Kenn Kelly from Never Settle joins us as he shares his story of his agency, their passion for supporting a cause and so much Woo.
>> The post WooCommerce Agency Growth and the Power of Subscriptions with Kenn Kelly appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community .
by BobWP at July 20, 2023 08:50 AM under Podcast Guests from North America
[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case a history of WordPress’s important moments.
If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the form there.
So on the podcast today we have Aaron Reimann. Aaron is a PHP developer who started working with WordPress in 2008. He’s currently running ClockworkWP, a design, development and hosting shop. He’s built sites for companies of all shapes and sizes ranging from small nonprofits to Fortune 100 companies.
He’s been an organizer for WordCamp Atlanta and the Atlanta WordPress meetup, and he also speaks regularly at events throughout the WordPress community, including WordCamp Europe, 2023 which is where this podcast was recorded.
Aaron gave a presentation at the event called ‘where did we come from?’ In that session, he spoke about something which we don’t often dwell upon, WordPress’ history. In the technology space we’re always looking towards the future. What new features are being worked on? What’s in the latest version of WordPress. So this is an opportunity to gaze back over the previous 20 years and see just how far WordPress has come.
We do this by looking at some of the more important milestones in the WordPress landscape. Which features were added that allowed the CMS to become the success that it now is.
Back in the early days, WordPress’ success was anything but certain. There were a set of rival CMS platforms all vying for the attention of developers and website builders. Joomla and Drupal may be familiar names, but there were many others as well. All of these platforms, WordPress included, had their strengths and weaknesses. And at the time it seemed like any of them could become the dominant CMS.
We discuss what might have been the key things which set WordPress apart, and made it the pick for many people who needed an online presence. The fact that WordPress was easy to install, and easy on the eye, were certainly important.
Then there’s the advent of the plugin architecture within WordPress. It’s fair to say that a vanilla version of WordPress will get you many of the features you need to get a website up and running. But if you want to do more then it’s likely that you’ll be relying on plugins. The fact that you could install and update from a growing range of plugins made WordPress indispensable. Able to create websites for almost any purpose.
Then there’s themes. It’s nice to have a functioning website, but it’s nicer still to have a functioning website which looks great. Themes enabled non-designers to make an impact online and made an entire industry for those who could turn their hand to theme creation.
Another pivotal moment was when custom fields were added into core, you were no longer bound by simply adding content to your posts and, later, pages. You could now create complex websites in which all sorts of data could be manipulated and displayed. WordPress now had all the hallmarks of a fully fledged CMS.
Then there’s Gutenberg in WordPress’ more recent past. Aaron is not yet completely sold on Gutenberg, still preferring the page builder that he’s grown accustomed to. But no discussion of WordPress’ first 20 years would be complete without a mention of this important change.
Then there’s the community of people who made and continue to make the software. Without the people there would be no WordPress.
We round off the discussion, talking about the fact that there appears to be a very high chance that WordPress will still be around in another 20 years. Will it still be the popular choice for website building? Who knows, but it’ll be fun to see what the future holds.
If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading over to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast. Where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
And so without further delay, I bring you Aaron Reimann.
I am joined on the podcast by Aaron Reimann.
[00:05:30] Aaron Reimann: Correct.
[00:05:30] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Very nice to have you with us. How you doing?
[00:05:33] Aaron Reimann: Well actually, I guess that just by default I want to say, yeah I’m doing great. I am doing great, but I am jet lagged. We landed from, came from Atlanta to Athens. Landed on Monday, and I’m, I think I’m just now getting back to normal, but I’m still just a little, little tired.
[00:05:46] Nathan Wrigley: Well, you’re very brave if you are suffering from jet lag. You’ve just had the bit of WordCamp Europe, which for you at least anyway, was going to be the most challenging.
[00:05:53] Aaron Reimann: Right.
[00:05:53] Nathan Wrigley: You had a presentation, workshop?
[00:05:56] Aaron Reimann: Presentation.
[00:05:56] Nathan Wrigley: Presentation, and it was all about, well, the subject that we’re going to talk about. Tell us how that went.
[00:06:01] Aaron Reimann: I think it went well. Of course, I’m biased and I was a little blinded by the lights while I was talking on stage. But I think it went well. Some people had some good questions at the end, and then some of the people that weren’t exactly willing to ask the questions in front of everyone, I had a few people ask questions afterwards and two of them you know, said this was great. I wanted to know the history of WordPress and I’m new. I thought that was really good.
[00:06:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s perfect. Great introduction. So we’re going to talk about the history of WordPress, but just before we do that, probably to give us a bit of orientation and information about you, just tell us a little bit about your background, your relationship with WordPress.
[00:06:36] Aaron Reimann: Okay. I’ve been a web developer since 1996, which I know dates me quite a bit. I started using WordPress in 2005, I think it was version 1.5.5 or something like that. And I only used it for a blog and I just kind of dumped my brain on the blog. Ran it for about three years, and it wasn’t until 2008, until I really started digging into WordPress. But in 2008 I quit my job. I was an IT guy, maintaining servers and computers and stuff like that and quit my job.
Started an agency with a friend of mine. Didn’t know what I was doing. But I had to figure out what platform do I want to use, and we’ll probably get into that. But ever since 2008 I’ve been using WordPress, and I’ve been running an agency. I sold, my business partner sold our agency in 2019, and then started a new company. I used basically the same contracts and things like that. When I started my business in 2008, I didn’t know what I was doing. Doing the reset in 2019. I had a process and a and knew how to run an agency. So it was much easier the second go round.
[00:07:49] Nathan Wrigley: So anybody that’s been using WordPress from one point anything, you really have been there from pretty early on.
[00:07:56] Aaron Reimann: Pretty early on.
[00:07:56] Nathan Wrigley: And used it a lot with, presumably with different clients for different applications. So the purpose of this conversation is to talk around the history of WordPress. This is kind of perfect because we are right up against the 20th anniversary. Software has managed to keep going for 20 years, which is pretty amazing. Just that is pretty amazing.
[00:08:13] Aaron Reimann: I’m sure we could probably sit there and just list them. This project died. This one died. This one died. I mean it’s common.
[00:08:19] Nathan Wrigley: But for some reason WordPress kept going. I’m going to begin the podcast interview with whole history of CMSs around the time that you began. Because it wasn’t really clear that WordPress was going to take the spot that it did. I think it’s fair to say now, if you were describing this as a race, it would be fair to say that WordPress won the CMS race?
[00:08:42] Aaron Reimann: Absolutely.
[00:08:43] Nathan Wrigley: But back then, back in the early 20 somethings, there was quite a few rivals. There was a few projects that could easily have taken off. They had the same open source ethos in many cases, some of them not so. Some of them you had to pay for and so on. So I just wondered if you’ve got any stories to tell or information about projects that you’ve used with other CMSs, like Drupal or Joomla, or Expression Engine, whatever it may be.
[00:09:04] Aaron Reimann: Yeah. So in 2008, I actually started using CMS Made Simple, because I saw it as easier than WordPress and more featured than WordPress. But WordPress is one of those things where once you get the ball rolling WordPress became unstoppable because it had so many more people joining and adding to the community. Which means more plugins, more features, more everything.
And so I dropped CMS Made Simple after building about three websites I think. I wound up dropping that to use WordPress. And I also had a business partner that wasn’t technical at all, and he really liked the fact that he could, I don’t know if it was cPanel or some kind of hosting platform. Gave him a one button push to install WordPress, and so he could start working on a website and he didn’t have to do anything technical. And I think that probably has had a big effect on WordPress because it just became so easy to install.
[00:10:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I genuinely thought that at the time, at least I was using different platforms. I came to WordPress in probably about 2015. So a long time after you and I played with all these other ones. And in many cases I felt that the features that they offered were superior. But the one thing that separated them from WordPress, the one thing that I should probably say, the one thing that separated WordPress from them, was the UI.
I felt that the UI was much more straightforward to use. It was actually quite beautiful. It hasn’t changed much in those years. It was just easier on the eye. It was much more straightforward. Dare I say it, there were less options, which might be a good thing or a bad thing.
[00:10:43] Aaron Reimann: I would agree with you. I think things like anytime I had to work on Joomla, I think it was around 2008 or so, Mambo I don’t know what the argument was, but all the developers dropped and started Joomla and Joomla became the thing, and Mambo died. Or Mamba, I don’t remember how to pronounce it.
But any time I had to log into a Joomla site, it was a mess. I looked at it and I didn’t know exactly where to go. WordPress, even with version as I demonstrated today in my talk, version 7, 0.7.1, it was really simple. You log in there, there actually wasn’t even a dashboard at the beginning. You just log in and boom, you are right in the editor to create a post.
People don’t have to sit there and think, how do I use this? It’s one of those things where like my mom could write a blog post. It was that simple. Whereas Joomla or Drupal, there’s a few more layers before you get into what you’re trying to get into.
[00:11:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s interesting. A lot of the rival platforms, they decided for more complexity. So they could, in effect, they could probably out of the box achieve more complicated things. But it turns out that plugins, as well probably come onto a bit later, plugins kind of stepped in and fixed that problem for us anyway.
[00:11:55] Aaron Reimann: Absolutely.
[00:11:56] Nathan Wrigley: So WordPress is 20 years old. The next thing that we’ve written down on our shared show notes is the milestones, if you like, during those past 20 years. There are certain things which happened in that past 20 years, which are probably more significant. I mean, there’s probably literally thousands of things that we could talk about, little tiny things. Some of them are much bigger bumps in the road. Things that really changed WordPress.
[00:12:15] Aaron Reimann: There’s probably a ton of them too, that I am not even aware of. Even though I’ve been in the community for so long. I’m focused on my use case of WordPress where I build marketing sites basically. I mean we write some plugins and do that, but mostly we focus on marketing sites. And I’m sure there’s a ton of things that I’m not even aware of that has happened that it doesn’t affect me, so I didn’t pay attention to it.
[00:12:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, but there certainly have been some big bumps. We’ve listed out a few here that between us, I think we think are significant. The first one, now we may not get this in the right order, it may be very well that some of these came prior to other ones.
[00:12:52] Aaron Reimann: It’s fresh in my head, so I probably will get it right. I think.
[00:12:55] Nathan Wrigley: You lead off then.
[00:12:56] Aaron Reimann: Well, if I remember correctly, going from 0.7.1 to 1.0, the only thing that really was added. They cleaned it up a little bit. It had less references to b2. If you look at the first version, all the files started with b2.
[00:13:11] Nathan Wrigley: We should say what b2 is.
[00:13:13] Aaron Reimann: That, might be helpful. So WordPress is a fork of b2/cafelog. I think I’m saying that correctly.
[00:13:21] Nathan Wrigley: That’s correct, yeah.
[00:13:23] Aaron Reimann: Okay, and so everything was prefixed with b2, in the first version of WordPress and 1.0, there’s only three files that were prefixed with b2, and they were, I think XML-RPC files, or XML feeds or something like that.
But everything got a lot cleaner. And so with 1.0 is where it, to me it looks more like WordPress. And then with 1.2 is when we got the plugin framework. And then in 1.5 is when we got themes. And those to me, I think we could probably talk the rest of the show about those two things. Probably shouldn’t, but we could.
[00:14:01] Nathan Wrigley: I think themes and plugins, plugins in particular, I think are where, for me at least, a lot of the magic has lay. A lot of the success is down to third party developers and the plugin architecture of WordPress. WordPress’s mission to democratize publishing is laudable, and it would be lovely, but a bare bones version of WordPress, a vanilla version of WordPress will only get you so far if you want something complicated. So the ability to open up WordPress to plugin developers was pretty seismic, I think.
[00:14:30] Aaron Reimann: Yeah, I agree. With plugins also comes with bloat, which is the thing that I run into, and I mentioned it on my talk. Someone asked me a plugin question and I said the worst site I ever worked on, I logged in once and I said, I’m not going to work on this site because there were 104 active plugins, active. There were some inactive ones there. I said I’m afraid to edit anything. So plugins are a blessing. And if you don’t know enough about what that can do to your site, it becomes a curse.
[00:15:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I’ve had similar experiences where, there’s just simply too much on there. And for WordPress’s promise to make it possible for almost anybody to create a website, maintain a website, update a website, that can be difficult. Because there is no indication anywhere that if you’re adding more plugins, you’re adding more bloat. You’re adding more time for pages to load because there’s things going on in the background.
[00:15:24] Aaron Reimann: It’s creating more tables in the database, and that is one of the things that you’ll see. People will have a live website and they’ll try a bunch of plugins and they’ll try five or six plugins, and it’s leaving these little imprints mostly, maybe in the files, but mostly in the database.
It creates tables, but there’s no cleanup. That’s a problem. And then when, five years later when you’re trying to migrate the site, you see all these tables and you’re like, why are these tables, do they, are they in use? Can I delete ’em? Stuff like that. It’s just, it just comes with lack of knowledge.
[00:15:57] Nathan Wrigley: I guess, if you had to have a seesaw of whether plugins were a good thing or a bad thing. I think for me, definitely it’s heavily weighted on the side of they’re a good thing. You’re right, they can be overused and what have you may be put in functionality that really you don’t actually need just because you want to play with it.
But the ability to turn a pretty basic blogging platform as it was, into something which could do literally anything that the internet allows is pretty compelling. And that, for me, the plugin and theme, more plugin in my mind.
[00:16:30] Aaron Reimann: Yeah.
[00:16:30] Nathan Wrigley: But the plugin and theme architecture is one of the key pieces for its popularity and success.
[00:16:36] Aaron Reimann: Yeah. I think that theming though is super important. As much as I don’t like some of the theming shops that are out there. I’m not naming names or anything like that. But a lot of those themes that people would purchase, they were bloated. They would come in with five custom post types that they don’t need, but people would see my website can look this pretty. I like what that screenshot of that theme looks like and people would buy it. It’s eye candy, and I don’t know if Drupal and Joomla, they don’t have anything like that.
[00:17:09] Nathan Wrigley: Certainly not on the same scale. There are theming engines in there, but no. And it became very commercial, didn’t it as well. You were able to purchase themes for really quite extraordinarily cheap prices.
[00:17:21] Aaron Reimann: Right.
[00:17:21] Nathan Wrigley: And again, sometimes I think a blessing and a curse because I tried all of these things, guilty as charged. Tried downloading themes, and then realized that I had to take out more than I, I’d see something and think, oh, that’s exactly what I want. I would download the theme, use the theme, and then figure out. It was more work to remove the bits that I didn’t need, but it still worked. And for me, it drew me into the WordPress ecosystem.
Then I learned that’s not for me. I’d like something more bare bones. So that’s the way I went, but it got me into it, which was the important part. So, yeah, themes as well then. Okay, what else? After themes and plugins, what else have we got?
[00:17:56] Aaron Reimann: Themes and plugins. And then I think it was in 2.9, the functionality was in 2.9, but it wasn’t documented and it came out in 3.0, were the custom post types. And the custom post types were a game changer for me because before, let’s take press releases. A client wants to have their press releases separate from their blog. The only way you could do that before was to create a category in your blog and make it not show up with the blog, but show up over here. And you feel like you’re just trying to hack something together, to make it fit.
And then when custom post types came out, it was amazing to me because it allowed us where, yeah, we can do that. You know, a client say I need to have this type of content show. Like, we can do that. It wasn’t trying to rig something that was impossible anymore.
And we use custom post types almost every site that we build. It’s just a, it’s a no-brainer. They say we need a way to do X and we’re like, okay, custom post type. We use that more than anything else probably.
[00:19:02] Nathan Wrigley: It’s interesting because we were talking earlier about things like Joomla and Drupal. I can’t speak to Joomla because I didn’t really use it, but Drupal even inversions significantly before the era that we’re now talking about, that kind of functionality was built into the core of the platform.
And because I was a user of Drupal when I came to WordPress, and it wasn’t immediately obvious in any part of the UI how to create a custom post type, and I know that you can do that. I had to figure out how to do it. In many cases, I think people will install some plugin, which takes care of that, but you can obviously do that in different ways.
[00:19:33] Aaron Reimann: Like, three different ways to do it.
[00:19:35] Nathan Wrigley: I do remember scratching my head thinking, where’s the button? Where’s the button for the, whatever it’s called. And it turns out it was custom post type. But then figuring out, okay, you can do this and you can create metadata around those and you can separate your website up. Like you said, this is the portfolio aspect of the website. And these are the, these are the other bits of the website.
Yeah, that’s really important. And it essentially, it turned it from a blogging platform into more of a, well, a fully featured CMS. In fact, I’d say you can’t really talk about it being a CMS until custom post types.
[00:20:03] Aaron Reimann: I say that made it a platform. It’s a platform. Where In 2006 and 2007, I was learning Ruby on Rails. And I realized every time I was creating something in Ruby on Rails, I needed to create, I had to figure out a way for people to log in. So that’s a module basically, that you’d have to install, and all these little pieces. And then I looked at WordPress and I’m like, oh, WordPress has all these things. And so to me, WordPress became in 3.0, just became a platform where if you’re smart enough, if you know how to develop plugins, you can make it do anything you want it to do. Which is awesome.
[00:20:40] Nathan Wrigley: Anybody who’s been using WordPress for a small amount, well not even a small amount of time, a fairly long amount of time. But certainly when you began using it, this feature didn’t exist. And it strikes me as so bizarre that you couldn’t create pages at at the beginning.
[00:20:54] Aaron Reimann: Oh, right, right.
[00:20:56] Nathan Wrigley: I mean, it was a blog roll, it was a blogging platform, so everything was a post.
But tell us about that, because that also is a fairly significant thing. You could create pieces of static content, which are not in some sort of hierarchy with other pieces of content, and that, again, crucial, important step.
[00:21:09] Aaron Reimann: Yeah, and to be honest, I’m kind of going in the back of my head. I probably, maybe 15% of the websites that we build use the blog. That’s probably a high number for us. Most of our clients don’t want a blog. They don’t see the value. And sometimes I think, you probably should have a blog, and try to push them. It’s a way to create content. If it’s a marketing site and their goal is for someone to push the button, fill out this form, and that’s the call to action. You don’t need a blog, but what would you do without pages?
So, that really, that kind of predates me. I always had pages with 1.5. I used it, All I had for my blog was I had one page that was a contact page. I mean, that’s it. But I needed that. I couldn’t have a blog post about my contact information because it’ll get lost in the shuffle.
[00:22:01] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of interesting that, well, I’ve read a post recently, I can’t remember where, if I can summon up where it was, I will add it into the show notes. But I read a piece recently, which describes what you’ve just been talking about, this 15% or less. The person writing the post essentially said, can we make it so that the blog, the posts are an option? So it’s toggleable. So you download WordPress and you enable or disable all of the blogging functionality. So the posts menu disappears, and actually would clean up a lot of the interface.
And in the sites that you are describing, building where it’s page, page, page, page, custom post type, whatever. That might be quite a neat feature, but it’s curious that it is totally the opposite of how the thing began. It began that way, and yet it has morphed. My use is the same as your use. It’s all about the pages. And quite often clients will say, I will create a blog, and you know, it never gets beyond the first post.
[00:22:55] Aaron Reimann: They’ll write one or two and then it just, it disappears. I try to always try to tell them, if you’re going to start this, you can’t stop. It just makes you look bad when you, your most recent blog post was five years ago. At least go in and change the date, do something. It is interesting that we don’t have much of a use case for blogs and I don’t think I host a single web, I also do hosting. I host probably about 300 websites and I don’t think any of them are just a blog. All of them are WordPress installs that’s page focussed, that maybe, maybe has a blog. So it is interesting how it completely shifted and that’s probably true for the majority.
[00:23:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think so. That seems to fit. I’m not suggesting that we get rid of that functionality. It’s crucial, but it’s kind of interesting. Just that blog post, it was interesting to me that you could switch that off. And they also showed what the UI might look like when all of the different things that are attached to WordPress’ post functionality. If you remove those from the UI, it does become a little bit easier for a novice who’s got no intention of using a blog to manage.
[00:24:00] Aaron Reimann: I remember when I was first trying to theme, I was trying to figure out what are the differences between pages and posts. I just couldn’t figure it out for a little, I kept getting confused. Should this be a post or should this be a page? Then I just realized, okay, so posts are chronological, it’s date based, and pages are not. And I’m like, okay, that makes sense. Have you’ve looked at the hierarchy graphic?
[00:24:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:24:24] Aaron Reimann: If you’re listening to this and you don’t, you’re not familiar with that and you make themes, you’re missing a big golden nugget of information because the hierarchy page, it’s awesome. It’s really cool and it’s gotten more complex as things progressed.
[00:24:38] Nathan Wrigley: So we have pages, we’ve done custom post types. We’ve done the beginning of the platform, with its rivals there. One other thing which we haven’t touched on, which I think we should is Gutenberg. That’s been a very, very big push for WordPress over the last three or four years?
[00:24:53] Aaron Reimann: Five.
[00:24:53] Nathan Wrigley: Five.
[00:24:54] Aaron Reimann: It’s been five years. It was released, sound like a know-it-all. It’s just, I only know this stuff because I just did a, did a talk about it. 2018, 5.0, is when it came out. It seems like it would’ve been just a couple years ago.
[00:25:07] Nathan Wrigley: Right, it really does.
[00:25:08] Aaron Reimann: We’re coming up on, I think five years of Gutenberg.
[00:25:11] Nathan Wrigley: It was a radical change. It really did upend the way that you create content. For some people it’s highly desirable. It allows them to do all sorts of things that they were not able to do. And it puts the, if you like, page building type functionality in front of people without the need to download any kind of plugin.
But from the shared show notes that we’ve got, it’s one of the things in the last 20 years roadmap, which you are not entirely sold on.
[00:25:38] Aaron Reimann: Not yet. So I’ve got a project, we’re going to be starting in the fall where I’m going to be using Gutenberg. The reason why we’re going to be using Gutenberg for pages and posts is I’m going to need this website to last me 10 or 15 years with content. Most websites that we build, it’s a marketing site. It’s going to get rebuilt, redesigned or whatever in three or four years, where if the page builder goes kaputs, you know, and disappears, no big deal, we’ll just, when we rebuild the site, we’ll just pick a better page builder.
In this case, this is going to be, this is for a state project and it’s going to be, the content needs to last 10 years or so. And to me, at that point, that’s where, okay, I’ve gotta use Gutenberg because I know Gutenberg, because that was the chosen way to do it. I’m going to stick with that, and that’s going to be good for my client for this specific case.
In the day-to-day stuff, simple marketing websites, it would be hard for me to go to a client and say, here’s Gutenberg and you can edit the pages using this. It’s a lot more overwhelming than, I’m a big Beaver Builder fan. And every client that we hand over the site, we give them these little videos. Here’s how you edit this. We record it and give it to ’em. So they’re able to see how to do it. They’ve got a video on how to do it, and it’s, to me, just Beaver Builder is, it’s so easy.
And so that’s why I’ve, still haven’t jumped, you know, on that bandwagon yet. I know I’m going to have to you know, at some point. So, it’s a hard shift for me.
[00:27:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I can well understand when it’s shipped in version five, the UI looks broadly the same as it does today, but the things that you could do with it then.
[00:27:22] Aaron Reimann: A lot more.
[00:27:24] Nathan Wrigley: Well, you can really do a lot more now, but it also felt that it was extremely limiting at the time it was released. I wonder if we could rewind history and replay that moment in time, I do wonder if perhaps more features should have been added so that the experience was much more obvious.
In other words, maybe it should have been an opt-in thing for a period of time, rather than, here’s Word Press 5.0, it’s now the default, and I wonder what your thoughts are on that. That it should be some kind of toggleable on, off thing?
[00:27:53] Aaron Reimann: I have no problem with, I like diversity when it comes, just options with things. I love the fact that the Elementor people that are here. Obviously that’s a plugin that’s very, very popular, but no one’s forced to use it. You know, you can use whichever one you want and, knock on wood, right, and hope that that will continue. Where WordPress doesn’t get so Gutenberg focussed where Beaver Builder and Elementor and Divi and all those, can’t work on WordPress. At that point then there’ll probably be some forking of some projects, which would be kind of interesting.
But I think it probably came out a little too early, in the aspect of it was the chosen choice, but I don’t think people had much of a choice. I mean it seems like it was decided, and you kind of had to start using it. And then you have the Classic Editor plugin becomes extremely popular. All of a sudden there’s what, 6 million? I don’t know, it seemed like it was five or 6 million active installs for that, because that was a big, we’re not interested in Gutenberg. We tried it. We didn’t like it.
It’s different now. If it were released today, you know, where it has a lot more features, we wouldn’t have had so much of a, should I use the word backlash? I mean it, I don’t know if it was a backlash. I know in my WordPress community in Atlanta, Georgia, nobody embraced it. It was too abrupt.
[00:29:20] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s fair to say that in the time that I’ve been a user of WordPress, the stories that got generated, the amount of time that was given over to talking about it. It’s like nothing else. It was really, kind of bifurcated the community. There were those that loved it, and there were those that didn’t like it. And I think you’re right, it’s definitely matured and it’s got to the point now where I think a lot of people have just, they’ve gotten on with it and they’re using it.
But interestingly, like you, you’re still able to use the tools that you liked and trusted prior to that as well anyway.
