24, the agency contracted for the redesign, cited its extensive experience with WordPress as the reason for not performing any accessibility testing on more recent versions of Gutenberg.

When asked if the team contacted anyone from WordPress’ Accessibility Team during the process or put Gutenberg through the same tests as the proprietary CMS’s, Studio 24 founder Simon Jones confirmed they had not.

“No, we only reached out to the two shortlisted CMS’s” Jones said. “I’m afraid we didn’t have time to do more. We did test GB a few months ago based on editing content – though it wasn’t the only factor in our choice. As an agency we do plan to keep reviewing GB in the future.”

In response to our concerns regarding licensing, Jones penned an update titled “On not choosing WordPress,” which further elaborated on the reasons why the agency was not inclined towards using or evaluating the new editor:

From a business perspective I also believe Gutenberg creates a complexity issue that makes it challenging for use by many agencies who create custom websites for clients; where we have a need to create lots of bespoke blocks and page elements for individual client projects.

The use of React complicates front-end build. We have very talented front-end developers, however, they are not React experts – nor should they need to be. I believe front-end should be built as standards-compliant HTML/CSS with JavaScript used to enrich functionality where necessary and appropriate.

As of yet, we have not found a satisfactory (and profitable) way to build custom Gutenberg blocks for commercial projects. 

The CMS selection report also stated that W3C needs the CMS to be “usable by non-sighted users” by the launch date, since some members of the staff who contribute to the website are non-sighted.

Since the most recent version of WordPress was not tested in comparison with the proprietary CMS’s, it’s unclear how much better they handle accessibility. Ultimately, W3C and Studio 24 were more comfortable moving forward with a proprietary vendor that was able to make certain assurances about the future accessibility of its authoring tool, despite having a smaller pool of contributors.

“[I’m] also deeply curious since the cursory notes on accessibility for both of the reviewed CMSes seem to highlight a ton of issues like ‘Buttons and Checkboxes are built using div elements’ or most inputs lacking clear focus styles,” Gutenberg technical lead Matías Ventura said. “An element like the Calendar for choosing a post date seems entirely inoperable with keyboard on Craft, for example, while WordPress’ has had significant effort and rounds of feedback poured into that element alone to make it fully operable.”

WordPress developer Anthony Burchell commented on how using a relatively new proprietary CMS seemed counter to W3C’s stated goal to select an option on the basis of longevity. Craft CMS’s continued success is contingent upon its business model and the company’s ability to remain profitable.

“FOSS have the same opportunity of direct access to developers,” Burchell said. “I recognize there are many accessibility shortcomings in popular software, but I think it’s more constructive to rally behind and contribute, not use a proprietary CMS that boasts beer budget in their guidelines.”

On the other side of the issue, accessibility advocates took the W3C’s decision as a referendum on Gutenberg’s continued struggles to meet WCAG AA standards. WordPress accessibility specialist Amanda Rush said it was “nice to see the W3C flip tables over this.”

“Gutenberg is not mature software,” accessibility consultant and WordPress contributor Joe Dolson said in a post elaborating on his comments at WPCampus 2020 Online. He emphasized the lack of stability in the project that Studio 24 alluded to when documenting the reasons against using WordPress.

“It is still undergoing rapid changes, and has grand goals to add a full-site editing experience for WordPress that almost guarantees that it will continue to undergo rapid changes for the next few years,” Dolson said. “Why would any organization that is investing a large amount into a site that they presumably hope will last another 10 years want to invest in something this uncertain?”

Dolson also said the accessibility improvements he referenced regarding the audit were only a small part of the whole picture.

“They only encompass issues that existed in the spring of 2019,” he said. “Since then, many features have been added and changed, and those features both resolve issues and have created new ones. The accessibility team is constantly playing catch up to try and provide enough support to improve Gutenberg. And even now, while it is more or less accessible, there are critical features that are not yet implemented. There are entirely new interface patterns introduced on a regular basis that break prior accessibility expectations.”

WordPress is also being used by millions of people who are constantly reporting issues to fuel the software’s continued refinement, which increases the backlog of issues. Unfortunately, Studio 24 did not properly evaluate Gutenberg against the proprietary CMS’s in order to determine if these software projects are in any better shape.

Instead, they decided that Craft CMS’s community was more receptive to collaborating on issues without reaching out to WordPress. Given the W3C’s stated preference for open source software, WordPress, as the only CMS under consideration with an OSD-compliant license, should have received the same accessibility evaluation.

“I can’t make any statements that would be meaningful about the other content management systems under consideration; but if WordPress wants to be taken seriously in environments where accessibility is a legal, ethical, and mission imperative, there’s still a lot of work to be done,” Dolson said.

Studio 24’s evaluation may not have been equitable to the only open source CMS under consideration, but the situation serves to highlight a unique quandary: when using open source software becomes the impractical choice for organizations requiring a high level of accessibility in their authoring tools.

“Studio 24 ultimately determined that working with a CMS to make it better was more possible with a smaller, proprietary vendor than with a large open-source project,” accessibility advocate Brian DeConinck said. “Project leadership would be more receptive, and the smaller community means changes can be made more quickly. That should prompt a lot of soul-searching for…well, everyone. What does that say about the future of open source?”

It’s hard to be nuanced in 280 characters.

The Twitter character limit is a major factor of what can make it so much fun to use: you can read, publish, and interact, in extremely short, digestible chunks. But, it doesn’t fit every topic, ever time. Sometimes you want to talk about complex topics, having honest, thoughtful discussions. In an environment that encourages hot takes, however, it’s often easier to just avoid having those discussions. I can’t blame people for doing that, either: I find myself taking extended breaks from Twitter, as it can easily become overwhelming.

For me, the exception is Twitter threads.

Twitter threads encourage nuance and creativity.

Creative masterpieces like this Choose Your Own Adventure are not just possible, they rely on Twitter threads being the way they are.

Publishing a short essay about your experiences in your job can bring attention to inequality.

And Tumblr screenshot threads are always fun to read, even when they take a turn for the epic (over 4000 tweets in this thread, and it isn’t slowing down!)

Everyone can think of threads that they’ve loved reading.

