The journey of WP Campus Connect has been nothing short of extraordinary for us. This first-of-its-kind initiative was born out of a desire to bridge the gap between students and the WordPress ecosystem and also to grow the local community. As an active member of the WordPress community, I often noticed the need to introduce fresh talent to the platform and create a space where students could learn, grow, and connect with the global WordPress community.
I shared this idea with our local community members, and we decided to design an event tailored specifically for students, providing them with hands-on exposure to WordPress and opening doors to potential career opportunities. Over the course of 23 days in October 2024, we conducted a WordPress workshop in four colleges in Ajmer, India, to bring this vision to life through engaging seminars and workshops.
What began as an experimental event has now set a foundation for nurturing the next generation of WordPress enthusiasts and contributors. In this blog post, we’ll discuss WP Campus Connect’s highlights, achievements, and incredible journey.
When we decided to organize a WordPress event exclusively for students, the big question was: How do we gather interested students, and where? Instead of asking them to come to us, we chose to meet them where they are—on their campuses. That’s how the event got its name: WP Campus Connect. We also decided that unlike other WordPress events, where attendees had to purchase the ticket, we removed this barrier and kept it free for all.
We decided to partner with four colleges, making it a multi-day event planned across four Saturdays in October. Though we had to adjust the schedule along the way (more on that later!), the concept remained the same.
Once our proposal was approved by the WordCamp Central, we started pitching the idea to colleges. The plan was to conduct 5-6 hour workshops in each college to introduce students to WordPress and career opportunities in web development. However, WordPress awareness in our region was low, and convincing colleges wasn’t easy. Out of six colleges we approached, four partnered with us after seeing the potential impact of the event.
Feedback from our partner colleges added another layer to our format. Most students had never heard of WordPress, so jumping straight into workshops might not have been effective. To address this, we introduced a pre-event seminar in each college. These 90-minute sessions aimed to familiarize students with WordPress, its global impact, career opportunities, and the upcoming workshops—ensuring they were motivated and prepared.
To maintain quality, we capped participation at 100 students per college, considering the infrastructure provided and our capacity to deliver a meaningful experience.
In the end, our final format became:
4 Colleges, 4 Seminars, 4 Workshops, and introducing WordPress to 400 students.
Once the event format was finalized and approved, it was time to turn the vision into reality. Organizing WP Campus Connect required meticulous planning, dedicated teamwork, and the support of our vibrant community. With a clear roadmap ahead, the next step was to form a team and assign responsibilities to ensure everything was executed smoothly.
We built a 10-member organizing team, with each member taking on a specific role based on their expertise. Here’s how we divided the tasks:
Every aspect, from logistics to content creation and online engagement, was managed collaboratively, with frequent check-ins to track progress and address challenges. With each team member playing their part, we turned the concept of WP Campus Connect into a well-coordinated, impactful event.
This teamwork not only made the event possible but also strengthened the bonds within our community, showcasing the power of collaboration in achieving ambitious goals.
With participation capped at 100 students per college, the respective colleges were responsible for selecting attendees. To ensure a fair and effective process, all colleges followed a similar pattern.
Each pre-event seminar was conducted for a larger audience, introducing students to WordPress, its career potential, and the workshop objectives. Following the seminar, the college faculty invited students to express their interest in joining the workshop. This allowed students who were genuinely motivated and eager to learn to step forward.
Based on these expressions of interest, the final list of workshop attendees was prepared. This approach ensured that the workshops were filled with enthusiastic participants who were ready to make the most of the learning opportunity.
The event days were the highlight of WP Campus Connect, with seminars and workshops conducted at all four partner colleges. Each session was tailored to inspire and engage students, introducing them to the power of WordPress and its vast career opportunities.
The 90-minute seminars introduced WordPress, its global presence, and its potential as a career path. While engaging a large audience within this short timeframe was challenging, we managed to keep the sessions interactive and enjoyable, ensuring students left motivated and curious.
While the seminars only required two team members, the workshops were a full team effort. Each workshop was approximately 5-6 hours long and designed to provide students with hands-on experience building their first WordPress website.
The college infrastructure varied, adding a layer of complexity. At one college, a single large computer lab accommodated all participants, allowing one lead facilitator to guide the session while others assisted. In other colleges, the workshops were split across multiple rooms. To maintain consistency, we conducted an internal team session before the event to ensure every facilitator was aligned on the workshop structure and delivery.
We helped students build their first WordPress websites, set up WordPress, understand themes and plugins, manage pages and posts, and more. In this hands-on workshop, they built a website home page, set up a blog, and added a contact form to the site.
Workshops included a small break where we provided refreshments and set up fun activities like photo booths. These activities added a lively touch and allowed students to interact and capture memories of their day.
Each workshop concluded with a feedback session, during which we interacted with students, learned about their experiences, and encouraged them to join our Meetup group to continue their learning journey with the WordPress community. Participation certificates and swag were distributed to all attendees, leaving them with a token of their experience.
The events wrapped up with group photos, which captured the energy and excitement of the day—a perfect end to a successful event.
One major challenge was ensuring the required infrastructure at partner colleges. While students were encouraged to bring their own laptops, many relied on college computer labs. At some colleges, outdated systems and missing configurations made it difficult to install the necessary software.
To overcome this, we used InstaWP to spin up temporary WordPress sites, allowing students to work seamlessly without delays. This quick solution ensured the workshops ran smoothly and introduced students to an innovative way of using WordPress.
Through WP Campus Connect, we introduced WordPress to over 370 students, sparking a newfound enthusiasm among many of them. The impact became evident at our next meetup, which saw a record-breaking attendance of over 50 participants—most of whom were new members. What stood out was their active involvement. They were not just attending but also contributing ideas for future meetups, showcasing their eagerness to engage further.
With the growing number of attendees, we recognized the need for a larger venue. One of our partner colleges stepped forward and is now a venue sponsor for our meetups, solidifying their support for the community.
Another exciting outcome was the suggestion to establish Student WP Clubs within colleges. These clubs can help sustain in-campus activities and introduce WordPress to students who missed the WP Campus Connect event. It can be a critical step toward ensuring the long-term growth and sustainability of the local WordPress community.
Looking ahead, we’re in talks with stakeholders and exploring possibilities to integrate WordPress into the college curriculum soon. This initiative has the potential to embed WordPress knowledge at an academic level, equipping students with a competitive edge by the time they graduate.
The momentum from WP Campus Connect has strengthened our local community and set a strong foundation for continued growth, innovation, and collaboration.
by Anand Upadhyay at December 05, 2024 06:25 AM under wpcampusconnect
ClikIT has announced its acquisition of the Infinite Uploads and Big File Uploads plugins from UglyRobot, LLC, owned by Aaron Edwards, the former CTO of WPMU DEV. The financial details of the deal have not been disclosed.
Infinite Uploads is a versatile WordPress plugin offering cloud storage, video hosting, and CDN delivery to enhance media management and site performance. Big File Uploads, on the other hand, simplifies the process of uploading large media files directly to the WordPress media library without requiring FTP or SFTP.
Blake Whittle, owner of ClikIT, shared that his team had been seeking an acquisition opportunity since December 2023. Discussions with Aaron Edwards had been ongoing for several months before finalizing the deal.
About the acquisition, Blake said, ““As websites become more complex and WordPress developers continue to innovate, we aim to solve the challenges of storing large amounts of media, such as images and PDFs, while making video streaming effortless with Infinite Uploads. We’re also leveraging Big File Uploads, used by over 100,000 websites, to simplify the process of uploading large files and bypassing web host limits. Our goal is to make managing WordPress websites as seamless as possible, and these plugins move us closer to that goal.””
“Existing customers will not notice any changes in billing, their portal, support emails, or even the description on their credit card statements. Much of the Infinite Uploads infrastructure was separate from UglyRobot’s other assets, meaning we didn’t need to decouple or migrate any data. The only noticeable change will be that support responses will now come from our team—and we’re dedicated to providing support that goes above and beyond.”, Blake promised.
ClikIT plans to relaunch Infinite Uploads’ affiliate program, improve support response times, optimize CDN caching, and further integrate the plugin into the ClikIT brand.
When asked on X if he was stepping away from WordPress, Aaron Edwards responded, “Pretty much! I still have small Imajinn AI plugin. Excited to see what @BlakeWhittle7 and team do with @infiniteuploads now. It’s in good hands and has so much potential!”
[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 school educators are bringing WordPress to the people of Uganda.
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/feed/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/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.
So on the podcast today, we have Stephen Dumba.
Stephen has been a high school teacher in Uganda since 2007. He specializes in WordPress, computer repair, and teaching IT skills. As the National Coordinator of the ICT Teachers Association of Uganda, he mentors, both students and teachers in ICT.
An active WordPress community members since 2019, Stephen organizes WordCamps and conducts online, and in-person, WordPress training across Uganda. Initiatives like Each One Teach One, and 1000 WordPress Ninjas aim to promote the use of WordPress nationwide.
Stephen regularly speaks at WordPress events, and focuses on integrating WordPress into education and community building.
I suspect many listeners might not know about the landscape of WordPress and ICT education in Uganda. Stephen is here to correct that today.
We start off talking about the ICT curriculum in Uganda, the initiatives to equip schools with computer labs, and the surge in student interest for ICT education.
We then discuss how WordPress is beginning to see adoption in Ugandan educational circles and Meetup communities. Stephen talks about how investing in WordPress turned his business around, and the larger impact it has had on education and employment opportunities.
But why is WordPress so embraced in Uganda? Stephen emphasizes its simplicity, extensive plugin options, and community support. He also describes the vibrant WordPress community initiatives, including regular Meetups, and the goal to host a thousand attendee WordPress event in the future.
Towards the end of the podcast, we discussed Stephen’s vision for building future WordPress leaders in Uganda, and the significance of sponsorships, and financial support, to sustain and grow these initiatives.
If you’re curious about how WordPress is shaping communities and education in Uganda, and the broader implications of ICT education in different regions, this episode 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/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
And so without further delay, I bring you Stephen Dumba.
I am joined on the podcast today by Stephen Dumba. Hello Stephen.
[00:03:44] Stephen Dumba: Hi Nathan.
[00:03:46] Nathan Wrigley: This is going to be a really interesting episode for me. There’s going to be an awful lot in here that I do not know about. We’re not going to be talking about WordPress, the code. We’re going to be talking about WordPress, the community, and how it’s grown up in the country where Stephen lives, which is Uganda.
And before we begin that, Stephen, I just want to give you the opportunity to tell us a little bit about yourself, your history with WordPress, the job that you do, and then we can unpack all of the wonderful things that you are involved with in Uganda. So over to you, your little potted bio.
[00:04:23] Stephen Dumba: Thank you, Nathan. I am Stephen Dumba. By profession I’m a teacher, but many times when I tell people that I’m a teacher, the next question is, where do you teach? Unfortunately, I’m not stationed in a particular school where I’m teaching, but I’m a teacher by profession.
But I’ve been, for the past 15 years, interested in computer repair. And then of recent, around 2018, I got invited to WordCamp Kampala. So that’s where my WordPress journey started.
I attended a WordPress event in 2018, at the close of 2018, and then I got an opportunity to speak at WordCamp Entebbe three months later. That was in 2019. And then from then on, I discovered that, yeah, I think this is a field that I can put all my energy on.
So I started developing websites in WordPress. But most importantly, I found that many of my fellow teachers were not well versed with web design and WordPress. So because of my role as the National Coordinator of the ICT Teachers Association of Uganda here, I took on the role of mentorship, a voluntary mentor. So I’ve trained many teachers in Uganda on how to use WordPress, and that’s how we are growing as a community.
[00:05:44] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you for that. That was really enlightening. So just to reiterate, you began your journey in 2017, having not used WordPress before. But also at the same time as that, a history of teaching, and with a current role of the National Coordinator of the ICT Association of Uganda, which sounds like a fairly influential role.
What I mean by that is I’m guessing that if you make some decisions about what CMS may be on offer to the school children in Uganda, your decisions count for something because of the role that you have. Would that be fair to say, your decisions matter?
[00:06:23] Stephen Dumba: I wouldn’t say it’s a personal decision, but it is a decision of a couple of us as teachers. You see, what we call the ICT Teachers Association of Uganda is a congregation of teachers who teach ICT as a subject here in Uganda, across the entire country. So basing on the conversations we have on our platforms, majorly WhatsApp, you come up with a decision even when no one mentions it. You find that it is easier to build websites with WordPress. And all the reasons are there for us to see.
Previously when I was still teaching, we used to teach web design as one of the topics in our subject, but we were using very rudimentary tools. We would even use stuff like Office to come up with something like a website.
When I got to know about WordPress, shared it with a few teachers, and by the way, I was introduced to WordPress by a fellow teacher, and by then he was the national coordinator of the ICT Teachers Association. He’s called Rogers Mukalele.
So he invites us to a group of WordPress users because he wanted us to improve on our skills, our web development skills. And then when it came that there was a WordCamp in 2018, I remember it was December, either November or December, WordCamp Kampala. We all went there just to see how are these people making websites, because they’re telling us in just a day you can come up with something so beautiful.
And when we went there and, true to his words, people had at least a homepage in just one or two hour session. So from there on, everyone was convinced.
So for us who had gone, we started sharing with those who hadn’t gone to this event. And so when Arthur organised WordCamp Entebbe in 2019, many teachers were like, we also want to go to WordCamp and learn how to use WordPress.
So that’s how I came up with the idea, wow, so I can speak at this event to the teachers. Because usually they take people, the way they communicate with teachers, it may not be as straightforward or as simple as us teachers understand ourselves.
So I thought I’d give this talk, and good enough this talk is even on, my very first is on WordPress TV. Things went on, and so people started seeing us as the go-to people for WordPress. And because of that, we had to keep on improving our skills. And so all other WordPress events that were organised in Uganda, I struggled hard to make sure that at least I catered for that particular audience.
So finally, Rogers goes out of this role of national coordinator and everyone was like, I think Steve, you can do this. Steve, be our national coordinator, please. Who’s going to teach us WordPress? Who’s going to mentor us in this field? And because of our association, people believe in what we say.
So when we tell them it’s good to have WordPress, we give them the figures of course, 43% of the web. And then when you come to government agencies here, I even wrote an article about 10 common websites in Uganda that are using WordPress, of which we have State House, that’s the President’s official home. He’s using WordPress. Then we have the tax body in Uganda, switched to WordPress. We have universities in Uganda are using WordPress.
So we were giving just those big, big, big agencies as examples. And then when we tell you that you can do something in a day, you can come up with an idea and build something in WordPress, and maybe improve that later, everyone would like this.
First of all, not many of our schools in Uganda have websites. So teachers had space where they could practice their WordPress skills. They would go to the head teacher, tell them, I developed some WordPress skills. Can I volunteer to build a school website? And so the teacher would volunteer, and then ask us some questions, we would guide them. And where we fail, we would also go to the more advanced community, the WordPress community of Uganda. And they’re also very helpful.
[00:10:27] Nathan Wrigley: Can I ask, where I live in the UK, we have an education system called the National Curriculum, and what that means is that basically every child receives, certainly when they’re very young, the same subjects. So if you’re a child in an entirely different part of the country, you’ll still be having basically the same palette of subjects, you’ll be doing maths, and history, and what we call ICT. And the ICT, in our case, stands for Information Communication Technology.
Is that the same in Uganda? Do you have one sort of curriculum which covers the whole country, or can different areas and different schools pursue whatever they like?
[00:11:08] Stephen Dumba: In Uganda we also have a curriculum developed by the National Curriculum Development Center, and it is across the country.
[00:11:15] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you. And also, what is the current state of technology like in Uganda? So where I live there’s lots of desktop computers. There’s lots of mobile phones. I’m curious as to how people are consuming the internet. Is it generally a keyboard with a screen, or does it tend to be more like a mobile phone?
[00:11:37] Stephen Dumba: The adoption of technologies in Uganda is still very, very, very low. Although, since the lockdown, there has been some improvement. However, I also like to mention, what we call the Uganda Communications Commission. They have been instrumental in making sure that secondary schools, that is for students from 13 to 18 years, they’ve ensured that all secondary schools at least have a computer lab of at least 30 users, 30 user stations.
But this is something that came around more seriously in 2013, because then ICT as a subject was introduced to advanced level. That is for the, 17, 18 year olds. It came as a compulsory subject.
By the way, in Uganda, students start learning ICT at 13. Below that, the curriculum doesn’t cater for that. So the curriculum starts it as an option at 13 years onwards. But in 2013, the government thought it wise to introduce this as a compulsory subject for the 17 and 18 year olds, what we call A Level here.
And because not all schools would afford to have computer labs, our communications agency, the Uganda Communications Commission, through their project which is now called UCUSAF, they came up with an idea and stocked computer labs across the entire country. So the chances of finding a computer lab in a secondary school are almost I think 90, I’ll give a figure of 90%.
[00:13:13] Nathan Wrigley: And would it be fair to say that home ownership of computers is not particularly widespread? Or would it be that most people going home would have access to a computer or a mobile phone, once they’re outside of the boundaries of the school?
