WordPress.com announced that it is giving away 1,000 free premium websites exclusively to university students. This offer is a fantastic opportunity for students to build their online presence.

The first thousand students who sign up will receive a premium WordPress.com website for one year, complete with a free custom domain name, SSL certificate, 13 GB of storage, access to premium themes, and an ad-free experience. With these features, students can create professional websites to showcase their portfolios, projects, or blogs. 

“This offer is perfect for students looking to stand out in their personal and professional journeys, ” WordPress.com said in the official announcement.

Interested students can fill out a simple form with their educational details and email address. After submitting, they will receive an email asking them to verify their student status. Once verified, a unique code will be provided within 24-48 hours to unlock their free premium website. 

Recently, the WordPress community has been trying to find ways to attract new users in the backdrop of discussions about the WordPress market stagnating. Executive Director of the WordPress Project, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, has also recently spoken about how WordPress equips students with essential skills for thriving in their future careers.

Transcription

On the podcast today we have Jamie Marsland, and it’s his third appearance on the podcast, which is a first.

Jamie has recently embarked on an exciting new journey as the Head of the WordPress YouTube channel at Automattic. This role is set to amplify the WordPress story through engaging and informative video content, capitalising on YouTube’s reach to over 2.7 billion monthly users.

As you’ll hear, Jamie only started his role a few days prior to recording, but he’s already full of plans to transform the WordPress YouTube presence. Automattic created this role to ensure a more focused effort on growing the channel, which currently has around 36,000 subscribers, significantly lower than some of the other WordPress YouTube channels.

Jamie envisions targeting distinct groups: beginners, DIYers, developers and designers, agencies and freelancers, product suppliers, and the community. Each piece of content will aim to add value, whilst trying to maintain some fun.

Throughout our conversation, Jamie shares his insights into why this role is necessary, especially in light of commercial rivals like Wix and Squarespace, who possess enormous marketing budgets. He discusses the importance of bringing new users into the WordPress ecosystem, whether they’re complete beginners or migrating from other platforms.

We also explore Jamie’s broader vision for the channel, including making high-quality content that genuinely adds value to the viewer, regardless of its production quality. He stresses that every video needs to answer the question of what value it brings to the audience. Fun and engagement are key themes, but quality content is paramount.

We also touch on his plans to bring in other voices, aiming to build a diverse team that reflects WordPress’ global reach.

Jamie also talks about the balance between engaging the YouTube algorithm and producing valuable content. He shares his experiences and strategies for creating content that draw viewers in, emphasising the importance of creativity in ensuring all target groups find something of interest.

Jamie assures us that his new role won’t mean an end to his own popular YouTube channel, which has been advocating for WordPress for many years. He plans to continue creating content on this channel, whilst focusing on growing the official WordPress channel.

Towards the end, Jamie hints at the changes that might start materialising by October, post WordCamp US. He’s eager to hear from the community, so if you have innovative, fun, or valuable content ideas, Jamie wants to know.

If you’re interested in the evolving landscape of WordPress on YouTube, Jamie’s strategic approach, or how you might contribute to this exciting venture, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Jamie’s Speed Build session at WordCamp US 2024

WordPress YouTube channel

Learn WordPress

Developer Blog

Jamie on X

(This post should be read while listening to Wish by Joshua Redman. The writing is synchronized to the music reading speed.)

Contributor day just wrapped up for Portland for WordCamp US. If you ever have a chance to visit a WordCamp, I recommend it. It’s an amazing group of people brought together by this crazy idea that by working together regardless of our differences or where we came from or what school we went to we can be united by a simple yet groundbreaking idea: that software can give you more Freedom. Freedom to hack, freedom to charge, freedom to break it, freedom to do things I disagree with, freedom to experiment, freedom to be yourself, freedom expressed across the entire range of the human condition.

Open Source, once ridiculed and attacked by the professional classes, has taken over as an intellectual and moral movement. Its followers are legion within every major tech company. Yet, even now, false prophets like Meta are trying to co-opt it. Llama, its “open source” AI model, is free to use—at least until “monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for Licensee, or Licensee’s affiliates, is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the preceding calendar month.” Seriously.

Excuse me? Is that registered users? Visitors to WordPress-powered sites? (Which number in the billions.) That’s like if the US Government said you had freedom of speech until you made over 50 grand in the preceding calendar year, at which point your First Amendment rights were revoked. No! That’s not Open Source. That’s not freedom.

I believe Meta should have the right to set their terms—they’re smart business, and an amazing deal for users of Llama—but don’t pretend Llama is Open Source when it doesn’t actually increase humanity’s freedom. It’s a proprietary license, issued at Meta’s discretion and whim. If you use it, you’re effectively a vassal state of Meta.

When corporations disingenuously claim to be “open source” for marketing purposes, it’s a clear sign that Open Source is winning.

Actual Open Source licenses are the law that guarantees freedom, the bulwark against authoritarianism. But what makes Open Source work isn’t the law, it’s the ethos. It’s the social mores. It’s what I’m now calling Ecosystem Thinking: the mindset that separates any old software with an open source license from the software that’s alive, that’s humming with activity and contributions from a thousand places. 

Ecosystem Thinking has four parts:

1. Learn
2. Evolve
3. Teach
4. Nourish

Learn is about keeping ourselves in a beginner’s mind, the curiosity to always engage with new ideas and approaches.

Evolve is where we apply those learnings to our next iteration, our next version. We see how things work in the real world: it’s the natural selection of actual usage.

Teach is actually where we learn even more, because you don’t really know something until you teach it. We open source our knowledge by sharing what we’ve learned, so others can follow on the same path.

Nourish is the trickiest, and most important part: it’s where we water the garden. If you’ve done the previous three steps, you’ve been very successful; now your responsibility is to spread the fruits of your labors around the ecosystem so that everyone can succeed together. This is the philosophy behind Five For the Future, which you’re going to see us emphasize a lot more now.

That’s the ecosystem. But if it’s the yin, what’s the yang? This openness and generosity will attract parasitic entities that just want to feed off the host without giving anything back. There are companies that participate in the Learn/Evolve/Teach/Nourish loop like a FernGully rainforest, and there are those who treat Open Source simply as a resource to extract from its natural surroundings, like oil from the ground.

Compare the Five For the Future pages from Automattic and WP Engine, two companies that are roughly the same size with revenue in the ballpark of half a billion. These pledges are just a proxy and aren’t perfectly accurate, but as I write this, Automattic has 3,786 hours per week (not even counting me!), and WP Engine has 47 hours. WP Engine has good people, some of whom are listed on that page, but the company is controlled by Silver Lake, a private equity firm with $102 billion in assets under management. Silver Lake doesn’t give a dang about your Open Source ideals. It just wants a return on capital.

So it’s at this point that I ask everyone in the WordPress community to vote with your wallet. Who are you giving your money to? Someone who’s going to nourish the ecosystem, or someone who’s going to frack every bit of value out of it until it withers? Newfold, especially since its acquisition of Yoast and Yith, gives back. (I’ve asked them to consolidate their Five for the Future pages to better represent the breadth of their contributions.) So does Awesome Motive, 10up, Godaddy, Hostinger, even Google. Think about that next time it comes up to renew your hosting or domain, weigh your dollars towards companies that give back more, because you’ll get back more, too. Freedom isn’t free.

Those of us who are makers, who create the source, need to be wary of those who would take our creations and squeeze out the juice. They’re grifters who will hop onto the next fad, but we’re trying to build something big here, something long term—something that lasts for generations.

I may screw up along the way, or my health may falter, but these principles and beliefs will stand strong, because they represent the core tenet of our community: the idea that what we create together is bigger than any one person.

(Hat tip to Automattician Jordan Hillier for the great ecosystem image.)

Hari Shanker and Courtney Robertson have introduced experimental WordPress contribution health dashboards designed to monitor the performance of various WordPress teams. They also presented the pilot dashboards developed for the Make/WordPress Core, Community, and Training teams, along with key statistics from the WordPress 6.6 release.

History and Challenges

The concept of performance dashboards dates back to 2021 when Community Gardener Ian Dunn started a discussion about “the idea of having a stats dashboard for each Make team. If that’d make a big impact, Meta could build an automated system to facilitate it.”  This sparked interest, particularly from the Community and Support teams.

The topic resurfaced at WordCamp Europe 2023, where Matt Mullenweg highlighted the importance of “project health dashboards” that provide better visibility into the performance of various teams. This led to the formation of a working group composed of Naoko Takano, Isotta Peira, Hari Shanker, and Courtney Robertson, tasked with turning this idea into reality.

The team sought community input through project health hangouts this year and analyzed the data using the open-source tool Bitergia Analytics. However, Bitergia lacked integration with several essential tools frequently used by WordPress teams, such as HelpScout, Figma, Trac, SVN, and GlotPress. To fill this gap, the working group manually analyzed additional data sources, including the WordPress 6.6 props list and internal contributor data from the Community and Training teams.

Hari Shanker acknowledged the challenges in manual data compilation, stating, “Manually compiling the data is time-consuming and may not be sustainable. @courane01 and I invested significant effort into preparing them. If they prove valuable, we hope to encourage other Make/Teams to create their own and explore a project-wide dashboard, though this could be resource-intensive.”

Key Insights From the Dashboards

The Core Team dashboard reveals that 37% of WordPress 6.6 contributors were new, highlighting the project’s ability to attract fresh talent. However, there’s a growing concern as the number of inactive contributors in 2024 is rising, and close/merge rates in Core GitHub repositories are declining. Contributions tend to spike around major releases, and much of the work is driven by sponsored contributors from companies like Automattic, Yoast, GoDaddy, and 10up.

The Training Team has exceeded its goals, achieving a 50% retention rate for video content and an enrollment rate of almost 60% for its courses. The Learning Pathways project also performed well, with high enrollment and course completion rates, along with an impressive 90% learner satisfaction rate.

The Community Team is just shy of its 45% target for new attendee participation, with a current rate of 44.76%. While the number of WordPress events dipped after the pandemic, the team has seen steady improvement in event participation as in-person gatherings continue to recover.

Key Insights From WordPress 6.6 Stats

Major points include:

• Approximately 640 people from 53 countries and 129 companies contributed to WordPress 6.6.
• 241 people contributed to WordPress Core for the first time, making up about 38% of the total contributors.
• The USA led with 1033 contributions, followed by Australia with 762 contributions.
• In terms of contributors by country, the USA had 84, followed by India with 69, and Bangladesh with 23.
• Automattic had the largest number of contributors (105 people), followed by rtCamp (14), and 10up (12).
• 26.5% of all WordPress 6.6 contributors were officially pledged through Five for the Future, accounting for 75.5% of all props.

Next Steps 

“Our long-term goal is to build automated, live dashboards for WordPress,” Hari Shanker revealed. The dashboards are in the experimental phase and future developments will depend on community feedback. Feedback can be submitted in the comments section of the post till October 7, 2024.

Episode Transcript

In this episode, Devin chats with Wil Brown, a seasoned WordCamp organizer, about the return of WordCamp Sydney after a five-year hiatus.

Wil shares updates on the event’s organization, including the diverse team of organizers from across Australia, the challenges of planning in a post-COVID world, and the focus on rebuilding local WordPress communities.

They also discuss what attendees can expect from the two-day event, covering everything from speaker sessions and networking opportunities to the importance of community-driven initiatives and sponsorships that make the event possible.

Takeaways

WordCamp Sydney’s Return After 5 Years: The last WordCamp in Australia took place in 2019, and WordCamp Sydney is making a long-awaited comeback, with excitement building across Australia and New Zealand.

Organizing a Large Event: Wil leads a diverse team of 12 organizers from all over Australia, and the event is expected to draw a large crowd. The team’s goal is not only to deliver a successful event but to train future organizers who can take WordCamps to their own cities.

Focus on Networking: Beyond the speaker tracks, the primary focus of WordCamp Sydney is on networking. Many attendees come specifically for the opportunity to connect with others in the WordPress and broader tech community.

Two Days of Talks and Discussions: The event will have two tracks of talks, including a mix of technical and non-technical sessions. While workshops were considered, the team decided to focus on talks to streamline planning.

Sponsorships and Financial Support: Wil highlighted the role of sponsors in making the event accessible, with 93.41% of the expected sponsorship already secured. They are also offering travel grants to support students and others who may need financial help to attend.

Local Community Growth: Rebuilding local meetups post-COVID has been a priority, with efforts to encourage more local WordPress communities to form and grow. Wil emphasizes that smaller, informal meetups are just as valuable as larger events like WordCamp.

Collaboration with Linux Australia: WordCamp Sydney benefits from a strong collaboration with Linux Australia, which provides financial and logistical support, including event insurance and grants for local open-source meetups.

Encouraging First-Time Speakers: Wil and his team have hosted workshops to help first-time speakers craft and submit their talk proposals, fostering a more diverse speaker lineup and encouraging new voices in the community.

Links

• Wil on WordPress.org
• Wil on LinkedIn
• WordCamp Sydney 2024
  • Get your ticket
  • Sponsor
  • Schedule

WooSesh, the virtual conference specifically designed for WooCommerce store builders, is scheduled for October 29-30, 2024, and promises an exciting experience. WooSesh 2024 will feature 33 speakers and 22 sessions packed with valuable insights, case studies, and tutorials on building customer-centric eCommerce experiences.

One of the best parts about WooSesh is that every presentation is recorded and published on WPSessions after the event. Whether you’re juggling multiple projects or living in a different time zone, you’ll have the flexibility to watch the sessions at your convenience.

Call for Speakers is Out

The Call for Speakers is open, and the last date to apply is September 21, 2024. Each speaker can submit up to two different presentation topics. This year’s theme is Customers First, and the organizing team is looking for case studies, tutorials, and demos that showcase innovative, customer-focused eCommerce experiences.

Speakers can pre-record their 20-25 minute sessions and share them with the organizers by October 23rd. Live Q&A will take place on Slack during and after each presentation, allowing speakers to interact with the audience in real-time.

For their contributions, each selected speaker will receive a $250 USD honorarium, a free ticket to WordSesh, and up to two coaching and review sessions to fine-tune their talk.

The organizers emphasized their commitment to diversity, “We are actively looking for a mix of voices – folks from different backgrounds, with different journeys and experiences, and who don’t look or sound alike. Everyone is encouraged to submit a talk proposal, especially people groups who don’t feel well-represented at tech conferences.”

The Seshies Awards

One of the highlights of WooSesh is the Seshies Awards, which celebrate the talent and innovation within the WooCommerce community. Nominations are now open for the six prestigious award categories:

• Innovation Award
• Store of the Year
• Agency of the Year
• Developer of the Year
• Extension of the Year 
• Community Advocate of the Year

Anyone can nominate themselves or their favorite WooCommerce store or expert for the awards. For more information about the event, visit the official WooSesh website.

WordCamp US 2024, the flagship WordPress event in North America, will start in a few hours. WordPress enthusiasts from around the globe are making their way to Portland, Oregon, for this highly anticipated event, scheduled for September 17-20 at the Oregon Convention Center.

This four-day event with around 45 engaging sessions kicks off with Contributor Day on the 17th, where attendees can collaborate on improving WordPress and giving back to the community. This year, WordCamp US introduces an exciting new addition—the Showcase Day.

Slated for September 18, Showcase Day highlights some of the most impressive websites powered by WordPress, including The New York Post, CNN Brazil, Disney Experiences, Harvard Gazette and Vox Media. Attendees will get a deeper understanding of how WordPress can scale for some of the world’s most notable brands.

The organizers have also added four Campfire sessions on Content Marketing, LGBTQ+ Community, ADHD and web hosting. 

The full schedule is already live, and attendees can experience engaging talks on key topics like Gutenberg, AI, accessibility, open-source technology, web designing, WooCommerce, and WordPress Playground.

In addition to the talks, WordCamp US attendees can look forward to the highly anticipated WordPress Speed Build Battle, networking opportunities at Networking Blocks, and plenty of side events for further engagement and connection. Attendees can also visit the famously closed-to-the-public Nike Company Store in nearby Beaverton.

To wrap up the event, the WordCamp US Social will take place at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) on the 20th from 7:00 to 10:00 PM, giving attendees a chance to relax, network, and celebrate the week’s successes.

And, of course, WordCamp US wouldn’t be complete without the live Q&A session with Matt Mullenweg, which will take place on Friday, the 20th. Interestingly, this year’s event concludes on a Friday instead of the weekend.

For those unable to attend in person, all the presentations will be live-streamed on the WordPress YouTube channel. Later, it will also be available on WordPress.tv.

Join us this week as Josepha takes a personal journey down memory lane to her first encounters with WordPress. In this episode, she shares the story of her very first WordPress website, the excitement of getting involved with WordCamps, and how those early discoveries shaped her rewarding path in the WordPress community. Whether you’re a seasoned user or new to the platform, Josepha’s reflections will inspire you with insights from her earliest days in WordPress.

