In episode, Bob and Birgit discuss their journeys in the WordPress community, focusing on the evolution of Gutenberg, podcasting challenges, and the importance of diverse voices, while planning for future events.

Want to transform your basic WordPress comment section into something that pulls readers into the conversation? The default comments section can feel a bit uninspiring – it’s just text boxes and basic avatars that don’t encourage much interaction.

But with some smart design choices and modern tools, you can create comment sections that make readers want to join the discussion. A well-designed comment area shows visitors their thoughts matter, building a space where meaningful conversations happen naturally.

This guide explores how to enhance your WordPress comments through Gravatar integration, which lets you display verified user profiles and avatars. You’ll learn how to use Gravatar’s features to boost trust and recognition among commenters. For those comfortable with code, we’ve also included tips on styling your comment section with CSS to match your site’s design perfectly.

Ready to build a more engaging community through better comment design? Let’s get started.

Why modernize your WordPress comments? A quick overview

Basic WordPress comment sections can make your site feel outdated compared to platforms where users interact through verified profiles. This affects more than just appearances – it impacts how visitors engage with your content.

Sites with basic comment sections often struggle with:

• Lower return visitor rates, as users don’t feel connected to the community.
• Reduced time spent on pages since there’s less incentive to read discussions.
• More spam comments due to lack of verification.
• Limited user recognition between posts and discussions.

Adding modern comment features changes this dynamic. When commenters can display verified identities, discussions become more meaningful. Users take more care with their responses when their professional profiles are attached. They’re more likely to return to check responses and participate in new discussions.

Quick improvements through tools like Gravatar bring:

• Automatic user recognition across WordPress sites.
• Built-in spam reduction through email verification.
• Professional-looking user profiles that build credibility.

Improving your WordPress comments form with Gravatar

Gravatar is a 3-in-1 solution that can help you create a truly engaging comment section. Let’s look at the different applications. But first – let’s look at what Gravatar truly is and explore its relationship with WordPress. 

First and foremost, Gravatar is a free profile platform by Automattic (the people behind WooCommerce and WordPress.com) that lets users create dynamic online identities that follow them around the Internet. The profiles are connected to the email address, so whenever you use that to register on a Gravatar-integrated site, the user data is automatically pulled (more on that later). 

For example, WordPress.com websites are integrated with Gravatar. When you create a profile with a website built on WordPress.com, your Gravatar information is imported, saving you time and effort throughout the registration process. If you don’t have a Gravatar profile and sign up for WordPress.com, you’ll get one automatically and have it linked to the email address that was used. 

WordPress.org also uses Gravatar but only to pull the profile pictures. 

If someone else writes a comment and doesn’t have a Gravatar profile, they’ll show up with this mystery profile picture or a different avatar that you can change from the settings. We recommend that you enable the Gravatar option and not override the profile pictures – this ensures that Gravatar user who comments on your website will have their avatars show up in your comments section. 

Gravatar is not just about avatars though – people with Gravatar profiles can create in-depth dynamic identities that can capture a wide range of information, from verified social media links, photos, articles, featured articles, and even payment links. As a WordPress author, a Gravatar profile becomes a crucial tool, as showcasing that you are an actual person behind your blog posts boosts the authenticity and authority of the written content and encourages people to engage because they know it’s an actual human being on the other side. 

Letting your commenters display similar levels of information about themselves is equally important – it encourages people interact and voice their opinions through a more legitimate looking profile. This is also something Gravatar can achieve through deeper integration. 

Using the Gravatar Enhanced plugin 

Okay, so you have a Gravatar profile, but it still doesn’t fully show up in your blog posts and pages. This is where the Gravatar Enhanced plugin comes in. It’s also completely free and lets you add customizable profile blocks to any post or page. 

While you can’t add the profile block to the comments section, the Gravatar Enhanced plugin lets you send automated emails inviting commenters to create Gravatar profiles, boosting their presence on your site. You can customize your invitation message, making it clear why Gravatar boosts their credibility as a commenter.

Integrating the Gravatar REST API 

Finally, the Gravatar API offers the most powerful way to integrate your WordPress website with Gravatar, letting you take full advantage of the platform’s comprehensive profile service. You can fully control what level of information you want to import from Gravatar profiles when they sign up with your website. By working with a developer, you can control what information is displayed for each user in a comment thread, and also create accessible and verified user profiles for each active member on your website, built on Gravatar data. This is ideal in many scenarios, such as a forum or online community website.

The integration offers several immediate benefits:

• Users who already have Gravatar profiles see their avatars automatically appear when commenting.
• Email verification happens automatically, reducing spam comments.
• Profile information syncs across all WordPress sites, creating consistency.
• Users can maintain separate personal and professional commenting profiles through multiple email addresses.

However, if you have a simpler WordPress blog and just want to optimize your comments section, you can use WordPress plugins to get simpler Gravatar functionality. Another essential tool here is Jetpack, which comes with Gravatar Hovercards.

These cards display additional information about the commenter without requiring readers to leave the page.

Whichever option you choose, the technical benefits are substantial:

• Reduced spam through email verification.
• Better user recognition across comment threads.
• Privacy controls that let users manage their identity display.
• Automatic profile updates across all WordPress sites.

This integration turns basic comment sections into trust-building tools. When readers see verified profiles and consistent identities, they’re more likely to engage in meaningful discussions. Plus, linking Gravatar profiles with WordPress comments creates a natural bridge between casual readers and active community members.

Styling WordPress comment forms with CSS

If you want more control over how the comment sections work, you could edit their style with CSS. So, here’s a short tutorial on how you can customize a comment form through the WordPress CSS editor. 

1. From your WordPress dashboard, go to Appearance > Editor > Styles. Click on the pencil icon on the right to start editing styles.

2. Click three dots on the top right, then Additional CSS, or scroll to the bottom of the panel on the right to access Additional CSS.

3. Start by adding code for the actual form. You can target it using the class comment–form. We’ll change the background color and fonts, as well as add a rounded colored border. Let’s also style the labels while we’re at it.

.comment-form {
background-color: #fefae0; /* Soft pastel yellow */
border: 1px solid #bc6c25; /* Rich contrasting brown */
border-radius: 8px;
padding: 20px;
font-family: 'IBM Plex Mono', monospace; /* IBM Plex Mono font */
font-size: 16px;
color: #333;
}

/* Style the form labels */
.comment-form label {
font-family: 'IBM Plex Mono', monospace;
font-size: 14px;
font-weight: bold;
color: #555;
margin-bottom: 5px;
display: block;
}

4. Next, we’ll do the input fields, with a background color plus a colored, rounded border.

.comment-form input[type="text"],
.comment-form input[type="email"],
.comment-form input[type="url"],
.comment-form textarea {
background-color: #f8f9fa; /* Light grey for contrast */
border: 1px solid #bc6c25; /* Same border color */
padding: 10px;
border-radius: 4px;
font-family: 'IBM Plex Mono', monospace;
font-size: 14px;
color: #333;
margin-bottom: 15px;
}

/* Style the textarea (comment box) */
.comment-form textarea {
min-height: 120px;
resize: vertical;
}

5. Finally, the submit button, which we’ll give a different color, font, and rounded border.

.comment-form input[type="submit"] {
background-color: #bc6c25; /* Rich brown */
color: #ffffff; /* White text for contrast */
font-family: 'IBM Plex Mono', monospace;
font-size: 16px;
font-weight: bold;
border: none;
border-radius: 4px;
padding: 10px 20px;
cursor: pointer;
}

Put it all together, and here’s what you should expect:

Launch your engagement-focused comment section 

Transforming your WordPress comment section from basic to engaging doesn’t require massive changes. By implementing Gravatar profiles and thoughtful design choices, you can create an environment where readers naturally want to participate.

The combination of verified identities and user profiles shows visitors that their contributions matter. When commenters can display their professional information and verified social links, discussions become more meaningful and spam decreases naturally.

Start by checking that Gravatar is selected as the active avatar service in your WordPress settings. Then explore additional tools like Jetpack for hovercards or Gravatar Enhanced for easy profile integration. For more technical implementations, the Gravatar REST API documentation provides everything needed to build custom solutions.

Remember: A well-designed comment section isn’t just about aesthetics – it’s about creating a space where your community can thrive.

Social media has become one of the most effective places for building and shaping personal brands, especially on sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram, which allow you to demonstrate expertise, connect with industry peers, gain knowledge, and grow a following. Besides all of this, your social media presence also often serves as a first impression for potential employers, clients, or collaborators, so it’s very important to have a strategy at hand. 

First, you’ll need to recognize that social media can quickly amplify both positive and negative aspects of your brand. Consistent, thoughtful posting can establish credibility and authority, while missteps can rapidly damage your reputation. Your “digital footprint” – the trail of data you leave online – has a lasting impact on your personal brand. 

To help you on this journey, we’ll go through all the aspects of a successful online persona and what you can do to make the most out of your digital presence.

Let’s begin! 

Why consistency across platforms is so important 

Building a strong personal brand relies on maintaining a consistent image across social media platforms. This uniformity helps people recognize and remember you more easily. When your profiles look and feel similar on different sites, you’re reinforcing your brand with each interaction.

Think of it like a jigsaw puzzle. Each social media profile is a piece, and when they fit together, they create a clear picture of who you are and what you stand for. Inconsistencies can muddy the waters and weaken your brand’s impact.

Gravatar is a tool that offers a solution to this challenge. It acts as a central hub for managing your profile information and avatar across multiple platforms. With its “Update Once, Sync Everywhere” feature, you save time and ensure a uniform online presence.

Gravatar integrates with many platforms, including WordPress, GitHub, and Slack. Beyond profile pictures, it syncs your bio, social links, and other profile elements, creating a cohesive online identity that strengthens your personal brand.

How to strategically separate personal and professional profiles 

Keeping your personal and professional online identities separate is a smart move. It helps protect your privacy, maintains professionalism, and allows for more targeted networking. But how do you do this effectively while still maintaining a cohesive personal brand?

Gravatar offers a unique solution by linking identities to email addresses rather than names. This allows you to create and manage multiple profiles easily – one for work, one for personal life, and even one for anonymous use if needed. To set this up, simply use different email addresses for each profile you want to create.

Here are some tips for maintaining consistency between different profiles while catering to different audiences:

• Use similar color schemes or design elements across profiles to maintain brand recognition.
• Adapt your language and content to suit the audience of each profile. Your professional profile might be more formal, while your personal one could be more casual.
• Consider using different profile pictures across your profiles, depending on their intent. For example, a suit for your professional profile, and casual attire for your personal one.

Gravatar’s privacy settings allow you to control what information is visible on each profile. This gives you full control over your data and what you share in different contexts.

How to choose the right platforms for your personal brand

Picking the right social media platforms for your personal brand is like choosing the stage for your performance. You want a venue where your audience gathers and where your talents shine brightest.

Start by understanding what a personal brand really is. It’s the unique mix of skills, experience, and personality you want the world to see. With that in mind, here’s how to choose your platforms:

• Find your audience: Where do the people you want to reach hang out online? If you’re targeting professionals, LinkedIn might be your go-to. For a younger, more visual audience, Instagram or TikTok could be better bets.
• Match your content style: What kind of content do you enjoy creating? If you love writing, X (formerly Twitter) or LinkedIn might suit you. For visual storytellers, Instagram or YouTube could be ideal.
• Align with your goals: What are you trying to achieve? If it’s professional networking, focus on LinkedIn. For thought leadership, X or Bluesky might work well. To showcase your work visually, consider Instagram or Behance.

Popular platforms and their strengths:

Platform	Best for
LinkedIn	Professional networking and B2B connections
X/Twitter	Quick insights and industry conversations
Bluesky	Similar to Twitter, but decentralized
Instagram	Visual content and lifestyle branding
YouTube	In-depth tutorials and vlogs
TikTok	Short-form, entertaining videos

Start with one or two platforms where you can consistently create high-quality content. As you grow more comfortable, you can expand to others. Think quality over quantity: It’s better to excel on fewer platforms than to spread yourself thin across many.

When setting up your profiles, ensure your bio, profile picture, and overall aesthetic align with your personal brand. Use similar usernames and social media handles across platforms when possible to make it easy for people to find you.

And don’t forget to review and update your profiles regularly. Your skills, achievements, and brand messaging will evolve over time, and your online presence should reflect that. 

Understand what success looks like on social media 

Success on social media isn’t just about racking up followers. It’s about achieving your specific goals. Are you aiming to become an influencer, or are you trying to drive conversions for your business? Your strategy should align with these objectives.

If you’re after conversions, focus on engagement rates, click-throughs, and lead generation. For brand awareness, keep an eye on reach, impressions, and share of voice. Remember, vanity metrics like follower count can be misleading.

Quality trumps quantity when it comes to followers. This aligns with Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 True Fans” principle, which suggests that to be successful, you don’t need millions of followers but rather 1,000 true fans who deeply value your work.

These dedicated followers are more likely to engage with your content, share it, and convert into customers or clients. They provide a stable foundation for your personal brand and can be more valuable than a larger group of passive followers.

Deciding on posting frequency and sticking to a schedule

Consistency is key when building your personal brand on social media, and it can only be achieved if you’re realistic about your schedule and the posting frequency that you can maintain long-term without sacrificing content quality. This could range from daily posts to a few times a week, depending on your capacity and the platforms you’re using.

Create a content calendar to plan your posts in advance. This helps ensure a balanced mix of content types and topics. Use scheduling tools to automate your posts, saving time and maintaining consistency.

Experiment with different posting times to find when your audience is most active and engaged. Many social platforms offer insights on optimal posting times for your specific followers.

Keep in mind that it’s better to post high-quality content less frequently than to publish subpar content just to meet a quota. Your followers will appreciate thoughtful, valuable posts more than a constant stream of mediocre updates.

Studying people with similar personal brands

Analyzing successful personal brands in your niche can provide valuable insights. Focus on extracting unique elements from their content strategies, audience engagement tactics, and cross-platform synergies. Use social listening tools and AI-powered analytics to conduct in-depth competitor analysis.

Look for emerging trends and untapped opportunities within your niche by studying patterns across multiple successful brands. The goal isn’t to imitate, but to innovate and adapt these insights to your unique voice and style.

Gravatar’s consolidated profile view can streamline your research process. It allows you to quickly assess an influencer’s digital footprint across various platforms, revealing valuable insights into their overall brand consistency and platform-specific strategies.

An interesting approach is to explore “brand archetypes”. These archetypes, first identified by psychologist Carl Jung, include personas like the Sage (sharing wisdom), the Creator (driving innovation), and the Hero (overcoming challenges). For example, Apple embodies the Creator archetype through innovative design and creative empowerment, while Google represents the Sage through its focus on knowledge and information sharing.

Analyze profiles of successful people in your field to identify which archetype they embody. Look at their content style, messaging patterns, and how they engage with their audience. Don’t just copy them – use these insights to refine your unique voice while staying true to your chosen archetype. Your Gravatar profile can help reinforce this archetype through consistent visual and written elements across platforms.

Mastering the art of collaborations

When thinking about collaborations, many people imagine regular guest posts or social media shoutouts. However, you can go way beyond those. Experiment with innovative formats like multi-platform storytelling campaigns, collaborative product launches, or industry-specific challenges.

When approaching potential collaborators, spend some time on the partnership proposals. Clearly outline mutual benefits and set realistic expectations. After a few tries, start analyzing metrics of successful collaborations to understand their full impact on brand growth and audience engagement.

Gravatar’s verified links feature can help establish credibility when reaching out to potential collaborators. An up-to-date Gravatar profile ensures that collaborators always have access to your latest work and achievements, facilitating more meaningful partnerships.

Consider forming a “collaboration ring” – a strategic alliance of complementary personal brands that regularly support and amplify each other’s content. This approach can create a network effect, expanding your reach and influence exponentially.

Understanding how to use AI strategically in social posting

With time, more and more social media strategies use AI to increase productivity and generate ideas. 

Consider using AI-driven sentiment analysis to fine-tune your messaging. These tools can help you understand how your audience perceives your content, allowing you to adjust your tone and style for maximum impact.

For example, Natural Language Processing (NLP) analyzes audience comments, helping you tailor your content to their interests and concerns. Meanwhile, computer vision AI can optimize your visual content for better engagement.

AI-powered chatbots are also a staple for handling routine follower interactions, freeing up your time for more strategic tasks. And predictive analytics can identify optimal content themes and formats for different platforms and audience segments.

However, it’s crucial to maintain authenticity. Use AI as a tool to augment your creativity, not replace it. The most effective personal brands blend AI-driven insights with a genuine human touch.

When using AI, be transparent with your audience. They’ll appreciate your honesty, and it can even position you as a forward-thinking brand embracing cutting-edge technology.

The importance of a digital footprint management strategy 

Your digital footprint – the trail of data you leave online – is very important in shaping your personal brand. Every post, comment, and like contributes to the digital persona you’re creating. Managing this footprint is essential for maintaining a positive professional image and seizing career opportunities.

• Start by regularly reviewing your online presence across all platforms. Set up Google Alerts for your name to stay informed about what’s being said about you online. 
• Be mindful of what you post and comment on, ensuring it aligns with your personal brand values.
• Create and share content that reinforces your expertise and professional interests. This proactive approach helps shape your digital footprint positively. 
• Utilize privacy settings on social media platforms to control what information is publicly visible.

Remember, your digital footprint has long-term implications. Today’s casual post could impact future opportunities. Strive for a balance between authenticity and professionalism in your online interactions.

How to use social media analytics to your advantage 

Social media analytics are powerful tools that provide insights into your content performance and audience behavior. 

Key metrics to track include:

• Engagement: Likes, comments, shares
• Reach: How many people see your content
• Follower growth: Track growth over time, and take note of anything you post that’s cause a sudden burst in followers.
• Click-through rates on shared links: Which links are getting the most engagement?
• Audience demographics: Age, location, interests

Use these metrics to improve your content strategy. If posts about a certain topic get more engagement, consider creating more content in that area. Most major social media platforms offer built-in analytics tools – familiarize yourself with these.

Set specific goals for your social media presence and use analytics to track progress. This data-driven approach allows you to make informed decisions about your content and posting strategy.

We recommend that you experiment with posting at different times and use analytics to find your audience’s most active hours. 

While numbers are important, they’re not everything. Use analytics as a guide, but don’t let them stifle your creativity or authenticity. The most successful personal brands balance data-driven decisions with genuine, value-driven content.

Elevate your personal brand with Gravatar 

Throughout this guide, we’ve explored numerous strategies to elevate your personal brand on social media. From maintaining consistency across platforms to leveraging AI and analytics, each approach contributes to a stronger, more impactful online presence.

Gravatar is a powerful tool that can be invaluable in building a strong online presence and reinforcing your personal brand. Its most important features include:

• A consistent avatar across thousands of websites
• A centralized profile with your bio and links
• Easy updating: change your Gravatar once, and it updates everywhere

With Gravatar, you save time and ensure consistency in your online presence. It’s particularly useful if you’re active on multiple platforms or managing different online identities.

Taking control of your online image starts with simple steps, and setting up a Gravatar profile is an excellent place to begin. It forms the foundation of a cohesive personal brand across the web, allowing you to present a unified, professional image wherever you engage online.

Like any worthwhile endeavor, your personal brand is an ongoing project. Regularly revisit your strategy, stay open to new tools and trends, and always prioritize providing value to your audience. With persistence and the right tools like Gravatar, you can build a personal brand that truly stands out.

Create your free Gravatar profile today.

An author box in WordPress might seem like a simple addition to any blog, but it’s actually one of the most important elements. Showing author credentials builds content authority – something that’s becoming increasingly vital in an era of AI-generated content and information overload. When readers can verify the expertise and background of the person behind an article, they’re more likely to trust and engage with the content.

WordPress includes basic author bio functionality, but the default options often fall short when trying to showcase author credentials and links effectively. If you want to connect with your audience, you need something that does more than just display a name and photo.

To help you with that, we’ll show how to create dynamic, professionally styled author boxes using the free Gravatar Enhanced plugin, helping you transform basic author information into compelling author profiles that update automatically.

Why would you want to customize your WordPress author box?

The internet is a place where literally anyone and anything can post content, humans and bots alike. But that doesn’t mean that they are experts in their field or that the posted piece is something users can trust. 

A well-designed author box with verified links does just that – it shows the face behind the words and puts your content above the millions of spammers and bots, building trust and showcasing expertise. 

Besides that, Google and other search engines look for signals that demonstrate Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) when ranking content. An author box with verified credentials, professional links, and relevant expertise helps strengthen these signals. For example, if you’re writing about medical topics, displaying your medical credentials and links to professional profiles helps validate your authority on the subject.

Okay, but what if you have a site with multiple authors? Well, it becomes even more complicated. Without additional tools, you’d have to create separate WordPress profiles for each author and add their credentials to the post. A better alternative is to find a profile management tool that lets you pull author information from a central database and updates automatically as their profiles update (hint: It’s Gravatar!)

Finally, author boxes also improve reader engagement. When readers can verify who’s writing the content and see the author’s expertise, they’re more likely to trust and engage with the material. Plus, social proof through professional network links and credentials helps establish a stronger connection with your audience.

Default customization options for author boxes in WordPress

WordPress comes with basic author box functionality, but its default options can feel limiting. By default, each author gets two main elements: a Gravatar-powered profile picture and a biographical text field found in the Users section of the WordPress dashboard.

Getting your author box to look exactly how you want proves challenging with these basic tools. The visual styling depends entirely on your active WordPress theme, which means changing how it looks often requires diving into template files and custom CSS. You can change the background color and the padding of the box, but that’s pretty much it, 

Any customizations made through template files must be implemented through a child theme to prevent them from disappearing during theme updates. This creates an ongoing maintenance burden, especially for multi-author sites that need consistent styling across different contributors.

The biographical text field also has limitations. Authors can’t easily add social media links, credentials, or other dynamic content that might change over time. Each update requires logging into WordPress and manually editing the bio text – a time-consuming process when managing multiple authors.

These restrictions often push site owners to look for better solutions that don’t require constant maintenance or coding knowledge. The need for more flexibility in design and easier profile management has led to the development of tools that expand on WordPress’s built-in author box capabilities.

Gravatar Enhanced: The best way to customize your author box in WordPress

The Gravatar Enhanced plugin rethinks how author boxes work in WordPress. At its core, the plugin’s Profile Block pulls information directly from Gravatar profiles, offering a fresh approach to displaying author information that’s both dynamic and easy to manage.

The Profile Block stands out by eliminating the need for manual updates. Authors can modify their profiles once at Gravatar.com, and these changes automatically appear across every site using the block. This centralized management saves significant time, especially for authors who contribute to multiple WordPress sites.

For guest authors, the process becomes remarkably simple. Instead of creating WordPress user accounts, site owners just add the Profile Block and enter the author’s email address. 

The block automatically fetches and displays their Gravatar profile information, including professional credentials, social media links, and biographical details.

Customization options are extensive but user-friendly. Through the block settings panel, you can:

• Adjust the background color to match your site’s design.
• Modify padding and spacing for better visual balance.
• Choose which profile elements to display.
• Customize border styles and box shadows.
• Set the width and alignment.

All these features integrate smoothly with WordPress’s block editor, making it simple to add author boxes to any post, page, or custom post type. The block inherits your theme’s typography settings by default, ensuring a consistent look across your site. If you want, you could also further customize it through CSS, giving you even more flexibility in how they look on the front end. For example, you could add border animations on hover or put semi-transparent overlays for a more interesting design. 

As you can see, unlike traditional author boxes that display basic information, the Profile Block acts as a verified digital business card – readers know they’re seeing authentic, current author information pulled directly from the author’s Gravatar profile.

How to set up your customized author box with Gravatar Enhanced 

Getting started with a more powerful author box takes just a few simple steps. First, create a Gravatar account using your WordPress email address – this forms the foundation of your enhanced author profiles.

Setting up your Gravatar profile is straightforward:

• Upload a professional photo for your avatar.

• Add a detailed bio highlighting your expertise.

• Include relevant social media profiles and professional links.

• Add any certifications or credentials that build trust – either through custom links or photos. 

Next, install the Gravatar Enhanced plugin on your WordPress site. 