[00:13:28] Stephen Dumba: It is not widespread. It’s not at all widespread. Computers will only be found in offices, and that is big offices. Computers only be found now in secondary schools, apart from a very few privileged schools that will have maybe a hundred computers.
[00:13:47] Nathan Wrigley: So young people, their exposure to computers is typically going to be in their educational institute, their school, or the college that they go to. And is the interest in ICT, well, is ICT as a subject popular in the same way that it is in my country? I mean, it’s almost the most exciting thing you can do to a child where I live, to put them in front of computers.
It seems that there’s just something about that interaction of the keyboard, the mouse, the computer, and all of the myriad things that it can do that is tremendously exciting. And also it’s a conduit to learning almost every other subject as well.
But is it something that the children themselves are excited about, learning how to work with computers? Or is it more that, a bit like maybe something like maths is here, you’re just kind of told you’ve got to do it because you’ve got to do it. Like I say, is it popular?
[00:14:45] Stephen Dumba: ICT is a very popular subject here in my country. I’ve even given the numbers. I remember, the last school where I taught, you would have a class of 80 learners and you had only 30 computers. And the kids had to struggle into the lab just to be the first on the computer. You just have to come out with ways of grouping them, and making sure that each of these learners has a chance to touch and use the computer.
For example, because of this demand where I was, I was often asked to come to school earlier than the official reporting time. For example, being at school at around seven so the kids can use the time between seven and nine, for those who did not have the chance to practice, to use the lab. And then even after work, after five, you’ll be obliged to stay at school up to around eight, so that you give chance to other learners, because the interest is just too much, just like the UK.
[00:15:46] Nathan Wrigley: So there’s loads of demand, but not enough places to put that demand. At the moment there simply aren’t enough devices for the amount of children, in this case, who wish to learn.
It’s an exciting thing to be involved in then I guess, because I think a lot of teachers, certainly in the UK, face the problem of disinterested children. Children who don’t wish to study a particular subject, and yet they’re being made to teach it.
Whereas it sounds like you’ve got the opposite problem. You’ve got children who are extremely interested to learn, but aren’t able to because, well, there’s a big queue to get into the ICT lab, and you’ve got to take your turn. Come before school begins, or wait after school has finished in order to give it a go. Okay, that’s really interesting.
[00:16:31] Stephen Dumba: If I can add, it’s for that reason that at a certain point we take these kids through a test to decide who will stay with us in the computer lab at a certain level. So when you have a class of 80 students, where as a teacher you could imagine, the African way, the problem is when it comes to time for assessment exams, are you going to spend two days in the computer lab examining in just one subject? No.
So what we do, if there are 80 students in your class, they’ll have to go through a test that will determine, and unfortunately we usually choose the best performers. And so we could say we need only 40 students. And so you leave out 40. Not that they don’t want, they are really interested, everyone is interested, but you don’t have just enough equipment to serve them.
[00:17:21] Nathan Wrigley: Again, linking back to the UK because it’s basically what I know. In the UK the ICT curriculum covers a lot of ground, it isn’t just about the web. And I wondered if that was the case as well.
Obviously the WordPress component is about building something which could go online ultimately, perhaps a website or something like that. But also they learn about programming languages, and how to write things in code on their local development environment, and what have you.
Do you cover any of that as well, or is it mainly to do with the internet, websites, WordPress, that kind of thing?
[00:17:55] Stephen Dumba: Not at all. In fact, websites is just part of the curriculum. They learn, of course, the obvious stuff, it’s basically learning Microsoft Office programs, and then web, and then there is security, a little bit of that.
In our new curriculum, right now we don’t have coding, we don’t have programming. What we have is a bit of HTML and CSS before we involve them in WordPress.
[00:18:21] Nathan Wrigley: Do the students have career opportunities outside of school, once school has finished? Is that maybe why it’s so popular? Apart from the fact that it’s obviously quite interesting sitting in front of a computer, you know, it opens up a whole world of possibilities. Is there also a credible career path with that as well?
Because I can imagine that if you were successful, let’s say you were incredibly good at building websites with WordPress, I can imagine that the career, the opportunities, would allow you to step outside your own town, your own region, your own country. And so I just wondered if there was a career path that the children could understand and conceive. That it would allow the world to be more available to them.
[00:19:04] Stephen Dumba: As teachers, we have shown them some career paths, like the standard web developer, stuff like that. But given that, in our country, the chances of getting employed are really so minimal. So most of these kids are learning it, first for the interest, but then they are also looking at the opportunities. They look at people like us that, yes, he has his own web development agency, that is Steve. You look at Rogers, he’s also surviving his way because of that skill.
So even when we are going in our mentorship talks with them, we show them that, learn this skill and you’ll be self-reliant after school. You’re not going to depend on someone who’s going to ask for your CV, someone who’s going to ask for your experience when you’re just fresh out of school. Many of them are learning it right now because they want to make a buck by themselves.
[00:19:58] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s brilliant. Thank you. And can I just ask, why WordPress? Given all of the different bits and pieces out there. I mean, obviously you attended the event in 2017, and that turned your head towards WordPress, but I’ve got to imagine there’s more to it than that.
Is it just that it is a tool which is, well, I mean for a start it’s freely available? You just go to a website and there it is, and you can download it, and there’s loads of software available that allows you to install it on a local environment, so you don’t need to pay for a hosting company or anything like that. What were the reasons that WordPress was the CMS of choice, the software of choice?
[00:20:35] Stephen Dumba: First of all is the ease with which you create this website. So I’ll give my personal example. And by the way, the teachers and learners follow my story so much, and it’s an inspiring one.
Around 2015, I hired a friend of mine to create a website for me. And we went through ping pong for some months, and then even after all those months, the website wasn’t really what I wanted. And then they told me that it’s because you’re using a friend to do it. You’re doing it cheaply. So you have to get some good money and hire another web developer.
So I got my, I think it was three months salary, I gave it to a person to develop a website who did not come up with a website even after a, you get it, yeah. Now look at, after a whole year you don’t have a website, some sketchy. And then in school we were teaching using Publisher. I don’t know if you heard about Microsoft Publisher, we were using it to create websites. And the websites are so sketchy versus the websites we see on the web.
So here you go to an event in the morning. You arrive at nine, get breakfast at 10, go into a session at 11, and at 2 you have a website. Who wouldn’t want to use that tool? And in fact, all my interests right now, like I told you before, I repair computers. So the only people who knew that I repair computers are the people in my community.
Now that I learned WordPress, I came up with a website, a website using WordPress. I think I used maybe two nights and it’s out there. And now because of this website, I’m traveling across the country. Now the people who are following my story will also want to do their own websites because of the ease with which you can use it to come up with a deserving website. A website that a client will look at and say, wow, this is what I wanted.
And it is even easier, even if you looked at another website for inspiration, it is easier to come out with a similar website in WordPress, as opposed to the other hard coding, that is one.
And then the other thing is, there’s one thing that I really look at, WordPress has a community in Uganda. You’ll simply call David, hi, I have a problem here. David will help you. Then you say, who can help me with this? And then they’ll lead you to another person.
Then look at the problems like when you want to monetise your website, when you want to add payment gateways to your website. All the other options that are available, it’ll take you a lot of effort to get them working. Whereas in WordPress, you’ll just dream of something, oh, I need this, then go to the plugin repository and the plugin is there. Even the free ones are working.
Just for example, as teachers, during the lockdown we wanted students to be able to access lessons when they are at home, while we were also in our homes. On WordPress, you’ll just go and look one LMS, and it creates a very perfect learning solution for you, just within no time. So I think there are very many reasons why you should love WordPress.
And let me tell you what, even the big agencies here, they were using other technologies. But we have been following them in the last maybe four years. All the big ones are getting to WordPress. So if we don’t know the reason why we want WordPress, perhaps they know the reason why they want WordPress. You get it, eh?
So even those, the naysayers who are still doubting WordPress, when they look at State House going for WordPress. When they look at our revenue agency going for WordPress. When they look at our Business Registration Bureau going for WordPress. When they look at our universities going for WordPress, then who are you? You have to give us a very big reason to choose any other.
[00:24:18] Nathan Wrigley: I guess modern WordPress with things like built-in patterns, so the ability to just basically click a button and have a pre-designed page, or row, or selection of blocks, really leans into that real ease of putting something on a page immediately.
So in the olden days, you would probably still have to have a variety of different plugins to wrangle to get things the way that you wanted it to look, but you’d also have to have a degree of HTML knowledge. And it sounds like, you know, especially for the people who are just beginning with WordPress, those kind of features are really key for getting that excitement going. Look, log in, click that button, and then that one, you’ve got a page, look at that. And you get something almost immediately.
How do you disseminate, or how do you communicate with all the other staff where you want to share your experience about WordPress? How do you communicate with all the other teachers throughout the country to coordinate what you’re doing?
[00:25:21] Stephen Dumba: Like I said earlier, I am the National Coordinator of the ICT Teachers Association of Uganda. The ICT Teachers Association of Uganda brings all teachers of ICT in Uganda together.
So one of the ways, yes, we have a website, ictteachersug.net, but for easier communication we use our WhatsApp platform. Right now we are using WhatsApp majorly. So when we are there, sometimes someone will ask a question, and someone will say, can you ask Stephen? He has been there, he has done that. And when they ask you, you tell them the whole story.
What we did, we came up with a few initiatives. For example, every Tuesday evenings 8:00 to 9:00 PM East African time, we have what we call Each One, Teach One. We believe no one has the monopoly over knowledge. There is something I know that Nathan doesn’t know. There is something that Nathan knows that I don’t know, and a hundred others don’t know.
So what we do in this session, Each One, Teach One, we get a topic that is on everyone’s mouth. And then we get one person to come and facilitate, and then you take them through an hour. They’ll ask you questions and stuff like that. And these topics are diverse. Sometimes it’s just motivation. Sometimes it’s really, how do I get started with WordPress? And then, how do I deal with SEO? The topics are very diverse, but we come together because we are a fraternity, and we have that objective of bettering ourselves inside and outside our profession.
[00:27:01] Nathan Wrigley: So that’s an online event, you do that via the internet. But you also mentioned that there’s a fairly vibrant WordCamp community that goes on with a variety of events across Uganda each year. Did I get that right?
[00:27:14] Stephen Dumba: Yeah. Now look at this, the story goes, Rogers comes and invites us to join the WordPress community of Uganda, which was based in Kampala then. And then three months later, we have an event in Entebbe, under WordPress Entebbe Meetup. So from there, the teachers who had traveled miles to come and attend this event are like, can’t we have such events nearer our places?
So Rogers comes up with the idea, I think I can start a WordPress Meetup in Jinja, that is 80 kilometers away from Kampala. And then in collaboration with existing meetups, we ask that these events should also include sessions for teachers and learners, not only the advanced topics. Also get to the basics, the beginners, the absolute beginners. So Rogers initiates WordPress Jinja Meetup.
After the lockdown, Moses initiates the WordPress Masaka Meetup. This is another teacher. And then in Lira we have another WordPress also initiated by a fellow teacher.
All these are done in collaboration with the existing meetups, and it is one community. But because of these distances, Stephen cannot come from here and travel 400 kilometers to attend a meetup. So it is better if a meetup group is started in that town. So even of recent, we have another Moses who started another meetup just outside Kampala, but Lira was started by Emmanuel Angoda. And more meetups are coming up by the way, because many teachers are interested.
[00:28:52] Nathan Wrigley: It does sound like the teachers are the backbone of the whole thing. The WordPress community is largely being driven by the teachers because, you know, they attend this one thing, and then go and start another little satellite meetup, which then is sprouting another meetup and so on. But it does sound like the teaching network is the thing which is really driving the community over there, which is interesting.
[00:29:17] Stephen Dumba: That would be a lot of pride on our side so that the teachers are the backbone of the WordPress community. Like I said, teachers work hand in hand with existing meetups because we engage with these people every other day.
Our request was that we work hand in hand to have more inclusive WordCamps, or more inclusive meetups. While the previous meetups were for advanced users, that is in our own thinking. Things were too advanced for us. You go to an event and people are speaking APIs.
So we were like, how about we had a meetup, we had a WordCamp where even an absolute beginner, a person who only knows how to click, can come up with a website on that day. And this was a welcome idea, so we are working hand in hand. The thing is that, with teachers, at least they have places where they can put these events, as in the schools. They have somewhere to start. It is easier for them.
[00:30:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I was going to ask about exactly that, about the location, because that can be quite a thing where we are, finding a location can be really hard. But I guess that’s a good short circuit, isn’t it? Because the teachers have access to a building. They have access to a computer lab, which they can use for the evening. Okay, I see. That all hangs together perfectly, doesn’t it? The school is, in a sense, the central place where it all happens, and the teachers are the people who make it happen in those locations. That’s fascinating.
That’s really interesting because here in the UK,, the WordPress community is usually not really the school, there’s no part of the educational system which is involved in it. It’s typically business owners, people building websites, people who’ve got companies where they’re selling something into the WordPress space, those kind of things. And they’re typically done in, I don’t know, venues of an evening, but schools don’t appear to be part of it. So there is quite a difference there.
Is there anything, Stephen, that you would say, if you could stare into the future, sort of five years or something like that, is there anything that you would like to happen? Now that could be as straightforward as, well, it would be great if we had more computers, or more members in our communities. I’m just thinking, five years, what would you like to be different in five years than is now with the Uganda community?
[00:31:42] Stephen Dumba: One thing we want with the community, in five years one of our dreams is to have an event with a thousand attendees. An event with a thousand attendees is testament of the years of efforts that we are put into building this. It’ll be really heartbreaking if after all those years of pushing WordPress, you still have an event with 50, 80, 200 attendees.
I want to see my students as speakers. I want to see them as organisers at events. I want them to come up and say, that’s our teacher. That is the person who introduced me to WordPress. And I want to see many of them.
Indirectly, this is good market for those who are in the business of web design, like I intend to be. The more people that we know who are interested in WordPress, it’ll be easier for us to mobilise people for events.
There’s things that really pain us, sometimes we have an event and all you have is international sponsors. You don’t have any local sponsor for this event. It shows you that the people who are in charge don’t know about WordPress yet. So let us train these young ones, and when they are in charge they’ll be very willing to support, to give back to the community, even if they don’t attend.
[00:33:02] Nathan Wrigley: What a fabulous, fabulous thought. The idea of an event of that magnitude with homegrown talent, if you know what I mean. The people that over the last many years you have been teaching, who are themselves the speakers, and presumably would themselves be now the teachers of the next generation as well.
So you’re kind of describing a thing which self perpetuates itself into the future. It just keeps going, and you’ve got the older generation who’ve been doing it for a while, the ones who are currently working inside of WordPress. And at the same time you’ve got the people who are coming up through the education system. That is such a fabulous, fabulous, idea.
Another question around that then, Stephen, is the financial thing I suppose, talking about how we get these events to work. Now, you mentioned that events are in schools and things like that,
but I’m just wondering if there’s something that you
would like to say regarding, I don’t know, sponsorship, or
people reaching out to assist in some way or
other.
[00:33:59] Stephen Dumba: one thing is. our community is entirely, we work entirely on our own resources, personal resources. It’s voluntary, but the demand for WordPress lessons is so high. And of recent, we started, an initiative called 1000 WordPress Ninjas. and our target was with three friends of mine.
There is a teacher called Noeline and another teacher called Simon. So we came up with the idea, let us at least give ourselves a target of training a thousand youth and teens in WordPress, especially those who are finding it hard to continue with school. is, easier to get those in school.
But there are many others who are there that we interact with. They are struggling with school. So you want to teach them, stuff like WordPress and life skills, indirectly life skills, but majorly WordPress.
But then they really want to associate with us. So they ask, but what really shows that I’m a WordPress Ninja. Then we ask them, what do you want? Then they say, don’t you have a T-shirt? But they cannot even afford this T-shirt. So while I can offer the lessons free, I don’t have enough money on me to buy T-shirts for a thousand learners. So there are those small things that any other person can come up and any idea and say, perhaps I will get a thousand T-shirts for these a thousand WordPress.
Ninjas Anything in anyway. And then sometimes there are places that are far remote that would also be interested, but we go there only when we can afford. So even if they ask me to go for this session this weekend, they ask for a session this weekend. As long as I don’t have enough money on me, I tell them maybe next month.
And sometimes I can push it to two, three, even six months. But if. There is a way that we can come up with something small. It can facilitate one of us to go to that place maybe 600 kilometers away, stay a night, have a day or two with them, and then come back. But otherwise, everything is voluntary by using our own pockets But any assistance would be Very welcome.
[00:36:10] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s the perfect place to end it, Stephen. Before we do end it, I’m just going to ask, where could people reach out to you? Either personally or perhaps that’s a website for the institute that you are in charge of? The National Coordinator of the ICT Teachers Association of Uganda. Anywhere that we can find you, email, social media, whatever you like.
[00:36:31] Stephen Dumba: Yeah. So I’m on X, people can find me on X and my handle is SteveUG. Our website of the ICT Teacher Association is ictteachersug.net.