My point is, threads are wildly underused on Twitter. I think I big part of that is the UI for writing threads: while it’s suited to writing a thread as a series of related tweet-sized chunks, it doesn’t lend itself to writing, revising, and editing anything more complex.

To help make this easier, I’ve been working on a tool that will help you publish an entire post to Twitter from your WordPress site, as a thread. It takes care of transforming your post into Twitter-friendly content, you can just… write.

It doesn’t just handle the tweet embeds from earlier in the thread: it handles handle uploading and attaching any images and videos you’ve included in your post.

• 
• 
• 
• 

All sorts of embeds work, too.

It’ll be coming in Jetpack 9.0 (due out October 6), but you can try it now in the latest Jetpack Beta! Check it out and tell me what you think.

This might not fix all of Twitter’s problems, but I hope it’ll help you enjoy reading and writing on Twitter a little more.

Last Friday, the WordPress Themes Team announced the release of its new Webfonts Loader project. It is a drop-in script that allows theme authors to load web fonts from the user’s site instead of a third-party CDN. The secondary message included in the team’s announcement is that it no longer plans to allow themes to hotlink Google Fonts in the future.

Throughout most of the team’s history, it has not allowed themes to hotlink or use CDNs for hosting theme assets, such as CSS, JavaScript, and fonts. The one exception to this rule was the use of Google Fonts. This allowed themes to have richer typography options at their disposal from what the team has generally declared a reliable source.

“The exception was made because there was no practical way to not have the exception at the time,” said Aria Stathopoulos, a Themes Team representative and developer behind the Webfonts Loader project. “The exception for Google Fonts was made out of necessity. Now that there is another way, the exception will not be necessary.”

In effect, disallowing the Google Fonts CDN would not be a new ban. It would be a removal of an exception to the existing ban.

Google Fonts has become so embedded into the theme developer toolset over the years, there was no way the team could simply pull the plug and prohibit the use of the CDN overnight. If the Themes Team members wanted to focus more on privacy, they would need to build a tool that made it dead simple for theme authors to use.

There is no hard deadline for when the team will remove the exception for Google Fonts, and it is not set in stone at this point. Stathopoulos said removing it has been the goal from the beginning, disallowing all CDNs. However, it took a while to find an efficient way to handle this. With a viable alternative in place, they can discuss moving forward.

Webfonts Loader for Themes

The Webfonts Loader project keeps it simple for theme authors. It introduces a new wptt_get_webfont_styles() function that developers can plug in a stylesheet URL. Once a page is loaded with that function call, it will download the fonts locally to a /fonts folder in the user’s /wp-content directory. This way, fonts will always be served from the user’s site.

The system is not limited to Google Fonts either. Any URL that serves CSS with an @font-face {} rule will work. It does not currently include authentication for CDNs that require API keys, such as Adobe Fonts. However, that is something the team might add in the future.

“For end-users, moving away from CDNs and locally hosting web fonts will improve performance (fewer handshake roundtrips for SSL), and is the privacy-conscious choice,” said Stathopoulos. “The only ‘valid privacy concern’ is that the web fonts’ CDN does not disclose information that is fundamental to the GDPR: what information gets logged, for how long these logs remain, how they are processed, if there is any cross-referencing with all the other wealth of information the company has from users, etc. The concern is a lack of disclosure and information. If a site owner doesn’t know what kind of information a third-party logs for its visitors, then they should ethically not enforce that on their visitors. With this package, the CDN is removed from the equation and the font still gets served fast — if not faster.”

A Path to Core WordPress

Today, there is now a broader focus on privacy concerns related to third-party resources, particularly with tech giants like Google. Such concerns extend to whether third parties are tracking users or collecting data. Additional concerns are around whether sites are disclosing the use of third-party resources, which may be required in some jurisdictions. Site owners who are often unable to work through the web of potential issues are stuck in the middle.

Jono Alderson opened a ticket to create an API for loading web fonts locally in core WordPress in February 2019. It is a lengthy and detailed proposal, but it has yet to see much buy-in outside of a handful of developers.

“If such a script is standardized and included in WordPress core, one of the main benefits would be more respect for the end-user’s privacy,” said Stathopoulos. “In the end, that’s all privacy is about: respecting users.”

A standard API like Alderson proposes could solve some issues. Namely, it would virtually eliminate any privacy concerns. However, loading fonts locally could allow WordPress to optimize font loading and would create a shared system where plugins and themes do not load duplicate assets because of the current limitations of the enqueuing system. A standard API would also put the responsibility of efficiently loading fonts on WordPress’s shoulders instead of theme and plugin developers.

The Themes Team’s new project is a solid start and strengthens the current proposal.

“If we’re serious about WordPress becoming a fast, privacy-friendly platform, we can’t rely on theme developers to add and manage fonts without providing a framework to support them,” wrote Alderson in the ticket.

Fuxia Scholz, a prolific WordPress Stack Exchange (WPSE) contributor, is the first member to reach 100,000 reputation points. The popular Q&A community site rewards expert advice by floating the highest quality answers to the top, allowing users to earn reputation points. The gamified help community has proven to be more motivating for developers than many traditional forums, since the upvotes communicate how useful their answers are to others.

Scholz started on Stack Overflow a few months before WordPress had its own site. She wrote around 50 answers and made connections with other WordPress developers ahead of the site’s beta phase in June 2010. Once the site graduated and got its own logo and design, Scholz started writing more.

“One core idea for all Stack Exchange sites is gamification: You earn reputation, and you get access to certain privileges,” Scholz said.

“You can say I got a bit addicted. My favorite questions were about problems for which I didn’t know the answer, and couldn’t find one with a search engine, because no one else had solved that before. I used my answers to teach myself, and I learned a lot this way! In May 2011 my reputation on WPSE was already higher than on Stack Overflow, and for the next years it went up in a steep curve.” Ten years after WPSE launched, Scholz has become the first to reach 100,000 reputation points.

“What reputation and karma do is send a message that this is a community with norms, it’s not just a place to type words onto the internet. (That would be 4chan.)” Stack Overflow co-creator Joel Spolsky said. “We don’t really exist for the purpose of letting you exercise your freedom of speech. You can get your freedom of speech somewhere else. Our goal is to get the best answers to questions. All the voting makes it clear that we have standards, that some posts are better than others, and that the community itself has some norms about what’s good and bad that they express through the vote.”