[00:29:49] Aaron Reimann: Right. And I tell people, when you’re editing a page, you’re going to be using Beaver Builder, and when you are blogging, you’ll be using this new thing called Gutenberg. And they’re okay with that, because they’re not trying to, it’s a post, right? So I mean, it’s going to have text and pictures and not much else.
We’re not trying to build functionality like a slider or anything crazy in there. I don’t even know, is that even in, I hope that’s not in Gutenberg. I think using it just for a blog, you’re not going to push the limits of Gutenberg. Like I’ve said, I’m going to have to start doing it, because I know it is the future.
[00:30:27] Nathan Wrigley: So far we’ve talked entirely really about WordPress as a piece of software, but yet here we are at WordCamp in Europe, Athens in particular. You’ve just presented in front of a bunch of people, so you probably have a much greater idea of the magnitude of this event. If you just walk downstairs, I know this is going to be hard to get across in the audio, but it really is a giant event. It’s truly enormous.
So I wanted to get into the community side of things, and whether or not, when you think the word WordPress, do you generally think of just software, the piece of software that you download from the internet? Or do you also have the community of WordPress in your head when you are thinking about that over the last 20 years?
[00:31:03] Aaron Reimann: I started using WordPress in 2008 and I went to my first WordCamp, I don’t know if it was 2012 or 13. I think it was 12, in Nashville. And that is where I just fell in love with the community, because nowhere else in the world have I been able to just ask people, the people are just so willing to help.
So if you’re a newbie or you need someone, you’re trying to figure out how do you fix this plugin, or add this functionality and you’re at a WordCamp. People are, they’ll jump in and just start, oh, maybe you should do this. I mean people are extremely helpful. That’s where I started falling in love with WordPress as far as the community.
And since then I’ve spoken at 20 plus WordCamps. Mostly in the southeast, US. It’s something that I don’t think is replicated anywhere else. For a little while I was in the Rails, Ruby on Rails world. They don’t have a community like that. The PHP community in Atlanta at least is it’s good, but it’s still not, and in Atlanta pre covid, we had 14 active meetups in the Atlanta area. It was extremely popular, and our WordCamp that we used to have every year, we would have 650 people there. And the only reason why it was 650, limited at 650 is because the venue that we used, that’s all we could do.
The community, at least in Atlanta, it’s been incredible. I’ve made friends there. Now we’re planning WordCamp Atlanta, and, you know, every Friday we’re on a call. Talking to these people that have become my friends over the past 10 years, which is really cool.
[00:32:45] Nathan Wrigley: I can’t disassociate the piece of software from the community now. In my head when I say WordPress, those two things are inextricably linked. And I think the fact that WordPress is able to be used by a whole different swathe of people. So you’ve obviously got the really technical people who enjoy the code, there’s all of that.
And then there’s the people who are into their SEO and marketing, and who knows what. There’s a million different pathways. And the fact that they can all combine in an event like this. The talks are not limited to one subject. There really is a broad spectrum of things on offer.
I think it is pretty special. I don’t know, I don’t quite know what the secret sauce was there that made that happen. But it did happen, and it is pretty unique. I think you hit the nail on the head. I’ve yet to encounter another community that’s loosely based around software that is quite as welcoming. It’s amazing.
[00:33:32] Aaron Reimann: Where these people become your friends, that’s weird. And this being at WordCamp Europe, I haven’t seen people since 2019, and I’m running into people and it’s great. I’m remembering people’s names, you know, which sometimes I don’t do great at, but it’s awesome. And it sounds kind of cheesy, but you have friends and brothers and sisters, you know, it’s a really cool thing.
[00:33:56] Nathan Wrigley: If you’re listening to this podcast episode and you never have attended any kind of WordPress event, I would say give one a try. It is definitely worth it. And if the first one doesn’t hit your expectations, give a few more a try, and see what happens. Because I can absolutely identify with what you’ve said. It’s embedded in my life. Lots of long-term friendships. And with people that I definitely, definitely would never have met. And who now I consider to be my good friends.
So over the last 20 years, WordPress, if you look at the graph, so on the one hand we’ve got the years running, and then on the other we’ve got the usage data. The line just keeps going up. 2011 is higher than 2010. 2013 is higher than 2012. We keep talking about this figure of roughly 40 something, 43, 42, it hovers around there, percent of the web. So it’s seemingly experienced more or less unstoppable growth.
What do we think about the next 20 years? Do you think there’s a plateau at which one platform like WordPress can reach, and then we just have to meter our expectations and say, well, that’s as far as one can expect it to go? Or are we after, I don’t know, 86%, double?
[00:35:02] Aaron Reimann: Has it not plateaued? I feel like it has plateaued, and I can’t tell you why. I don’t know why it’s plateaued. I can just give you general ideas. There’s still some people that will never use WordPress. They’ll say, oh, I see it in the news. It’s hacked all the time. And it’s like, it’s not hacked. It’s WordPress core is secure. It’s hosting issues, not updating things, or a plugin that’s not updated.
But there’s always going to be, you’re going to get the stigma from certain groups of people, that are never going to want to use that. And then there’s people that are going to want to use different, they don’t want to use PHP. If they’re going to build, they’re not going to until WordPress is no longer PHP based, you know. I think it’s not going to be able to surpass that, because of the fact that there are other technologies out there that aren’t compatible with that stack.
[00:35:55] Nathan Wrigley: I guess it’s impossible for something to keep growing exponentially, because at some point there’s just a natural limit. There’s other people who will be interested in other things. It’s amazing that it got, even if it did stay where it is or possibly decline, it’s pretty remarkable that it got where it did in 20 years. So I think we can all be content with where it is right now anyway.
[00:36:14] Aaron Reimann: Yeah, well I ended my talk telling people that chances are, even if WordPress were to stop today, I don’t know what would, cause, you know, where everyone’s like, we don’t want to build on WordPress anymore. I probably will still retire fixing WordPress sites because there are so many millions of sites that are out there that are going to linger for years on end.
I’ll be able to make a little money off of maintaining WordPress sites 20 years from now. Which is pretty cool. And I think about like Cold Fusion. I know Cold Fusion, I think they got an update a couple years ago or maybe a year ago or something like that.
There’s still Cole Fusion sites, which Cold Fusion to me died in 2007 or, or something like that. But it’s still lingering. And I think if WordPress stopped today, we’d have a very similar thing. Where I could still make a living off of WordPress. Which is a cool feeling, I guess.
[00:37:05] Nathan Wrigley: The rise of WordPress, if you drill down into the statistics, you just look over the last, let’s say eight years. It’s risen remarkably quickly. It’s got faster and faster towards this 43 or whatever it may be, percent. It feels like if you drill down into the data that page builders were a big part of that. And I do wonder, we were talking a moment ago about Gutenberg, and I wonder if in the future, I wonder what that dynamic will do? If the page builders all get consumed or Gutenberg eats their launch.
I don’t know what’s going to happen there, but I thought that was a curious thing to tease out of this. That the growth that we’ve had recently, probably in large part can be attributed to page builders, and the ability to create pages, and all of that relatively easily inside the UI. I don’t really have any thoughts on how that will carry on?
[00:37:53] Aaron Reimann: I would definitely agree with you. I kind of went down the path of, I first used Visual Composer, probably like 2015 or so. I was like, that’s a cool idea. It seemed buggy to me, but once I tried Beaver Builder, I was sold. And I think once people realize, for example, a couple weeks ago I built a website for my brother. And he just needed something pretty simple, but I showed him using a page builder. I said, I built the header and footer, and I said, here’s how you put content in. And he built the other pages. He did, change it, upload the images and stuff like that. He knows nothing about computers.
So the page builders have definitely made it where you don’t need a developer. I mean, obviously for something more complex, if you need some kind of functionality to talk to some third party API, yeah you’re going to need a developer. But I mean, if all you’re trying to do is display content, the page builders have just made it so easy. Beyond easy.
[00:38:52] Nathan Wrigley: I do wonder in the future, it seems like every podcast that I record at the minute ends up at this question, what AI will do to WordPress. And I know that we didn’t discuss this in our show notes, but it’s interesting, Page builders made it fairly straightforward for non-technical people to, what you see is what you get. And it truly did that. It literally almost pixel for pixel. It was exactly what you were looking at before you click publish.
And I wonder what’s going to happen to WordPress with AI, and whether or not the job in the future will be entirely different for people like you. Whether it will be more talking to an interface and telling it, no move left. Make that red. Get me a picture of a cat over there.
[00:39:33] Aaron Reimann: I don’t know man. I watched Terminator 2, when I was 15 and I’m not interested. And I think people are going to be using it to write their term papers and, you know, all that. It’s interesting, I think, I don’t know, have me back in five years. We’ll figure out was this a good thing or a bad thing? I’m not using, ChatGPT much. I’ve tinkered with it, but I can’t, I haven’t put it into my, day-to-day yet.
I’m talking to a developer friend of mine. He is, at his company, they’re making them learn how to use it because it’s going to, not replace them, but it’s going to make them more powerful and make them quicker and be able to build things faster. And I think that’s where we get to look forward to. You know, until the robots take over. We’ll see.
[00:40:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. We’ll have you back in five years and we’ll see. We’ve really gone around the whole subject, but I was wondering over the last 20 years, if you had any wishlist things that you wish had gone into WordPress. If you could rewind and say, wouldn’t it have been good to put that in, to slot that in, in year five or seven. Honestly you can make anything you like up here. Really interesting just to get your insight.
[00:40:41] Aaron Reimann: Yeah. I don’t, because of the fact that I’ve always been a, I shouldn’t say always because I don’t write code anymore, but I, you know, I had 15 years of writing code and I now have people that write code for me at my company. And anything that WordPress couldn’t do, we just built it. So I needed WordPress to be stable and be a core where it gives us a login. Something that gives us pages and posts, just the real basics and everything else we can build, which is pretty awesome. I love it.
[00:41:13] Nathan Wrigley: That’s a perfect place to end it, I think. Aaron, If there’s a URL you want to drop or a Twitter handle or someplace that people can get in touch with you to talk about this, what would we do?
[00:41:22] Aaron Reimann: My company is clockworkwp.com, and then my Twitter handle is @reimann, so A R E I M A N N.
[00:41:32] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much for talking to us on the podcast today. I really appreciate it.
[00:41:35] Aaron Reimann: All right. Thank you.
On the podcast today we have Aaron Reimann.
Aaron is a PHP developer who started working with WordPress in 2008. He is currently running ClockworkWP, a design, development and hosting shop. He’s built sites for companies of all shapes and sizes, ranging from small nonprofits to Fortune 100 companies. He’s been an organiser for WordCamp Atlanta and the Atlanta WordPress Meetup. He also speaks regularly at events throughout the WordPress community, including WordCamp Europe 2023 where this podcast was recorded.
Aaron gave a presentation at the event called ‘Where did we come from?’ In that session he spoke about something which we don’t often dwell upon, WordPress’ history. In the technology space we’re always looking towards the future. What new features are being worked on? What’s in the latest version of WordPress? So this is an opportunity to gaze back over the previous twenty years and see just how far WordPress has come.
We do this by looking at some of the more important milestones in the WordPress landscape. Which features were added that allowed the CMS to become the success that it now is.
Back in the early days WordPress’ success was anything but certain. There were a set of rival CMS platforms all vying for the attention of developers and website builders. Joomla and Drupal may be familiar names, but there were many others as well. All of these platforms, WordPress included, had their strengths and weaknesses, and at that time it seemed like any of them could become the dominant CMS.
We discuss what might have been the key things which set WordPress apart, and made it the pick for many people who needed an online presence. The fact that WordPress was easy to install, and easy on the eye were certainly important.
Then there’s the advent of the plugin architecture within WordPress. It’s fair to say that a vanilla version of WordPress will get you many of the features you need to get a website up and running, but if you want to do more, then it’s likely that you’ll be relying on plugins. The fact that you could install and update from a growing range of plugins made WordPress indispensable; able to create websites for almost any purpose.
Then there’s themes. It’s nice to have a functioning website, but it’s nicer still to have a functioning website which looks great. Themes enabled non-designers to make an impact online, and made an entire industry for those who could turn their hand to theme creation.
Another pivotal moment was when custom fields were added into Core. You were no longer bound by simply adding content to your posts and, later, pages. You could now create complex websites in which all sorts of data could be manipulated and displayed. WordPress now had all the hallmarks of a fully fledged CMS.
Then there’s Gutenberg in WordPress’ more recent past. Aaron is not yet completely sold on Gutenberg, still preferring the page builder that he’s grown accustomed to, but no discussion of WordPress’ first twenty years would be complete without a mention of this important change.
Then there’s the community of people who made, and continue to make, the software. Without the people, there would be no WordPress.
We round off the discussion talking about the fact that there appears to be a very high chance that WordPress will still be around in another twenty years. Will it still be the popular choice for website building? Who knows, but it’ll be fun to see what the future holds.
Aaron’s talk at WordCamp Europe 2023
by Nathan Wrigley at July 19, 2023 02:00 PM under wordpress history
Dan Walmsley shares when contemplating how to shape a feature, there's at least three major considerations
>> The post Three Major Considerations on Shaping an AI Feature appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community .
by BobWP at July 19, 2023 08:41 AM under Artificial Intelliegence
I woke up this morning to a lot of people sending me the link to today’s Axios story reporting that Vox Media (which includes The Verge, New York Magazine, Polygon, and many other outlets) is moving from its proprietary CMS, Chorus, to WordPress VIP, Automattic’s open source solution for large publishers.
This is very exciting—not just for the obvious reasons, but because I’ve been a fan and reader of Vox since they started. As a tool-maker, one of the greatest honors is when fantastic people choose your tools to practice their craft. I’m also sure their feedback will make WordPress better! Vox Media folks, if there were any Chorus features you loved, drop them in the comments and we’ll make sure they can become a plugin or get baked into WP core. And if anyone has built amazing features in other CMSes you’d like to see in WordPress, we’re hiring!
As I said in my recent conversation with Dries Buytaert and Mike Little celebrating WordPress’ 20th anniversary, and with a hat tip to Fight Club, I believe that on a long enough timeline, the survival rate of proprietary software drops to zero. I don’t fault anyone for starting a CMS—I’ve been guilty of that myself a half-dozen times, not counting WordPress—but while something custom-built may seem better for your needs in the beginning, that never lasts. Unless you invest heavily in engineering (like tens of millions per year), the steady improvement of a healthy open source community, like the tens of thousands of developers working on WordPress every day, will eventually catch and surpass any proprietary system.
Not all open source projects achieve the famed positive flywheel; it takes decades, and most will fail in the process. The ones that reach exit velocity, though, become part of the fabric of civilization. At that point, it makes more sense to build on top of them rather than recreate the wheel. You’ll still get where you’re going, it’ll just be a smoother, faster ride.
(Midjourney prompt: A chorus of people using WordPress.)
In 2009, I announced the release of my first breadcrumbs plugin. It was a one-file PHP script that I’d been using in my themes for around a year, and I wanted to contribute it to the larger WordPress community in the form of a plugin. Over the past 14 years, this original script has changed multiple times.
Today, I am happy to announce a new version of it. This time as a block plugin: X3P0: Breadcrumbs.
I submitted it to the official WordPress plugin directory last week, and it should eventually make it there. There’s currently around a two-month waiting period for plugin reviews, and I wanted to get this into the community’s hands a bit sooner than that. You can snag a copy from the Releases page on the plugin’s GitHub repository.
The goal for this block was to offer a simple interface that anyone could use instead of having to interact with a complex PHP script.
Aside from the standard design tools (e.g., colors, dimensions, border, etc.), the block offers a handful of custom options in version 1.0. The first is the ability to customize how the home “crumb” works:
The icon picker lets you choose from a range of home icons and emoji. You can also show/hide the “Home” label.
Next to it in the toolbar is a separator picker, which lets you choose the icon or symbol that sits between each breadcrumb:
The block boasts a couple of extra options for conditionally hiding the breadcrumbs on the site homepage and whether the last breadcrumb item should be visible.
I’d love for you to give the plugin a spin and let me know what you think. There are many ways that I believe the plugin could be even better, but I’d rather get your feedback first.
One early version of this block did dynamically populate the breadcrumbs in the Post Editor. But this block is primarily meant to be used in templates in the Site Editor. Like other template-specific blocks, there’s no way to populate the data (which is dynamic) until the block is rendered on the front end. So placeholders make sense.
I opted to keep the output the same between the Post Editor and Site Editor so that the experience would be consistent regardless of where the block was inserted. Plus, this keeps the code lighter, which is always a win in my book.
Absolutely. The block is just a wrapper around a PHP class, and you can call it directly from your classic theme’s PHP templates:
<?php if ( class_exists( 'X3P0\Breadcrumbs\Trail' ) ) {
\X3P0\Breadcrumbs\Trail::display();
} ?>Code language: PHP (php)Alternatively, you can parse and output the block:
<?php echo do_blocks( '<!-- wp:x3p0/breadcrumbs /-->' ); ?>Code language: PHP (php)The PHP under the hood of the plugin is highly configurable. There’s around two dozen options and a few filter hooks that allow developers to change how nearly every aspect of the breadcrumb trail is output.
But just dumping each of those options into the interface would likely make a terrible user experience.
For version 1.0, at least, I took the less is more approach to block settings. This will give me time to both listen to feedback on what’s actually needed and to evaluate how those options would be best integrated into the UI in the future.
Yes…Probably.
Breadcrumb trail structures can range from fairly simple to extremely complex. The plugin tries to handle each scenario it comes across as gracefully as possible by default.
Again, as I introduce more of the plugin settings from the PHP side into the block itself, this will open it up for more editor-based customization.
There is a three-year-old ticket requesting a breadcrumbs block in core WordPress, and there is also some early work in a pull request. I feel like we’ll eventually have a core block, but there is no guarantee on when that will happen.
A core block could take a while since it would need to consider extensibility before becoming a feature-complete implementation. There are several breadcrumb solutions, and each have their own take on what the resulting output should be.
If/When it happens, I’ll reevaluate what this means for this plugin. It may be better to migrate it as a variation on the core block or for it to continue being a standalone implementation. As they say, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.
I’m also happy for core to borrow any (or all) code needed from my plugin—the great thing about the GPL is that we can do cool things like share code.
WordPress 6.3 RC1 is ready for download and testing.
This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, you should evaluate RC1 on a test server and site.
Reaching this part of the release cycle is a key milestone. While release candidates are considered ready for final release, additional testing and use by the community can only make it better.
Get an overview of the 6.3 release cycle, check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.3-related posts, and review the new features in WordPress 6.3. Save the date for a live product demo scheduled for Thursday, July 20, 2023, at 16:00 UTC (Zoom link). This live demo will be a great opportunity to join the WordPress community to celebrate the accomplishments of 6.3 and this final chapter of Phase 2.
Thanks to the many WordPress beta testers, this release contains 40+ (Editor) and 80+ (Trac) updates since the Beta 4 release. Keep it up WordPressers!
Notable updates for this release include:
_get_block_template_file function and set $area variable (#52708)bulk_edit_posts() function needs an action hook (#28112)Browse the technical details for issues addressed since Beta 4 using these queries:
For a recap of what’s coming in 6.3, please refer to the Beta 2 post, which summarizes key features.
You can also dig into technical information about various components in 6.3:
For a compilation of the dev notes above and more, read the comprehensive WordPress 6.3 Field Guide.
Testing for issues is a critical part of developing any software, and it’s a meaningful way for anyone to contribute—whether you have experience or not. While testing the upgrade process is essential, trying out new features is too.
The monetary reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities is doubled between the Beta 1 release and the final release candidate (RC). Please follow responsible disclosure practices as detailed in the project’s security practices and policies outlined on the HackerOne page and in the security white paper.
You can test WordPress 6.3 RC1 in three ways:
wp core update --version=6.3-RC1The current target for the final release is August 8, 2023, about three weeks away. Your help testing this version ensures everything in this release is the best.
Do you build plugins and themes? Your products play an integral role in extending the functionality and value of WordPress for users of all types worldwide.
Chances are, you have already been testing your latest themes and plugins with WordPress 6.3 betas. With RC1, you will want to complete your testing and update the “Tested up to” version in your plugin’s readme file to 6.3.
If you find compatibility problems, please post detailed information to the support forums.
Do you speak a language other than English? ¿Español? Français? Português? Русский? 日本? Help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages. This release also marks the hard string freeze point of the 6.3 release cycle.
RC1 is here
Hold your applause ‘til the end
Download, test, repeat
Thank you to the contributors who collaborated on this post: @DanSoschin, @Meher, and @JPantani.
In this show, Tammy Lister return and joins Jonathan as they talk about their own builder experience and where their monthly show is headed.
>> The post Welcome Tammie Lister Back to the Do the Woo Host Team appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community .
by BobWP at July 18, 2023 08:59 AM under Podcast Guests from Europe
WordCamp US 2023 is happening next month in National Harbor, Maryland. The Contributor Day will kick off the event on Thursday, August 24, preceding the conference days. It is open to any attendee, including those who have never contributed before and seasoned contributors alike. There are many technical and non-technical ways to contribute to WordPress.
Those who are not able to attend WordCamp US are also welcome to join the event virtually via the the #contributor-day Slack channel. New contributors attending in person will begin at 8:30 AM EST and returning contributors will join at 9:30. A guide will be present in the Slack channel at 10 AM EST to help virtual contributors.
Recommendations for preparing for Contributor Day are on the event page, along with a list and description of all the Make WordPress teams that contributors can elect to join.
The sign up form is now open for everyone who plans to attend the event in person. It includes the opportunity to give feedback on anticipated accessibility needs and meal preferences for the lunch provided during the event. Contributors will also be asked to select their preferred contributor team(s) during sign up so organizers can be prepared with team leads available.
Gutenberg 16.2 was released with a number of important changes to pattern management. Most notably, Reusable blocks have been renamed to Patterns, and the Library section of the Site Editor has been renamed to Patterns.
This release also introduces a sync status on the pattern details screen to give more information to site owners when managing patterns. The custom patterns label has been changed to “My Patterns” in the Patterns sidebar. A new lock icon designates theme patterns as unable to be edited or modified. All of these changes were cherry-picked from this version of Gutenberg and are included in the upcoming WordPress 6.3 major release, as of Beta 3.
Gutenberg 16.2 introduces a vertical text orientation, which can be applied using a block’s typography settings. At this time the feature is only available when the theme author opts in for the theme to support it, but it may be expanded in the feature.
“This new feature is a first step towards full support of vertically written languages as well as for decorative purposes in website design,” Automattic-sponsored Gutenberg contributor Bernie Reiter said in the release post.
Footnotes, which were introduced in Gutenberg 16.1, received several usability improvements in this release. The first iteration was bare bones with the footnotes created automatically and then inserted at the bottom of the content. This update makes a Footnotes block available in the block inserter, so users can place it again in case it gets deleted.
Other notable improvements in Gutenberg 16.2 include the following:
It also appears the Gutenberg team is preparing for the eventual deprecation of TinyMCE.
“We’ve added a new Gutenberg Experiment to explore a potential path towards the deprecation of TinyMCE,” Reiter said. “When enabled, it prevents loading TinyMCE assets and Classic blocks by default, only enabling them if usage is detected. The update also handles scenarios where posts contain Classic blocks or users input raw HTML, offering conversion options or reloading to use the Classic block.”
Check out the Gutenberg 16.2 release post for more details on the enhancements and bug fixes included in this release.
Join WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy and Core Tech Lead Mike Schroder as they discuss their favorite new features and enhancements coming in WordPress 6.3.
Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording.
Host: Josepha Haden Chomphosy
Guests: Mike Schroder
Editor: Dustin Hartzler
Logo: Javier Arce
Production: Nicholas Garofalo
Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod
( Intro music )
[00:00:00] Josepha: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks.
I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go.
( Intro music continues )
[00:00:39] Josepha: We have with us Mike Schroder. They are on the WordPress 6.3 release squad, and I believe, Mike, that your role there is the Core Tech Lead.
Is that right?
[00:00:50] Mike: Yeah, that’s correct. I’m one of the tech leads along with Andrew Ozz and David Baumwald.
[00:00:56] Josepha: Thank you so much for being able to join me today.
[00:00:58] Mike: Thanks for inviting me.
[00:01:00] Josepha: This is our 6.3 sneak peek, and so it has a little bit of a “What do you wish people knew about the upcoming release?” aspect to it, but it also has like a “What do we find most interesting about the work that we’ve been doing in this release so far?”
As the Core Tech Lead, what currently is like your favorite thing that y’all are getting into the release or the thing that’s the most interesting or happiest to finally be done with it?
[00:01:27] Mike: Yeah, I think there are a couple of things. So I was playing around with the release in anticipation for this, and one of the favorite sort of user-facing features that I played with was the live preview for Block themes. And it just makes it feel so intuitive to open up a new Block theme and play around with Styles and different designs and see how it looks.
I really enjoyed it, opened it up on my personal site and started messing around with different color palettes and things like that, and it was a lot of fun.
[00:01:55] Josepha: Like it’s a live preview, but also with all of the content they already have on your site.
[00:01:59] Mike: It does use the templates and so it, it shows some of the live content from the from the homepage, for instance, and some of those blocks, and some of the other areas are editing the templates rather than the live content. But yes, it was neat to play around with it and see my blog content in the background and yeah, some real-time design. That was really fun.