[00:36:47] Nathan Wrigley: All of these links will head into the show notes, so if you go to wptavern.com and search for this episode with Stephen, you’ll be able to find all of the links there. All I can say is thank you so much for all of the hard work that you’ve put in so far. It sounds like you’ve got a really interesting, growing community over there, and also good luck for the future. I hope that in the next five years you do indeed put on a WordCamp with a thousand people. That would be absolutely marvelous. Thank you for talking to me today.
On the podcast today, we have Stephen Dumba.
Stephen has been a high school teacher in Uganda since 2007. He specialises in WordPress, computer repair, and teaching IT skills. As the National Coordinator of the ICT Teachers’ Association of Uganda, he mentors both students and teachers in ICT.
An active WordPress community member since 2019, Stephen organises WordCamps and conducts online and in-person WordPress training across Uganda. Initiatives like Each One Teach One and 1000 WordPress Ninjas, aim to promote the use of WordPress nationwide.
Stephen regularly speaks at WordPress events, and focuses on integrating WordPress into education and community-building.
I suspect many listeners might not know about the landscape of WordPress and ICT education in Uganda. Stephen is here to correct that today.
We start off talking about the ICT curriculum in Uganda, the initiatives to equip schools with computer labs, and the surge in student interest for ICT education.
We then discuss how WordPress is beginning to see adoption in Ugandan educational circles and Meetup communities. Stephen talks about how investing in WordPress turned his business around, and the larger impact it has had on education and employment opportunities.
But, why is WordPress so embraced in Uganda? Stephen emphasises its simplicity, extensive plugin options, and community support. He also describes the vibrant WordPress community initiatives, including regular meetups and the goal to host a thousand-attendee WordPress event in the future.
Towards the end of the podcast, we discuss Stephen’s vision for building future WordPress leaders in Uganda and the significance of sponsorships and financial support to sustain and grow these initiatives.
If you’re curious about how WordPress is shaping communities and education in Uganda, and the broader implications of ICT education in different regions, this episode is for you.
ICT Teachers Association of Uganda
National Curriculum Development Center
Uganda Communications Commission
Uganda Communications Universal Service Access and Fund – UCUSAF
by Nathan Wrigley at December 04, 2024 03:00 PM under Uganda
Your Gravatar profile is your digital identity hub. Today we’re making it even better with more free domain options and seamless Bluesky integration.
We’re expanding our domain offerings to give you more ways to express yourself online. For a limited time, grab your free domain with any of these extensions:
.bio
.fyi
.life
.ninja
.rocks
.contact
.guru
.link
.place
.social
.cool
.info
.live
.pro
.world
Your domain isn’t just a URL — it’s your identity on the open web. Use it for your Gravatar profile, email signature, business cards, and now…your Bluesky handle.
Bluesky is growing in popularity, and it’s doing usernames differently. Instead of traditional @usernames, Bluesky uses domains as handles. This means your Gravatar domain can be your Bluesky identity too.
By default, new Bluesky users get a generic yourname.bsky.social domain. But to verify ownership of your account, you can use any domain you own, like yourname.link or yourname.social.
With Gravatar, we’ve made it super simple:
No DNS configuration needed. No technical hassles. Just a sleek, professional identity that’s truly yours.
Your online identity should be in your control. With a custom domain, you’re not tied to any platform’s naming rules. You own it. You control it. You can use it anywhere.
Custom domains build trust and recognition. When people see your own domain instead of a generic link, they’re more likely to remember and engage with your content. It’s a simple way to make your online presence more professional and credible.
Ready to claim your piece of the web? Head to your Gravatar dashboard and look for the claim a domain option at the top of your profile.
Remember — these domains are free for the first year, but only for a limited time. Claim yours before someone else does!
Already have a Gravatar domain? Check out our quick guide on using it with Bluesky.
by Ronnie Burt at December 03, 2024 02:50 PM under Features and Updates
WordCamp Europe 2025 will take place in the vibrant city of Basel, Switzerland, from 5 to 7 June 2025. This will be the 13th edition of this flagship event, and the organizers are currently seeking both sponsors and speakers to make this event the best one yet.
WordCamp Europe 2025 is currently inviting speakers to share their knowledge, experiences, and innovative ideas with the WordPress community. The event will feature two full days of engaging talks and interactive workshops. There are three presentation formats available: Lightning talks (10 minutes) for concise insights, Long talks (30 minutes) for in-depth exploration of topics, and Workshops (60–90 minutes) for hands-on learning experiences.
The call for speakers is open to everyone, regardless of prior speaking experience. You can share technical expertise, an inspiring personal story, or an innovative use case for WordPress. To encourage diversity and inclusion, underrepresented speakers are strongly encouraged to apply.
Each applicant can submit up to two proposals. The deadline to submit your application is 31 January 2025.
Organizations looking to connect with the WordPress ecosystem can participate as sponsors. Sponsorship opportunities for WordCamp Europe 2025 range from €1,000 to €90,000, with add-on packages to suit varying levels of engagement and budgets. Sponsors can benefit from brand visibility, networking opportunities, and recognition as a vital part of the WordPress community.
All sponsors must comply with the 100% GPL requirements and pass a vetting process to ensure alignment with the community’s values. A detailed breakdown of sponsorship options is available on the event’s Sponsorship Packages page, and the Sponsors Team is ready to assist with any queries.
The 2024 edition of WordCamp Europe was a huge success, with nearly 3,000 attendees from 96 countries, 86 sponsors, and 52 speakers. For 2025, the organizers are anticipating even bigger numbers, with an estimated 3,500 to 4,500 attendees expected to join in the excitement.
by Jyolsna at December 02, 2024 06:10 PM under WordCamp Europe
DreamHost has been removed from WordPress.org’s recommended hosting page. The update was made by Samuel Wood (Otto), “Tech Ninja” for Audrey Capital, and the page now exclusively lists Pressable, Bluehost, and Hostinger as recommended hosting providers.
The removal came without any explanation, with the associated changeset message simply stating, “Hosting: rm dreamhost, per matt.” DreamHost was previously removed temporarily from the page earlier this year, on January 17, 2024, only to be reinstated later.
The Hosting page has been a point of contention within the community for years. The lack of clarity surrounding the criteria for being listed or delisted on this influential page has often sparked debates.
Last year, when SiteGround was removed from the recommended list, the WordPress community responded with demands for greater transparency. Contributors called for clear and objective guidelines to determine who qualifies for inclusion on the page.
Interestingly, the page doesnot include WordPress.com in the recommended list.
Your online presence is more extensive than you might think. A 2023 report by Ghostery, a provider of privacy-focused software, found that the average website contains 32 tracking scripts, silently collecting data on your browsing behavior. This highlights a crucial fact: a significant portion of your digital footprint forms without your direct input.
So, despite what many people think, managing your digital footprint goes beyond obsessing over your online privacy – it’s also about protecting your reputation, future opportunities, and personal safety. For example, your online content can affect your employment and relationships; it could even make you vulnerable to cybercrime.
If you’re looking to go beyond basic management strategies, this article offers advanced techniques to take control of your online presence. We’ll explore the potential consequences of an unmanaged digital footprint and provide you with powerful tools and strategies – including Gravatar – to help you shape and protect your online identity.
Whether you’re a professional concerned about your online reputation, a privacy-conscious user, or a parent worried about your child’s digital presence, these strategies will give you the skillset to navigate the Internet with confidence.
Start by conducting a thorough digital footprint audit. Search for your name on various search engines and take note of what information appears. Check all your social media profiles, blogs, and websites where you have an account. Pay special attention to old, inactive accounts and consider deleting or deactivating them if you don’t need them anymore. One way to find accounts you might have forgotten about is to search your email inbox for words/derivatives of words like “Verification”, “Activation”, “Login”, etc., things they send when you create a new account
Next, evaluate the content you’ve shared. Does it align with your current personal and professional goals? Look for any outdated or potentially harmful information. This process helps you identify areas for improvement.
As you review, note any discrepancies or negative information that could impact your reputation. Make a plan to update, correct, or remove such content. Remember, your digital footprint is dynamic, so we recommend making regular assessments on a monthly or quarterly routine.
Take control of your online presence by regularly reviewing and updating privacy settings on all your social media platforms. Ensure that only necessary information is visible to the public.
Limit data sharing by disabling location services and restricting the amount of personal information you share online. Use privacy settings to control who can see your posts and personal information.
And don’t forget to utilize platform-specific tools. For example, Facebook offers a Privacy Checkup feature, while X (formerly Twitter) provides detailed Privacy and Safety settings. These tools can help you manage your privacy more effectively.
Before hitting that ‘post’ button, pause and consider the long-term impact of sharing personal details or sensitive information online. Remember, once something is posted, it can be challenging to remove it completely.
Understanding your audience is crucial. Be aware of who can see your posts and adjust your sharing settings accordingly. You might want to use different privacy settings for different audiences – friends, public, or custom lists.
Oversharing can lead to serious consequences. It increases your risk of identity theft, unwanted solicitations, and even professional repercussions. A good rule of thumb: if you wouldn’t want it on a billboard, don’t put it online.
Ensure all your devices and applications are running the latest versions to protect against security threats. This is important because security updates prevent attacks that lead to data leaks and breaches, and it’s always recommended that you update to the latest privacy policies.
Where possible, enable automatic updates to stay protected without extra effort.
Don’t stop at updates – use security tools to bolster your defenses. Install and regularly update antivirus and anti-malware software. Firewalls and VPNs can add extra layers of security, helping to keep your online activities private.
Lastly, don’t forget about data backups. Regularly back up important data to prevent loss in case of a security breach. This practice not only protects your information but also gives you peace of mind.
Stay on top of what’s being said about you online by setting up alerts. Tools like Google Alerts can notify you when your name or brand is mentioned online. This allows you to respond quickly to any mentions, whether positive or negative.
Make it a habit to periodically search for your name on search engines. This practice gives you a clear picture of what information is publicly available about you.
If you come across negative or inaccurate information, address it promptly and professionally. In some cases, you might need to contact website administrators to remove harmful content.
Your digital footprint isn’t just about minimizing risks – it’s also an opportunity to showcase your best self. Create a professional profile on platforms like LinkedIn to highlight your skills, experience, and accomplishments.
Regularly share relevant content that showcases your expertise and interests. This could be articles you’ve written, projects you’ve completed, or industry news you find interesting. By doing so, you’re actively shaping your online presence in a positive way.
Don’t forget to engage with your network. Comment on and share posts from others in your field so you can increase your visibility and build valuable professional relationships.
Gravatar offers a strategic solution for creating a centralized online identity that’s more consistent with your preferred brand and, crucially, completely in your control. It’s a service that allows you to create and manage a single profile that can be used across multiple websites and platforms.
Here’s how it works: You create a profile on Gravatar, storing your information securely. When you interact with Gravatar-enabled websites, they import your data from your Gravatar profile rather than storing it themselves. This approach is highly beneficial for alleviating data privacy concerns.
To get started with Gravatar:
Prevention is the best way to go, but you can’t protect yourself from absolutely everything, and chances are there will be some content that ends up somewhere you wished it didn’t. But how do you deal with this issue if you don’t own the website?
Let’s take a look.
The most direct approach to removing unwanted content is to reach out to the website owner or content creator. When drafting your request, be polite and persuasive. Explain why the content should be removed and how it affects you personally or professionally.
Here’s a template you can use or adapt:
Subject: Request for Content Removal Dear [Website Owner/Content Creator],I hope this email finds you well. I’m writing to request the removal of [specific content] from your website, which can be found at [URL].This content [explain how it affects you, e.g., “contains outdated information about me” or “is causing harm to my professional reputation”]. I would greatly appreciate if you could remove or update this information.If you need any additional information from me, please don’t hesitate to ask. I’m happy to provide any necessary documentation to support this request.Thank you for your time and consideration. Best regards,[Your Name] |
If you don’t receive a response, follow up after a week or two. Be persistent but remain courteous throughout the process.
If the content appears in Google search results, you can request its removal using Google’s Search Removal Request. While this doesn’t remove the content from the original website, it can significantly reduce its visibility.
To use Google’s removal request form:
This method is particularly effective for removing explicit images, fake pornography, or personally identifiable information. However, keep in mind that Google’s removal process has limitations, and not all requests are granted.
De-indexing is the process of removing a webpage from search engine results. While the content remains on the original website, it becomes much harder to find.
To request de-indexing:
This method can be particularly effective for news websites or blogs that may be willing to de-index older articles without removing them entirely.
You can also do this to your own website by adding <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”> to the <head> of the page you don’t want indexed.
If the content is defamatory or violates your rights, you may need to consider legal options. Always consult with a legal professional before taking this route.
A pre-trial claim is a formal request for content removal that can be made before taking legal action. The process varies by jurisdiction but generally involves:
Make sure to research the specific requirements for your country and state if you’re from the US because they will be different. Just to give you a general idea, here’s an example from the state of Illinois.
And for the people in the EU, remember that under the GDPR law, individuals have the right to request their data be deleted from institutions and websites at any time, even if they previously agreed to its presence.
For particularly challenging cases, consider using Online Reputation Management (ORM) services. These professionals specialize in improving and protecting your online image.
Reputable ORM services can:
While these services can be effective, they often come with a significant cost. Research thoroughly and read reviews before engaging in any ORM service.
Remember, managing your online presence is an ongoing process. Regular monitoring and proactive management are key to maintaining a positive digital footprint.
The consequences of neglecting your digital footprint can be severe and long-lasting. From missed job opportunities to identity theft, the risks are real and growing. But armed with the strategies we’ve discussed, you’re now equipped to take charge of your online presence.
Remember, managing your digital footprint is an ongoing process. Start today by conducting a thorough audit of your online presence. Adjust your privacy settings, be mindful of what you share, and regularly monitor your reputation online.
Don’t forget the power of a centralized profile. Gravatar offers a simple yet effective way to manage your online identity across multiple platforms and build a more controlled and cohesive online presence.
Your digital identity is yours to shape. Take control now – create your free Gravatar profile today and start managing your digital footprint more effectively.
by Ronnie Burt at December 02, 2024 04:27 PM under Personal Branding
WordCamp Asia, one of WordPress’s premier flagship events, is seeking a host city for its 2026 edition. Previous editions were held in Bangkok and Taipei, with Manila set to host in 2025.
Local WordPress communities meeting the following criteria are encouraged to apply by December 31, 2024:
The global organizing leads will review applications, and the selected host city will be announced during the closing remarks of WordCamp Asia 2025.
Organizing a flagship event is a significant undertaking, but a global team of experienced organizers from across Asia will collaborate closely with the local team for over eight months to ensure its success.
Check out the call for host cities announcement for more information.
by Jyolsna at November 30, 2024 05:23 PM under WordCamp Asia
Hi there,
I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving and spend some time offline with friends and family. And if you don’t live in the US or don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, you might still have had a quiet time, with US business owners and leaders offline.
This time of the year there is a lot of planning going on. The first in-person event of 2025 will be WordCamp Asia. The Gutenberg Times is a media partner and I will hold a workshop on how to create a demo with Playground. If you’d like to connect for a meeting in Manila, use the self-schedule app.
For now, I wish you a incredible rest of the weekend!
Yours, 💕
Birgit
The Gutenberg 19.8 RC1 is available for testing. With the final release, a few experimental settings and functions will be stabilized. You’ll find many quality-of-life improvements for blocks and editors. You will learn from the release post of the final release on December 4th, 2024. Sarah Norris, JavaScript developer and core contributor will join me as my special guest on the Gutenberg changelog episode 112, and we will cover all important changes, then, too. You can use the Gutenberg Nightly via Playground to start testing.
🎙️ Latest episode: Gutenberg Changelog #111 – Gutenberg 19.6 and 19.7, Developer Hours, Playground, and Collaborative Editing with special guest, Anne McCarthy
In his latest video, INCREDIBLE WordPress layout in 250 seconds, Jamie Marsland, teaches you how to create a stunning card layout in WordPress using core blocks and the new negative margin feature.
Rob O’Rourke, principal engineer at the enterprise agency Human Made, was Introducing the WordPress Query Loop Filters plugin. This plugin provides filter controls for the query loop block, using the interactivity API and a powerful way to bring dynamic filtering to your WordPress site. In this article and accompanying video, O’Rourke leads you on a walk-through on how to add a taxonomy filter, create a dynamic Search or add a Post Type filter.
For your more complex table needs in the Block editor, Table Block by Tableberg might be the right plugin for you. The description reads: “From pricing tables to product tables, you can build any types of tables using Tableberg. The plugin is designed for both novices and experienced users. It offers advanced functionalities like responsive controls, alignment adjustments, and cell merging, ensuring that tables look great on all devices without the need for coding skills.”
Justin Tadlock published a Snippet on the Developer Blog on How to disable the Font Library. With a few lines of code you and remove Font library tools for the users of your theme.
“Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2024”
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. 2024 on. Updated by yours truly. The previous years are also available: 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023
Mark Howells-Mead shared in his post how to get preset aspect ratios in the WordPress Block Editor. He sets them via theme.json and then with the help of the useSettings function, he retrieves the value for a SelectControl component.
Join Ryan Welcher and Nick Diego in the upcoming Developer Hours: Improve your workflows with WordPress development tools. They will take a deep dive into the advanced usage of tools like create-block and wp-scripts, along with a few others. Their focus will be on solving common challenges and showcasing techniques that go beyond the basics, even for developers already familiar with these tools.