Credits

Host: Josepha Haden Chomphosy
Editor: Dustin Hartzler
Logo: Javier Arce
Production: Brett McSherry
Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod

Show Notes

• Josepha’s Blog
• WordPress Playground
• Small List of Big Things
  • WordCamp US arrives this week (September 17-20)
    • WP Briefing: It’s your first WordCamp? Welcome!
  • Upcoming WordPress Meetings
    • Data Liberation Project
  • WordPress Events
  • Make WordPress
• Have a question you’d like answered? Submit them to WPBriefing@WordPress.org.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Josepha: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go.

[00:00:28] (Music intro)

[00:00:39] Josepha: Folks, this week is WordCamp US, and over the past week or so, I spent a fair amount of time talking to people about that first-time experience. And as with any person who’s talking about their version of a shared experience, I started thinking back to mine.

I think my first experience of WordPress was not typical, though. I had never even heard of WordPress when I first went to a WordCamp. I think, I think most of the time people have heard of it before, but I was just there for the plot. So, like many people in my generation, all of us old people of the internet, I was first online with things like Angelfire and GeoCities.

[00:01:16] Josepha: When I went to college, I was keeping friends and family up to date on what I was up to with a little, like, newsletter? And then Xanga made it to our college campus, and eventually, so did Facebook. And I was one of those kids kind of like half-breaking sites with HTML and CSS I found online. I was changing layouts like every week to suit my mood.

Then, when I graduated and found myself in a city with more talent and more competition than I’d actually accounted for, and started to realize that this online stuff I’d been doing for fun might actually be something that I needed to use as a tool professionally. So, I first went out and reserved my screen name everywhere I could think of.

[00:02:01] Josepha: And we’re talking, like, LiveJournal, WordPress.com, Blogger, all the things, and eventually wound up building my first site on Weebly. And it was super ugly. I’m not able to design things. I have an okay sense for a design that is good, but like, left to my own devices, it’s gonna be what that was, which is like a tie dye background for some reason, and had everything organized into little, like, blocks, I guess? You know, like, old magazine layouts? And it technically had everything that I wanted, but it wasn’t necessarily the best version of any of those things either. I could write a little bit about myself and my services, I could add a few photos, there was a way to contact me, and I could do it all by myself.

And so it was a good place to start. Not long after that, though, I graduated into the need for a more professional-looking website, and it was beautiful. I received a website; someone built it for me. It was beautiful; it had this elegant design. Had a lot of custom functionality, but it was built using ColdFusion. I couldn’t do anything to it. I couldn’t change anything. All minor changes just had to kind of wait until there was enough to make sense to use that maintenance time, that maintenance retainer that I had. It really was just kind of formal. It was an isolated snapshot of all of the sorts of information that was required to be on the web at that time.

[00:03:28] Josepha: And then, later that year, I went to my first WordCamp, and I moved my site over to WordPress. And for the first time, I had that kind of mixture of professional expression that was on top of something that enabled my own expression. And honestly, I didn’t learn much more about the software for a few years. It was doing what I needed it to do, how I needed it to be done, and that’s really what mattered to me.

And when I skip a few years ahead after that, a few years later, when I was learning by organizing Meetups and WordCamps that had speakers that I wanted to hear from, that had topics that I felt like I needed to learn more about, what I remember most about that learning period for me is that I knew that I wasn’t the first person to run into any of my problems, which meant that a solution was probably already out there, and I could find someone to come and teach us about their solution.

[00:04:23] Josepha: And also, I knew that if we were running into a new problem and started breaking things left and right, there was always a way back. I was never really too far away from success. Like I felt like I might be lost, but I still was pretty much findable. And I guess I always want that for new users of the open web now, like new members of our WordPress community.

I want them to feel like the breaking of things is fine and safe and that no mistake is irretrievable. I want us to have some place where perfection isn’t the point. Now listen, I know the software is complex right now. The admin is a little mismatched, your first choices are huge choices, and there are a million places to start.

[00:05:03] Josepha: So, all I can say is, start with what you need, and once you’ve got that, like the back of your hand, move on to what you need next. And keep doing that, bravely and messily, until what you’ve got is all you ever wanted. I’m gonna leave for you, in the show notes, a link to something called WordPress Playground.

It’s gonna launch a little WordPress site in your browser. There will be no host. It’s just all in the browser itself. And it will have the latest bundled theme on it, Twenty Twenty-Four, and the latest version of WordPress. And that’s it. Go in there and click around on the left-hand menu. Start a post, change a page, modify the theme.

Just play around a while. See if it’s something that seems fun to you or valuable, or if it’s something that you can use as a time capsule for your kid because that sounds like a nice little mix of fun and work. And remember, sometimes perfection’s not the point. 

[00:05:57] (Music interlude)

[00:06:04] Josepha: That brings us now to our small list of big things.

Folks, as I mentioned at the top, WordCamp US is happening this week. It is September 17th through 20th this year, quite a few more days. But that also means that we’ll have quite a bit more stuff to do. If you have your tickets and haven’t looked at all of the presentations occurring over the four-day event, remember to take a look at the schedule and pick out topics that are interesting. And remember, just because you picked it out before you went doesn’t mean that if you get in there and it doesn’t work for you. You can’t choose a different topic while you’re there. And as a bonus, if this is your first WordCamp that you’ve ever attended, I have you covered. You can check out my previous episode on all the things to remember for your first time attending a WordCamp. And we have a pretty active community as well. If you just have questions or want to get in there and say, ‘Hey, I’m going to a vegan restaurant for lunch; who wants to join me?’ You can do that, and you can definitely find somebody.

Also, there are some upcoming WordPress meetings. So, if you’re not attending WordCamp US but still want to connect with the community, there are a ton of team meetings that are happening. You can find those on make.WordPress.org/meetings, I think. So really, really easy URL to remember. You can join your fellow community members and contribute to the WordPress project there.

[00:07:18] Josepha: And I also wanted to just call your attention to a few really big projects that still need a little bit of help around the project. So, on the one hand, we have Data Liberation. That is still a really big project, but specifically, we are nearly ready to start working on some user-facing elements of that. It is being powered by Playground, and because the data liberation, the migration of one site to another, is so complex, once we get those elements built into Playground, I think it also stands to fix a bunch of the problems that we have across our user flow, our user experience for the project. Things like having better theme previews and being able to get a sense for what a plugin functionally will do for you versus what it says it’s going to do for you. And getting a sense for what the admin looks like, all of those things. And so, anyone who wants to learn more about contributing to Playground or to Data Liberation, I absolutely encourage you to go check out those meetings, see what’s happening, and get your hands a bit dirty with that.

[00:08:26] Josepha: We also have a bunch of stuff happening in our community space. If you had received this podcast from somebody because they were like, hey, I know someone who might like WordPress or who has just learned WordPress and has never been to an event or any other reason that you are listening to this but don’t yet know the community, there is an easier option than just jumping straight into a WordCamp like I did. You can go to a meetup. You can see there’s a widget in your dashboard that’ll tell you what your nearest event is, but if you put your location into that widget, and nothing comes up. Technically, that means that you have an opportunity to bring a bunch of people together to teach you stuff you wish you knew about your site right now. So you can wander over into your dashboard and see those, or you can also head over to the community area on make.WordPress.org and anybody over there is happy to help you get started. And let me tell you, it is a very low-effort sort of thing to do. Here again, perfection’s not the point. And so that, my friends, is your small list of big things.

[00:09:28] Josepha: Don’t forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app or subscribe directly on WordPress.org/news. You’ll get a friendly reminder whenever there is a new episode. If you liked what you heard today, share it with a fellow WordPresser. Or, if you had questions about what you heard, you can share those with me at WPBriefing@WordPress.org. I am your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. Or tomorrow if we’re all going to WordCamp US. 

[00:09:58] (Music outro)

I noticed recently that WordCamp Nairobi is on the calendar for 1-2 November. Then I noticed their Camp slogan is “Beyond the Savannah: Connecting the Kenyan WordPress Community to the World”, and I thought “Yes! That’s so perfect for HeroPress!” So much so that it’s going to help drive the mission of HeroPress in the future.

At the moment we’re simply a Media Partner, so I’m here to tell you that the call for speakers is open! If you can attend you should apply to speak, we need as many voices as possible.

I recently met with Moses Cursor Ssebunya, Patrick Lumumba, and Emmanuel Lwanga, all organizers of the WordCamp. If you see them, say hi and shake their hand for me. It sounds like it’s going to be a great event.

The post WordCamp Nairobi, Call For Speakers appeared first on HeroPress.

In this episode, Maggie Cabrera and Birgit Pauli-Haack discuss Developer Hours, Playground, WordPress 6.6.2, Gutenberg 19.2, Data Views and Design Systems

Show Notes / Transcript

• Editor: Sandy Reed
• Logo: Mark Uraine
• Production: Birgit Pauli-Haack

Show Notes

Special Guest: Maggie Cabrera

• X (former Twitter: @one_maggie
• WordPress @onemaggie

• Community themes on GitHub
• Twenty-Twenty-Five Default Theme on GitHub
• Block Themes by Automattic in WordPress Directory
• Recap Hallway Hangout: Theme Building with Playground, Create-block-theme plugin, and GitHub

Announcements

Developer Hours

• Developer Hours: A First Look at the Template Registration API in WordPress 6.7 
• Next Developer Hours: Sept 24 at 15:00 UTC Developer Hours: An Introduction to Data Views

Developer Blog

• What’s new for developers? (September 2024)
• Registering block templates via plugins in WordPress 6.7
• Using Data Views to display and interact with data in plugins
• Subscribe to the Developer Blog

WordPress 6.7 & 6.6.2

• Roadmap to 6.7
• WordPress 6.6.2 Maintenance Release
• WordPress 6.6 CSS Specificity

Community Contributions

• Providing content for your demo with WordPress Playground
• WordPress Playground for Theme Developers
• WordPress Playground for Plugin Developers

Gutenberg 19.2

• What is new in Gutenberg 19.2 (11 September)
• Gutenberg 19.2 Released with Enhancements and Bug Fixes

What’s discussed or in the works

• Data Views Update #1
• Advancing the WordPress Design System

Stay in Touch

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hello, and welcome to our 107th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk about Developer Hours, we will talk about Playground, and we will talk about Gutenberg 19.2, as well as some DataViews and design systems. I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and a full-time core contributor for the WordPress Open Source project, sponsored by Automattic.

It’s again a special pleasure to have Maggie Cabrera with me. She’s a theme and core contributor and also sponsored by Automatic. And you work in the community also with the themes, or have been. You’re always a good supporter for theme developers, so welcome.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Thank you so much for taking the time today. How are you?

Maggie Cabrera: I’m good, thank you. Thanks for inviting me again. And yeah, I mainly work in core, but themes are very special for me, and very dear to my heart. So, whenever there’s an opportunity to help out with the community or anything, I’m there. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And I also see that there are quite a few themes coming from Automatic for the theme repository in all kinds of different shapes. So, I’m really happy that it inspires a lot of people to do very specific themes. Not this overall, everything looks the same block themes, but have some for WooCommerce, have some for a print, and have some for somebody who wants to do just public scripts, movie scripts, or something like that. It’s quite interesting what’s coming out like that.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah. We’ve been working on submitting a lot of themes that the designers have been working throughout the year, and I’ve been impressed when reviewing them technically, the amount of talent that the designers have and how much they can actually express while working in the editor. And I see how both the designers and the editor have matured over the years, and it’s so lovely to see what you could do three years ago and what you can do now. It’s just so amazing, I just love it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: Can’t wait for the next 3, 4, 5 years.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, and it’s also the speed with going from idea and the overall design, and then, all of a sudden, it’s a theme that you can publish on the WordPress repository.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah. The designers don’t use Figma anymore, they just go jump on the site editor and they start the site editor, the edit in site editor, and then, with Playground, they generate a PR that we review for the technical stuff.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Uh-huh.

Maggie Cabrera: So, the themes make it through the theme directory guidelines, because there’s like, you need to add the license for the images and the assets and all that stuff. But, in general, most of the work is done in the editor and there’s barely any code that needs to be touched.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes, it’s it.

Maggie Cabrera: It’s amazing to see that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, it’s interesting. And Beatriz Fialho, she demonstrated that in a recent Hallway Hangout, how that connection works between the Create Block Theme plugin and then the Playground and then the GitHub PRs. Yeah, so, how these three tools actually work together, and that’s quite interesting, too, how streamlined the process is. Yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: And it’s only getting better.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, getting better and better. 

Announcements

Yeah, so, we have a few announcements, dear listeners, and well, I have a section here that says listener questions and we haven’t gotten any listener questions lately. So, if you have a question, just send them to Changelog@GutenbergTimes.com or ping me on the WordPress Slack or on Twitter if you have a question that you want the answer to, and we can answer them here at the podcast here.

Developer Hours                                                      

So, today I have a few announcements. The Developer Hours, a first look at a new API that will come with WordPress 6.7, and that is the Template Registration API for plugins.

Up until now, plugins had a really hard time getting templates into the block theme, the site editor, so they can be offered to the site owner or designers to use whatever comes in the plugin, also for the front end. And there was a developer ask last week about that and also a Developer Blog article about how to do this in various detail. Mind you, WordPress 6.7 hasn’t been out yet, but it was in Gutenberg 19.1, so that was the Developer Hours last week, or this week? This week, sorry, September 10th. Today is September 12th. I haven’t followed that example in the Developer Blog post yet completely, but I can see how that really makes it a difference when you, for instance, have a plugin with a custom post type as well as custom fields. You can also provide all that already in a template, both for the single post of your custom post type, as well as for the archive template. So, your plugin is pretty much ready to be used with any block theme, or also for classic themes, of course, if you want to do that.

And so, the next Developer Hour is on September 24th and, as always, on 1500 UTC, that’s 11:00 AM Eastern. It’s about the introduction to DataViews. And it’s not so much the introduction in what’s in the site editor now, but it’s more like how you can use the DataViews component as part of your own plugin for the settings page, or when you handle other data that’s coming in from a different source like from an API, say, on the internet. So, the Developer Hours will cover the fundamentals of DataViews component, how to add a React app to the WordPress admin page, and how to display a custom datasets using the DataView component. And, there will be a Q&A session, and there’s also already a post on the Developer Blog for the first part of it, like using DataViews to display and interact with data and plugins.

So, that’s September 24th, 1500 UTC. And I’ll share, of course, all the links in the show notes, not only the RSVP for the Developer Hour, but also the article for the Developer Blog. And I will also share the subscribe to the Developer Blog links, so we’ll never miss a post again. And also, I will share the link to the Developer Hours YouTube playlist, so you can go back and say, “Oh, which Developer Hours have I missed?” or, “Oh, there was a Developer Hour, I need to learn this.” So, it’s actually pretty cool to have those resources all available.

Speaking of Developer Blog, there’s the newest “What’s New For Developers” roundup post available since September 10th, and it has about 25 different changes for plugin developers as well as themes. Some of them about 6.6.2, other ones are coming from Gutenberg 19.0 or Gutenberg release 19.1 and they’re divided up between plugin and tools or theme developers. Some things are also good for both, but you’ll figure that out. But it’s just a rundown of developer relevant things that coming into WordPress before WordPress 6.7 comes out.

Well, that was a whole thing.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Thank you Maggie for being so patient. Any comments about things you want to do?

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, I was just looking at the What’s New For Developers and I think those are so useful to keep up with all the changes in Gutenberg and core because so much happens in so little time and it’s kind of hard to follow everything and be able to know what you can benefit from in your themes or in your plugins or whatever implementations that you’re making. So, yeah, it’s so good to have that all condensed and easy to follow.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, thank you. Yeah. Yeah, there’s a whole group of writers on the Developer Blog that are working on it and we are scouting all the things that come out of the teams being the releases or comments to core, but even then, we miss things. So, if you find something that we missed, don’t hesitate to let us know. We’ll just add it to it or bring it into the next one.

The Roundup post comes out always on the 10th of the month, so October 10th is the next one that will come out, and I think the designated writer, we are working on a team on this, but the designated writer will be Nick Diego, and he’s leaving right now for WordCamp US. But, yeah, he will be back and then start writing, but we are all contributing to that. We have a whole list of things where we just copy paste things from release or from track tickets and then we need to do some research and then have the little blurb there.

Roadmap 6.7                                                       

All right, well, speaking of 6.7, the roadmap 6.7 has been out and Anne has published it on September 3rd. That was pretty much a few days after Jessica Lyshek and I were wondering if there will be a roadmap post at all before Beta One, but there is, so we are going through it fast because it’s a long post anyway, so we might as go fast, but we also will cover it in the next episode after the next one. So, this is 107. We will cover it in 109 when we’re going to record it around October 10th, that’s when Beta Two was out for 6.7. Beta One is October 1st and then, October 8th will be Beta Two.

So, the roadmap, the first thing that comes up is of course the new default theme. Have you looked at it?

