Carl Alexander and Zach Stepek, hosts of Woo DevChat at Do the Woo Podcast, end the year 2023 the only way these two could end a year.
>> The post Looking at 2023 and Moving into 2024 with Carl and Zach in Woo DevChat appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce and WordPress Builder Podcast .
Want to share your favorite episode, host or show? Perhaps you have a burning question or comment. Here's your chance.
>> The post Share a Question or Comment for the Do the Woo End-of-Year Show appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce and WordPress Builder Podcast .
This minor release features 7 bug fixes in Core. The fixes include a bug fix for an issue causing stylesheet and theme directories to sometimes return incorrect results.
This release also features one security fix. Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately.
You can download WordPress 6.4.2 from WordPress.org, or visit your WordPress Dashboard, click “Updates”, and then click “Update Now”. If you have sites that support automatic background updates, the update process will begin automatically.
WordPress 6.4.2 is a short-cycle release. The next major release will be version 6.5 released in early 2024.
For more information on this release, please visit the HelpHub site.
The security team addressed the following vulnerability in this release.
To help the security team and WordPressers around the world, you are encouraged to responsibly report vulnerabilities. This allows vulnerabilities to be fixed in future releases.
This release was led by Aaron Jorbin.
WordPress 6.4.2 would not have been possible without the contributions of the following people. Their asynchronous coordination to deliver maintenance and security fixes into a stable release is a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress community.
Aaron Jorbin, Aki Hamano, Akira Tachibana, Alex Concha, Angela Jin, Anton Vlasenko, Barry, bernhard-reiter, Caleb Burks, Corey Worrell, crstauf, Darren Ethier (nerrad), David Baumwald, Dennis Snell, Dion Hulse, Erik, Fabian Todt, Felix Arntz, Héctor Prieto, ironprogrammer, Isabel Brison, Jb Audras, Jeffrey Paul, Jessica Lyschik, Joe McGill, John Blackbourn, Jonathan Desrosiers, Kharis Sulistiyono, Krupal Panchal, Kylen Downs, meta4, Mike Schroder, Mukesh Panchal, partyfrikadelle, Peter Wilson, Pieterjan Deneys, rawrly, rebasaurus, Sergey Biryukov, Tonya Mork, vortfu
To get involved in WordPress core development, head over to Trac, pick a ticket, and join the conversation in the #core. Need help? Check out the Core Contributor Handbook.
As a final reminder, The WordPress Security Team will never email you requesting that you install a plugin or theme on your site, and will never ask for an administrator username and password. Please stay vigilant against phishing attacks.
Thanks to @angelasjin and @desrosj for proofreading.
by Aaron Jorbin at December 06, 2023 05:03 PM under Security
Nuno Morgadinho from WidgiLabs and Jesper Wallmander from Wallmander Co chat about their experiences and insights into running a WooCommerce Agency
>> The post Agency Client Relations, Team Work and Differentiating with Nuno Morgadinho and Jesper Wallmander appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce and WordPress Builder Podcast .
by BobWP at December 06, 2023 11:02 AM under Podcast Guests from Europe
In this show the organizers for this event share how the idea transpired for the Next-Gen event and the goals to help grow the Italian WordPress meetup community.
>> The post Growing Meetups at the WordPress Community Day, Roma 2023 appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce and WordPress Builder Podcast .
by BobWP at December 06, 2023 08:00 AM under Podcast Guests from Europe
[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how AI is transforming the workplace.
If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea featured on the show. Head to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox. And use the form there.
So on the podcast today, we have Artemy Kaydash. Artemy is a WordPress and WooCommerce freelance developer who focuses on backend development. After realising his passion lay in back-end work, he shifted his focus from full stack development to creating, supporting, maintaining, and editing WordPress and WooCommerce plugins. He also runs a personal website where he shares his expertise through blogging about WordPress and WooCommerce.
Most of this episode centres around the impact of AI on the landscape of web development. We explore the implications of AI tools for web developers, firstly talking about the way that AI systems have rapidly become somewhat essential and the developer’s toolkit.
We discussed the pivotal role AI may have in the future and how it could become an indispensable time-saver, relegating many uninteresting tasks from needing to be carried out manually.
We get into the intersection of AI and web development, highlighting the need for developers to adapt and harness the potential of AI tools to remain at the forefront of innovation.