[00:02:20] Josepha: And has that been a big focus of the release? Was it something that you and the other Tech Leads both for the Core side and the Editor side just had to focus a lot on in this round of the release?
[00:02:33] Mike: So I was not a part of a lot of that work. So I’m not gonna take credit for it. I think that is the culmination, all of those different things together of a lot of the things that the Editor team has been working on for some time. And it was just, it was really refreshing to see it.
The other feature that I had in my head, if it’s okay for me to talk about a second one, is something that has been trying to get landed in Core for quite some time, and that has to do with automatic rollbacks. If plugin updates or theme updates start to happen and then they fail in the middle of that update, then it will automatically restore the previous version of the plugin or theme. And that’s a pretty big improvement over the previous behavior, which could result not as well.
[00:03:16] Josepha: Right. Where you would just have a site that was like, “Best of luck to you,” and emails that told you what kind of probably was broken. I shouldn’t be sassy about that. The WSOD protection that we put in really was a huge leap forward for the way that we handled that in the past, but this is great news.
[00:03:34] Mike: Yes, I was so excited when that landed, and this is I guess the next part of that. And it’s been, yeah, it’s been in the works for a long time, through testing and there was an entire team that did a lot of work on it in a future plugin. And I’m very excited to see it land.
[00:03:49] Josepha: That’s great. That’s one of those things that we hope a WordPress user never has to know exists. Like it’s always our hope that the plugins work perfectly and the themes work perfectly. And so unless something is going really wrong you won’t know that’s a feature. Surely it tells you like, “This didn’t update by the way. Go figure that out.”
[00:04:08] Mike: Yeah, the whole idea of this particular feature is to make it feel more like everything is smooth and one site continues to work, and the underpinning of it has been going in for a couple of releases. The whole idea is to make the experience more smooth for users.
[00:04:21] Josepha: Cool. That auto rollback actually was not on my radar as a thing to keep an eye out for in this release, so that’s really neat. One of the things that I saw as I was doing, I don’t do any complicated testing. I mostly do like testing of what users would expect with the workflow with my eyeballs and a mouse.
[00:04:40] Mike: Well, that’s, that’s wonderful.
[00:04:42] Josepha: I’m not doing any of the fancy testing with like code, but one of the things that I saw as I was working through my general, just regular test, my spot check click around test was that it looks like there’s some consolidation, some consolidation of the navigation in the Editor.
So, it had I think maybe Pages and Templates in there before, and now there are five things in there. Do you have a bit of a concept of what went into that, what we’re hoping everybody’s gonna be able to accomplish there now?
[00:05:13] Mike: So I, I was not involved as much in the later stages of this, but I was in a couple of the first couple iterations of this particular feature, and I think this is, I don’t want to guess the exact amount of times that this has been sort of reworked so the experience is good for users, there been so much effort that’s gone into helping navigation be a comfortable experience for people to work with within the site editor.
And what I have heard is that everyone that’s worked on it is very excited that it’s landing and that users will be able to experience it and more easily work with navigation.
[00:05:46] Josepha: Yeah, I think that navigation is one of those things, both like creating good navigation as a software designer, but then also as somebody who’s like putting together a website. Good navigation is hard to do. And it’s design where everyone’s, “Good design is invisible,” and we don’t actually mean that.
We don’t mean it’s invisible. We mean it’s not intrusive, it doesn’t get in your way, it acts in the way you think it’s going to act, and it knows or has a good guess about where you’re trying to be, what you’re trying to do in that particular moment on a site. And so like the fact that we’ve had probably hundreds of people working on navigation inside the software is no surprise to me, but I bet it’s gonna be a surprise to a lot of people.
They’ll be like, “It’s like folders, right?” Turns out it’s not.
[00:06:33] Mike: Yes, it was, incredibly, incredibly difficult to design. I know there was, the couple instances that I was most involved with, I know there was so much discussion about how folks are used to working with navigation within WordPress and sort of what expectations are for menus and what expectations are for, you know, users both that have been using WordPress for a long time and users who, who are new to WordPress, and the Site Editor. And having all of those considerations from the various stakeholders just makes it a really difficult design problem.
[00:07:03] Josepha: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, not for nothing like the WP Admin itself, that dashboard inside the WordPress software, like that’s been due for an update for quite some time. This is the same one that I think we’ve had since 2008, which was also very disruptive in its way. And so like it was a good disruption, but we really haven’t made any substantial changes to it since then. And part of it is because there are so many use cases for WordPress, and we don’t have a good concept of that because we don’t have a lot of tracking in the software. We don’t take anyone’s like data about what field they work in. We don’t do any of that.
And so it’s hard for us to account for all of the use cases and get a really excellent design for a majority of the people that are gonna be using it. Because like we don’t actually build software for robots around here. Not yet.
[00:07:54] Mike: ( laughs ) Yeah.
[00:07:55] Josepha: No, I don’t think we’ll ever be robot-building software.
[00:07:57] Mike: I doubt it, but I also don’t wanna predict the future. No, I agree. And I think that is absolutely one of the super tricky things about building WordPress. I’m really glad that WordPress doesn’t collect any of that data. And it makes it so that the sort of testing that, that you were talking about, in user studies and things like that, are incredibly helpful for figuring out what the best approaches are.
[00:08:21] Josepha: Yeah, absolutely. Since we’re just in the zone of like things that Josepha likes and that she saw, I’m gonna also do this other thing. In one of the last couple of releases, the Style Book came out, which was such an exciting thing for me. It’s great to be able to see whether or not all of the style choices you’ve made in various parts of the admin or in the code, depending on how you’re doing things.
It’s nice to make sure, in one big set, that like everything is coherent. Everything that you thought you changed did get changed and it looks the way that you wanted it to look in concert with everything else in there. And it looked like we now have revisions specific to styles, like styling things across the site, have revisions.
Is that right?
[00:09:06] Mike: That’s correct.
[00:09:07] Josepha: I think that’s a super big deal because as somebody who is just, I’m filled with techno joy. I don’t always want to look at a manual. I just want to do stuff until it breaks and then hope I can fix it. The hoping you can fix it part ( laughs ) can sometimes be really nerve-wracking if what you’re doing is creating a site for a client or you are working on your first big theme and you wanna make sure that’s all together.
And so style revisions to go along with some of the Editor revisions I think is a great change.
[00:09:39] Mike: Same. Absolutely. This is not a feature I have, done too much particular playing with, at this point.
[00:09:44] Josepha: You’re a very skilled developer.
[00:09:46] Mike: I appreciate that. That’s very kind. I think that adding revisions to anything that folks regularly change in posts or pages is, really important. And making it very easy to get to both make forward changes and also to realize, “Oh, there was this other change that was, you know, there was three clicks ago that I really loved. How do I get back to that? How do I see the history?” And that’s what I love about that sort of feature. Being able to really easily see, “Okay, when did this happen? In what series? How can I jump back and get to that spot that felt right.”
[00:10:19] Josepha: Yes. Anytime that we can have that kind of historical layering of things, I think is good. I went to a meetup. I like to go to meetups that are 101 content, because that’s like the folks that really need new refined processes the most. But I went to a 101 meetup a couple years back, and I remember that the presenter was saying like, take a theme that you pretty much like and make some changes until you have a theme that you love.
And people kept saying like, “Yeah, but what if I break everything?” And he said in the middle of that to everyone, not knowing who I was because who cares? He was like, “Yeah, WordPress is not gonna let you do anything that will completely destroy a theme or completely destroy your site. There’s an undo button and you can just undo it. It’ll be fine.” And I was like, “Yeah, that is true now.”
[00:11:15] Mike: I love that.
Gosh. I mean, I remember when I was playing with my first WordPress site, and even to make really small changes with navigation or with menus, I had to go in and make changes to the PHP code, and none of that was protected.
[00:11:31] Josepha: You’re like, “This is free-range me out here.”
[00:11:34] Mike: I love, absolutely. I love that is just no longer the case anymore and it’s super easy to go in and play with a theme and make changes without worrying about any of that. And, I mean, I may be a developer, but that’s the way I would prefer. That’s the way I go in and edit my sites now too.
If I wanna mess with a theme, go in, and it was the Customizer and now it’s the Site Editor, and it’s great.
[00:11:58] Josepha: Yeah, it’s a leap forward, I think, leap forward.
So another thing that I ran into, I guess it’s two things that I ran into while I was wandering around in there recently, and it’s possible that I ran into these two things because I just personally love them the most, but the Footnotes block looks like it is potentially going to land.
I have been so excited about this block for no reason. I have dreams about it. I wish that were not a true statement. I did recently have a dream about it. I dreamt that it didn’t land in the release, and that I went to talk to Ella about it and she was like, “Oh, yeah, publishers have given up on footnotes and they’re just doing end notes now, and so I decided not to ship it.” Like this is a dream I had.
And so I’m a little worried, but tomorrow I’m gonna be like, “Hey, Ella, friend, what’s happening?” And she’s gonna be like, “Yeah, end notes are where it’s at.”
And then the other block that I’m personally very excited about is what I like to call the “Spoilers block.” I know it is not “Spoilers”, it’s the called “Details,” but anytime I’ve ever used that after like early, early times in my career, early in my career, I used to call them accordions and I don’t know why, but now I call them “Spoiler blocks.” But I know it’s actually called the “Details block,” where you can put in a piece of information at the top, essentially a title, and then expand it to get more information in there.
So are both of those actually gonna land or am I gonna be heartbroken?
[00:13:24] Mike: As far as I’m aware, yes. I know that I haven’t checked recently on the latter, but I was just playing with the Footnotes block, and it’s really cool. I really like the interface. I think that it makes it really simple to add quick footnotes to, anywhere in the site, and everything feels very automated and simple.
[00:13:46] Josepha: As someone who every, almost everything that I’ve ever written, I want to have an aside in it, which essentially just becomes a footnote. One of the weirdest parts about Gutenberg at first is that like, the asterisk way of doing it, where you just put one after the word and then put one at the start. The asterisk makes it into a list block, and for a long time you also couldn’t escape it, and so I had to do a lot of fancy footwork to get my footnotes to work for a while, and so I’m excited for that.
[00:14:15] Mike: I think I had similar discouraging moments with lists and I was really encouraged by the way the footnotes select, and I’m sure there are other ways to do it too, but select, right-click, footnote, and they all automatically go to the bottom order, all of it. It’s a really smooth process.
[00:14:31] Josepha: Yeah. I’m really excited about it. I know that like for the last two or three major releases, a bulk of what we’ve been offering to folks is like, design stuff, and we’re just like, “It’s a bunch of design things,” but this release actually has over 500 different tickets that were marked as features or enhancements that are going into it.
And so, you and I have talked about seven things so far, but I also understand that there are literally 500 tickets or so that were marked as “feature” or “enhancement.” And so we are definitely not gonna catch everything that goes in there, but there is kind of a group of another group of enhancements to the design tools because of course this wraps up the bulk of phase two so that we can all move into the collaborative editing phase.
And so like, do you have a sense for, like is this just mostly polish for those design and like image media management kinds of things? Or are there big features that are coming in those also?
[00:15:29] Mike: My understanding is that it’s all of the above. I think that there are a lot of new features being added along with polish to those features. And I think the neatest thing is that there are also a lot of enhancements that are focused on bringing all of those things together and making it feel like more of a connected experience. And so I think that’s my favorite part so far in testing that I’ve been doing of, the many, as you mentioned, so many additional new features that, that we’re added this time. And, I have a huge amount of respect for, you know, everyone that works, for the huge amount of folks that work on it across the project.
[00:16:07] Josepha: Yeah. Yeah, you’ve given a couple of answers where you were like, “I wasn’t personally involved in that,” but on the one hand, I was like, “Everyone knows that we’re not all personally involved in it,” but on the other hand, not everybody knows how many people touch all of these tickets and features and bugs and tests as we get them ready to be put into the release.
Last year, I was super worried that like, post active fear of Covid, and now everyone just like deciding that they’ve done their best and they’re going back out there. Like I was really worried that everyone was gonna be having so much fun out of the house, that they would stop contributing.
[00:16:43] Mike: ( laughs )
[00:16:44] Josepha: I know, but we actually had one of our most active years for contributors last year, which means that especially for the releases that are coming this year, the people who worked all the way through last year, like almost 2000, I think, contributors, just to code, that’s not even like the contributors who worked on reigniting the community and putting together events, all of those things like all of the other things that we do.
It’s, it is remarkable to me that when we look at any feature it is definitely been looked at or worked on, or at least passed through desks of easily a hundred people, even for small little things. And I just love that, the depth of the work we do.
[00:17:29] Mike: Absolutely. Same. I remember wondering about that too, about your same sort of concerns. And it’s been really great to be a part of the community as it’s essentially, as it’s grown together again, I think is maybe the best way I can think of to say it. That’s been quite wonderful.
[00:17:46] Josepha: Yeah, absolutely. Mike, this has been an absolutely delightful conversation. Is there anything you would like to leave us with before we move on to our small list of big things today?
[00:17:58] Mike: The release candidate for 6.3 comes out tomorrow, and what I would love the most is if anyone in interested in testing, anyone, whether it’s testing exactly like this sort of testing that you were just talking about, with loading the RC and clicking around and seeing what works the best and what doesn’t work and what feels good and what doesn’t, or if it’s testing, if you’re like a plugin or a theme developer, testing with those things to see how things work and looking for backwards compatibility breaks that are unexpected so we can fix them before release.
If you work at a hosting company or you make sites for folks, helping test that to see that it works really well on your platforms for folks that you work with. I think all of those would be super helpful, and there are testing instructions that can be found on the release candidate announcement page.
[00:18:43] Josepha: Perfect. Wonderful. Mike, thank you so much for joining me today.
[00:18:47] Mike: Thank you so much. I’ve really appreciated the time.
( Musical interlude )
[00:18:49] Josepha: That brings us now to our small list of big things. It’s actually kind of a big list of big things today. So first on the list is that WordCamp US has a Contributor Day and we need your help. So the WordCamp US Contributor Team has contacted all of the team reps asking for help with a new approach to organizing this year’s Contributor Day.
The hope is to make the initial steps to contribution easier. And so they’re asking teams who will be present to help participate with that process. I will have a link in the show notes to the post that has more information.
Also second thing related also to WordCamp US is that I would like to put out a call for art and music, especially that is related to open source and the freedoms that it brings. So one of the things that makes WordPress so fantastic in the world is not only that like we’re creating opportunities for folks, we’re offering economic, and I don’t know, philosophical freedoms to people, but we frequently do think about that in the vein of, you know, commerce and work and the economy, and we rarely think about it in the obviously related subset of arts and music. And so I also would like to put out a call for any open source related arts or poetry or music that you all have created.
I would love to be able to display some of that at WordCamp US this year. I don’t think I have a link quite yet for a call for that, but as soon as I do, I’ll send it out on social media and other places.
The third thing on our small list of big things is that, as Mike mentioned, tomorrow is the RC1 release date for WordPress 6. 3, and you can help us to test that.
It’s always good for us to test any release as it’s working its way through the process, but certainly by the time it gets to RC, that’s when we are pretty sure it’s going to be as stable as possible. We’ve done some soft string freezes and feature freezes-ish. And so that’s about as stable as it’s going to get. And so I encourage everyone to get out and test that as much as possible. And in all the ways that Mike shared.
Item number four, we are also reaching a milestone. So, a couple weeks ago, we reached the one year milestone for the start of the Meetup Reactivation Project.
We have about 50% of our Meetup groups reactivated. If you are listening to this and you are a Meetup organizer and you haven’t heard from anyone from WordCamp Central or the community team, I’m going to put a link to the notes, or rather, a link to the post in the notes so that you can also learn more about that.
You don’t have to hear from us in order to get your meetup group going again. But, if you are interested to know what has gone into that process, or always just want to know what’s going on in the community side of things, that’s a good place to start. So there will be a link to that in the show notes as well.
Number five, WordPress event organizers in general, but also anyone. So there are two different events coming up on Thursday, on July 20th.
First, there is the WP Diversity Workshop. This is added workshop for us to help promote the ideas of building diverse and inclusive WordPress events. And so, this is not necessarily one of those events for people who want to increase their skills in speaking so that they are able to, to speak confidently at a WordPress event. These are for people who are organizing WordPress events and want to make them more inclusive and more diverse from the start. I encourage any organizer to go to it, regardless of whether you’re doing WordPress events or not, but certainly for WordPress events that is something that we care about and want to have included in our entire event series.
The other thing that’s happening on Thursday, because like I said, two things happening on Thursday, is that we have a WordPress 6. 3 live product demo. We’ve been doing these for the last few releases, and you get a couple of people from either the release squad, or like folks who do that kind of developer relations work in WordPress, who sit down and just do a general click-through, a general run through, a public demo of what we expect to land in the release.
And so that also is on Thursday. I will also have a link for you in the show notes. If you are listening to this not on WordPress.org and you don’t know where the show notes are, don’t worry. The show notes are on WordPress.org. You go to WordPress.org/news/podcast and in the transcript there are show notes that have links to all of these things.
And that, my friends, is your big, small list of big things. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. Thank you again for my guest, Mike’s, time. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks.
( Outtro music )
by Nicholas Garofalo at July 17, 2023 01:00 PM under wp-briefing
If you are attending this year's WordCamp US, let our listeners know what you are most looking forward to.
>> The post WCUS 2023, What Are You Looking Forward To? appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community .
Sarah Norris, JavaScript developer and 6.4 editor tech co-lead joined Birgit Pauli-Haack on the Gutenberg Changelog for the first time. They discussed WordPress 6.3, Gutenberg 16.2 and Phase 3 Collaboration
Add a summary/excerpt here
Show Notes
JavaScript Developer 6.4 editor tech co-lead
Stay in Touch
Transcript
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hello and welcome to our 86th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. And today’s episode will talk about Beta 4 6.3, Gutenberg 16.2, and the first posts about what to expect for phase three on Gutenberg. And I’m your host Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and WordPress developer advocate, also full-time co-contributor to the WordPress Opensource Project. And I’m here with my friend and colleague, Sarah Norris, JavaScript developer on the themes team, core contributor and co-tech lead for the release in 6.4. So that’s in November, but we are starting now. Sarah and I danced a good two hours at the Pride Party in Athens, and we had great fun. I haven’t danced that long for decades, so thank you so much for joining me on the show today, Sarah. So, how are you?
Sarah Norris: I’m good, thank you. Thank you so much for having me. That pride party was super fun. It’s a beautiful setting on a rooftop bar in Athens. Yeah, beautiful weather and I got so many steps in, I tripled my step goal.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I did too, but not as much as I did the first day I was in Athens when I went up the Acropolis twice.
Sarah Norris: Twice, yes. That’s a big hill to climb twice.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So, if you do it twice, you get a lot of steps in. I think that was the day I had 17,000 or so.
So, you’re working on the Gutenberg Project. And so, when you think about 6.3, what excites you the most about what’s coming up next month?
Sarah Norris: Yeah. There’s so many exciting updates, especially around enhancing the UX of the site editor in particular, which is super exciting. So, one of my favorites is the command palette, because it allows people to search for different parts of the site, like navigation, pages, style variations, templates, and it’s similar to Spotlight on a Mac or using Alfred. So, it’s a really quick way to access different areas of the site without you having to search through different menus. That’s a really cool update.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that’s a cool feature. Yeah, I like it too because now I don’t have to figure out which of the different editors I have to use to do stuff, so I cannot just ask that command palette. Yeah, open my page, or open a post, or edit a template, or something like that. Yeah, it’s really cool.
Sarah Norris: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Another thing I’m excited about is the updates to the site editor sidebar. So, currently in 6.2 we’ve only got a list of templates and template parts, but 6.3, it’s going to look a lot different. Oh, well, it’s going to look similar, but there’s going to be a lot more items. So we’re introducing… there’s navigation styles, pages, patterns as well. So, I guess similar to the command palette, it gives you a lot more options to access those other features quickly. So, if you are already in the site editor context, you’ve got more options to get to other areas a lot quickly.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, I like that too. Especially the part where I can edit my page content together with my page templates, so I can just switch that and say, “Oh, that’s a template, I want to do for…” Yeah and, “Oh, and now I need to fix something on one of the pages,” and I can do it all from the site editor. I wish I could also do posts from there, but I guess maybe that’s coming, maybe not. Yeah.
Sarah Norris: Yeah, maybe it’s coming.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Anything else?
Sarah Norris: Yes, so I guess specifically on the pattern section, this is now where template parts are going to live. So, sometimes I guess if people are already using the editor and the following along with updates, this can be a little bit maybe confusing or it’s just like, “Oh, I’ve just got used to template parts. Now they’re patterns.” But I think it’s a really good change for new users because it’s less terms to use templates to template, and then there’s patterns. And especially with this refocus on patterns, it’s a single word we can now use. So, maybe we had a few other words before. And so yeah, any reduction in terms is a win.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Yeah, that’s in line with also renaming reusable blocks to pattern. They’re sync patterns now. And then template parts are patterns. They are reused, but they’re reused in the templates. So, I think what will round it all up later on is when we have partial sync patterns. So, when you use a pattern on a page and you want to change the styling or the color that it kind of changes overall the patterns of all the time that you use that pattern, but with different content. So yeah, that is still a piece that’s missing, but I think the foundation needed to be there with kind of figuring out it’s all the same, just a little bit different. Reusable blocks and patterns and template parts, they’re all the same soup. It’s just different flavors. Yeah.
Sarah Norris: Yes. Exactly. Yes.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And I think you’re right. For a new person coming to WordPress, it’s much easier to figure out.
Sarah Norris: Yeah. And anything we can do to speed up that understanding as well, it really helps gives you a boost to understanding how to use the site editor. I think it also… that this refocus on patterns helps building block themes much easier as well. And it highlights how we can create a variety of different layouts across themes. So, patterns they can be just part of one theme, but other patterns can be part of any number of themes as well. And it really highlights how themes are a collective of different aspects rather than just a single topic asset as they might have been in the past. And yeah, I love that. I’m really looking forward to different people trying that out.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And having certain parts of your site being your site, not depending on the theme, I think that’s the next level that wasn’t before possible in WordPress. Yeah. So, it’s an interesting… that templates can be different from the theme, and that kind of blows my mind right there.
Sarah Norris: Yes. It’s a whole new layer.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Whole new layer and whole new complexity. But yeah, I like it because for a user, it doesn’t really matter if it’s a theme-related pattern or their own pattern. But they will be surprised when all of a sudden it goes away.
Sarah Norris: Yes, exactly.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: The theme, yeah.
Sarah Norris: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, now that’s different. Yeah, it won’t go away. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Anything else that excites you?
Sarah Norris: Yes, there is something actually that I really wanted to mention. So, for Beta 4 that’s just been released, there’s some major performance boosts. So, they’re all going to come out with 6.3. So, there’s some major performance boosts, both classic and block themes. And for both client side and service side, it means a significant boost for the largest content for Paint or the LCP metric, which is basically when the page’s main content has likely been loaded. So with 6.3, there’s going to be a reduced LCP of 26% for block themes and 19% classic themes. Yeah, so that’s massive.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, that’s pretty big.
Sarah Norris: Exactly. Yeah. But it matters so much as well, because it’s so many websites this will roll out to. Yeah, I really wanted to highlight it because it’s something to really shout about and celebrate.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So, when you upgrade to 6.3, all of a sudden your sites are faster, almost 20%, even if you’re on a classic theme. So yeah, that’s definitely a boost. And you don’t have to do anything. It’s all for free.
Sarah Norris: Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It’s automatic, automatically performance boost.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Depending, of course, what plugins you use and what the theme does, but yeah.
Sarah Norris: Yeah, yeah, base level, base level performance.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Base level. Base level, yeah. There are always edge cases and we need to be aware of those and that they might happen. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, that’s a lot of things to come. I really like that the footnotes block made it into 6.3. It was a little late on that, but it definitely comes, and there is a certain corner in our community that actually has been waiting for that for many, many years. So, now it’s here.
Sarah Norris: Yes. Yeah. That will be major for certain aspects of certain different types of articles that people use WordPress for. Yeah, footnotes, I can imagine people have been waiting for that for such a long time. So yes, it’s great.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Some of them are still kind of hand-coding all the pieces together.
Sarah Norris: Right.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So, in a similar way, and I wanted to highlight a community contribution from Justin Tadlock. He has had a plugin in the repo for a long, long time that deals with breadcrumbs, and he migrated that into that it’s block-based now. So, you can have a breadcrumb block for your pages and archives, and it automatically will pick up the hierarchy of the nested pages, and you can change text color background, link color, and including the hover state, and also adjust the padding on the margins. And it has been submitted to the plugin repo. But yeah, there appears to be a two-month waiting time for new plugins to get approved. So, we will share it in the show notes the link to the GitHub repo, where you can just download the ZIP file from there. But I tested it, and I really like it. It helps me organize some of my test sites quite a bit.
And Justin Tadlock has been in the community for many, many years, so his code is solid. Yeah. So, I share that with you. I wish there was something similar in core, but this is the next best thing. So, let us know what you think about it.