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: What they’re working on?

Maggie Cabrera: I’ve not been following it as much as I would’ve liked because I’ve been busy, but been looking at the design and a little bit at the repo and I am, as always, very impressed with the design work and how ambitious this thing looks like, even though I think Twenty Twenty Four was really ambitious, I think this one’s outdoing it because look at the amount of patterns there.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: There’s so many.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: I know for a fact how hard they are to build in such a short period of time to the standards that we expect the default team to have.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: It’s a great work being done there. So, for sure, if anyone’s listening is interested in theming, go and have a look at the repo and check the work being done there.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So, how many patterns are there? I can’t even count them. Wow.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that’s really a lot. Yeah, so we probably need to do a review of all the patterns at some point.

Maggie Cabrera: Oh yeah. I’m looking at the repo and I’m scrolling through all the ones that are mentioned. It’s long.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, and I like the…

Maggie Cabrera: I think it’s at least double what Twenty Twenty Four has, or close to that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Oh yeah, at least. Yeah. What I see is also the name of the patterns are quite revealing, so you know pretty much what’s going to be in there, but I like the vertical header. We haven’t talked about vertical headers yet.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And so, really, really excited about about trying that out, and then, it has a poster section and I can read a few patterns for a photo blog and then portfolio and newsletter, sign up. That’s kind of standard, so I’m tempted to install it and make it… Put it up on one of my technical blogs and try it out and see what’s coming out of it.

Maggie Cabrera: If you give it a couple weeks, you will have an odd version that’s decent enough to start doing your thing because it doesn’t have any functionality in it. What you will be missing, it’s probably going to be minor stuff like translation on patterns and, yeah, maybe you will be missing some accessibility fixes and stuff like that, but you will have most of the design on that version.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Excellent, excellent. Yeah, so, well it’s going to be two weeks until I actually get to do some of that. Yeah. And then, what’s also going to be in 6.7 is definitely a refinement of the DataViews.

Maggie Cabrera: Mm-hmm.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And some of them is the extensibility that you can extend or register and unregister some of the actions that are in there via plugins. I know that that’s already in there, because it was in Gutenberg and that’s going to be in 6.7 as well. Yeah, the grid layout in the DataViews to follow the aspect ratios and there are quite a few interesting developments there.

The next one is something that is definitely exciting, that’s the polishing of the query loop where there are additional features in there, like the offsets and all that. Putting it from the toolbar into the sidebar and all that. So, that is always good because some of the features actually confuse me and other people.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So…

Maggie Cabrera: And if they confuse us who are quite used to interacting with it often enough, I can’t imagine for someone that encountered it for the first time. Yeah, I think that’s great.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I like that too, yeah. We have been talking about this podcast about some of the Zoom Out experience and that the team has been working on it. We will see if it makes it at whole or just in parts, and it’s an experience where, when you select a pattern, for instance, that your canvas zooms out and shows you more of your page than the normal editor would show you so you can add the pattern easily and see it in relation to other things. I think that’s a great feature. I just don’t know how it’s defined, that there are sections and what if I want to edit, then I have a different mode. And so, it’s all a little bit, yeah, we need to figure that out, and as long as I’m confused…

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, I understand. We’re working on that and Zoom Out is already in core, it’s just that the way to access it is not as straightforward as anyone would think. Every time you go on global styles, you will trigger Zoom Out when you’re browsing the style book, I think it is. But the mode is there. The code is, it’s just, the thing is, how are we going to surface this to the users? That’s most of the main thing that we’re discussing is, how do we want the users to experience Zoom Out? So, depending on where we are when we’re closer to the release, we’ll figure out if it stays somewhat hidden.

So, right now, I think there’s a button that you can click in the preview. We’re iterating on that. I think, right now, it’s on the preview, but I think that’s going to move. It’s no longer in the patterns. I think we’ve moved out of that because we thought that you might want to not have it trigger if you have a theme that has patterns that are not full sections and you want to insert patterns inside patterns, which wasn’t really working with the Zoom Out view, but still, we also want to… We’re working on, there’s an open issue that we’re still iterating on and I think it’s going to move into an experiment, to add Zoom Out when you are creating a new page so that, instead of having this pop-up that shows you… Like, Twenty Twenty Four has four or five versions of a page. Instead of having that pop-up every time, you would actual go into pattern insertion mode and you would just build your page using the pattern. So, you have, or you can toggle that out and just write a new page with just text.

But yeah, we’re still… The mode is there and still needs polishing and all that, but mainly what we’re iterating is what we want the user experience to be. So, we cannot really predict what exactly is going to land, but some of it will.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, there’s some great testing going around and if you want to test that out, I’m sure we can just install the Gutenberg plugin 19.2 and then play around with it and see what works for you and what doesn’t. And, if you pay attention, sometimes it’s hard to narrow down why you all feel trapped or confused or something like that, but it’s hard to describe that. But if you can, that would be really helpful for the designers and the developers to figure out where…

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, feedback is more than welcome.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: Absolutely, yeah, and if someone has an idea in mind as to how they would think they could benefit from this. They are a plugin author and they think they could use this for something, idea that they have, then that’s more than welcome, too, because we think we know the blows people will want to go through, but we are probably not thinking what everyone else has in mind. So, yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, I understand. So, the 6.7 also will come with some media improvements. We talked about the HEIC images that are automatically converted to JPEGs. Then, auto size of lazy loading and some background attachments or fixed backgrounds that are on the block level as well, and, of course, need to be uploaded in the media library and all that kind of thing. Yeah, and then, the meta boxes in the iFrame post editor. There is a PR and Anne has shared the links to that, how meta box is going to be, because we talked about it here a bit that the post editor and the side editor become one.

Maggie Cabrera: Mm-hmm.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: But it’s a little bit tricky when the post editor has meta boxes on the bottom, then, it loads it not in the iFrame. The iFrame is the unified canvas or editor, but if it’s not in the iFrame, then some of the things are not working like they are in the editor. So, the interfaces are, all of a sudden, don’t match. So, they’re kind of trying to figure out that, and I think they found a good solution with two sections in the editor and the post editor where the block editor is on top, and underneath, they have an additional window there. It’s going to be interesting to see, but I think with the block bindings UI that’s coming in 19.2, some of it is offset because those are a better interface to connect with post meta data or other custom fields.

Yeah, what else is the design tools? Everybody… No, not everybody. Every block gets border controls now.

Maggie Cabrera: Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So, you can… Yeah, we ran through the list here quite often and those are all coming to the WordPress 6.7 and it also stabilizes some of the block supports because some of them, they were still in experimental status, especially topography supports features, and they will come out of experimental status, so more people can use them now in their own custom blocks or for block variations.

We talked about template registration API, that’s coming, and then, we will talk about the preview options and then updates to the interactivity API and the block bindings API. And another one is the HTML API. So, it’s a lot of… It’s definitely, again, with the last three of them, developer heavy, but there are great improvements for the interfaces and for the contact creators and the designers in the site editor. So, that is going to be WordPress 6.7 and we are going to dive into it in episode 109. That’s two episodes from now.

All right, back to our program here.

Maggie Cabrera: Mm-hmm.

What’s Released – WordPress 6.6.2

Birgit Pauli-Haack: First, what’s released? It was WordPress 6.6.2, and it had 26 fixes, 15 in core or in track, identified in track and 11 identified in the Gutenberg repo for the block editor, and some maintenance security release. But some of the fixes are bug fixes for things that were in 6.6 and dealt with the lower CSS specificity. That changed a few sites that looked a little bit different, and now, the bug fixes are in. There were quite a few in 6.6.1, and now 6.6.2, has caught up with the other ones. And then, there’s a bug fix for the derivative state in the interactivity API and, yeah, some are for the post editor rendering in the iFrame.

The release post has the whole list of things that’s in there and what’s new for developers. I’ve written a few sentences about the bug fixes that are relevant for our theme developers. 

Gutenberg 19.2

That gets us to Gutenberg 19.2.

Maggie Cabrera: Mm-hmm.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: 193 PRs, 58 bug fixes, and 59 enhancements. 54 contributors contributed to them. Six of them are first-time contributors, so it’s always good to have first time contributors. I am so happy…

Maggie Cabrera: Oh, it’s… Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: … they are identified and in the release post so you can scroll down and learn more about them.

Maggie Cabrera: Yep.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yep. So, do you want to lead us for the first one?

Enhancements

Maggie Cabrera: Move bulk actions menu to the filter and consolidate with floating tool and total items display?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, that’s part of the database, and it is…

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think the biggest problem with the data views is that they want that on that real estate on the screen… Do everything.

Maggie Cabrera: Mm-hmm.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And now, it’s all very top-lastic and now I need to give it a little bit more space, so they moved the bulk actions to the footer, and it’s really interesting to see how that comes about when you do it in incremental, and somebody should do a video, how it’s going to work from.

Maggie Cabrera: It’s hard, right?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: The first few to the next one, that’s probably going to be fun.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Cool. Yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: I think, in general, there’s also this constant concern in the editor in general. You want to give the users as many options as they can while keeping things simple. And then, do you want to hide things that are not something that you use all the time, but still users need to know they are there when they need them. So, it’s a constant… It’s a balancing act, to not overcrowd the UI while still giving the users a really powerful tool.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Definitely. And, with the admin pages, it comes that there’s a 20-year history, what these listings on the admin pages can do, so that needs…

Maggie Cabrera: You need to be able to do everything.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah, and extend it.

Maggie Cabrera: Yep.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: … I think that’s something that’s going to be in mind for 6.8 or 6.9, that, once the DataView component is… But it’s also one single component that’s really hard to do. Yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah. That’s why it’s so important for people to start trying and adopting it early so they can influence the development early on, because, yeah, it needs to be very extendable. So, the best way to do it properly is giving feedback so that the core contributors actually have in mind the needs of plugin developers. So, yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: That’s very important.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, so, there is composite component that comes in, too, that had a few PRs in 19.2, but the bigger PR is going to be merged in 19.3 and it will come out in two weeks. So, you will find some of the references interesting because they say, “Don’t use the composite AI.” So, what is it?

So, there’s a new version. Sometimes, a component has run its course and needs to be refactored and one of those is the drop-down menu version 2.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah. Yeah, I’ve been looking at that. It looks so good.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Sometimes you really need to learn from things, right?

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I also have the feeling, especially in software development, when you do go new routes, that the first time you never get it really right, because it teaches you how it wants to be done, whatever you’re going to do. And then, the second time, you get it right and you learn from that and then you iterate.

Maggie Cabrera: You’re always iterating, right?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, you cannot settle with the first version of the thing.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Correct. Yeah. I will share a link to the drop-down menu version 2 tracking issue on Gutenberg, so you see what’s all in the works and where the vision goes. And I will also share the Storybook. It’s not Storyboard, it’s Storybook, right?

Maggie Cabrera: Storybook, yeah. Yeah, it’s Storybook.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Storybook, yeah, yeah. I’m always getting Stylebook, Storyboard, Storybook…

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah

Birgit Pauli-Haack: … totally confused.

Maggie Cabrera: Actually, it’s Storyboard, you are right, it is Storyboard. I’m thinking of Storybook because it’s…

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, so it’s…

Maggie Cabrera: Okay.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Is it confusing now?

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: Well, you provide a link so people will know.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. No matter what, just click on the link and then you get there, and I really have been discovering the storyboard. It’s been a while since I discovered it, but it was a component work. It’s so good to go there instead of reading the documentation.

Maggie Cabrera: Oh, yeah, I do it all…

Birgit Pauli-Haack: … in the block editor handbook.

Maggie Cabrera: I use it all the time. All the time. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So, why do you do that?

Maggie Cabrera: Well, when we’re developing and we need to touch a component or there’s a component that I’ve never worked with, sometimes, I just don’t even know what attributes are available to me and it’s so much easier to just checking the Storybook because it’s just more visual than actually going into the remi and all that stuff. I will eventually do that too, but it feels easier for me to… I’m more of a visual person, I guess.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And me, too. Yeah, and seeing things in action and you can put in values in certain things and then see how the component behaves as a standalone component. You don’t see it acting in context and that’s sometimes really good because you can isolate how your interface is going to be. So, yeah, I really like that. Yeah, so, I’m going to share that in the show notes so you can look at that as well.

Maggie Cabrera: Okay.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. The next one is the block bindings UI. So, there is a pull request to only allow admin for now, admin users to create and modify bindings by default. There is a discussion going on the track ticket to get it into core about, is it really necessary to go for the admin role or shouldn’t we go for capabilities? And when capabilities, which one is it? Is it just edit post or is it edit meta or…

Maggie Cabrera: Oh, yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s quite an interesting discussion because, all of a sudden, you get a bigger picture of what all needs to be happening to make this a good feature.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah. And it feels like, if you’re trying to match what Carl was doing, the classic editor, sometimes it doesn’t really work. So, you have to rethink it in the context of the site editor these days. What do the users today need now, not what was implemented 10 years ago?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right, totally. And the other good news is, about the block bindings UI, it’s coming out of experiments. So, if you install the Gutenberg plugin, you will be able to see it right away. You don’t have to enable an experiment for that now and can interact and try it out and test it before it comes into 6.7.

It gives you a way to see all the block bindings for a block or for a section, and which fields are attributed. What it does not do yet is register the custom fields. You still need a developer to do that. That is not yet in the editor, and that’s the missing piece where I say, okay, block binding is all nice, but I still need to have a different plugin to register my custom post types… Yeah, custom post types, and with that, also the custom fields, but it’s one step at a time. Yeah. That’s the…

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Rome wasn’t built in one day either.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So there was something in the site editor that has been removed now. That’s the shuffle button from the block toolbar that we want…

Maggie Cabrera: That button was added… Well, I might be wrong here. I think we want the shuffle button to be available mainly when we are on Zoom Out mode.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: Because you don’t want the users to be shuffling by mistake a block, a pattern that they have already changed because they’re just editing their site. But when they’re still composing the template, they still have not decided if the pattern that they have inserted is the one that they want. We still want them to have the ability to shuffle through other patterns in the same category.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. It’s a quick browse through the patterns that we have per category. So, now it’s also to be limited to a category.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah. 

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So, you want to see which one of the call to action patterns are fitting nicely to that, so you don’t have to click and edit. You can just shuffle it and see how it flows. But yeah, it’s interesting how a confusion can happen when you’re actually editing, editing things. So, yeah, and that’s something to learn only from usage here.

The next one is… It’s a tiny change, however, you probably are going to look for it when you want to…

Maggie Cabrera: Oh, yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: … extend your media from the cover block. It moved from the inspector controls or from the sidebar to the block toolbar into the block setting and in the… Yeah, so, you can do it from the block toolbar. You can clear the media and you don’t have to open up the sidebar and go there.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: But if you are accustomed to having it in a sidebar and clicking there, you can now say, “Where is it?” It’s in the toolbar. Yeah, sometimes, those changes kind of can frustrate-

Maggie Cabrera: It’s aligning it with other blocks, like the site logo, the feature image. They have it on the same place where it now is for the code blocks. So, now, it’s more consistent with all the blocks that behave the same way.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, yeah, good point. Yeah. And we love consistency, right?

Maggie Cabrera: Yes. Yeah, because with having so many contributors, it’s very easy to not think about those tiny things. So, it’s really nice when someone picks one up and it’s like, “Oh, this doesn’t feel right,” and then you notice that it’s inconsistent with other blocks and then you just bring them all in line. It’s very satisfying, I think.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. And it actually removes confusion, and I think it’s a good time to do that now in that place where the editor is, to go through the design. And I know that we’re going to talk about it in our, later on after we get through the change here, about the design system and what’s going to happen there.

So, the next one, maybe you can help me out with that. The content only is… So, it says, “Content only, add support for block styles on top level content only lock blocks.”

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah. I think… I’m not so sure about the top level part. I think it means, when you have a pattern that is content-only and it has a group lock that is surrounding it, sometimes you will have block style variations that affect a group on whatever is inside. So, we’re enabling those style variations in content only. So, you can still change the styles in Cascade because the block styles in your JSON file will affect the group log and whatever’s inside. I want my group block to this background, but I want all the paragraphs inside this group block to have this other color. And you will not be able on content only to change the color of the paragraph, but because you will be able to change the block style, that Cascade still works.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, okay. Yeah. Now I get it. Yeah. Excellent. Yeah, that’s a very good feature.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Wonderful. And then, we have two things that are already also on the Zoom Out mode. There’s an edit button on the Zoom Out mode toolbar, meaning that you can switch to an edit. Zoom Out means you’re just looking, yeah, but then, you also want… If you see something and then you want to edit it, then you need the edit button. Yeah?

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And that’s how…

Maggie Cabrera: I think both of those PRs are adding two different ways to exit Zoom Out mode.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Mm-hmm.