We deliberate on the potential ramifications of AI on job roles within the WordPress space, underscoring the enduring need for human expertise in deciphering customer wishes, refining marketing strategies, and crafting compelling design experiences.
Although Artamy is not sure how the future will unfold, it’s clear that he sees the present as a pivotal moment in which those who adapt to the realities of AI can flourish, whilst those who do not might be left behind. His perspective allows us to glimpse a future of web development in which AI can be a force for positive change, to be embraced, not feared.
If AI has piqued your curiosity in the past, especially in the WordPress space, this episode is for you.
I am joined on the podcast today by Artemy Kaydash. How are you doing, Artemy?
[00:03:34] Artemy Kaydash: I’m doing good. What about you?
[00:03:36] Nathan Wrigley: Good, thank you. Lovely to have you on. We’re going to talk today about AI, which is a really interesting subject. Something that personally is really fascinating to me. Before we get into that, Artemy, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind just spending a brief moment giving us your biography. How come you’re talking on a WordPress podcast today? What is your relationship with WordPress? What do you do for a living? That kind of thing.
[00:03:59] Artemy Kaydash: So I’m 24 years old. I’m a WordPress and WooCommerce freelance developer. I want to underline that I’m a backend developer. I used to be some kind of a full stack developer, but at some point in my life, I understood that I don’t like working with front end stuff. So I decided to focus on backend and today I create, support, maintain, and edit WordPress and WooCommerce plugins. That’s what I do.
I also have a, my personal website, where I blog about WordPress and WooCommerce. Where I share some of my knowledge. Where I teach people how to do some things with WooCommerce and WordPress. You can visit it. It’s kayart.dev. I guess that’s all you should know about me,
[00:04:45] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. We will link to any URLs or sites or anything like that we mention. We’ll make sure to link to them in the show notes. So if you go to WP Tavern and search for this episode, you’ll be able to find all of the links in there. But we’re going to have a chat today about AI.
Now, I think I should probably say at the outset, I certainly am no expert in any way about AI. I am just curious. And, I would say more than that, I’m fascinated by it. I’m not always particularly enamoured by it. I’m not entirely sure that it’s always the best thing to pursue, but I am fascinated by it.
I don’t know what your credentials are, whether it’s something that you view Artemy, are you into the technology of this? Do you get yourself in the weeds of any code related to this? Or are you like me somebody that’s fascinated by what it’s doing?
[00:05:38] Artemy Kaydash: I think I’m more like you, I don’t know much about how AI works under the hood. I’m a big fan of philosophy and I think a lot about our future and what’s ahead of us. So of course, I’ve been thinking a lot about how AI will change the way we live, the way we work.
So I wrote some posts on LinkedIn about this, especially about the content creators. And you know, I’m excited but I think that there’s a lot of hype and marketing around this topic because you know, when I made my first steps in web development in 2017, some people already told me that in a few years there will be no demand in front end developers because, I don’t know if you ever used the Avocode app.
Avocode allows you to take a PSD template, from Photoshop, and it generates CSS for you. And then we had some tools like Figma, or something like this, that generated CSS on the fly. You create a figure and it generates CSS for it. Even then there were some people that thought that in a few years there will be no demand in HTML and CSS developers. And you know what? We are in 2023 and we still need front end developers.
Front end has become much more complex. We now have things like React, Vue and other front end frameworks. Those tools, they cannot solve these issues. I think that when a new tool comes up that allows you to automate some things, you can go on the next level. You can create much more complex things.
So I think that with AI, at least in the nearest future, that’s something that’s going to wait for us. AI will allow us to automate some simple, sometimes stupid, stuff that we hate to do because it’s boring.
For example, I don’t like writing HTML and CSS. So if ChatGPT is going to generate HTML and CSS for me, that’s great, because I want to focus on things that’s interesting for me. And I don’t think that, at least at the moment, at least in the state that ChatGPT has now, it can replace me absolutely. It can do some stuff for me, but it cannot replace me fully. That’s what I think.
[00:07:53] Nathan Wrigley: That’s one of the interesting things that we’ll probably chat through is whether or not we are going to be out of work, because of the advances in AI and the capabilities that they bring. But that’s a really interesting argument and an argument that I’m sure many people would share the outcomes that you just suggested. That the AI can increasingly take over the mundane, the uninteresting things that you may well have had to do, but also it allows us to do increasingly more complicated things.