The reputation points were originally inspired by Reddit Karma. Spolsky admits that the points not a perfect system but they do tend to “drive a tremendous amount of good behavior.” Gamification can shape and encourage certain behaviors but Spolsky said it’s a weak force that cannot motivate people to do things they are not already interested in doing. For Scholz, it was the community aspect and an earned sense of ownership and responsibility that kept her hooked.

“In 2012, the community elected me as a moderator, and that changed a lot,” she said. “Now it wasn’t just a game anymore, it was a duty. I felt responsible for the site. I still do. I also found some friends on there. We met at WordCamps and in private, and worked together on different projects.”

Scholz no longer works in development and said she doesn’t care about WordPress anymore, but she is still a regular contributor on the WPSE.

“I switched careers and work as a writer, translator, and community manager for Chess24.com now,” she said. “But I still care about the site WordPress Stack Exchange! I keep an eye on new tags, handle flagged posts and comments, try to make every new user feel welcome, and I search for people who are abusing the system — vote fraud and spam. And, very rarely, I even write an answer, because I still know all this stuff.

“Checking the site has become a part of my daily routine, like feeding the cat.”

This daily habit has snowballed into Scholz racking up more than 2,000 answers. She is getting upvotes on many of her old answers nearly every day, which is what pushed her over the 100k milestone.

“There is a lot to say about the way our site developed over the years,” Scholz said. “I’m not happy about some things. The enthusiasm of the early days is gone. We don’t have enough regulars, there is no discussion about the site on WordPress Development Meta Stack Exchange, and our chat, once very active, funny, and friendly, is now almost dead.

“Maybe that’s normal, I don’t know. But it’s still ‘my’ site. Reputation and badges don’t really mean anything for a long time now, but keeping the site working, useful and friendly is more important.”

Peter Adams, the owner of the PhotoPress plugin, announced a couple of weeks ago that now is the time for his project to take center stage. “It’s Time for PhotoPress,” read the title of his post in which he laid out a four-phase plan for the future of his project.

Adams is no stranger to manipulating WordPress to suit the needs of photographers. He described photography as his first love and second career. He initially found the art of taking photos in high school and set off to college to become a professional photographer in the early ’90s.

As his university graduation loomed, he was recruited to run web development for an internet ad agency that built websites for Netscape, Bill Clinton’s White House, and dozens of Fortune 500 companies. He spent the next 15 years starting or running tech companies before returning to his roots as a photographer.

Today, he photographs for various magazines and companies. And, that’s where his PhotoPress project comes in.

“As far as WordPress has come, it is at risk of losing an entire generation of photographers to photo website services such as Photoshelter, SmugMug, Squarespace, and PhotoFolio,” he said. Adams wants to change that, making WordPress the go-to platform for photographers around the world.

The Jetpack of Photography Plugins

If you dig into the history of the PhotoPress plugin on WordPress.org, it seems to have a 15-year history. However, this is not the same plugin that was published a decade and a half ago by a different developer. The original plugin is now defunct, and Adams took over when the name was freed up on the directory.

Adams wrote in his announcement post that WordPress has done a great job of delivering several media features over the years. “Yet despite that, there are still many rough edges and missing features that keep WordPress from being the first choice for a photographer that needs to publish a beautiful portfolio of their work, put their image catalog/archive online, or showcase a photo editorial/project.”

He outlined a list of 10 specific problem areas that he wants to address in a “Jetpack-like” plugin for photographers. This is the bread and butter of the first of the planned four phases, which he said is about 80% finished. He had originally planned to develop PhotoPress as a series of separate plugins, each addressing a specific problem. Now, it is a single plugin with modules than can be enabled or disabled.

When asked why the “right time” is now, Adams explained it is because the Gutenberg (block editor) project is a giant leap forward in usability in terms of creating photography blogs.

PhotoPress Gallery block in the editor.

“Photogs are a rare breed of non-technical users with high design sense,” he said. “Things that I used to have to teach photographers to do using shortcode syntax and custom CSS can now be simple controls with live feedback inside a Gutenberg block. It’s really a game-changer for getting people comfortable with customizing things like gallery styling — which is the number one thing photographers need to do.”

The primary piece of the PhotoPress plugin is its custom PhotoPress Gallery block. It allows users to choose between a range of gallery styles, such as columns, masonry, justified, and mosaic. Each style has its own options. Images can also be launched into a slideshow when one is clicked.

Based on some quick tests, the block’s front-end output will go farther with some themes than others. This is mainly because of conflicting CSS and issues which can be solved by testing against more themes.

Aside from the block, the plugin can automatically extract image metadata and group that data through custom taxonomies, such as cameras, lenses, locations, keywords, and more. WordPress stores this information out of the box, but it is hidden away as post meta. The plugin uses the taxonomy system to make it manageable for end-users.

Ultimately, Adams set out to create a photography plugin that fits in with the WordPress admin user interface and experience, which he has accomplished.

The Future of PhotoPress

The project is still a work in progress. Adams is still moving through Phase I of the four-phase plan. Once it is complete, he can move on to the next steps in the process.

Phase II is to create themes that are designed specifically to work with the PhotoPress plugin. He has three planned thus far. One for handling portfolio sites. Another for creating a stock photo archive. And the last for photojournalism and exhibits. Each will be built on top of his photography theme framework.

The themes in Phase II will likely be commercial products. Adams said he needs a way to fund the next phases of the project. He hopes to have this step underway by the end of the year.

For 2021, he wants to begin tackling Phases III and IV. The former will be a website-as-a-service (WaaS) similar to WordPress.com but for photographers. It will begin as a paid project but could have some free options for emerging photographers and students. The final phase is to build an onboarding system.

Web Stories for WordPress dashboard.

Two and a half months after the launch of its public beta, Google released its Web Stories for WordPress plugin. So far, the plugin has over 10,000 active installations and has garnered a solid five-star rating from four reviews.

Google created the Web Stories format through its AMP Project to allow publishers to create visually-rich stories. It is primarily geared toward mobile site visitors, allowing them to quickly jump through story pages with small chunks of content.