Maggie Cabrera: Because we’re still thinking about how you enter it and how you leave it. So, that’s it. If you feel like you want more granular control over the blocks inside the sections, like we were talking about, content only is very similar, then you would want to be able to exit. So, these are two ways, yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And the second one is, you double click on a block and then you exit Zoom Out mode and hopefully that block is then selected.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And so, that’s a good thing. And then, so, the Zoom Out mode is definitely something to explore quite a bit because it changes how you might think about site building and the order of things.

So, the next two items are part of the design tool block border, block support everywhere. Now, comment edit link and the comment reply link also get border support. So we have it everywhere now.

Maggie Cabrera: Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: There might still be a few missing. I’m going to take a look for 6.7 on all the design tools because I have… For 6.6, I did the roster of the design tools and there were some empty spaces in there. Now, I’m going to fill up those empty spaces on the border controls.

Maggie Cabrera: Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: The next one is the post publish upload media dialogue is now also handling the upload errors. So, the post publish upload media dialogue, that’s the dialogue that comes when you hit publish once, and then you get a suggestion that you have images that are referencing a third outside your site. So, might be Google or might be a different website.

Maggie Cabrera: It could also be the theme. It could also be the theme, because the theme adds… On the templates, it adds the URL and it points to your asset folder on the themes, but the images are not on your uploads folder.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: And that’s the difference. So, those are lost if you change themes, but if you click that button, those get moved into your uploads folder. So, it’s in your media and your site.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, I didn’t know about that, but that’s cool.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah. I think that’s the reason why this is there.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, actually, I had early on with Ella, a dialogue that images coming from Google should automatically be uploaded. Yeah, yeah, and there were no block themes around when we had that discussion, so that was, what, five years ago?

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, yeah. For sure.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And it started out with a button on the toolbar of the image block where you can say upload image to media library. But then, it was also…

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: … “Okay, if I had 15 in my post, yeah, I don’t want to do it one at a time. Give me a feature where I can do 10 at a time.” And that was in the publishing section where it says, “Hold, you have images that are pointing someplace else,” but you were able to click on them, but the errors wouldn’t bubble up. Yeah, so, and that has now been solved with this one. So, now you get the error messages when it doesn’t work. Before it just didn’t do anything. Yeah? You were clicking and clicking and you didn’t know why it wouldn’t work. So, the typography changes comment is that, now, you can individually override the presets through the interface, I would think.

Maggie Cabrera: No, I think it’s theme JSON.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, it was theme JSON.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, I think it is. There’s an example on the PR. You click, “Here is some test.” Theme JSON.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: There is a little arrow and you see how you can set fluid to through on a specific-

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, right.

Maggie Cabrera: … for the whole site.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Per the preset for fluid. Yes. Yeah. So, you can have a preset one that is fluid and the other one is not.

Maggie Cabrera: The global setting can be set to false, and that can be overridden by one specific concept.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, okay. Well, thank you for making that clear. And the next one is, there is now an experiment for client-side media processing in Gutenberg. That is by Pascal Birchler. He actually has his own plugin where he experiments with all kinds of different media processing, and this one is coming as an experiment to Gutenberg. So, I’m really looking forward to that. It’s for client side media processing, so you don’t need the server involved in it.

Maggie Cabrera: Oh, yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s all in a browser. It’s all in the browser.

Maggie Cabrera: Nice.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s all in the browser. And then, the last one from the enhancements is the details block gets now a transform from any block type. From a paragraph, you can make a details block. You can… From a list block, you can make a details block. And so, it’s really cool. It’s a small quality of life change that changes a lot.

New API                                                       

And now, we come to the extensibility section and there is a new API for the preview options. So, there is, on the right-hand side, on the top, you have the preview and to do either mobile or desktop or preview in a new tab. That’s what’s there, and I think now, with this release or with this Gutenberg release or the one prior, there’s also the 50% one that is your zoomed out one, right, for the desktop.

Maggie Cabrera: That might go away.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, it might go away. It’s a zoomed out, might go away thing. Yeah. But, right now, it’s they have with the menu.

Maggie Cabrera: No, I mean, it might go away because it will be moved somewhere else.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes.

Maggie Cabrera: Not because it will go away fully.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It won’t totally go away, but…

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: … it might be its own button. Yeah. But what this PR enables is that plugin developers can have separate preview options and register them with the Gutenberg so people can look at things in a different way.

Maggie Cabrera: Mm-hmm.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So, one of the examples is that if you build your new newsletter with the block editor, you don’t want the preview to look how it’s on the website, but you want to how to look in an email.

Maggie Cabrera: That’s great.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: … that’s where this example is for. But there are other examples that I right now can’t come up with, but because that’s my lack of imagination right now. But if I think about it some more, I’ll find some that were… If you have an idea, what else could be in the preview?

Maggie Cabrera: I don’t know, maybe you could do a preview of dark mode, for example.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Excellent.

Maggie Cabrera: I don’t know.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Excellent. Yeah. Or a preview of the screen for your TV because it’s a special site…

Maggie Cabrera: Oh, yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: … that it’s only for the TV, but you want to see it because it’s a whole different…

Maggie Cabrera: Or a tablet.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: … aspect ratio.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah. Maybe you want the landscape tablet from your preview…

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right.

Maggie Cabrera: … because your website is going to be used by… Yeah, it could be anything.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So, I think we have a little conversation here. We come up with a lot of examples, and plugin developers, these are your opportunities. I’m going through the other 100 ones, red line items, and I stopped by CSS and styling. And these are the two PRs that made it into 6.6.2 as bug fixes. One was the featured image block, getting the CSS specificity reduced.

Maggie Cabrera: Mm.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And now is behaving nicely again with the sites. And then, the other one was the retain same specificity for non iFrame selectors. That was the piece that, if the editor wasn’t loaded into the iFrame…

Maggie Cabrera: Oh, I see.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: … some of the theme JSON things, spacing rules were overwritten by the editor. So, you wouldn’t have the same look from the editor like you have on the front page.

The front page wasn’t affected by that, but it was just the editor thing. Yeah. We are also accustomed that the front page looks like the editor or the editor looks like the front page, that we notice those changes and are, “Do we have to fix something?”

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah. I must say that the work that’s been done with the CSS specificity has been amazing. I think it’s a really, really hard change that landed on 6.6 that, of course, add some consequences that are now being patched, but it’s still, I see the work being done to not break people’s sites and fix them when, inevitably, sometimes we do. And it’s a very big change that it’s very useful and the people really need it, but it’s still complicated and complex and they’ve been painstakingly making sure we’re not really breaking people’s site, even if it’s just by patching 6.6.2.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, the unification of CSS specificity was very important to make the style variations work, the extended block style variations, and to have a standard way of doing things. Yeah, well…

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: … what you said before, yeah, there were so many contributors and now, eight years of development, some people have different CSS or early blocks had a different CSS behavior than later blocks and, yeah, everybody learned from things and now we’re back and fixing it.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, and that’s more consistent for themers. They know what to expect from core blocks. Other CSS is going to behave. They know that it’s going to be consistent. So, yeah, in the long run, it’s going to be great, even though now it’s a little bit of a bumpy road. But yeah, keep reporting the bugs so we can fix them.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, definitely. So, on that, we are pretty much almost through the changelog for the 19.2. One thing is that, if you are a plugin developer or developer who wants to explore the DataViews component, the documentation has been updated quite a bit and edit stories for combined fields and layout properties, and that also, you can explore all that for the data use component that is in this release.

All right, anything else that you…

Maggie Cabrera: No, I think we covered a lot.

What’s in Active Development or Discussed

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, we covered a lot. Yeah, yeah. But we are now arrived at the section, what’s in active development or what’s discussed? And I wanted to point out to a design blog post, not that because it was mine, but because it was very important to have it and a DataViews series on the design blog about what are the features that coming that the design team is working on? And there’s just an update number one, and there will be many, many to come on the Design Team Blog. That’s make.wordpress.org/design. More and more posts will come out and it also is an iteration of the design shares, and Joen Asmussen does every two weeks putting the whole work of the design team on display and what are they working on with the GitHub or track tickets where the discussion is happening.

Design Systems                                                       

And, speaking of Joen, he just published a very visionary post about advancing the WordPress design system, and that covers that with all the new development, and in the editor, there’s also coming… What they also built is actually a design system with the components that can be used by plugin developers as well as the site editor or Gutenberg, as well as outside of the WordPress system. So, it’s the design system out of the atomic blocks building coming from components and then sub-components and building larger components. And then, you can build the interfaces from that. And everything is also done in the Figma repository that is open and public for WordPress. And then, the Storybook that we mentioned before. So, these are the three pillars of the WordPress design system. And, if you haven’t noticed that, reading that particular article will help and bring it all together and contributors will work on it, but this is where the framework of the design system to bring it all together.

The next step is actually what we talked about as well is to focus on the specific updates on the Figma libraries and the Storybook site to set clear and actionable goals for the design system and also go through the current system and look for inconsistencies so they can be fixed. And then, also to elevate and connect the three pieces to a unified system.

There will be bi-weekly updates on the progress in Figma. You can have your comments on the draft. And, of course, in GitHub that’s a known place where you can leave your comments and your work if you wanted to. So, a good example of a Storybook design system references the design system from the auto manufacturer, Audi, how they deal with that for the website development. What’s your thoughts about that?

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, I just love these kinds of posts. I love all the design work on it. I love the attention to detail. I love the consistency of that. I think it’s fantastic. If you go into the Figma file that Joen links, you see that attention to detail. You see all of those components. That’s how we keep everything consistent, when you’re implementing something new and you’re using a component and something like, this is not looking good.

I think we were seeing on the PR that we talked about where we’re adding the extensibility on the preview dropdown. If you’re looking at that PR, there’s comments saying, “Oh, it looks like, when you’re adding a new item, there’s a left padding or left margin that it’s in misalign with the rest of the things.” And you start picking those up and seeing, “Oh, there’s this back here.” And again, you go back and keep things consistent. So, it becomes easier and easier for new developers to come use a component and just basically use them out of the box and everything looks exactly right.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Mm-hmm.

Maggie Cabrera: So, yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: I think that’s pretty important.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It also speeds up development because there are…

Maggie Cabrera: Mm-hmm.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: … certain discussions or decisions that were already made and you just need to pick them up and move with your idea forward, but you don’t have to build any… I mean, you still have to use them and know how to use them, but you don’t have to think about interfaces anymore, you’re just going to need to know-

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, or accessibility.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Or accessibility.

Maggie Cabrera: That’s already thought of.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Exactly, yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: There’s so much work in these.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s actually a…

Maggie Cabrera: There is so much discussion.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s a big point of this as well. It’s kind of that. So, we have the three pillars, that’s the components, the Figma library, and the Storybook, but it’s also design, development, and accessibility that brings it all together. There are a few words in that article that I think I don’t understand. I need to talk with Joen about it, but when he uses the word “Pattern,” I don’t think he thinks WordPress patterns. It’s more design patterns. That’s a different pattern.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, I think so.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, and he talks about design tokens. I don’t know exactly what that means. Yeah, so, it’s a little bit heavy on the technical terms.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, the design lingo. Yeah, I cannot help you there.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: You’re a developer, right?

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah. No, it’s not just that. I really enjoy working closely with design on designers. I think it’s one of my favorite things. I think there’s also a bit of the foreign language.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: I don’t know if it’s for you, too.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: I think there’s a little bit of that because when language gets a little bit more, I don’t know, more technical or more specific…

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: … if you’re not fully into that, we’re used to it as in the developer lingo, right?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: Because we do know what the difference is between, I don’t know, yeah. But, for designers, it’s even harder, and if you are not speaking the language, then it’s an extra…

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: An extra hard skill.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It has some things in there, like, what is a sticker sheet?

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think we can clear that all up by asking, commenting on the post and figure that out. Yeah. So… But it’s a very interesting post. I learned a lot from it, and it also seems to have quite a few comments there that are worth reading. So, I will share a link to it in the show notes and also the link to the DataViews update that just has a visual representation of a new feature that comes to the DataViews. So, it’s all in one place.

All right, that was it. So, Maggie, if somebody wanted to get a hold of you, where would that be?

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, I’m on Slack. My Slack, I’m… Let me check, because I’m not sure what my username is. I think I’m OneMaggie. Yeah, OneMaggie, and on Twitter, it’s One_Maggie.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right. Okay, and I’ll share those links also in the show notes.

So, this is it. As always, the show notes will be published on the Gutenbergtimes.com/podcast. This is number 107, and if you have any questions, suggestions, or news you want us to include, send them to Changelog@Gutenbergtimes.com. That’s Changelog@Gutenbergtimes.com.

Thank you so much for listening, and I welcome all the new listeners that I’ve seen that joined us in the last month. And, if you are on Shopify listening to this, please leave a comment or review or, on iTunes, review or on Pocket Cast or on your favorite podcast app because it helps with other people discovering this. Especially if it’s useful for you, it might be useful for others.

Thank you so much for listening and I’ll talk to you in two weeks. Thank you, Maggie.

Maggie Cabrera: Thank you for having me. Bye.

After revamping the WordPress.org homepage, Theme Directory, Plugin Directory, Pattern Directory, and HelpHub, the Meta team has now updated the Five for the Future site. Members of the Meta, Design, and Community teams collaborated to redesign and launch the site in time for WordCamp US 2024.

A Fresh New Look

Developer Relations Advocate Nick Diego shared, “ This visual update is part of an ongoing effort to create a consistent design language across WordPress.org… This change marks the beginning of modernizing Five for the Future.”

New Home page

The update features a block-based child theme built on top of the shared WordPress.org parent theme, streamlining aesthetics and simplifying future updates. Key changes include:

• All content has been converted to blocks, making it easier to manage and update.
• The layout, typography, and color scheme have been standardized to align with the broader WordPress.org ecosystem.
• A new contributor testimonials section featured both on the homepage and as a dedicated page, showcases the experiences and contributions of community members
• An updated pledges directory lists organizations committed to contributing to the Five for the Future initiative. 

What’s Next?

Future plans include adding new features and content, such as case studies and more testimonials from participating organizations. A Five for the Future blog and newsletter are also in the pipeline. 

Nick Diego added, “Forthcoming updates will aim to improve organization profiles by listing activity, automating emails, enhancing onboarding, and adding options for sponsored contributors. The goal is to showcase the strength and impact of Five for the Future with a refreshed, feature-rich website.”

You can suggest improvements or report issues with the new theme by opening a ticket on GitHub. For updates on upcoming WordPress.org changes, join the #website-redesign Slack channel.

Hi there,

WordCamp US is upon us, even for those of us not going: We can watch talks on the livestream, depending on the timezones. We can shut down our social networks to avoid FOMO (Fear of missing out). We can enjoy the calm on other platforms, and start testing a few things coming to WordPress 6.7, or we can catch up on Learn.WordPress interactive learning paths.

On a different note, I have been diving more into AI Essentials, prompt design and the testing of various tools. It’s such a brave new world. I had excellent results in making some of my work easier by using an AI tool: a draft outline of a presentation in a second language (Claude) , getting a tailored list of sightseeing activities in a new city (Perplexity) , or correcting code examples to WordPress Coding Standards (ChatGPT), are only three examples of well executed AI assistance. I also took a glimpse at Google’s AI Studio, that allows you to build apps or integrations that tap into Google Gemini AI. All very fascinating, I found.

My latest go-to AI tool replaces Google search for me. Google gives me short snippets and the links, I still have to weed through and spend some time finding the right information. Perplexity provides the answer with details and sources. No further trip around the Internet necessary.

What is your day-to-day experience with AI? What did you test lately? Please let me know in the comments or hit reply on the email.

And now back to regular programming….

Have a lovely weekend, and if you are traveling to Portland, Oregon, have a safe trip.

Yours, 💕
Birgit

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

This year, the State of the Word will take place on December 16, 2024, at 09:00 UTC and will be live-streamed from Tokyo, Japan. Matt Mullenweg will provide a retrospective of 2024, demos the latest in WordPress tech, and comments on the future of the WordPress open-source project.

This week, the design team published the landing page for the event, where you can request an in-person ticket for the Tokyo Node Hall. Soon you can find a list of local watch parties. I saved the date in my calendar to watch the live stream from my living room, a week before Christmas.

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Lauren Stein invites you to Tour the New Learn WordPress site. In her post she offers a 2- min YouTube video and student testimonials about the new site and the ever-growing learning path courses and tutorials.

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Joen Asmussen posted his Design Share #63 (Aug 26-Sep 6) to update us all on the wonderful work the WordPress design team produces. He highlighted:

• Image Block: Surface autocomplete width options
• WP.org 2fa improvements
• Twenty Twenty-Five Patterns
• Style Book in Classic/Hybrid Themes
• Five for the Future refresh
• Lesson learning flows

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In this month’s edition of the What’s new for developers? (September 2024)  on the WordPress Developer Blog, I highlighted for several key updates in WordPress Core, Gutenberg, and Playground. You’ll also find details on upcoming developer-focused events and resources.