So the things that were available to us as web developers 10 years ago, are no longer the things that we would use anymore. And perhaps in the future AI will enable us to do things as yet unimagined. I guess only the future will tell, but you don’t have an intuition, certainly at the moment, that anybody using AI could replace a human? You’re thinking more that it would be able to augment what they can do. Add on to what they can do. Reduce the amount of time it takes them to do things. Have I got that about right? Is that your position?
[00:08:57] Artemy Kaydash: It absolutely already can replace some people, especially if you’re talking about some manual stuff like, there are some people that they are paid for, okay, I have an Excel table and I need you to go through every cell and do something with this. And ChatGPT and similar tools, they can do something like this.
So the less intellectual your work is, the more is probability that your work is going to be replaced. So if you want to be in demand, if you want to keep up with these AI tools, you need to work on your intellectual skills, on your soft skills. You have to work on your, way of thinking. And of course, as a law of evolution, you have to adapt. You either adapt or die, unfortunately.
[00:09:47] Nathan Wrigley: Do you think then that one of the tools that you’ll have to have in the future? And again, let’s rewind the clock. If we were to go back 10 years, your suite of tools would be, I don’t know, some software which enabled you to write the code, plus a bunch of possibly books or online resources to enable you to take that knowledge and put it into your head and so on.
But do you imagine that in the future, using AI will be a prerequisite, an essential tool for anybody, just because, well simply from a time saving point of view, the fact that you don’t have to research everything yourself, and it may be able to fulfill, let’s say, a proportion, 50%, 30%, 90% of the tasks that you need to achieve. That will be an essential skill, aside from all the other things you need to know. You have to know how to write in in React. You have to know how to set up a server, whatever it is. But the AI will be your companion sitting there helping you, and it will be necessary because of the time benefits and all of that that it brings.
[00:10:48] Artemy Kaydash: Absolutely. 10 years ago, there were no package managers, there was no NPM, there was no packages or something like this. And now they are part of our life, and we cannot work without it. So I think that some AI tools, absolutely will be a part of our tool set.
And that’s fine, that’s great. They will allow us to do some stuff that we had to do manually earlier. That’s great. It means that we will have more time to focus on things that we do better. At least for now.
[00:11:16] Nathan Wrigley: Do you have any intuitions or have you played with AI and it fulfill what you needed to do? So I’ve played with AI fairly recently, probably in the last week or so, and I’m continually amazed by the things that it can achieve from a simple text prompt. So for example, the WordPress code base has been out, completely free, for everybody to examine for many, many, many years.
And so there’s no inhibition to all of the AI pieces of software, ChatGPT, and Claude and Anthropic, and all of the different pieces that you can go and look at. All of them have had access to that code. And so when I ask it to do something fairly straightforward in WordPress, something that I would have to sit down and write and think through. I am always bowled over by, a, how amazingly accurate it is in understanding what I wanted it to do. But also how clean the bits and pieces that it returns. Now sometimes it gives me something which is entirely unusable, but on the whole I am utterly amazed by how reliable and effective it is.
[00:12:23] Artemy Kaydash: I use ChatGPT and Bard sometimes. But I usually use it for, I think that every developer has some Stack Overflow threads that they are visiting regularly. Go to see the same answer every and every again, because they cannot remember it. So ChatGPT is good for these things.
Or sometimes I use ChatGPT to generate some boilerplate code for me, and it’s great. For example, as I told you before, there was a case when I worked on Dokan website. Dokan is a multi vendor plugin for WooCommerce. And I had to get some data about a vendor, if I’m not mistaken. And, when I asked ChatGPT to find an answer for me, how can I get this data using PHP and without MySQL, it just hallucinated some answers. It told me to use some methods that didn’t exist. So I still had to go to the source code. I had to find a class I need, and I had to find methods I need.
Or for example, there are some questions that do not have one single answer, you know. For example, how to structure your code? There’s no single answer. How to stylize your code? There’s no single answer. How to structure your classes? What should be the relations with each other? There are no single answer for this. So you have to think about it.
And that’s why, forums like Stack Overflow, they are still the thing, because there are some discussions of real people that have some experience behind their back. And you can read it, and you can make your own opinion about their opinions, and you can find your own way. And I think that ChatGPT, or other stuff, they won’t help you with this. Because it’s your decision, and you will take every blame for every error that ChatGPT will make.