Beta 4 of WordPress 6.3
So, that brings us to our section, What’s Released, and as you mentioned, Sarah… Sarah, mentioned it before, the WordPress 6.3 Beta 4 was released this week, and it’s really coming down to the wire. So, if you haven’t tested your plugins, themes, and other customizations of your website, you should start testing now, because you have less than a month to fix things if they break. The final release is August 8th, and today we are recording on July 14th. Oh, by the way, happy Bastille Day in France. Yeah, so get on the testing part, and I have been saying this for now for weeks, but the more you test, the more we can find the bugs now and we can release a better product. Yeah. So, have you been testing WordPress 6.3 Beta 4?
Sarah Norris: Yes, I have. Yes. Yeah, I’ve got the Beta plugin installed, and yeah, I make sure I’m up-to-date default testing.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I have websites, one website that is actually using nightly, and when it’s release time, the Beta and release candidates in production. So, I know immediately when something doesn’t work as I do with the Gutenberg nightly that I use in production on certain sites.
Sarah Norris: Living on the edge.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Welcome to the life on the edge. But I actually hear that Matt Mullenweg is using the WordPress nightly on his blog as well, so in production.
Sarah Norris: Yes.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So yeah, there’s a lot of trust coming out of the team, and it’s well warranted. The team that is releasing 6.3 has been stellar, like all the other ones. And there was a little hiccup for Beta 1, but Beta 4 was smooth. It was done in 58 minutes. That, I think, is a record. Well, it’s definitely very, very fast. Sometimes it takes about 90 minutes, so it comes really down to the wire. So, if you find something, say something.
Sarah Norris: Yeah, definitely. Well, I think what’s really impressive, when you’re doing the Beta parties and with the testing, usually the bugs are found… And I’m touching wood as well, because I don’t want to tempt fate to any large… but the bugs that are found, they’re either hard to replicate or hard to find. So, they’re small bugs, and I think that’s a kudos to the team that are involved in that the bugs aren’t that visible. There’s rare cases, but generally speaking… So, I think if you’re helping to test as well, even if you find a bug that you think maybe it doesn’t matter too much, just mention it because that’s what the team is looking for. They’re usually the bugs that are… Like I’m looking at the change hub for Gutenberg, and the bug fixes. They’re all the little edge cases to make sure it’s really polished. Yeah, I’m always impressed with that. There’s no really major visible bugs. It’s always the little ones.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s always the little one. And then, it’s also what kind of gets it done. Well, it’s like everything else in life. It’s the little things that make you happy and that make you aggravated.
Sarah Norris: Exactly.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And that brings us to Gutenberg 16.2 release that happened this week. There were a hundred, again, 184 PRs committed by 47 contributors. That’s a lot of change coming in in two weeks period, given that 16.1 had 255 PRs to go through. So Sarah, you’re in luck; you only got two-thirds of what we did last year.
Sarah Norris: Yeah, that’s true. I should be grateful.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Do you want to start, get us in there?
Sarah Norris: Yes. Yeah, so the first one we’re looking at, so this is rename reusable blocks to patterns. Yes. So, this is renaming reusable blocks to sync patterns. So, this is to align with the new editor terminology that I guess we’ve just touched on. So yeah, so a sync pattern is any change made to one pattern that gets deployed to all instances of that pattern across your site. And then the opposite would be an unsync pattern. And so, they’re included in the inserter with all your other patterns, but changes to these patterns will not be reflected throughout the site. And then, that means you can customize each instance of that pattern. Yeah, again, it’s a wording, a terminology update, but I think it really aids the UX of the site editor in general.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, but what it also brings, and I’m very delighted to say, is that you now can actually create patterns on your site. Up until now, you were reliant on themes or on the community patterns from the pattern directory to get patterns, or you had to write them in PHP and then upload it to your site. But now you have the same interface or the same workflow with which you created reusable blocks or now sync patterns you can now also use to create unsync patterns. So, you have much more… the user has much more freedom to create some reusable blocks and some reusable sections of the site that can then be further customized or not. Yeah so, I think there were a lot of people waiting for that part because not everybody touches code or has somebody around that can touch code. So, doing it in the interface is really… that’s actually the big win from the name change.
Sarah Norris: Yeah, yeah, exactly. That’s exactly it. And yeah, anything that helps the low-code or no-code ability around the site editor is fantastic. It really opens up WordPress to so many new users, and I’m really looking forward to seeing hopefully just personally more designers using WordPress as well, because there’s so many beautiful designs out there already. So yeah, I’m really looking forward to beautiful design patterns increasing as well.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, me too. And I saw in the theme directory just as a side, quite a few new themes, block themes, that were done by contributors that haven’t done a theme before or that haven’t even contributed before. And that is such a great development with that. I really love that to see, even if it’s simple or to get the feet wet and get through the whole process of getting into the theme directory. I think that’s another hurdle by itself, but once they made it, it’s much easier to get the second, third, and fourth theme into the directory. But that was just a side note. So the next feature from 16.2, I’m doing it again, 16.2 is the rename of command center to command palette. It’s not a new feature, but it’s kind of the name change is really following what…
There was a big discussion on GitHub, and I think that is where the most consensus came around, that command palette is something that is translatable, is relatable, even for non-native English speakers. And we talked about it, how excited we are about it, both the renaming of the reusable block to patterns and the rename of the command palette. It all will be in 6.3. So, when people ask me what features from Gutenberg will be in 6.3, I would say 15.2 release to 16.1, but I think that’s a lie. I think it’s 16.2 beta sections from 16.2 Gutenberg release that all actually made it into 6.3, especially the whole thing around the site editor library, and the sync, and all that. Yeah.
Sarah Norris: Right. Yeah, I think it’s a good name change as well. I think it’s a term that should be localized fairly easily. It’s important. Okay. So, this is the library adding sync status to the pattern details screen, and so this is really cool that can be expanded on in the future to include more details as well. So, this shows the sync status of a pattern on the pattern details screen. So, it’s either going to say not sync or fully synced currently at the moment. But this can be expanded to include further details about the pattern, things like the author who made the pattern, maybe where the pattern’s being used across the site, so things like template names or pages or posts. So yeah, I’m really excited about the potential here, but also the feature that’s being added in 6.3, it’s super helpful, just the information being there so easily. It’s great. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, so there was for a while, the last item on the menu in the site editor on the left-hand side was called Library, and had template parts and had patterns. And that has also been changed to patterns, because everything that’s in there is actually, per se, a pattern and Library was too big. There were thoughts that maybe they put the fonts in there or some styles or something like that, but that didn’t pan out. It kind of is all… It’s the second shoulder for the patterns, and everything else will be in a different heading there. So it’s the reusable blocks, the sync patterns, the template parts as well as the unsync patterns. Yes.
Sarah Norris: Yes. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And there will be a section in that menu item called My Patterns. So, these are the customized patterns that you did that were created with the UI and on site. They’re not coming from scenes, they’re not coming from plugins, they’re not coming from code. They come from your interaction with the interface, and you build them all yourself. So, it’s all yours. It says My Patterns, but it’s yours. It’s kind of funny.
Sarah Norris: Yeah. Again, that’s another really good UX terminology update that I think helps, but I guess primarily new users, because unfortunately if you’ve been used to the terms, you get reuse to the terms, but that’s all good. It’s part of working in an open project with lots of different iterations all the time. And new users, they get the benefit.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. I don’t know. With a 20-year-old project, how long does it take until you are not a new user anymore, or how many new users does it take to take over the majority, but then longer than… Well anyway, so any user will have an advantage about it. For some of us, we need to relearn things, but we have an active mind, and we can relearn things because these are small changes. It’s just a little vocabulary kind of thing.
Sarah Norris: Yes, exactly.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Speaking of which, we are not done with the name changes, are we?
Sarah Norris: No, no. There’s another one, but another really good one as well. So yes, there’s been a change, changing the Home template name to Blog Home. So, this one is for templates and touches on something that’s been around a little bit longer than patterns, I suppose. So, the name Home suggests that the template will display the site homepage. So, this is true when the reading settings of the site are configured to display the latest posts on the front page, but if there’s a static front page, then the home template will display the post page, not the homepage. So, this is where the confusion lies and has for a long time as well. But for block themes, it’s more easily surfaced, especially to people who aren’t deep in the code.
So, the renaming of the home template in the site to Blog Home is a lot more descriptive what it’s actually being used for, whilst the template file name is still home.html. So, that still is a parallel of home.php. And so, it’s still exactly the same in the template hierarchy. It’s just the visual name that’s been changed. But again, I think it’s particularly useful for low-code or no-code users. It’s much easier to understand, and it just reemphasizes that it’s going to be used for the blog and not always the homepage. We’re not completely fixing anything here, but it’s certainly the start of hopefully addressing this issue that’s been resurfaced to no-code is basically… So yeah, I’m really excited to see if this does help and see what journey it takes us down into addressing the homepage confusion. It existed for a while.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And the way you explained it, I actually understood.
Sarah Norris: Cool.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And I finally got the trigger that, “Oh, okay, now I got it.” But now the question for you, if I use the setting that I want a static page, then it just displays the page, right, from the page template that I designate as the front page, as the homepage.
Sarah Norris: Yes. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you just have to be aware that that’s changing a template. And again, we could probably add some additional helper functionality in the site editor to help people understand that, because currently you have to jump out into the WP Admin, into the settings section, yeah, into the settings. So yes, I think we could maybe surface that in different areas, but then when I start to think about it, it also gets more confusing. But I’m sure we’ll figure out a way to make it make sense, because there’s additional confusion as well with the existence of the frontpage.html template, and that takes precedence over any other template to be the front page.
And so, obviously you can use that to your advantage if you want to be a really opinionated theme and say, “This is always going to be the front page. This is definitely the prettiest version of the patterns I can put together.” But then, because it’s so opinionated, always is the front page, it can be confusing to users who are trying to not make it the front page. So, there’s just additional legwork or additional click to get around it not being that template.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. And then there is a front-page.html.
Sarah Norris: Yes. Yes. That’s the one I’m talking about. But yes, there’s also index. So, there’s home.html, which is the one that’s been visually renamed. There’s front-page.html, which is the one you just mentioned, and then there’s also index.html, which to anyone who’s worked with the web before, it’s hopefully the most easy to understand because it’s the index. But again, to non-coders, it’s just a third thing that could also be your front page, and that’s always the default. If nothing else exists, it’s index. But yeah, I understand how it can be really confusing. I mean, if you’ve ever looked at the WordPress template hierarchy page in the documentation, I think it’s fantastic because a really good visual map, but then the first time I saw it, I was like, “Oh, wow, there’s a lot of mapping going on here. There’s a lot of different options to choose from.”
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, indeed. Indeed.
Sarah Norris: It’s a good challenge to have, I think, in the site editor. Yeah, I think we can fix it in many different ways. And yeah, we’ll get there.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, and you just reminded me, we have on the developer blog, one of the early posts was about the template hierarchy.
Sarah Norris: Oh yes, I remember. Yes.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes.
Sarah Norris: Yeah, it was a really good post.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: … demystifying home and post templates in WordPress theme development. And I’m kind of putting that link into the show notes fully knowing that it was before the name change.
Sarah Norris: Yes. I think that’s okay.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: We need to review the post, so we can make sure that that’s the same with a new name change there. Cool. Yeah, that was an excellent article by Daisy Olsen, and had some great examples and screenshots there. Yeah. Excellent. So, what else?
Sarah Norris: I think the next thing was introducing more welcome guides. So again, I think this is a really good UX update. So, this is adding welcome guides to the page content focus and template focus, so the little well-designed models that pop up when you jump into different areas of the site editor. I think it’s easy for you users to be confused on… what you mentioned before… new users to be confused on whether they’re editing a page, editing a template, how the template influences the page, and vice versa, and which context they’re used in. So yes, so this is a great way to introduce people to the differences.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s also a good way for those of us who are new to this new site editor experience, and that’s also a new user, but for the first four years we were kind of trained to just click away the welcome guides because it hasn’t had anything new and it didn’t remember our choices. So it will come back, but it’s coming back with new content. So, read it a little bit because it helps you get over that hurdle, “Where am I and what am I doing,” quite easily and has some nice animations in there. I really like them, and they are hidden under the acronym NUX, and yeah, that’s new user experience. I always thought there was something like NPM and NPX and NUX. It’s all the same JavaScript library kind of thing. No, it isn’t. It’s new user experience.
So, I read over it quite fast until I saw the words “welcome guide,” and I said, “Oh, there’s new content there.” And I checked it out and I really like it. And I learned a bit. If you want to get started quickly and not have to read through all the changelog and all the posts that are coming out, use the welcome guides. But we hopped over off something on themes, like add border and theme support, border theme support and link color theme support. That is a new thing that, actually, it was fixed in WordPress core, but needed to be synced up with the Gutenberg plugin. And you said you worked on it. What exactly had happened?
Sarah Norris: Yeah, I’m not sure what you’d call it, if it’s not a back foot. It’s like a forward foot.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s a sync. It’s a sync.
Sarah Norris: A sync.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: A kitchen sink. It’s a sink.
Sarah Norris: Yes, sink. Yes. So, this is previously the border and link theme support. They were named experimental. So, this update basically takes out the experimental. Yeah, that’s essentially it. But yeah, it’s a really good update because I think the word experimental can be scary to anyone who’s included APIs in new plugins or themes. So yeah, just the fact that it’s not there anymore is brilliant.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, and that’s the support you said in theme.json for link color and that quite a bit. So, you have a UI for link color and border theme, border radios, border size, and border of the sides. So, you could have a left side and a bottom side border, but you don’t have a border on the left side or a right side and a top side or something like that. Yeah, so it’s really cool. The next thing is really cool and it’s not coming to 6.3. You need 16.2 to get it, and that’s that the typography, you can get some text orientation in a paragraph to go vertical.
Of course, you’re not going to do this for whole full paragraphs with multiple lines. You probably do this for a header or for a subheader or something like that. It’s not going to be in the heading block, but it’s in the paragraph block. But you need to enable it in the theme.json at all. And then it’s only available for paragraph blocks, so it’s still the early iteration, but I find it really cool. So, because it’s not in the heading, you could just change the font size of it to be a little bit bigger. You make it vertical, and then you can place it next to a paragraph in a group block row, and then you have some interesting layouts that you can play with. I find it really fascinating.
Sarah Norris: Yeah, it is a really cool change. I remember a site I made years ago, probably 20 years ago, where I was playing around with text being vertical instead of horizontal, and it makes for some really interesting design capabilities. Yeah, it’s a really cool update. It’s also enabled on post navigation links as well, as well as the paragraph block, so the next and previous post, because we can maybe…
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, cool.
Sarah Norris: Yeah, lots of design flexibility with those, because I guess they’re usually on the sides. So yeah, that aids going vertical as well as horizontal.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, nice. Yes. Oh, I didn’t know that. Yeah. Excellent. Yeah, must have missed it when I read the PR. Yeah, you could also do it next to an image or something like that. And you have full control over background, margins, color, so it really puts it to use in your designs and makes something amazing.
Sarah Norris: Yes. Next up is the range control, so adding support for large 40-pixel number input size. So, I think this is a really nice visual update to the range control component in the editor, which helps land the UI for all components, because I think quite a lot of other components have been using this size. So yeah, it brings the range control into line and it affects the visual spacing around the number input for the range control. So, it’s much easier to read and use, and especially if it’s scanning to lots of components and settings, then yeah, it’s much more easier to read now.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And plugin developers can use it in their plugins as well. These are components that are available to any developer who uses the components, and now it’s an additional attribute for there to have some bigger numbers in there.
So, the next thing is a new API and it makes the new “register, insert a media” category API extensible, so other plugin developers can use it to organize the media categories. So, this is probably one of the things that people waited for almost 20 years about, that there is a hook to insert media categories into WordPress. Have you played around with it? Do you know how it works?
Sarah Norris: I haven’t played around with it, but I’ve read the updates though. I think it’s a great update, especially for plugin developers, because it allows them to register their own media categories. Then they’ll be displayed in the inserter, so it’s perfect for plugins that are adding custom blocks. Extensibility is at the heart of WordPress as well, so I think this is a really good example of that.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Excellent. Yeah, so that brings us to one of the major changes, to TinyMCE deprecation. But don’t get scared; you still can use it. This change sets the path for the TinyMCE deprecation to update the experiments with a strategy to get the TinyMCE and the classic block not loaded automatically, but only when it needs to load. That definitely has a performance improvement. And right now it’s an experiment and needs to be tested, especially with the extensibility that is around TinyMCE that has been in WordPress for almost 20 years. But it’s also contained in classic blocks, and so the question is how it’s going to behave with whatever’s in the classic blocks and for Gutenberg. So, it’s not quite clear to me what the end goal is, but I think that is pretty much the end goal, to have TinyMCE not load automatically, but load only when it really needs to be loaded.
Sarah Norris: Yeah, I think that’s the end goal to fully deprecated TinyMCE, which would be a massive boost to the performance of the editor, which is really great to hear. I was playing with this before… Plus, a common use case for the classic editor was to insert HTML using the code editor rather than the visual editor, so how you can switch between the code and the visual editor. So this is still possible, but if you use the code editor to do this with this experiment enabled, you’ll see a warning that says you’re trying to use a deprecated classic block.
But what’s really cool is that it gives you the choice to convert the HTML to a custom HTML block, so using the new editor, or you can refresh the page to use the classic block if you prefer to do that. So, it gives you the option to do both, but converting to the custom HTML block is so quick. You just click the button, and it’s immediately there, and it just works as it was before. I think that’s really impressive, and I think it’ll help aid the transition to using the block editor as well.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think we all need a little help once in a while to see how the good things are. To make it totally clear, WordPress is not abandoning TinyMCE. If you’re using the classic editor, you will still have access to it. It will be backwards compatible, and it’s just that the classic block in Gutenberg is maybe on the way out with a TinyMCE. But it’s a start of an experiment. So, it could be another year or two, or maybe only half a year depending on how the experiments go. But yeah, try it out and see what you think about it. In the changelog, there’s the PR, but if you want to write it down on the podcast, it’s 50387. That’s the PR that deals with it. And there was a lot of discussion there as well, but I found it important that we talk about it. I am pretty sure it’s not the last time that we will talk about it.
Sarah Norris: It’s the beginning.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s the beginning. It’s the beginning of an experiment. What else was in 16.2 that we wanted to talk about? There’s a lot of bug fixes. There’s quite a few. Also, just a polish of copy and icons and all that. Global Stars Revision API. That is all for 6.3. I think we’re done. Are we?
Sarah Norris: Yes, I think so. Yeah, there are a lot of bug fixes though. I noticed there’s quite a lot of things like spacing updates to get a lot of the editor components in line, which it sounds like really tiny updates, but when you add them all together, I think it really aids the experience of the editor and it really makes a big difference, a good update.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. If you get more clarity and more consistency in the design, that definitely makes a difference.
Yeah. So, I’m stopping just for a little bit at the documentation for the developers. There has been a push from Ryan Welcher to update some of the package documentation and add examples to the packages, so you know how they can be used and get started on using them without having to go through the source course and figure it out how you’re actually going to do the API there. And in this release, there was examples to the rich text package, to the keyboard shortcut package, and to the customized widget package. And I’m sure he’s working on more. There is a tracking issue in Gutenberg repo for these kind of updates. Another push on documentation is to add READMEs to some of the components that don’t have them because the examples and the README are automatically added to the handbook of the block editor. And if it’s in code, then automatically it will show up in the documentation.
So, that’s definitely a great developer experience update, and it can only do one at a time, but sooner or later we all get through that.
All right, and the last thing I wanted to mention is there will be revisions of your style variations or your global styles. 6.3, the revisions for styles will be in there or are already in there. So, when you change some of your styles and you say, “Okay, the one that I did yesterday, I would like better,” you will be able to go back to that particular moment in time in your revisions and make that the current one. The team was also working on giving the same revision treatment to template customization, but that didn’t work well enough to get into 6.3. So, that is something that will be in 6.4. Template revisions are not yet; they’re still experimental. You can get them in 16.2 and work with them, but they did not make it into 6.3.
Sarah Norris: I think the style revisions are a really neat update, and actually the whole way you can view the style book now as well.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh yeah, that’s a real cool thing. Yeah.
Sarah Norris: Yeah, it’s very cool, how fast you can preview the styles. But I really love how you can just switch the style book, and I don’t often hear it talked about that much. I think it’s a perfect way to test your theme. If you just open the style book, you can test so many aspects of a theme. And I think 6.3 is really highlighting how you can do this.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And there’s one other thing, it’s that you can preview themes. So, if you have downloaded a theme, a block theme, but you haven’t activated yet, you can actually preview that and also see it in the style book, so you see how your blocks behave with a new theme. I think that’s really cool. You can also see how your pages behave if you have certain designs on some pages or posts. Yeah, so the preview, that’s kind of getting feature parity almost with a customizer that was for classic themes where you also could do previews of themes with your own content. I think for many, many years that was really missing here in Gutenberg, and I really love that that’s coming to 6.3.
Sarah Norris: Yeah, it’s very cool.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And that is the changelog of 16.2.
We have a big section in the What’s Active Development and Discussed because Matias Ventura has started thinking very deeply about the Gutenberg phase three. He published in March a more global high-level kind of approach on that, and now he published seven or five or six… Six. Six posts on certain aspects of it. So, he covers real time collaboration, outlines the concurrent collaboration and shares edits that he envisions or that it’s not only him, it’s the whole team, kind of what they’re going to work on. And then the workflows, he discussed requirements for full publishing workflow that’s async in comparison to sync where both… where sync means two people can edit the same thing at the same time and the system is handling all the edits and async workflows means, “Okay, I go in today. Tomorrow my editor has some comments and I go in back and kind of work through the comments,” similar like Google Drive, but the whole content team.
So in most of the bigger sites, it’s not just one person publishing, it’s not just the writers publishing. It’s a whole team of media people, of video people, and they all need access to certain things and be part of the workflow and connect with each other. Right now, they do it outside of WordPress and somebody brings it all together, but we all hope so much to do this in WordPress. So, that’s the section of the workflows.
And then we talked about it already with the styles and templates, the whole system of revisions, which is a little bit archaic right now. It helps you, but it doesn’t know anything about blocks, and that will get a full overhaul of the current system making blocks aware and having all the data layers available for revision so editors and admins can see things.
And the fourth one was something that a lot of people really want is an overhaul of the media library with media management capabilities and unifying the interface between the block editor, and the media library, and then also of course improve the overall media workflows. So, dive into those. We have links for all of them in the show notes. Then there are two more that came out this week. Those four were last week, and this week came two more. One is about block libraries and then one about the admin design. So, I did not get into reading all of it. I skimmed a lot, but how are you doing with catching up with the new things?
Sarah Norris: Yeah, I’m trying to stay up-to-date. I’m also skimming a lot. The new admin design really caught my eye though, because again, I think it really helps to bring everything in line into the same design using the same design system. It just really makes everything look polished. I’m so proud to work on such a good product like this when it’s all coming together, and I’m really looking forward to the admin update. I’m sure so many people are as well looking forward to another redesign.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Apart from that, it really looks dated like 15 years ago. So, when you look at the designs… And I will also share an article by Sarah Gooding from the WP Tavern, where she actually captures a part of the conversation that happens on the post. So, each one of those posts, it’s not only reading through the post that Matias did, each one of them has between 15 and 25 or 40 comments where the whole contributors come together and have an input there. And you can too. And Sarah Gooding did a great job in summarizing the main points of the support that an admin support will get from the developer community, especially the screenshot that… Well, for me it means I saw a screenshot from a plugin settings page, and you come from something like the site editor where it says plugins or the list of plugins, and then you click on it.
And then the plugin has its own space with menu on the left menu on tabs on top, and so it feels like its own app, but with the same interfaces that Gutenberg is using or the block editor is using, or by that point, when that comes out, WordPress is using. So, it all will be more polished as you said. It will be more modern, but it will also be more contained, keeping the cognitive load that you have when you have too many things that you can click on that kind of overwhelms you. You can focus on that plugin settings and that plugins app, and it will be a similar experience than the block editors now.
Sarah Norris: Yeah, that’s exactly it. I think it really helps with the user experience. It’s perfect. I’m really looking forward to it.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, me too. And we had a live Q&A with the developers from Give WP; that’s a very strong plugin with millions of users that allows nonprofits to collect donations on their website. And they are coming out with a revamp of their plugin using WordPress components and scripts and making it the same interface like the block editor, but you’re creating your own forms. So they have no additional… There’s no additional training necessary to get what each interface items does. You have the dropdowns that you know from the sidebar from the block editor, you have the inserter from the block editor, and you have the design tools that you need from the block editor. And they did a great job.
And Jason Adams and John Waldstein, they did a great demo about the stage of their revamp right now. And we have a great discussion with also Lena Morita who was on the show. She is actually a developer on the components team. It was a great conversation. So, I’ll leave a link in the show notes for you if you missed it, and you shouldn’t have missed it, of course, so you can get a record… We recorded it and the post with all the additional links there in the YouTube description. So, you can follow up along that.
Sarah Norris: Around the realtime collaboration as well, Riyad posted a really good post on the core blog as well. But yeah, maybe it’d be good to look to that as well if you’re more interested in the technical detail around realtime.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. He just posted it yesterday, I think, where he dives really into the architecture of the real time collaboration, because two years ago actually he did some experiments with a site called sblocks.com, where you could have two versions of the same post and then with different browsers, you could kind of edit it, and it was all there. And you could actually share it. I don’t know what happened with that, but so he has some great insights in how that’s going to work and we’ll leave that also in the show notes.