Subscribe to the Developer Blog, and you’ll never miss a post again.

Upcoming Events

September 19, 13:00 UTC: WordPress Playground Block code editor theme support with Jonathan Bossenger.

September 24, 15:00 UTC Developer Hours: An Introduction to Data Views with JuanMa Garrido, André Maneiro and Nick Diego

As a reminder, JuanMa Garrido published recently Using Data Views to display and interact with data in plugins on the WordPress Developer Blog.

WordPress 6.6.2

The maintenance and security release of WordPress 6.6.2 came out on Tuesday of this week.

Jyolsna JE has the skinny for you in WordPress 6.6.2 Released with 26 Bug Fixes on the WPTavern.

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Gutenberg 19.2

The latest version of the Gutenberg plugin was released on September 11, 2024. 193 PRs, 58 bug fixes, 59 Enhancements by 54 contributors, 6 of them first time contributors. Release lead, Vicente Canales, highlighted in his release post What is new in Gutenberg 19.2 (11 September)

• Block Bindings UI
• Preview options API
• Other notable highlights.

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Jyolsna JE also covered the release for the WPTavern in Gutenberg 19.2 Released with Enhancements and Bug Fixes.”One of the most significant updates in Gutenberg 19.2 is removing the experimental flag from the Block Bindings UI. This feature, now fully integrated into the editor, allows users to link block attributes with external data sources seamlessly. ” she wrote.

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This week we also recorded an episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast (107), My special guest, Maggie Cabrera and I enjoyed chatting about WordPress 6.6.2, Roadmap 6.7, the next default theme, Design systems and Gutenberg 19.2. The episode will drop into your favorite podcast app on Sunday. If you enjoy listening to the podcast, please write us a review on any of the podcast directories (Spotify, PocketCasts, Apple etc.)

🎙️ Latest episode: Gutenberg Changelog #107 – WordPress 6.6.2, Gutenberg 19.2, Data Views and Design Systems with special guest Maggie Cabrera

WordCamp US Showcase talks

It’s more and more difficult to glen from session description how relevant certain talks will be for Gutenberg enthusiasts. It’s become so mainstream that most talks about WordPress will include block related content. The full WordCamp US schedule (in PDT) is available on their site. There are way over 50 talks scheduled for this year’s WordCamp US and the time difference is nine hours for me.

If you wish to put your own list together, you’ll find the respective livestream links for the three days and four rooms on the official WordPress YouTube Channel > Live.

The many hours of livestream out of each room will be online for a couple of weeks, until the AV team manages to separate each talk into individual videos. The video of Matt’s Q & A will probably online within the hour and available the next day. Many talks will be past my bedtime. I will wait for the individual videos to show up and catch up in the following weeks.

Birgit Personal Watch List (as per 9/14)

With below list, I leaned into my self-centered personality and publish my personal watch list. haha. The times are in UTC. This is not a list of all the talks I want to watch. These are the talks I might be able to watch on the live stream. The links under “Room” point directly to the YouTube Live stream for this room on the particular day.

Date	Time UTC	Talk title	Room
9/18	16:15 UTC	Disney Experiences’ Magical Transformation with Gutenberg	Rose City
9/18	17:30 UTC	Unlocking Disney’s Digital Evolution: Navigating the Gutenberg Era	Stumptown
9/18	18:30 UTC	How WordPress Powers The New York Post	Stumptown
9/20	16:00 UTC	How TIME Uses Patterns to Drive Recirculation and Engagement	Mt. Hood

Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners

Bud Kraus has good news for you! In his post for GoDaddy Pro, A primer on WordPress block markup for the non-programmer, he wrote: “Understanding the fundamentals of any WordPress block is not as difficult as mastering PHP as you would have back in the pre-Gutenberg era.” Following along you’ll learn about the various concepts of the modern WordPress theme, template and patterns, and of course, blocks. Then he continues to give you a glimpse under the hood and shows you some block markup code and teaches you what attributes are.

It feels similar to when my dad showed me how to exchange spark plugs on my car or start my car with a jumper cables or replace a tire. I never aimed to be a car mechanic, but having a bit of knowledge can save you when you get stranded in a foreign place with no cell phone reception. Although you are not a programmer, knowing a bit about the underlying code base, can go a long way.

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Kathryn Presner and Helena Artmann recorded their online workshop on Exploring the Query Loop block. “The Query Loop block might sound bland, but it’s actually the driving force behind the layout of modern WordPress blogs. Dive into this critical block together with Presner and explore ways to show off your content and learn how to configure it to get the result you want. They also cover the different types of blocks you might want to nest inside it. Finally, you uncover some lesser-known ways to use the Query Loop block, to display pages and other types of content besides posts.”

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Mike McAlister from Ollie WP just dropped a cool tutorial on how to build smarter and faster with synced patterns. He shows how you can use synced patterns in WordPress to make site building a breeze. With these patterns, you can tweak multiple parts of your site at once, making your workflow smoother and keeping your design consistent.

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The number of Block themes in the Themes directory was 942 this morning. You find now a great collection of themes for businesses, writers, photographers, agencies, and products. The newly released pattern browser you can use when clicking through a single theme page gives you a great insight in how various parts of your website will look, when using a theme. Many themes showcase, services, FAQ, content form, or about us patterns, that, make building a site a streamlines process.

The latest five Themes approved were:

Hello Blocks by Md Ataur Rahman of Wpmet, builder of the GutenKit and other WordPress plugins. This is their first theme in the WordPress Repository.

Margarethe by the theme builders at Automattic and built for site owners in the interior design space. It’s the latest of 209 block themes built by Automattic’s designers.

Happening, also out of the workshop at Automattic, designed for events and ceremonies.

TributeToGovPress by Tommaso G. Scibilia from Italy it’s his second block theme published in the repository within the last few weeks. This theme seems to be the block theme version of one of his favorite themes: Gov Press by Govfresh, that hasn’t been updated since August 2019.

Eternal by Uxl themes, a theme, opinionated about its design and suitable for all screen sizes and the patterns offer design for business websites, like services, price lists, process steps or for the about page. It’s the 23rd theme from Uxl in the repository and their eighth block theme.

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On WordPressTV, Wes Theron posted a new video Use the Create Block Theme plugin for exports, and theme variations. You’ll learn how to use the Create Block Theme plugin to customize, save, and export a WordPress theme. You’ll explore how to apply changes to colors, fonts, and layouts and export your modified theme as a zip file for use on other websites.

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Adam Jones, HumanMade, identified Five key features for enterprise users in the upcoming version of WordPress 6.7. Those are:

• Streamlined site management with the Template Registration API
• HEIC image support for optimized media management
• Zoom-out editor for patterns for a high-level view of content creation
• More flexibility in content display with the enhanced Query Loop block
• Performance improvements & developer enhancements

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

Simone Maranzana, co-creator of Advanced Columns, built the Figma plugin Block Flow that “allows you to easily convert your designs into WordPress blocks. This plugin is designed to simplify the process of transforming your visual projects into functional WordPress code. The exported blocks do not contain inline styles and rely solely on the logical attributes of the supported blocks. You can read more details in her X-Thread.

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 “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

Building Blocks and tools for the Block Editor

In this week’s Developer Hours, Justin Tadlock and Nick Diego took a first look at the Template Registration API in WordPress 6.7 and explored how to register custom block templates in your plugins. This long-needed feature lets you create default front-end output that plays nicely with themes while also being customizable from the Site Editor by users.

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Alex Standiford shared publicly how he made his WordPress Archive style different post formats, using the Block Visibility plugin and a short code snippet. More in his post. There is also a discussion on the topic
Bring post formats to block themes on GitHub, you can follow along and chime in.

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Siddharth Thevaril, working for 10up, shared his experience in Building an extendible WordPress admin Settings page with Gutenberg Components. Thevaril covered setting up a custom settings page, using React for the interface, and integrating Gutenberg UI components for a clean, responsive design. The tutorial includes code snippets and practical tips for developers.

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Ajit Bohra, an early Gutenberg contributor, announced the latest project he has been working on with the team of Lubus, a web development company out of Mumbai. WPUI is “a design pattern library built upon WordPress components which gives you the building blocks you need to build your react-powered WordPress plugin or app” (quoted from their site). The project is built in public and available on GitHub. “It was born to avoid the mundane task of assembling UI for WordPress.” Bohra tweeted.

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Daniel Bachhuber, CEO of WordPress.Com (the commercial WordPress hosting company) announced on X (former Twitter) a new prototype of plugin that offers building Custom Content Models from within the Block Editor. The plugin is available on GitHub from Automattic’s repository. It’s open-source and can be extended or forked. It’s more a proof of concept rather than production-ready code, and for the developers it seems to be just an exercise, of “would it be possible” than actually geared towards getting into WordPress Core?

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Brain Coords tells the story around his contribution to the Custom Content Model in his video Custom fields and post types inside the block editor – with WordPress.com. WordPress.com invited Coords to explore and build the prototype. In his video, Coords takes you through the genesis of the project and the approach the development took. He also gives you a demo and answers audience questions.

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Matt Medeiros sat down with Mark Szymanski in their episode 65 of the WPMinute podcast to discuss Was The Create Content Model Prototype Good Enough?

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WordPress Playground

JuanMa Garrido announced, that three new guides published in the WP Playground Docs

• Providing content for your demo with WordPress Playground
• WordPress Playground for Theme Developers
• WordPress Playground for Plugin Developers

The hope is that these resources can help inspire and guide theme and plugin developers to fully take advantage of WP Playground’s potential.

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.

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For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com

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The reimagined Learn WordPress experience launched just over a month ago. It introduces Learning Pathways, a new approach to educational content from the Training team.

In case you haven’t explored the updated Learn WordPress site yet, take a peek at what you’ve been missing in this short and sweet virtual tour:

The reception of the new experience and Learning Pathways courses has been positive, with the average learner rating at 4.5/5 since the site’s relaunch. Here’s what learners have been saying:

The Training team is working hard to add more Learning Pathways to the existing roster, with the Designer and Intermediate Plugin Developer Learning Pathways already in progress. In the meantime, explore the four Learning Pathways at Learn WordPress.

There’s always more to learn.

Just the other day Lana Miro wrote her HeroPress essay from from Mykolaiv, Ukraine. In it she gives some credit to the WordPress community for helping her literally not lose her mind while bombs fell in her neighborhood. Additionally she credits her company, which builds tools for WordPress.

In the past I’ve said “WordPress won’t help you. It’s software, it just sits there.” But if that software hadn’t been just sitting there, a group of people in Ukraine wouldn’t have been able to make this company, to become friends and co-workers, and support each other.

WordCamp Crazy is a group of men from Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh that travel together to WordCamps around the world. If that doesn’t seem odd to you then you don’t know the history of those three countries. On the whole they don’t get along. Yet because WordPress exists these men met on common ground and became friends. Sure it’s just a small group of people, but it’s one step in healing the wounds between their countries. How many other groups or even just two people around the world are like them, that we never hear about?

There are almost 300 stories on HeroPress now, we’ve been building it for 10 years. But there are so many more stories that I’ve heard that never made it to the site. So many lives changed.

I think “How did this happen?” and I look at WordPress as a tool. Who built it? So many people. Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? Not just core, not just plugins, themes, hacks, tweaks and code. All the support questions answered, all the talks given, all the translations, tutorials, blogs, videos, events, and simply time sitting quietly explaining something to one person who needed it.

Here’s my point, right here.

If you’ve ever contributed to WordPress in any way, YOU did this. I did this. WE did this.

Think about that, and about your impact on the world. Because of your actions, the world is a better place.

Thank you.

Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash

The post You Did This appeared first on HeroPress.

Gutenberg 19.2 was released on September 11, 2024. This latest release includes notable changes such as Block Bindings UI, enhancements to the Zoom Out mode, an experimental client-side media processing feature, and some bug fixes.

Here’s a rundown of the key features and changes:

Block Bindings UI Moving Out of the Experimental Phase

One of the most significant updates in Gutenberg 19.2 is removing the experimental flag from the Block Bindings UI. This feature, now fully integrated into the editor, allows users to link block attributes with external data sources seamlessly. By default, only admin users can create and modify bindings, ensuring greater control and security. 

Vicente Canales from the Core team has shared this video in the announcement post. 

Preview Options Extensibility

The new release also adds extensibility to Preview Options via the Plugin API.Plugin and theme developers can now introduce custom preview options in the block editor’s preview dropdown. This allows users to preview content in different formats or environments, offering more flexibility in how they view their creations.

Enhanced Zoom Out Mode

The toolbar now has an “Edit” button, making it easier to switch between modes. Users can also exit Zoom Out mode by double-clicking on blocks and the “Shuffle” block toolbar button has been removed. 

Content-Only Mode Enhancements

In Content-Only mode, top-level locked blocks now support block styles, providing more consistent designs. Block icons are also now displayed in the toolbar for easier identification.

Experimental Client-side Media Processing

Gutenberg 19.2 introduces an experimental client-side media processing feature. This reduces the server load and potentially improves performance and efficiency. 

Other notable highlights include:

• A new reorder control is available at the field level on the new view configuration UI.
• The minimum supported WordPress version for Create Block is now set to 6.6.
• Only admin users are allowed to create and modify block bindings by default.
• Block editor improvements include a ‘Reset’ option for the MediaReplaceFlow component and Block Library enhancements include better handling of social icons and pagination blocks.
• 10 bug fixes, including a fix for pagination arrows pointing the wrong way in RTL languages and resolving an editor error in Safari caused by the checkVisibility method.

There has been one reported issue with this release, where it causes problems with the Web Stories editor. WordPress Core Committer Pascal Birchler has confirmed that the issue is related to Gutenberg and not Web Stories. Interested users can also check out Riad Benguella’s post on Gutenberg development practices and common pitfalls.

Episode Transcript

In this episode of Scaling Enterprise WordPress: The Inside Track, co-hosts Brad Williams and Tom Willmot discuss the evolving role of WordPress in the enterprise space with special guest James Giroux, Technical Account Manager at WordPress VIP.

James shares insights from his 15-year journey through the WordPress ecosystem, touching on his experiences across freelancing, product development, and enterprise-level projects.

The conversation covers key topics such as the challenges and opportunities of scaling WordPress for large organizations, the importance of community and networking in career development, and the future of WordPress in the enterprise market.

They also highlights the need for more enterprise WordPress champions, the role of thought leadership in driving adoption, and the exciting developments to come at WordCampUS.

Takeaways

The Importance of Enterprise in WordPress Growth: James emphasizes that for WordPress to continue its growth and dominance in the CMS market, it must break into enterprise-level organizations, which house large teams and complex systems. The WordPress community has historically catered to smaller users, but scaling up is necessary for future growth.

Learning Enterprise Deeply: James shares his experience transitioning into the enterprise space, learning about complex systems, technical challenges, and the unique needs of large-scale organizations. He introduces terms like DXP (Digital Experience Platform) and highlights how enterprise WordPress involves more than just a large website—it’s about integrating with systems, APIs, security, and compliance.

The Role of Community and Networking in Career Development: All three hosts stress the importance of attending events, engaging with the community, and making connections to advance in the WordPress ecosystem. James credits much of his career growth to attending events like WordCamp and building relationships within the community.

Challenges in the Enterprise Space: There are many moving parts when it comes to WordPress in the enterprise—more stakeholders, longer sales cycles, complex integrations, and technical requirements. James points out that many people in the WordPress community might not realize the depth of these challenges until they dive in.

The Opportunity for Product Companies: WordPress product companies often don’t realize how their tools are being used at an enterprise level. There’s a need for more collaboration between product companies and enterprise organizations to align pricing models, service levels, and support structures that suit large-scale projects.

Influencers in the Enterprise WordPress Space: There is a growing need for WordPress “enterprise influencers”—people who can champion WordPress as a solution for large organizations and communicate its advantages to a broader audience. By doing so, WordPress can challenge competitors like Adobe and Sitecore more effectively.

The Value of Events Like WordCamp US: Events like WordCamp US provide a platform for showcasing what WordPress can achieve at scale. Presentations like NASA’s website migration highlight WordPress’s capabilities for handling massive projects, and these showcases help promote WordPress as a serious contender in the enterprise CMS space.

Long-term Goals in Enterprise WordPress: James is focused on becoming a top-tier Technical Account Manager while also serving as an ambassador for enterprise WordPress, bridging the gap between the community and large organizations. His long-term goal is to help more companies adopt WordPress by educating and advocating for its enterprise capabilities.

Links

• James Giroux’s Blog
• WordPress VIP
• WordCampUS
• NASA
• Scale Consortium

It’s a tough pick, but I think Inside Out 2 might be my favorite Pixar movie. Just everything about it was just so well done. How they incorporated the different aesthetics, neuralinguistic concepts, everything. Chef’s kiss.