The Web Stories plugin creates a visual interface within WordPress for creating Stories. It breaks away from the traditional WordPress interface and introduces users to an almost Photoshop-like experience for building out individual Stories. The Stories editor is completely drag-and-drop.

The plugin also offers eight predesigned templates out of the box that cover a small range of niches. However, according to Google’s announcement, the company plans to add more templates in future updates.

Web Stories Are for Storytelling

“Firstly…the power of Stories,” wrote Jamie Marsland, founder of Pootlepress, in a Twitter thread. “Stories are how we (humans) see the world and share our experiences. Up to now the platforms that we have to tell stories have been limited to books/films/tv/websites/blogs/instagram stories etc.”

“Websites are ok for telling stories but in many ways the format doesn’t really fit the linear arc of storytelling. When Marshall McLuhan said ‘the medium is the message’ in 1964 he was talking about how the medium itself has a social impact, and change the communication itself…and the possibilities for what is communicated and how it is perceived. But we should keep coming back to Stories. Stories are the key here imo. Now we have an open format to tell Stories, and we have an open platform (WordPress) where those Stories can be told easily.”

Marsland finished his thread by saying that using Stories as a replacement for a brochure or website is a missed opportunity. He said that it was a platform for storytelling and should be used as such.

It is far too early to tell if Web Stories will simply be a fad or still in wide use years from now. The technology certainly lends itself well to telling stories, particularly in mobile format, but I doubt we have seen the best of what is possible on the web. The format feels too limited to be the end-all-be-all of storytelling. It is merely one medium that will live and die by its popularity with users.

With the right design skills, some people will craft beautiful Web Stories. And, that is just what Marsland has done with the first Story he shared:

Page from the Wilson and Pootle Web Story by Jamie Marsland.

I agree with his conclusion. Web Stories should be about storytelling. When you move outside of that zone, the technology feels out of place.

Where I disagree is that websites are not ideal for storytelling. Ultimately, the WordPress block editor will allow artistic end-users to craft intricate stories, mixing content and design in ways that we have not seen. We are just now scratching the surface. I expect our community of developers to build more intricate tools than what the Web Stories plugin currently allows, and we can do so in a way that revolutionizes storytelling on the web.

New Features

Story editor with Unsplash photo integration.

The Web Stories plugin now adds support for Unsplash images and Coverr videos out of the box. The plugin adds a new tab with a “media” icon. For users of the first beta version of the plugin, this may be a bit confusing. The previous media icon was for a tab that displayed the user’s media. Now, the user’s media is under the tab with the “upload” icon.

It is also not immediately clear that the Unsplash images and Coverr videos are not hosted on the site itself. There is a “powered by” notice at the bottom of the tab, but it can be easy to miss because it blends in with the media in the background.

Media from Unsplash and Coverr is hosted off-site and not downloaded to the user’s WordPress media library. I could find no mention of this in the plugin’s documentation. Such hotlinking was a cause for debate over the recent official release of the Unsplash plugin.

Google also announced it planned to add more “stock media integrations” in the near future. According to a document shared via a GitHub ticket, such future integrations may include Google Photos and GIF-sharing site Tenor.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the international standards organization for the web, is redesigning its website and will soon be selecting a new CMS. Although WordPress is already used to manage W3C’s blog and news sections of the website, the organization is open to adopting a new CMS to meet its list of preferences and requirements.

Studio 24, the digital agency selected for the redesign project, narrowed their consideration to three CMS candidates:

1. Statamic
2. Craft CMS
3. WordPress

Studio 24 was aiming to finalize their recommendations in July but found that none of them complied with the W3C’s authoring tool accessibility guidelines. The CMS’s that were better at compliance with the guidelines were not as well suited to the other project requirements.

In the most recent project update posted to the site, Studio 24 reported they have shortlisted two CMS platforms. Coralie Mercier, Head of Marketing and Communications at W3C, confirmed that these include Statamic and Craft CMS.

WordPress was not submitted to the same review process as the Studio 24 team claims to have extensive experience working with it. In the summary of their concerns, Studio 24 cited Gutenberg, accessibility issues, and the fact that the Classic Editor plugin will stop being officially maintained on December 31st, 2021:

First of all, we have concerns about the longevity of WordPress as we use it. WordPress released a new version of their editor in 2018: Gutenberg. We have already rejected the use of Gutenberg in the context of this project due to accessibility issues.

If we choose to do away with Gutenberg now, we cannot go back to it at a later date. This would amount to starting from scratch with the whole CMS setup and theming.

Gutenberg is the future of WordPress. The WordPress core development team keeps pushing it forward and wants to roll it out to all areas of the content management system (navigation, sidebar, options etc.) as opposed to limiting its use to the main content editor as is currently the case.

This means that if we want to use WordPress long term, we will need to circumvent Gutenberg and keep circumventing it for a long time and in more areas of the CMS as time goes by. 

Another major factor in the decision to remove WordPress from consideration was that they found “no elegant solution to content localization and translation.”

Studio 24 also expressed concerns that tools like ACF, Fewbricks, and other plugins might not being maintained for the Classic Editor experience “in the context of a widespread adoption of Gutenberg by users and developers.”

“More generally, we think this push to expand Gutenberg is an indication of WordPress focusing on the requirements of their non-technical user base as opposed to their audience of web developers building custom solutions for their clients.”

It seems that the digital agency W3C selected for the project is less optimistic about the future of Gutenberg and may not have reviewed recent improvements to the overall editing experience since 2018, including those related to accessibility.

Accessibility consultant and WordPress contributor Joe Dolson recently gave an update on Gutenberg accessibility audit at WPCampus 2020 Online. He reported that while there are still challenges remaining, many issues raised in the audit have been addressed across the whole interface and 2/3 of them have been solved. “Overall accessibility of Gutenberg is vastly improved today over what it was at release,” Dolson said.

Unfortunately, Studio 24 didn’t put WordPress through the same content creation and accessibility tests that it used for Statamic and Craft CMS. This may be because they had already planned to use a Classic Editor implementation and didn’t see the necessity of putting Gutenberg through the paces.

These tests involved creating pages with “flexible components” which they referred to as “blocks of layout,” for things like titles, WYSIWYG text input, and videos. It also involved creating a template for news items where all the content input by the user would be displayed (without formatting).