Once activated, you’ll find the Profile Block ready to use in the block editor. Add it to your single post template or anywhere you want author information to appear, input the author’s email connected to their Gravatar profile, and the plugin will automatically generate the profile block using their profile information.

Because the Gravatar profile is dynamic, every single change will be immediately updated on the block as well. No need to juggle multiple author bios or worry about outdated information.

For multi-author sites, simply repeat the process for each contributor. They’ll control their own profiles through Gravatar.com while you maintain a consistent, professional look across all author boxes on your site.

Transform your WordPress author boxes with Gravatar Enhanced

Moving beyond WordPress’s basic author box functionality opens up new possibilities for showcasing writer expertise and building trust. The Gravatar Enhanced plugin replaces manual profile management with automatic, real-time updates while adding excellent customization options and privacy protections.

Instead of wrestling with template files or juggling multiple author accounts, you get a streamlined system where authors manage their own profiles. 

Ready to upgrade your author boxes? Get started with Gravatar Enhanced today and give your content the professional polish it deserves.

Building an online community takes dedication, skill, and strategic thinking – but the rewards make it worth every bit of effort. A thriving community can transform your business, whether it’s your main focus or supplements your existing offerings.

Starting a community might seem deceptively simple. After all, people naturally want to connect with others who share their interests. And social media makes it easier than ever to gather people in one place.

But creating a community that genuinely serves its members while meeting your goals? That’s a different challenge entirely. Most communities struggle with low engagement, unclear purpose, or lack of sustainable growth.

This guide breaks down advanced strategies for building a community that lasts. You’ll learn practical approaches to choosing the right platform, creating engaging experiences, and fostering meaningful connections among members. Each section includes specific tactics you can implement right away, backed by examples from successful communities.

Define your reason for creating an online community

Starting an online community requires significant time and resources. Before diving in, you need a clear purpose that guides every decision you make.

The most successful communities serve specific, well-defined goals. A vague aim like “connecting people” won’t provide enough direction. Instead, focus on concrete objectives such as:

• Supporting customers through peer-to-peer problem solving.
• Building brand loyalty through exclusive experiences and early access.
• Creating collaborative learning spaces where members share expertise.
• Gathering feedback to improve products or services.
• Providing specialized networking opportunities in niche fields.

Your community’s purpose shapes everything from platform choice to content strategy. An educational community focused on live workshops needs different tools than a support community built around troubleshooting forums.

Ask yourself: Will this community be central to your business model or support existing offerings? A course creator might build their entire business around a learning community, while a retailer might use community spaces to enhance customer experience through product discussions and reviews.

The clearer your purpose, the easier it becomes to make decisions that serve both your members and your goals.

Define your ideal persona and why community is important for them

Success in community building starts with deeply understanding who your members are and what draws them to connect with others. Going beyond basic demographics reveals what truly motivates participation.

Take these specific examples:

• Remote tech workers seeking professional growth might join to share career advice, discuss industry trends, and build relationships outside their immediate team.
• Home bakers learning artisan bread techniques want to troubleshoot recipes, showcase their creations, and find motivation from fellow enthusiasts.
• Independent artists could gather to share business tips, critique works in progress, and find potential collaborators.

Each group has distinct needs that shape how they’ll engage. Remote workers might value structured networking events and skill-sharing sessions, while bakers might prefer photo-rich discussions and live-streaming demonstrations. Artists might engage most with portfolio showcases and project collaboration tools.

Study where your ideal members currently gather online. What frustrates them about existing spaces? What makes them stick around? Use these insights to craft experiences that solve real pain points.

And remember – your community will attract different types of participants. Some will actively create content, others will moderate discussions, while many will simply absorb information. Design your space to support all these interaction styles.

Selecting the right format and channels for your online community

Your community’s format directly impacts how members interact and engage. Each option offers distinct advantages for different community goals:

• Forums excel at organizing in-depth discussions by topic, making it easy for members to find relevant conversations and contribute meaningfully. They’re particularly effective for technical support or knowledge-sharing communities.
• Live events build excitement and real-time connection. Whether through video workshops, AMAs, or virtual meetups, synchronous gatherings create shared experiences that strengthen community bonds.
• Comment sections work well for focused discussions around specific content pieces. They’re ideal for communities built around blogs, courses, or media content where context matters.
• Activity feeds keep members updated on community happenings, highlighting recent discussions, achievements, and contributions. They help maintain engagement between deeper interactions.

WordPress offers the flexibility to mix these formats without platform restrictions. Unlike social media networks, you control the experience and aren’t subject to algorithmic changes or paid reach limitations. It also gives you an opportunity to create an engaging community platform with customized profile pages and personalized recommendations based on user data. 

Whatever the format is, we recommend starting with free channels to build your initial audience. For example, many fitness channels offer free training videos on YouTube and then a paid membership option for subscribers who want to join specific programs. Similarly, the Good Mythical Morning YouTube channel nurtures viewers before inviting them to join their premium Mythical Society community. This approach lets you demonstrate value and build trust before asking for a deeper commitment.

Creating member profiles for your community 

Member profiles form the foundation of community identity and connection. Gravatar helps website owners with this crucial element by linking profiles to email addresses, enabling consistent identity across platforms with minimal setup time.

The “Update Once, Sync Everywhere” feature saves valuable time for both administrators and members. Instead of creating new profiles for each community space, Gravatar allows all integrated platforms to pull in and auto-populate profile data.

Two powerful APIs make implementation straightforward:

• The Avatar API pulls member photos and basic details
• The Profile API imports comprehensive profile information

This automation speeds up the user onboarding significantly. New members arrive with pre-filled profiles, reducing friction and increasing the likelihood they’ll engage right away. Familiar avatars across different sections of your community help members recognize each other easily, strengthening relationships.

If you’re looking for some inspiration on how to build beautiful profile pages, check out our article on user profile page examples. 

Privacy remains in members’ control. They choose what information to share and can maintain multiple identities for different community roles – perfect for separating member and moderator profiles.

Creating community guidelines and moderation strategies

Smart moderation strategies keep communities healthy while encouraging authentic interaction. Advanced approaches include:

• AI-powered content filtering to catch obvious violations automatically.
• Multi-tier moderation systems where trusted members help maintain community standards.
• Living guidelines that adapt based on community feedback and real situations.

Gravatar’s universal profiles enhance these efforts by:

• Using verified email addresses to reduce fake accounts and spam.
• Building trust scores based on member history across platforms.
• Speeding up issue resolution through integrated reporting systems.

Balance strict rules with community self-regulation. The Stack Exchange network demonstrates this well: Experienced members gain moderation privileges through consistent positive contributions, creating a sustainable system where the community largely moderates itself.

Clear consequences for guideline violations matter, but focus more on rewarding positive behavior. Highlight exemplary members, celebrate constructive contributions, and create paths for members to earn additional privileges through helpful participation.

Strategies for launching and growing your community

A successful community launch builds momentum that drives sustained growth. Smart tactics maximize early engagement and set the right foundations.

Reward early adopters with exclusive perks like special “founding member” badges displayed on profiles. Besides the badges, members with this level could also have direct access to community leadership, the right to give input on future features and direction, and even early access to new content or features.

However, you should nurture all members, not just the early adopters. Create achievement systems that encourage meaningful participation:

• Recognition for quality contributions.
• Special roles for consistent, helpful answers.
• Progress tracking tied to learning goals.
• Visible milestones on member profiles.

You can measure how successful your efforts are by measuring engagement metrics – number of comments, new members, etc. However, it’s best to go beyond the basics and track indicators that show real community health:

• Ratio of new discussions to responses.
• Time between member questions and first answers.
• Number of connections made between members.
• Quality and depth of conversations.

Finally, think of different ways you can scale engagement through time. Partner with micro-influencers who genuinely connect with your community’s purpose – their authentic enthusiasm will attract members who share your values.

As your community grows, personalize the experience based on member behavior and interests. Use Gravatar profile data to:

• Customize onboarding paths.
• Suggest relevant discussions.
• Connect members with shared interests.
• Highlight content matching expertise levels.

Keep in mind that small, active communities often provide more value than large, disengaged ones. Focus on fostering quality interactions rather than chasing member numbers.

Fostering engagement and participation in your online community 

Engaged communities don’t happen by accident. They need thoughtful content, smart incentives, and active leadership. This section explores advanced strategies that go beyond basic engagement tactics, helping you create an environment where meaningful interaction happens naturally.

Creating compelling community content and discussions 

Strong content sparks conversations that keep members coming back. Focus on creating material that taps into your community’s specific interests and motivations:

• Frame discussion topics as practical problems to solve rather than digital queries.
• Share behind-the-scenes insights that make members feel like insiders.
• Create content series that build anticipation and regular participation.
• Use polls and surveys to gather opinions on controversial industry topics.

Mix content formats to suit different learning and interaction styles:

• Short-form videos for quick tips and demonstrations.
• Long-form articles for deep dives into complex topics.
• Audio content for on-the-go consumption.
• Interactive workshops for hands-on learning.

Encourage member-generated content by:

• Featuring expert members in community spotlights.
• Running themed challenges that showcase member work.
• Creating dedicated spaces for member success stories.
• Setting up peer mentoring programs.

Implementing gamification and rewards for active members

Gamification transforms passive members into active participants when implemented thoughtfully. The Duolingo language learning community demonstrates this perfectly – their streak system and XP leaderboards turn daily practice into an engaging challenge.

Achievement paths should reflect genuine community values. A tech support community might award “Problem Solver” status to members who consistently provide validated solutions. These members then receive special privileges, like the ability to mark answers as official solutions or mentor newcomers.

Collaborative challenges build stronger connections between members. Take Strava’s monthly distance challenges – they motivate individual achievement while fostering a sense of shared accomplishment. Your community might organize team projects that combine different skill sets, such as writers partnering with designers to create resources for the community.

The most effective rewards provide real value. This could mean exclusive access to industry experts, featured spots in community content, or early access to new features. One gaming community successfully uses a point system where active members earn credits toward premium content and merchandise.

Track achievements through Gravatar profiles to make recognition visible and persistent. Members can showcase their expertise badges, contribution streaks, and impact metrics across all community spaces, building consistent reputation and authority.

Staying involved and active as a community leader

Leadership visibility builds trust and encourages participation. Make your presence felt through:

• Regular “state of the community” updates.
• Direct responses to member concerns.
• Personal stories that demonstrate vulnerability.
• Clear communication about community decisions.

Balance hands-on involvement with empowering others. Train moderators to handle day-to-day management, spotlight emerging community leaders and create opportunities for members to take ownership of initiatives.

Remember that your consistent presence shows members their participation matters.

Scaling and building your community

Growth presents both opportunities and challenges for community builders. A strategic approach helps maintain quality while expanding reach.

• Start with a detailed roadmap that outlines growth phases. Map specific initiatives to member count milestones – what works for 100 members likely won’t serve 10,000. Include plans for things like expanding moderator teams, adding new content formats, introducing advanced features, and upgrading the technical infrastructure of your platform to accommodate increased traffic. 
• Make data-driven decisions by tracking meaningful metrics:
  • Member retention rates across different joining cohorts.
  • Response times for member questions.
  • Active participation percentages.
  • Content engagement patterns.
• Gather and act on member feedback systematically. Monthly surveys, feedback threads, and one-on-one conversations with active members reveal pain points before they become major issues.
• Maintain community culture through growth spurts. The Reddit community r/AskHistorians demonstrates this well – they’ve scaled to over a million members while maintaining strict quality standards for historical discussion.
• Be cautious about growing too quickly. Rapid member influx can overwhelm moderation systems and dilute community culture. Focus on attracting members who align with your community’s core values rather than chasing pure numbers.

And remember: bigger isn’t always better. A focused community of 500 engaged members often provides more value than one with 50,000 lurkers. A great example of this is Jay Clouse’s highest-tier community, which has a cap of 200 members. He knows that exclusivity is one of the most important perks, and having fewer subscribers allows him to pay more attention and provide those people with unique benefits. 

How to monetize your community strategically

Smart monetization enhances member value while creating sustainable revenue. The trick lies in aligning monetary goals with community benefits. Here’s what you can do: 

• Paid memberships: Premium memberships work well when they unlock genuine value. Sara Beth Yoga, for example, offers basic classes through her YouTube channel while reserving expert-led workshops and specialized support groups for paying members. Members gladly pay because the premium features directly serve their goals.
• Sponsored content: Brand partnerships succeed through authentic alignment. A photography community might partner with camera manufacturers for exclusive tutorials or early product access. Both the brand and community benefit, while members gain valuable insights.
• Virtual events: These can include workshops taught by community experts, industry conferences featuring member speakers, mastermind groups for specific topics, and behind-the-scenes tours or demonstrations.
• Digital products: If members frequently ask similar questions, package those answers into comprehensive guides or courses. Let community input shape product development to ensure relevance. 
• Affiliate marketing: Sign up for affiliate programs to earn commissions on products you’ve personally tried and you believe your audience will find useful or interesting. 

Always maintain transparency about monetization. Explain how revenue supports community growth and improvement. Many successful communities, like DEV.to, openly discuss their business model and gather member input on monetization decisions.

Start small – test ideas with core members before full rollout. Their feedback helps refine offerings that truly serve the community.

Scaling your thriving community: Gravatar’s role in sustainable expansion

Building a thriving online community requires careful planning, consistent effort, and the right tools. Each element covered in this guide is vital in creating spaces where people genuinely want to connect and contribute.

Gravatar’s profiles-as-service system removes major technical hurdles from community growth. This frees you to focus on what matters most – fostering meaningful connections between members.

The platform supports sustainable expansion through several key features:

• Streamlined registration eliminates common friction points. New members arrive with pre-populated profiles, making them more likely to engage immediately. No more abandoned signups due to lengthy forms.
• Multi-platform identity management helps members maintain consistent presence across community spaces. A member’s contributions in your forums, comments, and events all link back to their unified profile on GitHub, Slack, and other integrated platforms.
• Rich profiles enable deeper connections. Members can showcase relevant expertise, interests, and achievements. This makes it easier for them to find like-minded peers and contribute meaningfully to discussions.
• Privacy controls give members confidence in participation. They can manage multiple identities and control exactly what information appears in different community contexts. This flexibility encourages authentic engagement.
• Developer-friendly integration speeds implementation through well-documented APIs and SDKs. You can focus on building unique community features instead of recreating basic profile functionality.

Ready to start building your community? Explore how Gravatar can help lay the foundation for sustainable growth while creating engaging member experiences.

Even though great content is an important part of any blog, it’s only a small part of creating great user experiences. Everything on your site should be focused on making sure readers can actually find, enjoy, and interact with what you’ve written. 

A well-designed user experience keeps visitors reading longer, encourages them to explore more posts, and makes them more likely to take a desired action, whether that’s signing up for your newsletter or checking out your products.

Search engines care about user experience too. Google specifically looks at how people interact with your blog, making UX a significant factor in where your content appears in search results. And according to Jakob’s Law, which tells us users prefer websites that work similarly to ones they already know, creating a familiar yet modern interface can dramatically increase engagement.

Ready to make your blog easier to use and more engaging? Let’s explore some proven practices and tools to help create an outstanding experience for your readers. Plus, discover how Gravatar can boost your blog’s credibility and user interaction.

1. Ensuring your blog homepage is easy to navigate and well-organized

The homepage of your blog sets the tone for the entire reading experience. Getting it right means implementing smart navigation features that help readers find exactly what they want.

• Start with an intelligent search system. Add auto-suggest functionality that predicts what users might search for as they type and weigh the results based on popularity and relevance. Make sure search results can be filtered by date, category, or content type to help readers narrow down their options.

• Structure your content with a clear taxonomy. Limit your primary categories to 5-7 options – any more can overwhelm readers. Build nested subcategories for more specific topics and use dynamic tag clouds to show popular subjects. This creates clear pathways for readers to explore related content.

How you load content matters, too. For blogs with lots of posts, choose between:

• Infinite scroll: Great for casual browsing and image-heavy content.
• Pagination: Better for readers who want to track their progress or return to specific pages.

On mobile devices, focus on these essential elements:

• A clean drawer menu that slides in from the side.
• Floating action buttons for quick access to searches or categories.
• Headers that stay visible while scrolling.

For content previews on your homepage:

• Keep excerpts between 120-160 characters.
• Use 16:9 ratio images for consistency.
• Create custom layouts for different types of posts (tutorials, news, reviews).

Remember to test your navigation with real users. Watch how they browse and search, then adjust based on their behavior. The best blog homepage design is one that feels natural and helps readers discover more of your content without thinking about it.

2. Optimizing the visual experience on your blog posts

The main goal of great blog design is to make content easy and pleasant to read. Let’s look at specific techniques that enhance readability and keep readers engaged.

Typography needs precise measurements to work well:

• Set body text between 16-18px for comfortable reading.
• Use a line height of 1.5-1.6 to create breathing room between lines.
• Keep line length to 60-75 characters to prevent eye strain.
• Pick fonts that render crisply on all screen sizes.

Make long posts easier to navigate with these structural elements:

• Add a sticky table of contents that follows as readers scroll.
• Show a progress bar indicating how far through the post they are.
• Create clear visual separation between sections using whitespace.
• Include “jump to section” links for quick navigation.

The first screen readers see (the “above-fold” area) should give them immediate context:

• Add a clear summary box highlighting the main points.
• Display estimated reading time prominently.
• Keep at least 15-20% of space empty to avoid visual clutter.
• Use subheadings to break up text into scannable chunks.

For complex or technical posts:

• Create expandable sections for detailed explanations.
• Add tooltips to explain specialized terms.
• Use bullet points and numbered lists for step-by-step instructions.
• Include relevant screenshots or diagrams.

Most importantly, maintain consistency across all posts. Readers shouldn’t have to relearn how to navigate each time they visit. This follows Jakob’s Law – when elements work the same way throughout your blog, readers feel more confident exploring your content.

Overall, visual design should support your content, not compete with it. Every element should serve a purpose in making the post easier to read and understand.

3. Performance optimization: Speeding up your blog with dynamic content loading

A fast-loading blog keeps readers happy and engaged. Here’s how to serve content quickly and efficiently using modern loading techniques.

• Start with progressive loading to prioritize what matters, such as text and critical elements. Defer less important elements until after the main content appears and use resource hints to tell browsers what to load next. For example, you can implement the intersection observer API to load images only as readers scroll through them. 
• Structure your JavaScript smartly by splitting code into smaller chunks that load only when needed. Use dynamic imports for features like comment sections or sharing buttons, load third-party scripts (like analytics) after core content, and apply virtual scrolling on index pages to handle large archives efficiently. 
• Optimize images for better performance by compressing them without noticeably reducing quality. We recommend generating WebP versions of all images and creating multiple sizes for different screen widths. You could also use content-aware loading to prioritize visible images.
• Set up technical optimizations, including browser caching with appropriate cache-control headers, skeleton screens (placeholder content) while posts load, and a CDN that will serve assets from locations close to your readers. Make sure you monitor Core Web Vitals regularly to catch performance issues early. 
• Include infinite scroll implementations like pre-loading the next set of posts before readers reach the bottom, keeping memory usage in check by removing posts far outside the viewport, saving scroll position when readers click through to a post, and showing loading indicators only when new content is actually loading.

4. Making your blog more authoritative through E-E-A-T best practices

Building trust with users means showing them exactly why they should value your content. Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) help readers – and search engines – understand the credibility behind your posts.

The best way to do that is by creating comprehensive author profiles:

• List relevant credentials and certifications.
• Highlight years of experience in specific topics.
• Link to other published work and research.
• Show professional achievements and awards.
• Connect social media profiles to establish a reliable digital presence.

Gravatar makes managing author identities simple across multiple platforms. Contributors have to create just one profile, and their information appears on Gravatar-supported websites, including every WordPress.com blog. There, the integration happens automatically – perfect for blogs with multiple contributors or authors who write across different sites. 

For WordPress.org sites, the Gravatar Enhanced plugin adds powerful profile features:

• Customizable author profile blocks.

• Automatic profile card embedding in posts. 
• Social media integration. 
• Custom biography sections.

You can use these features to build authority with your audience and create dedicated pages showcasing each author’s expertise. And if your users don’t have a Gravatar profile, you can set up an automated email sequence inviting them to create one. 

If you’re not on WordPress (org or com), don’t worry! You can use Gravatar on any platform thanks to its easy-to-implement REST API.

Now, going beyond author profiles, you can build authority by structuring your archives effectively. For example, you can create Group posts by topic to demonstrate subject knowledge and display engagement metrics like comment counts. When you have someone who’s been contributing for a while, you can feature their most popular or influential posts or add testimonials from industry peers or readers. 

We also recommend that you make expertise visible throughout your content, not just through design: 

• Add “About the Author” sections within posts.
• Include relevant credentials in article introductions.
• Link to author’s research or cited works.
• Show expertise indicators next to author names.
• Feature author contributions to industry publications.

The Gravatar API lets you enhance these profiles further:

• Pull in verified professional achievements.
• Display unified author information across platforms.
• Show real-time updates to author credentials.
• Create custom profile layouts for different content types.

Whatever your approach is, the best strategy is authenticity. Focus on highlighting genuine expertise and real accomplishments rather than inflating credentials. Readers appreciate honesty and will trust authors who demonstrate their knowledge through quality content backed by verifiable experience.

5. Boosting engagement and user interactions on your blog

There are several strategies you can implement for a successful and engaging experience. 

First, you must ensure that your internal linking structure is logical – you don’t need to link to everything, just the posts that make sense. When you’re smart about it, you can keep readers exploring your content naturally through connections based on topics, skill levels, and reader interests. So, place contextual links within your content where they add value, and use automated related post sections that adapt based on what similar readers have found useful.

Now, it’s a great thing to guide your readers throughout the blog, but you also need to motivate them with concrete but meaningful calls to action. Don’t bombard them with popups; analyze your scroll depth data to understand where readers are most receptive to taking action. Test different CTA positions, designs, and messages with various user segments to find what resonates best.

Want to create a successful newsletter? Think beyond basic signup forms. WordPress.com’s native newsletter functionality allows for sophisticated subscriber management. You can segment your audience, deliver automated post notifications, and track which content drives the most engagement. Plus, you can show different content blocks depending on whether someone’s already subscribed.

However, perhaps the most powerful way to build engagement is through an active comment section. Here’s where Gravatar’s universal profile system really shines. When readers comment, their verified profiles automatically sync across any Gravatar-enabled platform. This builds a sense of community as readers recognize familiar faces and can trust they’re interacting with real people.

With the Jetpack plugin, you can enhance this further by enabling hovercards – detailed profile previews that appear when readers hover over a commenter’s name. These cards can display social connections, verified links, and complete user information, encouraging meaningful discussions while reducing spam and low-quality comments. This feature is automatically enabled on WordPress.com websites. 

Want to set up commenting on your WordPress site? Check out our detailed guide on enabling and managing comments effectively.

6. Creating multimedia elements that add genuine value to articles

Adding images, videos, and interactive elements can enhance understanding – but only if they’re implemented thoughtfully. Your multimedia content should support your message without slowing down your blog.

• Data visualization demands careful attention to detail: Interactive charts and graphs have to work across screen sizes while maintaining readability. Before adding a visual element, ask whether it makes complex information clearer. And remember to A/B test different visualization styles to see which ones readers engage with most.
• Video integration requires balancing quality with performance: Implement lazy loading so videos only download when readers scroll near them. This keeps your pages fast while still offering rich content. Match your video player controls to your blog’s design, and add clear thumbnails that tell readers what they’ll learn.

Whatever multimedia elements you choose, optimize them for Core Web Vitals:

• Compress files without sacrificing quality.
• Set proper width and height attributes to prevent layout shifts.
• Use modern formats like WebP for images and WebM for video.
• Ensure all content works well on mobile devices.

Most importantly, make your multimedia content accessible. Add descriptive alt text for images, provide transcripts for videos, and ensure interactive elements work with keyboard navigation and screen readers.

Think of multimedia as a powerful tool, not a requirement. Each element should serve a clear purpose in helping readers better understand your content. When used strategically, these additions can transform complex topics into engaging, memorable experiences.

Boost your blog’s UX with Gravatar integration

Ready to put these UX improvements into action? Gravatar offers a simple way to enhance your blog’s user experience through automated profile management.