[00:14:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think that’s a really good point. It is definitely not perfect. But in some situations, it is remarkably close to perfect. But still, as we stand towards the end of 2023, you still need a human to judge whether or not what it has given you is perfect.
I do wonder if in the future, the inspection that humans need to apply to what AI gives us back. I do wonder if as time goes on, that will be less and less required, because it becomes more and more accurate. So for example, if we were to just look at the things that were output by, for example ChatGPT, in versions prior to what we’ve got now, there was definitely a difference in the quality of things.
If we were for example just to take the silly example of image creation. Now, I know that’s got nothing to do code, but it’s an interesting example. It was really easy to spot just 18 months ago, like really, really easy to spot that an AI made that picture of a human being. Because look at the fingers, look at the ears, there’s just clearly something is not quite right there.
However, if you were to run the same query today, it would be almost impossible to tell that a human being hadn’t been involved in that, because they have learnt along the way. So I do wonder whether or not we’ll need the humans to have that level of inspection in the future.
And that brings me to another point, this is something that I’ve considered a little bit. You, whilst you’re significantly younger than I am, put it that way, but you’re no longer a child, let’s say that. And you have managed to, since you were a child, you have managed to presumably be employed, be paid, be in work, in order to acquire the skills that you now have. And the reason that you have been able to have that work is because somebody needed to have you, for example, as an intern or as a junior developer, and you have acquired skills in steps, getting more and more difficult work as the years have gone by.
I wonder if the AI, if there’s a risk that it will knock out that bottom layer of people who get into the workplace at the intern level. Because why would we need to employ an intern? Because we now know that the AI can handle pretty much everything that an intern would have done. And so as time goes on, I wonder if there’s going to be a gap in people coming through, learning the technology, learning all the bits and pieces. So I wonder if that’s anything you’ve given thought to?
[00:16:48] Artemy Kaydash: Well, you cannot take a college graduate and make him as the CEO of your company, right? You still have to learn about your business. So yeah, of course AI will take some of their jobs. But you still, you cannot jump through the levels. You have to go your way. You have to learn your, what you need. You have to live through your experience and there is no way to escape this. So I think that the company owners will still take interns. Maybe they will pay them less I guess, maybe, who knows. But still people need to gain their experience. There is no way to escape this.
[00:17:22] Nathan Wrigley: I guess that may be the concern of people who are worried about AI, is that we just have to think through these problems in advance, so that we’re not 20 years from now, looking back and saying, boy, we, we really haven’t had any interns getting through our company and now 20 years on, we’ve got nobody left to fulfill these positions. What do we do?
[00:17:45] Artemy Kaydash: That’s the people natures, right?
[00:17:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, but obviously in your own business, that’s an easy one to fix. You just make that decision. If as a nation or as an industry, we don’t consciously think about that, there is a risk that, Well, it’s okay, the other businesses out there, they won’t farm everything out to the AI. So I’ll be able to employ people who grew up and went through their internship. And that’s fine. But if we’re all doing it, then there’ll just be this deficit of people. Who knows, maybe that won’t be the case.
Let’s move the conversation a little bit. And I’m going to mention the LinkedIn posts that you wrote, that the URLs for those are far too long to give out. So I’ll just say go to the show notes and have a look. But you wrote a couple of pieces over on LinkedIn where you shared your concerns about AI hoovering up, vacuuming up, all of the knowledge that we’ve put out there, so blog posts and what have you. And whether or not there’s like an ethical problem, or something that we ought to be able to stop the AI from doing that.
So do you just want to outline, you don’t really give a position on this. You don’t say whether you think it’s right or wrong, but you highlight it as a potential issue in the future. Do you just want to go through that?
[00:18:52] Artemy Kaydash: Well, of course it’s bad. These AI tools, and the companies behind them, they take your content and use it to make money, and they don’t share this money with you. Of course, it’s bad for me. But you know, it is what it is. You have to accept this rule because you cannot change them. So you have to adapt.
And as I said in those posts, you cannot protect your content like fully. And in one of those posts I mentioned an article on The Register where the site, the CEO of Medium, it’s a huge publishing platform, so they have a lot of content. And I’m sorry, I don’t remember his name, but he told that yeah, we try to block AI crawlers from our website. But still there are some companies that scrape our data, and then they sell this data to OpenAI or Google or someone else.