Gutenberg would lend itself well to these uses cases but was not formally tested with the other candidates, due to the team citing their “extensive experience” with WordPress. I would like to see the W3C team revisit Gutenberg for a fair shake against the proprietary CMS’s.

W3C Is Prioritizing Accessibility Over Its Open Source Licensing Preferences

The document outlining the CMS requirements for the project states that “W3C has a strong preference for an open-source license for the CMS platform” as well as “a CMS that is long-lived and easy to maintain.” This preference may be due to the economic benefits of using a stable, widely adopted CMS, or it may be inspired by the undeniable symbiosis between open source and open standards.

“The industry has learned by experience that the only software-related standards to fully achieve [their] goals are those which not only permit but encourage open source implementations. Open source implementations are a quality and honesty check for any open standard that might be implemented in software…”

Open Source Initiative

WordPress is the only one of the three original candidates to be distributed under an OSD-compliant license. (CMS code available on GitHub isn’t the same.)

Using proprietary software to publish the open standards that underpin the web isn’t a good look. While proprietary software makers are certainly capable of implementing open standards, regardless of licensing, there are a myriad of benefits for open standards in the context of open source usage:

“The community of participants working with OSS may promote open debate resulting in an increased recognition of the benefits of various solutions and such debate may accelerate the adoption of solutions that are popular among the OSS participants. These characteristics of OSS support evolution of robust solutions are often a significant boost to the market adoption of open standards, in addition to the customer-driven incentives for interoperability and open standards.”

International Journal of Software Engineering & Applications

Although both Craft CMS and Statamic have their code bases available on GitHub, they share similarly restrictive licensing models. The Craft CMS contributing document states:

Craft isn’t FOSS
Let’s get one thing out of the way: Craft CMS is proprietary software. Everything in this repo, including community-contributed code, is the property of Pixel & Tonic.

That comes with some limitations on what you can do with the code:

– You can’t change anything related to licensing, purchasing, edition/feature-targeting, or anything else that could mess with our alcohol budget.
– You can’t publicly maintain a long-term fork of Craft. There is only One True Craft.

Statamic’s contributing docs have similar restrictions:

Statamic is not Free Open Source Software. It is proprietary. Everything in this and our other repos on Github — including community-contributed code — is the property of Wilderborn. For that reason there are a few limitations on how you can use the code:

Projects with this kind of restrictive licensing often fail to attract much contribution or adoption, because the freedoms are not clear.

In a GitHub issue requesting Craft CMS go open source, Craft founder and CEO Brandon Kelly said, “Craft isn’t closed source – all the source code is right here on GitHub,” and claims the license is relatively unrestrictive as far as proprietary software goes, that contributing functions in a similar way to FOSS projects. This rationale is not convincing enough for some developers commenting on the thread.

“I am a little hesitant to recommend Craft with a custom open source license,” Frank Anderson said. “Even if this was a MIT+ license that added the license and payment, much like React used to have. I am hesitant because the standard open source licenses have been tested.”

When asked about the licensing concerns of Studio 24 narrowing its candidates to two proprietary software options, Coralie Mercier told me, “we are prioritizing accessibility.” A recent project update also reports that both CMS suppliers W3C is reviewing “have engaged positively with authoring tool accessibility needs and have made progress in this area.”

Even if you have cooperative teams at proprietary CMS’s that are working on accessibility improvements as the result of this high profile client, it cannot compare to the massive community of contributors that OSD-compliant licensing enables.

It’s unfortunate that the state of open source CMS accessibility has forced the organization to narrow its selections to proprietary software options for its first redesign in more than a decade.

Open standards go hand in hand with open source. There is a mutually beneficial connection between the two that has caused the web to flourish. I don’t see using a proprietary CMS as an extension of W3C values, and it’s not clear how much more benefit to accessibility the proprietary options offer in comparison. W3C may be neutral on licensing debates, but in the spirit of openness, I think the organization should adopt an open source CMS, even if it is not WordPress.

Fashion is ephemeral. Art is eternal. Indeed what is a fashion really? A fashion is merely a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months!

Thus wrote Oscar Wilde on Victorian-era fashion in an article titled “The Philosophy of Dress” for the New-York Tribune in 1885.

In many ways, WordPress theming is the same as the ever-changing landscape of fashion. Rounded corners are in one day and out the next. Box shadows are in one year after being frowned up just months earlier. Perhaps web design is so intolerable that we must change it every six months. Or, at least freshen it up every year in the case of WordPress.

If art is eternal, there are only two default, Twenty* themes that I can truly recall from past years: Twenty Ten and Twenty Fourteen — yes, Twenty Twenty is memorable, but it is also still the current default. Twenty Ten was a classic that paid homage to WordPress’s past. Twenty Fourteen was such a leap away from tradition that it is hard to forget. Everything else has seemed to fade to varying degrees.

With WordPress 5.6 and the end of the year looming, it is time to look forward to the latest trend. As Mel Choyce-Dwan noted in the announcement of Twenty Twenty-One, the next default theme, “Pastels and muted colors are pretty in right now.”

She is not wrong. The colors are a refreshing change of pace. Now that we are into the second day of autumn, I am getting the good kind of vibes from some of the more earthy-tones from a couple of the color palettes expected to ship with the theme.

Potential color palette options for Twenty Twenty-One.

Whether Twenty Twenty-One will be a fashionable theme for the year or art that we can remember a decade from now, only history will be able to judge. For now, let’s enjoy the creation and take a look at what we should expect from the next default WordPress theme.

The Current Twenty Twenty-One

The new default theme is a fork of Automattic’s Seedlet, a project in which I lauded as the next step in the evolution of theming. It is a theme that is focused on WordPress’s future of being completely comprised of blocks. It gives us an ideal insight into where theme development is heading. It makes sense as the foundation for the new default. Few other themes would make for a good starting point right now. With WordPress theme development in flux, Seedlet is simply ahead of the pack in terms of foundational elements.

Seedlet WordPress theme screenshot.

“This provides us with a thorough system of nested CSS variables to make child theming easier, and to help integrate with the global styles functionality that’s under development for full-site editing,” wrote Choyce-Dwan of using Seedlet as a starting point.