The Gravatar Enhanced plugin makes implementation straightforward, with customizable profile blocks that showcase author expertise and build reader trust. Hovercards add depth to your comment sections, displaying detailed user information when readers hover over profile images. This creates a more dynamic, engaging experience that encourages meaningful discussions.

For developers, the Gravatar API enables custom profile displays tailored to your blog’s specific needs. Build unique author showcases, create advanced comment systems, or integrate user profiles in creative ways. Plus, built-in privacy controls let users manage exactly what information they share.

Whether you’re a developer or a passionate blogger, you can use Gravatar to transform your blog into an engaging, professional platform where readers can connect with authors and each other meaningfully. Check out the Gravatar REST API or the Gravatar Enhanced plugin today!

Every social media platform has an About section. However, this tends to be very limited in terms of what you can include in it, making it hard to make a memorable first impression and truly tell people what you’re all about. For example, these sections often limit you to a single link in your profile and don’t allow different content formats, just text. 

That’s why link-in-bio tools have become essential for anyone sharing content online. These tools let you pack multiple destinations into one simple URL, making it easier to guide followers to your content, products, or services.

This is important for everyone – from an influencer promoting sponsored content to a business owner showcasing products. But with so many tools on the market, it can be hard to choose the right one – some offer basic link collections, while others provide advanced features like analytics and customization options.

This guide examines popular link-in-bio tools, from dedicated solutions like Linktree to comprehensive profile systems like Gravatar. You’ll learn about essential features, pricing comparisons, and practical tips to help you select the tool that fits your needs.

What is a link-in-bio tool?

A link-in-bio tool creates a single webpage that houses all your important links. Think of it as a mini-website that fits inside your social media profile’s single link limitation. Instead of choosing between linking to your website, the latest video, or a new product, you can share everything at once.

These tools typically let you include the following:

• Social media profiles
• Website links
• Product pages
• Blog posts
• Contact information
• Latest announcements
• Promotional content

As you can see, this is a great alternative to X’s (Twitter) one-link or Instagram’s five-link limit. However, beyond solving the one-link problem, these tools make your profile look more professional. 

Rather than cramming multiple URLs into your bio text, you present a clean, organized hub for your content. This makes it easier for followers to find what they’re looking for, whether that’s your latest YouTube video or your online store.

Features to consider in a link-in-bio tool

While the features you require will depend on your specific use case, there are some universal good-to-haves that every good link-in-bio tool should provide. 

• Flexible presentation options. Look for platforms that provide various layouts and themes to match your style. For example, a photographer might want a grid layout to showcase their portfolio, while a musician might prefer a list format with embedded music players.
• Design flexibility beyond basic themes. The best tools let you control colors, fonts, and layouts to match your brand identity. Some even allow custom CSS for complete design control. This means you can make your bio page look like a natural extension of your website or social media presence.
• Link management features. While basic tools might limit you to 5-10 links, more advanced options offer unlimited links with organizing capabilities. You might want to group your podcast episodes separately from your shop links, or temporarily feature a special promotion without deleting your regular links.
• Additional content features. Beyond simple URLs, look for tools that support text descriptions, image galleries, video embeds, or newsletter signups. A makeup artist could embed tutorial videos directly in their bio page, while a writer could feature book excerpts alongside purchase links.
• Useful integrations with other platforms. This might include connecting your eCommerce store to display products, embedding your Spotify playlist, or linking your email marketing service to capture leads. These integrations save time by automatically updating your bio page when you post new content.
• Privacy and user control features. Some tools let you password-protect certain links, manage multiple profiles from one account, or control who can edit your page. This becomes especially important when working with teams or managing different brands.
• In-depth analytics. Good tools show you which links get the most clicks, when people visit your page, and where they’re coming from. This data helps you optimize your page – for instance, you might discover that placing your newsletter signup at the top doubles your conversion rate.

Comparing the top link in bio tools

Each link-in-bio tool offers unique advantages. Here’s a detailed look at seven popular options to help you make an informed choice.

Gravatar

At its core, Gravatar is a universal profile system that doubles as a link-in-bio tool with a unique “Set once, seen everywhere” approach to online profiles. When you create a Gravatar profile, thousands of websites can automatically display your profile picture and information – but only with your consent. 

For example, when you comment on a WordPress blog or contribute to a GitHub project, these platforms can pull in your verified profile data. This automatic syncing saves time and ensures consistency across your online presence.

The platform functions as both a link-in-bio tool and a comprehensive profile system. You can add:

• Essential links to social media and websites.

• Verified account connections.

• About Me section.

• Payment details.

• Contact information.

• Images and videos.

Customization options give you full control over your profile’s appearance. Drag and drop elements to perfect their placement, choose background colors that match your brand, and add custom headers and footers to make the page yours. The layout builder makes it simple to create a professional-looking profile without needing design skills.

Think of Gravatar as a digital business card that evolves with your online presence. Beyond basic contact details, it showcases your portfolio, connects your social profiles, and highlights your professional achievements – all in one place that updates everywhere automatically.

Privacy remains in your control. Create multiple profiles for different aspects of your life – perhaps one for professional connections and another for creative projects. Choose exactly what information appears on which websites and manage all your online identities from a single dashboard.

Unlike most competitors, Gravatar offers free custom domain support (when acquired through WordPress.com). This means your bio page can live at “yourname.link” instead of a platform-specific URL. And the entire service costs nothing for individual users, making it an accessible option for anyone building their online presence.

Linktree

Linktree popularized the link-in-bio concept with its straightforward approach. The platform shines with its user-friendly interface and extensive template collection. You can set up a basic page in minutes, choosing from various button styles and color schemes.

With their free plan, you get unlimited links, QR codes, and a Shop tab to sell products like merch and affiliates. If you decide to go for one of their paid plans, however, you get:

• Advanced design options like custom animations
• Deeper analytics, such as performance for specific links.
• Link scheduling, SEO settings, Google Analytics, and other marketing tools. 
• Collecting email addresses and phone numbers. 
• Priority support and tailored onboarding with the highest tier. 

Linktree also integrates well with platforms like Mailchimp and Shopify, making it suitable for email marketing and ecommerce.

Later Link in Bio

Later’s tool takes a unique approach by turning your Instagram feed into clickable content. Each post becomes a link destination, making it perfect for visual content creators who frequently reference past Instagram posts. 

There is a free plan, but it’s very hard to find what’s actually included in it. The paid tiers start from $25/month up to $80 for individuals and $200 per month for agencies. 

Features include: 

• 30 and 150 posts per social profile for the first two paid tiers and unlimited for the rest. 
• Easy integration with Later’s social media scheduling tools for planning posts and corresponding bio links in advance. 
• Analytics with up to 1 year of data.
• Credits for AI features. 
• Brand collab tools for creators. 

Hopp by Wix

Built on Wix’s website platform, Hopp offers extensive customization options. Users benefit from Wix’s drag-and-drop interface and design flexibility, making it possible to create highly personalized landing pages.

Besides that, you also get: 

• URL shortening to match the brand name. 
• A mobile landing page that you can track. 
• Smart promotions that show a pre-roll when a user clicks on a specific URL. 

The platform particularly suits small businesses thanks to its built-in ecommerce capabilities. You can sell products directly through your bio page, complete with inventory management and secure payment processing.

Sprout Social

Aimed at businesses and agencies, Sprout Social’s link-in-bio feature comes as part of its comprehensive social media management suite. The tool emphasizes professional features like:

• Grid-like design of the links that mirrors an Instagram feed.
• Advanced analytics – group, profile, and post-level reporting. 
• Automated link rotation and link scheduling.
• Engagement and customer care services include social inbox, comment moderation, and case management. 

While it’s one of the pricier options with no free plan, the integrated approach makes sense for teams already using Sprout Social’s other features. The tiers start from $199/per seat per month up to $399. 

Stan

Stan focuses on monetization, functioning as both a link-in-bio tool and an ecommerce platform. It’s built specifically for creators who want to:

• Sell digital products, services, courses, and webinars. 
• Offer paid subscriptions.
• Host exclusive content.
• Manage fan relationships.

The platform includes features for managing customer relationships and tracking sales metrics, though its specialized nature means it might be overkill for users just seeking basic link sharing.

Maximizing impact: Best practices for link in bio optimization

Creating a link in bio page marks just the beginning – optimizing it is what drives real results. Here’s how to make your page more effective.

• Start with a clean, organized design that matches your brand. If you’re a photographer with a minimalist black-and-white Instagram feed, your bio page should reflect that same aesthetic. This visual consistency helps visitors instantly recognize and trust your page.
• Place your most important content at the top – that new product launch or latest video needs prime placement. And remember to remove outdated links promptly. Nothing frustrates visitors more than clicking a “new release” link from three months ago.
• Write clear, action-focused text for each link. Instead of “My YouTube,” try “Watch my latest photography tutorials.” Rather than “Shop,” use “Browse handmade ceramics.” These specific descriptions tell visitors exactly what to expect, increasing the likelihood they’ll click.
• Test your page on different devices – mobile, desktop, and tablet. Are buttons easy to tap? Is text readable without zooming? Does the page load quickly? Most of your visitors will browse on phones, so mobile-first design matters.
• Track your analytics to understand what works. If your Spotify playlist gets more clicks than your online store, maybe your audience prefers content over products. Use these insights to adjust your strategy. Try different link placements, descriptions, or visual elements to see what resonates.
• Think of your bio page as telling your brand’s story. Rather than throwing random links together, create sections that guide visitors through your work. A fitness coach might group links into categories like “Workout Plans,” “Nutrition Tips,” and “Success Stories.” This structured approach helps visitors find exactly what interests them.
• Remember to refresh your page regularly. Add seasonal content, highlight new projects, and remove outdated material. A dynamic page gives followers reasons to return and explore what’s new.

Create the ultimate link-in-bio with Gravatar

Link in bio tools solve common problems, but Gravatar takes a different approach. Rather than just collecting links, it acts as a complete online identity manager. Your Gravatar profile syncs across various integrated platforms, ensuring your online presence stays consistent without extra work.

What makes Gravatar unique? Privacy controls let you decide exactly what information appears where. You can manage multiple identities from one account. And unlike most link in bio tools, Gravatar offers custom domain support at no cost when using a WordPress.com domain.

Plus, there’s no catch – it’s completely free for individual users. Getting started takes minutes: sign up with your email, add your essential information, and customize your profile. Your unified online presence awaits.

Create your Gravatar profile for free so that your social media followers can truly make a connection with you.

Ever visited a website that seems to know exactly what you’re looking for? That’s website personalization in action. It’s the art of tailoring a site’s content, layout, and overall experience to each user based on their preferences, behaviors, and demographics.

Website personalization can be done in different ways. You might encounter:

• Content personalization that serves up articles or products you’re likely to enjoy.
• User interface customization that adjusts the layout based on your browsing habits.
• Product recommendations that feel like they’re reading your mind.
• Marketing messages that speak directly to your interests.

Think about how Netflix suggests shows you might like or how Amazon recommends products based on your browsing history. 

Similarly, news websites often customize their content feeds to match your reading preferences, while eCommerce sites may greet you with personalized homepages depending on your location and cookie history.

In this article, we’ll dive into key techniques for implementing personalization on your website. We’ll also explore how Gravatar can play a very important role in this process, helping you create a more engaging and tailored experience for your users.

Ready to transform your website into a personalized hub that keeps visitors coming back for more? Let’s get started!

Benefits of website personalization

Successful online content always caters to the needs and preferences of its visitors, and website personalization is a powerful strategy for improving your site’s performance and user satisfaction. 

Here’s how it can help you:

1. Improved user experience: When your website speaks directly to each user’s needs and preferences, it creates a more enjoyable and relevant browsing experience. It’s like having a store that rearranges itself for each customer – pretty cool, right?
2. Increased engagement: Tailored content is a magnet for user attention. When visitors find what they’re looking for quickly and easily, they’re more likely to stick around, explore more pages, and return for future visits.
3. Higher conversion rates: Personalized recommendations and targeted Calls-To-Action (CTAs) are conversion powerhouses. By showing users exactly what they’re interested in, you’re essentially laying out a red carpet to the “Buy Now” button.
4. Enhanced customer loyalty: When users feel understood and valued, they’re more likely to form an emotional connection with your brand. This can turn casual browsers into loyal customers who not only keep coming back but also recommend your site to others.
5. Better data utilization: Personalization allows you to put all that user data you’ve been collecting to good use. Instead of letting insights gather dust, you’re turning them into actionable strategies that drive real business growth.
6. Competitive advantage: When constantly fighting with competitors (not in real life, hopefully), adding a personalized experience can be your secret weapon. It sets your website apart and gives users a compelling reason to choose you over the generic alternatives.

Challenges of website personalization

While website personalization offers numerous benefits, it’s not without its hurdles. Let’s take a look at some of the common challenges you might face:

Collecting data

• Data collection methods: Gathering user data can be tricky. You might use behavior tracking, surveys, or third-party sources. However, as people become more conscious about their data, the best strategy is to collect this information directly from your users – it’s the most trustworthy way. 
• Data quality and accuracy: Your personalization is only as good as your data. Poor quality or inaccurate data can lead to off-target personalization, which might frustrate users instead of delighting them.
• Integration challenges: Integrating data from multiple sources into a unified system can be like solving a complex puzzle. Tools like Gravatar can help simplify this process by providing a centralized profile management system.

Adherence to data regulations

• Privacy laws and regulations: Navigating the maze of data privacy laws like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) can be daunting. If you don’t comply, you risk legal issues and losing the trust of your users. 
• Consent management: Getting user consent for data collection and personalization efforts is crucial. It’s a balancing act between being transparent and not overwhelming users with consent requests.
• Data security: With great data comes great responsibility. Securing user information is paramount to prevent breaches and misuse. Gravatar, for instance, prioritizes data security and gives users control over their personal information.

Other challenges

• Technical complexity: Implementing personalization can be technically demanding. Setting up algorithms, managing large datasets, and ensuring real-time data processing are not small tasks.
• Resource constraints: Personalization efforts can be time-consuming and potentially expensive. You might need to invest in new tools or expertise. Using existing solutions like Gravatar can help streamline processes and reduce the burden on your resources.
• Over-personalization: There’s a fine line between helpful personalization and feeling like you’re being watched. Finding the right balance is key to ensuring personalization feels natural and beneficial, not creepy or intrusive.

Requirements of a personalization engine

To effectively personalize your website, you’ll need a reliable personalization engine. Here are the key components you should look for:

Unified dataset

A unified dataset is like the brain of your personalization efforts. It’s a centralized repository that brings together data from various sources, giving you a comprehensive view of your users.

Benefits:

• Provides a holistic understanding of user behavior and preferences.
• Enables detailed audience segmentation for targeted engagement.
• Simplifies the process of combining data from different channels.

Data sources: Your unified dataset might include information from CRM systems, eCommerce platforms, social media, mobile apps, and even in-store data.

Open architecture

An open architecture is all about flexibility. It’s a system design that plays well with others, allowing easy integration with various third-party tools and technologies.

Benefits:

• Connects with your existing marketing tech stack (CRM, CMS, analytics tools, etc.).
• Allows for easy addition of new features and tools without disrupting existing systems.
• Reduces the need for extensive custom development work.

Decision logic

Decision logic is the smart part of your personalization engine. It’s the set of rules and algorithms that determine what personalized content to serve up based on user data.

Benefits:

• Automates the personalization process, reducing manual effort.
• Enables real-time personalization, delivering tailored content on the fly.
• Uses machine learning to continuously improve personalization strategies based on user interactions.

Decision logic can power personalized product recommendations, dynamic content delivery, targeted email campaigns, and much more!

Types of data used for personalization

Effective website personalization relies on various types of data. Let’s explore the key categories:

Contextual data

Contextual data is all about the user’s current situation and environment, including their device, operating system, browser, screen resolution, and traffic source (direct, paid, referral, search, social media).

This information helps tailor the user experience based on their current context and specific situation.

Some examples include: 

• Displaying a mobile-optimized version of a website for smartphone users. 
• A food app showing restaurant recommendations depending on the user’s location. 
• Customizing content based on the user’s referral source (e.g., different landing pages for social media vs. search engine traffic). 

Behavioral data

Behavioral data captures how users interact with your website, for example where they click, what they add to their cart and purchase, and what pages they visit. This data provides you with insights into user preferences and interests, allowing for highly accurate personalization.

Some examples include:

• Recommending products based on previous purchases or browsing history.
• Personalizing content based on frequently visited pages or clicked links.
• Sending notifications and emails about items in their cart. 

CRM data

CRM data is information you’ve collected directly from users, mostly through surveys, registration forms, and other intentional interactions. This is one of the best data types because it’s highly accurate for personalization as it’s directly provided by the user, reflecting their stated preferences and needs.

Some examples include:

• Customizing email marketing campaigns based on user-provided preferences.
• Personalizing website content for registered users based on their profile information.

Zero-party data

Zero-party data is information voluntarily shared by users through surveys, polls, and other interactive tools, including personal details and preferences. It’s considered highly reliable as it’s willingly shared by the user, offering deep insights into their preferences.

Some examples include:

• Creating personalized content and offers based on user-provided preferences and feedback. 
• Enhancing user profiles with detailed information gathered from interactive tools.

Exploring key techniques for website personalization

1. Segmenting your site according to personas

Create distinct experiences for different user groups:

• Define key personas like “Budget-conscious shoppers,” “Luxury buyers,” or “Tech enthusiasts” based on demographics, behavior, and preferences. You can create your personas with a tool like the Hubspot persona creator. 

• Use tools like Google Analytics to gather data on user segments. Look at metrics like pages visited, time on site, and conversion rates for each segment.
• Develop content variations for each persona. For example, show “Budget-conscious shoppers” value-focused messaging and discounts while presenting “Luxury buyers” with premium product recommendations.

Example: If you’re a sports apparel website, you can show runners products like performance shoes and workout gear. But for people who are more into streetwear, make it all about the latest fashion-forward sneakers and urban apparel.

2. Utilizing geolocation strategies

Tailor content based on a user’s location:

• Use IP detection to identify user location and deliver location-specific content, like showing local store information, events, or news based on the user’s city or region.

• Adjust language, currency, and shipping options based on user location. A visitor from Germany should see prices in Euros and German language content.

For example, Booking.com automatically shows the version of the site relevant to the user’s country and suggests destinations based on previous searches.

This is the homepage for US visitors: 

And this is what’s on the page for Spanish visitors: 

3. Optimizing content based on devices used

Adapt your site to different devices:

• Ensure your website is mobile-friendly and adapts to different screen sizes using responsive design frameworks like Bootstrap or Foundation.
• Deliver different content formats based on device type. Prioritize concise text and vertical videos for mobile users while offering longer-form articles on desktop.
• Optimize loading times and performance, especially for mobile users. Compress images, minify code, and use browser caching.

Spotify‘s mobile app is a master class in device optimization. It’s streamlined for on-the-go listening, with big buttons and simplified navigation. Switch to the desktop, and suddenly you’ve got a full-featured music command center.

4. Personalizing landing pages

Create customized entry points:

• Use visitor data to customize landing page elements in real time. Personalize headlines, images, and CTAs based on user segments.
• Conduct A/B tests with tools like Optimizely or AB Tasty to determine the most effective personalized elements.

For example, show a landing page with enterprise-focused messaging and case studies to visitors from large companies while highlighting ease of use for small business visitors. 

HubSpot is the king of personalized landing pages. Visit as a marketer, and you’ll see content about lead generation and email campaigns. But if you’re in sales, it’s all about CRM and pipeline management.

5. Personalizing recommendations

Suggest relevant content or products:

• Use user behavior data and machine learning to provide personalized product or content recommendations.
• Amazon is the pioneer in personalized recommendations, suggesting products based on a user’s browsing and purchase history.

• News sites like The New York Times recommend articles based on a reader’s interests and previously read stories.

6. Targeted CTAs

Create calls-to-action that have an impact:

• Design CTAs that cater to specific user segments and behaviors. 
• Use dynamic content to adjust CTAs based on user interactions.
• Optimize CTA placement for maximum visibility. 
• Use behavioral triggers to display CTAs at the right moment.

For instance, show a “Schedule a Demo” CTA to enterprise visitors who have viewed multiple product pages while offering a “Try for Free” CTA to small business visitors. 

7. Personalized checkout pages

Streamline the purchase process:

• Use user data to pre-fill forms and reduce checkout friction. 
• Offer personalized payment options and shipping methods.
• Provide personalized product recommendations during checkout based on the items in the user’s cart.

For example, every time a customer adds a product to their cart on Fenty Beauty’s website, a popup of the checkout shows up with some recommended products. 

8. Customizing loyalty programs

Reward users in meaningful ways:

• Offer rewards based on user preferences and behavior. If you know a customer loves eco-friendly products, offer points bonuses on green items.
• Send personalized emails and notifications to loyalty program members. 
• Use segmentation to deliver relevant loyalty program updates.
• ​​Use gamification to keep things fun. Progress bars, badges, and tiered rewards can turn shopping into an engaging experience.

Sephora’s Beauty Insider program offers different rewards and perks based on a member’s tier and purchase history.

Gravatar: A key player in website personalization

Gravatar is a powerful tool for web developers who want to improve their website personalization strategies. 

With Gravatar’s user profile integration, you can import essential user data, including names, display names, avatars, locations, and verified accounts. This access to user profile information means that new visitors don’t have to fill out endless forms just to use your website, improving their experience from the get-go.

Gravatar’s ongoing development, particularly the inclusion of user interests, opens up new avenues for developers to implement more sophisticated personalization techniques. This feature enables the creation of tailored content recommendations and product suggestions based on user preferences, potentially increasing engagement and conversion rates.

The platform’s straightforward integration process, whether for WordPress sites or custom-built platforms, allows developers to quickly implement personalization features. The comprehensive Gravatar API documentation will give you all the necessary resources to incorporate these features effectively.

Finally, Gravatar’s commitment to user privacy aligns with current data protection standards, allowing developers to employ personalization strategies that respect user preferences and comply with privacy regulations.

Ready to take your website personalization to the next level? Head over to Gravatar and start exploring. Your users (and your conversion rates) will love you for it!

Building your own forum gives you something the usual social media channels can’t match: A dedicated space where your community can gather, share knowledge, and help each other grow. Forums build lasting connections between members who share similar interests, challenges, and goals.

Running your own forum offers distinct advantages over relying on social networks or existing community platforms:

• Members generate valuable content that helps with market research and product development.
• Premium spaces can be monetized through exclusive access.
• Direct feedback loops between your team and power users improve products faster.
• Searchable discussion archives reduce support costs.
• Community-driven innovation creates competitive advantages.
• Experienced members naturally help newcomers, building stronger bonds.
• You maintain complete control over your platform.

And here’s a fascinating detail many people miss: Forums drive significant search traffic. Research from Detailed.com shows that discussion threads frequently appear in top search results, as people actively seek authentic opinions and recommendations from real users.

This guide provides practical steps for building a forum that encourages meaningful discussions and keeps members coming back. A huge part of success lies in choosing the right platform. While there are many options available, WordPress offers particularly strong benefits for creating an integrated forum website. Let’s explore why WordPress makes sense as a foundation, and how to build an engaging community space that serves your specific goals.

Choosing the right platform for your forum

Forums work best when they’re integrated with your broader business strategy rather than existing in isolation. This integration matters more than many realize – forums can complement and enhance core business functions in powerful ways:

• Supporting online course students with collaborative learning spaces.
• Creating fan communities that drive product innovation.
• Providing enhanced customer support through peer assistance.
• Building brand advocacy programs that amplify marketing.
• Hosting member discussions that generate valuable insights.

While launching “just a forum” might work for passion projects or interest-based communities, most organizations need deeper integration with their existing services and goals. Building a forum should connect directly with your broader business objectives, whether that’s reducing support costs, gathering product feedback, or strengthening customer relationships.

For example, many people are tempted by free platforms like Flarum or Reddit because they let you set up standalone forums quickly. However, the issue here is that they create disconnects between your community and your main business presence. This separation causes real problems:

• Members must switch between different websites to access your products, contact information, or support resources.
• User experiences become inconsistent as third-party platforms control the interface.
• Adding custom features or integrations gets complicated or impossible.
• Your valuable community discussions live on someone else’s domain.