So, yeah, you can block some AI crawlers, very specific crawlers. But there will come more of them and you cannot block all of them. It’s like an arms racing, right? Websites have been trying to block AI Crawlers for ages, and no one could do this, and you cannot do this. Because when you create a new wall that they have to go through, you will come up with an idea how to go through this wall, and then a new wall and you come up with a new idea. So it’s a constant process, and you cannot stop it.
And I also tell that the only way to at least kind of protect your content is to use some, paywall features or something like this, or create a private group or something like this. As I told you before, you can automate these things as well. So if someone really want to take your content, they will find a way to take your content. And you cannot fully protect it. So you have to find ways to still, still be in demand. For example, I’m a content creator myself, because I have a website. I have a blog.
I blog about the WordPress, and just like Stack Overflow, I noticed that when ChatGPT has become public, traffic on my website has decreased. Of course because some people, they don’t go to Google anymore when they have a software question. They go straight to ChatGPT or Bard or something like this. And they ask these tools these questions. So they don’t need my website anymore.
And those companies just scraped, I think you can find my content in this tools because, I wrote some unique articles, and they couldn’t find any other answers. At least I think this way. So yeah, you have to adapt. And my answer about this is that you have to be unique because your content can be stolen, but your way of thinking, your unique life experience, your unique perspective, and sometimes your craziness. It cannot be simulated, at least for now.
[00:21:53] Nathan Wrigley: That’s a really good answer. I like that little bit at the end. This is interesting. So if we were to rewind the clock to the beginning of the internet, I get the intuition that it was a really different enterprise. The internet came around, hyperlinks were invented, all of a sudden things could connect to other things.
And then blogging began, and it was a real, a real moment of pride for people to set up their blog and put their voice out there and know that if search engines did their job correctly, those search engines would find your content and then people through the search engine would find their way back to you. And I still think that, although you could argue that Google may have interesting ways of surfacing your content that don’t necessarily lead back to your article. Broadly, the intention of a search engine is to go around the web, scrape it, and then for people to find themselves back at your site.
Whereas, although I think it’s a little trickle at the moment, of people who’ve moved away from search engines to ChatGPT, I can see a moment where the trickle becomes a bit of a stream. And then the stream becomes a bit of a tidal wave. Where if you want the answer to something, you’re not just trying to find something to read, but you just want the answer to a problem, then I think you’re right. I think people will increasingly go to the place where that answer will be given back to you, so an AI.
And then the problem is, what’s the incentive in writing anymore? Why would you write if you know for a fact that the vast majority of people will never see what you’ve written. It’s just going to be consumed by an AI, which will spit it out, give you no credit for it. There is a potential for it to ruin the enterprise of writing content in the first place, yeah?
[00:23:48] Artemy Kaydash: Well, you can think about this way, and I think some people will surely do this. But for example, what’s the point of listening to this podcast? We were just two guys, what was the point? But, I guess it means that some people are interested in my experience, in my way of thinking and your experience and your way of thinking.
There are some authors that I read, not because they create, not because they give me some answers, but they make me think. They have some good perspectives. And I can use these perspectives to create some of my own perspectives, right? So, it’s about thinking. It’s about reading something that, as I said before, there are some questions that do not have one single answer. You have to think about it.
So I think that bloggers will be more focused on this type of content, like my opinion on this, or my perspective on this, or what I think about this. Because, at least for now, ChatGPT doesn’t have any opinions. It can share some facts. And you can’t even be sure that these facts are real because it hallucinates sometimes.
[00:24:56] Nathan Wrigley: I do wonder if the AIs maybe need to do a better job of citing where they get things from. So in the example that you gave earlier, where you wrote a few posts, where you tackled something probably for the first time, and if somebody wanted to find the solution, you were the person that had provided it. So you’ve got an intuition that ChatGPT, in this case, had consumed your article, and when you went to find whether they had or not, you could write a question which clearly gave that content that you’d written back to yourself.
I do wonder if the AI could do a better job of saying, okay, the information that we’ve got came from this website and this website. Here’s the links that we used, that we scraped in order to find the content that we’ve just surfaced, which we’re sort of pretending we made up, but we didn’t really. So if they could give more information about where they’re getting their information, maybe that would help, provide that gap between what we have now with search engines, and what we have now with AI, where we don’t really know where the heck it got anything from.