And then, this is just an announcement. If you are listening to this on the weekend and early next week, there will be another live Q&A on July 21st, and that’s with David Bowman and Alex Geatches and Joni Halabig. And we are talking about design systems and how they work with the theme.json.
So, David and Alex, they are working on the WordPress VIP side of automatic, and they have built a bridge between Figma design system, token system, and the theme.json. And so, as a site manager or designer, you can keep in sync those two systems and don’t have to recreate things in theme.json, because there’s a rich plugin that does all the settings and the variables and all that for you for your next WordPress theme. So, spinning up a new site within the design system shouldn’t be too hard. So, check it in, check in with us on July 21st, 1700 UTC. The link is on the front page of the Gutenberg Times homepage. Of course, we have it also in the show notes. And if you listen to that after July 21st, it will be on YouTube under livestreams, so you can watch the recording there as well.
Well, this was a lot of announcements, so do you have anything that you want to announce? Well, you will be a 6.4 editor co-lead, tech lead for the editor.
Sarah Norris: Yes.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: But you also work on themes, right?
Sarah Norris: Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So, there is also a new default theme coming. Do you know anything about that? Do we have some rumors or some secrets we can share?
Sarah Norris: Yes. Well, I know it was really exciting. I think we’re going to be looking at how we handle post formats. There are ways to do it at the moment, but I don’t think they’re obvious. They’re not easy. So, I think maybe a focus of the new default theme will be to focus on post formats to help things… Podcast websites would be a good example. Yeah, that’s really exciting, because I imagine a lot of people have probably waited for that functionality as well.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. That has been a little bit neglected a bit.
Sarah Norris: Yes.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: … over all the Gutenberg excitement. Yes, of course. Yeah. All right, so when people want to get in contact with you, Sarah, where can they connect with you or best connect with you?
Sarah Norris: Yes, so mikachan is my username on most formats, or mikachan_ where mikachan’s already been taken. And I’m on LinkedIn and all the usual places. So yeah, you can find me easily.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right, so mikachan, what is that?
Sarah Norris: Oh, it’s a really old username I’ve heard since I was a kid, basically. It’s just an anime reference. I was an anime fan. I used to build fan sites using WordPress actually when I was a kid.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So, you stopped building fan sites now?
Sarah Norris: Yeah. So yeah, it’s a little disappointing, isn’t it? Fan sites aren’t really a thing anymore. Maybe they should be. I think we should bring fan sites back.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Well, thank you so much. It was great fun to have you on the show, and I’m looking forward to working with you also on the 6.4 release, because we will probably connect quite a bit because Anne and I will be on the editor triage team.
Sarah Norris: Yes, exactly.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So, we’ll give you other things to shovel through.
Sarah Norris: Yeah, I’m really looking forward to working with you too. Thank you so much for having me.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right, Sarah. All right. Thank you so much. Bye-bye.
Sarah Norris: Bye.
by Gutenberg Changelog at July 16, 2023 10:16 AM under Gutenberg
Howdy,
There is so much going on in the WordPress space: The next major release is less than four weeks away, Community Summit and WordCamp US will happen next month, the 6.4 release is getting started and while contributors are polishing, fixing and cleaning up the Site Editor, others are already working on Phase 3.
And next month I will be on vacation starting August 5th, 2023. Yes, for the first time in six years, I will miss WordCamp US, and seeing my WordPress friends. Lots of FOMO will come my way.
Thursday, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, release lead of WordPress 6.4, kicked off the first Zoom meeting of the all-underrepresented-gender release squad to work on the next major release.
It was lovely to see all the faces of the wonderful people. 6.4 Beta 1 is scheduled for September 26, 2023. It’s not that long until a ton of great new features will come to WordPress in November. It will bring a bit of Phase 3, a lot of polish for Phase 2, the Interactivity API, the fonts API and the interface to manage fonts for the site. I’ll watch the Make Core blog for Chomphosy’s ‘official’ Roadmap for 6.4.
Alright, that’s about the future. The first Dev Notes for WordPress 6.3 have already been published. And I hope to see you all at the Live Q & A next Friday! It’s going to be mind-blowing! Really.
Have a wonderful weekend and start into the next week!
Yours, 💕
Birgit
PS: If you are new to Gutenberg Times and are interested in how it all began and became what it is now, Nadia Maya Ardiani interviewed me for Hostinger’s WordPress Experts blog.
Next Live Q & A: Design Systems and Theme.json on July 21, 2023
David Bowman and and Alec Geatches from WordPress VIP will show off how they keep design systems developed in Figma and themes in WordPress in synch and their workflows streamlined. Joni Halabi, senior developer from Georgetown University will join me as co-host.
WordPress 6.3 Beta 4 came out this week. It’s really coming down to the wire. If you haven’t tested your plugins, themes and other customization of your website, you should start now. You got less than a month to fix if something breaks.
Next week, the squad will release WordPress 6.3 RC 1, and with it the Fieldguide with the accompanying Dev Notes.
Anne McCarthy published three videos to show off great features coming to WordPress with the next version.
This is also a reminder on the WordPress 6.3 Live Product Demo on July 20th, 2023 at 16:00 UTC (12 pm EDT / 18:00 CEST) with Rich Tabor and Anne McCarthy. There will be a Q&A session, and you may submit questions in advance via the #walkthrough channel on WordPress Make Slack.
Leonardus Nugraha, co-lead on the docs release team published WordPress 6.3: What’s Coming In the Next Major Update for Hostinger’s blog.
Paul Taylor of Big Bite also What’s new in WordPress 6.3 and sized up the second major release of 2023, which includes key improvements across page speeds, accessibility, and the editing experience.
Gutenberg 16.2 was released and release manager Bernie Reiter highlighted in the release post What’s new in Gutenberg 16.2? (12 July)
Sarah Norris, JavaScript developer and 6.4 editor tech co-lead joined me on the Gutenberg Changelog for the first time, and we discussed Gutenberg 16.2, WordPress 6.3, also 6.4 and Phase 3. It was a great joy and we had great fun recording and chatting. The episode 86 will arrive at our favorite podcast app over the weekend.
🎙️ Latest episode: Gutenberg Changelog #86 – WordPress 6.3, Gutenberg 16.2 and Phase 3 Collaboration with Sarah Norris as special guest, hosted by Birgit Pauli-Haack
Last week, Matias Ventura published four posts covering various aspects that will be considered for Phase 3 of the Gutenberg Project. This week, the series continued with one article on Block Library and the other one about the Admin Design.
Riad Benguella did a deeper dive into the architecture of developing for Real Collaboration in content creation. To accomplish this, Benguella proposes a Data synch engine, so developers on the project and those extending WordPress with plugins don’t need to know much about where the date is coming from or going. The technical solution for this is a “conflict-free replicated data type” (CRDT) and the most promising open-source framework to implement it in a web application is YJS.
The six posts about Gutenberg Phase 3 have been out for a few days. The most excitement gathered Matias post on the new Admin Design. Sarah Gooding followed the discussion and summarized it in her article: WordPress Plans Ambitious Admin UI Revamp with Design System, Galvanizing Broad Support from the Developer Community.
Nick Schäferhoff reported about the Real-time collaboration aspect for Gutenberg Phase 3: Real-Time Collaboration in WordPress: Here’s What to Expect. He not only gives you an overview from last week’s posts, he also help us understand why it’s important to expand WordPress in this way: “Seeing as many websites and content strategies are run by teams, giving people tools to collaborate directly in the environment they are working in would go a long way in making the creation process more seamless.” Schäfterhoff wrote. Towards the end of his post, he shared links to project where you can start experiencing a collaborative approach, starting with Asblocks by Riad Benguella.
The video Designed with WordPress “is an ode to the editing and customization phases of our roadmap, and the beauty they can bring to your designs. It celebrates the tools and the possibilities they create. It encapsulates the exciting steps made in the past that propel the vibrant future of WordPress” It is so beautiful! Take a few moments and enjoy the sheer beauty.
We discussed the Block Editor and WordPress 6.3 on the 260th episode of This Week in WordPress. It was a great pleasure and joy to talk again to Nathan Wrigley, and Michelle Frechette and to meet Katie Keith. “How many times can we say patterns?” Answer: A lot.
… and when you read Anne McCarthy’s post below, you also will know why!
In their latest post, Core Editor Improvement: Advancing the power of Patterns, Anne McCarthy covers new features, big and small, coming to WordPress 6.3 that impact the experience of creating and using patterns. You can explore these features if you’re using Gutenberg 16.2 except the ability to rename and duplicate custom patterns coming to 16.3.
In the latest Learn WordPress workshop, Bud Kraus Demystified the Navigation Block and showed you how to set up your site’s navigation now and in the future. How you build menus for your website had changed considerably and this is a great workshop to learn, what you have to relearn and unlearn 🙂
Justin Tadlock migrated one of his long-time plugins to also work with the site editor as a block: Breadcrumbs. You can now add a breadcrumb block to your pages and posts and archives, and it will automatically pick up the hierarchy and nested pages. You can change text color, background, and link color, including the hover state and adjust the padding and the margins. The plugin, I hear, has been submitted to the plugin repository, but there appears to be a 2-months waiting time to get approved. You can use it now by grabbing it from the GitHub repository.
Isabel Brison, co Editor Tech lead on the 6.3 release, published the first Dev Note from the Gutenberg project: Layout updates in the editor for WordPress 6.3. You learn more about the changes to layout support, CSS specificity, the new Grid type, to post template and spacer block of the Site editor.
“Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2022”
A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test and Meta team from Jan. 2021 on. Updated by yours truly. The index 2020 is here
Mary Baum posted her the first post on the WordPress Developer Blog. Make your site’s typography make a statement is the first post of a series of six tackling the ins and outs of typography in general and specifically for designers using WordPress and its site editor as a design tool. As the new #nocode site editor also attracts new designers and those without a long career in design, this series will help everyone to level up and build attractive, readable and fast websites.
On the WordPress Developer Blog, Justin Tadlock published What’s new for developers? (July 2023). The sixth edition of a monthly roundup that showcases features that are specific to theme and plugin developers. The latest updates are focused on the upcoming WordPress 6.3 release.
Eric Karkovack interviewed Riad Benguella about the Command Palette coming to WordPress 6.3 next month: A Closer Look at the WordPress Command Palette. “It opens up a world of possibilities. Imagine being able to change the price of a WooCommerce product without having to edit its post. Or you might display the latest entries from your contact form. The potential time savings could add up. Suddenly, what used to require dozens of clicks could be reduced to a few keywords.” Karkowack wrote.
Asked about the next steps for the feature, Benguella answered: “Right now, the Command Palette is available in the Site Editor and the post editor. But we need to add it to more pages and more contexts to take advantage of its capabilities. For instance, when a block is selected, we may offer contextual commands to manipulate and interact with that block.”
The next WordPress Developer Hours will take place on July 26, 2023, at 11 am EDT / 15:00 UTC and will cover the topic of Styling Blocks. It will have two presentations: Two demos/presentation:
Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s master branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.
Have you been using it? Hit reply and let me know.
Questions? Suggestions? Ideas? Don’t hesitate to send them via email or send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.
For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com
Featured Image: Haus der Kunst in Munich, Germany exhibits art by Hamid Zenati. Photo by Birgit Pauli-Haack
Don’t want to miss the next Weekend Edition?
by Birgit Pauli-Haack at July 15, 2023 04:39 AM under Weekend Edition
The Gutenberg project has aimed to revolutionize how we manage web content as much as Johannes Gutenberg did the printed word. The project’s roadmap is comprised of four unique phases:
With the upcoming release of WordPress 6.3, Phase 2 of the Gutenberg project is coming to a close; a journey worth celebrating.
This video is an ode to Gutenberg’s editing and customization phases, celebrating the new design tools and the possibilities they create. The piece encapsulates the exciting steps made in the past that propel the vibrant future of WordPress.
Everything showcased in the video is built entirely with the WordPress Editor, using currently available blocks, patterns, and themes. This new era has opened the ability for the design community to contribute to the project directly without depending on developers to translate their ideas into designs. Consider this an invitation for designers to join a new generation that embraces the diverse and expressive capabilities of WordPress.
The work that goes into Gutenberg is a powerful testament to the collaboration of coders, developers, and designers in our community. United, we strive to build WordPress into a realm of significance and lasting impact.
Video credits: Tino Barreiro, Beatriz Fialho, Takashi Irie, Henrique Lamarino, Rich Tabor, Pablo Honey, Matías Ventura, and Holographik.
Thank you to the post authors Tino Barreiro, Nicholas Garofalo, Dan Soschin, Rich Tabor, and Chloé Bringmann.
by Chloe Bringmann at July 14, 2023 10:33 PM under Gutenberg
As the dev notes for the upcoming WordPress 6.3 release are rolling out, there are so many exciting features that have not yet been highlighted. The new development mode, initiated by declaring the WP_DEVELOPMENT_MODE constant, is one that will be particularly useful for theme developers initially.
“The development mode configured on a site defines the kind of development work that the site is being used for,” Google-sponsored WordPress Core Committer Felix Arntz said. This mode is not recommended for production sites.
The possible values for the WP_DEVELOPMENT_MODE constant include core, plugin, theme, all, or an empty string (which is the default). The “all” value is applicable to sites where all three aspects may be modified, such as a client website in progress.
“There are currently only a few use-cases in WordPress core which are determined by the development mode, but this will likely increase in the future,” Arntz said. “Most usage today relates to theme.json caching.”
Since the cache is usually only invalidated when the theme is updated, it can become cumbersome to developers who are actively modifying theme.json and have to manually invalidate it to see their changes. This caching functionality is bypassed when the value is set to “theme.”
Although the WP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE constant seems similar to the new developer mode, it specifically denotes whether the environment is development, staging, or production but does not specify what type of development is being done.
“It is likely that you will only use the WP_DEVELOPMENT_MODE constant on a site where WP_DEBUG is enabled and WP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE is either ‘development’ or ‘local,’ since it is not advised for development to occur directly against staging or production environments,” Arntz said.
For more details on when and how to use Developer Mode, and code samples for checking if development mode is active on a site, developers can refer to the dev note published to the make.wordpress.org/core blog.
Bluehost launched its new WonderSuite product this week, which introduces a setup and site creation experience guided by AI. In September 2022, the hosting company debuted its managed WooCommerce packages after acquiring YITH, a WordPress plugin company with more than 100 WooCommerce extensions. The new WonderSuite product is included in all Bluehost WordPress hosting plans and is not specific to online stores.
WonderSuite brings together solutions from YITH and Yoast and integrates them into a new unified design that is based on Yoast’s open source React component library. This interface was introduced as an update in Yoast 20.0 with mixed feedback. Although many users reacted positively to the modern design, some are not keen on plugins building their own UI in the admin. Bluehost is using this component library to streamline and unify the UI for its various products inside the admin.
WonderSuite is aimed at small and medium-sized businesses, agencies, and freelancers who are just getting online. The major update here is the WonderStart onboarding experience that asks the user specific questions and then populates other parts of the website building process with their answers. For example, social media handles will automatically sent to SEO optimization and added to the social buttons block.
Bluehost also pulls the WonderStart data into the WonderBlocks, which are used to create a library of block patterns and page templates using images and suggested text based on the user’s entries during onboarding. All of this works with the block-based YITH Wonder Theme, which is free on WordPress.org and active on more than 10,000 sites.
Wonder theme users have access to some patterns and templates but Bluehost customers have more designs available to them in combination with WonderBlocks. Those hosting with Bluehost who don’t want to use the default Wonder Theme will can still use the WonderBlocks pattern library with any block-based theme.
Bluehost is one example of a host that is putting AI to use inside the admin. The new WonderHelp section is an AI-powered guide that users can tap into during the site-building process. Users can ask it to create a blog and the feature will provide a guide inside the site builder with instructions for what to do on each page.
The company is working on a feature called WonderAssist that is anticipated later in 2023. It will provide AI-powered content generation with relevant copy, product descriptions, and SEO-friendly excerpts integrated with the other parts of WonderSuite.
Bluehost’s e-commerce customers also have access to WonderCart, which provides a collection of cross-sell and upsell features, along with promotional and discount options inside a single, unified interface, instead of spread across multiple plugins and tools.
Existing Bluehost customers can find the updated plugin in their WordPress sites with the new products available. Onboarding is currently only available for users starting new websites but a representative said they are working on creating a path that allows existing customers to re-route through the onboarding experience.
In today's show Vova Feldman co-hosts as we chat about all things when it comes to WordPress and WooCommerce builders comfort zone.
>> The post The Do the Woo Friday Show with Vova Feldman appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community .
by BobWP at July 14, 2023 07:51 AM under Podcast Guests from Asia
WordPress’ admin is on deck for a long-awaited makeover after Gutenberg lead architect Matías Ventura published plans for a revamped admin design as part of the Phase 3: Collaboration road map.
“As WordPress turns twenty years old, the overall aim of this work is to improve upon this experience at a foundational design level, giving plugins and users more control over the navigation while ensuring each WordPress experience is recognizable, intuitive, accessible, and delightful,” Ventura said.
His post is a follow-up to some earlier admin concepts he published a year ago which evolves the admin towards more fluid browsing and editing flows. This is similar to the block editor design that positions the admin frame as a shell that wraps around a canvas that contains the content in a zoomed state. Instead of users clicking back to access navigation tools, the tools remain present but outside of the canvas view.
Although contributors have not yet officially produced any designs for the project, Ventura shared a light version of an admin concept.
One aspect of the proposed plans that has energized the developer community is the prospect of the admin getting rebuilt with an extensible design system.
“This effort is also an opportunity to formalize the design primitives and interaction paradigms that are part of the UI component system begun in wordpress/components,” Ventura said.
“A crucial aspect is to ensure WordPress itself is built with the same pieces and APIs that plugin authors can use. Aside from color themes, our set of primitive components also need to work in dense environments like the editor, as well as environments that need more breathing room and focus like admin sections. Density, clarity, usability, and accessibility are paramount.”
The admin design concepts have renewed developers’ excitement about the future of WordPress, but they are also hoping this revamp will solve several long-standing problems with the interface.
One recurring theme in the feedback was the need to find a way to curb the pollution of top-level menus and the out of control admin notices, which are hijacked by plugin developers in the absence of a standard notification system.
“It’s really about aligning APIs, ensuring we have semantic descriptions of capabilities, and offering the right levels of controls for both plugins and users,” Ventura said.
“I know it’s a fairly limited example, but there’s a nice balance in the ability to pin or unpin plugin sidebars on the editor, from the perspective that plugins can be opinionated, and users can still interact with those opinions.”
Another challenge that concerns developers is ensuring the new design adequately accommodates WordPress sites with large numbers of posts, pages, categories, menus, comments, and other things that can easily overwhelm a UI that was intended to be simplified.
“As part of leveraging the components across the admin interface, we need to address functional gaps (like table and list views, bulk editing operations, etc) and assist plugin needs for anything that might not be already addressed that should be addressed,” Ventura said. “Ultimately, the design library needs to be showcased in the wordpress.org website as a clear resource for people building upon WordPress.”
Developers who participated in the comments were optimistic about the project and reacted positively to the concepts Ventura shared.
“I often say, white space is where the magic happens,” WordPress designer and developer Brian Gardner said.
“The light admin concept is breathtaking and gets me even more excited than I am now about the future of WordPress.”
Several developers commented on how eagerly they are awaiting an update to a modern UI that reduces the number of page refreshes.
“Wow! It’s gonna be amazing!” WPMarmite founder Alex Borto said. “A complete admin fluid browsing experience is much needed. I dream of navigating through the admin area without any page loads!”
For years, WordPress developers have been expected to try to match WordPress’ dated admin UI on their settings pages and the Yoast SEO plugin drew criticism when it released version 20.0 with a new modern interface. Many users are not keen on plugins building their own UI in the admin, as it can make things more confusing. Having a standard set of UI components would make things easier for developers who are extending WordPress.
“This gives me great optimism about securing the next 20 years of WordPress’s success,” WordPress developer Mike McAlister said. “The fact that you can do anything with WordPress is incredible, it’s probably our biggest strength.
“But without standardized design patterns for the admin, we’ve seen that devolve into a UI/UX headache with plugin and theme developers baking their own experiences inside WordPress. Reining this in and creating a unified experience for everyone to buy into will not only make it easier on product creators, it will also be a huge win for users.”
Ventura said this document is just an outline of the admin design project and that it will be followed up with more in-depth design explorations further down the road.
WordPress 6.3 is less than one month away. Get started testing now and tune in for the live product demo.
As we head into WordPress 6.4’s kickoff, it’s time to set our sights on Gutenberg Phase 3: Collaborative Editing. Your feedback to the ideas presented is important.
The first cohort of New Contributor Mentorship Program has also begun. There is clearly more interest than capacity to staff in this first group, which is a very encouraging sight.
β WordPress 6.3 Beta 4
6.3 Live Product Demo
Help Test WordPress 6.3
3⃣ Gutenberg Phase 3
Contributor Mentorship Program!
>
>
Thanks for reading our WP dot .org roundup! Each week we are highlighting the news and discussions coming from the good folks making WordPress possible. If you or your company create products or services that use WordPress, you need to be engaged with them and their work. Be sure to share this resource with your product and project managers.
Are you interested in giving back and contributing your time and skills to WordPress.org? 
Start Here ›
Get our weekly WordPress community news digest — Post Status’ Week in Review — covering the WP/Woo news plus significant writing and podcasts. It’s also available in our newsletter. 
You — and your whole team can Join Post Status too!
Build your network. Learn with others. Find your next job — or your next hire. Read the Post Status newsletter. 
Listen to podcasts. 
Follow @Post_Status 
and LinkedIn. 
This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.
by Courtney Robertson at July 13, 2023 04:31 PM under WP-CLI
Sponsor: WordPress.comBuild and manage professional sites with secure managed hosting on WordPress.com.
Beautiful themes, built-in SEO, and payment tools, and access to over 50,000 plugins. Everything you need for your business, plus 24/7 support from WordPress experts.
Mentioned in the show: You can follow Post Status and our guests on Twitter:The Post Status Draft podcast is geared toward WordPress professionals, with interviews, news, and deep analysis. 
Browse our archives, and don’t forget to subscribe via iTunes, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Stitcher, Simplecast, or RSS. 
Cory Miller (00:00:00) – All right. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Post Edits Draft. We’ve got another interview in our series on agency journeys. And I’m talking to a long time friend of mine, Rob Carnes, who has been very active in post. It’s been to a bunch of our meetups and I’m really excited to share his story today. So Rob, thanks for being on The Post podcast.
Rob Cairns (00:00:21) – My pleasure, Corey. Glad to be here.
Cory Miller (00:00:24) – Well, Rob, let’s dive in. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your agency today. Name and what you do. What kind of work primarily you do for your clients.
Rob Cairns (00:00:34) – Okay, So my name is Rob Cairns. I’m in the greater Toronto area of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I should tell you, before I got into running an agency, I have a very tech heavy background which a lot of agency owners don’t have. So I come out of an enterprise healthcare environment, doing servers, doing all kinds of cool stuff to support one of Toronto’s biggest hospitals.
Rob Cairns (00:00:58) – Before that I was actually an old time COBOL programmer. There’s probably a word that you haven’t heard in a long, long time, and I spent some time in the financial industry, so I’ve got a bit of a business background. And then I jumped into agency life because, you know, I always tell the story. I never planned to be in marketing because I had a marketing professor in school back in the 80s who came in the class, and her whole thing was, Oh, I’m good. I’m here because I want my summers off. And I said, I swore then in there I’d never be a marketer if you paid me money to. Well, I lied. So, yeah. And I run I run an agency that’s WordPress focused. A lot of it is WordPress security stuff right now and some builds and then a lot of email marketing and consulting these days. That’s kind of where I’m at.
Cory Miller (00:01:50) – Yeah. And what’s your agency name?
Rob Cairns (00:01:53) – Stunning digital marketing.
Cory Miller (00:01:55) – And what’s the website for your.
Rob Cairns (00:01:58) – Digital marketing is the agency site and digital marketing.info is like my Linktree site. It’s got links to everything I do on the web and where you can find me.
Cory Miller (00:02:09) – Excellent. Excellent. Well, I know as I’ve gotten to know you through some of the meetups, too, I hear more and more about the work you do, and it always impresses me. You’re like, Hey, is anybody worried about this particular update? And and I know you managed quite a few sites and it always I always like lean in when you talk about that because it’s at the heart of what a lot of agency work, particularly at post is that our agencies do is that beast of maintaining WordPress across multiple WordPress client sites. Well, great. Thank you for that. So tell me a little bit about how you got there. I heard a little preface of that, but I wanted to start out with where you are today. Um, and then talk about how you got there. That’s always the compelling part of these Journey series to me is what happened before.
Cory Miller (00:02:59) – So this is today and then what? What’s a little snippet of how what led up to where you are today?