A better approach? Think beyond just “building a forum” and focus on creating an integrated website with forum functionality. This makes it easier to:

• Keep members engaged with your core business offerings.
• Maintain consistent branding across all touchpoints.
• Add new features as your community grows.
• Retain full control over the member experience.
• Scale smoothly as opportunities emerge.

WordPress excels at this integrated approach. As a flexible content management system, WordPress lets you build any type of website while adding powerful forum capabilities through plugins. This prevents “platform sprawl” – the headache of managing multiple disconnected systems for different purposes.

Open Studio is a great example of that. They previously ran their communities, course hosting, and payments on separate platforms. Working with WooCommerce agency Saucal, they consolidated everything into a single WordPress-based system. While that’s a large-scale example, the same principles apply to smaller communities – start with an integrated foundation that can grow with your needs.

How to create an online forum with WordPress

Building a WordPress-based forum involves several key components. Let’s break down each essential piece of the setup process.

Set up reliable WordPress hosting

Forums need hosting that can handle multiple users interacting simultaneously without slowdowns. Look for WordPress-specific hosts like Pressable that optimize their systems for fast loading times even with many concurrent visitors, including handling sudden traffic spikes, without upgrading your plan. You can also benefit from built-in caching to reduce server load, the option to automate regular backups of forum content, and strong security protections. 

We recommend evaluating your choices based on the following criteria: 

• Server response times in your target regions. 
• Maximum concurrent user limits. 
• Database performance specifications. 
• Backup frequency and retention. 
• Support response times for technical issues. 
• Bandwidth allowances for file attachments. 
• SSL certificate inclusion for secure connections. 
• Server-side caching capabilities. 

Select a forum-friendly WordPress theme

Your theme forms the visual foundation of your forum and is one of the more important aspects of great user experience. Thankfully, there are a lot of themes to choose from, such as Disputo or Pocco. 

While your choice will depend on your specific needs, there are some universal qualities that every good forum theme must have. These include: 

• Clean typography for easy reading of long discussions.
• Responsive designs that work well on phones and tablets.
• Fast loading speeds to keep members engaged.
• Simple navigation between forum sections.
• Compatibility with forum plugins.

If you’re adding a forum to an existing site, ensure the theme matches your current branding while supporting forum functionality.

Installing bbPress as your forum engine

bbPress provides the core forum features for WordPress. This free plugin adds discussion capabilities with minimal overhead:

1. Install bbPress from the WordPress plugin directory.

2. Create your initial forum categories.

3. And create your first forum! 

4. Set up the forum user settings, which come with some anti-spam features, as well. 

5. Customize the main forum features like auto-embedding links, reply thread levels, subscriptions, and more. 

6. Configure user roles. You can do this when you create a new user or from the dashboard. 

7. Add any extension plugins for extra features.

Managing user profiles and identity

Strong user profiles build trust and encourage participation, but they can be tricky to manage. In order for your forum to be successful, the users participating in it need to have trustworthy profiles that can be showcased in important places, especially if it’s going to be a discussion area for a specialized topic. 

Thankfully, the easy integration with Gravatar makes the process a lot easier. Our REST API gives you more control and the option for custom profile data retrieval and display, advanced privacy setting management, personalized user experiences based on profile data, and flexible presentation options for member information. 

This lets you:

• Speed up registration processes and customer onboarding. 
• Enable consistent identities across platforms. 
• Provide verified email-based profiles. 

More about that a bit later! 

Secure your forum community

Forums naturally attract spam and unwanted content, which can both get in the way of building a strong and reliable community. To prevent these, you need a good WordPress security plugin, and Jetpack is one of the more solid options. 

It will help you set up a reliable login system with two-factor authentication for the users and forum owners, making sure only the verified registered users are logging in and keeping the conversations free of spam. 

Besides that, its useful features help you block suspicious login attempts, prevent spam account creation, monitor for malicious activity, and protect member privacy – all essential security measures. 

Setting up content access controls

Different forums need different levels of privacy, and you need to figure out what type of forum you and your audience will benefit from the most. Common options include public forums, private member-only sections, support forums, and hidden areas for moderators and admins. 

Of course, you don’t have to choose one or the other. You might have a public forum that helps every user or lets them discuss relevant topics and maintain a premium area for paying subscribers. 

Membership plugins like Paid Membership Subscriptions can help monetize exclusive content while maintaining easy access to public discussions. It integrates well with WooCommerce and bbPress, which allows you to create special members-only products and sales. 

Your forum checklist: Core elements of a forum

Every successful forum needs essential components properly configured and optimized. Here’s a comprehensive breakdown of what your forum needs to function effectively.

Component	Required Elements	Implementation Tips
Topics & categories	• Hierarchical structure. • Auto-tagging system. • Content organization rules.	• Limit category depth to 2-3 levels. • Use clear, descriptive names. • Set up moderation workflows.
Navigation	• Breadcrumb trails.• Category filters. • Quick-jump functionality.	• Keep paths shallow. • Add search filters. • Enable topic shortcuts.
User authentication	• Login button placement. • Registration flow. • Social login options.	• Integration with Gravatar. • Clear registration steps. • Multiple login methods.
Search functionality	• Advanced filters. • Auto-complete. • Results weighting.	• Include topic titles and content. • Add search analytics. • Enable filter combinations.

Beyond these basic elements, we recommend adding some extra features such as: 

• Community pages: Show automated welcome messages for new members, dynamic FAQ sections pulled from common questions, member directories highlighting active contributors, and an achievement system recognizing participation. You can then use that system to award members with a moderation function if you want to. 
• Forum threads: Threads are the bread and butter of forums, so they have to be fully functional and engaging. To help people stay in the loop, give them the option to receive email notifications when someone replies and add solved/featured status options. However, ideally, users should be able to subscribe to every thread even if they haven’t participated. Finally, include different formatting tools for improved readability and test your forum with screen readers for better accessibility.
• Activity widgets: These aren’t necessary, but they really help maintain engagement by showing trending discussions, recent member achievements, upcoming community events, and popular topic statistics.

Focus on customizing these elements to match your specific community needs while keeping functionality intuitive. Members should find the interface familiar enough to participate comfortably while discovering features that make their experience better than on other platforms.

Streamlining user profiles with Gravatar integration

Adding Gravatar to your forum removes common friction points in the registration process. Members can start participating right away using their existing Gravatar profiles, which sync automatically between different platforms they use. This universal profile system is particularly powerful – with over 200 million users already on Gravatar, many of your potential members might already have profiles ready to use.

Profile management becomes straightforward since Gravatar handles the following:

• Avatar images that update everywhere at once.
• Basic profile information like names and bios.
• Privacy settings that follow user preferences.
• Cross-platform profile synchronization.
• Verified email-based identities.
• Professional profile photos and metadata.

For developers, implementation is straightforward through the Gravatar API. This lets you:

• Pull user profile data securely.
• Respect privacy settings automatically.
• Update information in real-time.
• Customize the display of profile details.
• Create personalized user experiences.
• Add custom profile fields.
• Generate user analytics.
• Enable social features.

These features create a smoother experience for both forum administrators and members, encouraging more active participation. New members appreciate skipping lengthy profile setup processes, while administrators benefit from pre-verified user identities and reduced fake account creation. 

The system also scales automatically – as your community grows, Gravatar’s infrastructure handles the increased profile management load without requiring additional setup or maintenance from your team.

And if you want to present this data in an attractive way, we recommend complementing the API with the Gravatar Enhanced plugin, which allows you to create and display profile blocks. This gives you a simple way to create a list of all your users on one page (though you’d need to do this manually) or use profile blocks to sign off on community posts. 

Keep in mind that it doesn’t replace the Gravatar REST API in scope but can be used to complement it and give additional UX functionality to your forum. 

How Gravatar simplifies user verification and community growth

Gravatar’s email-based system provides built-in verification that helps maintain forum quality. New members can jump into discussions faster since their profiles are already set up, removing barriers to participation.

The platform enhances engagement through several mechanisms:

• Members maintain consistent identities across all forum sections.
• One-click profile setup reduces registration abandonment.
• Verified email addresses build trust between members.
• Simple profile management encourages long-term participation.

These tools help create richer member profiles that spark more meaningful interactions. Members can focus on participating in discussions rather than managing multiple profiles or dealing with complicated setup processes.

Best practices for managing and moderating your forum

Automate routine tasks to save time

Running a forum means dealing with spam, trolls, and occasional disruptions. Setting up automated tools early saves countless hours of manual work. Start with spam filters that catch unwanted promotional content through keyword detection and behavior patterns. Then, you can add trust-level systems that automatically grant privileges to members who consistently participate positively.

For new members, implement a post-approval queue until they demonstrate genuine engagement. This extra step prevents drive-by spam while allowing moderators to welcome newcomers properly. Rate-limiting features prevent rapid-fire posting and help maintain discussion quality.

Build a structure for your moderation team

Effective moderation needs clear systems and processes. Here’s what we recommend: 

• Give moderators specific roles with carefully defined permissions, and keep detailed logs of all moderation actions. 
• Set up private channels where moderators can discuss issues and get help with difficult situations. 
• Document common scenarios and expected responses to help moderators stay consistent.

Create positive engagement incentives

Members who feel recognized contribute more often. Design systems that reward helpful participation through reputation scores and achievement badges. Quality scoring helps highlight valuable content, while member levels show experience and trust. Simple “thank you” mechanisms encourage members to help others.

Plan for challenging situations

Even well-run forums face occasional problems. Prepare by setting up content filtering for sensitive topics and IP restrictions for repeat rule breakers. Create clear procedures for emergency situations and establish fair appeal processes for moderation decisions. Document major incidents to help prevent similar issues.

Remember that automated systems work best alongside human judgment. Good moderators explain rules patiently, provide context for decisions, and help new members understand community norms. This balanced approach creates a welcoming environment where members feel safe contributing while keeping the moderation workload manageable.

Start building your professional forum community today

Building your own forum puts you in control of your community’s future. Third-party platforms might offer quick setup, but they limit your ability to grow and adapt as your community evolves. With WordPress, you can create a fully integrated platform that connects your forum with your existing website and services.

The process is straightforward: Start with reliable WordPress hosting, add bbPress for core forum functionality, and integrate Gravatar to streamline user profiles. This combination gives you everything needed to launch a professional forum:

• Complete control over your platform.
• Flexibility to add custom features.
• Simple user registration and profiles.
• Strong security and spam protection.
• Options for premium content areas.

Gravatar integration proves particularly valuable for accelerating community growth. Members can join discussions immediately using existing profiles while you benefit from verified user identities and simplified onboarding.

Ready to get started? Check out the Gravatar documentation for detailed integration guides. Your future community members are waiting – give them a great place to connect.

Ever wondered why some WordPress comments display professional profile pictures while others show generic gray icons? The secret lies in Gravatar – a powerful yet surprisingly simple tool that’s transforming how people connect across the web.

What is Gravatar, Anyway?

Gravatar, short for Globally Recognized Avatar, has evolved far beyond its origins as a simple avatar service. Today, it’s a comprehensive profile service that connects your email address to your digital identity, making it available wherever you interact online.

Think of it as your digital business card that automatically follows you around the web. When you comment on a blog, join a new platform, or contribute to a project, Gravatar ensures your professional image is consistently represented. Major platforms like WordPress.org, Slack, GitHub, Mailchimp, and even OpenAI rely on Gravatar to enhance their user experience.

Why Gravatar Makes a Difference

Gravatar eliminates common frustrations in online interaction. Instead of repeatedly uploading profile pictures and filling out information across different sites, users enjoy:

• Automatic profile synchronization across WordPress sites
• Consistent digital representation in comment sections
• Professional presence across multiple platforms
• Complete control over their shared information through granular privacy settings
• The ability to maintain separate professional and personal identities through different email addresses

For Site Owners and Developers

Implementing Gravatar brings substantial benefits to your WordPress site:

• Streamlined user registration processes with auto-filled profile information
• Reduced server load since Gravatar hosts all profile images
• Enhanced compliance with data protection regulations
• Access to powerful developer tools through the REST API and SDK
• Built-in verification features to combat spam accounts
• The ability to create personalized user experiences based on imported profile data

The real power shows up in community building. When users see their familiar profile picture and information automatically appear, they’re more likely to engage. This familiarity builds trust and encourages more interaction.

And for sites targeting specific industries or niches, Gravatar helps create professional communities where members can easily recognize each other across different WordPress platforms.

How to use Gravatar with WordPress.com

Getting started with Gravatar on WordPress.com is straightforward since every WordPress.com account automatically includes Gravatar integration. Here’s everything you need to know about using it effectively.

Your WordPress.com account creates a Gravatar profile automatically when you sign up. To manage your avatar:

1. Sign in to your WordPress.com dashboard
2. Navigate to My Profile.
3. Upload or modify your picture.

However, the settings you can adjust here are very limited and for a full list of things you can add, you need to edit your Gravatar profile directly. 

Advanced Features

Beyond basic avatars, WordPress.com includes several Gravatar-powered features to enhance your site.

Gravatar Widget

The Gravatar Widget adds a quick About Me section to your blog’s sidebar or footer. Add it by:

1. Going to Appearance > Customize > Widgets.

2. Selecting Gravatar Widget.
3. Customizing the size, alignment, and text.
4. Adding social media links if desired.

For more detailed profiles, the Gravatar Profile Widget displays your complete bio, gravatar link, contact information, links, and recent activities. 

Need to add a Gravatar somewhere specific? Use the shortcode:

[gravatar email="user@example.com" size="96"]

This works in posts, pages, and text widgets – perfect for team member profiles or guest author introductions.

Hovercards

And do you want to show more information when someone hovers over a profile picture, you can enable Gravatar Hovercards to display mini-biographies, social media links, recent posts, and custom information.

How to use Gravatar with WordPress.org

Setting up Gravatar on a self-hosted WordPress site takes just a few extra steps but offers all the same benefits. Here’s how to get everything configured properly.

Basic Setup:

1. Log into your WordPress dashboard and go to Settings > Discussion. 

2. Scroll to Avatars and check Show Avatars.

3. Choose your preferred rating level (G, PG, R, X)

4. Select a default avatar style.

5. Save changes

After this setup, Gravatar automatically displays user avatars in comments, author bios, and other profile areas across your site.

Gravatar Enhanced Plugin 

The Gravatar Enhanced plugin is 100% free and takes functionality even further. 

• The Privacy Shield feature helps ensure Gravatar doesn’t log the avatars that you serve on your site, perfect for community sites where privacy matters. 

• The Profile Block makes it simple to add beautiful author bios to posts – just insert the block, and it automatically pulls the author’s Gravatar profile data. 

• Email notifications gently remind users to set up their Gravatar profiles, helping create a more engaging community. 

• Site owners particularly appreciate the Quick Editor, which lets them update avatars directly from the WordPress dashboard.

Gravatar API 

The Gravatar REST API is how WordPress.org users import their profile data, allowing website owners to build more intuitive and user-friendly sign-up processes, customize customer onboarding, and create a sense of community on the site. 

And for custom solutions, the Gravatar API opens up exciting possibilities. Pull in comprehensive user data to create dynamic author pages that showcase a writer’s latest posts, social media activity, and professional background. Build team pages that automatically update when members change their profiles. Or create custom comment systems that show different profile information based on user roles. 

Building a Stronger Community

The true power of Gravatar lies in its ability to transform anonymous usernames into recognizable community members. Consider these strategies:

• Add welcoming setup instructions near comment sections
• Include Gravatar guidance in welcome emails
• Create helpful documentation for new users
• Encourage profile completion through gentle reminders

Privacy and Control

Gravatar stands out for its commitment to user privacy:

• Users maintain complete control over shared information
• Multiple identity management through different email addresses
• Granular privacy settings for different contexts
• Easy profile updates that propagate across all connected platforms

Taking Action

Ready to enhance your WordPress site with Gravatar? Start with these steps:

1. Review your current avatar settings
2. Update your own Gravatar profile
3. Consider adding enhanced features through plugins
4. Create clear documentation for your users
5. Monitor community engagement improvements

Remember, building an engaged community requires more than just tools – but having the right tools makes it easier. Gravatar removes common friction points in user interactions, allowing your community to focus on what truly matters: creating meaningful connections and conversations.

Want to learn more about implementing Gravatar in your WordPress site? Check out our comprehensive Gravatar Enhanced plugin documentation. Let’s go!

Has it been a while since you gave your Gravatar a fresh look? We just rolled out some fun new editing tools that let you remove backgrounds, add new ones, and decorate with stickers. Your avatar travels with you across the web — now it can show even more of your personality.

Background Magic

Take any photo and instantly remove its background. Drop yourself onto a beach, in front of a cityscape, or keep it clean with a solid color.

That quick selfie can now look like a professional headshot.

Sticker Time

Add some flair with our collection of stickers. From sunglasses to speech bubbles, you can layer on elements that match your style. Use the search feature to find the perfect additions.

How to Use the New Features

1. Head to gravatar.com/profile
2. Click on Avatars
3. Upload a new photo or click the three dots to edit an existing one
4. Look for the Background and Stickers menus
5. Start creating!

Pro tip: Try the search button in both the background and sticker menus – you might find something unexpected and perfect.

Backgrounds come from Pexels and stickers from Giphy. Or you can upload your own.

Why Update Your Avatar?

Remember, your Gravatar shows up automatically on millions of sites like WordPress, Slack, and Zapier. It’s the face you show the world across the web. With these new tools, you can make sure that face is exactly how you want it.

Share your new look with us on X or Bluesky — we can’t wait to see what you create!

Transcript

On the podcast today we have Tammie Lister.

Tammie is a product creator focusing on WordPress. She has a hybrid background as a full stack product creator. She contributes to WordPress and is passionate about Open Source and the WordPress community.

Tammie has a rich history with WordPress, having worked with themes and the platform for many years.  Her journey melds her artistic flair with technical expertise, something which is, I think, quite rare. Her experience spans theme building, design, development, and more recently, guiding product developers through Guildenberg, an initiative which she co-founded.

The fact that Tammie is both a designer and a technical expert has allowed her to offer a well-rounded perspective on the evolution and future of WordPress themes. We explore the shift from classic themes to the new era of Full Site Editing and theme.json, and discuss whether the slower-than-anticipated adoption of these new tools signifies a deeper trend, or just a transitional phase.

Additionally, Tammie shares her insights on the necessity of beauty versus utility on the internet, the importance of experimentation in design, and how our definition of art and themes needs continual rethinking.

We also get into her personal artistic endeavors, where she balances her tech workspace with an art studio, highlighting her lifelong passion for photography.

If you’re curious about the current state of WordPress theming, the impact of emerging technologies on the platform, or how to infuse more creativity into your web projects, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Tammie’s website

Guildenberg

Pattern Directory

Museum of Block Art

Create Block Theme plugin

Figma

Penpot

Classic to Block website

In this Inside Woo, James Kemp and Darren Ethier from WooCommerce highlight the importance of community engagement, evolving development practices, and the initiative "More in Core" to enhance core functionalities while balancing flexibility.

When it comes to digital marketing, social media platforms seem to get all the love. But while it might not be as flashy, email marketing remains one of the most powerful tools for your business when it needs to communicate directly with its audience.

Before you can use this powerful marketing medium, however, you need an audience. This is where a list of email subscribers comes in. These lists are made up of people who’ve given you permission to message them. It’s a vote of confidence in your brand and an invaluable opportunity for you to develop a new customer relationship. 

So how do you convince someone to give you their (correct) email address? There are a number of viable strategies.

Let’s look at everything you need to know about how to collect emails for email marketing.

Why collect emails?

Before we get into how to capture email addresses from website visitors, it’s important to consider why you want to gain new subscribers in the first place. 

To establish a direct line of communication with potential customers

Email marketing creates a direct link between you and your audience. When someone subscribes, you can ensure your message reaches them without interference from algorithms or third‑party platforms.

Whether you want to announce a new product, share some testimonials of others who’ve enjoyed your product or service, or promote a flash sale, emails are a personal and effective way to communicate with potential customers.

To keep your audience informed and engaged

Marketing to a strong email list helps you keep your audience in the loop about your latest updates, promotions, and news. Regular newsletters and targeted emails keep your brand top‑of‑mind, ensuring your subscribers remain engaged and interested in what you have to offer.

Staying connected to potential subscribers by periodically offering valuable insights is a great way to keep your funnel filled with quality leads.

To send personalized offers

Marketing is most effective when the message relates, very specifically, to the recipient. This is known as personalization and email marketing is perfect for it. The most simple version of personalization is using a recipient’s first name in the subject line or email. A bit of a more advanced tactic is segmenting email messages to different lists based on broad criteria like age or gender. 

Even better, though, is sending emails addressed to a subscriber’s first name that contains an offer for a specific product or category that the subscriber expressed interest in. Most WooCommerce email marketing extensions have this or a similar capability. 

To yield a high return on investment

Because it costs relatively little to produce, and it reaches interested subscribers directly, the ROI of email marketing tends to be quite high. Some report it as high as 36:1. 

This might not take into account the expense of attracting first-time subscribers or the time it will take a small business owner to learn the technical processes if they need to do it themselves. 

However, it’s still clear that reaching interested consumers through email is well worth the effort and one of the most essential parts of the digital marketing mix for any size business. You just need to get subscribers and start your first campaign. 

What to know from a legal and ethical standpoint

When learning how to collect email addresses, you need to consider a few ethical and legal conundrums.

The importance of user consent and transparency

You have to be honest with your target audience when collecting email addresses. Tell your target audience what you are doing and present them with opt-in forms so they can provide informed consent. 

Avoid deceptive practices, such as pre-checking boxes or using vague language on email sign-up forms. These tactics can harm your credibility and even cause inbox providers to send your messages to spam — even for legitimate subscribers. Potential customers should be able to easily subscribe (and unsubscribe) from your email campaigns.

In general, just because you have an email address does not mean you should send it promotional messages. A person should give explicit consent and subscribe to your list. 

Compliance with GDPR and the CAN‑SPAM Act

The General Data Protection Regulation is a sweeping consumer privacy law in the European Union. It protects the data privacy rights of all EU citizens and can directly impact the way you gather email addresses. 

If your company does business in the EU or targets EU consumers, familiarize yourself with the GDPR and adhere to its provisions.

If you do business in the U.S., you’ll need to be aware of the CAN‑SPAM Act. Passed in 2003, the law protects consumers and businesses from unwanted electronic email messages. Failing to adhere to either law can lead to fines and other severe penalties.

Privacy policy and terms of service

Ensure your website includes a clear privacy policy and terms of service that outline how you collect, use, and protect personal information. Add details about how you collect email addresses and what you use them for.

Collecting email addresses is perfectly legal and ethically acceptable, provided you’re transparent about it and do your best to protect consumer information. In most cases, you can send transactional messages (order confirmations, password reset emails, etc.) without express permission, but promotional messages should only be sent with consent.

What is needed to collect emails from website visitors?

You’ll need the following to collect email addresses:

A website or landing page

Landing pages are web pages you create for a specific campaign or purpose. Users typically end up on a landing page after they click on an ad or other online CTA. 

You should build a landing page for every specific campaign designed to collect email addresses. This allows you to hyper‑focus the language, visuals, and CTA most impactful to your target audience. As a result, you can expect a much greater rate of success in attracting new subscribers.

This doesn’t mean you can’t also include a lead capture button or sign-up form on other areas of your website. You can, and should, put these in places people expect — in the footer, halfway through a blog post, in the sidebar, etc. 

Email signup form in the footer of https://www.magnatiles.com/

A compelling offer or lead magnet

Most people won’t give up their contact info just because you asked them to. It doesn’t matter how great your landing pages are, they probably aren’t going to opt‑in unless you give them something of value in exchange for their email.

A lead magnet is a great way to incentivize visitors to sign up for your email list. Showcase your lead magnet on your landing page and let people know that they can access the resource for free in exchange for their email subscription. Common lead magnets include eBooks, webinars, and discount codes. 

Though often not as strong, for the right entities, a lead magnet could be the promise of something in the future — early access to a Black Friday sale or exclusive content released on a regular basis. 

And no matter what you offer, once a customer completes the sign‑up form, send the lead magnet or some sort of follow up to their email address right away.