WordPress 6.6.2, released on September 10, 2024, brings 15 bug fixes to Core and 11 to the Block Editor. Led by Tonya Mork and Vicente Canales, with Aaron Jorbin mentoring the team, this is a short-cycle maintenance release ahead of WordPress 6.7, scheduled for November 12, 2024.

Core Fixes 

This update addresses 15 Core issues, including CSS specificity changes in certain themes and the resolution of Button Block CSS conflicts. Other notable improvements include:

• Global Styles now blocks empty CSS rules and malformed selectors for custom CSS for blocks.
• Text-wrapping issues on the About page, which caused line breaks in Japanese, have been fixed.
• A bug that wiped out template contents when renaming templates has been addressed.
• The Site Health Tool now correctly loads directory sizes.
• Autofocus query string parameter in the Customizer URL has been fixed. 
• Issues with the search functionality in the installed themes section have been resolved.

Block Editor Fixes

This release addresses 11 issues in the Block Editor, including improved layout style specificity in the non-iframed editor and fixes for pseudo-element selectors in custom block CSS. The release also reduces the specificity of the default featured-image block style rules and prevents the duplication of template parts in non-block-based themes. Post Editor has received multiple improvements. 

Tonya Mork’s post gives the complete list of bug fixes in WordPress 6.6.2.

Websites with automatic background updates will automatically get updated to WordPress 6.6.2 while others can download it from WordPress.org or update the website via the WordPress Dashboard.

Meet the all new and improved Gravatar Enhanced – a plugin that brings more Gravatar goodness to WordPress while keeping privacy at the forefront.

What’s in the box? Let’s take a look inside:

Gravatar Privacy Shield

Your users’ privacy matters. That’s why we’ve built robust privacy features into Gravatar. We’re not in the business of tracking or selling data. Instead, we’re focused on helping you share only what’s necessary and curating your profile for the open web.

Our Privacy Shield features of the Gravatar Enhanced plugin give you control:

• No referrer information: By default, your site won’t send referrer data on Gravatar requests. Even if sent, we don’t use or store it.
• Opt-in proxy service: This extra layer keeps requests to Gravatar at a minimum and masks them. It’s peace of mind for you and your users.

These features are a direct response to feedback from the WordPress community. We’re committed to transparency and putting you in control.

Learn more about the proxy service here.

Gravatar Profile Block

Gravatar is evolving beyond avatars. Our new Profile Block lets you showcase user information anywhere on your site. It’s dynamic, it’s sleek, and it’s effortless.

Here’s what you get:

• Avatars, names, bios, and links – all pulled directly from Gravatar profiles
• Automatic updates whenever a Gravatar profile changes
• No need for manual edits or giving WordPress dashboard access

Think of the possibilities:

• Professional author bios without granting full site access
• Team pages that stay current without your intervention
• Enhanced user profiles for courses, memberships, and forums

Right now, the block displays a default card. But we’re cooking up something special. Soon, you’ll be able to customize both design and content.

Want a sneak peek? Check out these upcoming patterns we’re working on…

Once you’ve enabled the plugin, just look for the Gravatar Profile block in the editor to get started.

Additional Enhancements

There is more to the plugin that you will want to explore:

• Hovercards are enabled by default to increase engagement and letting visitors see who an avatar belongs to
• Enable email notifications to prompt commenters without a Gravatar to create one
• Visit Users > Your Profile to change your avatar with the Gravatar Quick Editor
• We ensure an alt tag of the display name is added to avatars whenever shown
• We ensure the stronger SHA256 encryption is used

Watch this space, as there is a lot more to come soon!

Questions or feedback? Drop them in the comments below.

Get Gravatar Enhanced today.

Transcript

On the podcast today we have Matthias Pupillo.

Matthias has extensive experience in the technology and creative sectors, and is currently working as the co-founder of FluentC.ai, an AI-powered language technology company. With a background in technology, he’s focusing on developing solutions to enhance communication across different languages and platforms. He’s been involved with WordPress since its early days around version 1.2, and has a rich history of web design and consulting, having worked on hundreds of WordPress websites. But it’s only recently that he’s become more engaged in the WordPress community through events like WordCamp Buffalo.

In the podcast today we talk about AI-driven language translations, particularly focusing on Matthias’s work with FluentC, which is his translation plugin for WordPress. It supports multithreaded, simultaneous translations of up to 140 languages, enabling your pages and posts to be offered in other languages in just a few moments.

We cover the differences between AI models designed for translation, such as ChatGPT and Llama, which aren’t specialised for this task, and how his platform builds a contextual layer above those. He emphasises the importance of context and diverse multilingual data in producing high-quality translations. FluentC’s functionality involves local storage of translated content, in an effort to maintain website speed. This is done using native WordPress hooks and URL modifications.

Matthias also offers his thoughts on the ongoing multilingual support phase of the Gutenberg project, and his hopes for FluentC to evolve from a standalone plugin to an API which could be used by WordPress Core.

We get into the broader implications of AI in translation, the need for open-source models to compete in this rapidly evolving space, and the parallels between AI evolution and past trends like blockchain and Web 2.0.

If you’re interested in the intersection of AI and WordPress, or are looking to enhance your website’s multilingual capabilities, this episode is for you.

Useful links

FluentC website

FluentC plugin

ChatGPT

Llama

Google Translate

DeepL

AWS Translate

WPML plugin

Polylang plugin

Matthias on WordPress.org

If you have an unsecured contact form on your website — one that doesn’t use any kind of spam-prevention technology — you’ll likely get a lot of time-wasting, irrelevant submissions. That’s because, without some sort of protection in place, contact forms are simply wide open for malicious actors and bots to submit spam.

There are several ways you can protect a contact form, whether you’re using WordPress or not. You can add CAPTCHAs, make contact forms only available for logged‑in users, or add a smart, automated anti‑spam protection tool like Akismet. 

Sites that care about the user experience and maximizing conversion rates should almost always choose a solution from that last category — one that stops contact form spam without annoying site visitors.

In this article, we’ll go over the most effective ways to stop contact form spam. We’ll also discuss why CAPTCHA is no longer the preferred tool for spam protection and show you what you should be using instead. Let’s get to it!

The best solutions to stop form spam in 2024

In this section, we’ll walk you through the best solutions to stop contact form spam. We’ll explain how each solution works, as well as its pros and cons, to help you decide which option to implement for your website.

1. Akismet

Over 100 million websites use Akismet to protect against form spam. Once you set up Akismet on your site, it will analyze submissions and determine what is real content and what is spam.

Akismet leverages machine learning to do this. The software has removed over 500 billion pieces of spam from the web. Every time it does this, it gets better at identifying spam. It’s gotten so good, in fact, that it boasts an accuracy rating of 99.99%.

The best thing about Akismet is that it doesn’t force users to solve puzzles or interact with elements on your site before enabling them to submit a form. Akismet does its work in the background and prevents contact form spam from reaching your inbox.

If you use WordPress, you can easily integrate Akismet with a plugin. Akismet also offers integration options for other content management systems (CMS), including Joomla and Drupal.

You can also integrate Akismet with other types of sites using its API. This makes it a near‑universal solution for spam protection.

2. CAPTCHAs

Completely automated public Turing tests (or CAPTCHAs) are tools designed to help block bots from being able to submit forms. CAPTCHAs are everywhere on the web, from login pages to comment sections and contact forms.

There are several types of CAPTCHAs you can use to protect a contact form. Google reCAPTCHA, for example, provides CAPTCHAs with visual puzzles that users need to solve or elements they need to click on to prove they’re human. The latest versions of reCAPTCHA don’t require interaction, but you’re free to choose which option to use.

While CAPTCHAs are popular, they do have a few downsides. We’ll explore the cons of using CAPTCHAs later in the post.

3. Honeypot

Using honeypots is a creative way to mitigate contact form spam for a website. This method involves setting up an input field within the form and hiding it from human users in some way (typically using CSS).

Although real visitors won’t be able to see the field, they’ll still be able to submit forms as usual. Spambots, on the other hand, are typically configured to fill out every field in a form, including honeypots.

This method can help you identify which form submissions come from bots. You can use that information to filter these messages and keep your focus on real submissions.

Although the honeypot approach can be effective, you’ll still receive contact form spam, which can clutter your inbox. Plus, you’ll need to understand basic CSS to hide a contact form field. If you use a CMS with a contact form plugin, it might not allow you to easily hide elements.

Some spambots are also capable of bypassing honeypot fields. And, you run the risk of real users stumbling into the hidden fields, which can lead you to think their submissions are also spam.

4. Session cookies

As you may know, some websites use session cookies to track your information and activity on their pages. This means you can also use cookies to identify bots due to the way they behave on your site.

Bot activity can be relatively simple to identify. Spambots often go straight for contact forms, fill them out immediately, and attempt to make multiple submissions. In contrast to how real users behave, they’re also unlikely to interact with other elements on a site.

You can use this information to block form submissions for sessions that engage in suspicious behavior. But this only works if you’re comfortable configuring cookies to detect suspicious behavior.

That process requires you to configure the cookies to flag behavior that you would typically see with spambots. There can be a lot of trial and error involved in this process, and it’s arguably a lot more difficult than using an available tool or service to block contact form spam.

Typically, this solution is more common among enterprise websites and businesses that have the technical know‑how to implement advanced security measures. Even then, the results you get might not be worth the trouble when there are out‑of‑the‑box solutions you can use to achieve similar (or even better) results.

5. Email filtering

Most modern email clients offer some type of message filtering functionality. You can use these filters to flag emails from specific addresses or those that contain keywords you associate with spam.

In general, you shouldn’t use email filtering tools to deal with contact form spam unless you get a very low number of messages. For this method to be effective, you need to decide what terms to filter and continue to add new keywords over time. 

Flagging the wrong keywords can lead to situations where your email will falsely flag messages from real users. Identifying these false positives will often require you to spend time in your email’s spam folder, which is precisely what you want to avoid.

Why CAPTCHA is not the best option

CAPTCHAs are one of the most common forms of spam protection on the web. You can see CAPTCHAs everywhere, but that doesn’t mean they’re the most effective spam protection method. 

There are several reasons why using them may not be the best option:

• CAPTCHAs negatively impact the user experience. Some types of CAPTCHAs require users to interact with an element to prove they’re human or to solve one or more puzzles. If you’ve ever had to solve multiple CAPTCHA puzzles to access a form, you know how frustrating this can be.
• CAPTCHAs are prone to false positives. Even humans can make mistakes when it comes to CAPTCHAs. The detection algorithms aren’t perfect, which can lead to situations where a website flags a real user as a bot and prevents them from submitting a contact form.
• CAPTCHAs require work to set up and constant updates. Spambots and CAPTCHAs are constantly trying to beat each other. Some types of spambots can bypass CAPTCHAs with a decent success rate. This means you may need to update your CAPTCHA implementation regularly. Plus, you have to set up CAPTCHAs individually for each form you want to protect.

It’s important to note that your experience using CAPTCHAs can vary a lot depending on which service you use. Some CAPTCHAs, like the latest versions of reCAPTCHA, don’t require users to solve puzzles or interact with elements on the web. Even so, it’s safe to say that CAPTCHAs are becoming outdated.

Instead of using a CAPTCHA, consider a more powerful alternative to the contact form spam problem, like Akismet.

Akismet: the best anti‑spam solution

Most anti-spam tools focus on identifying spam content and bots before they can submit a contact form. Akismet does things differently. 

The service uses machine learning to constantly improve its spam detection capabilities. That constant improvement has led to the point where Akismet can boast a 99.99% accuracy rate in detecting spam. 

You can choose whether to save spam comments for review or let Akismet discard them immediately.

Akismet will automatically detect contact form spam and filter it for you. The service also offers a host of other benefits, which include the following:

• Easy setup. If you use WordPress, you can set up Akismet in minutes. All you have to do is install and activate the plugin, and it will automatically start protecting your site against spam submissions. This ease of use also applies to installing Akismet on other types of sites.
• A more seamless user experience. The service works in the background and doesn’t involve elements that require user interaction. This reduces the friction of submitting a contact form, which can improve your conversion rates.
• Integration with any kind of website. Akismet offers simple integration protocols for several popular platforms, including WordPress. You can also use the Akismet API to make the service work with nearly any other kind of website or application.

Keep in mind that if you want to use the Akismet API, you’ll probably need to work with a developer to set up a custom integration for your site.

How to integrate Akismet on any website

Akismet offers different integration methods depending on what kind of website you run. If you’re using WordPress, you can get Akismet up and running in a matter of minutes.

To start, install and activate the Akismet plugin. Then, Akismet will ask you to select a plan. 

Hobbyists can select a Personal plan and pay a fair rate of their choice. Incredibly affordable commercial plans are available for other situations.

Once you sign up for a plan, you’ll get access to an Akismet API key. Enter that key in WordPress by going to Settings → Akismet Anti‑Spam.

Click on Connect with API key and that’s it. Akismet will activate and start protecting your site from spam immediately. 

Note that if you’re using Akismet with WordPress, the plugin integrates with some of the most popular contact form tools. That includes options like Jetpack’s form blocks, Contact Form 7, and Gravity Forms.

As we mentioned before, Akismet also offers integrations with other CMSs, including Joomla and Drupal. Those integrations work differently than with WordPress, so you’ll need to check the Akismet documentation to set them up.

You also have the option of using the Akismet API to integrate the service with any kind of website or application. This requires some level of development work, but enables you to leverage Akismet’s spam detection and protection functionality on any website.

Frequently asked questions

If you still have questions about how to stop spam from website contact forms, this section will answer them.

What is contact form spam?

Contact forms are common targets for spammers and bots. If the form doesn’t use some type of security feature, spammers are able to make all kinds of useless and potentially‑harmful submissions through the form. These can include links to other websites, promotions for fraudulent services and products, and automatically‑generated content.

How does contact form spam affect a website?

Contact form spam shouldn’t affect your website on the front end, unless the form is open to some kind of attack that can compromise your site’s security (like SQL injection).

In most cases, the biggest downside of contact form spam is having to deal with it. This spam can quickly fill up your inbox and make it harder for you to separate the real messages from the fake ones.

Why is Akismet considered the best solution for contact form spam?

Most solutions that focus on stopping contact form spam do so at the expense of the user experience. CAPTCHAs, for instance, force users to solve problems or click on elements before they can submit a form. This can reduce the number of people willing to use the form and can even make them inaccessible to those with disabilities. 

Akismet is highly effective in stopping contact form spam, with a detection accuracy rate of 99.99% for spam content. Plus, Akismet doesn’t impact the user experience whatsoever, as it works in the background during form submission.

What are honeypot fields, and how do they work?

A honeypot field is an element in a contact form that only bots should be able to engage with. You can create one by using CSS to hide a field in plain sight or through a plugin that will handle this for you. Regular users will skip the hidden field, but spambots won’t.

Once the honeypot is set, you can filter all contact form submissions that fill out the field. You may also be able to blocklist the IP addresses that make the submissions, depending on which contact form tool you’re using.

How effective is CAPTCHA in preventing spam?

CAPTCHAs are among the most popular solutions for protecting your website from contact form spam. Their popularity makes them a significant target for attackers, who are constantly devising ways to bypass them using automated tools.

It’s also not uncommon for CAPTCHAs to flag real users as bots. Overall, CAPTCHAs can be highly effective, but they’re not without several downsides.

Can spambots bypass honeypot fields and CAPTCHAs?

Yes, some spambots can bypass honeypot fields and CAPTCHAs. Attackers are constantly trying to bypass form security measures, and that means creating new bots and constantly updating them so they remain effective.

Akismet bypasses this problem by focusing its spam detection tools on the content of the form submissions. The service also learns from each submission, which makes it the most accurate spam detection and prevention tool on the market.

Can Akismet protect against all types of spam?

Spammers and bots tend to target any public form on websites. Akismet can protect all the forms on your site by monitoring submissions. It does this without you having to set up individual protection for each form, as is the case with CAPTCHAs.

Where can I learn more about Akismet?

You can visit the Akismet features page to learn more about how its spam protection functionality works. If you’re ready to start using Akismet on your website, check out the available plans.

Stop contact form spam using Akismet

If you’re spending time dealing with contact form spam, you may be missing out on submissions from real users. Using tools that enable you to stop form spam will free up your time for other tasks. Moreover, with the right tools, it’s relatively easy to stop contact form spam.

There are several ways to stop contact form spam on WordPress and other platforms.. Akismet is the leading option since it doesn’t impede navigation for real users. It’s also easy to implement (particularly if you’re using WordPress), and it has a 99.99% rate of accuracy for spam detection.

You can use Akismet for free on your personal website or choose from affordable plans for commercial sites, where spam protection becomes even more essential. Start using Akismet today!

Episode Transcript

In this episode of Woo BizChat, hosts Adam Weeks and Emma Young dive into the world of asynchronous communication, sharing insights on how to effectively communicate across different time zones and platforms.

They explore the do’s and don’ts of async communication, the importance of over-communicating, using emojis and tone to convey clarity, and when to switch to a real-time conversation.