This session will feature practical examples and insights to help you work more efficiently, especially when building blocks, block themes, and Editor extensions. While the discussion will cover more advanced implementations, it will remain accessible to developers of all experience levels, with plenty of resources provided. There will also be time for questions and a preview of enhancements coming in future WordPress releases.
Steve Bonisteel, technical editor at Kinsta, discusses in his recent post Advanced WordPress development: how to build your next project with wp-scripts a set of tools for WordPress development. He highlights how wp-scripts makes the build process easier with a zero-configuration setup, support for modern JavaScript, CSS processing, code quality tools, and testing utilities. This package helps agencies manage multiple WordPress projects by standardizing the environment and centralizing tool dependencies.
The article includes guidance on setting up a development environment with wp-scripts, using webpack, and utilizing features like advanced compilation, intelligent bundling, and integrated testing, along with examples for handling JSX, modern JavaScript, and linting for code quality checks.
Aki Hamano demo’d on X that “Code is Music” and share a video on how his Piano Block can be used to interrupt your content creation flow with some music. You can also study the source code on GitHub
Tom Rodes is Using a Gutenberg Block to run Snake. He built it in React and runs it in the Gutenberg editor. It’s a fabulous way to procrastinate on your content creation tasks. You can inspect the code on GitHub or play the game inside Playground.
Jonathan Bossenger built a variation of Dodge game you can play on his site. It’s outside the block editor but used the Interactivity API directives, actions, and stores. The code is available on GitHub.
Do you know other fun way to use WordPress and the block editor for a fun projects? I want to know about it. Email me pauli@gutenbergtimes.com
Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s master branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.
Now also available via WordPress Playground. There is no need for a test site locally or on a server. Have you been using it? Email me with your experience
Save the date! Next week, Dec 6th, 2024 at 14:00 UTC, Adam Zielinski will meet with Tammie Lister and others for a Hallway Hangout to discuss Playground for agencies; how agencies and product builders could use WordPress Playground for client work and showcase their products.
You can create Playground configuration files called blueprints written in JSON (see docs). With the help of Blueprints you can build demos or test environments and share with clients, users or co-workers. You can also view a list of example blueprints in the Blueprint Gallery. You can access directly from the https://playground.wordpress.net/ > Blueprint Gallery.
Not everyone is comfortable writing JSON, so Ajit Bohra and his team created a Blueprint builder in the block editor. On Friday. Adam Zielinski and Dawid Urbanski met with Ajit Bohra for an informal discussion about this tool and how it can be integrated into the Playground platform. The recording is now available on YouTube.
Two new blueprints in the Gallery: ImportStarter Content
Since WordPress 4.7, Theme builders could add Starter Content to their themes, to showcase how the theme could shine or to give users a head start on building their new site. Playground offers two methods to import Starter Content: via an option on the installTheme step or as a separate importStarterContent
step. The two new examples in the Blueprint Gallery show how to use both of them.
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: Wynwood Walls, Miami Florida, photo by Birgit Pauli-Haack
Don’t want to miss the next Weekend Edition?
by Birgit Pauli-Haack at November 30, 2024 11:13 AM under Weekend Edition
BuddyPress 14.3.3 is now available. This is a maintenance release.
14.3.3 fixes a mistake made in the build process for 14.3.1 (and 14.3.2 attempted to fix, but didn’t completely fix the issue, so was never released).
14.3.1 fixed two bugs:
bp_heartbeat
property is included in the WP Heartbeat data object (see #9248).For complete details, visit the 14.3.1 changelog.
You can get the latest version by clicking on the above button, downloading it from the WordPress.org plugin directory or checking it out from our Subversion repository.
by David Cavins at November 29, 2024 07:33 PM under releases
I’m not opposed to age-gating at all, I think it’s appropriate in many situations and useful, and democratic societies can decide their own rules there. But it should be handled and authenticated as low-level as possible, at the operating system layer.
See also: Australia’s Senate bans social media for kids under 16. But there are lots of other less controversial examples, like adult websites, or ordering alcohol online or through an app.
by BobWP at November 28, 2024 11:22 AM under WooCommerce Core
The highly anticipated preliminary injunction hearing in the WP Engine v. Automattic case took place yesterday at the Northern California District Court. Presiding Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín made it clear that while she was “inclined to grant some sort of injunction,” WP Engine’s proposed version was “exceedingly vague” and “not particularly narrowly tailored.”
The judge emphasized that she could not enforce WP Engine’s proposed injunction due to its lack of specificity. In the meantime, both parties have been ordered to maintain the status quo until December 2, giving them time to submit revised proposals for the injunction.
Automattic and Matt Mullenweg were represented by Anna Shaw and her team from Hogan Lovells, while WP Engine was represented by Rachel Herrick Kassabian and her team from Quinn Emanuel.
WP Engine’s counsel asserted their client’s right to operate without the looming threat of a “nuclear war” and to remain an integral part of the WordPress community, which they have contributed to for over 15 years. They highlighted the abruptness of Automattic’s actions, pointing out the sudden issuance of a trademark license agreement on September 20—an unprecedented move after years of peaceful coexistence.
They told the court, “That’s not how trademark owners operate. That is not how you protect and enforce your mark. You don’t wait 15 years and then drop a demand for thirty two million dollars on the recipient.”
One of the key issues discussed was Automattic’s demand for 8% of WP Engine’s gross revenue, a sum amounting to $32 million. When questioned, Matt Mullenweg allegedly admitted that this figure was based on WP Engine’s financial capacity, stating, “It’s what I thought they could pay. We did an analysis to figure out what the free cash flow was. That’s how we set that number.” WP Engine’s legal team compared this approach to setting a ransom rather than calculating a reasonable royalty.
WP Engine also claimed Automattic’s actions, including their ban from WordPress.org, have caused significant harm—loss of customers, market share, reputation, and goodwill.
Anna Shaw, representing Automattic, countered that WP Engine still has access to WordPress software and plugins. What has been restricted, however, is their ability to use enhanced services provided by WordPress.org, such as hosting, managing, and distributing plugins via the platform. Shaw further stated that WP Engine circumvented this restriction by creating a “mirror” to restore customer functionality.
WP Engine’s Attorney Brian Mack said the mirror was only a temporary and partial workaround they had to put in place to satisfy their customers. He added that “The WordPress core software, the software that defendants make available on their website, is intimately linked with WordPress.org. There’s 1500 references in the code. They’re hard coded references that you cannot change… Every single WordPress installation relies on WordPress.org.”
He also shared about the huge security vulnerability for all of their clients and Automattic releasing the paid features of ACF pro on WordPress.org under a new URL. But Shaw accused them of wanting to avoid the costs associated with paying for or building an alternative solution.
[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, transitioning WordPress to the SaaS market.
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/feed/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/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.
So on the podcast today, we have Steve Burge.
Steve is behind several popular WordPress plugins, such as PublishPress, MetaSlider, and TaxoPress. And today he’s here to share his journey, especially his recent ventures into the SaaS, or Software as a Service, landscape with his latest project Logtivity.
Steve is experienced in building and marketing WordPress plugins, but Logtivity is different. It’s a SaaS product aimed at offloading and managing activity logs for WordPress sites, ensuring that the site’s performance isn’t bogged down by massive data logs.
We talk about how Logtivity started, somewhat serendipitously, through discussions with a UK based developer. Steve recounts how this partnership evolved from a side project into a full-time commitment. He emphasizes the often under appreciated requirements of dedicating undivided attention to a SaaS product, highlighting the challenges and setbacks spaced when juggling other responsibilities.
One of the key takeaways from Steve’s journey is the importance of identifying and pivoting to the right niche. Initially targeting large websites with massive data needs, Steve and his team discovered that agencies and maintenance services provided a more stable customer base for Logtivity. This pivot not only helped them understand their market better, but also influence them marketing strategies and pricing models.
Speaking of pricing, steve touches on the substantial difference between monetizing plugins and SaaS products. A plugin might be a one-time or annual purchase. SaaS services often require higher, recurring monthly fees. This price shift is essential for covering the more considerable operational costs, including uptime guarantees, server maintenance, and robust data handling practices, all of which are critical for a reliable SaaS offering.
Steve also discusses the less glamorous side of SaaS development, managing uptime server administration intricacies, and the constant need for vigilance. Unlike plugin development, where a failure might only inconvenience users until they download a fix, SaaS downtime can be catastrophic, especially for services as crucial as those monitoring site activity logs.
As someone who’s navigated this challenging, yet rewarding, path, Steve offers good advice for anyone looking to make a similar transition.
If you’re a WordPress plugin developer eyeing the SaaS space, or simply curious about the differences between plugin and SaaS development, this episode 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/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
And so without further delay, I bring you Steve Burge.
I am joined on the podcast today by Steve Burge. Hello, Steve.
[00:04:07] Steve Burge: Hey Nathan.
[00:04:07] Nathan Wrigley: Nice to have you with us today. I’ve spoken with Steve on a number of occasions on different podcasts before. Today we’re going to be talking about, well, an interesting journey that Steve has had in the WordPress space, and also in the SaaS space. We’ll find out a little bit about that in a moment.
Before then, Steve, would you mind just giving us your intro? Tell us a little bit about your experiences with WordPress in the past. And maybe you want to just drop some information about this new SaaS thing that you’ve been wrangling as well.
[00:04:36] Steve Burge: Sure thing. So the most relevant part of my background for this podcast is that we’re very heavily involved in plugin development. The one we’re best known for is PublishPress, which tries to solve all sorts of publishing problems with WordPress. But we’ve got another couple, including MetaSlider, which is a popular slideshow plugin. One called TaxoPress, which organises taxonomy terms.
So that’s been our background over the last few years. And how that loops into this podcast is we’ve recently launched a SaaS product called Logtivity, which is basically an activity log for WordPress. It takes all the activity logs, which can get really massive, can accumulate enormous amounts of data, and we’ll host them for you. So your site isn’t slowed down, and your database isn’t plugged up with all this data. And, well, it’s not been easy, and that’s kind of the topic of this podcast.
[00:05:30] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you, that’s brilliant. So the idea of Logtivity is that it offloads and puts all of that information onto hardware under your control. Because typically WordPress could, if you left everything switched on, presumably it’s tracking all sorts of information and that could add up to megabytes, and megabytes, and megabytes, and finally gigabytes and terabytes, I guess. Ultimately, if you leave it all there, and you don’t exactly know what you want to record, or for how long, and what have you. So that’s what this, product does. We’ll link to it in the show notes.
But as you said, this podcast is going to be about that journey, that move towards SaaS, and the interesting steps that you would, I guess, possibly do differently. The successes and the failures during that. And you’ve written down a series of bullet points on the paper near you, and we’re going to go through those. So this’ll be fascinating. So firstly, let’s just go through how it got started. How did you decide that you wanted to create a SaaS?
[00:06:26] Steve Burge: We’ve acquired some plugins over the years, and during one of the conversations we ended up talking with a developer out of the UK who had an activity log plugin he was looking to sell.
It had become a SaaS service and he was working on it slowly by himself, but not really making too much progress. And so it kind of spun out of an acquisition talks with him. And we ended up partnering with him, and both of us were doing it kind of part-time. He had a day job and was putting in a few hours in the evening, and we had our main plugin business and we’re helping him out a few hours a week.
Slowly we kind of worked together, almost like a 50 50 partnership. He was doing those few hours on the development, and we were doing a few hours on the documentation and the marketing.
[00:07:12] Nathan Wrigley: And so you strayed into the idea of doing a SaaS product, contacted this developer in the UK. I’m guessing from the little bit at the top of the show that everything didn’t necessarily work out. I don’t know if it was a collision between you and that developer, or just a whole bunch of other things.
Let’s embark on your list of things, and they may be a list of ways to do things better in the future. But let’s go through that with the idea of what it would be like if you were a WordPress plugin developer, or theme developer, or what have you, and you were looking to transition into the SaaS space. Some lessons learned basically from Steve and his team. So go for it. Let’s start at number one.
[00:07:49] Steve Burge: Our number one is probably inspired by quite a few conversations we’ve had. In fact, this whole list is inspired by conversations we’ve had by people recently, have been interested in adding a SaaS version of their plugin, or launching a whole new SaaS product, looking to expand their WordPress plugin lines.
And I’ve seen some of the demos, I’ve sat down at WordCamp US, I saw three demos at least, of people with their SaaS products that they’re working on. And then I’ve had conversations since then, people trying to spin out an idea. And my first advice to them has been, don’t do this part-time. It’s really difficult to make this work as a side hustle.
It’s possible with a plugin. With a WordPress plugin you can put something on wordpress.org, do some marketing, add some features, and it’s possible to get some traction. Not easy, but possible.
It’s almost impossible with a SaaS service. It requires commitment we’ve found. We went through a couple of years with this partnership with the UK developer, who became a friend, and I enjoyed working with him, but it didn’t work with each of us chipping in a few hours a week.
[00:08:54] Nathan Wrigley: Is that because of the problems that you’ve got to try and solve? So obviously with the WordPress plugin, a lot of the bits and pieces that might make up a SaaS are taken care of. So authentication, user management, and all of that, and permissions and those kind of things, they’re all taken care of and so the plugin just builds off the base of WordPress, which provides a lot of that.
Whereas I’m imagining, maybe there are libraries and ways of doing it in a more refined and quick way, but they might not align. Is it something to do with that? Is it the fact that you’ve taken on a load of work, which you might not have foreseen you need to do?
[00:09:27] Steve Burge: Yes, absolutely. You have to build your own payment gateway, your own authentication, and there are some libraries available. We built Logtivity in Laravel, and there are some drop-in libraries, but it’s never quite that easy. There are big chunks that you do need to build yourself. You may see some SaaS frameworks out there, but none of them are ever quite as easy as they promise.
And so you are starting from a lower level. There’s not the ability to suddenly drop in a WooCommerce and have the ability to sell the product. There’s probably not a licensing system like Easy Digital Downloads, which is ready to drop in and go from the start.
And so earlier this year we moved to acquire the whole of the plugin finally from our UK partner. And we put a full-time developer on Logtivity, and that’s when we’ve really started to see some progress because we underestimated the workload involved.
[00:10:17] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so it’s basically a measurement of the amount of work involved, and also an understanding that there’s a load of extra work, which you take for granted in a sense, in WordPress.
I guess also with WordPress, the end user is fairly well-defined in that they’re website builder, and they’re going to have a WordPress website. And you’ve got the constraints of the system that that brings and all of the different bits and pieces there. So the scope is a little less large.
Your audience is defined, they’re WordPress website owners who are willing to extend the boundaries of WordPress. Whereas I guess with a SaaS, at the beginning at least, from a marketing point of view, you’re also just sort of shouting into a void. Nobody has heard of you. You might have to start frequenting other social networks, and building some sort of reputation outside of the WordPress space. You can’t use that marketing channel as well. Yeah, okay, so there’s a load there. So that’s number one. Take us through the next few then.
[00:11:13] Steve Burge: Oh, you kind of hit on number 2 there. The niche is hard to find. In our particular use case, we imagined that the main customers would be, well, very big websites that needed to offload enormous amounts of data. That’s kind of the origin story of Logtivity, is that there was a customer just like that who had activity logs that were so big they just couldn’t possibly be downloaded from their own website. They needed to offload it somewhere. And so we thought there were lots more customers out there like that. No, it turned out we’re probably solving a problem that maybe dozens of people had.
[00:11:44] Nathan Wrigley: So the assumption being that there’d be loads of end users with this problem, and I guess that’s one of market research and asking the question, is there anybody out there who would use this thing? I mean, you’re obviously pursuing the solution, Logtivity continues. Have you pivoted who the target audience is? Maybe you’re addressing, I don’t know, the hosting space or something like that instead.
[00:12:05] Steve Burge: We’ve pivoted more towards agencies. Our biggest users are agencies who have hundreds of customers, and they need an easy way to track what’s happening on all those sites. Agencies and maintenance services.
The niche problem has come up with quite a few of the people I’ve talked to who have been kicking around SaaS ideas. They put up a site with AI content marketing, or one particular WordPress plugin niche, and it’s tricky to hit that niche, not only a niche that people will pay for initially, but also one that gives you room to grow into the future.
[00:12:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s interesting isn’t it, because you’re separating people from an amount of money, which a typical WordPress plugin can manage is one thing, but SaaS products seem to, over the course of a year at least anyway, my intuition is that they’re more expensive. And trying to get people to open up their wallet and pay for something like that, yeah, you’ve got to know who those people are.
And you’re right, if in the beginning it was an end user who was building a website, it’s probably the least interesting thing in their day thinking about activity logs and what have you. Whereas it really does solve a problem for a development agency who’s trying to track down a problem on a WordPress website that they have access to, and that they are in charge of.
So pivoting that, and learning that was probably extremely important. It makes you wonder at the beginning, imagine the amount of time you could save if you’d just been able to draw that conclusion, and figure out who the actual perfect target market was. So that’s an important thing to mention. Thank you for that. What came next?