There are no plans to spin up a Google Web Font for this theme. The design team is going native and sticking with the default system font stack. Choyce-Dwan listed several reasons for the choice, such as keeping a neutral font that allows broad use, speed, and customizability via a child theme.

Despite the neutral font, the default pastel green is a fairly opinionated design decision. It will not be used broadly across industries. However, the team plans to create multiple color palettes that will give it more range. Presumably, these palettes can also be overwritten.

Pastel green color scheme on single post view.

Other than the colors, the design is relatively simple. Choyce-Dwan said that the theme’s block patterns support is where it will be truly unique.

I was initially unhappy with the patterns that were going to ship with WordPress 5.5. However, an 11th-hour update improved the situation so that they did not feel entirely experimental. The foundational Seedlet theme for Twenty Twenty-One has some unique patterns that begin to scratch the surface of what’s possible with this WordPress feature. My hope is that the new default theme steps it up a notch.

Currently, the theme does not register any custom patterns. However, it has a placeholder file and a note that they are a work in progress. Choyce-Dwan shared some patterns the team has already designed in the announcement.

Currently-designed block patterns.

“We’ll be relying on our talented community designers for more ideas,” she wrote. The team has also created a GitHub template for anyone to contribute pattern design ideas.

Currently, the theme does not support the upcoming full-site editing feature of WordPress. After the Beta 1 release of WordPress 5.6, the team plans to begin exploring the addition of this support. WordPress is expected to ship a public beta of full-site editing in its next major release, but it is unclear whether it will be far enough along to be a headline feature for the Twenty Twenty-One theme.

The team and volunteers have less than a month before the October 20th deadline for committing the new theme to trunk, the core WordPress development branch. At that stage, the theme should be nearly complete and ready for production. Of course, there will be several rounds of patches, bug fixes, and updates before WordPress 5.6 lands in December. Right now is the best time for anyone who wants to get involved with Twenty Twenty-One to do so.

Useful links with more information:

• GitHub Repository
• Theme Mockups via Figma
• Twenty Twenty-One Idea Pinterest Board

Unokwanisa kuverenga rondedzero iyi muChiShona

So I chose a career in Web Development!!

To be honest it’s kind of funny when I think about it and quite surreal to be here talking about my story. It has been a journey and I would like to share my story with you.

I have been lucky in the Dad department. My Dad encouraged me to work hard and dream big from a very young age. I remember occasionally having ‘when I grow up’ talks.

For quite some time I wanted to be a Judge, however awesome this dream sounds it was not very inspired. After binge-watching Judge Judy for a whole weekend, I started calling myself Judge Thelma. Though I don’t remember much of this my sister says that I used to say I would arrest all the men in the World if I ever became a Judge. HAHAHA! (clearly I didn’t understand how the World works)

I did not understand what being a Judge meant or what was required for me to start banging that gavel to my heart’s desire. Eventually, I learnt that I had to become a lawyer first then magistrate before I could be nominated to be a Judge and let us just say that is how I sentenced that dream to a lifetime down the drain.

See what I did there? hahaha!

With Daddy Dearest

A few years later, I was in High School and that is when I decided to pursue a career in Computer Science. I did not know what I would be doing or how I would get there but I just knew that I was going to pursue a career in ICT. I wrote my first line of code when I was 16 years old.

This was after I had joined the school’s computer class, initially, I thought I would be learning about Excel Sheets and Word Documents until I was assigned to write my first program in C (talk about a double-take!!). It was not easy but it was very exciting, l remember writing up simple code for a Video Club – a simple check-in/out for VHS tapes and CDs. Dear World, thus began my fascination with computers.

Seven years later, I was now in university studying ICT as I had always wanted. I was doing a Bachelors in Business Management & Information Technology. In my third year, I was interning at a local Webdesign and hosting company. This was never my plan, I only took on that job after I had failed to get a job with local banks or telecommunications companies. Before I was introduced to Website Design I envisioned myself suiting up and working in IT Audit or offering IT support. Even though things did not go as I had planned, I am glad they did not exactly go my way in that aspect. So in 2017, I was designing websites using HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScripts and Joomla which was the prefered content management system at that company. I knew about WordPress but I was not using it for anything. People have this misconception that WordPress is not for real developers and it is not secure and at that time I was one of those people.

Finding my tribe

One day when I was working at the front desk Thabo Tswana came to give a colleague of mine a purple WooCommerce pen. I did not know what WooCommerce was at that time but I was taken by the purple shirt and pen he was carrying. I asked him about it and he explained what WooCommerce was and that what he was carrying was called ‘swag’. So the love of freebies led me to the WordCamp Harare website, instead of buying a ticket I applied to volunteer. I learnt more about WordPress, I was a volunteer, without any knowledge on WordPress.org or WordPress.com. I only started using WordPress because of the awesome people that l had met at that Wordcamp.

Everyone was so welcoming, a week later with help from Thabo I designed my first ever WP website.

Soon after I was part of the community and a bit more involved in the meetups. We had our first-ever Women Who WordPress meetup in 2018. So many ladies came on board bloggers and developers alike. We were free to talk and discuss a lot of things. We had more time to discuss the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org we shared views on how to handle discrimination at work, how to promote your website and a whole lot of other things.

Establishing roots

In 2018, Harare had its first-ever female Lead Organiser Tapiwanashe Manhobo whoop whoop! I was also part of the organising team that year, I was assigned to handle Harare’s first Kids Camp. The planning process was stressful because the economic crisis in Zimbabwe was getting worse, luckily we had over 8 months to plan and with help from sponsors, we managed to pull through. In the end, everything turned out great. I wrote an article about the Kids Camp here.

After the first Kids Camp, we had several WordPressors that were enthusiasts about encouraging kids to embrace ICT. In 2019 we had not planned to have a Kids Camp because of financial constraints but to our surprise, we had some anonymous donations and we managed to have a WordPress Community outreach to a youth centre a week after our WordCamp. We had the outreach at the Centre for Total Transformation which is a non-formal school that caters for underprivileged and vulnerable children. We taught them about WordPress, Computer Hardware and Software.

Here is a small video I took with Ellen when we were about to leave. Did l mention that I am terrible on camera? hahaha!