A form to capture emails

Your website or landing page should include a simple sign‑up form where folks can input their email address. Make sure the form is easy to fill out without too much hassle. Don’t play twenty questions. Ask the basics so you can avoid annoying your visitors.

We suggest limiting your sign‑up form to three or four fields, which can include the person’s first and last name, email address, and an opt‑in checkbox. Don’t push your luck by asking for the person’s birthday, phone number, or other information unless absolutely necessary.

An email marketing tool or CRM

You’ll need a customer relationship management (CRM) system or email marketing tool to put all of those email addresses to use. Explore several options and find the platform that best supports your email marketing efforts.

A source of targeted traffic

Most importantly, you need a source of traffic. If you already have a strong flow of site visitors, then sure, you can add a sign-up form to a conspicuous location on your site. 

But it’s not likely to generate a ton of new subscribers unless you have a good lead magnet to accompany it or a particularly eager audience. 

Effective strategies to collect emails

After you’ve put the right infrastructure in place, you’re ready to start collecting new email subscribers. Here are some strategies to jumpstart your efforts:

Leverage gamification such as quizzes and surveys

Great marketing should never be boring. The best marketing campaigns and email capture strategies are fun and engaging.

Consider using interactive quizzes or surveys to gamify email collection. People may be more likely to share their contact information if you have quiz results or a prize dangling on the other side.

For instance, you could ask someone to complete a quick 3-5 question survey and offer an exclusive discount code after they submit their results. When they’re finished, thank them for participating and ask for their email address so you can send them their code. At that point, offer the opportunity to also subscribe to your email list — many will! 

Implement a timed slide‑in or pop‑up

A timed pop-up triggers when a site visitor has spent a certain amount of time on your page. They’re a can’t-miss — so use the opportunity to promote your best lead magnet. 

Example of an email pop-up on https://danosseasoning.com/ 

Slide‑ins are another option. They perform the same task, but slide onto the visitor’s screen instead of popping up out of nowhere. They tend to take up less space and are often more mobile responsive than pop‑ups.

You may also want to consider a pop‑up that triggers when someone exhibits exit intent. When a visitor seems like they’re about to leave by clicking the “Back” button in their browser or closing the tab altogether, they’re met with a timely message.

Run contests or giveaways that require email entry

People love the chance to win a free prize. Create a truly valuable offer (bonus points if you can tie the prize back to your business in some way) and sensational graphics that demand attention. 

This is what you might advertise in your pop-up or slide-in, but you can also promote the giveaway on social media and partner with influencers to get the contest in front of a highly-targeted audience. 

Social media platforms are some of the best mediums for these kinds of promotions. Just be sure to send traffic to your site and collect entries through a simple form. When registering for the giveaway, ask people to subscribe to receive special updates and deals through email.

Collect email addresses through webinars and event registrations

Networking events are a great opportunity to gather email addresses. You can host digital meetings or webinars and require users to provide their email during the registration process. This approach is great if you operate in the business‑to‑business space or have an audience of professionals.

Make sure to record the webinar. You can recycle this lead magnet again and again to keep capturing emails with little extra work.

Capture emails through live chat sessions

If you have live chat on your site, encourage visitors to provide their email address for customer service follow-up and ask if they’re interested in receiving special offers after the chat ends. Make sure your chatbot is programmed to ask this automatically. 

Tips to make the most of your email collection efforts

Once you know how you want to collect the emails — through a contest, hosting a webinar, or something else — you can work to optimize your efforts for the best results.

1. Build a clear value proposition

Ask yourself, “Would I give out my email address after visiting this landing page?” If you can’t confidently answer that question with a yes, it’s time to rethink your value proposition.

What are the pain points most common for your audience? Why do they typically buy from you? While you don’t want to offer your solution or product completely for free, you can offer something adjacent. Or help them take the first steps for free. 

If you run an ecommerce business, a product giveaway or style guide might be more appropriate.

2. Create a sense of scarcity or urgency

Nothing gets people to act fast like the fear of missing out. If you want people to sign up for your mailing list when they visit your site, create a sense of urgency with a strong call to action.

Use phrases like “Join Now” or put a ticking clock next to your sign‑up button that lets them know they’ll get a coupon if they complete the form in the next 15 minutes. Convey that your free gift is only “while supplies last,” or that the deadline to enter your contest is near.

3. Display social proof and trust badges

Build trust by showing that others have already signed up. Include testimonials, subscriber counts, or trust badges from reputable companies to reassure potential subscribers.

Make sure they know you’ll never sell their information to a third party or send them an overwhelming number of messages. You could even promise a specific volume — “Only two emails a month!”

4. Avoid using CAPTCHA

You should avoid including a CAPTCHA on your lead capture form at almost all costs. CAPTCHAs drive visitors wild. Only 71% of users even try to solve a CAPTCHA. The rest just bounce as soon as they see that annoying box.

Yes, spam is a real problem. It can lead to security issues and definitely clog up your email and submission lists with useless entries. The good news is that there are better options for blocking spam, such as Akismet.

Akismet is an anti-spam solution that works completely in the background. And it’s just as effective — if not more so — than CAPTCHA. In fact, it works with 99.99% accuracy! To date, the tool has removed over 500 billion pieces of spam. That’s not a typo — it’s billions with a “b.” 

Without yet another annoyance standing in their way, people will be much more likely to complete the form. So you get better conversion rates without the spam. That’s a big win. 

5. Use a heatmap to optimize form placement

A heatmap analyzes how visitors interact with your website. It visualizes the hottest spots on your site so you know where to place sign‑up buttons and calls to action. Use these insights to place your email capture form in a high‑visibility area where visitors are most likely to engage.

6. Enhance your email capture campaign with video content

Video can stop a visitor’s scrolling in its tracks. Consider embedding a short video on your webpage next to your sign‑up form to draw attention and give visitors a chance to scan that section of your site.

Videos can also work well on landing pages — feature your lead magnet to really convey the value in a way only video can. You can also include video testimonials or anything else related to the email capture campaign. The point is: an investment in video content for any part of the campaign is probably worth it. Just be sure to A/B test to see what kind of impact, positive or negative, it actually has. Speaking of A/B testing… 

7. A/B test on a regular basis

A/B testing involves comparing two different landing pages to see which one resonates with your target audience. During each test, publish two nearly identical landing pages. Change only one detail, such as the form placement, CTA, or headline.

See which option visitors respond better to, and then move on to the next round of testing. You can do this as much as your resources allow and your performance should get better after each time.

8. Create a compelling thank you page

After a user subscribes, redirect them to a thank you page that reinforces their decision and provides additional value. Tell them what to expect or what to do next.

Frequently asked questions

What is email marketing?

Email marketing involves connecting with prospective customers via email. You can promote your products, share exciting news, or re‑engage subscribers who haven’t purchased anything from you in a while.

It’s a great way to build a case for your products or services, stay top of mind, and inspire leads on the fence to go ahead and make a buying decision.

Email marketing allows you to target individual audience segments. You can focus on subscribers who signed up through a particular offer, have shown specific behavior (like buying products from a specific category), or nearly anything else you can think of (as long as you have the data).

Is email marketing suitable for small businesses?

Absolutely! Email marketing is a great strategy for small businesses because it’s affordable and can offer a strong ROI. 

Many email marketing software solutions offer tiered pricing. If you’re a small business, you might even be able to start for free!

As you see success with your efforts, you can upgrade to a higher plan and unlock even more great features to power your campaigns.

What are some best practices for designing a landing page for email collection?

Start by identifying your value proposition. Determine why someone would want to give up their email address and ensure you’re providing them with something useful in exchange. Minimize distractions on your landing page like a CAPTCHA. Keep it short and focused.

Include a strong CTA and trust signals. Finally, constantly test and adapt! 

What are lead magnets, and how can I create one that appeals to my audience?

A lead magnet is a valuable offer that you provide in exchange for a user’s email address. Think of it as a bartering tool. Customers get something for free in exchange for subscribing to your email list. 

Consider your business model and the preferences of your target audience. Ecommerce businesses might send customers a discount code. A B2B company might offer a guide or access to a related tool. 

You aren’t trying to make a sale. An email subscription is your invitation to establish a relationship with a new contact and convey your value proposition over a period of time. 

Should I use CAPTCHA to protect my forms from spam?

No, not if you want to run the most successful campaign possible. 

To get the most subscribers, you need a frictionless sign-up experience. So, while you don’t want your CRM flooded with fake bot emails, you need a better solution: Akismet. This AI-powered tool stops 99.99% of spam without annoying users. 

What is Akismet, and how can it improve my email collection strategy?

Akismet is an advanced spam filtration tool that uses the power of artificial intelligence. It blocks 99.99% of comment, form, and user registration spam. To date, the platform has blocked over 554 billion pieces of spam and is trusted by more than 100 million websites.

What types of companies use Akismet?

All types of companies trust Akismet to stop spam in its tracks. Roughly 100 million websites use Akismet, including enterprise brands such as Microsoft, ConvertKit, Bluehost, and more. If some of the world’s biggest brands trust Akismet to beat spam without annoying pop‑up CAPTCHAs, you can, too.

Where can I learn more about Akismet’s solutions?

Explore the Akismet website and blog to learn about its features and real-world use cases like ConvertKit. Find out why millions of companies trust Akismet to put an end to spam. 

The Melapress WordPress security survey highlights critical gaps in WooCommerce security, emphasizing the need for password policies, team training, and 2FA adoption to enhance website protection against breaches.

WordCamp Asia 2025 is just around the corner. Hear why Do the Woo and others are sponsoring this year.

It’s another year, I have ordered all the things and tested all the cables, there’s a little bit about tech and a little bit about life. Here’s what made the cut, now I’m going to be factoring in weight of everything as well.

The flat-lay this year was taken at my sister Charleen’s house, where she hosted Christmas for our family for the very first time. Charleen and I have worked on the home in Austin for several years and it was awesome to see it all spruced up for the holidays and also for my Mom to visit it for the first time in 13 years. Part of the idea of my sister being in Austin is that if there’s a hurricane or anything in Houston my Mom can just drive up a few hours and be totally comfortable, so we put in an elevator, solar panels, Powerwalls, fiber, and Starlink. Her house is also my Austin headquarters when I’m in town, she set up a nice desk for me to work. Christmas was the beta-test, with Mom + nurse + four dogs all up in Austin; the whole circus was cozy and comfy for the holidays.

I was telling my friend Rob Reid the stories of my Mom and sister’s homes said I had to listen to the song Get Mama a House by Teddybears and B.o.B, it’s a good earworm and I will say that getting them both in beautiful homes they love has been one of the most rewarding things I’ve spent money on. So as advice for other entrepreneurs, get your momma a house!

TL;DR on the gadgets: The most significant change to my bag has been the introduction of the Daylight Computer, which I think everyone should have and is a genuinely new platform, and that we’ve finally reached reliability and excellence on retractable USB-C cords, these Baseus cords available in a variety of colors and 3.3ft and 6.6ft lengths. I give them out like candy, everybody loves them. I’ve also started wearing Havn hats/underwear/shirts/etc to block unnecessary EMF. (They used to be called Lambs.) And I’ve found great nootropic benefits with DryWater and Celsius. Without further ado, here’s the list:

THE BACKPACK

1. Aer Fit Pack 3 backpack. This is still my go-to, and it’s embroidered with Automattic and WordPress logos. This is part of our standard swag at Automattic, and I’d like to get a WP-embroidered one on our .org swag store when that’s back up.

DEVICES

2. 16″ Macbook Pro, right now the M4 Max with 128 GB RAM, amazing what you can run locally on this this thing. I’m very excited about inference at the edge in the coming years.
3. iPad Pro, which I use as a second display when I’m on the road using Apple’s screen mirroring giving me another 10 inches of screen.
4. Daylight Computer DC-1 represents the first truly new platform I spend time on. It’s a healthier way of computing and I would like to increase my % screentime on it in the coming years. Also amazing for kids.
5. Kindle Paperwhite, this might lose to the Daylight in the future but I do like its form factor.
6. iPhone 16 Pro, you use your phone so much just always have the latest model. This is my primary phone.
7. Google Pixel 9 Pro finally is iPhone-parity for me, I use this mostly for tethering with Google Fi and testing our apps on Android. I got the pink one, it’s really a beautiful device and I could imagine a world where it was my daily driver but there’s just so much convenience in the continuity features of an all-Apple life. It’s the little things, like copy and paste, that really hook you.

One nice thing is that the iPad and two phones all have connectivity plans, which I try to spread across different providers so I always have something that works or I can tether to.

POWER/ADAPTER

You should ABC, Always Be Charging!

8. Baseus 8-in-1 USB-C hub, 99% of the time this is used as an ethernet or HDMI connector, it’s pretty reliable and not too heavy. (86 grams)
9. Anker 150W Charger Block, this is just a little extra, I could probably drop it.
10. Anker 47W Nano Charger, nice for setting up a charging station by the bed.
11. Baseus 100W power cable, with detachable charging block. This is the core of the entire system, and most of the time I just use this. It’s chunky at 236 grams but anchors everything else.
12. Belkin 37W Dual USB Car Charger, which I find myself using mostly in Europe when in transfers.
13. USB-C adapters, just in case.
14. Whoop 4.0 Charger/Battery Pack, I really enjoy the stress and sleep tracking features of the Whoop, and this keeps it charged. I did a podcast with their founder Will Ahmed.

CABLES

15. Insignia Micro USB 3.0 Charger, this is by far the most cursed cable I carry around, which is for taking photos off my Nikon SLR.
16. Cable Matters 4K HDMI Cable, I like the ultra-thin and this can be clutch when connecting to a conference room or hotel TV.
17. Baseus 100W/5A retractable cables, now in two sizes 3.3ft and 6.6ft (about 100cm/200cm). These are my favorite new things! Love love love.
18. Apple Watch Magnetic Fast Charger, I also usually wear an Apple Watch Ultra. I don’t do too many notifications, but it’s amazing for finding my phone.

AUDIO

19. AirPods Pro Gen 2 for pairing with the iPhone, these are so good and if I forget them it’s the first thing I pick up at the airport electronics store.
20. Pixel Buds Pro, for pairing with the Pixel 9 Pro, also amazing I just don’t use as much.
21. Custom ear plugs, for protecting hearing when the sound or music is too loud.
22. UE Premier custom headphones, this is still the best audiophile experience I have, great on planes.
23. USB-C Headphone Jack Adapter
24. Belkin RockStar 5-Jack Audio Splitter
25. Belkin RockStar 3.5mm Audio w/USB-C Charge Adapter

MISCELLANEOUS ELECTRONICS 

26. Aranet4 CO2 monitor, this can change your life, if the area you’re in isn’t well ventilated then you run cognitively lower without even noticing it.
27. Logitech mouse, with quiet clicks, I find a mouse is just ergonomically an easy productivity upgrade from the built-in trackpad.
28. Flipper Zero, the funnest little cloning gadget I’ve tried.
29. Pixel G1s RGB Video Light, can be used in party mode to set lights.
30. USB-C chargeable Candle Lighter
31. Petzl E_LITE Headlamp
32. Universal Airplane Phone Holder

PERSONAL ITEMS

33. Passport
34. Hermes business card holder, which I’ve been using more since spending more time in Asia with the increased community activity there.
35. Thread Wallet elastic card holder/wallet 
36. Hay catch-all Pouch
37. Sea2See Sunglasses
38. Marunao mint case
39. Lockpick set, you can learn to unlock most locks in a few hours of training. Like the Flipper this is kinda a hacker tool.
40. Blue Rock, a little worry stone you can hold in your hand and rub.
41. WordPress ring, because I’m married to the game.
42. WordPress pin, spruces up any outfit with a little open source rizz.
43. Plastic holder with stickers for our various brands and products, I love seeing WordPress or Tumblr stickers in random places, and sometimes place them myself.
44. Notecards from Ugmonk Analog, you can rabbit hole their entire site to upgrade your desk game. Lovely stuff.
45. Maruman N196A Nemosine Notebook.
46. OHTO Needle-point Pen 0.7mm, picked up in Japan and I like for when I want to draft something more thin-lined.
47. Montblanc Heritage Egyptomania Doue ballpoint pen, which I like for signing important things and also crossing out todos on the Ugmonk cards.

TRAVEL ESSENTIALS

48. Icewear Merino wool gaiter
49. Lambs EMF WaveStopper beanie, literally a tin-foil hat.
50. RAINS insulated gloves
51. Gore Thermo Beanie
52. Olo InVision Eye Mask 
53. Herb Bar essential oil blend, always nice to have something good-smelling around. Not endorsing this specifically, but I always have some essential oil around.
54. Immunity Throat Spray, suggested to me by the mushroom GOAT himself, Paul Stamets, I saw him use this at an event we were both at. When I travel or am around a bunch of people I’ll do three sprays in morning and night, and I’ve often been the one in my group to not get the “conference cold” that goes around.
55. Z-Biotics, introduced to me by my friend Sid, it’s kind of a game-changer anytime you drink, lessens the negative effects of alcohol. It works so well there’s a possibility of moral hazard. They have some new stuff around fiber, it’s an interesting company to follow.
56. Celsius energy powder packet, this is nice to turn any drink into a Celsius, when you need an extra boost. Be careful with these as they have 200mg of caffeine! I try to avoid after 2pm, and not in first hour I wake up.
57. DryWater electrolytes powder packet, I’ve switched to this over LMNT because I like the ingredients and sourcing better. Electrolytes when you first wake up is better than coffee, I’ll often mix this with tea.

If you want to get super-nerdy, here’s a spreadsheet with the weights. Basically I’m 10.7 pounds of computing devices (Macbook, iPad, Daylight, Flipper, iPhone, Pixel), and ten pounds of other stuff. Add in a bottle of water or other random things I put in the bag ends up being ~22-28 pounds most of the time, which I’d like to get down.

But with my backpack I can tackle a really wide variety of situations. It’s fun! If you have any tips or suggestions please leave them in the comments! I’m always trying out new gear.

BobWP celebrates the seven-year anniversary of Do the Woo, with hosts discussing its evolution, hosts’ experiences, digital accessibility, and exciting future plans for the podcast.

Birgit Pauli-Haack and Tammie Lister talked about WordPress 6.8, Gutenberg 19.9, 20.0 and 20.1 plugin releases.

Add a summary/excerpt here

Show Notes / Transcript

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

Show Notes

Tammie Lister

• WordPress | X (former Twitter) | BlueSky
• making @ compositionproducts.com
• delivering @ logicalbinary.com
• thinking @ binatethoughts.com

Cursor AI

• Cursor AI vs Human Developer in Speed Build Special…shocking result!
• Revolutionize Your WordPress Development with Cursor AI 

WordPress 6.8

• WordPress 6.8: Release Squad, Timeline, and Focus
• Design plans for WordPress 6.8

Gutenberg plugin

• What’s new in Gutenberg 19.9? (19 December)
• Gutenberg 19.9 Introduces Style Book to Classic Themes
• What’s new in Gutenberg 20.0? (10 January)
• Gutenberg Plugin Reaches 200th Release Milestone with Version 20.0
• Gutenberg 20.1 RC1 (final release Jan 22, 2025)

Storybook

• WordPress Storybook
• StorybookJS

Stay in Touch

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hello, and welcome to our 113th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog.

Dear listeners, I wish you all a happy New Year, lots of fun and laughter, good health, and most of all, prosperity and peace. Yes, we took a holiday break and there are still three plugin releases that happened in the meantime. And in today’s episode, we’ll talk about WordPress 6.8, Gutenberg 19.9, 20.0, and 20.1.

I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and developer advocate at Automattic. Today’s co-host is Tammie Lister, OG Gutenberg developer and designer, product consultant, and long-time core contributor to WordPress and BuddyPress, I recently noticed again.

Thank you for joining me, Tammie. How are you today?

Tammie Lister: I am great. Thank you. How are you?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I’m good, I’m good. I’m done with winter, but I think I can control that. So if you’re done with winter too, let’s help and change the weather if we can do it.

Tammie Lister: Yeah, I am very done with winter, although it’s kind of nice as long as you just don’t go outside. But also, as long as you wrap up warm, I think that’s the thing, just…

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. There are several days that I stay inside, which normally doesn’t happen, but yeah.

Tammie Lister: I have a wood burner, which makes winter a little bit more tolerable.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, we have central heating, which is very good. So, well, Tammie, you’re always on the forefront of web and WordPress development. What are you working on right now and what are your plans or outlook for 2025?

Tammie Lister: Yeah. So I guess over the holidays, I did what a lot of people did, which is I did some tinkering. So a lot of people take time off and the holidays appear to be the time when they sit down and do a project. And it appeared to be that everybody over the holiday has explored with AI development tools.

The one that I chose, well, I chose, I did a bit of Bolt, but I also did Cursor specifically. And I was using it as a rubber duck that’s basically for development. So I was doing a lot of that in my work. I’ve been doing a combination of working on themes, but also working on some product consultancy, and that’s been really interesting to balance those. But also looking at contribution perspective, stepping back into releases. So really for me, it’s with a lot of these tools is how can I get the ideas that are in my head out faster into prototypes rather than maybe them just sitting in my head. But I don’t think I’m alone based on what I was seeing on the socials and seeing in Slack. A lot of people were just brewing ideas and just getting them out, so…

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. No, no, I agree. And for those listeners who are not English natives, the rubber ducking is a process.

Tammie Lister: Ah, yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: … by developers who talk to actually inanimate object and get it out, but they have it ahead.

Tammie Lister: Sometimes a rubber duck.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s a rubber duck. And then by way of explaining it to somebody, most of the time a solution comes or at least, okay, another avenue to troubleshoot something opens up. So it’s a known process and it’s called rubber ducking.

Tammie Lister: Yeah. And a lot of these tools are really helpful for that, particularly with things like WordPress and Gutenberg, there’s always something you don’t know about or maybe there’s a feature you haven’t got to learn about. So one of the things I was able to do was be like it could teach me about that area whilst I was learning to code.

I also did some things which are completely unrelated to that, but on the newer features. I was able to say, “How would you implement it and teach me as you are doing it each stage,” which is really helpful. It’s having that training guide as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I really love it. And it prompts you. So speaking of Cursor AI, it actually prompts you. “Shall I explain this a little bit to you?” kind of thing.

Tammie Lister: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And you say, “Yes, please do like I’m a 5-year-old,” or something.

Tammie Lister: “Explain it to me like I’m the rubber duck.”

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And then one of the AIs, when I say, “Please make it readable for a non-technical person,” and every time they come with a legal analogy. Yeah, legal. Can they do these trademarks? Well, anyway.

Tammie Lister: I like whenever you’re saying with that, if you don’t set any boundaries with things like that, they try and go above and beyond. They’re very over-performing so you’ll find it’ll be like, I watched this when I watched Nick Diego when he did his block challenge and it was just, I think he just said, “Make it Christmas-y,” and it was just like, “Have sparkles, have this, have that, have the other.” And I also discovered that if I didn’t set some boundaries, it was suddenly like, “Have this, have the other.” So just set some boundaries to it.                                                 So a good example from a Gutenberg perspective would be, say, use create block scaffolding, would be use the components. And knowing things like that means that it really tailwind otherwise. It’ll be like, “Put tailwind in it, put tailwind in this.” And it’s like, “Yeah, there’s some components we can use. It’s okay.”

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. But you really need to be knowing something about development to actually guide it also to something that you then also have production-

Tammie Lister: Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Not production ready, but you can use.

Tammie Lister: And I found that when I was doing things which were not my wheelhouse, which was in thinking not WordPress, and I was just doing some different language stuff. And when I completely didn’t know the stack I was working with and it was just like, “Sure, I don’t know if you’ve just done or just taken me completely down the wrong path.” But then you go through the, “Explain why you did this,” and then it will pick through. And then oftenly, it will self-correct itself. Then you can be like, “Can you do this a simpler way?” and it’ll be like, “Yes, I can. You are correct.” And I don’t know if you find that you’d say please and thank you to it a lot because I say an awful lot of…

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Sometimes, yeah.

Tammie Lister: … please and thank you to my AI overlords.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And I like that when Nick said, somebody mentioned that, I think Jamie mentioned that when Nick was going through, I said, “You are always very polite.”

Tammie Lister: I am so polite just in case.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Just in case.