[00:13:39] Steve Burge: Oh, well, you’re picking my brain. Number three, again, which is, the prices are higher. You are working with a substantially different pricing segment. If you’re selling a plugin, you’re probably, even something big like Gravity Forms, the initial pricing option is about $50 a year, and not unusual tool for SaaS services to be that per month.
With Logtivity, I actually have a list of all our products on the whiteboard behind me, and one of the details is how much people are paying us each month on average. With our plugins, the average is between $5 and $10 a month, which would be hard to make a SaaS service work.
Logtivity, the average is closer to $20. So we’re already at a pricing segment which is twice where we are with our plugins. We hope to keep growing that because to run a successful SaaS, you probably need to be aiming at a pricing level that is three, four times what you’re charging for your plugins. And to do that, you need to add a lot more value.
[00:14:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s interesting. I’ve never really heard anybody encapsulate that as that fraction, you know, or that multiple, three or four times is what you need to be at, in ballpark figures to make it profitable.
I guess that comes down to the requirements of a SaaS product. You’ve got actual hardware that you’ve got to manage, you’ve got servers that need to be up. Whereas a WordPress plugin, you have a zip file that you need to put somewhere. And that typically could be on some extremely inexpensive hosting option. Very typical hosting option out in the WordPress space.
With a SaaS option, you need to have a much more complicated, robust setup. And also, I guess, you’re into the realms of sort of GDPR, and data handling, and maintaining all of that as well. Okay, that’s interesting. So I think that was three. Let’s move over to four.
[00:15:27] Steve Burge: Those last couple of minutes, you basically knocked off all the rest of the items on my list. I’ll go through them in more detail. I put this on Twitter, slash X, as a question last week, and the very first response I got was from one of the founders of GiveWP. And his was basically one word reply, it was uptime. That is all your responsibility now.
As a plugin developer, like you say, you give them the plugin package and then it’s all in the customer’s hands. But when you’re running a SaaS service, that uptime is all on you. You need to be there 99.9% of the time. And if that happens on a Sunday morning, you have downtime, Saturday night when you’re out with your family and you had a drink or two, and you have downtime problems, it’s a whole different experience from running a plugin where you can offload almost all of that worry.
[00:16:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess the nature of the data that you are gathering in particular means that downtime is really not an option. You can be kind of forgiving of some SaaS apps if they go down, because the nature of the work that you are doing in there is not really that crucial or time sensitive.
And if your consumption of log data stalls, then you’ll just have this big black hole. And then people come because their site, they want to track something down that happened at the exact coincidental moment that your hardware failed, you’re in a bit of bother, aren’t you? And you’ve got to promise something like 99.9, or even potentially higher, given the nature of the data that you are gathering. So yeah, that’s really interesting. Uptime suddenly becomes a really important thing.
[00:17:00] Steve Burge: I’ve been thinking about some of these successful SaaS’ that we’ve had out of the WordPress community. You have Metorik, the WooCommerce product that Bryce from Australia developed. He’s taking in WooCommerce data and suddenly, you have downtime, you miss a couple of sales. Suddenly your key WooCommerce revenue data is off.
Or perhaps the most popular niche has been backup services. Backup slash maintenance services like ManageWP or BlogVault. You’re dealing with critical information there when it comes to people’s site backups.
So, yes, uptime is a whole new headache that you have to learn to deal with, when you’re dealing with SaaS as opposed to plugin development.
[00:17:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so the typical plugin developer can happily go out, as you described it, on a Saturday night, and have a few drinks, knowing that if something goes wrong with the website, at the very most, people are going to be unable to access the latest version of the software, possibly the support forums, or whatever that may be. You can be fairly forgiving of that.
But if your SaaS goes down on Saturday night and you’ve had a few drinks, suddenly you are faced with this bit of a dilemma really, isn’t it? Do you try to fix it? You’re just miles away from a telephone, or an internet connection, or whatever it may be. You’re out in the back of beyond, camping with your family or something like that, and suddenly all the bets are off.
So I presume it’s incumbent upon you to set up a much more robust structure of people who are managing that. So it can’t just be Steve. It’s got to be Steve plus one other who is available when Steve is not.
[00:18:34] Steve Burge: Yes, whenever I’ve talked to someone about this, it’s been a relief for them to get that first hire down so it’s not just them. They can occasionally take some time off, but you need a different skillset that you either need to learn yourself, or you need to hire, which is server admin.
The knock on effect of worrying about uptime is you need to get familiar with diving into Google Cloud consoles, or Amazon S3 consoles. Poking around into at least moderate level server admin skills to be able to get your SaaS up and running. As Laravel users, there are some nice options. We use Laravel Vapor, which is a pretty robust option that takes quite a bit of the server admin headache away from us, but definitely not all of it.
[00:19:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and I guess the key thing that I got out of what you just said there was the first hire is the bit where you suddenly feel a sense of relief, because it’s no longer just on your shoulders. Not just in terms of server management and the technicalities of learning how to do that, but just that on 24 hours a day, the nature of just never being able to entirely switch off.
And I mean, it’s just ordinary things like planning a regular weekend and going out, and knowing that at some point the telephone could ring and you need to be within earshot of that telephone. You’ve got to make sure that you are on the internet somewhere.
And then I guess also you need to set up sort of standard SOP things. So, okay, if our uptime monitoring software alerts to the fact that our SaaS is down, what do we do? Who’s taking it? Where does the chain of command go? What’s the pre-written email that we’re going to send out to our customers, and all of those kind of things?
[00:20:12] Steve Burge: More than one time ourselves, or our UK partner, was tapping away frantically on our phones trying to reboot a server, or get things working when we weren’t in the office. These things happen.
We’ve tried to have people with a variety of skills help out with Logtivity because when it comes to hiring a WordPress plugin developer, it’s normally been fairly straightforward. If you’re a good PHP developer, or even if you’re adjacent to PHP, our last hire with our plugin shop was someone with JavaScript experience, and they’ve really had no problem adjusting to be a WordPress plugin developer.
But with a SaaS service, you’re looking for someone who knows WordPress, because if you are interacting between your SaaS and WordPress, they need to know the normal WordPress standards. Plus, it helps in a big way, obviously, to know the platform you’re working with. It could be Node.js, it could be Laravel. And then you have the server admin on top.
And so it’s not surprising to me that some of the people who have successfully started SaaS’, they 10 X developers, incredibly talented people. I think we discussed Bryce Adams from Metorik. There’s another guy doing well, Aaron Edwards, who has an AI documentation service called DocsBot. And it requires, certainly as the founder or the initial developer, to really be able to have a good understanding, across multiple areas, from your own SaaS platform, to WordPress, to server admin, and whatever else might be needed to keep your SaaS service going.
[00:21:39] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, great. Really interesting stuff coming out of this. And it’s really sparking my thought process because each time you describe the next bullet point, it definitely leads me into a thought process that I hadn’t had before. And so this is really interesting. So where do we go next? What’s the next one?
[00:21:54] Steve Burge: To wrap up what we’ve done, we said that uptime is a major issue, it’s on you.
Server admin is a key skill that you’re going to need to learn.
The technical challenge is wide ranging, that. You may have to deal with several new areas, not just your own SaaS stack, but also the server admin.
And the technical challenge itself is different coming from a very defined framework like WordPress. People joke that as a WordPress developer you basically make it up and do it your own way. When they start looking at other people’s plugin code and think, what kind of weird non-standard thing have you done here?
But the truth is, most people working in WordPress are working in a pretty closely defined framework. A lot is given to you including the authentication, for example, a lot of the database structure. If you are building a SaaS service, either for good or bad, that’s on you.
We kind of touched on that point earlier, but I didn’t mention the one, I put this question on Twitter, this was probably the most common response I got, that you’re on your own. I got responses from people who had used Node. People who’d used Rails. People who had used Laravel, all sorts of different products.
They all said that adjusting to that freedom was perhaps the most interesting challenge for them. I’ve been quite big on mentioning the difficulties so far, but in terms of being a learning experience, in terms of being something completely new, it’s a whole different mindset moving from working in WordPress to working inside one of these SaaS frameworks.
[00:23:23] Nathan Wrigley: You mentioned the sort of, I think you described it as, it’s all on you. I wonder if basically you’re saying it’s quite a lonely thing to do. Because the WordPress community is kind of famously large, and famously accommodating, let’s put it that way. People who have really competing products do manage to be able to just put their differences to one side, and the profit motive to one side when they gather at things like WordCamps.
I’m just guessing, but I’m guessing that the SaaS space is probably a little bit less, and I would imagine there’s a little bit more of a cutthroat mentality. I don’t know if that’s true or not.
[00:24:01] Steve Burge: It’s certainly, you’re coming across more unique problems. Problems that are unique to your build. Problems that are unique to what you are trying to do. Which maybe only a handful of people have experienced, and if they have, they probably haven’t put it onto a forum, onto Stack Overflow or somewhere for other people to find.
But I can guarantee 99%, if I run across a WordPress problem, I’ll be able to Google it and find the answer because the problems are probably fairly limited. It’s a clearly defined product, a clearly defined framework.
Just before coming on the show, a customer had a problem with uploading images. They couldn’t upload an image that was larger than like 2,500 pixels. I hadn’t heard of that as a problem before. A quick Google search. Oh, it was something that was introduced in WordPress in 5.3. We come across similar problems in our SaaS service, there’s no Google results, there’s no search results. For good or bad, we are figuring it out by ourselves.
[00:24:51] Nathan Wrigley: So yeah, every time there’s a support request that you don’t fully understand, Google is your friend in the WordPress space, because it’s very likely that somebody has had that exact same problem before. A perfect example with the image uploads, and it was just, it had never come across your door before. But then it did, and you were able to find the answer in fairly short measure, I would’ve thought.
But the notion that if that’s a problem on your own hardware, in your own SaaS, well, you’re on your own. Go and figure that out. And I guess there is a bit of that, you’ve got to figure out all of the different bits and pieces, and be fairly self-reliant. And in the back at the same time, being able to manage the stress that causes. And obviously if you’re in the process of building, and it’s not yet profitable, or if you’ve built it, shipped it, and it’s not yet, every one of those is one of the death by a thousand paper cuts kind of thing.
[00:25:37] Steve Burge: Oh, for sure. There’s a learning curve to this, and it takes time. In the blog post that I put together, putting all these lessons together, I dug into the success stories of a couple of people that have really made a success of their WordPress connected SaaS.
One of them, the two founders took a couple of years without pay to get it started. Bryce with Metorik took about a year to leave his job from Automattic and get to a comfortable level.
It’s a big change from having a comfortable job, or running an existing business to get some things like this up and running. It’s probably a fulltime commitment for at least a year, if you’re lucky.
[00:26:12] Nathan Wrigley: And you’ve got to be able to bankroll that. And there’s going to be some expenses that you hadn’t foreseen. And it’s not just a case of giving people a zip file. There’s a whole lot more going on.
Gosh, that’s really fascinating. I suppose the one question that I want to ask is, if you had your time again, would you even embark upon a SaaS at this point, combined with WordPress? Would Logtivity be something that you’d examine and think, you know what, maybe not?
[00:26:38] Steve Burge: We were kicking around this question after having these conversations recently. It may be that we have some extra features coming soon. We’re going to see how those go, and it may be time for another pivot, including perhaps wrapping it into one of our existing products with an existing customer base. Some of our successful plugins have thousands and thousands of users. It may be that something like this is better picked up, is better sold, to an existing customer base.
[00:27:06] Nathan Wrigley: I guess that’s an interesting point as well in that WordPress, the sky is set at a certain height maybe with WordPress. And if you have an absolute barnstormer of a SaaS product, and we can all imagine ones which we’ve all used before, Slack may be a good example, something like Notion or something like that. Ones that lots of people have heard of but didn’t necessarily exist all that long ago. I guess in the case of Slack, it probably has.
But really the sky is miles away. There is no limit. So if you were to be successful, it has a greater opportunity to turn it into something truly inspirational, groundbreaking. You can do whatever you like. You’re not constrained, in air quotes, by the WordPress backbone of it all. So, yeah, you would do it again, I’m taking it from that. But you maybe would’ve done things slightly differently, and pivoted it, and changed the direction of it a little bit.
[00:28:00] Steve Burge: Oh yeah. Just as a learning experience. You’re in this business to make money obviously, but to learn as well and try new challenges. And out of the 20 odd years that I’ve been doing things in this industry, I would put launching a SaaS product right up there with the very toughest. I’ve learned more doing this than just about anything else I’ve done in those last 20 years.
[00:28:22] Nathan Wrigley: That seems like a perfect place to end it. Steve Burge, thank you so much for chatting to me today. Really appreciate it. Just before we go, where can people find you, apart from Logtivity? We’ll link to that in the show notes on wptavern.com. Where else might we find you? Do you hang out on any socials, or anything like that?
[00:28:42] Steve Burge: Yeah, I am stevejburge on most of those, Twitter / Threads / Bluesky platforms.
[00:28:52] Nathan Wrigley: Well, thank you very much, Steve. Really appreciate that. And hopefully people will reach out if they’ve got some interesting conversations to have with you about turning WordPress into SaaS. Thank you very much.
[00:29:03] Steve Burge: Thanks Nathan. I don’t want to discourage anyone. We’ve had lots of conversations about people launching their own SaaS, and I’ve tried to be encouraging. It’s a difficult path, but a worthwhile path. And hopefully anyone who reads our blog post will get some good advice from the WordPress community. And I hope they have good luck in launching their product.
[00:29:23] Nathan Wrigley: As I said, we will put all of the links in the show notes. Head to wptaven.com and search for the episode with Steve Burge. We’ll link to the blog post there. But once again, Steve, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.
[00:29:36] Steve Burge: Cheers Nathan.
On the podcast today we have Steve Burge.
Steve is behind several popular WordPress plugins such as PublishPress, MetaSlider, and TaxoPress, and today, he’s here to share his journey, especially his recent ventures into the SaaS (Software as a Service) landscape with his latest project, Logtivity.
Steve is experienced in building and marketing WordPress plugins, but Logtivity is different. It’s a SaaS product aimed at offloading and managing activity logs for WordPress sites, ensuring that the site’s performance isn’t bogged down by massive data logs.
We talk about how Logtivity started, somewhat serendipitously, through discussions with a UK-based developer. Steve recounts how this partnership evolved from a side project into a full-time commitment. He emphasises the often underappreciated requirement of dedicating undivided attention to a SaaS product, highlighting the challenges and setbacks faced when juggling other responsibilities.
One of the key takeaways from Steve’s journey is the importance of identifying and pivoting to the right niche. Initially targeting large websites with massive data needs, Steve and his team discovered that agencies and maintenance services provided a more stable customer base for Logtivity. This pivot not only helped them understand their market better, but also influenced their marketing strategies and pricing models.
Speaking of pricing, Steve touches on the substantial difference between monetising plugins and SaaS products. A plugin might be a one-time or annual purchase, SaaS services often require higher, recurring monthly fees. This price shift is essential for covering the more considerable operational costs, including uptime guarantees, server maintenance, and robust data handling practices, all of which are critical for a reliable SaaS offering.
Steve also discusses the less glamorous side of SaaS development, managing uptime, server administration intricacies, and the constant need for vigilance. Unlike plugin development, where a failure might only inconvenience users until they download a fix, SaaS downtime can be catastrophic, especially for services as crucial as those monitoring site activity logs.
As someone who’s navigated this challenging, yet rewarding, path, Steve offers good advice for anyone looking to make a similar transition.
If you’re a WordPress developer eyeing the SaaS space, or simply curious about the differences between plugin and SaaS development, this episode is for you.
WordCamp Asia 2025, in partnership with The WordPress Foundation and WordCamp Central, has announced two scholarship opportunities for the upcoming event in Manila, Philippines. These scholarships aim to support community members by covering essential expenses such as flights, accommodation, and event tickets. A team of program managers from WordCamp Central and the WordPress Global Community Team will oversee the selection process.
The Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship is being extended to WordCamp Asia for the very first time. Previously, this scholarship was exclusively available for WordCamp US attendees. It is designed to support women who are active contributors to the WordPress project, have never attended WordCamp Asia, and require financial assistance to participate in the 2025 event.
The Diversity Fund Scholarship reflects WordCamp Asia’s commitment to inclusivity and accessibility. This scholarship supports active WordPress contributors who have never attended flagship WordCamps (Asia, US, or Europe) and require financial assistance. It prioritizes individuals from underrepresented demographics who are eager to use their WordCamp experience to strengthen their local WordPress communities in Asia.
Applications for both scholarships are now open and will remain so until December 6, 2024. If you meet the criteria, don’t miss the chance to apply. All applicants will be notified of their selection status by December 20, 2024.
Also mark your calendars—the third batch of tickets will drop on November 28 and 29, 2024.
by Jyolsna at November 26, 2024 05:58 PM under WordCamp Asia
In the latest chapter of the ongoing dispute between Automattic and WP Engine, a new plugin “Secure Custom Fields” (https://wordpress.org/plugins/secure-custom-fields/) has been added to the Plugin Repository by WordPress.org. This plugin has 90+ active installations and exhibits the features of ACF Pro plugin like repeater, flexible content, clone fields gallery, options pages, and ACF Blocks.