Adam and Emma also tackle the tricky topic of swearing in professional contexts, the value of getting feedback, and how to build rapport while keeping communication clear and human.

Takeaways

Over-communicating is better than under-communicating: In asynchronous communication, providing thorough context is essential, especially if the person hasn’t met you in person or doesn’t know your communication style. Clear, detailed messages help avoid misunderstandings.

Use emojis strategically: Emojis can add warmth and tone to otherwise cold, text-based communication. However, don’t overdo it—use them to enhance clarity and express emotions without distracting from the message.

Break up complex messages: When you need to ask multiple questions or cover several topics, break your message into separate posts or threads to keep discussions organized and avoid overwhelming the recipient.

Timing and consistency matter: Whether it’s a recurring meeting agenda or an important message, being consistent with when and how you communicate helps establish predictability and reliability in your workflow.

When to switch to real-time communication: If a conversation becomes too complex or emotional, it’s often best to switch from async to synchronous communication. A quick Zoom call or Slack huddle can save time and prevent misunderstandings.

Be mindful of your audience: Different cultures and communication styles may require adjusting your approach. Always be respectful and considerate, especially when using acronyms, jargon, or informal language.

Feedback is key: Regularly ask for feedback on your communication style to improve. It helps you ensure that your messages are clear and interpreted as intended.

Set expectations clearly: Don’t be afraid to set clear deadlines and expectations in your messages. It’s unkind to be unclear—people appreciate knowing when something is due or when to take action.

Use peer reviews for important messages: When sending out important or client-facing communication, consider drafting in a tool like Google Docs and getting feedback from peers before hitting send.

Know when it’s okay to swear: Swearing in async communication depends on the company culture and your relationship with the person you’re communicating with. Keep it professional, especially in client-facing conversations, and avoid being the first to swear.

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Here is Lana reading her own story aloud.

Це есе також доступно українською.

My name is Lana Miro, shortened for Svitlana. I’m a Partnerships Manager at Crocoblock. This article is my personal story about how WordPress and my work have been helping me stay on board during the war in Ukraine.

Brief Introduction

I’m 28 years old, born and raised in Mykolaiv, Ukraine. It’s a peaceful, small city (before the war, about 400,000 people lived here). I never thought about moving because travelling and exploring other cities for short periods was enough for me. Mykolaiv was always my comfort zone, where I felt safe.

This city provides me with a sense of peace – the river, the parks… the river – yes, I’m a fan of water.

My Introduction to WordPress

I began my journey with WordPress in 2017 when I started an internship at TemplateMonster. That’s when I discovered this incredible platform that captivated me with its scope and possibilities.

At TemplateMonster, I worked as a Partnerships Manager. At that time, the company’s niche was templates for various CMS platforms. So, I’m well-acquainted with all of WordPress’s competitors.

During my three years with the company, I realized that WordPress was the largest and most interesting CMS for me.

Why?

• The community and the number of people creating content about WordPress is enormous!
• A variety of plugins and templates.
• An interesting and intuitive dashboard.

In 2020, during the Covid pandemic, I started experiencing issues with my back and mental health, so I decided to take a one-year break. I left the project and rejoined another Holding project a year later – Crocoblock.

Crocoblock was a breath of fresh air for me because of its amazing community and cool plugins that I wanted to work with.

My main tasks involved finding partners for collaboration, organizing events, and more. I’ve described partnerships in more detail in my free guide – WordPress Partnerships Basics.

Invasion: How to Work?

The war with Russia has been ongoing since 2014, so the Russian invasion in 2022 wasn’t a surprise to us. However, what was surprising – that bombs, missiles, and artillery could be used with such intensity in the 21st century.

For the first two weeks, we were paralyzed.

The beginning

The first two weeks of the war were a real shock. We were all paralyzed, but the Crocoblock team quickly came together, creating an operational chat to support each other. This was a time when words, actions, and even just being present in the chat meant so much.

For example, one of our employees immediately went to the army, so we collected money, and our developers bought everything he needed to start.

I checked my work email on the second day of the escalation. Lying in the basement, with the internet barely reaching, I decided, “I’m relatively safe, so I can respond to partners.” I reviewed critical messages, and let them know that we were okay and would respond as soon as we adapted.

A few days later, we decided to write a blog post to let the Community know we were okay and to explain what was happening.

After two weeks of lying in the basement (yes, my family of nine spent two weeks in the basement, occasionally sleeping in the corridor or bathroom for safety), a bomb was dropped near our street, and that became a critical moment for our family. 

By a majority vote, we decided to move to the western part of our country.

Adaptation period

Once we were safe, I was able to start working at 100% (okay, maybe 80%, as 20% of me was still in shock ). Of course, the news, conditions, and stress affected me, but work helped me get back into a routine and begin to adapt.

Work became my lifeline. 

It brought me back to life, giving me a sense of stability when everything around me was falling apart. We recorded a video message for our clients, which was an important step not only for synchronization but also for my personal recovery.

Not to mention the numerous words of support we received afterward.

We once again realized that Crocoblock clients are the best.

Part of the team immediately moved to safer cities or went abroad. But some stayed in Mykolaiv, and Anna, our CEO, was in an occupied city – Kherson. But that’s her story. I was incredibly happy when she finally left the occupation, and we exhaled in relief.

After three months (which felt like a year), my husband and I decided to move closer to Mykolaiv to be near his parents. It was safe there, but due to the constant changes, my depression reached its peak.

Fortunately, part of Kherson was liberated, and Mykolaiv was being shelled less frequently, so we decided to return home. That’s when I started treatment with a psychiatrist. She helped stabilize my condition and bring me back.

2022 was the hardest year for me and my family, but the ability to work and be part of the WordPress community helped me Just Continue. At the end of the year, I decided to thank everyone who supported me, asked how I was doing, joked, and was kind to me in a post on Medium. 

Team changes

Of course, the war impacted our team, and I immediately noticed how management changed its approach to focus on caring for each team member.

We started having training sessions based on the team’s requests (e.g., anxiety management), management helped with healing supplies (since there are blackouts or Internet issues in Ukraine), and relocation if needed.

During the war, our HR team introduced the IDP (Individual Development Plan), which allows you to outline your development for the year, focus, and receive better feedback. This helped me during my depression. The war brought changes, and I became more anxious, chaotic and found it hard to focus.

The constant support from my manager was also crucial. My manager is Anna, our CEO. I regularly receive feedback from her, which is often needed to work better. She also supports my initiatives and ideas, which is incredibly motivating.

I try to implement her skills in managing my team of three wonderful women – Victoria, Community Manager; Nikki, Content Marketer; and Dashel, our blog Editor.

Today

I’m writing this article on August 26, during one of the biggest attacks by Russia (just one day after our Independence Day celebration). More than 100 missiles and drones were launched this morning.

We woke up at 7:30 a.m. and saw the attack begin. Thanks to monitoring channels, we can continue to live and hide in shelters when they announce. I had breakfast, did some exercise, and started working with sirens in the background.

Next came the emergency electricity offs, as one of Russia’s goals is to break our energy system and plunge our country and people into chaos. But besides anger and hatred, I no longer feel anything for them. We are prepared; we have power banks, EcoFlows, water reserves, and are ready to work full force so our country can survive.

We are currently actively preparing for our 2nd WordPress Agency Summit in September, and this helps me feel like I can be useful to the community. Join us; it’s free.

We’re also trying to participate in more WordPress events. For example, this year we sponsored WordCamp Europe 2024, and we’re planning to sponsor a local event in Spain for the first time.

In general, I’m finding my place in the WordPress community, which inspires me with its kindness and support. The first step was my guide on partnerships. Next, I plan to:

• Launch my blog – a home for my thoughts – on partnerships, event organization, mental health, etc.;
• Contribute photos to the WordPress directory (since this is an old hobby I forgot about);
• Plus, I have many ideas that I want to gradually implement.

What Helped Me

My strength comes from the support of my team, family, and the WordPress community. Along with that, therapy, household chores, and even simple joys like cafes or books helped me find inner harmony to continue living.

My top glimmers:

• Donating to the military (I try to donate at least 10% of my income every month);
• Car trips (this is my therapy and childhood dream);
• Household chores to distract myself and declutter;
• Cafes (many atmospheric places have opened in the city);
• Supporting Ukrainian businesses (we try to buy local products);
• WordPress events and activities;
• Books and good music;
• Comfortable and beautiful things;
• The support of my family and sister;
• Flowers and small gifts (I didn’t see the point before, but now they bring a smile and improve my mood).

Because only in harmony with myself can I help my country.

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Як WordPress та робота допомагають мені залишатись на плаву під час війни? 

Слухайте власну історію Лани вголос.

Мене звати Лана Міро, скорочено від Світлани. Я – партнерський менеджер у Crocoblock. Ця стаття – моя особиста історія про те, як WordPress і робота допомагають мені залишатися на плаву під час війни в Україні.

Короткий вступ

Мені 28 років, я народилась і проживаю у місті Миколаїв, Україна. Це спокійне, не велике місто (до війни, тут проживало близько 400 тис. людей). Я ніколи не задумувалась про переїзд, бо мені було достатньо подорожей і дослідження інших міст на короткий період. А от Миколаїв завжди залишався моєю комфортною зоною, де я почувала себе в безпеці.

Тут є те, що дає мені відчуття спокою – річка, парки… річка – так, я фанат води.

Знайомство з WordPress

Я почала свій шлях з WordPress у 2017 році, коли прийшла на стажування до TemplateMonster. Тоді я відкрила для себе цю неймовірну платформу, яка захопила мене своєю масштабністю і можливостями.

У TemplateMonster, я працювала менеджером з партнерств. На той період ніша компанії – це шаблони для різних CMS. Тому я обізнана з усіма конкурентами WordPress.  

Протягом 3х років роботи в компанії, я зрозуміла, що WordPress найбільша і найцікавіша для мене CMS.

Чому? 

1. Ком’юніті та кількість людей, які створюють контент про WordPress – величезна!
2. Різноманітність плагінів, шаблонів
3. Цікавий і інтуїтивний дашборд 

У 2020, під час Covid, я почала більше відчувати проблеми зі спиною і ментальним здоров’ям, тому вирішила зробити паузу на 1 рік. Звільнилась з проекту і поновилась через рік у інший проект холдингу – Crocoblock. 

Crocoblock став для мене новим ковтком повітря, бо тут крутезне ком’юніті і класні плагіни, з якими хочеться працювати. 

Моїми основними завданнями було пошук партнерів для співпраці, організація заходів, і т.д. Більше про партнерства, я описала у своєму, безкоштовному посібнику – WordPress Partnerships Basics. 

Повномасштабна Війна: як працювати?

Війна з росією триває з 2014 року, тому для нас не був сюрпризом наступ росіян 2022. Але сюрпризом було, що у 21 столітті можуть використовуватись бомби, ракети, та артилерія в такій інтенсивності. 

Перші 2 тижні ми були паралізовані.

Початок

Перші два тижні війни були справжнім шоком. Ми всі були паралізовані, але команда Crocoblock швидко згуртувалася, створивши оперативний чат для підтримки один одного. Це був час, коли слова, дії і навіть просто присутність у чаті значили дуже багато.

(наприклад, наш співробітник одразу пішов воювати, тому ми зібрали гроші і наші розробники купили все що йому потрібно для початку). 

На робочу пошту я зайшла десь на другий день ескалації. Лежачи в підвалі, інтернет трошки дотягував, тому я вирішила – “Я відносно в безпеці, отже можу відповісти партнерам :D”. Я оглянула критичні повідомлення, дала знати що у нас все окей і відповімо якомога скоріше як адаптуємось. 

Через пару днів, ми вирішили написати блог статтю, щоб дати знати нашим клієнтам та партнерам – ми в порядку і що взагалі відбувається.  

Через 2 тижні, лежачи в підвалі (так, 2 тижні моя сім’я з 9 людей провела в підвалі, періодично сплячи в коридорі або ванній кімнаті дому для безпеки) недалеко від нашої вулиці скинули бомбу і це стало критичним моментом для нашої сім’і. І методом голосування – ми виїхали на захід нашої країни.

Період адаптації

Будучи в безпеці, я змогла почати працювати на всі 100 (ну окей, на 80%, 20% мене ще досі було шокована). Звичайно, новини, умови і стан стресу вплинули, але робота допомогла повернутись в режим і почати адаптуватись. 

Робота стала моїм рятівним колом. Вона повернула мене до життя, дала мені відчуття стабільності, коли все навколо руйнувалося. Ми записали відеозвернення для наших клієнтів, що стало важливим кроком не лише для синхронізації, але й для мого особистого відновлення.

Не кажучи вже про численну кількість слів підтримки, яку ми отримали потім. 

Ми ще раз зрозуміли – Crocoblock клієнти – найкращі.

Частина команди одразу переїхала в безпечніші міста або виїхала закордон. Але дехто залишався в Миколаєві, а Анна – наша CEO взагалі була в окупованому місті – Херсон. Але це вже її історія. Я була неймовірно рада коли вона нарешті виїхала з окупації і ми видихнули з полегшенням.

Після 3х місяців (для мене вони тягнулись як рік), я і мій чоловік вирішили переїхати ближче до Миколаєва до його батьків. Там було безпечно, але через зміни, моя депресія досягла апогею.

На щастя, звільнили частину Херсону і Миколаїв став менше обстрілюватись, тому ми вирішили повернутися додому. Де я почала лікування з психіатром. Вона допомогла стабілізувати мій стан і повернути себе.

2022 рік був найскладнішим для мене та моєї сім’ї, але можливість працювати та бути частинкою WordPress ком’юніті допомогло мені вистояти та допомагати моїй країні. В кінці року, я вирішила подякувати всім, хто мене підтримував, запитував як справи, жартував, був добрим до мене, у своєму пості на Medium.  

Командні зміни

Звичайно війна вплинула на нашу команду і я одразу помітила як менеджмент змінив підхід до управління з акцентом на піклування про кожного члена команди. 

У нас почались тренінги згідно запитів команди (наприклад, боротьба з тривожністю), менеджмент допомагає з засобами заживлення (так як в Україні бувають блекаути/проблеми зі світлом або зв’язком) та релокацією за потреби.

Під час війни, наша HR команда ввела IDP (Individual development plan), який дозволяє окреслити розвиток людини протягом року, сфокусуватись і отримувати кращий фідбек. Мені це допомогло під час депресії. Бо війна внесла свої корективи і я стала більш тривожною, хаотичною і важко було сфокусуватись.

Важливою є постійна підтримка менеджера. Мій менеджер – це Анна, наша СЕО. Від неї я постійно отримую фідбек, який так часто потрібен, щоб краще працювати. Також вона підтримує мої починання та ідеї, що неймовірно мотивує. 

Я стараюсь наслідувати її навички у своєму управлінні моєю командою з трьох прекрасних жінок – Вікторія, Community Manager; Ніккі, Content Marketer, та Дашель, Editor.

Сьогодення 

Пишу цю статтю 26 серпня, в день однієї з наймасштабнішої атаки росії (буквально 1 день від святкування нашого дня Незалежності). Більше 100 ракет і дронів було випущено зранку. 

Зранку ми прокинулись о 7:30 і побачили початок атаки. Завдяки моніторинговим каналам, ми можемо продовжувати жити і підглядати коли треба сховатись в укриття. Я поснідала, зробила зарядку і почала працювати з серенами на фоні (це значно краще ніж вибухи). 

Далі почались аварійні відключення, бо одна з цілей росії – зламати нашу енергосистему і ввести нашу країну і людей в хаос. Але, окрім злості і ненависті я більше не відчуваю нічого до них. Ми підготовлені, маємо пауербанки, екофлоу, резерви води і готові працювати наповну, щоб країна вижила.

Зараз ми активно працюємо над підготовкою до нашої 2гої WordPress Agency Summit у вересні і це допомагає мені відчувати, що я можу бути корисною ком’юніті. Доєднуйтесь, це безкоштовно. 

Також стараємось більше брати участь у заходах WordPress. Наприклад, спонсорували WordCamp Europe 2024, та плануємо спонсорувати вперше локальний захід у Іспанії.

В загальному, я шукаю своє місце у WordPress ком’юніті, яке надихає мене своєю добротою та підтримкою. Першим кроком був мій посібник про партнерства. Далі, я планую:

• запустити свій блог – дім для моїх думок – про партнерства, організацію заходів, ментальне здоров’я і т.д.;
• контриб’юторство фотографій у директорію WordPress (так як це моє стареньке хоббі про яке я забула);
• Плюс маю безліч ідей, які поступово хочу втілювати.

Що мені Допомогло

Моя сила – це підтримка моєї команди, родини, і ком’юніті WordPress. Разом з тим, терапія, побутові справи, і навіть прості радощі, такі як кав’ярні або книжки, допомогли мені знайти внутрішню гармонію, щоб продовжувати боротьбу.