Rob Cairns (00:03:06) – So where I am today was kind of how I got there was us working in healthcare. I wasn’t happy, I’ll tell you that now. I was working probably 60 to 70 hours a week at the time. So this is going back 14 years ago was when we started and I was extremely unhappy and somebody said to me, So why don’t you just go? And I said, Well, I’ve been here 21 years, so if they want to get rid of me, it’s going to cost some lots of money to get rid of me. So let’s force the hand and see where it goes. Well, 14 years ago, my dad was sick with pancreatic cancer at the time he actually passed away July 8th, the anniversary that’s coming up. And they decided, knowing I was going to be taking some time off, they decided we need to we’re going to make some changes and you can go away.
Rob Cairns (00:03:56) – And at that point, I was already building WordPress websites on the side. So I just kind of transitioned to what I was doing on the side full time. Now here’s where it got interesting. I decided really quickly only building the website, it’s only part of getting it out there. You still got a market that site and you got to do it properly. So I made a decision then and there. I was going to build a full stack marketing agency. I’ve taken some courses, a lot of courses. One of my mentors in this space is a gentleman by the name of Paul Tobey, who I’m founder of. Paul. Toby’s actually the father of Adrian Toby, the founder of Groundhog, who you know. So that’s.
Cory Miller (00:04:40) – Love.
Rob Cairns (00:04:40) – Adrian Yeah, love Adrian, Love. His dad saw his dad in January, actually, and we sat in his house and listened to him play some jazz tunes for us where we were visiting and and then transitioned in and at one time was offering all kinds of services and then just realized some of these are just don’t want to do so I just kind of niche down and got out of what I didn’t want to do so.
Cory Miller (00:05:10) – Got you. So how long ago did you go? Full time with the business?
Rob Cairns (00:05:16) – 14 years ago.
Cory Miller (00:05:18) – 14 years ago. Okay. That’s awesome. We were going strong about the same time.
Rob Cairns (00:05:22) – Yeah, about same time. And you. And you and I connected, I think the first time about 14 years ago when I was in the headway community. And you were running the items community. And you’d be proud to know two of the products in my security stack back up by the in 19 security are still there to this day so.
Cory Miller (00:05:40) – Oh that’s fantastic to hear. Well, okay, So I’m really curious. Was there a point when you were like, doing this on the side? What was that juncture when you’re like, okay, I’m going to do this full time? A lot of the stories we hear, I hear in It’s My Own is some event. Something helped kind of catalyze the process to become a full time entrepreneur. And so I’m curious. So not happy, of course. And then, hey, I think you might have mentioned this just a second ago, but I want to make sure I’m clear on it.
Cory Miller (00:06:13) – So was there event that kind of like, okay, I’m doing this full time, this is the only thing I’m doing.
Rob Cairns (00:06:18) – So my as I say, my dad was battling pancreatic cancer at the time. Oh, right. Yeah. I went on three weeks vacation after I was on the corporate project, number one, and amassing overtime like nothing. And I walked back in on a Monday morning. I got a call from the director’s secretary at 10 a.m. and say, Director won’t see you in a boardroom at 3:00. And the boardroom was not the normal boardroom for meetings. So I just kind of put my feet up and said, okay, I know how this day’s going to play out. Welcome back from vacation for me. And believe it or not, I actually shipped everything personal home from work at lunchtime in a cab because I saw the writing on the wall. I’d seen it on the wall for a while. Yeah. Then I get, um, I get called in and the director says, Do you know why you’re here? I said, So you’re going to let me go, so let’s just get it over with.
Rob Cairns (00:07:16) – And the h.r. Manager turned to me and said, how do you how do you feel about all this? And my response at the time was, my lawyer will tell you at 9:00 tomorrow morning. Now you’re like no other comment.
Cory Miller (00:07:27) – Now at this time, you were already doing things on the side, though, right? Yeah, I think that’s important to note in the story because, you know, some of these events that happen, but you were already kind of testing the waters, building some kind of side hustle side gig on the side. So you didn’t just, you know, jump out into the ether. You had something kind of built up. Were you doing work for like client? I mean, friends? How did the the side gig kind of start parallel to that side gig?
Rob Cairns (00:07:59) – Actually, it’s really interesting you ask that question. Being in tech, I’m like a resource in my family and you can appreciate that. So I did go to the let’s send an email to let’s ask the question.
Rob Cairns (00:08:13) – And I actually got fed up with family, believe it or not, and I wrote a website at that time was HTML and said, by the way, here’s all the family pictures from the event last week because I was also the manager of all that digital stuff. And by the way, here’s links to all the questions you guys asked me and nobody’s allowed to ask me a question until you go to these links and and actually do your own homework. So that was my start into domains and all of that and web stuff. And the other thing that started it was this is going back to the days of dial and dialing Internet providers, if we remember those days. Yep. And trauma, they were a dime a dozen. So I used to switch providers, i.e. email services more than most people because I get fed up with one dial in provider and I cancel. I go to another one, I cancel, I go to another one, I cancel. So I finally said, Forget this, I’m going to register a domain which I still have to this day.
Rob Cairns (00:09:15) – And then that was kind of my foray in. And then after doing static sites, I realized WordPress was the way to go and that’s what kind of opened the door.
Cory Miller (00:09:24) – So what was your introduction to WordPress? What kind of time period did you start using?
Rob Cairns (00:09:28) – WordPress would have been about 16, 15 years ago. 16 years ago?
Cory Miller (00:09:32) – Yeah, right. Right. In its first early heyday for sure. That’s about the same time I got started with WordPress, this cool platform that you didn’t have to manage with all these HTML top software and updated 100 pages you could do with one click. Essentially this concept of content management system was really, really crazy and awesome.
Rob Cairns (00:09:53) – We all remember the famous five minute WordPress install where our our hosting providers didn’t have a one click installer like stop flashes or any of them. We had to do it ourselves, right?
Cory Miller (00:10:05) – And yeah, we did it. I mean, I’m trying to remember when I did that, if it was FTP, you know, putting it on the server.
Cory Miller (00:10:14) – Yeah, I’m trying to think back about that. I use soft tactless quite a bit in the early days, but that was magical back then. If you think about it, it’s like I want the ability to do build a website and I don’t have to learn too many technical logistics. I remember googling. What does FTP mean? That was one of our first post that I themes because I was like, if I have this question, I bet you a bunch of other people have this question. But yeah, WordPress made it easy.
Rob Cairns (00:10:40) – Yeah. I have to tell you a funny story. You appreciate being over it. I think so. I had a client years ago. It was Australian, one of my first big clients, and he didn’t see the spending the money on something like backup buddy. So the silly client came back to me and said, So write me the documentation process of tobacco and restore a website menu and document it out. And the story goes that the cost to him paying for that documentation at the time would have cost him more than a yearly license for backup money.
Rob Cairns (00:11:12) – Well, even or not. So needless to say, he became a backup buddy. Pretty convert pretty quickly. Corey.
Cory Miller (00:11:20) – So. Well, okay, so you go full time with the agency starting to do on work. I know somewhere in there was like, Hey, there’s more to just the actual website build. There’s marketing different parts around the website. Um, as you look back, you know, 15 years now, what were some of the catalytic events that help you in your agency, personal professional, WordPress, all these things. If you look back where like 3 or 4 of the things that really made the difference in your agency to where you’re now, I know you’ve been doing this a long time. I know you’ve been able to have freedom of life to do different things in your life as part of the business part of WordPress, which is always the magic, I think, WordPress. But if you look back, what are those couple of things that kind of stand out?
Rob Cairns (00:12:06) – Um, a couple of things.
Rob Cairns (00:12:07) – One is I come from a family of entrepreneurs, so my mother is 78 years old, still alive and still selling houses, believe it or not. As a real estate agent, my aunt who passed away at 92, was one of the top real estate brokers for Century 21 in the Farmington, Detroit area for many, many years. First successful. I come from a family who’s done business on their own, so that helps. My father was a CFO for an insurance broker, so that helps. That helped install some money sense into me and some business sense into me. I’m also a lifelong learner. So you and I have talked over the years about how much reading I do or how much listening to other podcasts. I do believe it or not, my own podcast is not on my podcast player backdrop. I’m busy listening to everybody else’s because think you got to get a variety of point. And then kind of just people along the way. People like yourself. People like Paul. Toby Paul was a big catalyst for giving me credit and saying, you know, more than like 75% of the world.
Rob Cairns (00:13:21) – Just go after it. So Paul was really good for me around mindset more than just technical stuff, so that was good. And then things like in my life recognizing and you and I have had this conversation about mental health challenges and the whole pearls around that. You’ve been through it. I’ve been through it. We’ve talked about it very candidly together over the years. That has helped. Am probably. 200% more mental health. Healthy today in my 50s and was in my 30s. I would say that, you know.
Cory Miller (00:13:58) – I think I want to say ditto. I think I think so.
Rob Cairns (00:14:02) – And then surrounding yourself with the right people and people like yourself, people like post others group people like, you know, people outside of the post group, people you can go to and say, Hey, I just need an ear or, Hey, I’m stuck on something technical. I should know doing that. And then kind of. A big part of all this was deciding a number of years ago that I’m such a security junkie and I always was, even when I was in health care, and I need to dive into the security space and put my time and money there.
Rob Cairns (00:14:38) – And that was a big part of it, too. And that’s how that came to birth. You mentioned, I imagine, websites as of yesterday’s count 418, believe it or not, just from an update in security perspective and growing by the day. So.
Cory Miller (00:14:53) – It’s it’s for sure become a thing in a good part of our industry and community that there’s agencies like yours and I’ve talked to a lot that that are recognized WordPress is awesome. There’s a lot of things that go into it as far as keeping those things updated. So somebody goes, Oh, I built it, you know, I built the baseball field, Field of Dreams. It’s there. Cool. Everybody’s going to come to it. There’s two sides of the coin that’s really interesting with your story. One is that updates security. Part of it got to keep the field maintained. The other side is the marketing part. I found this fascinating because you’ve got this to blend of marketing and the really the maintenance said that includes this big topic called security.
Rob Cairns (00:15:37) – Yep, it’s true. And like one of the biggest things I think agency owners don’t do well is they don’t manage their own mailing lists, let alone their client mailing lists. And email marketing has become one of my strengths over the years and think that is a big deal because the only thing you really own is your website. In your mailing list. Everything is kind of what we call rented land or other people’s land in the rules change by the day and it gets to be awful.
Cory Miller (00:16:07) – So yeah, yeah, it’s, it’s interesting. I’ve talked to a lot of people. I think a lot of the WordPress community saw one thing from my work at things, but I go, you know, one want to know the key to what we built. There’s a lot of keys, right? But one of the big keys, especially marketing, was email marketing. And I love how you said website, what you really own, the website and email address. You don’t even own the rankings. You got to keep working on those things.
Cory Miller (00:16:32) – You got to you don’t even necessarily on the traffic. You got to keep working on those things. But when you have the what click for me with email marketing, was this old school, now old school concept of direct marketing when people used to go door to door and still do of course, to sell something to that person directly. And I think that was when it clicked for me is email is direct marketing where I don’t control the algorithms and whatever tech billionaire is going to buy another of the social media platforms. But if I consistently build I was actually talking to entrepreneur last week about this, just she’s just getting started with the physical product. And I said, Hey, you know, all the jazz and the sexiness is out on the social media platforms. However, it’s a great way to get started, push them, funnel them into an email where you can still to date in 2023, directly market. It still works, but so many are adverse to it or don’t do the work to keep up their keep up, grow, maintain their email lists and use them properly.
Rob Cairns (00:17:37) – And to segment them properly. Mean the big issue is. So I’ll give you an example. I have an email list that’s running about 7500 active right now. I’ve probably got, if you count people have an open stuff in like the last 60 days and probably closer to 1200. So the key is not to send emails to your host, send them to the 7500 that are active and then every six months touch base with the other people once in a while, like because honestly, that’s waste of time and money. Like don’t put your emphasis there, but you segment your list and figure out what people want from you and who’s going to open stuff. And as a result, on that 7500, I run an open rate of about listeners about 62% on a regular basis. Which is incredible.
Cory Miller (00:18:29) – Yeah, indeed. And it all takes work. Websites, take work, emails take a work to properly do it well. So. So you know, a couple of the things I’m interested in. The last 15 years or so you’ve been doing, this is what you’ve seen kind of transition the evolution of WordPress you know, from and websites within that.
Cory Miller (00:18:53) – So you know how WordPress has gone in the last 15 years. Where do you think it is now? Where do you think it’s going in the future, what your clients are seeing and value in as part of having a great web presence? And I’m curious your thoughts on those two things. So the underlying technology has grown 15 years. We just celebrated 20th anniversary of WordPress, which is just fascinating to me. Um, and then, you know, this, this changing perception, I think growing, valuing perception of websites, the value of having a WordPress type website.
Rob Cairns (00:19:29) – So there’s a couple of things. When we all started with WordPress, you and I, it was basically a blogging platform and now we’re building these whole robust membership sites, e-commerce sites, we’re building all this stuff and it’s incredible. And people say, Oh, why don’t you go to an e-commerce platform? Well, I have to tell you, I picked up the paper today, this morning before we jumped on this call. Corey and Shopify, who we all know is one of the big e-commerce products, is in trouble with the Canadian government because they refuse to hand over shopping records to the tax people so they can go after individuals.
Rob Cairns (00:20:10) – And the cool thing about WordPress is that’s all self contained. So as we get into this privacy era, everything’s within your dashboard and you can even buy marketing solutions like Groundhog Adrian, Toby or Fluent CRM, another one that resides right inside that dashboard which protects your privacy and puts you in control. And I think that’s the whole thing about WordPress. The other big thing I’ve seen is a big change in the hosting space. And you’ll agree with me, um, what’s old is good and what hosting companies have reinvented themselves in the last while. And two I like to point out to is one over at New fold and we both of us have a mutual friend there in the name of Dave Ryan at Neufeld. So Dave and his team, I’ve had many dealings with them. They were the old endurance and they came out of that. And they’re trying to reinvent themselves by running around and buying plug ins like they bought Yoast and they bought it and doing things like that. And then important for new fold, they’ve become more community aware than they’ve ever become before.
Rob Cairns (00:21:19) – So this was not the idea of eight years ago or nine years ago. I can guarantee that. And they’ve changed. And then you take somebody like her friends up at GoDaddy and, you know, I know that team pretty well for work I’ve done, and they’ve reinvented themselves. They’ve come out of the ashes of the Danica Patrick ads, as we call them. Remember those? Could you see a sexist ad like that flying in today’s society? I don’t think so.
Cory Miller (00:21:50) – No. We’ve evolved past that for sure for for better.
Rob Cairns (00:21:55) – But they’ve also reinvented themselves. And then even in a hosting space, you got companies like Liquid Web and WP Engine and Cloud, and then you’ve got companies that were leaders that have kind of dropped off. And a company I throw into a group like that is Siteground think, you know. Ten years. Five years ago, they were great. And then somethings kind of happened. So things go cyclical. Um, in terms of the technology more, it’s worth mentioning where we’ve gone.
Rob Cairns (00:22:25) – So we’ve gone from coding and WordPress with plugins to page builders and your team and I think this is one of the first with, with your builder product, right? And themes to, to build sites. And then we got into things like headway, which we all know the story of what happened there and they were part of their problems. They were miles ahead of their time and just not adapted. And then we got into the traditional page builders like the Beaver Builders, the Yeah, Elementor, the bricks, that kind of stuff, which is prominent now. And now we’re headed to this magical thing called blocks. And you know, there’s a couple block ecosystems. The one I use is cadence. I’ve been all in with Cadence for a couple of years now. So there’s evolution, that spot. And I think we’re we’re starting to see more is WordPress is becoming more than just a publishing platform. Automattic owns Tumblr, Automattic owns pocket casts, one of the biggest pocket podcast players out there. They own the day One journal, which is a journaling app, um, would encourage anybody out there who needs a journaling product to go get it.
Rob Cairns (00:23:45) – It’s worth every penny of it, like honestly. So they’re trying to democratize that whole, the whole solution. So, so a lot that’s gone on in 20. Um.
Cory Miller (00:23:59) – Yeah, there’s a whole history there and everything you talked about. I think what stands out was the hosting industry. It’s definitely evolved, grown and a lot of money has come into WordPress hosting space in particular. You talk about new Fold in Endurance, for instance, like it’s turned over, been sold and bought so many acquisitions in the space and for good reason, because WordPress is a great platform for millions of people to build their website on. So but you know, there’s a trend there too, which is you talked about the reinvention and kind of coming out of stuff. What I’ve seen in 15 years plus years or so is. Yeah, it starts out good. Trying to claim her to get new customers. New clients, show them, you know, help them with their stuff. And it seems a lot of cyclical ness of like, okay, they reached this point where now they’re trying to really all the hosting companies, I would say, should make a profit.
Cory Miller (00:25:02) – But then there’s a swath that like, okay, increasingly trying to make it more profitable to understand part of business. However, then you see customer service and support start to kind of fade with some of that and then you get this whole, okay, they’re going down and then going up. And I’ve I’m not going to name the names, but there’s a lot there where you see the cyclical up and down of that hosting side, which isn’t always healthy for WordPress either. I get it as a business part. What they need to do for their shareholders, partners, all that kind of stuff. But it’s definitely changed from like 2008 when I think this was on a shared hosting plan for like, I don’t know, $5 a month or $10 a month at like HostGator. And it’s I’ve kind of bemoaned it some because what the effect now is the experience for the WordPress user, those people that are your clients that are using their website and there’s that up and down. They’ve had to ride some of that and it’s always not good thing for the health of the ecosystem.
Rob Cairns (00:26:06) – It’s true. And the other thing I should add to to this discussion is I think the team up at Automattic, the parent company of WordPress, has been much more receptive to comments, suggestions than ever before. And I know some people don’t feel that way, but I think we’re in really good hands with Josepha being the executive director of the WordPress project, you know, and things like that. And I know on the Gutenberg side I’ve gotten to know Matthias Venture, The Gutenberg lead a little bit and, and people like our friends Polly Hack or people like Jessica Frick over at Percival, which is an automatic company. People like that have put us in pretty good hands, frankly.
Cory Miller (00:26:52) – Yeah, my personal opinion is automatic has long term commitment to the industry and I’m really proud to have them as sponsors a lot of automatic and post status and for good reason. But you know a long term commitment to like they have had the opportunity for many years to really really monetize what WordPress is and have held back. I think this is only my personal opinion.
Cory Miller (00:27:18) – No facts really share other’s leadership there. But get go have had a long term commitment because they believe in open source, they believe in the open web and the ecosystem is healthy. When you have a diverse set of people offering services and products to that, so you get great performance. Obviously they know WordPress inside and out and then the support and those are the things that have that kind of wane over time. In any hosting company that I’ve been, that I’ve been around, I’ve had I’ve been a customer at many of the ones you talked about had clients and friends at many of the ones that you talked about. And but the consistency, I think, is what matters overall. So I agree with you. Agree. Um, okay. So we’ve talked about a whole lot of stuff. Now I want to talk I want to ask this specific question related to your clients. What are you hearing from your clients about WordPress, how they’re using their websites? Because I love talking to our agency owners because tip of the spear for me is the people out there doing the work.
Cory Miller (00:28:20) – For those people using WordPress, they might not even know or care that there’s this open source platform underneath it all. But what are you hearing from your clients about what WordPress and working with the websites?
Rob Cairns (00:28:32) – Yeah, there’s a couple things. I don’t think my clients care what’s under the hood. So by that mean they don’t care if it’s a WordPress site, if it’s a custom site, if it’s something else, as long as it gives them the results they want. So one of the things I’ve been pushing in the community for the last ten years is don’t sell the solution. Sell what it brings you. I’m a big one. Outcome or something, not how you get there. And if anybody doesn’t believe that, I suggest you go look up a guy by the name of Simon Sinek. Start with why is his book and find his Ted talk and watch it and watch it again. So sell the the what you get out of it. So that’s the first one. I also think clients hate to say are dropping the security ball big time right now.
Rob Cairns (00:29:21) – I’m working on a site right now where the client couldn’t find their backup that they were sending to a cloud drive for six days and they took them six days to find out where they put that backup. So one of the things I find with my clients is you have to help them manage their digital assets or their digital stuff, and even more so in small businesses. What happens if the business owner gets run over by a truck tomorrow? What happens if he dies tomorrow? Do you have a succession plan for your business? Do you know how to handle that? Most people don’t. So that’s a problem. And then the other thing is, I think a lot of people flock to WordPress because frankly, what are we powering now? 45% in the Internet, 50% somewhere in there. And I think that alone is a selling thing. That’s attraction. Thing is WordPress is open source. It can’t be secure the security holes every month. Well, guess what? Microsoft Windows plugs security holes on the first Tuesday every month called Patch Tuesday.
Rob Cairns (00:30:27) – And the whole business world runs on Windows more than that. Right. And they’re still plugging holes. Security is a trust factor, not a it happened or it didn’t happen.
Cory Miller (00:30:37) – So I like that because security is a non-essential part of the digital our digital world, particularly our Internet, it’s a part of it. The real question is how are the people or companies behind that making sure it’s always secure. I remember talking to a security expert. I don’t know, it’s been eight years now and they said it’s not a matter this is one that just all they do is security and they go, it’s not a matter of if we’ll get hacked, it’s when and what we’re doing continually. And I go, that’s part of the digital age. That’s where we’re at. So I love that emphasis from your point. It’s just not when it’s if. And what are you doing in the meantime to help proactively do that?
Rob Cairns (00:31:19) – And I’ll take that one more. Corey I have a saying in my business that’s not if you’ll be hacked, it’s when you’ll be hacked.
Rob Cairns (00:31:25) – And how do you recover where I take it? So I kind of look at this mess I’ve been dealing with, and a big part of the problem was the client didn’t have a site updated, the client didn’t have the PHP version updated, the client couldn’t find the backup. You see where this is going? Yep. And it’s we got to take care of those assets and we got to treat them like the they’re important. So that’s that.
Cory Miller (00:31:52) – Just like you would lock your car or your house at night or your car if you’re driving into the supermarket or the grocery store, whatever that is, you’d lock your car because, you know, you do those things. We don’t even think about those things. They’re so embedded now and we need to be doing that. I love this message. We need to be doing that with our digital assets.
Rob Cairns (00:32:11) – We’re a mutual friend of ours. You know, Kathy’s N over at K very well. And I turned to Cathy in January and said, I’m going to make you a prediction.
Rob Cairns (00:32:20) – And she said, Oh, I don’t like your predictions are usually right. And I said, I’m going to declare 2023 as a year of the vulnerability, the first week of January. And that was coming out of the whole LastPass debacle that happened. And we all know about that one. And sure enough, and I think it’s partially awareness, but I think there’s a multitude of factors and it’s kind of played out that way. The other thing I’m hearing from clients is clients don’t realize that websites have to have a budget attached to them for their business. So marketing budget and they say, Oh, we do it in house. And I say, okay, so what’s your hourly rate worth? Oh, it’s worth $40 an hour. How many hours a month do you do? Oh five. So your marketing budget is 40 times five. So that’s the other thing. Business has got to take this stuff seriously and start to budget for.
Cory Miller (00:33:17) – I love that Social Security and then budget, and that’s the mindset.
Cory Miller (00:33:21) – So, you know, a lot of the conversations I’ve been having is the recognition from clients that their website is not just valuable, it’s an integral part of how they do business. Covid accelerated a lot of that. I think it’s like, Hey, we got so many physical location, bricks and mortar type businesses realizing when you can’t actually see a person face to face. So I have two way of a way to be able to do business. So I love that it’s integral. So security, part of life budgeting, you need to budget for it just like you would any other part of your businesses in the essential part of your business. And so many of the agency owners have talked to here at Post Status, they the clients are recognizing that it’s in some of the instances, I would say more like a B2B. They see it’s at a very, very valuable part of their overall sales strategy and they value it deeply. Some run their whole operations or half operations, you know, and items and post those two, we run our whole operation through online space so it feels foreign.
Cory Miller (00:34:26) – But that’s not the way business is traditionally. It’s, you know, you go to a store, you travel, you walk, you ride in a horse and buggy or a car to get to. Things have changed. And that seems like what I’m hearing, too, is that mindset needs a change of like this is all a part of business domains, websites, all the platforms you might be on, all as important as that door that opens up into your business.
Rob Cairns (00:34:51) – 100% and then look at the criticality of it. So, for example, if you’re an e-commerce site that’s making 30,000 US a day profit, then you need a different level of support than somebody that’s got a brochure site that is out there just to be the face of their business. So you got to think about things like that, too. Very much so.
Cory Miller (00:35:12) – Okay, so security and budget. Anything else on your mind about when you when you’re working with clients and how they’re valuing their websites? Any perspectives you have to share there too.
Rob Cairns (00:35:22) – I think a lot of clients in this day and age are unrealistic and think that’s the world we live in. So it’s a very much an I want it now world. It’s I want it yesterday. There’s no patience out there like to tell you I don’t think clients are any different.
Cory Miller (00:35:39) – So. Yeah. So it’s the physical part of business, which I have a friend that has a restaurant supply business and I understand how like when you’re, you know, stove or cooktop is down, they can’t sell. And then now that okay, got to have it now. And that service side is pretty intense for them. I can see that now being applied to the business is where they see it as essential. I want to say that’s a good part, but when it comes with some mindset change of okay, we need to be able to budget for that and pay for that and, and knowing like in the middle of the night or whatever it is to have that kind of service turnaround is not always possible or realistic.