Last month, WordPress.org took over WP Engine’s ACF plugin, citing security issues, and renamed it Secure Custom Fields (https://wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-custom-fields/)
David McCan from WebTNG, has a detailed video analyzing the new plugin. He shares that the update check and license check functionality from ACF Pro has been removed. He remarked “This seems like a classic case of a null plugin which is now being hosted in the WordPress plug-in directory. So I’m wondering if this is even a legal Fork. I’m not an expert in software licensing law but my understanding is you need to preserve the original copyright notices when you fork a plugin. it’s one of the requirements.”
Prominent voices have weighed in on the controversy. Gergely Orosz of The Pragmatic Engineer newsletter tweeted, “Automattic – the creator of WordPress, a company raising $950M in VC funding – took a paid WordPress plugin built and owned by another dev and re-published it, making it free. If you have a business selling a paid WP plugin: Automattic can null it, anytime. Another new low.”
Duane Storey shared in X that ACF is now “an officially registered trademark of WP Engine.” He also said, “Sounds like what’s being put into the WordPress repository is basically a nulled version of ACF Pro without some of the copyrights. It’s clear Matt’s no longer a champion of any of the things he once said he was. I left a review. “
Tim Brugman, a Full-Stack Developer, pointed out, “A8c’s _new_ SCF plugin deactivates Advanced Custom Fields PRO when it is activated. An action that is not allowed by the dot org Plugin Handbook.”
Automattician Brandon Kraft, who submitted the plugin, addressed the issue on Mastodon, “The decisions on forking ACF or ACF Pro, etc., are above my paygrade, so to speak, but I didn’t refuse to work on it because I wanted to try to do it right/better.” He also shared, “I wasn’t involved in the forking the Pro code, but I just don’t see a notice. One item on my list is create a proper LICENSE.md that includes the GPL and ack past copyright…acknowledging it is built on existing work. If I missed the copyright already in the code, that’s an oversight on my part and not intentional.”
The Repository reported that a member of the WordPress Plugin Review Team, speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that after Kraft submitted the ACF Pro fork, it was approved by another Automattic employee, bypassing the Plugin Review Team’s usual processes and checks.
The incident has sparked heated discussions on Reddit too. While the majority is against WordPress.org’s action, some support getting the pro features for free.
The preliminary injunction hearing for WP Engine vs Automattic is scheduled for later today.
BuddyPress 14.3.1 is now available. This is a maintenance release.
14.3.1 fixes two bugs:
bp_heartbeat
property is included in the WP Heartbeat data object (see #9248).For complete details, visit the 14.3.1 changelog.
You can get the latest version by clicking on the above button, downloading it from the WordPress.org plugin directory or checking it out from our Subversion repository.
by David Cavins at November 26, 2024 05:09 PM under releases
I guess something has changed with the Joe Rogan / Spotify deal and now all the old episodes are on YouTube again, which means the gems from the archives can now pop up. I was alerted to this conversation between Joe Rogan and John Carmack, and it’s pure gold. I know I’m five years late in watching this, but that makes it even better because it’s so prescient. Joe asks amazing, in-depth questions that reveal deep domain knowledge, and it sparks John Carmack to make observations that are quite wise. No filler. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see both Joe and John being absolutely right. This is one of my favorite podcast episodes ever.
In this episode, Birgit Pauli-Haack and Anne McCarthy discuss Gutenberg 19.6 and 19.7, Developer Hours, Playground, and Collaborative Editing
Show Notes
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Transcript
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hello, and welcome to our 111th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. In today’s episode we’ll talk about Gutenberg 19.6, 19.7, developer hours, playground and collaborative editing. I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and full-time core contributor for the WordPress Open Source project sponsored by Automattic. With me today is the brilliant Anne McCarthy, product manager for WordPress and author of the Source of Truth posts that she’s keeping for almost over a year. No, two years maybe. Forgot. Yeah.
Anne McCarthy: Might be almost.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hi, Anne.
Anne McCarthy: It’s been a long time. Yeah. Hello. Thank you so much for having me. And also I feel like it’s like a lucky, I don’t know, 1, 1, 1, 1. I’m like, I’m into that 111. That feels good.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. I can’t believe it’s over 100 episodes, yeah.
Anne McCarthy: That’s amazing.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s amazing. All the co-hosts that I had and special guests, it was really, it’s quite a trip. And I’m still excited and people are listening to it even more. And so, this is my shout-out for all the new listeners on the podcast. And if you want to, please, please leave a review, whatever you feel about the show, it definitely helps with the distributions. Anne, while 6.7 came out, you did a masterwork of Source of Truth. Can you pick up two features that you are most excited about from this release?
Anne McCarthy: Oh, yeah, that’s tough. Yeah, two features. I am very biased by the things that improve the experience and the feedback that we heard back when I was running the FSC outreach program. That’s something that I’m always thinking about. And so for me, I would pull out, zoom out. I think zooming out and being able to build with patterns, one of the big issues that we used to have back in the day was that it was hard to find the discoverability of patterns and to work with pattern’s a lot easier.
And I think the potential of zoom out, I think there’s a lot of things that we need to figure out still. But I think the potential of zoom out and the ability to zoom out and focus on the sections of your site, to get out the granular details is a huge win and something that can be built upon and used contextually right at the moment when you need it. I think that’s the part that we need to start sorting through is do we now expose this when it comes to adding a new page or adding a new template? Because I know some folks really don’t like that pop up of starter patterns.
But I’m always fascinated by how we can make the pattern experience easier and make the site building experience for folks who need it a bit more approachable and more section by section. I’m really, really excited about it. I just built a site for someone recently, a podcast I really like. And that’s one of the things I was most excited to show her is like, “Hey, if you want to add future stuff, look, you can just, boom, sections. Add this in, you can just add these patterns.” And I think it makes the user experience a lot better.
The other one I’ll mention is more technical, but something that also has been a long-standing point of feedback back. Back when I was doing developer relations, developer advocacy, the template registration API, I remember early on so many plugin authors being like, “How do we adopt block templates? How does this work? How do we register things?”
And I would send very niche GitHub links to how other folks had done it. And this registration API just eases all of that. And I’m really excited for folks to increase the adoption of using block themes and block templates and embracing a block world. And I am thrilled that that has landed in 6.7. And I hope more and more folks can take advantage of it. Those are the two very different, but I would say those are the two that make me excited.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Excellent. Excellent. Yeah, we talked about 6.7 with other hosts here before because it’s an eight to nine weeks release cycle. In between we had our episodes and we looked at that. But we are looking to the future. We have right now on the Make Core blog, we have two posts. One is the release schedule proposal by Héctor Prieto for next year and I can’t believe we are going to have a 7.0 release in 2025.
6.8 is proposed to be scheduled for April 15th, 6.9 for August 5th and 7.0 for November 11. And it’s all around the flagship word camps, around some holidays and way before Black Friday the new version is out. Even those who experienced a lot of traffic for the last two months of the year, they can do it with a new version.
Also for WordPress 6.8, the call for volunteers is out, so if you want to contribute to a release, it is definitely a certain advanced level of contributing. But what you can do, even if you don’t have experience, you can shadow people that are on the release. To maybe do that and then start working in the release squad for 6.9. Definitely try and figure that out if you want to contribute.
Otherwise, there are multiple other ways to contribute to WordPress course. We all have done it. We all did some documentation changes, we did some reports on the Gutenberg and the track tickets we tested with that. And testing has become really fun now with Playground. Yeah, it’s really interesting to see how that sped up so much. Any thoughts about that?
Anne McCarthy: Yeah, I am super… It’s so interesting when I had a call this week with some of the WordPress YouTubers, an AMA with Matías Ventura, the project architects of Gutenberg. And Playground is something I’m so fascinated by because it really does make it immediately accessible. You immediately can have your hands on it and it works well.
And Playground, one of the things I love about the Playground team, and this is something I think that’s really important when you’re using a new tech like that, they want to hear what would make your experience better, easier, if you run into a bug, all that sort of stuff. You’re getting… We report stuff all the time. I feel like that’s one of the things that I really love about these efforts right now in the WordPress project is there’s so much momentum and so much care and thought being put into those tools.
And so if you haven’t given it a try, please give it a try. If you’ve run into an issue, please, there’s a GitHub repo where you can open issues. But I’m really hoping we can get more educators and influencers using it to help bring WordPress to more people. If you haven’t been paying attention to WordPress Playground, I definitely encourage you to do so. And it’s a great way to test things early. As Birgit was saying, testing is a lot easier and more approachable thanks to a lot of the stuff that’s being done there.
I always find it a great way to, whenever I’m doing the Source of Truth, I’m spinning up WordPress Playground constantly. I think there’s some stat where I think 700,000 people have used WordPress Playground. I’m probably 50,000 of those. Because I feel like I’m using it probably on a daily basis, so if that’s helpful insight for… I truly probably use it on a daily basis. If you aren’t, it’s definitely something to add to your list of tools.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Definitely. Yeah. If you want to learn more about Playground, we are planning some Hallway Hangouts. Hallway Hangouts are informal discussions with contributors on their new features and what they’re working on to give a little bit feedback but also to show off a few things to trigger some creativity.
And there’s Ajit Bohra who is a early adopter of Gutenberg as well as a Gutenberg contributor, has built a blueprint builder. Blueprints are the configuration files for Playground. And he made this into a block editor feature and had been working on it. And so next week, February… February, how did this come in? No, it’s Friday, not February, it’s Friday, November 29th at 14:00 UTC we are in a Playground Hallway Hangout with Ajit Bohra. And he shows off what he has done, what his vision is, what the team is going to think about. Adam Zielinski who was the sole developer for a year now has the whole team behind Playground will also be there.
And the second event is with Tammie Lister and discussing how agencies can use Playground for their product, in their client work and all that. That’s December 6th, also 14:00. These are save the date for you right now. We are publishing that on the Make Blog on Playground before with all the Zoom links, but that’s just to get it out before that happens. And you know about it.
There’s also a developer hour coming up on December 17th that’s also on Playground and watch the announcement on meetup.com. It is not quite clear what the topic is about, but it’s definitely on the roster. December 17th for 16:00 UTC. And this week was a developer hangout. No, next week, I’m sorry. I’m getting my weeks mixed up.
Anne McCarthy: So much is happening. I don’t blame you.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. December 3rd there is a 16:00 at 16:00 UTC. Ryan Welcher will talk about improving your workflows with WordPress development tools. It’s about extensions, it’s about create block, it’s about create block theme, it’s about webpack and all the different things that can make your life easier. That’s also sniffers for coding standards and all that. You will learn how to use them and how to make it easier for you to develop things.
This week what I wanted to say was the recording of the developer hours is available on Exploring the Block Bindings API from WordPress 6.7 with Justin Tadlock and Nick Diego. They just had the block bindings actually my favorite thing for 6.7 that it’s in the UI and you can connect your custom fields with the blocks and have an automatic display on the front end that’s just phenomenal and is really magic for me. But that’s what you can see in that recording.
All right. Now the announcements. The developer blog has some new things there since we last talked about it. Of course, the What’s New for Developers comes out every 10th of the month. And that covers a lot of things from 6.7 but also from the 19.6 release that we are going to talk about today. And we have a new post format on the developer blog called Snippet, which is a small explanation of a problem solution for one task and then the code snippet with it.
There are two snippets there right now. One is how to disable heading levels in the editor. That’s about a feature that came with 6.7 as well is different heading levels and how you can control that. When you have your editors and they are not supposed to use H1s, you can disable that from the drop-down list. And you can also say, “Okay, we don’t do H5 and we don’t do H6,” and disable that. And the snippet shows you how to do that very easily with BHP.
The other one is to conditionally unregistered patterns. That’s important for theme developers who have patterns for plugins that might not be installed yet. You don’t want to show the pattern because it runs into a problem. Now you know how to conditionally unregister those patterns and both by Justin Tadlock. All right. That’s from the developer hours to developer news. And from the upcoming events, the Hallway Hangouts and developer hours.
Anne McCarthy: I love all the formats that are happening. There’s so many learning opportunities and I really liked the new snippet approach. I saw that coming up and I think that’s a really neat way for folks to get bite-size… The tutorials are so cool. I followed some of them to learn. And the snippets I think really round it out. Kudos all around. I think it’s just awesome how much… I’ve never… In my opinion years ago, I think this is the dream. If we had to be able to see how much stuff was going on, it’s just amazing how many resources there are and ways to either watch live or watch later and learn with other people. It’s really cool.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And we will also bring the developer hours recordings into the developer blog.
Anne McCarthy: Nice.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s on my list for the last thing that I’m going to do this year is to create the custom post type and figure out how we lay it out and what additional information is going to be around the embedded videos. But yeah, it’s such a great tool. And we are all working towards the extenders who try to use the new APIs, be it interactivity API, the block bindings or even the block hooks that came out in 6.6 and 6.5. There’s always something… And especially also using block themes with the style variations. And so the developer blog is now a… It’s been around two years this month.
Anne McCarthy: Wow.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And we have about 50 posts. And this definitely enriches it because not everybody has time to read 3,000-word tutorials when they’re looking for something. Yeah. Yeah. And if you have any ideas, dear listeners, about what should be written about, you can always come in into the core-dev-blog channel in WP Slack and the Make Slack and figure out how that is. There’s on the website there’s also how to contribute, how you go from idea to post if you want to write for it. Yeah, definitely. You can also subscribe to it so you never miss a post again with developer.wordpress.org/news/subscribe and put in your email address and you get notification.
That brings us to what’s released. And we talked about WordPress 6.7. We have in the show notes for you the field guide 6.7 and also Anne McCarthy’s WordPress 6.7 Source of Truth published on the Gutenberg Times. But I mention it also because this week WordPress 6.7.1 was released and it fixed a few bugs that okay, those needed to be really done fast because there was a fatal error or the editor didn’t work right when you had uncategorized pattern browsing or there was a TypeScript error on the categories for theme patterns.
Anne McCarthy: Was an auto-size issue with lazy loading and that was a big one that we saw. I saw a lot of reports of across many different areas. And so that will be fixed and yeah, I’m excited. I’m really kudos to everyone who worked on that. It’s a huge… It’s one thing you race to the finish line to get the big major release out and then to do another point release. It’s just really impressive and a lot of effort from a lot of folks in the community.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And that’s just nine days after the release of 6.7, so that’s really kudos to the release leads. There was Jonathan Desrosiers and Carlos Bravo who pushed this all over the finish line with the contributors that actually fixed the bugs. But now some of them is in the upcoming Gutenberg releases we’re going to talk about.
Which brings us to Gutenberg 19.6. 194 PRs with 57 contributors, eight were first timers. Kudos to them getting their badges for core contributing there as well. It has 37 enhancement, 65 bug fixes was the one that was released right before release candidate to get all the bugs in. And the rest is always on documentation, tooling, code, quality and components. Let’s dive in. What’s first on the list?
Oh, yeah, there are two things that I want to talk about for the developers. The great block scaffolding tool has a new flag. It’s called Dash dash target dir, to allow the tool to also target where the scaffold should be placed.
There were some conventions that you had to call the command line outside the plugins in the plugins repo to get a next folder into the repo to where your blocks are created. And now you are in more control of where you can place the new block or a new series of blocks with a scaffolding tool. That was a major request from developers that that might be added.
And the other one is with wp-scripts, you can now also do a root folder argument for the plugin zip command, so you get your plugins packaged. And that’s in the right folder or from the right folder. That’s better there. I want to point that out for the developers on the show using the tools that are built into Gutenberg. Do you want to take the Block Libraries B list?
Anne McCarthy: Yeah, let’s run through that. I love block library updates because it’s amazing how just slowly chipping away at stuff, whenever I’m doing a Source of Truth, I always find there’s a beautiful set of things that have just big and small tools like 6.7 had shadow support for the group block, which folks really wanted. And it’s just amazing how the improvements continue to come.
We have a transformation from separator to spacer blocks. And that just allows whenever you’re using the transform menu to easily switch between things. I think that’s a great one. I think it makes a lot of sense. I actually am really… Whenever I was looking for the changelog for this, I was excited to see it. I ran into that maybe three weeks ago and so it’s like, “Oh, yeah, this is an obvious one to have.
But adding the lightbox option in the gallery block link control. I actually used this. When did I write a blog post? Three days ago? Whenever you add a gallery block before you had to individually select each image block within it to add that lightbox and the lightbox is when the image takes over the screen. And now there’s just a control at the top level. When you’re selecting the gallery block, go into the block toolbar, hit the link, and you can easily just have it applied to all the images. Which yes.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Such a relief.
Anne McCarthy: Yes, it’s a relief that it’s perfect… Yeah, it’s like, “Oh, this makes perfect sense. Why didn’t we have this before? I love when that sort of stuff comes out.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Not everyone has just three pictures in the gallery. Some people have 20 pictures in the gallery. And then it’s really…
Anne McCarthy: And it’s funny. Yeah, I was like, “When did we add this?” Because I literally… Yeah, that’s something I cannot tell you how many times I have gone through and manually added that. Or I’ll miss one image by accident and not realize it. This just makes it so much easier for the archives. There is now border block support, which is great for block theme authors. Border support is also added to comments. Just again, more styling options.