Мої топ глімери:

• Донати на військо (щомісяця стараюсь не менше 10% доходу донатити);
• Поїздки на машині (це моя терапія і дитяча мрія);
• Побутові справи, щоб відволіктись і не думати;
• Кав’ярні (у місті відкрилось багато атмосферних закладів);
• Підтримка українських бізнесів (намагаємось купувати локальні товари);
• WordPress заходи та події;
• Книжки та хороша музика; 
• Зручні та гарні речі; 
• Підтримка моєї сім’ї, родини та сестри;
• Квіти та дрібні подарунки (раніше не бачила в тому сенсу, а зараз дарують посмішку і настрій).

Бо тільки у гармонійному стані я можу допомагати своїй країні вистояти.

The post How WordPress and My Work Help Me Stay on Board During the War – Як WordPress та робота допомагають мені залишатись на плаву під час війни?  appeared first on HeroPress.

WordPress 6.6.2 is now available!

This minor release includes 15 bug fixes in Core and 11 in the Block Editor, addressing issues like unexpected CSS specificity changes in certain themes. For a full summary of the maintenance updates, you can refer to the Release Candidate announcement.

WordPress 6.6.2 is a short-cycle release. The next major release will be version 6.7 planned for November 12, 2024.

If you have sites that support automatic background updates, the update process will begin automatically.

You can download WordPress 6.6.2 from WordPress.org, or visit your WordPress Dashboard, click “Updates”, and then click “Update Now”.

For more information on this release, please visit the HelpHub site.

Thank you to these WordPress contributors

This release was led by Tonya Mork and Vicente Canales, with Aaron Jorbin mentoring us.

WordPress 6.6.2 would not have been possible without the contributions of the following people. Their asynchronous coordination to deliver maintenance fixes into a stable release is a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress community.

Aaron Jorbin, Aaron Robertshaw, Adam Silverstein, Aki Hamano, Akira Tachibana, Akshat Kakkad, Alexandru Horeanu, Amit Raj, andreiglingeanu, Andrew Serong, Ankur Vishwakarma, Anthony Hortin, apmeyer, Ari Stathopoulos, Benjamin Denis, bernhard-reiter, Brian Alexander, Bruno Freiberger Garcia, Carolina Nymark, Colin Stewart, Daniel Richards, David Ballarin Prunera, David Baumwald, David Herrera, Dean Sas, DEBARGHYA BANERJEE, Dennis Snell, George Mamadashvili, Greg Ziółkowski, James Rosado, Jason LeMahieu (MadtownLems), Jb Audras, Jeremy Herve, Joe Dolson, Jon Surrell, Jos Klever, karan4official, Kelly Choyce-Dwan, Kowsar Hossain, kracked888, luisherranz, Marius L. J., mariushosting, Mark Howells-Mead, mattraines, michaelwp85, Mukesh Panchal, munyagu, Narendra Sishodiya, Nick Diego, Nithin John, Nithin SreeRaj, Omar Alshaker, Paal Joachim Romdahl, Pamela Ribeiro, Pascal Birchler, Paul Biron, Peter Wilson, presstoke, ramonopoly, Riad Benguella, Scott Reilly, Sergey Biryukov, Shail Mehta, smerriman, Stephen Bernhardt, Tonya Mork, Vicente Canales, wongjn, ytfeLdrawkcaB

How to contribute

To get involved in WordPress core development, head over to Trac, pick a ticket, and join the conversation in the #core and #6-7-release-leads channels. Need help? Check out the Core Contributor Handbook.

As a reminder, please see this post for the upcoming security changes for plugin and theme authors on WordPress.org.

Props to @jorbin, @cbringmann, @audrasjb, and @sergeybiryukov for proofreading.

Episode Transcript

In this episode of All Things WordPress Woo, Emerging Tech series, host Dave Lockie chats with Thomas Shellberg from Automattic’s Applied AI team.

They explore Automattic’s recent AI projects, including the Jetpack AI Assistant for content creation, the Odie chatbot for in-house WordPress.com support, and Big Sky, an ambitious AI-driven tool for helping users build websites.

Thomas shares insights on the role of AI in enhancing user experience, reducing complexity, and supporting small businesses. They also discuss the evolving landscape of e-commerce, AI’s potential to democratize web development, and the future of AI-powered solutions in WordPress and WooCommerce.

Takeaways

The Projects: Automattic is working on several AI-driven projects, including the Jetpack AI Assistant for content creation, Odie, an in-house chatbot for WordPress.com support, and Big Sky, an AI assistant that helps users build their first website. Each project aims to simplify tasks and improve user experience across WordPress and WooCommerce.

AI in Content Creation: The Jetpack AI Assistant integrates directly into the Gutenberg editor, offering users contextual suggestions for rewriting, translating, and improving content. It can also generate images and outlines to help users overcome the “blank page” problem when writing.

Automation in Customer Support: The Odie chatbot, used on WordPress.com, handles about 30-40% of support volume, answering common and repetitive questions quickly. This allows Happiness Engineers to focus on more complex and creative customer problems, improving overall support quality.

Simplifying Website Creation: Big Sky, Automattic’s most ambitious AI project, aims to help users—especially those with no web design experience—build their first website on WordPress.com. By generating an initial layout, users can easily modify their site without starting from scratch.

Empowering Small Businesses: Automattic’s AI tools, particularly in WooCommerce, aim to democratize e-commerce by giving small businesses access to tools that are typically available to larger companies. These tools can help artisans and entrepreneurs create professional websites without the need for technical expertise.

Balancing Flexibility and Opinionation: A recurring theme is the challenge of balancing flexibility with providing opinionated guidance. Automattic’s goal is to maintain the customizable nature of WordPress and WooCommerce while offering users more structured, streamlined experiences with the help of AI.

Future of E-commerce Analytics: Automattic is also working on improving WooCommerce analytics with AI-driven insights that can provide actionable feedback for merchants. This includes personalized suggestions on how to improve store performance based on industry benchmarks.

AI’s Role in Democratizing Technology: The discussion highlights how AI can lower the barriers for small business owners, reducing the complexity and cost of building and managing websites, and allowing them to compete with larger brands.

Automattic’s Community Engagement Specialist, Devin Maeztri, has announced that the WordPress Community Team will close all inactive meetup groups by September 16, 2024. Over the past month, the team has been working hard to reactivate recently inactive WordPress Meetups.

“This project comes in response to recent data revealing that nearly half of our groups are currently inactive—a statistic that underscores the need for proactive measures.”, Devin explained. As of June 2024, there are more than 762 WordPress Meetup groups across 108 countries and nearly 537,000 members. 

The Community Team released a list of inactive Meetups at risk of removal from the WordPress Chapter Meetup Program. Organizers have until September 16 to confirm if they wish to remain active.

As per the list, 22 meetups have already requested closure. Spain leads with six closure requests, followed by the USA (4), France (3), and Indonesia (3).

Meetup groups that fail to respond will be removed from the WordPress Chapter Meetup Program. Currently, 140 groups are yet to respond, with the largest numbers coming from the USA (33), Italy (8), Brazil (7), Spain (6), India (6), and Venezuela (4).

“Once a group is removed from the WordPress network, Meetup.com will guide Co-organizers, Assistant Organizers, Event Organizers, and Members on how to keep the group active independently (including managing the subscription fee).”, Devin assured.

Since June 2024, WordPress.com has offered free websites for local WordPress meetups.

Organizers who believe their group was mistakenly flagged as inactive and groups that wish to rejoin the WordPress network after removal can contact the Community Team at support@wordcamp.org.

Last week, Automattic announced Pedraum Pardehpoosh as its new Vice President of Product. Though a new face in the WordPress arena, he brings extensive tech experience from both startups and major corporations like Walmart, Apple, and Airbnb.

In the announcement, Automattic shared, “As VP of Product, Pedraum will oversee product excellence across Automattic, beginning by immersing himself in the open source WordPress ecosystem that drives innovation for 43% of the Internet.” 

I’m thrilled to be joining Automattic. My top focus will be to understand the WordPress ecosystem deeply, first and foremost. After that, I hope to help foster a culture of product development, befitting a company of Automattic’s stature. With so much talent and so many great ideas that go along with that, I expect the top challenges will be prioritization and focus.

– Pedraum Pardehpoosh

Automattic’s product portfolio includes WordPress.com, Woo, Jetpack, WordPress VIP, Simplenote, Longreads, The Atavist, WPScan, Akismet, Gravatar, Crowdsignal, Cloudup, Tumblr, Day One, Pocket Casts, Newspack, and Beeper. 

Pedraum’s appointment comes during an exciting time for Automattic as they migrate Tumblr to WordPress. The company is actively hiring for this migration and other roles, with open positions listed here.

Episode Transcript

In this episode of Woo AgencyChat, Gigi J. Kizhakkechethipuzha, founder of Virtina, an eCommerce engineering company, joins Steve Tamulewicz from eCreations, a WooCommerce and WordPress platform engineering expert. Together, they dive into the all things with running a WooCommerce agency, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and how their companies adapted to the shifting landscape.

Gigi and Steve share how they approach ecommerce challenges, from competing with marketing agencies to solving complex client problems. The conversation also dives into the increasing role of AI in the industry, discussing both its advantages and potential drawbacks.

Takeaways

The Shift to eCommerce During COVID-19: Both Gigi and Steve shared how their businesses adapted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Brick-and-mortar stores faced significant challenges, but eCommerce sales surged, highlighting the importance of having a strong online presence. The pandemic forced many companies to improve their digital strategies and embrace eCommerce as a permanent part of their business model.

The Role of AI in eCommerce: AI has become a valuable tool for idea generation, content creation, and problem-solving in both companies. Gigi and Steve discussed how they use AI tools like ChatGPT to overcome creative blocks and code challenges, but both emphasized the need for human oversight to ensure the final product aligns with the brand’s tone and goals. AI is still in its infancy, and while it accelerates processes, companies need to stay sharp and not rely on it exclusively.

Collaboration Over Competition: Gigi emphasizes the importance of collaboration among agencies rather than seeing each other as competitors. He believes the “ocean is big enough” for everyone to thrive, and partnerships can lead to better outcomes for clients and businesses alike. Steve shares that some agency environments are highly competitive, but he shares Gigi’s perspective that collaboration is key to long-term success.

Adaptability is Key to Growth: Both guest co-hosts highlight how adaptability has been critical to their success. Whether it’s shifting lead generation strategies, using new AI tools, or adjusting to market changes, being flexible and open to new technologies and methodologies has allowed them to stay ahead in the rapidly evolving eCommerce space.

Future of eCommerce Platforms: Gigi raises an interesting point about the future of platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce, wondering if AI will one day generate fully-featured eCommerce platforms based on customer needs. This could lead to a more competitive landscape where businesses can more easily adopt advanced eCommerce solutions.

Human Expertise Still Matters: Despite the growing use of AI, both Gigi and Steve agree that human expertise remains crucial. AI can assist with tasks, but human insight, creativity, and decision-making are still essential for success, particularly in complex eCommerce projects.

Links

• eCreations
• Virtina
• Gigi on LinkedIn
• Steve on LinkedIn
• Test Rigor
• Selenium

I had a huge nostalgia blast today with this video from Lazy Game Reviews showing and setting up a Timex Datalink watch, which was a “smart” watch that would show data that you transmitted to it by holding it in front of your CRT monitor and it flashing a bunch of lines.

It’s hard to describe how much my Ironman Triathlon Datalink watch was my entire world when I was a little kid, I was totally obsessed with it. I filled up every bit of its memory with numbers and notes. And the Indiglo!

Hi,

We are sprinting towards a new WordPress version, and the two months until the final release will pass quickly! The Roadmap to 6.7 is now available.

If you’ve got a ton of websites to manage, whether you’re a product owner, agency dev, or consultant, it might be a good idea to get that testing schedule lined up. The release cycle schedule for WordPress 6.7 helps with that, for sure.

I just looked at the latest on Data Views in the site editor—super exciting stuff! It’s going to be a big part of the WordPress admin redesign, and you’ll be hearing and reading more about it soon.

For now, have an awesome weekend and soak up the last bits of summer. I can’t wait for the fall colors to start in Bavaria!

Yours, 💕
Birgit

PS. If you house your products on the WordPress repositories, this post is for you. Upcoming Security Changes for Plugin and Theme Authors on WordPress.org. Set-up 2FA now. Don’t procrastinate!

PPS: And if you have the feeling that this edition is too short, I bet, you haven’t read all the articles listed in last week’s edition.   😝    

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

The design team published the first update of a series on the progress of Data Views in Data Views Update #1. “This update is the start of a series to provide more frequent information about the latest and greatest, so folks can follow along, provide feedback, and explore using this component. It builds on the initial update shared in June and will share biweekly updates going forward as it remains helpful.”

If you are moved to start exploring the Data View component for your plugin, you get a head start reading through JuanMa Garrido’s Using Data Views to Display and Interact with Data in Plugins, where he explains how to add a React app to a plugin page and use the Data Views component to display a data list.

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Thanks to the effort of release leads, Tonya Mork and Vicente Canales, the release candidate 1 (RC1) for WordPress 6.6.2 has been available since September 4th. The final release will be on September 10. It entails 15 fixes in Core and 11 fixes for the Block editor. Quite a few commits and PRs were dealing with issues caused by the lowered CSS specificity. It also fixed the bug around the derivative state for the Interactivity API and the post editor connected to iframe rendering. The list of all fixes are available in the RC 1 release post.

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🎙️ Latest episode: Gutenberg Changelog #107 – WordPress 6.6.2, Gutenberg 19.2, Data Views and Design Systems with special guest Maggie Cabrera

Joen Asmussen outlines a cross-team effort, that’s on the way to Advancing the WordPress Design System. “The goal, specifically, is to bring together existing tools like @wordpress/components, the new Figma library, and Storybook into a unified design system reference site that anyone can use to contribute back to WordPress or extend WordPress in line with a shared design language. ” he wrote. Asmussen also pointed to the Storybook of car manufacturer Audi, to illustrate how something like this could look.

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Jyolsna JC at WPTavern reports on the WordPress 6.7 Roadmap Includes New Default Theme, APIs, and Media Enhancements. “Anne has cautioned that the new features mentioned in the post are being actively pursued, but doesn’t necessarily mean each will make it into the final release of WordPress 6.7.” she wrote.

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Reminder: Live Developer Hours will take place on September 10th at 15:00 UTC. A First Look at the Template Registration API in WordPress 6.7 Join Justin Tadlock and Nick Diego to discuss the feature and how to use it. Tadlock published a tutorial on the WordPress Developer blog last week, that might give you a head start. Join the Developer Hours to get your questions answered.

Upcoming Online Live WordPress Tutorials

The training team has added a few more online tutorial on the roster on Meetup:

September 10, 2024, at 9:00 am UTC: Setting up a WordPress blog

September 11, 2024, at 12 am UTC: Creating Your Own Contact Form Plugin

September 12, 2024, at 14:00 UTC: Exploring the Query Loop block

Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners

Colin Newcomer take First Look at the Upcoming Twenty Twenty-Five Default WordPress Theme. “Looking at the preview images, it kind of makes me think of Ikea – and that’s a compliment! I like its minimal looks and I think there are some great-looking patterns that users will be able to play around with.” he wrote.

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Bud Kraus of JoyofWP posted a valuable tutorial on how to create a simple style guide for your WordPress website on Hostinger blog. While big companies have designers for Style Guides, small business owners or freelancers can use the WordPress Site Editor, respectively the Style Book tab as their tool. The tutorial helps you make choices on color combinations and block styling to ensure a consistent look. Documenting your decisions ensures you’ll know how to update your site in the future. Kraus has notes for you depending on if you’re working within a block theme, a classic theme or with Elementor page builder.

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Press This: podcast is back and host Brian Gardner discussed with his guest Rich Tabor how WordPress as a design tool empowers users to create unique designs using the platform’s versatile tools. Tabor emphasized how important user-friendly feature are for a flexible design.

Theme Development for full Site Editing and Blocks

Anne McCarthy invites you to help testing the Block Bindings UI, that’s still an experiment in the Gutenberg plugin. She shared on her personal blog all the information you need, including a demo video and the Playground link to a test site

 “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

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.

In the upcoming Developer Hours: A First Look at the Template Registration API in WordPress 6.7 Justin Tadlock and Nick Diego will demonstrate will default front-end output demonstrate the basics of registration and how to integrate custom fields, block variations and more. Your questions will be answered in the Q & A portion of the event. 

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Nick Diego published on his personal blog how it enabled linked Group blocks in WordPress and took a slightly different route than Damon Cook in his post on the developer blog. Diego walk you through his thinking on implementing his vision on what’s necessary for the block editor view as and how he tackle the challenge on the front end. The final result is quite intriguing.

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.

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For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com

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Featured Image: Tiles at Vancouver Airport by Birgit Pauli-Haack

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