Rob Cairns (00:36:27) – And communication is a big part of it too. I don’t think some clients communicate well, don’t think some agencies communicate well. Like, for example, I’m going on vacation next Wednesday. Yay me, I’ve already sent out an email to my entire client was saying, By the way, the only thing I’ll deal with while I’m away is a website down issue. Everything else sits till I get home and just tell them upfront. Now, they might not like to hear it, but that’s you’re allowed to take time off. You’re allowed to recharge.
Cory Miller (00:36:58) – The good communication, getting ahead of it to manage those expectations? Yeah, absolutely vital. All right, Rob. Well, anything else you want to share that you’re excited about, that you’re working on or doing?
Rob Cairns (00:37:10) – I think the big thing is the security side of it. Think, think. We just got to be aware and and make sure you’re aware and if and if anybody needs help agencies otherwise reach out, be glad to help them and be involved in the community.
Rob Cairns (00:37:25) – That’s a big part of what you and I do. You do not repost status. As you know, I co-manage a large LinkedIn group with Courtney Robertson. I’ve got a podcast that’s, you know, it’s good for business awareness, but it’s also good for the community too. So get involved. The community. Somebody if you can go to a word camp, go says the guy who’s got no time to go to work. Camps right now have not been to a five check by I missed word camp Buffalo Oh boy did I take stuff for not being on that one because that was a that’s an hour and a half away. I didn’t go to Montclair this weekend because, again, I’ve got conflicts. And the other thing is, look after you and your family and look after how you feel. Look after your health. Because if you don’t do that, you can’t run your business. So keep that.
Cory Miller (00:38:14) – Absolutely. Well, thanks, Rob, for being on post staff. Appreciate your work in the community and what you do with WordPress out in the world to our story.
Rob Cairns (00:38:22) – Thanks for having me.
This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.
AI is here to stay so I asked the community about the impact on eCommerce. Listen in to Patrick Rauland, Remkus de Vries, Katie Keith, Kelly Muro and Scott Bowler.
>> The post What Impact Will AI Have on eCommerce? appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community .
All-In-One Security (AIOS), a plugin active on more than a million WordPress sites, was found to be logging plaintext passwords from login attempts in the database and has patched the security issue in version 5.2.0.
In a post titled “Cleartext passwords written to aiowps_audit_log” published to the plugin’s support forum two weeks and five days ago, @c0ntr07 reported the issue:
I was absolutely shocked that a security plugin is making such a basic security 101 error (not to mention being out of compliance with NIST 800-63-3, ISO27000, CIS, HIPAA, GDPR, ….)
How can I stop the logging of clear text passwords?
How can this be fixed so we don’t fail the upcoming security review and audit by our third-party compliance auditors?
A support representative from AIOS confirmed that it was a known bug in the last release and offered a development copy of a zip file with a fix. It took more than two weeks for the patch to be published.
In version 5.2.0, released on July 10, 2023, AIOS included the following security updates in the plugin’s changelog:
Users are advised to update to version 5.2.0+ immediately in order to secure their sites. At the time of publishing, almost no users have updated to 5.2.0+, leaving hundreds of thousands of users who are running 5.1.9 still vulnerable.
“So far the developer haven’t even told the users to change all passwords,” Patchstack CEO Oliver Sild said in response to the issue on Twitter. “Due to the scale, we will 100% see hackers harvest the credentials from the logs of compromised sites that run (or has run) this plugin.
“We have also sent out vulnerability alert to all Patchstack users. Hopefully the Updraft team will do the same and will tell their security plugin users to clean those logs ASAP and ask all the site users to change the passwords where ever they used the same combinations.”
While you can try your best to answer every visitor’s question directly on your site, some will inevitably have questions and need to reach out for help. Or maybe a member of the press wants to set up an interview. Perhaps qualified job candidates want to get in touch.
Whatever the reason, it’s usually a good idea to have a means of contact through your site.
Luckily, you can add a contact form in WordPress to make it a quick and easy process for visitors to reach out. And you can even include special fields to help identify the purpose of each inquiry and respond quickly and effectively.
In this post, we’ll discuss nine simple steps to add a contact form in WordPress. And we’ll tell you about the best ways to prevent fake spam submissions from clogging your inbox. Then, we’ll address the most frequently asked questions concerning contact forms.
The easiest way to add a contact form to your website is to use a WordPress plugin that simplifies the process. You can find tons of free (and paid) options that offer a similar type of service. But, most premium plugins come not only with a simple contact form template, but additional options and advanced features.
Contact Form 7 is a popular choice. While it comes with a steep learning curve for beginners, the tool is free and can be installed on an unlimited number of sites. In addition, it’s important to note that this plugin doesn’t store or save contact form submissions unless you add a second tool called Flamingo.
You can also accept file uploads, display a confirmation message upon submission, and extend the plugin with several add-ons.
But, if you’re looking for a straightforward WordPress contact form plugin that’s quick to learn, Jetpack’s an excellent choice.
It’s a super beginner-friendly tool, since it enables you to add the Form block to your page in the same way that you’d use any other WordPress block. Even better, you get tons of configuration options.
For instance, you’re able to change the confirmation message and redirect users after submission. Additionally, you can continue to edit and reorder the layout of your form even after you’ve added fields to your page.
Plus, Jetpack also has a WordPress comment feature and integrates seamlessly with anti-spam tools like Akismet, enabling you to protect your site from any illegitimate or malicious form submissions.
Since Jetpack is a free plugin, you can install and activate it right within the WordPress dashboard. Simply head to Plugins → Add New. Then, search for “Jetpack”.
Here, it’s the first option that you can see, so go ahead and click on Install Now. This may take a few seconds. Then, select Activate.
At this point, you’re able to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account. If you don’t have a WordPress.com account, it’s quick (and free) to set one up. Then, you can unlock the full potential of the Jetpack tool on your website.
Now that you have Jetpack installed on your site, you’re ready to create a new contact form. You can open an existing page to edit or, if you want to create a dedicated contact page, create a new page by going to Pages → Add New within your WordPress dashboard.
Now, just as you normally would, add a WordPress block to your page by clicking on the + icon. Search for “form” and choose the green Form block.
You’ll then be able to select a template for your form. Jetpack currently supports contact forms, registration forms, feedback forms, and more. For this tutorial, we’ll use the Contact Form.
This will create a basic contact form. Your contact form template will be visible on your page, with Name, Email, and Message fields, along with a submission button.
Now, click on Save or Publish to update your page.
As we mentioned above, the default Jetpack contact form fields include Name, Email, and Message. But, you can customize the form fields if you’d like.
To do so, simply click on the specific form field that you want to change. Then, select the field icon in the toolbar above.
For example, if you’re changing the Name field, this icon will be labeled Name Field.
At this point, you’ll see a whole list of Jetpack fields that you can replace your Name field with.
You might like to swap the default fields for a website URL field, date picker, phone number field, checkboxes, dropdowns, etc.
To make the change, simply click on the new field that you want to add to your form. Then, edit the field label by typing a new name in the text area.
Now, you can also make certain fields a requirement for your visitors to complete. To do this, select your field and click on the asterisk icon in the toolbar.
Or, you can disable this feature by clicking on it a second time. This will make the field optional, and you’ll see that the (required) text beside the Name field has disappeared.
To add an extra field to your form, access the WordPress blocks by clicking on the blue + icon to the left of your screen. Then, search for “Jetpack” to view all the Jetpack form fields.
Now, simply drag your new field into position.
If you want to reorder your existing fields, use the arrows in the toolbar to move fields up or down.
Now, click on Publish or Save to update your contact form.
Now that you’ve customized the fields of your contact form, it’s time to configure the form settings. This way, you can determine the email address where form submissions should be sent. Additionally, you can display a thank you message to visitors that complete your form.
To access your form settings, click on your Form block. It’s important to make sure that you’ve selected the entire form and not just one of your form fields. Now, in the Block settings to your right, you should find the configuration options.
At the very top of your menu, you’ll see Manage Responses. Since you’re just building your form now, you won’t need this yet. But in the future, you can simply click on View Form Responses to view and filter form submissions in your dashboard.
Now, let’s move on to your Submission Settings. Here, you’ll be able to change your form display message. Simply use the On Submission dropdown box to choose Show a custom text message.
Then, in the Message Text box, you can type your thank you message.
Alternatively, you can use the On Submission dropdown menu to choose Redirect to another website. Then, paste the URL in the Redirect Address box.
You can also set the email address where form submissions should be sent in the Email Connection tab.
Here, simply add your email address to receive submissions in your inbox. You can also choose a custom email subject line for these messages. When you’re ready, click on Publish to update your form.
At this point, you’ve created a new contact form, configured your form settings, and customized your field selections. Now you’re all set to style your form by adjusting elements like colors, fonts, sizing, and more.
To access the stylistic settings, select one of your form fields. Then, navigate to the Block settings. Starting out in the Field Settings, you can adjust the specific field width using the available options.
For example, you might want the name and email field to appear on the same line. In which case, you can change each fields’ width to 50% so that both fit on a single line.
Keep in mind that you can use the Sync fields style toggle to make sure that all fields update with the stylistic changes that you make in this section. This enables you to easily create a cohesive look.
Now, under Color, you can set new colors for the field background, field text, label text, and border. It’s important to maintain a contrast between the background and text so that users can clearly see what they type.
But, you can get creative with the combinations, or match the form colors to the rest of your website’s branding.
It’s also easy to change the text size and line height of your fields under Input Field Styles. Meanwhile, Label Styles is where you can make the same changes to your field labels.
If you scroll down to Advanced, you’re able to add custom CSS to apply greater stylistic changes to your form. Again, select Publish to update the form with the styles.
Implementing a contact form on your WordPress website has tons of worthwhile benefits. Still, it does open up your website to one major risk — spam. Not only can spammers and bots interact with your form, they can also target the email addresses that visitors supply in your form fields.
That’s why it’s a good idea to install an anti-spam plugin to prevent spam on your form. Akismet Anti-Spam is an excellent option, developed by Automattic (the team behind WordPress.com).
It integrates seamlessly with the platform as well as plenty of plugins like Jetpack. The Akismet features work automatically, blocking spam with a 99.99 percent accuracy rate.
To get started with Akismet, you’ll need an API key. You can get a free API key if you’re running a personal blog, but for business and commercial sites, you’ll need a paid subscription.
Or, you can get access to Akismet with some of Jetpack’s plans like Jetpack Security, Jetpack Complete, or Jetpack Starter. Once you’ve purchased your package, all you need to do is connect your WordPress site to Jetpack.
Akismet will be activated immediately, but you can check that the plugin is enabled by going to Settings → Akismet Anti-spam from your WordPress admin area.
Here, you can see whether the plugin is active and view the number of spam comments that the tool has blocked. Additionally, you can configure your Akismet settings to display a privacy notice and manage spam more effectively.
Protecting your forms from spammers and bots using Akismet is ideal because it enables you to do so without impacting the user experience.
While some sites try using CAPTCHAs as an alternative, this should be avoided. That’s because this adds unnecessary steps to the process and can deter visitors from filling out your form (more on this later).
Now that you’ve got your contact form ready, let’s take a look at some of the ways that you can add it to your website. For instance, you can add your form to a page. Or, you can add it to your header, footer, or sidebar.
The easiest way to add your contact form to your website is to add it to one of your pages. As we’ve discussed, this is super simple to do with Jetpack, since you can add a form as a WordPress block.
All you need to do is add a new page to your site or open an existing one to edit. Then, click on the + icon to add a new block and search for “form”.
Now, add the Form block to your website and select the Contact Form template. Here, you’ll see the default Jetpack form fields including Name, Email, and Message.
Then, you can configure your form settings to display a thank you message to visitors and specify the email address where you want to receive form submissions. Plus, you can apply styles to the layout to change the color and size of the form.
You can check out how to do this in the main section of the tutorial in steps 4, 5, and 6. But at this point, click on Publish to save your contact form to your page.
The easiest way to add a contact form to your header, footer, or sidebar is to use the Site Editor. In the past, you’d only be able to unlock this level of functionality using custom code, or with plugins.
But for some time now, the Site Editor has made it easy to get your site looking exactly the way you want. The one caveat is that to use the Site Editor, you’ll need to activate a block theme. These themes are composed entirely of WordPress blocks, enabling greater flexibility.
Once you’ve activated a block theme, you can open the Site Editor by heading to Appearance → Editor in your dashboard. Then, click on Template Parts.
Here, you can click on any template part, but we’re going to select Header.
Next, click on the pencil icon to launch your header in the editor.
Now, click on the + icon to add a new block to your header. Select the Jetpack Form block.
Then, choose Contact Form. Now, you should see the WordPress contact form template appear in your theme’s header.
To the right of the editor, you can configure and customize your form using the instructions in steps 4, 5, and 6 of the main tutorial in this article. Meanwhile, you can edit and add fields via the toolbar.
For example, since you have limited space, you might make your form super simple, getting rid of unnecessary fields.
Additionally, you can reduce the size of fields so that you can make your contact form fit nicely within your website header.
As mentioned above, the easiest way to add a WordPress contact form to your header, footer, or sidebar is to use the Site Editor. This is recommended since the Site Editor enables you to edit templates and template parts without code (or additional plugins).
But, if you don’t want to make the switch to a block theme, you can still add a contact form to your header, footer, or sidebar.
First, you’ll need to open the WordPress Customizer, so navigate to Appearance → Customize in your dashboard. Now, click on Widgets.
The widget areas that you can edit depends on the theme you’re using. For instance, some themes might give you access to your header while others only let you tweak your sidebar or footer.
Click on your preferred widget area (like your footer) and then select the + icon to add a new block.
Here, find the Jetpack Form block and add it to the footer. You should now see the default form layout appear in your footer.
To the left of your screen, select the Contact Form template and your footer will update instantly.
Then, you can change or add fields and mark fields as required using the toolbar. Plus, if you select the entire form block, you can select Show more settings.
Here, you can configure a thank you message, manage form submissions, and apply stylistic settings to your form. For full details, check out sections 4, 5, and 6 of the main tutorial.
At this stage, it’s important to test your form to make sure that it’s working properly. To do this, first make sure to save your latest changes. Then, click on Publish to make your form accessible to users online.
Now, you’ll need to log out of WordPress and view your website on the front end. Once you’ve logged out successfully, open a new browser window and enter your site’s URL.
If you’ve added your form to a page, you’ll need to enter the specific page URL. But, if you’ve added a contact form to your header or footer, just type your general web address.
Now, locate your contact form on your site.
This will show how your form currently appears to visitors. To test it thoroughly, enter your own details and click on the Contact Us button.
Now, you should be able to see the custom thank you message that you set up in step 5 of the tutorial.
You can log back into WordPress to view the form submission. As discussed, you’ll find this information by clicking on the View Form Responses button within the editor where you created the form.
Alternatively, you can also access form submissions by going to Feedback → Form Responses in your dashboard.
Here, you should see the test response that you submitted.
Although we’ve tried to show you a highly comprehensive guide to adding a contact form in WordPress, you might still have some questions. So, let’s take a look at some of the most frequently asked questions (and answers) regarding this topic.
Yes. There are plenty of free contact form plugins for WordPress including Contact Form 7 and Jetpack. While Contact Form 7 is a great choice for more experienced users to create advanced forms, Jetpack is the best content form plugin for beginners. It’s super simple to install and configure your forms. Plus, you can enable Akismet spam protection to prevent spam submissions on your form.
By far, the easiest way to create a contact form in WordPress is with a plugin like Jetpack. This is because a dedicated WordPress form plugin gives you access to an intuitive form builder. This way, you can design your form visually, dragging fields where they need to sit on your page.
But, if you don’t want to use a contact form plugin, you can do it yourself using WordPress core functionality. This method is only suitable for advanced users that have some knowledge of CSS, HTML and PHP.
Additionally, you’ll be required to code all the error handling and form field validation if you decide to create a contact form without a plugin. This makes the manual route far more complex and time-consuming than the alternative.
There are tons of ways to optimize your WordPress contact form conversion rate. For example, you can limit the number of form fields. Then, when visitors see that your form is super quick and easy to complete, they may be more likely to convert.
Additionally, it’s important to make your form layout simple and clear. Plus, it’s a good idea to check that your forms are mobile-friendly. This is especially vital since over 60 percent of the global population uses a mobile device to go online.
The easiest way to prevent spam submissions on your contact forms is to use an AI-powered solution like Akismet. Not only does Akismet block spam with 99.99 percent accuracy, it also enables you to maintain a smooth user experience (as opposed to alternatives like CAPTCHA).
While Akismet works seamlessly with Jetpack Forms, you can install the plugin on any website (regardless of your preferred contact form plugin). All you need to do is head to Plugins → Add New.
Then, search for “Akismet”. Once you find Akismet Anti-Spam: Spam Protection, simply click on Install Now → Activate.
If you decide to add a contact form in WordPress using Jetpack, you’ll see the Akismet Anti-Spam link appear beneath the Jetpack tab of your WordPress dashboard.
Then, you can set up your Akismet account, or enter the API supplied with your Jetpack plan.
Some website owners like to implement CAPTCHA to protect against bots. This involves adding extra steps to prevent spammers and bots from completing your forms. For instance, users might need to complete tasks, solve equations, or answer questions.
But, there are some reasons why you should avoid CAPTCHA, and instead, opt for a more user-friendly alternative. For starters, these additional steps create greater friction since they require more time and effort from legitimate visitors who want to complete your form.
This can explain why Moz found that CAPTCHA can lead to a notable drop in conversions. Meanwhile, ConvertKit discovered that you can preserve a positive user experience (UX) by using Akismet.
Akismet is developed by Automattic (the same team behind WordPress.com). This AI-powered solution offers a non-intrusive way to block spam on your contact forms.
Akismet is an easy-to-use complete solution for spam detection and prevention. Not only will the plugin block spam on your contact forms, but it will also detect and block spam from all the comment forms on your site.
Akismet is developed by the same team that created WordPress.com. Therefore, it works seamlessly with the platform. Better yet, rather than disrupt the UX, Akismet is a spam solution that works automatically, in the background of your site.
If you aren’t using Akismet, you’ll likely rely on solutions like CAPTCHA or reCAPTCHA. These protocols can hinder your form conversion rate since they demand more time and effort from your visitors.
What’s more, Akismet blocks spam with a 99.99 percent accuracy rate.
As you can see, over a hundred million websites actively use Akismet. It’s one of the most popular anti-spam solutions out there.
Plus, Akismet is trusted by some of the biggest companies in the world, including Microsoft, ConvertKit, Bluehost, and WordPress.com. What’s more, there are plenty of plans to choose from, so you’re sure to find an ideal solution for your website needs.
Without a contact form, your website visitors might have to go through a lengthy, complex process to ask you a simple question. This can be frustrating and lead to a negative user experience.
Fortunately, you can improve your WordPress website by adding a simple contact form. The easiest way to get started is with a contact form plugin like Jetpack.
Using the Jetpack Form block, you can easily customize your form’s appearance, generate a thank you page, or redirect users upon submission. Plus, you can protect your business and your customers by using an anti-spam plugin like Akismet.
Akismet enables you to prevent spam in your comments and forms, without interfering with the user experience. Better yet, it’s super simple to install and configure, since it works automatically. You’ll also get access to a feature that outright blocks spam, saving you disk space and speeding up your site. Check out our Enterprise solution today!
WordPress’ Community Team kicked off its experimental mentorship program this week, announcing that the inaugural cohort has been assigned to a group of mentors who will guide them forward on project contribution across various teams.
“Our mentors offer 1:1 support to each contributor in our cohort,” Automattic-sponsored Community Team contributor Hari Shanker R said. “These mentors check-in with mentees each week to offer them support and guidance on the program and to answer any questions that they may have.”
Mentees graduate from the program after completing self-directed courses, participating in “learn-up” sessions, selecting a contributor team, and making an initial contribution to the team. Optionally, mentors may guide their mentees through a three-month contribution plan. The goal is to create new ongoing contributors through the program.
A group of 13 mentees have been selected from 50 applications and will participate across eight teams, including Core, Training, Community, Documentation, Photos, Test, Polyglots, and Support.
“While our group is not in a position to assign mentors to everyone, the activities and tasks of our cohort will be shared in the newly-formed #contributor-mentorship channel of the Make/WordPress Slack, where interested folks can join most of our contributing sessions and onboarding sessions which will also be shared widely with our community.”
Other open source projects, such as Drupal, have supported mentoring programs that have been used to successfully engage new contributors at events, inspire more collaboration, and foster a learning environment.
Earlier this year the Linux Foundation published a report from a recent study on Mentorship in Open Source. It surveyed more than 100 mentees from the LFX Mentorship graduating class of 2020 and 2021, and 99% reported the program was beneficial. Nearly half of the graduates (47%) said it helped them get a job.
The report explores the additional benefits of mentorship programs beyond increasing contribution to the open source project itself. Quality mentorship programs can have an economic and career impact on mentees, as well as increase diversity across the project and help new contributors get more connected to the community.
WordPress’ Community team has already invested time from 22 facilitators and 13 mentors in getting the program launched. The structure offers a somewhat more formal experience similar to a short internship, but it’s still in the early stages and may change based on feedback from participants.
“This program is an experiment—our hope is to learn as much as possible from the same to improve mentorship in the WordPress project and to support and empower more contributors,” Shanker said.
[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case how to internationalize your WordPress code.
If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea featured on the show. Head to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox. And use the form there.
So on the podcast today we have Carrie Dils. Carrie is a WordPress loving freelance developer with modern 20 years experience in web development and full scope WordPress projects. She teaches WordPress and front-end development courses for LinkedIn learning and blogs regularly about WordPress, and the business of freelancing.
This is another of the podcast interviews, which were recorded at WordCamp Europe in Athens. It took place soon after Carrie had completed her workshop at the event. This workshop was entitled international appeal, making your themes and plugins translatable.
WordCamp workshops are practical hands-on sessions. Carrie’s intention here was to make the audience aware of ways in which they could translate their code into other languages. Specifically it was to assist developers in localising their themes and plugins so that they could be consumed and understood by a wider audience. It covered translation functions for PHP and JavaScript, and a foundational understanding of how the process of localization works.
We started the podcast with some orientation, getting to grips with what internationalisation is in the context of WordPress. Carrie explains that there are workflows already available for developers to use to translate their plugins and themes. This enables their clients or customers to switch between languages in the admin interface so that they can understand more about what they’re doing.
Carrie talks about the fact that, although she’s not aware of any legal compulsion to carry out this internationalisation work, it’s very useful for consumers of your code. They will be able to rely on a language that’s familiar to them, and not always have to fall back on English. We get into the weeds a little as Carrie explains the foundations of how the translations actually work, and how developers can tap into this.
The fact that WordPress is so popular means that it’s in a great position to make the internet a more inclusive space. Part of that is making people from all over the world. Understand how WordPress, and the tools built on top of it, works.
Carrie says that it’s not about trying to translate every part of your plugin into the 200 plus languages which WordPress supports. It’s more about doing what you can, when you can, for those people who can benefit from it.
Carrie’s talk will at some point make it onto wordpress.tv, so you can see it there for yourself, but until that’s available she lays out some of the places where you can go to get support around this subject. The plugin and theme handbooks are an ideal place to start that journey.
We get into a chat about which languages are spoken most widely and how Carrie thinks about which languages to pick. If your resources are limited. She points out that as a developer, you’re building in the capability to have your code translated, and the actual work of making those translations can be handled by others if your code is created correctly.
Given that AI is always a hot topic, we digress a little towards the end about how the work of translations is likely to become more automated as large language models take on the burden of translating content and assisting in the writing of code.
If you’re a developer who is curious about making your code available to a wider audience through internationalisation, this podcast is for you.
If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
And so without further delay, I bring you Carrie Dils.
I am joined on the podcast today by Carrie Dils. Hello, Carrie.
[00:05:12] Carrie Dils: Howdy, howdy.
[00:05:13] Nathan Wrigley: We are in Athens at the WordCamp EU celebration, 2023. Carrie’s just walked into the room and told me that she’s finished her workshop. How did it go?
[00:05:24] Carrie Dils: It went well. The rooms are kind of set up classroom style, well with desk like these that we’ve got sitting in front of us, so attendees could bust out their laptops and get on the wifi and participate. And it was small enough that acoustically, if they had questions and weren’t miced, it was okay.
[00:05:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. What’s the difference between a workshop and a presentation?
[00:05:42] Carrie Dils: Well, so in theory a workshop is meant to be more hands-on, practical. Whereas a presentation is just sort of receiving information, a workshop might be actually doing something with the information that you’re getting. Workshops came in two flavors, a fifty minute and a, I guess roughly two times that, so a two hour workshop.
I was in a 50 minute slot and it’s a little difficult to do anything truly interactive, and I wasn’t sure how many attendees there would be. So mine was probably closer to presentation and workshop, but I tried to throw in some interactive elements.
[00:06:20] Nathan Wrigley: You were one of the early ones as well, so at least you’ve got it out the way. You can now enjoy the rest of the conference.
[00:06:26] Carrie Dils: Right, right.
[00:06:27] Nathan Wrigley: What was the subject?