The cover block has image resolution options now, which is just again, more control to more having commonality between every image block. And this is something I think about a lot whenever you’re working with blocks that interact with media is like, how can we make it as similar as possible When you’re working with image things? Because that is an inconsistency that it wears on you when you’re using a block and it’s similar, you’re like, “I’m just using an image. Why is it different if I’m using the cover block or the image or the gallery block?” We should have a lot of congruence there.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Totally.
Anne McCarthy: And so it’s neat to see that.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. Love it.
Anne McCarthy: And then the HTML block forces the HTML preview when you’re in view mode, which I actually need to look at this and make sure I’m going to get this right.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: The view and design view, yeah, the edit view, that changes. I think there’s a writing, write mode coming that I have to dive into because the change was edit and view and now it’s write and design. And I need to figure out what the differences are.
Anne McCarthy: Oh yeah, if you ever offline, want to talk about that, I can do a deep dive about write mode. I’ve been up in there opening a lot of issues around that.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hallway hangout about it.
Anne McCarthy: Yes, I think that’d be really smart mode for any folks who have blocks bundled in their plugins, something to pay attention to. And there’s a great tutorial that I think Nick Diego just did around adopting your blocks to content only that you can find the developer blog. I’m pretty sure that’s live. I saw a draft and now I’m like, I’m pretty sure I saw it live.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s live. It’s live on the developer blog.
Anne McCarthy: Okay. Cool.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh. And I’ll share the link then in the show notes. Yeah.
Anne McCarthy: Cool.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: The next one is that we have a… Oh, your favorite feature. The zoom out note now has a keyboard shortcut to open up the editor of being available in the editor. You can zoom out per keyboard and you don’t have to look for that little icon there. And there’s an iterated zoom out shuffle into a more visual control. What does that entail?
Anne McCarthy: It’s cool. I can talk about that a little bit.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, please.
Anne McCarthy: Before whenever you were zoomed out and looking at the patterns, there was this shuffle option. And while it was nice to just quickly switch through it, it shuffles through patterns of the same category. The issue is you’re not seeing visually what’s coming next and you can’t get at a glance, “I want to switch to this.” And so it changes it from this shuffle option to this change design option. You’re also a bit clearer on what it’s doing.
And it gives you this nice little preview of, okay, change design, and then look at a list of the patterns related to this. And then you can visually select what you want to change it to rather than just a full blown shuffle, like what’s going to happen when I click this? It allows a bit more control and predictability to the experience. I was really excited to see this.
I have noticed I need to test this more as part of the fun of things when I was working on a site yesterday, that there’s a little bit of lag. Definitely keep… This is one of those areas that when we talk about zoom out is a great initial feature. I’m really excited to keep iterating to make it more useful. No, feedback is very much welcome there.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: The data views is the way how you in the site editor, you can navigate all through all the templates and all the pages and patterns. And it’s also the predecessor for the new admin design. But that has now in the templates, it hides the media field in the list view, which makes it a little bit more dense and more streamlined. Yeah. The next one is, I really love that, the style book now has a color tab where you can see all the color variations. This additional stuff, we’re going to talk about it in 19.7. But the style book is coming really to its better use now that we have all the different features like the style variations, block variations and that. Do you want to do the next one?
Anne McCarthy: Yeah. Real time collaboration, this is relating to inline commenting specifically. There was a lot of work being done around inline commenting that I think we’ll get into later. But basically comments were disabled for published posts for now. You can imagine this is basically to narrow the scope.
While we’re trying to get this feature in place to have it be ready for future release and maybe a bit beta form, there’s some just hard decisions that be made to narrow the scope so we’re not just completely exploding the scope and then something doesn’t work super well. The decision was made for post after they’ve been published to not have the ability to add comments.
And we actually got great feedback from some folks in the enterprise space who there’s a channel for real time collaboration. I posted it about online commenting. And some of the enterprise folks are hanging out there and it was great. One of them actually chimed in on the main iteration issue for what’s coming next with online commenting and mentioned, “Hey, that thing you just disabled, we actually want that.” I think that’s part of the beauty of keeping folks up to date and having that tight feedback loop.
The second that was disabled, someone was like, “Can you revert that? I actually want that.” And it’s like, “Yes, yes, yes. Eventually we will revert. This is just for now narrowing scope.” That’s what you can get from that release. But that’s part of the beauty. I wanted to mention the feedback there because I think it’s really cool that folks are paying such close attention.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Anne McCarthy: Behind the scenes stuff.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think I was one of the people who said, “I want this back.”
Anne McCarthy: Yes. Yeah, yeah, you comment on it too. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. But the inline commenting when you get… It’s an experiment still in Gutenberg, so you need to enable it so you can see it. But then it’s really good to have the… Because you can comment on each block and you can have replies. And it’s a great way to collaborate on things and have one editor there and have everybody else comment on a picture or on a block or on a quote or on a design. If you use the design tools and to just have it right there.
And when you open up a post, you see the comments there, you can open it up, you can even pin it to your sidebar. It’s a great feature to test out and comment on. And when you have a few minutes in the afternoon or something like that, I really enjoyed it. And to see what’s coming next in the experiments, there are a lot of experiments in Gutenberg.
Anne McCarthy: Yeah. I know we need to groom that list. I’m trying to wait for the right time to do a make test post asking for feedback. If you want to wait for more curated specific, “I can look at this post and follow these instructions and click on this link and I’ll open a WordPress Playground,” you can wait for that too. Because that is something… I just am trying to wait for us to fix some of the obvious stuff before asking people for their time. That’s something I’m always mindful of is the right time to bring folks in where it’s the most impactful for bringing feedback.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I have to tell you, I love your test instructions. Every time something comes out, it’s such a great way to explore a new feature guided. But then all of a sudden, now that you know how it works, you can create an opinion and I always have an opinion. I travel with it, but then you also can pinpoint it to a certain instruction as well. It’s a guided testing instruction. And also exploring new features. You do fantastic work with that and I’m looking forward to some of the new ones that come out.
Anne McCarthy: Thank you. Yeah, that’s helpful to hear. Because I want it to be that. I want it to be both exploration and feedback. We need to be veering people into what’s coming next so they can have that opinion that you just described. Yeah, that’s really cool to hear.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. The next one was on a backport that actually made it into 6.7. It was an improvement to get the post format in the query loop. And that is something that if your theme supports post formats, there is a way to do archive pages and all that. It’s not 100% seamless. There is some thinking through it from the developer part when you build a theme, but having that is definitely helpful so you don’t have to write the query yourself. There is a… I am a little bit… I don’t remember.
Anne McCarthy: I know this preview, I was like, “I can talk about this a little bit.” But yeah, basically, there’s, yeah, a new API is preview mode flag. And this is something that it looks like it’s been three years looking at the PR since this flag was there to basically allow, to indicate if a block is rendered as part of a blocks list, a block preview, a pattern preview, et cetera. And it’s a way, at this point we need to make it stable. And this came in again from feedback. What I really like to call out whenever this is influenced by feedback.
And this came up with in Jetpack where Riad was helping someone on the Jetpack team when they were asking questions. And he was like, “We should probably stabilize this. It’s been three years now. This isn’t actually unstable, but if we can render a placeholder for this, let’s do it.” And so this is really helpful and it’s just another signal. We do want to be careful about what we list is stabilized. And so this is one of those examples where it’s good to have just another tool in the toolbox to stabilize it for plugin authors.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely, because a lot of plugin authors are a little hesitant to use marked unstable or marked experimental flags features. And so adoption is really slow, although the things have been used in core or with other plugins quite a bit already and are stable, but they haven’t been made stable. And I know for the next release of 6.8, there’s a huge push on that for some of the design tools like the fonts and border controls and all that to make that what’s experimental to be stable and move that forward. It’s really cool.
I think we are through the enhancement on 19.6, but there are a few bug fixes I wanted to point out. The first one is the self-nesting and circular nesting block fix. Up until that fix, it was really possible to have a block that has inner blocks to make it an inner block of itself. It’s like an Inception, if you ever saw that movie. It really confused the block and what to do with it. And you could also nest blocks that are the same nesting in multiple times. It’s like the infinite mirror when you go in zoom and you share a screen and everybody can… You see yourself multiple times, but that is definitely fixed. Or well, if it’s not, please let us know.
And the other part that I wanted to shout out is that there is the link shortcut only to be triggered when there is a text selection. And that has to do with the two features that are triggered by the same shortcut. And depending on which context you are, it gives you the right tool. Control K opens up the command palette where you can then just look for a new open site editor or create a new page. You can do this in the command palette, but it also lets you add a link to the canvas if you’re in there.
And if you are having a text selected, you could trigger that, creating a link with control K, but you wouldn’t be able to trigger the command palette. And if nothing is selected, that’s what you probably wanted. There were a few people, there’s a whole discussion about it in that PR about maybe changing the shortcut, but it’s the internet and the software developers have used the same shortcut for multiple things.
It’s, yeah, exercise. People know about it, and here it comes together quite interestingly enough. But, well, I don’t know about you, but if I have a text selected, I don’t use Control K. And I just do copy-paste and have the link underneath my text selection. It doesn’t bother me, but it would’ve bothered me if Control K gives me the control panel, it doesn’t give me the command palette and rather opens the link feature there. I think it was a good decision. Riad made the pragmatic decision.
Anne McCarthy: I think it was a really good call because this is definitely, I have found it to be incredibly frustrating with the command pilot. And I think it has impacted the experience of using that and the likelihood of people using it in a way that it’s just not predictable. I think this will… I really hope it’s a meaningful improvement and it seems like it is based on… I actually helped test this at one point and just forgot to leave feedback. But yeah, I’m excited to see this in place and hope it helps.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it definitely does.
Anne McCarthy: It’s a great call out. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I wanted to let everybody know that command palette, control K is a shortcut to get to you fast. And I think that’s it. Yeah, that’s pretty much what I wanted to talk about in Gutenberg 19.6. And we go right into 19.7.
Anne McCarthy: Let’s do it.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Let’s do it. It’s 148 PR. Is not as much as 19.6, but that was with 46 contributors and six of them were first timers. The release had 26 enhancements and 49 bug fixes. Bug fixes are a big, big piece of every release. And of course, I have in the show notes both the release posts and we can go into the enhancement. Do you want to start us out?
Anne McCarthy: Yeah, I would love to. Now in the preview dropdown, the device preview dropdown, there is an option to show template. And before this was available in the setting sidebar, but it wasn’t super discoverable. And so this is just adding it there as well. Whenever you want to actually see a template preview, this option is now there whenever you’re trying to review your content.
And I think this is one of those things that again, I am very curious to see how the feedback lands and how folks feel about it. If it ends up making sense to folks. We’ve added various things into that device preview dropdown. Including zoom out originally was thought of as being in the device preview and that was eventually moved. And I think this makes more sense conceptually. I was against zoom out being there, but I think having a template preview is a neat way to have a what you see is what you get. You may not need to go see the post in a new tab if you can just toggle this on and off to show or hide template.
And I don’t know, for me personally, whenever I’m writing or creating stuff, I often start with having the template gone. I don’t want to see it. It’s a distraction. And then whenever I’m ready to see, “Okay, how does this actually look in context?” You can toggle that on for show template. And I think it’s a great small enhancement that can help with usability and curious to see how people like it and use it.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely. Yeah, and I’m really curious what people are going to do with the… Because the preview dropdown has been opened. There’s an API now for plugin developers to put it in. And I saw people put in view this in your newsletter because they use the block editor for the newsletter. And I also have seen it in I think blog visibility, what’s it on the front end when you have… The plugin block visibility by Nick Diego has an option to see it what is it that I showed. Where you can show and hide things. And he was able to manage the canvas to actually show and hide things quite easily. Yeah. It was really interesting what plugin developers are going to do.
Anne McCarthy: Yeah, I agree. I think it’s the preview options API, I just was looking it up to make sure I had the name and was available in 6.7. I think it’s a pretty cool… The accessibility there feels pretty powerful.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely. Yeah. And this is, the next thing is more like a PSA so to speak, that the view external link that is in the toolbar on top is actually now at the end of the editor header controls. It got moved, so don’t be confused. It’s now on its final place for now until we move it again. But yeah, I think the zoom out button or link made us think a little bit more about what is the order of those things. And it would really help to get some feedback on it. What do you think about it? Yeah, just don’t miss it. It’s there. You just need to look a little left on it. And the next one is, can you talk about that?
Anne McCarthy: Oh, yeah, I would love to. There’s situations where there’s a post, you’re writing a post, you have a number of images in the post. And let’s say you want a quicker way to just set a featured image. There’s now an option where if no featured image is set, you can set any image to be the featured image.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s cool.
Anne McCarthy: Yeah, it’s really cool and it comes from this desire to make it easier for folks whenever they’re in the flow of writing things. And as we know, images are really powerful. If you switch themes and you don’t have a bunch of featured images set, it can be a pain. There’s a lot of broader thinking around this. This is just an initial iteration to make it really easy to make sure to just set an image as a featured image.
And so, I definitely plan on using this. Because I always am reusing… I’ll post a blog post, I have a gallery of images, I love taking photos. And then I have to go again and select the featured image and go through the media library and all sorts of stuff. And now instead I can just be like that one, I want that one as a featured image. Through that, set as featured image. And so it just uses the same set as featured image property as it’s used elsewhere in the system. It’s also really cool use case with that. I’m excited to see it.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I have two questions about it. One is if I set it as a featured image, then I can take it out of the post because it’s a different storage? Yes. Okay.
Anne McCarthy: I think so. Yeah. I think it’s basically it’s an attribute that’s set. And so, if it doesn’t have a featured image, it’ll be set as a featured image of the post. And you can also, if you override that and set the featured image, I’m pretty sure then that will be the priority is whatever is set as a featured image in that flow.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Most of the time or sometimes the theme supports featured image in a blog post. Then if you take an image that’s in the canvas as a featured image and it still stays in the post, then all of a sudden you have a double in there. It depends on how the theme works or how you set up your templates for the single post. If that’s a trained method now for you, yeah, you probably want to switch off the display of the featured image on the single post.
Anne McCarthy: Yeah. Because that is such a… I right now have a theme that has… It does duplicate and I just decide to accept it. And I often, because block themes are so powerful, I’ll just go on a site editor and make sure that it looks good or looks separate and doesn’t feel too, I don’t know, annoying, where it’s like the images are just right after each other. And that’s one of the cool things with block themes is you can always just edit it or straight up remove it from your template if you want.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s fascinating what you can do, what you couldn’t do before. Yeah, yeah. The next two are other ones of getting more support for blocks. That’s the post content. Block now has border support and spacing support. And the details block also got anchor support. You could have the header of the details block be an anchor so you can link to it, which is very powerful.
Anne McCarthy: Oh, this is a big one.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Anne McCarthy: Yeah. Can I talk about it? I’m obsessed with.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, talk about it.
Anne McCarthy: Okay. I’m going to tell the story of the background of this. When the site editor first was launched and people would drop into the editor, the site editor and start building, they would stumble on this style section. And a lot of folks thought that they were just styling their template. Whatever they were looking at, it was like, “Oh, cool, I’m styling just what I’m seeing.” And it’s actually styling everything.
The style section when you’re in the editor is styling everything, whether you can see it or not. And so this was almost like an information architecture problem, a UX problem. And to help start to alleviate this and to communicate the global nature, the same styles experience you get when you’re in the editor is being moved to the top level in that dark sidebar. Designers call that the frame. The frame of the experience or that dark sidebar before you get into the canvas and the editor.
It’s being moved to the top level. Whenever you first enter the site editor, you’ll see those same sections that you’re used to seeing. And when you hit styles, it’ll actually bring you in using data views. This great view of all your styles experience that you would expect whenever you’re actually in the editing experience. And the hope is that this will allow folks to understand that it’s like you’re editing everything. And in line with the other changes were done to allow you to toggle between the style book and previewing your site. And so, I think it’s a really exciting way to see when you first are landing there. I’m pretty sure it’s in 19.7. There’s basically a new landing section that’s added to the style book. I’m 99% sure I’ve tested this a ton.
And there’s also in line with this, there’s some upgrades to the style book. The style book is a bit better laid out. And then there’s also this landing section that basically pulls the most important information from your theme related to styles so that when you get there you get this sense of like, “Okay, this is the styling of my site, these are the colors, this is the typography.” And it just is meant to be a clear, easier to understand experience that you’re impacting the entire site.
And with that said, you will still have access to styles when you’re in the editor, so it duplicates it. And I am really curious to get feedback from folks because I think this is going to be confusing. I think folks are going to see the same thing and think, “What’s the difference? Is this the same? I’m not really sure. Is this for the entire site and this is for the template.” And so that’s one of the things that’s part of the beauty of iterating in Gutenberg before a major release is to get that feedback.
And part of the reason to keep it in the editor is for block themers who will want to be making changes while they’re editing templates and not just necessarily at the high level. There were a couple of different use cases to have to accommodate there. And part of the issue that we can figure out is what does the user experience look like between the two? How do we connect the two experiences?