Kids Camp 2019 – Centre for Total Transformation

I have fallen deeply for WordPress because of the Community, I enjoy attending WordCamps, meeting new people and just learning new stuff. I have a huge list of WordCamps I need to attend before l kick the bucket, hopefully. Last year I managed to cross WordCamp

Johannesburg off my bucket list. This year I was going to attend WordCamp Capetown but unfortunately, 2020 had other plans for the whole world. Anyway when everything is back to normal my plan to travel to WordCamps will proceed. (fingers crossed)

Reaping Fruits

Meanwhile, my plan to improve my developing skills has not been on hold. Even though I can still cook up code in C and Java, for now, I have also included WordPress PHP functions to the mix. It was not easy to get to this point, daring myself got me to this slightly better stage. My IQ is not way up there, however, I try to do my best where I can and I am happy to say it has paid off so far.

Around November last year, I was designing as a freelancer while job hunting. Out of the blue l got a call for a job offer from Trust Nhokovenzo who is big on Digital marketing and also part of the WordPress Community. He had asked someone in the community about developers and my name happened to come up. So since February, I have been part of his team at Calmlock Digital Marketing Agency.

There is so much more in the world of WordPress that l am yet to tap into so even though I am ending my write up here, for now, my story is going to continue …

Until next time…

Hevo Nyika

Saka ini ndakasarudza kugadzira mawebhusayiti.

Ndakaita rombo rakanaka pana baba vandakapihwa naMwari. Baba vangu vaindikurudzira kuti ndishande nesimba. Ndinoyeuka pano neapo tichiita hurukuro dzedu dzekuti ‘kana ndakura ndoda kuveyi’.

Kwenguva yakati rebei ndaida kuve Mutongi. Kunyangwe ini ndisingazvirangariri mukoma wangu anotaura kuti ndaiti ndaizosunga varume vese vari pasi rino kana ndikangoita mutongi HAHAHA zveshuwa handaiziva kuti mitemo yenyika inofambiswa seyi.
Ndanga ndisinga nzwisisi kuti kuva mutongi kwairevei kana zvaidikanwa kwandiri kuti nditange kurova iro ghavheu kuchishuwo chemoyo wangu. Pakupedzisira, ndakadzidza kuti ndaifanirwa kuzoita gweta ipapo magistrate ndisati ndasarudzwa kuita Mutongi naizvozvo ndokupera kwakaita chiroto chekuva Mutongi.

Na Baba Vangu

Gare gare papfura makore mashoma pandakanga ndave kuHigh School ndakanga ndakuda kuita basa rema kombiyuta. Ndakanyora mutsara wekutanga wekodhi pandaive nemakore gumi nematanhatu. Izvi zvakaitika mushure mekunge ndapinda mukirasi yemakombiyuta, pakutanga ndaifunga kuti ndinenge ndichidzidza nezveExcel Sheets neWord zvisineyi ndakaona ndakunyora kodhi yangu yekutanga muC. Zvaisave nyore kunyora kodhi asi zvainakidza kwazvo, ndorangarira ndichinyora kodhi yeVhidhiyo Kirabhu.

Makore manomwe apfura, ndakanga ndava kuyunivhesiti ndichidzidza ICT zvandakagara ndakaronga. Ndaiita Bachelors muBusiness Management & Information Technology. Mugore rangu rechitatu ndainge ndave kushanda kune imwe kambani yaita zvekugadzira mawebhusaiti. Ndakawana basa iri mushure mekunge ndatadza kuwana basa kumabhanga. Kunyangwe hazvo zvinhu zvisina kuenda sezvandaive ndakaronga, ndinofara kuti hazvina kunyatso enda nenzira yangu. Saka muna 2017 ndaigadzira mawebhusaiti ndichishandisa HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript uye Joomla iyo yaive iyo inokurudzirwa kukambani kwandaive. Panguva iyi ndaiziva nezve WordPress asi ndakanga ndisingaishandisi.

Kuwanana neWordPress

Rimwe zuva pandakanga ndichishanda ndakaona Thabo Tswana akauya kuzopa mumwe mukomana wandayishanda naye chinyoreso cheWooCommerce. Ndakanga ndisingazive kuti WooCommerce yaive chii asi ndakafarira chinyoreso nehembe ye WooCommerce yaanga akapfeka. Ndakamubvunza nezvazvo akatsanangura kuti WooCommerce yaive chii. Saka nekudawo zvakanaka, zvemahara ndakaenda pawebhusaiti yeWordCamp Harare ndikabata zvimbo zvegore iroro. Ndakazvipira kubatsirawo vamwe vekuWordPress kuWordCamp Harare. Nerubatsiro kubva kunaThabo ndakagadzira webhusaiti yangu yekutanga yeWordPress vhiki rakatevera .

Mushure mekunge ndaitawo chipato cheavo vanoshandisa WordPress ndakanga ndakuenda kumisangano yeWordPress yaitwa muHarare. Takaita musangano wevakadzi chete muna 2018. Vakadzi vazhinji vakauya kumusangano uyu. Tainga takasununguka kukurukura zvinhu zvakawanda. Takakurukura pamusoro pemutsauko uripo pakati peWordPress.com neWordPress.org takagovana maonero ekugadzirisa rusarura kubasa nezvimwewo.

Nguva yandakatanga kushandisa WordPress

Muna 2018, kurongwa kweWordCamp Harare kwakatungamirwa kekutanga nemusikana ainzi Tapiwanashe Manhobo (waiva mufaro mukuru). Ndakanga ndiri mumwe wevairongawo naye. Hurongwa hwekuronga WordCamp Harare mugore iri hwainetsa pamusaka pekuoma kwehupfumi wemuZimbabwe, zvisineyi takaita rombo rakanaka nokuti takawana rubatsiro kubva kunevamwewo vanhu vakatiwedzera mari. Pakupedzisira, zvese zvakabudirira zvakanaka. Takarongawo WordCamp yevana varipasi pemakore gumi nechishanu, munokwanisa kuverenga pamusoro pezuva iri pawebhisaiti yangu apa.