[00:06:28] Carrie Dils: Internationalization in WordPress. So making your plugins and your themes translatable. So basically from a coding perspective, there are functions that you can use so that if someone wanted to take all of the text strings from a theme or a plugin, and translate them into another language, they could do that.
[00:06:51] Nathan Wrigley: So this was a talk specifically aimed at theme developers and plugin developers, as opposed to sort of end users who might use a plugin to translate their own site.
[00:06:59] Carrie Dils: Right. So the internationalization, which you might commonly hear that, with the word localization. So think of internationalization is the piece that a developer does when creating a theme or plugin. Localization is the process of then translating it into other languages.
Not to be confused with multilingual websites, where the actual content of a website is translated into other language. That’s actually a different process.
[00:07:26] Nathan Wrigley: So is this then a process of assisting developers to ensure that their products are usable by people all over the world?
[00:07:36] Carrie Dils: Exactly. So imagine, when I first started using WordPress. I didn’t know any better and you needed to do something and you just edited files directly, like edit the core files directly, edit the theme file directly. And I very quickly learned the first time I pushed that update button that it’s not meant to do that.
But if you want to think about translating the software into other languages, it’s impractical to go make a duplicate code base just to change, forget your password as an English phrase into say a Spanish or a German translation of that. You don’t need to copy all of WordPress just to change that one bit of text. So the way it is written with these translation functions enables others to then go in and grab those strings without touching the original code base.
[00:08:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Do you know if there’s any jurisdictional, legal requirements to do this? So if you’re launching a product into the WordPress space, you are basically launching a product throughout the planet. Anybody can buy it anywhere. And the only two examples that cropped up into my head were, for example, in Canada where I believe everything has to be translated into French and English. If you are selling something there, if you put up signage or what have you.
And also in the UK, if you’re in Wales, Welsh and English would be another example. I didn’t know if there were guidelines around that. If you are a plugin developer, theme developer, whatever you are doing in the WordPress space where you potentially might be breaking law in different parts of the world?
[00:09:05] Carrie Dils: That’s a great question. To my knowledge the answer is no. There are no legal requirements. It’s not like accessibility where there are laws around site accessibility. Really because we’re not necessarily talking in the case, the examples you’re giving, that’s the end user. End user facing copy. Whereas this is more behind the scenes. So imagine what you would see in WP admin, that sort of thing.
[00:09:30] Nathan Wrigley: So I guess you had to get into the thick of the code, and put coding examples up to demonstrate. And I’m also guessing that most of this is built into WordPress. You are just leveraging things that are already there, or maybe not. Maybe you are extending the functionality that ships with WordPress.
[00:09:45] Carrie Dils: No, and it actually goes beyond WordPress. I’m going to get real nerdy on you. There is something called gettext and it is open source. It’s licensed under, GNU. I can’t say GNU without thinking of Gary Gnu that does the news from Giggle Snort Hotel. Now I’m showing my age. If you’re listening to this and are not familiar with that, this was children’s programming in the seventies.
So anyways Gary Gnu has the news, and there is something called gettext. And this is a sort of universally recognized system for writing translatable code. WordPress uses gettext and has its own kind of wrapper functions around that. So what we’re talking about is not, while there are functions that are unique to the WordPress ecosystem, the concept of internationalizing your code goes well beyond WordPress, and WordPress uses gettext, which is what most software languages use.
[00:10:41] Nathan Wrigley: I’m guessing the fact that you’ve done a talk about it indicates that you think it’s not being used as often as it perhaps should be?
[00:10:49] Carrie Dils: So I’m always going to come at things from a education, knowledge is power perspective. It’s quite possible that people may be listening to this and have already used, seen translation functions, and just didn’t know what they were.
For instance, if you see a double underscore, parenthesis and then some string of text in there, well, that double underscore parenthesis is a translation function. So it’s less about trying to convince people to use it, more educating that it exists and what are the reasons that it’s important to use it.
So WordPress powers over 40% of the web, I think around 43% at last count. Interestingly, if you go to wordpress.org/stats, s t a t s, there’s lots of details there about WordPress installs, and one of those is what language is WordPress, what locale is being used. And I think it’s around 55% are not in English.
So WordPress is global software. It’s used all around the world. And I love especially talking about this topic at WordCamp Europe, where we have so many languages, and cultures represented. And making WordPress available in around 200 different locales. And that’s the job of the Polyglots team. So if you go to make.wordpress.org, the Polyglots team is who’s in charge for making WordPress translatable.
And it’s of course volunteers from all of these different locales that are bringing it to life in their language. But if you’ve ever gone to say the settings page of your WordPress admin, there’s a little box that says what language would you like your site in? If you were to choose another language, one of those 200 languages that exist, then everything in the admin will be displayed in that locale.
The education piece is that it is global. It is used around the world and the process of internationalizing your code is what makes it possible to have your code exist in other languages.
[00:12:55] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s really easy to think about the fact that, well you and I both obviously native English speakers. More or less everything that I’ve ever endeavored to do with WordPress has been in English. If a plugin comes, or a theme comes and everything is displayed in English, I’m entirely happy. That’s fine by me. But I guess we are excluding a bunch of people for whom that obstacle is simply too high.
You’ll be presented with a bunch of options. Some of it probably in quite technical language, and if the developer hasn’t made the effort to translate it into some additional languages, I’m guessing in most cases, you’re not advocating while it’s 200 or nothing.
[00:13:33] Carrie Dils: Right.
[00:13:33] Nathan Wrigley: Maybe pick some low hanging fruit if you like. That’s just part of the job of WordPress. If we are going to endeavor to be truly international, that work has to be done. But how did you get interested in this? How come you are doing a presentation about this particular subject given the panoply of things that you could have picked?
[00:13:50] Carrie Dils: So I’ve been working with WordPress for over a decade now, and early into that I was introduced at, it was WordCamp Austin, actually, I think 2013 or 14. I was introduced to the idea of web accessibility, and specifically what accessibility looks like in WordPress. And if somebody’s listening and they’re not familiar, accessibility is basically writing both from a code perspective and from a design and presentation, really soup to nuts, your website. Making it accessible for anyone to use regardless of what kind of device they’re on, if they’re on a laptop, a mobile phone or a screen reader.
So making the web accessible and I was just so glad somebody told me that that was something that was important, because I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
So extend that idea that the mission of WordPress is to democratize publishing. Well, how do you democratize publishing to someone who doesn’t speak English and sees software, to your point, we’re happy when it’s, when it’s in English. But if you’re seeing all these technical words or, you know, whatever it is. You’re walking through the WP admin experience and it’s not in a language that you’re comfortable navigating, well then your power to publish is diminished.
So I think of it in terms of, or I guess that’s where I got interested in it, is sort of, I don’t know that most people would consider it a branch of accessibility, but in my mind it’s related.
[00:15:23] Nathan Wrigley: So let’s imagine that I’ve been listening to this and found it persuasive. Okay, I’ve got a plugin, I’ve got a theme, what have you. But I’ve made no effort to translate anything. And I think, okay, I should. I should begin this journey. How straightforward is it? Does WordPress provide the tools and the infrastructure and the file types and whatever else is going on? Is it fairly easy to drop into this? Is there documentation which is up to date to make it straightforward? Or is this one of those impossibly difficult to find pieces of documentation? And if it’s easy to find, where is it?
[00:15:53] Carrie Dils: That’s a great question, and it’s easy to find. So if you go toward wordpress.org, there’s the plugin handbook, and there’s also the theme handbook. And both of those handbooks have sections on how to internationalize your code.
So I’m going to take your question a step further. As someone who is creating products to be distributed maybe for, you know, you’re selling your theme or your plugin. Writing your code in a way that it can be translated into other languages, increases your user base. It makes it accessible to people in other places, right?
So as the plugin or theme developer, I don’t necessarily have to go, my job is to write my code in a way that it can be translated. Other people can do their translations. I don’t have to necessarily ship my code with a ton of translations.
[00:16:45] Nathan Wrigley: So you are not suggesting that the burden to get these 200 languages out there is always going to be on the shoulders of the developer. You could ship something and let the community take it over. If this was an important plugin that you developed, which it turns out 40% of all WordPress websites wish to use, it could be a community effort to do that?
[00:17:02] Carrie Dils: Absolutely. If your customer base is international, then you might want to ship it, you know, with language packs, or the translations for, the locales where your customers live. That would just be common sense.
[00:17:15] Nathan Wrigley: It’s a little bit off piste, which languages would you say, matter is the wrong word, but do you know what I mean? So obviously English has become the lingua franca of WordPress. By default Most things happen in English. And we come to this event, and although we are in Athens, everything’s largely in English.
What are the languages which seem to dominate internationally that you would say, okay, if you’re a developer and you wish to get your things translated, do these ones first, because you’ll have the biggest reach. Now obviously if your product is designed for Hungarian users, probably Hungarian’s the first one to go for. But broadly speaking, if you’re just trying to open it up to the world, English, and then where do we go from there?
[00:17:55] Carrie Dils: Well, as I was doing some research for my session, I was looking statistically, I think about 13% and please, anybody listening to this that says she is very wrong right now. I acknowledge that I am probably very wrong right now. But I’m going to say it’s maybe 13% of the world’s population speaks English. Making it one of the largest, but not the largest. And again, I’m sure I’m about to say something wrong, I think Chinese, specifically Cantonese.
To your question, I’m not entirely sure. I think it would be more about what market are you trying to go after. I had the experience, maybe seven or eight years ago, of releasing a commercial theme. One of the goals I was trying to accomplish was, one, to create a theme that was accessible, and two, to create a theme that was translation ready.
And it was a learning experience for me, and I was able to collaborate. I put out a call to my network, to friends that don’t speak English natively, and asked them for translations. So I ended up shipping my theme with, I want to say eight to ten different translations ready to roll. And some of those, this was the particularly interesting bit for me, some of those are scripts that read right to left, versus read left to right, like English.
So depending on, I’m about to blow your mind, Nathan. Depending on the language, you may need to make layout changes to the front end of the site. So imagine you’ve got a content right sidebar for a site. Well, if you are switching to a right to left script like Hebrew, or Arabic. You would then detect if the language was loaded in one of these RTL scripts and reverse the layout accordingly. So there’s like a separate CSS file for rTL scripts. Isn’t that kind of fascinating?
[00:19:55] Nathan Wrigley: That is really fascinating actually, and also probably quite a bit of additional work. That’s my next question actually. We live in a very commercial WordPress now. I think if you and I were having this conversation 10 years ago, the whole commercial side of WordPress was far less significant. There’s now a lot of money tied up in WordPress. And you alluded earlier to this, you said that you could, you can open up your plugin, theme, whatever it may be, to a wider audience.
So I guess somebody listening to this might want to know, okay, how much work is this and what’s the payback? Is it easy to do this? If I pick these two or three popular languages, will I be able to achieve this in a matter of days? Do I need to employ professional transcribers or translators. And will I receive a return on by investment? Like I said, this question probably wouldn’t have occurred 10 years ago. Do you understand the motivation for this might be quite low on the pecking order?
[00:20:44] Carrie Dils: Yes. So it’s relatively low effort, Nathan. So think of, as developers, there are best practices for the way that we write code. Maybe it’s the way that we structure our comment. I mean, there are actually WordPress coding standards for how things should be formatted and all of that.
So using translation functions in your code is really just the best practice. It’s low effort to do as a developer. It’s very approachable. And again, the burden of doing the translations into other languages, you don’t necessarily have to do that piece, but of course that, if you know that you have a user base in a particular locale, it would probably behoove you to provide those translations out of the gate with your product.
But in terms of what’s the return, I’m not entirely sure. I don’t have any statistics that speak to that. But certainly from a goodwill aspect, that is there. And also, take away some of the arrogance factor, acknowledging that there are users that may be using your product that are not native English speakers.
So just providing that as part of your code base is a pretty, I don’t want to say easy, because that’s an overused word. It depends on who you are if it’s easy. But if you are already a WordPress developer used to writing code, chances are you’ve copy and pasted a translation function, or a texturing that was wrapped in a translation function and maybe you didn’t know that’s what it was.
[00:22:14] Nathan Wrigley: It is June in 2023, so it’s impossible to have a conversation without the words AI. Will there be a place for AI in this? Because it does seem, the burden may not be the coding side. It may literally be, well we haven’t got the finances to get the text translated. We don’t have any expertise in that area, and we don’t know people who can speak Hebrew, Arabic, whatever.
So there’s a cost to that. I’m just wondering if that might well be brought down by things like AI. I’m thinking, you know, you can throw things into Google Translate and out it comes with the correct answer. I just wonder what your thoughts are on that. Whether that’s going to assist this endeavor.
I mean, I can imagine, I can really imagine a future in which we go to ChatGPT, or some variant thereof, and say translate my site’s admin area into Hungarian, for example. And it will wrap all the functions correctly and do it all for you. That sounds like a, possible future.
[00:23:08] Carrie Dils: I think so I have done zero experimentation in that regard, but I don’t see why it couldn’t. Because you can train AI, right? So if you’re training it on specifically what these functions are, and how you use them. I don’t know why it couldn’t take and theoretically generate both the code. And then on the translation side, to your point, Google Translate already exists. I think the issue right now at least at this stage with AI translations, you lose context.
So imagine, I gave this example in my workshop, so the word lead, L E A D in English has multiple meanings. I could be leading a presentation. I could get a sales lead for my product. I could have my dog on a leash, and it’s called a lead. So if you were just to tell Google Translate, hey translate the word lead into these 10 languages, who knows. There’s a reason for the phrase lost in translation. So I think probably that’s the first shortcoming I could see with the current state of affairs. Obviously, I think that could be addressed and would be really interesting to see what the applications are with AI.
[00:24:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it just feels like a fairly decent shortcut. In that, given everything that we’ve said before about how it would be, well, I’m going to use the word honorable. It would be an honorable thing to do to translate your plugin into the 200 plus languages that WordPress can accept.
Now, I realize in most cases that’s probably off the table. But if technology could assist in that effort, and you did have the time to double check to make sure that lead meant lead and not lead, if you know what I mean. Then that seems like a win-win because there’s just no downside to that.
[00:24:53] Carrie Dils: Exactly. Nobody ever cried because your site was faster or more accessible. Yeah, so it’s doing that. There’s not really a downside to it.
[00:25:02] Nathan Wrigley: Where would you direct us? I’m a plugin developer, a theme developer. You have mentioned the handbook, but I wonder if there’s other things out there. So there might be, I don’t know, YouTube channels or other documentation, maybe some books or something that you’ve written. I don’t know. Is there anything else that you would point people towards? And I will include whatever you say into the show notes so people can just click.
[00:25:21] Carrie Dils: I can provide you with a handful of articles on my site that I’ve written. I also have a class if I, just shameless plug, a course on LinkedIn learning on this topic, where I’m teaching more specifically exactly what these translation functions are. When you would use them, et cetera.
And I also met a gentleman this morning, Toby, whose last name I didn’t catch, but he’s presenting tomorrow on the same topic. And then of course in theory the workshop will end up on TV?
[00:25:51] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So by the time this podcast episode airs, typically, the WordPress TV won’t have caught up to that, but should it change at some point in the future, I will make the effort to update the show notes.
Another thing which people have in mind when we talk about translations in WordPress is Gutenberg’s stage four. Now, I realize there’s not a perfect overlap here because that’s more about changing the, well, my understanding, at least anyway, is that’s more about changing the content.
[00:26:16] Carrie Dils: Yes.
[00:26:16] Nathan Wrigley: How do you feel more broadly, the WordPress project more generally, in terms of accessibility and being able to read it in different languages? I know that’s a way off. It feels like three, phase three that we’re in at the moment could take decade or more to actually finish. I mean, it’s quite complicated, the concurrent editing, I think.
But are you fairly bullish that WordPress is going to be at the vanguard of this in the future? I know that we’ve been talking about the internals, the plugins and what have you, but broadly speaking, on the front end, how do you feel about phase four?
[00:26:46] Carrie Dils: I won’t overstep my bounds and pretend like I know more than I do about it. That said, when Matt laid out the four phases of Gutenberg, however many years ago that was. The project has continued to follow that roadmap, albeit maybe not at the quickest clip. So I have faith that will happen.
[00:27:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:27:04] Carrie Dils: At some point in the future. And that that works towards the WordPress mission of democratizing publishing. I don’t know exactly what, practically speaking, what shape that takes.
Oh, here’s a resource for you, and people who would know. Polyglots, I mentioned them earlier, the Make WordPress team. They have a Slack channel. They have weekly meetings. If you were to go to the Polyglot section on wordpress.org, that would probably be the place to tune in and, they would have much better information than me.
[00:27:34] Nathan Wrigley: Carrie, you’ve been very helpful. You’ve provided me with a question. I know that you wanted to mention that there’s been some updates recently. Well not recently, fairly long time ago, five years I think you mentioned, in the way that you can actually implement these things. You mentioned that it was only possible in PHP until five years ago, something like that. But now you can do this in JavaScript if that’s your thing. Talk to us about that.
[00:27:55] Carrie Dils: Yes. So earlier I mentioned the gettext library, sort of the standard for writing translation functions. And that’s common across many programming languages. WordPress is written primarily in PHP and JavaScript. And up until WordPress 5.0, there was no mechanism for translating JavaScript, only for translating strings that were included in PHP files.
So now, behold. If you love JavaScript and you love to learn JavaScript deeply, now you can also learn to translate, or include translatable strings in, your JavaScript. And they’re actually, it’s a subset of the functions that are available in PHP, but they work identically.
[00:28:37] Nathan Wrigley: And so all of that’s again, in the documentation. If we go to the resources in the show notes, we’ll be able to find all of that.
[00:28:42] Carrie Dils: Absolutely, yes. The handbooks are really, it might take you a little bit of digging around or jumping, jumping around pages, but yes.
[00:28:51] Nathan Wrigley: Carrie, thank you so much for talking to us today. Before we part ways, if somebody has listened to this, is interested, wants to find out more, but wants to come directly to you, how do they do that?
[00:29:01] Carrie Dils: Twitter is probably where I hang out the most, and my handle is super simple, c d i l s.
[00:29:09] Nathan Wrigley: You got in early.
[00:29:10] Carrie Dils: Yes, I’ve been on for quite a while. And then I’m also on Mastodon, on the wpbuilds.social @cdils.
[00:29:18] Nathan Wrigley: Carrie Dils, really appreciate you talking to us today. Thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of the conference.
[00:29:24] Carrie Dils: Thank you, Nathan. Great chatting with you.
On the podcast today we have Carrie Dils.
Carrie is a WordPress-loving freelance developer with more than twenty years experience in web development, and full-scope WordPress projects. She teaches WordPress and front-end development courses for LinkedIn Learning, and blogs regularly about WordPress and the business of freelancing.
This is another of the podcast interviews which were recorded at WordCamp Europe in Athens. It took place soon after Carrie had completed her workshop at the event. This workshop was entitled ‘International Appeal: Making Your Themes and Plugins Translatable’.
WordCamp workshops are practical, hands-on, sessions. Carrie’s intention here was to make the audience aware of ways in which they could translate their code into other languages. Specifically it was to assist developers in localising their themes and plugins so that they could be consumed and understood by a wider audience. It covered translation functions for PHP and JavaScript, and a foundational understanding of how the process of localisation works.
We started the podcast with some orientation; getting to grips with what internationalisation is in the context of WordPress. Carrie explains that there are workflows already available for developers to use to translate their plugins and themes. This enables their clients or customers to switch between languages in the admin interface so that they can understand more about what they’re doing.
Carrie talks about the fact that, although she’s not aware of any legal compulsion to carry out this internationalisation work, it’s very useful for consumers of your code. They will be able to rely on a language that’s familiar to them, and not always have to fall back on English. We get into the weeds a little as Carrie explains the foundations of how the translations actually work, and how developers can tap into this.
The fact that WordPress is so popular means that it’s in a great position to make the internet a more inclusive space. Part of that is making people from all over the world understand how WordPress, and the tools built on top of it, works. Carrie says that it’s not about trying to translate every part of your plugin into the two hundred plus languages which WordPress supports, it’s more about doing what you can, when you can, for those people who can benefit from it.
Carrie’s talk will at some point make it onto WordPress.tv so you can see it for yourself, but until that’s available she lays out some of the places where you can go to get support around this subject. The plugin and theme handbooks are an ideal place to start that journey.
We get into a chat about which languages are spoken most widely, and how Carrie thinks about which languages to pick if your resources are limited. She points out that as a developer you’re building in the capability to have your code translated, and the actual work of making those translations can be handled by others if your code is created correctly.
Given that AI is always a hot topic, we digress a little towards the end about how the work of translations is likely to become more automated as large language models take on the burden of translating content and assisting in the writing of code.
If you’re a developer who is curious about making your code available to a wider audience through internationalisation, this podcast is for you.
LinkedIn Learning course by Carrie
If you are sponsoring either WordCamp Europe, US or Asia we can help you get the word out pre-, post- and during the event.
>> The post New Sponsorship Opportunity, WordCamp Media Friend appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community .
The State of Digital Publishing, a startup market research publisher focused on digital media, is hosting an online event called WordPress Publishers Performance Summit (WPPS) on July 27, starting at 2PM EST. The organization’s mission is to help publishers develop sustainable business models through education, guides, online courses, and other resources. They have partnered with Multidots, a WordPress development agency and WordPress.com VIP Gold Partner, who is sponsoring the event.
WPPS will feature 10 panelists speaking on best practices for managing and optimizing the performance of WordPress publishing sites. Panelists have been selected from high performance teams at The Boston Globe, Forbes, Multidots, WordPress.com VIP, Parse.ly, and other publishers.
The schedule includes four 40-minute sessions over the span of four hours:
These sessions will be aimed at editorial and content strategists, SEO specialists, ad tech and integration professionals, and others working in the publishing industry.
WPPS is free and attendees can register on the event’s website. Unlike many other virtual events, the organizers do not plan to record the sessions so those who are interested will need to watch them live. Participants will have the opportunity to ask questions and have them answered by the panel. Those who are unable to attend live can sign up on the website to receive an ebook with the panelists’ recommended WordPress best practices that were shared at the event.
WordPress 6.3 will make site editing several clicks faster for users who are moving from the frontend to edit the corresponding template. When you click the “Edit Site” link in the admin bar from a category page, for example, you currently get dumped out into the Site Editor on the home page. From here it’s several clicks more to get to the template you intended to edit. The upcoming release changes it so that the “Edit Site” link is aware of the current template.
WordPress developer Brian Coords pointed out the fix on Twitter today. It’s a delightful bit of good news for anyone who works regularly with the Site Editor and becomes annoyed by how long it takes to click through to the applicable template. WordPress is now more context aware, delivering site editors to the correct template directly from the admin bar.
The update applies to posts, pages, archives, 404 templates, front page, and anywhere the user happens to be on the frontend. Check out the Gutenberg issue and the related WordPress Trac ticket for more technical details on how contributors arrived at this implementation.
This small fix is important because it removes the requirement for the user to have to know the name of the template they intend to edit. It’s now as easy as clicking directly from the frontend. The more WordPress can reduce friction and the need to have special knowledge in order to edit templates, the more accessible it becomes as a design tool for someone who is just starting out and has no framework for the idea of underlying templates.
WordPress 6.3 is on track to be released with this fix on August 8, 2023. Beta 4 landed today with 40+ (Editor) and 60+ (Trac) updates since Beta 3, and RC 1 is expected next week.
WordPress 6.3 Beta 4 is ready for download and testing.
This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, you should evaluate Beta 4 on a test server and site.
Get an overview of the 6.3 release cycle, check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.3-related posts, and review the new features in WordPress 6.3. Also, save the date for a live product demo scheduled for Thursday, July 20, 2023, at 16:00 UTC (Zoom link). This will be a great opportunity to join the WordPress community to celebrate the accomplishments of 6.3 and this final chapter of Phase 2.
Thanks to the many WordPress beta testers, this release contains 40+ (Editor) and 60+ (Trac) updates since the Beta 3 release. Excellent work, team!
Notable updates for this beta release include:
Browse the technical details for issues addressed since Beta 3 using these queries:
Testing for issues is a critical part of developing any software, and it’s a meaningful way for anyone to contribute—whether you have experience or not. While testing the upgrade process is essential, trying out new features is too.
The monetary reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities is doubled between the Beta 1 release and the final release candidate (RC). Please follow responsible disclosure practices as detailed in the project’s security practices and policies outlined on the HackerOne page and in the security white paper.
You can test WordPress 6.3 Beta 4 in three ways:
wp core update --version=6.3-beta4The current target for the final release is August 8, 2023, about four weeks away. Your help testing this version ensures everything in this release is the best.
Beta ships, once more
Up next week, an RC1
6, 3, out the door
Thank you to the contributors who collaborated on this post: @DanSoschin, @Meher, @eidolonnight, and @JPantani.
Dave and Dan takes you inside of Automattic and their own thoughts around WordPress, WooCommerce and AI.
>> The post Pulling the Curtain Back on WordPress, Woo and AI with Dave Lockie and Dan Walmsley appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community .
by BobWP at July 11, 2023 07:48 AM under Podcast Guests from North America
This is an aggregation of blogs talking about WordPress from around the world. If you think your blog should be part of this site, send an email to Matt.
For official WordPress development news, check out the WordPress Core Blog.
July 20, 2023 09:30 AM
All times are UTC.