Tammie Lister: Just in case Terminator is correct. You’ve got to be polite.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Well, but this show, your listener is not in an AI show. We could probably talk another two hours about it, but we have other things to do today. 

Announcements – WordPress 6.8 Release

So there’s the announcement that WordPress 6.8, the release squad is done, the timeline is announced, and the focus is announced. And the schedule is beta one is March 4th. That’s pretty much around the corner. Then release candidate is the 25th of March, the first release candidate. And then the final release will be April 15th.

And Jonathan Desrosiers put up that post and I want to quote from his post, and he said, “The squad is also a bit smaller than usual because of the release being a polish and bug fix release. Also of note, the core tech lead and editor tech lead roles have been combined into a single tech lead role as part of the continued initiative to support more closely coordinated efforts across Gutenberg and Core.” And that’s the quote end. The tech leads are Joe McGill, Jonathan Desrosiers, and George Mamadashvili. So that’s a great team to put this all together. All 10 release squad members are actually long time contributors and have been on many, many releases before. So it’s Jeff Paul, Michelle Frechette, JB Audras, Felix Arntz, and Krupa Nanda. And Tammie Lister has raised a hand as a design lead for the release.

Yeah, so what does a design lead do on the release?

Tammie Lister: Yeah. So there’s, as of all these roles, there’s some keeping things on the track, things you do from the design perspective, the about page, getting any materials that are needed for the release. But really the best, the fundamentals are if anything has a niche design or design feedback ticket during the release, it’s unblocking. That’s the best way that I can put it from that. And because this release specifically is a polish and a fix, maybe go into what that really means. It means most of, if not all, of the big features are ready, or we are not really going to be doing so many of those. And I think that that’s something that last year actually was requested by the community specifically to focus on. I don’t know if we’re going to have one, two a whole year. I have no idea. We’re just entering this year.

But, I actually, from a design perspective, it’s quite good because we have quite a lot of tickets that need design feedback, both in Core and in Core Editor. So I’ve been able to look at those right going all the way back and triage them. Maybe a good thing too, because that’s often a word, but to explain the way that triage or at least the way that I approach triage is that triage shouldn’t leave a ticket in the state that you find it. So that could be your audition labels, but you are also moving it on. So we have a lot of tickets that they need feedback, but then they need to go to their next state. So just leaving something with a test or a feedback, that’s awesome, but it just leaves it with test or feedback. It doesn’t move it on. It doesn’t.

Also, some of these tickets, so if something maybe in five years ago was thought to have a design, and I actually discovered this over the holidays, well, just before the holidays when I was going through my old tickets in the Gutenberg repo. And I discovered that a lot of them have already had different interfaces done. So they’re completely invalid tickets now. But because people have been really not… So many people have been doing work and there’s so many tickets, been able to go back over some of those and saying, “Okay, well, the interface has changed. Do we still think that this is a valid application or do we wish it well? And do we want to close it because we’ve already taken a different approach as a project?”

So that’s one thing that can be done. Those aren’t all that common. But also just looking at because something has an easy fix, I call them paper cuts, there’s often little things that can be done as well. And I suspect there’s going to be quite a few of those from a design perspective, some little paper cuts we can get in. Design also doesn’t just mean visual design. I always like to include some CSS and styling in there because of my hybrid nature as well, so yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Cool, yeah. Well, thank you very much for stepping up to the plate and thank you for everybody stepping up to the plate and being on the radio.

Tammie Lister: And there will be of us joining, I think that’s always the important thing, is there’s a post on mixed design about how anyone can just step up and join in if you have an hour, half an hour a week that you can just sit there and do some triage that’s been involved and just raise your name and then you can get included in the release.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Excellent. Yes. Yeah, so that’s on WordPress 6.8. I think we will, on this podcast, talk about what’s going to be in there a little later in the year, maybe after WordCamp Asia, probably have another Gutenberg Changelog episode. We will have one before WordCamp Asia and one after Asia.

But we say the Gutenberg plans keep rolling in, two big ones and one not so big one. One was 19.9 that was in December. Then the first one in January was 20.0. And then just last week, oh, this week, we were recording this on January 17th, so this week, George Momotos really just did the 20.1 release candidate. So the Changelog we’re going to talk about is going to be from the release candidate, but the other two have been released and I share with you the release post.

Gutenberg 19.9                                                        

So let’s get started with Gutenberg 19.9. 

Enhancements

So what was a big change is something that’s probably not in any release, but it’s in the plugin release, is that the experiments page of the Gutenberg plugin has Anne McCarthy went through it and give it better titles, a description, and a little bit of an order on the experiment space because there are now 13 experiments listed on that page. So that is definitely a good thing, especially when you want to check them out and enable them and play around with the things. What’s in the experiments page is a few data views, then all the collaborative editing things and experiments then some new blocks. The grid layout, the interactive grid layout, is in the experiments. So those are there.

Tammie Lister: I think often people forget about that page, so it’s really nice to see it called out because I think it should remind people that it’s there as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Tammie Lister: So number one I’m seeing here is add PHP admin support for environment enhancement and document layout in Storybook. A lot of this is improvements to components and Storybook in general. This reminds me, I’m also seeing Storybook, Storybook, Storybook, Storybook, Storybook, and it reminds me of the importance of the design system. I’m going back to that. One of the things we are really looking at in this release is: how can we bring that awesome work that’s happened in the editor into those other areas of WordPress, and seeing this really good work from the Storybook reminds me of that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So Storybook, just in case you heard this for the first time, don’t confuse them with Stylebook. That’s a total different thing. But the Storybook is a way of documentation, certain components with their attributes and their different options so you can see them in isolation. And it’s actually available on the WordPress GitHub pages, and I will share the link in the show notes. So if you haven’t looked at it yet and you are developing for WordPress, it’s definitely a place to go and see what’s actually in the design system, as Tammie said, and also how you can use it for your own plugins. Well, not so much themes, but for the plugins, or any other admin contributions that you want to do.

The next pieces are more like individual blocks that got some enhancements. First up is the cover block that the image size option for the featured image is now available. You could assign the featured image to be part of the cover block, but you couldn’t specify the size for that. So now you can, and which is good for a lot of things. And talking about the featured image, no, it’s a new feature. It’s not featured image, sorry. It’s about the post template block that you can deeply nest it into the query block. It’s like query block inception over down, down, down, down.

Tammie Lister: And I would say there’s another one here with patterns model to drop down on query block any, and another one, add query total block for displaying total query results. The query block is a block that pretty much most agency workers always had to extend or have a variation of rather than be able to use out of the box for quite a while. And it’s not an amazing block. It’s just not quite got there because it’s so complex and it’s so many different variations. So anytime you add a feature, it’s just a lot to add a feature. So I think being able to see these improvements are really powerful.

And if you remember where the query blocks started, I think it’s great to see how it’s come along. I remember the first mock-ups to try and get a mind around the query block. And wherever it is now, I’m just really excited to see. And also from the sensibility perspective where it is now and the fact that I think a lot more cases, probably at least 30, 40% don’t need to extend it now. And I think that we’re probably only ever going to get to 50/50 because it’s such a complex situation, but being able to get to that from where most couldn’t use it is really powerful for the query block.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, and it’s so much the jump from the classic theme to a block theme is that a user can actually get in contact with a query block and really adapt it to what it needs to do.

Tammie Lister: And within, yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: How often have I had the request to remove a date or remove the author or remove the category pick? That was all developer-oriented kind of thing.

Tammie Lister: And a theme of understanding it, just a theme of being able to understand query blocks. So one of the big things that just learning as a themer is a real block, a block, a block. A blocker for you as a themer is trying to understand, and it often puts off a lot of people in theming because they may be more on the design side and they’re just like, “Oh, now I’ve got to learn the loop, got to learn how to do coding, and I’ve got to learn how to do that.” Well, with the query block, you don’t have to. It doesn’t mean if you know it, you can still use it. And I think that was really important to say when we’re talking about query block, that you can use it, but you can also use other methods or you could extend it and have your own really powerful option. And that’s something that I don’t think people will often hear is you have an option. And I find that a lot of times it does it for me now, but that little bit that it doesn’t, extending it is really powerful as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And you mentioned the query total block. That’s a new block and it helps you display the query results ranges, so to speak. You get the total results, but it also gives you so, “12 results found,” or in the pagination it says, “Displaying 1 through 10 of 12,” or something like that. And it gives you a little bit more flexibility in display query related theme designs here.

Tammie Lister: And that’s a good note. The query block isn’t just a block. It’s a block with the blocks. And a lot of our mega blocks, I don’t know, nested blocks, a lot of those one are that. And we’re often, I don’t think we need more terminology, we really don’t, but we don’t see the complexity of them. And the query block is one of those really complex blocks. Navigation block is similar because of that nesting and because of the complexity inside it. If you look at even title image, the way that you have the content loops and the way that that can be, you don’t even need to have the finite control now. You can just have the content now and all those different options.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it takes a little bit getting used to and also getting experience in what works and what doesn’t work for you. Different thing, yeah.

Tammie Lister: Yeah, it’s blocks.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Well, I remember the time when I would try to get the pagination block on my page and it didn’t go. It didn’t show because…

Tammie Lister: Oh, that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: … it was not inside the query button exactly.

Tammie Lister: Yeah, you’re reminding me. There used to be a thing where it used to, I think there was a while where it could easily just go outside and it would just hang around just outside. And it would never error so you would never know why it was erroring. It would just be like that. It’s pagination that you could click the pagination and go up and down it, but it wouldn’t do anything. But that also shows how far we’ve come because if you have that now, it would give an error. And now a lot of the system is interactive enough to self-correct itself, and it’d be like, “No query found,” or there’s a lot of error catching and correction in the system, or it’d be like, “No, that block has to be within the container.”

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Or it doesn’t show up if it’s not inside the container.

Tammie Lister: Yes, which is the refinements and the polish, which brings us lovely back to 6.8. I don’t know.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right, right, right. Yeah.

Tammie Lister: But that’s part of it, right? With all these complexities.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And I think the next one is a separator block that can now also divs instead of horizontal lines. So it can be styled, better styled. And it also is not announced because it’s a decorative thing. It’s not announced through the page reader, the screen reader.

Tammie Lister: Which was always interesting to listen to initially, the screen reader doing the spacer block and then when you hadn’t done it correctly and then doing the separator block and he was like, “Rah, rah.” It’s shouting at people.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Well, we laugh about it, but I think for someone who reads a screen reader, it’s not funny.

Tammie Lister: No, but that’s the thing. It’s like you’re laughing at the refinement.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right.

Tammie Lister: But it’s good. And only because of the really awesome feedback that we’ve had from the accessibility team and the learnings that we’ve done have we been able to get on that. And I think again, that shows that the learnings and the refinement and the collaborative work that has gone on behind the scenes between the team, we’re laughing with the gentleness of history, I think, right? That’s what we are able to do.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And until you hear actually a screen reader shouting at you, you have no idea how that actually works. So it’s always been an epiphany for me to not talk with people who know how to use a screen reader or teach me how to do it and do it myself. And then you say, “Oh no, that’s wrong.”

So the next part is about Stylebook. We talked about Storybook. That’s a developer stuff. Storybook, it’s a designer stuff, but that’s in the editor. And the Stylebook actually lets you go through all the blocks on your site with the style attached to it. So if you use one of the style variation and you open up the Stylebook, you see how each of the blocks, image block, paragraph block quotes look with that particular style and you can actually edit it. And as I said, there was something like that it’s a side editor thing, but now Stylebook screen comes also to the classic theme. And that I think is a really good move to have that there because there have been for eight years having blocks displayed in classic themes and not something like a Stylebook was available. Now, it is.

Tammie Lister: The only option before was to get the block theme tested data and then put it in. And then generally people, when you release the site, you had a page and then on that page you listed every book. I’m laughing at the work I’ve done.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I hear you.

Tammie Lister: I love Stylebook. Often I surprise clients by showing them it. They’re like, “Huh? Where did that come from?” And the reason I like it is I use the editor like Dreamweaver, and one of the things that I find is when I lay my foundations in a theme, I will then go straight to Stylebook. So I’ll do the foundations, the color, the typography, and then don’t make that noise, but yeah, and then I go to Stylebook and I’m like, “Okay, particularly color.” So one good thing I’ll be able to do calendar always, I can be like, “Oh yeah, no, the colors won’t necessarily going to reflect so well.” So I make sure that I get in my naming and my colors and all those things going so that I can have that dynamic base that pulls in on different blocks depending on what the block is and all those ways that I can have borders and shading and different things.

So that’s one of the things that I try to do when I’m pulling something through. And that can be whether I’m doing a base theme or whether I’m using Ollie or any number of different themes as a foundation, doesn’t matter. That’s exactly the same as a child theme. Doesn’t matter. It’s exactly the same approach every single time. And so Stylebook, whenever I show someone, they’re like, “Oh, I want to use this.” Still waiting for the day where I can have it detached and front end show someone because I still think that that would be chef’s kiss because the amount of projects I’ve had to do zero or something like that, or those other tools that you have to use on top of it. But yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, no, I really like the Stylebook. I remember the time where I had a GitHub test with all my test blocks and variations of the block and how that’s going to work, yeah. And the next one is also a Stylebook one that is a render overview colors in four columns. So one of the new features is that the color variations, I think, is the right terminology are now shown on top of the Stylebook. So you can see when you change the style variations, how the colors actually change. It’s cool.

Tammie Lister: So the post editor, I guess we’re moving to, so we have inline commenting, added new sidebar as extension of the canvas. And with inline commenting, we order the comments and the sidebar and UX enhanced comments. So this is all really adding the commenting and getting us on the path to that awesome work as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s a collaborative effort. And inline commenting is asynchronous, not synchronized collaborative. You can only see it when you enable the experiments for it, but it’s really cool where you can add the comments per block and then you can reply to it. And there are some quirks with it in terms of the list of posts where you see the number of comments, but it never matches what the comments are. So there’s some kind of a bug in there. But as long as the feature isn’t settled yet, I don’t think there’s a sense in fixing that one because that’s the last thing to fix.

Tammie Lister: If you use Google Doc comments, you can use this. I think that’s the best way to describe it to someone. It’s very like how you would expect commenting to work.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah, try it out then if it doesn’t, post some feedback on GitHub.

Tammie Lister: Yeah, try it out. And if you find a bug, report it. You see it, report it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So that’s about the enhancements of 19.9. It’s a pretty solid release and has a lot of bug fixes as well. 

But Fixes

There is one thing from the bug fixes that I wanted to point out. I think that was for the sync patterns. The content-only block was editing mode was removed because it’s not really, if you want to sync pattern, do you want to edit the content? So the editing mode was reversed to do that just in case you ran across it and you couldn’t edit your patterns. 

Documentation

And then documentation improvements or a lot of Storybook updates were there, as well as the documentation of the fields package, which is a part of the data views package for the developers that if you use the data views outside of the site editor for your own plugins, you definitely want to look at the fields package.

Tammie Lister: And there is a deprecation on icons, which is important to think about if you are looking at using the design system. So warning has been renamed caution field. And the only reason I raised that is if you’re already using it in your design system, being aware that icons have changed, but again, in the Storybook you’d be able to find that information.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. I think was, I think that’s all I wanted.

Tammie Lister: Did we do one of the releases? I’m very excited with all.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, we are done with 19.9. 

Gutenberg 20.0

Now, we come to Gutenberg 20.0, and 20.0 means that’s the 200th release of Gutenberg. Who would’ve thunk in June 2017 that we will have…

Tammie Lister: I know.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: … the 200th release? Who was ever thinking that far? Yeah, there are 274 merge PRs by 71 contributors, 13 of them were first time contributors. I think that’s one of the largest numbers of first time contributors for a Gutenberg plugin. And the project came with 83 enhancements and 82 fixed bugs. We are not going to read through all 83 of them. Sorry, people.

Tammie Lister: My brain’s still stuck on the 200th as some… Because at the first, I’m like-

Birgit Pauli-Haack: You were part of the original team?

Tammie Lister: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: For many, many years. Three or four years, I think.

Tammie Lister: Which I think is the first few are always unexciting because you’re just like pushing pancakes. But I think if you, from the first 10.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Where did that expression come from? Sorry, sorry, sorry. I need to go back to what are you doing? Pushing pancakes?

Tammie Lister: So your first pancake is always not such a good one. It’s like the first pancake you put out, right? That’s the first few releases or something that you put out. They’re just like, “Eh, it’s just good.” But you’re not counting those because you’re just like releasing. You’re just getting it out. But by 200, and the thing that I’d like to reflect is the cadence. And I think that that’s the important thing.

So with WordPress, we’re very used to having regular releases throughout the year, but they generally have a gap now. You’re having three or so throughout a year. That’s our cadence. But with Gutenberg, because of its plugin format, you’re having that real frequency of release. So we’ve got into that habit of a proper sprint release is what people have got into. And the sheer amount of things that go into it, it’s overwhelming. Every time I come and do this, I’m like…

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s a lot. “Who reviewed all that?” HPR has some review and a lot of people have-

Tammie Lister: And testing. HPR has someone that creates it, the original issue, someone that works on it, someone that then tests it, someone that then documents it, someone then pushes it. Well, it has at least two people that will review it. And then there’s so much work. So at least probably five to seven people have touched it per PR potentially.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And it’s so important to have a few different views in there to really fix all the bugs before it gets released. But you’re never successful in that. But I also like, I sometimes go back to some of the issues as well as the PRs. And sometimes they’re a year old or they started with a brilliant idea but the software wasn’t there yet. But then people keep looking at it and say, “Is it there yet? Is it there yet? Oh, could we do this?”

Tammie Lister: Back then, we couldn’t have achieved most of what we do now, which is why everything should be re-looked at. I often say if anything really is left at the interface when I first worked on it, we maybe have a problem because it should be iterated and changed on. Because even down to animations and interactions, we know more how people work on. People have changed and adapted. There’s a whole pandemic happened. People interact devices have changed. The Playground, look at what can be done with devices.

And I guess that leads us on to even looking at these lists. You look at the blocks, the thing that we have listed here is the block library, I guess. You have the details block. That strikes me in this release, the details block was something that when they originally came out, it was the paragraph block, right? The first block, and then it’s added up. So now we have a details block, we have a page list, social lines block, things block, and all these different blocks that are also maintained on top of everything as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, we also have old widget blocks. The latest post thing is really outdated. It should be deprecated because you have the query block now for that. It’s evolving.

Enhancements                                                       

So what’s in 20.0? So there is an enhancement on the create block scaffolding tool or two of them. So now you can use external templates and customize more fields. And then the other part is that you have a default template that helps you with the multiple block plugin case. Up until now, it was only you could create a plugin with a block and then you had to get the additional blocks in with a certain flag. And now it’s a little bit easier, I think, to do that.

I like this tool. A create block is such a neat way to start out with a block and then just focus on the editor and the front end. And you don’t have to all come in.

Tammie Lister: Yeah, I love it. And to me it means that it stands with other, going back to when we were talking about Cursor, it uses it. It picks it up. And I think by if I looked at any other language that I’ve started playing around with, they all have their own versions to do scaffolding. So it makes it over par with that and just easier.Can you do it by hand? Yes, of course you can do your own thing, but it also helps from a learning perspective. And then you can just do it right from the start. Same as I love the create block theme plugin, all these tools. Can I hand code a theme? Yes. Can I hand code a block? Yes. Can I do other things while those tools are doing it for me? Yes. So it’s about the tools doing it. And also with what you are saying, it’s going to mean that I’m doing it. I’m having that foundation to then build up on top of.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, and you do it the same time over and over. So maintainability is also pretty big with using that. There’s also a wp-env environment, the development environment that comes with Gutenberg, and now has multi-site support. It’s definitely increasing the footprint of the developers who you’re going to use it. So the block library has some consistent work done where the blocks sidebar has changed the component and brave contributors go block by block and make it consistent going through that. So it is a different panel and it uses a tools panel item and the tools panel instead of the settings panel. It’s definitely they changed the components out of it and used the tools panel drop down for that.

Tammie Lister: So in this release, we’ve also got some focus on Stylebook. So we’ve got to give Stylebook its own route, so it can be linked to directly and add the appearance design menu through admin action. So again, this is iterating on Stylebook and improving it more, which is really, really exciting. I’m curious to test out the linking to it directly as well to see if what that happens with permissions. So we’ve achieved what I wanted it to do.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Good idea, but I think you need to have some edge.

Tammie Lister: I do. I don’t think it’s quite the front-facing thing that I’m wanting.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, it’s not.

Tammie Lister: But it’s getting there.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: In there, yeah. Its own route is really powerful when you…

Tammie Lister: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, you want to link to it. And then the block hooks got two additional enhancements. One is to apply the block hooks to post content on the front end and the editor so people can see it, and the other one is in sync pattern to actually also apply the block hooks. So before then, the block hooks wouldn’t work in patterns. Now, they do. Block hooks is a method to add a block at the end or at the beginning of another block for display. And now with this release, you can also see it in the editor and edit there. So the user has a little bit more control over there, the blocks that are automatically added.

Tammie Lister: Speaking of tools, there’s adder in the plugin, there’s adder Playground blueprint JSON to the assets blueprints folder of plugin repo. So anytime I see anything about Playground, I get super excited. For those that haven’t explored it, the way that I describe it is a collection of awesome recipes to be able to either pre-run or from testing to your plugin or to be able to just run. So you can even run a testing PR with them. There’s just so much that you can do with them in the browser. You can either have single installs or you can have a bit more perpetual sites as well with Playground. And it’s just really, really powerful in getting more powerful.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And if you want to learn more about blueprints, the Playground, new interface for the last month actually, has the blueprint gallery coming into the Playground interface. So you can actually read through them and test them out right away. And they are really cool as examples to, okay, if it can do that, then maybe it can also do that and you have a blueprint on how to do that. So I love that. And well, I built some of the blueprints, so I’m really excited about getting those done.

And my next thing is to enable all the experiments or more than one experiment in the good mug repo and have a Playground for that. And the next one, and that’s just merged into the blueprint gallery. But I also am thinking about the distraction-free writing experience that if you have a Playground to just do writing, so you need to have the distraction-free enabled and some other things that need to be enabled, but so you can really have a writer try it out without having all the distraction things.

Tammie Lister: I love that idea that you could use Playground to test modes like what you are suggesting. And that’s also really important to say with Playground you can also and gone into a sidetrack off Playground, but with Playground you can also install plugins. And that’s something that often is not thought of. So the recipe can also be add Woo, add this, add that. So it can be the whole configuration setup. As you are saying, it’s not just open the editor at a certain point. It’s not like if this, then that workflow, it’s also installing things and configuring them as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And you could even import some demo content because most plugins only shine when you actually have content to look at.

Tammie Lister: Yeah, it’s true.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And the “hello world” not always does it.

Tammie Lister: Could I have it with Stylebook lockdown? Or I’m just like, “Is this how I get my Stylebook?”

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And now with the root, you could actually make the Stylebook your landing page.

Tammie Lister: And that’s how I get my design system. So okay, now we solved my problem. How do we solve the next problem on the Changelog? So we solved both our problems today.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes.

Tammie Lister: So moving on from that, we have write mode, allow template part editing in write mode. Anything that is improving write mode is also exciting for me because it’s one of those little paper cutters, it’s probably like a small version of it, but it’s an easing of the experience to me and that is also really useful. So I had love to see these iterations over time as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, me too. Yeah. And for the longest time I wasn’t really getting what the difference is between design mode and write mode. But now with the template part, I am actually getting it. It’s really cool.

Tammie Lister: I describe the difference between using Google Docs and Dreamweaver. That’s the best way I can describe for me.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Very good analogies. For a long time document about…

Tammie Lister: When you add things in.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Well, this is a fun show and we are, I think, that’s true with 20.0.

Tammie Lister: Two down.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Two down, one to go. And it only had 94 PR so it’s not that much in there. 

Gutenberg 20.1

But the Gutenberg 20.1, it has not been released yet at the time of this recording. And so it will be released on January 22nd will be the release of 20.1. There’s a lot of 20s in my life at the moment.

Tammie Lister: There are.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So it’s 20.1. All right, yeah. So what does it bring?