Mushure mekuita WordCamp yevana, takave nevamwe vanhu veWordPress aifarira kukurudzira vana kuti vagamuchire ICT. Muna 2019 takanga tisina kuronga kuve neWordCamo yeVana nekuda kwezvimhingamupinyi zvemari asi chakatishamisa ndechekuti takawana mari kubvawo kune vamwe. Takaita Camp iyi paCentre for Total Transformation chinova chikoro chisiri chepamutemo chinodzidzisa vana vanotambura. Tadzidzisa vana ava pamusoro peWordPress, Computer Hardware uye Software.

Ndofarira WordPress zvakanyanya nekuda kweavo varimu nharaunda yacho, ini ndinonakidzwa nekuenda kumaWordCampi, kusangana nevanhu vatsva uye kungo dzidza zvinhu zvitsva. Gore rakapera ndakakwanisa kuyambuka muganhu weZimbabwe ndichienda kuWordCamp Johannesburg, dai pasina kuti 2020 nyika dzepasi rino dzakawirwa nedenda reCOVID 19 zvimwe ndingadayi ndakaenda kuWordCamp Capetown. Zvisinei hazvo kana denda ranani zvimwe ndichakwanisa kufamba ndichienda kumaWordCamp edzimwe nyika.

Kukowa zvandakadyara

Zvichakadaro, chirongwa changu chekuvandudza hunyanzvi hwangu hachina kumira. Kunyangwe ini ndichiri kukwanisa kubika kodhi muC uye Java, ikozvino, ndasanganisirawo WordPress PHP. Zvaive zvisiri nyore kusvika apa, zvakatora kuzvishingisa nekushanda nesimba. Ndinofara mwari aiva neni pamufambo wangu uyu.

Muna Mbudzi gore rakapera, ndaive ndichigadzira mawebhusayiti apo nditsvaga basa. Pasina nguva ndakataura naTrust Nhokovenzo uyo akaandipa basa mukambani yake, kambani iyi inonzi Calmlock Digital Marketing Agency.

Pane zvimwe zvakawanda kuWordPress zvandisati ndapinda mazviri. Nhaizvozvo kunyangwe ndiri kupedzisa kunyora kwangu apa, nyaya yehupenyu wangu ichaenderera mberi…

Kusvikira nguva inotevera …

…. tsvaga chinangwa chako, chiite mushe mushe ..

The post Hello World – Hevo Nyika appeared first on HeroPress.

WordPress contributors are discussing different strategies for responding to Facebook and Instagram dropping unauthenticated oEmbed support on October 24. WordPress will be removing both Facebook and Instagram as oEmbed providers. When a user attempts to embed content by pasting a URL as they have in the past, they may not understand why it no longer works. They may assume that WordPress broke embeds, causing an increase in the support burden for this change.

A few participants on the trac ticket for this issue have suggested WordPress detect users who will be impacted and attempt to warn them with a notice.

“Since this may impact users unknowingly, it is possible to push a dashboard notice to users who have Facebook/Instagram embeds in their content, showing for site admins, as a one-off that can be dismissed,” Marius Jensen said.

“We’ve previously done post-update-processing to clean up comments, so the idea of looking over content for an embed isn’t completely outlandish, and would help with those who don’t follow WordPress’ usual channels to learn of this.”

Others don’t see the necessity. “Why should we make exception here?” Milan Dinić said. “It’s not the first time oEmbed support was discontinued for a provider, and I don’t remember anything specific was done then.”

There is still some uncertainty about what will happen with existing oEmbeds after Facebook updates its API. During a recent core developer meeting, Helen Helen Hou-Sandí confirmed that WordPress does not clear oEmbed caches regularly. “Technically oEmbed caches are cleared if you save and a valid response is returned, we do not do cron-based garbage collection,” Hou-Sandí said.

In a post today on the core development blog, Jake Spurlock assured users and developers that the existing embeds added before Facebook’s API change should still work:

Because oEmbed responses are cached in the database using the hidden oembed_cache post type, any embed added prior to the October 24th deadline will be preserved past the deprecation date. These posts are not purged by default in WordPress Core, so the contents of the embed will persist unless manually deleted.

Marius Jensen cautioned that there is still the possibility that existing embeds may not work going, depending on what Facebook does.

“We don’t know how they plan on implementing the use of unauthorized embed attempts,” Jensen said. “It could not return an embed code and your link would remain a plain link, or maybe they decide to return some kind of embedded ‘unauthorized’ content. I don’t think anyone has heard any specifics on how Facebook plans on doing this, so we’re all just kinda waiting to either hear more, or see what happens.”

Jensen said WordPress doesn’t re-check the cached results except when something changes with the post, but there may be plugins that clean up temporary data that may create an unpredictable outcome.

“The reliability of the caches are hard to determine (and being caches, it’s sort of in the term that it’s not guaranteed to always be there, but rather fetched and saved for a while when needed),” Jensen said.

Ideally WordPress’ oEmbed caches will prevent millions of embeds from breaking, but it’s still unknown how Facebook and third party plugins could change things.

Coming off a rocky 5.5 core update that deprecated jQuery Migrate and flooded official support forums with reports of broken sites, some contributors are wary of having another situation where users are left in the dark.

“I think a dashboard notice is desirable,” Jon Brown said. “Otherwise we’re not preemptively warning people in a way they can prepare and transition to another solution. We’re letting them know the same instant it’s going to break (when editing a specific post). I don’t think we can safely assume cached data is going to persist forever either, plenty of routines out there purge transient data before its stated expiration date.

“I see this as potentially being similar to the problems seen in dropping JQM. It’ll cause avoidable and silent breakage client side without even any error logging for a site developer to pick up on. In hindsight, what ideally would have happened with JQM would have been incorporating the detection code from Enable jQuery Migrate Helper into core temporarily, or simply installing that plugin automatically on behalf of users.”

Brown suggested WordPress detect calls to the cached embeds and warn users before the calls have the chance to fail so they can consider enabling a plugin to keep their embeds working more reliably.

The discussion remains open in the make.wordpress.org/core post and the corresponding trac ticket. Spurlock said WordPress will likely remove Facebook and Instagram oEmbed providers in the upcoming 5.6 release (scheduled for December 8) but it could also be shipped in a 5.x minor release that happens after October 24.