Maybe when you open styles in the editor, it automatically brings you to that view. I’m not really sure, but there’s ways that design thinking can be applied to this. I’m really excited about this. This helps to solve, it starts to solve a long-standing issue around communicating styles as global styles, styles as impacting your entire site. And it just brings that sidebar at the top level to be a bit more useful. And so I’m obviously way too excited about this.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, no, no, no. I’m really glad that you explained it. Also, the whole genesis of it because I remember those feedback from the FSC program here that people are… And I always attributed to that there’s another level of abstraction and another level of design coming with the templates where users never had access to it so they didn’t have to learn that new concept. That stumbles them, but there is a way to actually alleviate that from the user experience. That’s brilliant. And I’m really happy that it also ties the style book of it.
What I saw was if you go through the styles in the middle section and you change the color palette in the style book, then in the right hand side, you can then see how that affects every single block or every single… Yeah. You can actually really make decisions about if you wanted that or do you need to do some additional adjustments there. The style book gives you a whole good overview. And it was always a little bit off site if you… It was hard to discover and now it’s right there for you to see. Yeah, so I’m really happy about that.
Anne McCarthy: I’ll share a little sneak peek. I was talking with some of the developers yesterday about this. But some of the work also to bring this to the top level, have it be like that is to then expose it for classic themes. Can you imagine a style book for classic themes and this landing section for classic themes?
The benefit, and this again goes back to phase two and gradual adoption and how important it is that we have these on ramps and ways of bringing some of these new features to everyone who’s using WordPress. And so that’s a PR in progress expected on a future Gutenberg Times episode. And all block themers out there and all themers in general out there, this is a great area to give feedback and to see how it works with your theme.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah, the style book. When I was implementing some Gutenberg sites in the early days, 2018, I would create a post with all the blocks in there so we could, together with a client, look at how everything’s going to look from the theme point of view and where adjustments need to be made. But that was a major effort to put all the blocks in there. The style book is such a great tool. And bringing that to the classic theme is definitely a great way to foster adoption. Also to make the life of a classic theme developer a little bit easier doing that.
Anne McCarthy: Yeah. We got a lot of good feedback from folks being like, “I want this. Why can’t I use this yet? How can I use this?”
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s the best thing that comes with Gutenberg and, “I need it.” I can totally.
Anne McCarthy: And I love that feedback loop. And then one of the things, the next thing to think about is what does that look like to expose it in the appearance menu? We have patterns, do we have a style? And then what about the font library? Where’s the order of things? These are things that are on my mind. It’s like, “Okay, do we have them all separate? When do we bring them together? What does that experience look like for exposing these things?”
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, the holistic approach to design is so important. Yeah. But that’s the whole story about Gutenberg. You need to first do the small things so you can do it in context with the big things. And it’s really a little slow to go from the small things to the big things when you do something new. The iteration and the feedback loop is really, really important.
Yeah. Here’s your landing section for the style book is the next one. Next item on the style book tab. Then the next one is something that surprised me a bit, that we have now an exposed filter in the drop down for the individual image on select or upload media that says, “Okay, filter the medium about uploaded in this post or unattached pictures or to show me just my pictures.” Yeah. It’s filtering down to something that we were never exposed to before and it’s really an enhancement of the media library for this Gutenberg section. Yeah.
Anne McCarthy: Yeah. And I’ll note that this actually really nicely ties into phase three. I know it doesn’t seem like it at first, but one of the things that whenever I talk to enterprise folks, imagine you are writing 50 articles a day. And you have photographers, you have media teams, you have all this sort of stuff. And you’re trying to add content, you’re trying to add media to a post.
One of the biggest things is, is this file in the doc already and is it attached to this post in any way? They need quick ways to identify very fast, is this already in here? If not, can I add it in? And because it helps prevent people from uploading the same image five times. This is something that starts down that path of thinking about media library improvements, the workflow related to it. And whenever you’re creating content in mass with lots of different people, how can you make it clearer and easier to quickly filter?
I’m so glad you called this out. I actually totally missed this. It seems like a smaller thing, but it actually directly ties into feedback that’s come into the project. I think it’s a cool quality of life improvement.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I can see that. Then especially the net has become so much more visible, visual that you need the pictures or the videos or the audio a little bit more sorted so that’s wonderful. Yeah, so I think we’re through the enhancements and I haven’t seen…
Anne McCarthy: Oh, I can point out one thing that I think could be good.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes, please.
Anne McCarthy: We were talking about this write mode, and this relates to this. This is like a bug fix. Write mode is exposed currently. And the plugin, it’s actually as of… I just checked the issue today that I opened. Between user testing and feedback, it’s pretty clear that it needs to be behind an experiment.
It’s actually going to be moved behind an experiment, but that will happen in 19.8. I’m pretty sure not 19.7. But in the meantime, to help reduce some of the confusion that we saw some folks running into, it basically makes it so that the tool selector between write and design is not exposed in the post editor. You’re only in design mode. And design mode, it shows all the tools. You can see everything, which is what you’re used to. Write mode offers that content only experience. It really just focuses on the content. It really… There’s a lot to figure out there, but I think of it as it contains the experience just to the purity of writing. It just is focused on the words. You can’t add a block, you can’t remove a block. It’s a very simplified editing experience.
And so, this basically has it so it’s only available in this write mode whenever you’re in the site editor. Which makes sense where you get that overwhelm and that’s where someone might just want to focus on the content of their template. But in the post editor, it doesn’t make as much sense. If you’re writing content, you don’t necessarily need to have these two different options. For 19.7, this is with landing. And then in the future, this will be put behind an experiment.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay. Yeah, I think we should do a separate podcast episode about all the 15 experiments in Gutenberg.
Anne McCarthy: Yes, that would actually be a really cool episode. I would love that. I would be game for that. For sure.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: We definitely would need to do this on video because we’re going to demo things and all that. Yeah. Yeah. I will keep it in the back of my mind for next year.
Anne McCarthy: Do it.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And we can do that. Yeah. Because we have until April until the new version comes out so there’s a lot of experiments that come up. yeah. The listeners, this was 16. 16. Yeah. 6.7 or 19.7. It’s 16.7. Yeah. Right?
Anne McCarthy: Yes. When you said it, it made perfect sense to me. I’m not going to lie. I was like, “Yep, that’s right. That’s true.”
Birgit Pauli-Haack: This was Gutenberg 19.7. And so we are at the section of what’s in active development or discussed. And we mentioned it before, there is these inline commenting that actually was almost entirely done by a group of contributors from a sponsored company called Multidots. And Pooja Bhimani, I hope I pronounced that right, is the lead on that. And they released the first and experimental version of inline commenting for the block editor. I think you were involved in that a little bit more heavily. Do you want to talk about this a bit more?
Anne McCarthy: Yeah, I would love to talk about it. I think it’s a great example of a wonderful contribution story for a really big feature. And the team over at Multidots reached out and they built a number of collaboration tools within their plugin and naturally wanted to help Core. And so this was where they decided to jump in. And right now they have shipped an initial version of 19.5, I think is what it got into, for inline comments.
And what it does is block level inline comments. You can comment on an entire block and you cannot comment on a sentence within that block. It’s an initial prototype to get some of the kinks out. And Ella, one of them, EllaTrips I think is her GitHub username.
Yeah, long, long, long time WordPress contributor and Core contributor has been really helping there as well as Riad and Joen and design. There’s just been a lot of beautiful coming together to move this feature forward. And it’s basically in a state where they’re both starting to chip away at some of the minor bugs, like, “Okay, these are obvious things to fix.” And then they’re going to work on implementing a new design.
And so there’s some really cool designs on there, both for the short term and thinking really long term. I actually have a post I’m hoping to share today, sharing an update about all these different phase three areas. And this is just one of those big areas to keep in mind and to follow. There’s a lot of momentum and there’s a lot of work being done there. And Multidots has done a great job.
This is a huge thing to jump into as a first contribution. And so huge kudos to them. This is not an easy task. I think they’ve been working on this since April of this last year. It’s been a huge effort to come together. And it’s been really fun to work with them and to watch them develop directly in the Gutenberg plugin and land something and iterate.
And that’s part of the cool thing with the Gutenberg plugin and with the… It’s an experiment right now, so you have to turn it on under Gutenberg experiments. But expect to see more to come there and test, a call for testing from yours truly eventually. I’m hoping next week. That’s one of my top priorities for next week and this week is to get that announced update post out about the different areas of phase three.
But yeah, I’m really excited about it. I think it’s a cool thing if you’re a small editorial team to try it out. If you’re a plugin author, think about how you might want to extend it. All that workflow collaboration head space, this is one of the first meteor things, or probably the second meteor thing that’s land other than data use, which is a huge thing. I just completely… Data views is the first, this is the second. And so, I’m really excited to see some of these phase three features that are really tangible begin to get out into the open.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Well, I’m glad you bring this all to us. And I think we are all… Yeah, test it all out. Did you say you want to post it today or tomorrow?
Anne McCarthy: The update for phase three will be today. I want it out today.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I will bring it into the show notes.
Anne McCarthy: Perfect.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: … because we are not going to publish that until Sunday. Today is Thursday, so it’s really good. I’m going to share it in the show notes. I think that’s an update on the real collaboration on commenting and interviews. I’m very much looking forward to reading that as a whole.
All right. This is, we are at the end of the show today, although with two plugins and Anne here, we have a great show. And next show would be in two weeks with Sarah Norris and it will be the last of 2024. And then I’ll go on vacation. Yes.
Anne McCarthy: Good. Good. Love to hear it. You got to rest. Congrats on over 100. I cannot believe you have over a hundred episodes of this. That’s really incredible. I keep thinking about that at the beginning of the show. I think that’s so cool.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, thank you. Yeah. I couldn’t have done it without you and all the other guests that are here that bring their brilliance to here. Because I only see one side of things and having other aspects of it makes it so much richer. Dear listeners, as always, the show notes will be published on gutenbergtimes.com/podcast. This is episode 111.
And if you have questions or suggestions or news you want us to include, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. That’s changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. And I want to thank you, Anne, for taking the time tonight to be with me and walk me through things and share your insights with everybody. Thank you all for listening. Goodbye.
Anne McCarthy: Goodbye. Thank you for having me.
by Birgit Pauli-Haack at November 24, 2024 09:52 AM under WordPress Themes
Phew! That was a long break! And a lot happened. It might take two editions to get us up to speed again.
And it doesn’t stop, the preliminary schedule for WordPress releases in 2025 came out and the call for volunteers is open for WordPress 6.8 release cycle.
With Thanksgiving ante portas (= at the gate. Yes, I was in Rome) I hope you have a calmer week ahead of you, be it because many contacts take time off and the noise level is reduced, or you connect with family and friends on Turkey day, off-screen.
I am always grateful to you, dear subscriber. Your support and keen curiosity keeps me sharing the news around the block editor and beyond with you. It also makes me a listener beyond the noise.
Have a splendid weekend ahead!
Yours, 💕
Birgit
WordPress 6.7.1 was released to quickly fix bugs that appeared late in the release cycle. Check the release post for details. If you just now consider upgrading to WordPress 6.7, you can consult the Field Guide and the Source of Truth to find out about all the new features and APIs.
Rich Tabor recorded the The Official WordPress 6.7 release video. Adam Preiser commented: “This is the best “official” WordPress release video you guys have ever uploaded. Great job!.”
Joen Asmussen posted an update on the Design teams work in his Design Share #68 (Nov 4-Nov 15). You can get a glimpse at the following projects or tasks:
Earlier this month, Asmussen published Design Share #67 (Oct 21-Nov 1) and highlighted these projects, some were already implemented in the latest Gutenberg release.
Nick Diego published this month’s roundup post on What’s new for developers? (November 2024). Catch up on last-minute additions in WordPress 6.7 and see what’s coming next for Core, Gutenberg, and WordPress Playground.
Gutenberg 19.6 was released on November 6th. It entailed 194 Pull Requests (PRs) by 57 contributors, eight were first time contributors.
37 enhancements and 65 Bug fixes. The rest are documentation, tooling, and code quality updates. Release lead Carlos Bravo highlighted in his post What’s new in Gutenberg 19.6? (6 Nov) the experimental inline comments, and improvements to the overall site editing experience.
This week, Hector Prieto pushed Gutenberg 19.7 release over the finish line. It included 148 PRs by 46 contributors, 6 of them first timers. The release contains 26 Enhancements and 49 bug fixes. Prieto emphasized in his post What’s new in Gutenberg 19.7? (20 November)
For the 111th Gutenberg Changelog, I invited the brilliant Anne McCarthy to go over these two Gutenberg plugin releases and also discuss in more depth the inline commenting and the updates in general.
🎙️ Latest episode: Gutenberg Changelog #111 – Gutenberg 19.6 and 19.7, Developer Hours, Playground, and Collaborative Editing with special guest, Anne McCarthy
Anne McCarthy published Update on Phase 3: Collaboration efforts which discusses improvements in WordPress’s collaboration tools, including Dataviews, real-time collaboration, and inline commenting. The goal is to make teamwork easier during content creation. The post highlights important updates and invites the community to provide feedback for a better user experience.
Jeremy Holcombe found for you the 12 best WordPress block themes and most of them are free!. He also explains briefly what block themes are and how they differ from classic themes.
In his latest video on WordPressTV, Wes Theron answers the question: Why design in the Site Editor and use it for prototyping? You’ll learn how to use the Site Editor to design and prototype websites with blocks, customize layouts, and apply basic design principles.
Devin Walker, co-founder of GiveWP, published a new plugin in the repo: Blocks for GitHub. Once installed, it enables a site owner to share a specific repo or the GitHub profile with their readers.
Stephanie Pi from WooCommerce Developer Experience team invites you to talk about Themes with Ellen Bauer on December 2, 2024, from 16:00 UTC. Pi wrote “You don’t have to be an expert on themes to join. This event will serve as an informal opportunity for you to share your initial thoughts, feedback, and questions about Woo Block Themes. It’s our way of starting the conversation early and getting input directly from the community as we shape the future of this space.” Ellen Bauer is a long-standing community member, theme builder, and now Product Lead at Woo, and occasional co-host on the Gutenberg Changelog.
Bud Kraus posted about Working with properties and key-value pairs in theme.json on the Kinsta Blog site. “Whether you’re building a theme from scratch, customizing an existing one, developing a style variation, or working on a child theme, grasping how to work with theme.json
is essential.” he wrote.
In episode 146 of the WP Tavern podcast Fränk Klein on Redesigning WordPress: The Shift to Block-Based Systems, Nathan Wrigley and Frank Klein discuss how block patterns improve user experience and highlight the need for adaptable design, cooperation among developers, and the ability to create more dynamic content with these new systems.
Brian Coords has Mike McAlister on his show and discussed with him Full Site Editing and Ollie. Mike talks about his extensive journey in the WordPress ecosystem, from a designer to a product builder with Ollie WP. They cover the importance of design in WordPress themes, the shift towards full site editing, the value of patterns and pattern libraries, responsive design controls, and more.
“Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2024”
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. 2024 on. Updated by yours truly. The previous years are also available: 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023
The upcoming Developer Hours will happen on December 3rd, 2025 at 16:00 UTC. Ryan Welcher and Nick Diego will discuss and demonstrate how to Improve your workflows with WordPress development tools. They’ll take a deep dive into the advanced usage of tools like create-block and wp-scripts, along with a few others. They will also focus on solving common challenges and showcasing techniques that go beyond the basics, even for developers already familiar with these tools.
In this week’s Developer Hours: Exploring the Block Bindings API in WordPress 6.7, Justin Tadlock gave an overview of the Block Bindings API and how it works, including major changes in the API since WordPress 6.5. He demonstrated how to use the new Editor UI for binding attributes and work with the new JavaScript API. Whether you are new to Block Bindings or have already started using them in their projects, the session offered valuable insights for everyone.
In his latest article, How to add content-only editing support to a block, Nick Diego shows how this feature lets users edit the content in a block without changing the block’s settings, improving user experience during content creation. He includes clear code examples to demonstrate how to implement it.
In his post, WordPress Block Development: Complete Guide to Multiple Blocks & Interactivity API, Deryck Oñate tailored his tutorial to developers who want to streamline their WordPress build setup, making it both efficient and flexible. You’ll dive into optimizing webpack configurations, using the interactivity API, and building multiple blocks—all while keeping the codebase clean.
In his latest Livestream, Ryan Welcher explored Creating an advanced UI for plugins, and used as example building the UI for managing taxonomy controls for his Advanced Query Loop plugin.
The Playground app now offers the Pull Request (PR) testers for WordPress Core and Gutenberg in the interface. Thanks to the contributions by Agata Dobrowolska and Brandon Payton, the feature is now reachable through the 3-dot menu in the left sidebar. If you are part of the outreach channel on Make Slack you might appreciate the easier way to test contributor work before it’ll be merged into the next release.
Don’t miss the upcoming Playground Hallway Hangouts:
Details will follow in Make Slack channel #playground and the Make Blog.
Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s master branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.
Now also available via WordPress Playground. There is no need for a test site locally or on a server. Have you been using it? Email me with your experience
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: Featured image for the Block Talks event site in 2020 by Mel Choyce
Don’t want to miss the next Weekend Edition?
by Birgit Pauli-Haack at November 23, 2024 02:01 AM under Weekend Edition
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.
December 06, 2024 05:45 PM
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