Enhancements

Tammie Lister: This has a lot of things again in the block library. This is the details block. So really requirements with the allowed block attributes there, and that reminds me of a lot of these blocks are created and then I need to be gone over again. And that’s something you were saying about going over the components and then bring them in. But a lot of these, a new feature like allowed block attributes or different things happen and then you need to go back over the old blocks and reiterate them because they maybe came out after or before and different things. So yeah, some of that’s going. Page lists, add color support, anything that sees adding support to a block gets me very excited from the senior perspective. And social links button, add clear button for color option, that seems like a small thing, but I know how important that is. Clears color is really, really important.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Every time I say, “Where did this go wrong? Let’s clear the colors first.”

Tammie Lister: Yes. And then with, I kind of made move on to design tools because that’s the next one after that. But with post comment link, showing border controls by default, and query total show border controls by default, again that’s deciding on the best defaults is also something you only know when you first release something you are not too sure, particularly with the design tools and to give a frame of design tools. That’s anything from borders to backgrounds to anything that is styling things. And it’s generally the things that are in theme JSON with the tooling visualized. So that’s when we’re talking about design tools. It’s the visual knobs and things that you can push to do that fall and interact with theme JSON. That’s a weird way of framing it, but that’s the best way I can put it.

And a lot of these defaults are guessed first time when something comes out. So the post comment link, a guess will have been come up that needed to be on, that needed to be off. So by having these things adjusted, it means that this feedback was given that that should be on by default or this should be off by default.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: But there are so many people. That’s just a 50/50 decision, but people are not 50/50. So sometimes they want it and sometimes they don’t want it. But yeah, I had a constant…

Tammie Lister: I had a toolbar where the option had to be added because that’s constantly my example of there is no good answer.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, but there is a shortcut, a keyboard shortcut.

Tammie Lister: There is an answer, put that option in.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And also remember it. That was also a part of it. That block editor remember me or my choices. Yeah, the clearable option, the color because is also available for the navigation block and it now surfaces the menu name in the list view. That’s for the navigation block. That was something that people just wouldn’t recognize the various menus in the list view. And the list view is your friend. So yeah, whatever we do for the list view is actually really a quality of life enhancements there. So the next one is, I’m not quite sure what this refers to, but maybe you know, the new default.

Tammie Lister: I’m not sure about this one either, I’ll be honest. So it’s the new default rendering mode for editor via post type supports. Looking at it a little bit, what it seems to be doing is similar to what I was saying, which is it basically says it updates how the new default rendering mode can be set for a post type. So to me, it responds to feedback given. So it says it doesn’t require best endpoint or any API-related changes.

So reading between the lines, it says that it would be feedback had been given on that and it says existing add post type support can be used to change or reset the default rendering mode. And then it gives some code examples to that. So again, it’s giving options that you can decide on defaults, which is what you were saying about. Really you don’t always know, but initially you have to make a best bet and then you can bring those refinements in.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And then there’s an enhancement for the data views that it adds a media field to the UI for content preview of the posts and pages in the grid view.

Tammie Lister: I get excited about anything coming into data views.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Data views, and it’s for the media field is really important for featured images and all that.

Tammie Lister: Yeah. I know it’s an experiment, but being able to just play around and any new feature that comes into data view is just exciting to be able to play with.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. I find them so much modern and I really would love to have make a kind of a snip decision or snip feature that kind of switches out the WP admin with the data views. But of course it cannot be that fast because it’s been-

Tammie Lister: I think you have to go a little bit gently with humans.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. A friend of mine said, “That’s for you, humans.”

Tammie Lister: Yeah, but I think that that’s why we have experiments. We’re going to make sure that the cake is having some testing. I know at core days in run, that was something that the ad was definitely sharing that by it being in there, it can be tested. It can be all the best version can be done. And then really those people call them edge cases, I call them stress cases because they cause stress. They can be felt afterwards and implemented. Otherwise, it would just take way too long to do so. At the moment, it’s the best case. That’s what data views are. And that doesn’t mean it’s all the cases.

So that’s part of the work with data views is really to go back over it and make sure it does all the work. And if you think of WP admin, anything to come out of the isolated view really has to just do all the work. And that’s something I’m very aware when I’m looking at what design things can I bring through. It’s like sprinkles at the moment is the best way I can put it because it has to be stuff that’s really, really packaged and baked already.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And looking at how the WP admin had been extended by plugins for 20 years, yeah.

Tammie Lister: How has it not been extended by a plugin at this point.

Because it’s been so long. It’s so long and tried and tested and it’s known. So that’s something when you bring something new. It will be there and we’d be talking in a couple of years as if it had always looked that way. And it will be the WP admin. It will just be a case of it has to be done in a certain way because and then everybody will be able to use it and understand it and implement it in that way.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. But that’s actually a very good way to end this podcast. I think we are through with 20.1.

Tammie Lister: Three for three.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: We did three in one.

Tammie Lister: Yay.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s really good. And so thank you so much, Tammie, for being here.

Tammie Lister: Thank you for having me.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I am so glad we are back in 2025 with the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. And as always, the show notes will be published on gutenbergtimes.com/podcast, and this is episode 113, 113th. And if you have questions and suggestions or news you want to include, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. And you can also leave… If you listen to that on Spotify, Spotify also gives you a feature to comment on it. That’s a great place to leave questions so we can answer them in the next episode. And thank you, everyone, for being a listener here and welcome back to 2025. And thank you, Tammie, for taking the time out of your life to be on the show and share all the good things with us.

Tammie Lister: Thank you so much.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right, you take care. Bye.

Tammie Lister: Take care too. Bye.

Howdy,

I know it’s still a month or two, but I am officially done with Winter and the cold. I am already looking forward to Spring and nature painting the world with color again.

Next month, I will warm myself up again by spending some time in Manila, Philippines at temperatures between 24° and 31° Celsius. If you are making plans for WordCamp Asia and might have time to meet, please let me know or use my public calendar bit.ly/bph-wcasia.

If not WordCamp Asia, might I run into you at CloudFest at the Europa Park in Rust?

What are your plans for 2025 regarding WordCamp and conferences?

Have a fabulous weekend!

Yours, 💕
Birgit

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

Fabian Kägy published What’s new in Gutenberg 20.0? (10 January), celebrated the 200th plugin release and highlighted the following updates:

1. Enhancements for the Style Book
2. Starter Patterns get a new UI
3. Easily set a Page to become the Posts Page
4. Display Block Type Badge for renamed blocks
5. More Highlights

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Nithin Sreeraj took a closer look at the features in his post Gutenberg Plugin Reaches 200th Release Milestone with Version 20.0

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George Mamadashvili made the RC1 of Gutenberg 20.1 available on GitHub for testing. The final release will be on January 22, 2025.

Tammie Lister and I chatted about the last three Gutenberg plugin releases and recorded Gutenberg Changelog 113th episode. We also talked about WordPress 6.8, exploration with AI, storybook and Gutenberg 19.9, 20.0 and 20.1. It was a fun first episode for 2025. It will land on your favorite podcast app on Sunday or shortly after.

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

In his video My Top 10 Website Layout Designs, Jamie Marsland collected his favorite layouts and demonstrated briefly how his assembled them in subsequent videos. It’s a great collection as if you are a site builder, you should be able to rebuild them and have them in your arsenal.

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1,086 Block Themes are now available for browsing in the WordPress Theme directory. The latest approved submissions are:

• Trivium by Effe Themes
• FSE Medical Clinic by Creta Themes
• General Food Store by WP Radiant
• Mechanic Car Repair by Titan Themes
• WENS Vivid by WEN Solutions, offering some great front page patterns for restaurants.
• WhiteBlack by Tommaso G. Scibilia. The artist from Sicily, Italy, published his 11th Block Theme since August 2024, that’s about two themes per month. 🎉

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Jan Hoek published the Vital Video Block plugin, a tool to help you with your YouTube video display and avoid slow-downs from background loading.

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Dominik Schilling updated one of my favorite plugins: Public Post Preview with four features:

• Under Settings > Reading Public Post Preview you can now set a different default expiration time.
• It also shows a link icon in the list of posts so you don’t have to go into the edit screen to obtain the temporary link.
• The list view also lists a filter to see only posts with the Public Post Preview link enabled.
• The Preview drop down of the editor also lists the public post preview.

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Colin Newcomer talks you along on getting started with WordPress Patterns. You learn what are Patterns, the synced and the unsynced kinds, and how to management them on your site. The detailed screenshots and instructions make this a great tutorial.

The only missing part is the Synced Pattern overrides that arrived with WordPress 6.6 last summer. This feature allows users to make content-specific changes to synced patterns without altering the underlying layout or design. Nick Diego posted an introduction to overrides in Synced Patterns on the WordPress Developer Blog.

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

Simon Cooke, business development director at HumanMade, discussed in his post How WordPress’ full site editing supports global scalability. In his view, WordPress Full Site Editing (FSE) helps large companies manage websites across different regions more easily. It allows businesses to create consistent design templates while giving local teams flexibility to adapt content. FSE makes it simpler to maintain a unified brand look, support multiple languages, and create websites that work smoothly in different markets. By providing centralized design tools and easy-to-use content blocks, companies can build more efficient and adaptable digital experiences globally.

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Brent MacKinnon, invites you to WooCommerce’s January Developer Office Hours: The Future of WooCommerce Themes on January 22 at 22:00 UTC. Ellen Bauer, WooCommerce’s Product Lead for themes, blocks & patterns, will share insights on theme development and block patterns. She will share the new starter block theme replacing Storefront, discus of block-based theming best practices and customization and answer your questions. The Developer hours will be held on the WooCommerce Slack space in the #developers channel.

More updated from WooCommerce Developer Blog

• Order DataStore Caching — A new approach to optimize WooCommerce performance
• New WooCommerce blocks cart item image filter
• Developer advisory: Block Checkout field entities
• Feedback request: Adding order fulfillments to WooCommerce

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Fränk Klein took a deep dive in how WP_DEVELOPMENT_MODE helps with developing Block themes, as it bypasses the theme.json cache. Learn how to enable it and how to use it. He also offers an array of code snippets for conditional handling in your wp_config.php file, and shares some pitfalls.

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Amor Kumar, principal engineer at WebDev Studios, created the Block Starter Theme, so you can “craft your next WordPress block them with a simple foundation”. This project is targeted toward agencies or developers building tightly controlled themes for clients. To facilitate full control of the editing experience, the following WordPress core features have been disabled: Openverse integration, Core block patterns, Core block styles, and search in the Block directory. The readme file lists how to use it and suggests a particular workflow for building a block theme. It’s definitely a great way to get started.

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In his post How your plugin can customize the WordPress Command Palette, Steve Bonisteel, technical editor at Kinsta, explains what the Command Palette is, and how its API can be used by plugin authors to provide a streamlined interaction with the block editor.

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In his video WP Queries in PHP and JavaScript – Brain Coords provided a tutorial on how to build a custom Avatar block. “I share how I built a custom solution for displaying guest speaker images on my podcast website using WordPress. I combined plugins like Seriously Simple Podcasting and the outdated WP Term Images, then created a custom Gutenberg block to dynamically display speaker headshots.” he wrote.

 “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.

JuanMa Garrido expanded the access to the Block Development Examples on the GitHub Repo. He built a TypeScript app using ReactJS and host it on the WordPress GitHub pages. Each example has its own card, that also shows the contributing author. The list can be filtered by tags. The details view links back to the readme.md file for each individual examples with explanations, code snippets and related resources.

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In his 404th episode of the WPbuilds podcast, Nathan Wrigley interviewed Alan Fuller, of Fullworks Plugins. They discussed Fuller’s journey from corporate life to WordPress plugin development. The conversation covers WordPress’s evolution from shortcodes to blocks, focusing on Alan’s “Display Eventbrite Events” plugin and its challenges, such as documentation gaps and API limitations. Alan also shares insights on developing for tools like Elementor, tackling support issues, and marketing struggles due to social anxiety. He highlights the role of AI in replacing part-time developers and reflects on pricing missteps. The episode explores WordPress development trends and Alan’s experiences with modern collaboration tools like Slack and GitHub.

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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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Celebrating 7 years of Do the Woo

Want to transform your basic WordPress comment section into something that pulls readers into the conversation? The default comments section can feel a bit uninspiring – it’s just text boxes and basic avatars that don’t encourage much interaction.

But with some smart design choices and modern tools, you can create comment sections that make readers want to join the discussion. A well-designed comment area shows visitors their thoughts matter, building a space where meaningful conversations happen naturally.

This guide explores how to enhance your WordPress comments through Gravatar integration, which lets you display verified user profiles and avatars. You’ll learn how to use Gravatar’s features to boost trust and recognition among commenters. For those comfortable with code, we’ve also included tips on styling your comment section with CSS to match your site’s design perfectly.

Ready to build a more engaging community through better comment design? Let’s get started.

Why modernize your WordPress comments? A quick overview

Basic WordPress comment sections can make your site feel outdated compared to platforms where users interact through verified profiles. This affects more than just appearances – it impacts how visitors engage with your content.

Sites with basic comment sections often struggle with:

• Lower return visitor rates, as users don’t feel connected to the community.
• Reduced time spent on pages since there’s less incentive to read discussions.
• More spam comments due to lack of verification.
• Limited user recognition between posts and discussions.

Adding modern comment features changes this dynamic. When commenters can display verified identities, discussions become more meaningful. Users take more care with their responses when their professional profiles are attached. They’re more likely to return to check responses and participate in new discussions.

Quick improvements through tools like Gravatar bring:

• Automatic user recognition across WordPress sites.
• Built-in spam reduction through email verification.
• Professional-looking user profiles that build credibility.

Improving your WordPress comments form with Gravatar

Gravatar is a 3-in-1 solution that can help you create a truly engaging comment section. Let’s look at the different applications. But first – let’s look at what Gravatar truly is and explore its relationship with WordPress. 

First and foremost, Gravatar is a free profile platform by Automattic (the people behind WooCommerce and WordPress.com) that lets users create dynamic online identities that follow them around the Internet. The profiles are connected to the email address, so whenever you use that to register on a Gravatar-integrated site, the user data is automatically pulled (more on that later). 

For example, WordPress.com websites are integrated with Gravatar. When you create a profile with a website built on WordPress.com, your Gravatar information is imported, saving you time and effort throughout the registration process. If you don’t have a Gravatar profile and sign up for WordPress.com, you’ll get one automatically and have it linked to the email address that was used. 

WordPress.org also uses Gravatar but only to pull the profile pictures. 

If someone else writes a comment and doesn’t have a Gravatar profile, they’ll show up with this mystery profile picture or a different avatar that you can change from the settings. We recommend that you enable the Gravatar option and not override the profile pictures – this ensures that Gravatar user who comments on your website will have their avatars show up in your comments section. 

Gravatar is not just about avatars though – people with Gravatar profiles can create in-depth dynamic identities that can capture a wide range of information, from verified social media links, photos, articles, featured articles, and even payment links. As a WordPress author, a Gravatar profile becomes a crucial tool, as showcasing that you are an actual person behind your blog posts boosts the authenticity and authority of the written content and encourages people to engage because they know it’s an actual human being on the other side. 

Letting your commenters display similar levels of information about themselves is equally important – it encourages people interact and voice their opinions through a more legitimate looking profile. This is also something Gravatar can achieve through deeper integration. 

Using the Gravatar Enhanced plugin 

Okay, so you have a Gravatar profile, but it still doesn’t fully show up in your blog posts and pages. This is where the Gravatar Enhanced plugin comes in. It’s also completely free and lets you add customizable profile blocks to any post or page. 

While you can’t add the profile block to the comments section, the Gravatar Enhanced plugin lets you send automated emails inviting commenters to create Gravatar profiles, boosting their presence on your site. You can customize your invitation message, making it clear why Gravatar boosts their credibility as a commenter.

Integrating the Gravatar REST API 

Finally, the Gravatar API offers the most powerful way to integrate your WordPress website with Gravatar, letting you take full advantage of the platform’s comprehensive profile service. You can fully control what level of information you want to import from Gravatar profiles when they sign up with your website. By working with a developer, you can control what information is displayed for each user in a comment thread, and also create accessible and verified user profiles for each active member on your website, built on Gravatar data. This is ideal in many scenarios, such as a forum or online community website.

The integration offers several immediate benefits:

• Users who already have Gravatar profiles see their avatars automatically appear when commenting.
• Email verification happens automatically, reducing spam comments.
• Profile information syncs across all WordPress sites, creating consistency.
• Users can maintain separate personal and professional commenting profiles through multiple email addresses.

However, if you have a simpler WordPress blog and just want to optimize your comments section, you can use WordPress plugins to get simpler Gravatar functionality. Another essential tool here is Jetpack, which comes with Gravatar Hovercards.

These cards display additional information about the commenter without requiring readers to leave the page.

Whichever option you choose, the technical benefits are substantial:

• Reduced spam through email verification.
• Better user recognition across comment threads.
• Privacy controls that let users manage their identity display.
• Automatic profile updates across all WordPress sites.

This integration turns basic comment sections into trust-building tools. When readers see verified profiles and consistent identities, they’re more likely to engage in meaningful discussions. Plus, linking Gravatar profiles with WordPress comments creates a natural bridge between casual readers and active community members.

Styling WordPress comment forms with CSS

If you want more control over how the comment sections work, you could edit their style with CSS. So, here’s a short tutorial on how you can customize a comment form through the WordPress CSS editor. 

1. From your WordPress dashboard, go to Appearance > Editor > Styles. Click on the pencil icon on the right to start editing styles.

2. Click three dots on the top right, then Additional CSS, or scroll to the bottom of the panel on the right to access Additional CSS.

3. Start by adding code for the actual form. You can target it using the class comment–form. We’ll change the background color and fonts, as well as add a rounded colored border. Let’s also style the labels while we’re at it.

.comment-form {
background-color: #fefae0; /* Soft pastel yellow */
border: 1px solid #bc6c25; /* Rich contrasting brown */
border-radius: 8px;
padding: 20px;
font-family: 'IBM Plex Mono', monospace; /* IBM Plex Mono font */
font-size: 16px;
color: #333;
}

/* Style the form labels */
.comment-form label {
font-family: 'IBM Plex Mono', monospace;
font-size: 14px;
font-weight: bold;
color: #555;
margin-bottom: 5px;
display: block;
}

4. Next, we’ll do the input fields, with a background color plus a colored, rounded border.

.comment-form input[type="text"],
.comment-form input[type="email"],
.comment-form input[type="url"],
.comment-form textarea {
background-color: #f8f9fa; /* Light grey for contrast */
border: 1px solid #bc6c25; /* Same border color */
padding: 10px;
border-radius: 4px;
font-family: 'IBM Plex Mono', monospace;
font-size: 14px;
color: #333;
margin-bottom: 15px;
}

/* Style the textarea (comment box) */
.comment-form textarea {
min-height: 120px;
resize: vertical;
}

5. Finally, the submit button, which we’ll give a different color, font, and rounded border.

.comment-form input[type="submit"] {
background-color: #bc6c25; /* Rich brown */
color: #ffffff; /* White text for contrast */
font-family: 'IBM Plex Mono', monospace;
font-size: 16px;
font-weight: bold;
border: none;
border-radius: 4px;
padding: 10px 20px;
cursor: pointer;
}

Put it all together, and here’s what you should expect:

Launch your engagement-focused comment section 

Transforming your WordPress comment section from basic to engaging doesn’t require massive changes. By implementing Gravatar profiles and thoughtful design choices, you can create an environment where readers naturally want to participate.

The combination of verified identities and user profiles shows visitors that their contributions matter. When commenters can display their professional information and verified social links, discussions become more meaningful and spam decreases naturally.

Start by checking that Gravatar is selected as the active avatar service in your WordPress settings. Then explore additional tools like Jetpack for hovercards or Gravatar Enhanced for easy profile integration. For more technical implementations, the Gravatar REST API documentation provides everything needed to build custom solutions.

Remember: A well-designed comment section isn’t just about aesthetics – it’s about creating a space where your community can thrive.

Transcript

On the podcast today we have David Darke.

David is a Bristol-based entrepreneur and long time WordPress user. He is the co-founder of Atomic Smash, a digital agency specialising in WordPress and WooCommerce performance optimisation. Since its founding in 2010, Atomic Smash has grown from a two-person team into a thriving agency known for helping businesses improve their digital platforms with WordPress. The podcast today traces David’s experiences growing the agency and the many highs and lows that he’s been on.

David’s story begins in a business incubator where the affordable desk space facilitated invaluable networking and relationship-building opportunities. Through perseverance and strategic networking, David has grown the agency from these small beginnings to a robust team of twenty professionals.

We talk about the myriad challenges he faced, from overcoming the initial skepticism due to his age, to the trials of managing business growth and client expectations. You’ll hear about the critical role that external business coaches have played in guiding his agency through different stages of growth, and how strategic learning has been pivotal in expanding beyond core web development skills to mastering business acumen and operational strategies.

David also discusses his current role, which involves less hands-on coding and more focus on technical oversight, sales, and strategic client interactions. He shares his insights into the importance of delegation, finding work-life balance, and ensuring his team operates efficiently without overextending themselves.

We also get into the evolving web industry landscape, particularly the integration of AI and SEO into their service offerings, aiming to position his company as a strategic partner for client growth. He emphasises the importance of hiring the right talent, including freelancers, and the necessity of pausing business coaching to implement growth strategies effectively.

Whether you’re an aspiring freelancer, an agency owner looking to grow, or simply passionate about WordPress, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Atomic Smash website

David on LinkedIn

Version 4.2 is coming your way with new hosts and new shows. Plus we are celebrating 7 years of Do the Woo.

Forty-one is a nice birthday because it doesn’t feel like too much pressure. For forty I did a big eclipse thing that ended up amazing, this year I’m replicating what I did a few years ago and celebrating in New York, Houston, and San Francisco.

My birthday today has already been lovely. Saw the amazing Broadway show Maybe Happy Ending (powered by WordPress!) thanks to a suggestion from my colleague Susan Hobbs who’s a connoisseur of musicals. Then did some fun karaoke in K-town. I didn’t realize how much I missed New York! Tonight will celebrate with one of my favorite DJs, Lemurian, who flew up from Tulum. In the spirit of a blog post for my birthday, I’d like to share with you all a blog post I’ve been working on a while inspired by one of Lemurian’s mixes. In 2018 Max (aka Lemurian) played at someplace called Concept and opened with a very interesting track.

Now, the thing that caught my ear was the bassoon. A double-reed instrument that you don’t often hear in the front of things, much less house music. Here is the original track on Spotify:

This lead me down a rabbit hole to an amazing (WordPress-powered) site called Lyrical Brazil that takes the Brazilian Portuguese lyrics and translates them. Please read that entire blog post. It turns out this song was written by a police officer who was shot and then paralyzed from the waist down, then started a Brazilian music school Candeia which was a fixture of Portela samba school. Here’s the lyrics of the song, translated:

Let me go, I need to wander
I’ll go around, seeking
To laugh, so as not to cry (repeat)
I want to watch the sun rise, to see the rivers’ waters flow
To hear the birds sing
I want to be born, I want to live
Let me go, I need to wander
I’ll go around, seeking
To laugh, so as not to cry
If anyone asks after me, tell them I’ll only come back after I find myself
I want to watch the sun rise, to see the rivers’ waters flow
To hear the birds sing
I want to be born, I want to live… (repeat)

Stunning poetry. Made all the better when you understand the context in which is was written.

One of the things I say to my friends is that in lieu of birthday gifts I just want them to publish, whether it’s words, photos, music, or anything. I leave you all with that. Each of us has an incredible story, a unique life experience that is yours and no one else’s. Find a way to express that creatively, and put that on the open web. It’s scary! Vulnerable. But you’ll find once you do that the rewards are better than you ever imagined. 2025 is going to be a weird year, let’s blog through it. Mazel tov!

All birthday posts: 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41.

Happy New Year! 🎆 🙌 🎉🥂

I hope you had some wonderful time with your family or friends over the holidays, and you started re-energized and excited into 2025.

At Gutenberg Times, we, that’s you and me, are now celebrating our seventh anniversary! Although, I started curating Gutenberg updates right after WordCamp Europe in June 2017, I registered the domain Gutenbergtimes.com and started the newsletter on January 14, 2018.

My dear friend, Bob Dunn aka BobWP started the DoTheWoo network around the same time, and we are planning a joined anniversary podcast episode to chat about our journey in the WordPress community. Stay Tuned!

As I just returned from vacation, I am pretty sure I haven’t caught up with all the great things that happened around the block editor. The updates here are pretty cool, though!

More again next week 🤗

Yours, 💕
Birgit

PS: We are not only four weeks away from WordCamp Asia. If you want to meet there, use my public calendar to self-schedule a meeting: bit.ly/bph-wcasia.

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

Jonathan Derosiers has published the final planning information for WordPress 6.8. The 10-person release squad consist of long-time contributors with a ton of experience. Desrosiers also confirmed the schedule, which was earlier proposed by Hector Prieto,:

• March 4, 2025, for Beta 1
• March 25, 2025, for RC 1 and
• April 15, 2025, the general release.

WordPress “6.8 will focus primarily on being a polish and bug fix release. New features will be considered if deemed reasonably ready.” Derosiers wrote.

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Justin Tadlock published the monthly roundup post on the WordPress Developer Blog What’s new for developers? (January 2025). You learn about the new Query total block, updates to styling blocks in themes, Playground updates as wells important update for Plugin developers.

State of the Word

On December 16, 2024, Matt Mullenweg, Matias Ventura, Junko Fukui, and Mary Hubbard delivered the State of the Word 2024 from Tokyo. The WordPress YouTube channel has all three videos for those of us, who could not be in Japan.

• State of the Word 2024
• Q & A with Matt Mullenweg
• STOW Panel Discussions on publishing in the open and the future of WordPress in Japan and beyond.

Nicholas Garofalo published a recap on the WordPress news site: State of the Word 2024: Legacy, Innovation, and Community.

Jyolsna J E posted her recap on the WPTavern. Recap of the State of the Word 2024 

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Gutenberg plugin

Gutenberg 19.9 was released on December 19th. In his post What’s new in Gutenberg 19.9? (19 December) manager Ramon Dodd highlighted:

1. Style Book in classic themes
2. Introducing the Query Total block

Jyolsna JE has the skinny for you via WPTavern: Gutenberg 19.9 Introduces Style Book to Classic Themes

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Gutenberg 20.0 was also released. It’s the 200th release of the Gutenberg plugin. The release post is still in the works but you can read the changelog on GitHub.

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Next week, Tammie Lister and I will talk through the two Gutenberg releases on the next episode of the Gutenberg Changelog. It’s going to be great fun as Tammie was one of the original designers/developers on the Gutenberg team, so the 200th release is a great occasion to talk about the journey in WordPress. Tammie Lister is also the design release lead for WordPress 6.8.

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

Ella van Durpe created an early prototype to Write Books With the Block Editor. The nascent project outside of WordPress is used to create e-books and documents using the Block Editor, even offline. You can export your work in EPUB format for e-book readers like Kindle or as DOCX files. Its features include chapter navigation, cover design, and a demo editor available as a Progressive Web App (PWA). It’s still evolving, with planned improvements like revision history and better file support. Feedback is welcome to shape its development. You can try it out by going to the demo editor and install it as a PWA locally via the installation icon in your browser bar:

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Marko Krstic released his DBlocks Finder plugin for blocks & synced patterns and helps users find and manage Gutenberg blocks and synced patterns within their WordPress sites.

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Anne Katzeff shared in her blog post Convert Content from the Classic Editor to Blocks, the few easy steps to converting content from the Classic to the Block editor. Katzeff also created a video with the steps you can follow along which covers converting blocks one post at a time or Global conversation using the Convert to Blocks plugin by 10up

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Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

Nick Diego published a code snippet on the Developer blog on How to filter the output of a block binding, using using the block_bindings_source_value filter. He provides a practical example of modifying the display of book prices in different currencies based on a URL query parameter.

---

In his post WordPress Themes Need More Weird: A Call for Creative Digital Homes, Nick Hamze advocates bringing back creativity and uniqueness in website design, especially when it comes to WordPress themes. He points out how everyone’s designs are starting to look the same, which kinda kills the vibe of real self-expression. Hamze is urging theme designers to ditch the boring old layouts and go for bold looks that show off strong opinions and suit specific needs. Think of themes like album covers—it’s all about having personality and making that instant visual impact. Overall, it’s a shout-out to designers to try out those unconventional ideas to jazz up WordPress themes and make the whole web scene way more fun and varied!

Theme: Psychedeli by Automattic

In Mastering light and dark mode styling in block themes, Justin Tadlock shows you how you can implement a light or dark mode depending on the visitors system settings. “The color-scheme property and light-dark() function are the foundation of the method used in this tutorial. They are both baseline CSS standards in 2024, so the challenge is making them work with WordPress standards.” Tadlock wrote.

 “Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2025” 
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 |  2024

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.

Eric Karkovack posted on the Kinsta blog on how to Use the WordPress Block Bindings API to power your blocks. The Block Bindings API, introduced in WordPress 6.5, is a significant advancement for WordPress developers. It allows binding data sources to core WordPress blocks, enabling the creation of dynamic websites more efficiently.

For more use cases and more in-depth insights, you can also peruse the WordPress Developer Blog. This page lists all articles on Block Bindings.

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In his video, Create an AMAZING WordPress Carousel with the Interactivity API!, Elliott Richmond takes you along on to build a Slider with the create-block scaffolding tool, using the interactivity api template. You’ll learn in this video:

• Setting up a carousel container and managing context variables.
• Calculating offsets and indices dynamically for smooth navigation.
• Adding seamless transitions with CSS for a polished user experience.
• Reverse-engineering forwards and backwards navigation with ease.
• How to prepare your slider for integration with WordPress settings or database values.

Sounds like a fun programming adventure! Richmond also shared his code on GitHub

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Ryan Welcher also shared a snippet on the WordPress Developer Blog:
How to register a block variation but hide it from the inserter. “In some cases, a custom block is overkill, and a block variation is a better solution. For example, a user in the outreach channel wanted to add an attribute to a block that was only used in a template and, based on the existence of that attribute, add some custom functionality.” Welcher wrote.

Playground updates

This week, and new version of Studio, the WordPress.com local development environment based on Playground, was released. The post Build Locally, Deploy Globally: Meet Studio Sync for WordPress.com has all the details of the new Sync features. You can use it to

• Synchronize local sites with WordPress.com hosted sites
• Take a local site live with a WordPress.com hosting plan.

The Sync feature is available to users with a Business or eCommerce plan.

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In the online workshop, an online workshop on WordPress Playground for developers,, Core WordPress Playground developer, Berislav Brgiacak joined developer educator Jonathan Bossenger to share insights into how developers can leverage WordPress Playground. Their notes are available on GitHub. You’ll learn

• how to configure a playground instance with your custom plugin and theme, and store that in GitHub.
• how to create a blueprint version of the above configuration to share with clients and coworkers.
• about possible use cases to use Playground.

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Nick Diego and Ryan Welcher also tackled Playground in their latest Developer Hours: Everything you need to know about WordPress Playground. WordPress Playground allows users to create fully functional WordPress instances directly in their browser, with no installation or setup required. Beyond spinning up WordPress sites, Playground offered powerful capabilities, from testing plugins and themes to running demos and even supporting app development. No matter how you engage with WordPress, Playground has something valuable to offer. In the session, Welcher and Diego explored tools and workflows for plugin and theme development, demonstrated how to use Playground for testing and support, highlighted key improvements introduced in 2024, and offered a preview of exciting new features planned for 2025.

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Adam Zieliński did some experimentation over the holidays, and has been using WordPress as a git repo, using Playground. As to answer the WHY he wrote: “I want Notion that’s free, offline first, and where I own my data. I also want to collaborate with my wife and my improve group. WordPress is the perfect foundation, the hosted version solves many of my problems, but I really want to version my data as static files.”

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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: Exhibition: The Last Supper Motor world Munich Photo by Birgit Pauli-Haack

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I wrote over on WordPress.org about breaking the status quo with a Joost/Karim fork. It’s a perfect time as Automattic is re-focusing its work while the legal stuff is going on.

Making great software, great product that stands the test of time and not just survives but thrives through monumental technological shifts is incredibly hard. That challenge is part of the reason I love doing it. There is never a dull day, and the reward of seeing the code you wrote used by the most amazing creators in the world is an indescribable pleasure. When I see what people create with WordPress, some days I feel like I’m grinding pigment for Leonardo da Vinci or slitting a quill for Beethoven.

In open source, one thing that makes it even harder to ship great software is bringing together disparate groups of contributors who may have entirely different incentives or missions or philosophies about how to make great work. Working together on a team is such a delicate balance, and even one person rowing in the wrong direction can throw everyone else off.

That’s why periodically I think it is very healthy for open source projects to fork, it allows for people to try out and experiment with different forms of governance, leadership, decision-making, and technical approaches. As I’ve said, forking is beautiful, and forks have my full support and we’ll even link and promote them.

Joost is a self-proclaimed leader in the SEO space, an industry known for making the web better. He asked for and I gave him WordPress marketing leadership responsibility in January 2019 and he stepped down in June of 2019, I think we would both agree in those 5 months he was not effective at leading the marketing team or doing the work himself.

Karim leads a small WordPress agency called Crowd Favorite which counts clients such as Lexus and ABC and employs ~50 people.

Both are men I have shared meals with and consider of the highest integrity. I would trust them to watch any of my 15 godchildren for a day. These are good humans. Now go do the work. It probably won’t happen on day one, but Joost and Karim’s fork, which I’ll call JKPress until they come up with a better name, has a number of ideas they want to try out around governance and architecture. While Joost and Karim will be unilaterally in charge in the beginning, it sounds like they want to set up:

1. A non-profit foundation, with a broad board to control their new project.
2. A website owned by that foundation which hosts community resources like a plugin directory, forums, etc.
3. No more centralized and moderated plugin and theme directories with security guidelines or restrictions are what plugins are allowed to do like putting banners in your admin or gathering data, everything done in a federated/distributed manner.
4. The trademarks for their new project will either be public domain or held by their foundation.
5. “Modernization” of the technology stack, perhaps going a Laravel-like approach or changing how WordPress’ architecture works.
6. Teams and committees to make decisions for everything, so no single person has too much power or authority.

Karim has a similar post. Joost says he has the time and energy to lead:

Now, as core committer Jb Audras (not employed by me or Automattic) points out, within WordPress we have a process in which people earn the right to lead a release:

However in Joost and Karim’s new project, they don’t need to follow our process or put in the hours to prove their worth within the WordPress.org ecosystem, they can just lead by example by shipping code and product to people that they can use, evaluate, and test out for themselves. If they need financial or hosting support is sounds like WP Engine wants to support their fork:

Awesome! (Maybe it’s so successful they rebrand as JK Engine in the future.) WP Engine, with its half a billion in revenue and 1,000+ employees, has more than enough resources to support and maintain a legitimate fork of WordPress. And they are welcome to use all the GPL code myself and others have created to do so, including many parts of WordPress.org that are open source released under the GPL, and Gutenberg which is GPL + MPL.

Joost also is a major investor (owner?) in Post Status (which he tried to sell to me a few months ago, and I declined to buy, perhaps kicking off his consternation with me), so they have a news media site and Slack instance already ready to go. He also is an investor in PatchStack and appears to be trying to create a new business around something called Progress Planner, both of which could be incorporated into the new non-profit project to give them some competitive distinctions from WordPress.

To make this easy and hopefully give this project the push it needs to get off the ground, I’m deactivating the .org accounts of Joost, Karim, Se Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen. I strongly encourage anyone who wants to try different leadership models or align with WP Engine to join up with their new effort.

In the meantime, on top of my day job running a 1,700+ person company with 25+ products, which I typically work 60-80 hours a week on, I’ll find time on nights and weekends to work on WordPress 6.8 and beyond. Myself and other “non-sponsored” contributors have been doing this a long time and while we may need to reduce scope a bit I think we can put out a solid release in March.

Joost and Karim have a number of bold and interesting ideas, and I’m genuinely curious to see how they work out. The beauty of open source is they can take all of the GPL code in WordPress and ship their vision. You don’t need permission, you can just do things. If they create something that’s awesome, we may even merge it back into WordPress, that ability for code and ideas to freely flow between projects is part of what makes open source such an engine for innovation. I propose that in a year we do a WordPress + JKPress summit, look at what we’ve shipped and learned in the process, which I’d be happy to host and sponsor in NYC next January 2026. The broader community will benefit greatly from this effort, as it’s giving us a true chance to try something different and see how it goes.

Social media has become one of the most effective places for building and shaping personal brands, especially on sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram, which allow you to demonstrate expertise, connect with industry peers, gain knowledge, and grow a following. Besides all of this, your social media presence also often serves as a first impression for potential employers, clients, or collaborators, so it’s very important to have a strategy at hand. 

First, you’ll need to recognize that social media can quickly amplify both positive and negative aspects of your brand. Consistent, thoughtful posting can establish credibility and authority, while missteps can rapidly damage your reputation. Your “digital footprint” – the trail of data you leave online – has a lasting impact on your personal brand. 

To help you on this journey, we’ll go through all the aspects of a successful online persona and what you can do to make the most out of your digital presence.

Let’s begin! 

Why consistency across platforms is so important 

Building a strong personal brand relies on maintaining a consistent image across social media platforms. This uniformity helps people recognize and remember you more easily. When your profiles look and feel similar on different sites, you’re reinforcing your brand with each interaction.

Think of it like a jigsaw puzzle. Each social media profile is a piece, and when they fit together, they create a clear picture of who you are and what you stand for. Inconsistencies can muddy the waters and weaken your brand’s impact.

Gravatar is a tool that offers a solution to this challenge. It acts as a central hub for managing your profile information and avatar across multiple platforms. With its “Update Once, Sync Everywhere” feature, you save time and ensure a uniform online presence.

Gravatar integrates with many platforms, including WordPress, GitHub, and Slack. Beyond profile pictures, it syncs your bio, social links, and other profile elements, creating a cohesive online identity that strengthens your personal brand.

How to strategically separate personal and professional profiles 

Keeping your personal and professional online identities separate is a smart move. It helps protect your privacy, maintains professionalism, and allows for more targeted networking. But how do you do this effectively while still maintaining a cohesive personal brand?

Gravatar offers a unique solution by linking identities to email addresses rather than names. This allows you to create and manage multiple profiles easily – one for work, one for personal life, and even one for anonymous use if needed. To set this up, simply use different email addresses for each profile you want to create.

Here are some tips for maintaining consistency between different profiles while catering to different audiences:

• Use similar color schemes or design elements across profiles to maintain brand recognition.
• Adapt your language and content to suit the audience of each profile. Your professional profile might be more formal, while your personal one could be more casual.
• Consider using different profile pictures across your profiles, depending on their intent. For example, a suit for your professional profile, and casual attire for your personal one.

Gravatar’s privacy settings allow you to control what information is visible on each profile. This gives you full control over your data and what you share in different contexts.

How to choose the right platforms for your personal brand

Picking the right social media platforms for your personal brand is like choosing the stage for your performance. You want a venue where your audience gathers and where your talents shine brightest.

Start by understanding what a personal brand really is. It’s the unique mix of skills, experience, and personality you want the world to see. With that in mind, here’s how to choose your platforms:

• Find your audience: Where do the people you want to reach hang out online? If you’re targeting professionals, LinkedIn might be your go-to. For a younger, more visual audience, Instagram or TikTok could be better bets.
• Match your content style: What kind of content do you enjoy creating? If you love writing, X (formerly Twitter) or LinkedIn might suit you. For visual storytellers, Instagram or YouTube could be ideal.
• Align with your goals: What are you trying to achieve? If it’s professional networking, focus on LinkedIn. For thought leadership, X or Bluesky might work well. To showcase your work visually, consider Instagram or Behance.

Popular platforms and their strengths:

Platform	Best for
LinkedIn	Professional networking and B2B connections
X/Twitter	Quick insights and industry conversations
Bluesky	Similar to Twitter, but decentralized
Instagram	Visual content and lifestyle branding
YouTube	In-depth tutorials and vlogs
TikTok	Short-form, entertaining videos

Start with one or two platforms where you can consistently create high-quality content. As you grow more comfortable, you can expand to others. Think quality over quantity: It’s better to excel on fewer platforms than to spread yourself thin across many.

When setting up your profiles, ensure your bio, profile picture, and overall aesthetic align with your personal brand. Use similar usernames and social media handles across platforms when possible to make it easy for people to find you.

And don’t forget to review and update your profiles regularly. Your skills, achievements, and brand messaging will evolve over time, and your online presence should reflect that. 

Understand what success looks like on social media 

Success on social media isn’t just about racking up followers. It’s about achieving your specific goals. Are you aiming to become an influencer, or are you trying to drive conversions for your business? Your strategy should align with these objectives.

If you’re after conversions, focus on engagement rates, click-throughs, and lead generation. For brand awareness, keep an eye on reach, impressions, and share of voice. Remember, vanity metrics like follower count can be misleading.

Quality trumps quantity when it comes to followers. This aligns with Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 True Fans” principle, which suggests that to be successful, you don’t need millions of followers but rather 1,000 true fans who deeply value your work.

These dedicated followers are more likely to engage with your content, share it, and convert into customers or clients. They provide a stable foundation for your personal brand and can be more valuable than a larger group of passive followers.

Deciding on posting frequency and sticking to a schedule

Consistency is key when building your personal brand on social media, and it can only be achieved if you’re realistic about your schedule and the posting frequency that you can maintain long-term without sacrificing content quality. This could range from daily posts to a few times a week, depending on your capacity and the platforms you’re using.

Create a content calendar to plan your posts in advance. This helps ensure a balanced mix of content types and topics. Use scheduling tools to automate your posts, saving time and maintaining consistency.

Experiment with different posting times to find when your audience is most active and engaged. Many social platforms offer insights on optimal posting times for your specific followers.

Keep in mind that it’s better to post high-quality content less frequently than to publish subpar content just to meet a quota. Your followers will appreciate thoughtful, valuable posts more than a constant stream of mediocre updates.

Studying people with similar personal brands

Analyzing successful personal brands in your niche can provide valuable insights. Focus on extracting unique elements from their content strategies, audience engagement tactics, and cross-platform synergies. Use social listening tools and AI-powered analytics to conduct in-depth competitor analysis.

Look for emerging trends and untapped opportunities within your niche by studying patterns across multiple successful brands. The goal isn’t to imitate, but to innovate and adapt these insights to your unique voice and style.

Gravatar’s consolidated profile view can streamline your research process. It allows you to quickly assess an influencer’s digital footprint across various platforms, revealing valuable insights into their overall brand consistency and platform-specific strategies.

An interesting approach is to explore “brand archetypes”. These archetypes, first identified by psychologist Carl Jung, include personas like the Sage (sharing wisdom), the Creator (driving innovation), and the Hero (overcoming challenges). For example, Apple embodies the Creator archetype through innovative design and creative empowerment, while Google represents the Sage through its focus on knowledge and information sharing.

Analyze profiles of successful people in your field to identify which archetype they embody. Look at their content style, messaging patterns, and how they engage with their audience. Don’t just copy them – use these insights to refine your unique voice while staying true to your chosen archetype. Your Gravatar profile can help reinforce this archetype through consistent visual and written elements across platforms.

Mastering the art of collaborations

When thinking about collaborations, many people imagine regular guest posts or social media shoutouts. However, you can go way beyond those. Experiment with innovative formats like multi-platform storytelling campaigns, collaborative product launches, or industry-specific challenges.

When approaching potential collaborators, spend some time on the partnership proposals. Clearly outline mutual benefits and set realistic expectations. After a few tries, start analyzing metrics of successful collaborations to understand their full impact on brand growth and audience engagement.

Gravatar’s verified links feature can help establish credibility when reaching out to potential collaborators. An up-to-date Gravatar profile ensures that collaborators always have access to your latest work and achievements, facilitating more meaningful partnerships.

Consider forming a “collaboration ring” – a strategic alliance of complementary personal brands that regularly support and amplify each other’s content. This approach can create a network effect, expanding your reach and influence exponentially.

Understanding how to use AI strategically in social posting

With time, more and more social media strategies use AI to increase productivity and generate ideas. 

Consider using AI-driven sentiment analysis to fine-tune your messaging. These tools can help you understand how your audience perceives your content, allowing you to adjust your tone and style for maximum impact.

For example, Natural Language Processing (NLP) analyzes audience comments, helping you tailor your content to their interests and concerns. Meanwhile, computer vision AI can optimize your visual content for better engagement.

AI-powered chatbots are also a staple for handling routine follower interactions, freeing up your time for more strategic tasks. And predictive analytics can identify optimal content themes and formats for different platforms and audience segments.

However, it’s crucial to maintain authenticity. Use AI as a tool to augment your creativity, not replace it. The most effective personal brands blend AI-driven insights with a genuine human touch.

When using AI, be transparent with your audience. They’ll appreciate your honesty, and it can even position you as a forward-thinking brand embracing cutting-edge technology.

The importance of a digital footprint management strategy 

Your digital footprint – the trail of data you leave online – is very important in shaping your personal brand. Every post, comment, and like contributes to the digital persona you’re creating. Managing this footprint is essential for maintaining a positive professional image and seizing career opportunities.

• Start by regularly reviewing your online presence across all platforms. Set up Google Alerts for your name to stay informed about what’s being said about you online. 
• Be mindful of what you post and comment on, ensuring it aligns with your personal brand values.
• Create and share content that reinforces your expertise and professional interests. This proactive approach helps shape your digital footprint positively. 
• Utilize privacy settings on social media platforms to control what information is publicly visible.

Remember, your digital footprint has long-term implications. Today’s casual post could impact future opportunities. Strive for a balance between authenticity and professionalism in your online interactions.

How to use social media analytics to your advantage 

Social media analytics are powerful tools that provide insights into your content performance and audience behavior. 

Key metrics to track include:

• Engagement: Likes, comments, shares
• Reach: How many people see your content
• Follower growth: Track growth over time, and take note of anything you post that’s cause a sudden burst in followers.
• Click-through rates on shared links: Which links are getting the most engagement?
• Audience demographics: Age, location, interests

Use these metrics to improve your content strategy. If posts about a certain topic get more engagement, consider creating more content in that area. Most major social media platforms offer built-in analytics tools – familiarize yourself with these.

Set specific goals for your social media presence and use analytics to track progress. This data-driven approach allows you to make informed decisions about your content and posting strategy.

We recommend that you experiment with posting at different times and use analytics to find your audience’s most active hours. 

While numbers are important, they’re not everything. Use analytics as a guide, but don’t let them stifle your creativity or authenticity. The most successful personal brands balance data-driven decisions with genuine, value-driven content.

Elevate your personal brand with Gravatar 

Throughout this guide, we’ve explored numerous strategies to elevate your personal brand on social media. From maintaining consistency across platforms to leveraging AI and analytics, each approach contributes to a stronger, more impactful online presence.

Gravatar is a powerful tool that can be invaluable in building a strong online presence and reinforcing your personal brand. Its most important features include:

• A consistent avatar across thousands of websites
• A centralized profile with your bio and links
• Easy updating: change your Gravatar once, and it updates everywhere

With Gravatar, you save time and ensure consistency in your online presence. It’s particularly useful if you’re active on multiple platforms or managing different online identities.

Taking control of your online image starts with simple steps, and setting up a Gravatar profile is an excellent place to begin. It forms the foundation of a cohesive personal brand across the web, allowing you to present a unified, professional image wherever you engage online.

Like any worthwhile endeavor, your personal brand is an ongoing project. Regularly revisit your strategy, stay open to new tools and trends, and always prioritize providing value to your audience. With persistence and the right tools like Gravatar, you can build a personal brand that truly stands out.

Create your free Gravatar profile today.

WordPress.com launched a new update to Studio this week, and we’re already seeing some buzz.

Studio is our free and open source app for local WordPress development, enabling you to spin up unlimited WordPress sites on your personal computer.

Through its newest feature, Studio Sync, you have complete freedom to:

• Connect your Studio site to and from a WordPress.com production or staging site, included for free in Business and Commerce hosting plans.
• Push and pull changes as a team by connecting a local Studio site to a shared WordPress.com site.
• Synchronize your local and hosted sites at any time with one click.

Studio is an excellent tool to have in your development arsenal, and you can download it for free, explore the docs, and become a contributor on GitHub.