[00:25:59] Artemy Kaydash: In the perfect world, yeah of course they should do this. And as I know, Bing AI already does this. If you ask Bing Chat about something, it doesn’t just give you an answer, it also provides you with some links it used to give this answer, and that’s great I think, But as I said, companies are not interested in you making money, right? They’re interested in making money for themselves. So, maybe if there will be some legal requirements that will make them to cite properly sources they use, and it’s something that would be great. As I said, there are always some workarounds. And I’m not sure if the companies behind these tools will not use these workarounds.
[00:26:43] Nathan Wrigley: That’s a good point. I think you’re right. So you made the point earlier that it doesn’t matter how clever you are in putting up a wall between your content and the internet. At some point you’ve got to allow people to get through that wall, and maybe the AIs will figure out how to get through that wall as well.
Yeah, it’s just an, I just think we’re on the precipice of something, or the opposite. We’re at the foot of a mountain and it’s, rather than it being a precipice that we’re about to fall into, which sounds really bad, maybe it’s a mountain that we’re just at the base of and we’re going to climb towards the summit.
I don’t really know. Certainly you mentioned earlier that certain jobs have already gone. If you were to look at the work of, I don’t know, crafting a spreadsheet, or amending a spreadsheet based upon something that your boss needed doing. That kind of work can now be done by AI. I wonder what your intuitions are as to the level of complexity that is going to be acquired by AI in the next few years.
So you mentioned at the top that you’re 24 years old. Is there any part of you that’s concerned about your job stability in the future? Do you think you’ve achieved a certain level of expertise where you’re immune? Or are you at that point where you’re looking over your shoulder thinking, I really do need to keep an eye on this because I’m afraid for my job? What do you think about that?
[00:28:02] Artemy Kaydash: Well, of course I cannot guarantee that in the future the AI tools could replace me or could not, because, who knows? Five years ago, we couldn’t even imagine that there will be things like DALL·E or something like this, and they do really great.
I don’t know, I really don’t know. The only thing I can guarantee, at least for myself, I’m still going to be a person I am. And I can work on my soft skills and I can adapt. Maybe I won’t be a WordPress developer in five years because ChatGPT will do, will create plugins for me. Well, maybe I will have to find a new job, who knows. But I’m pretty sure about myself, and I’m not pretty sure about my job, right.
[00:28:42] Nathan Wrigley: One of the interesting arguments that I heard recently, it’s a fairly pessimistic argument, I’ll put that out there right at the beginning, but the argument always goes a bit like, well, if we invent new technology, then obviously that will disrupt things, but there’ll always be new opportunities created. So, if 5,000 people lose their jobs over here, what will happen is 5,000 other jobs, or something equivalent, will get created somewhere else. The technology will create a new branch of the workplace that we haven’t as yet imagined, and that will be where those people will go, once they’ve figured out how to adapt and what have you. So it’s this constant process of improvement, alteration, and finding where you fit into this new jigsaw puzzle of the technological landscape.
One of the arguments that I heard recently was that this could be the first time where that argument doesn’t really hold. And the argument went a bit like this. In every other technological innovation, humans have been able to move out of the thing which was innovated into, and they’ve been able to go to somewhere else, because now we’ve got something, there’s some space available. So a good example would be the industrial revolution, where machines were made to move things, drill holes through things, lift things.
In other words, the machines took the physical things that we needed to do, and it mechanized those, and so people moved from the sphere of physical work, and became more intellectual workers. However, if in this current revolution of AI, the AI also beats us at the intellectual enterprise, it’s better than us at thinking, it can do things more quickly. Where do humans go? What’s left? Machines are better lifting things than us. Machines are better thinking through things than us, well, we’re on a permanent holiday then, aren’t we? Don’t know if you’ve got any thoughts about that? If this technology is literally transformational because it’s consuming the last vestige of what we’ve got left, which is our brain, really.
[00:30:45] Artemy Kaydash: Philosophers and economists have discussed this topic even when ChatGPT wasn’t even a thing. So for example, like one of the possible scenarios, okay. We’ll have great AI tools that will do every job for us. Which means that we have like millions and billions of people without a job.
They still need to eat. They need to live somewhere. They need to drink something. One of the possible scenarios is that governments will have to like take some part of those big companies revenue and share it with people like, passive basic income, if I’m not mistaken, it’s called.
[00:31:25] Nathan Wrigley: Universal Basic Income, UBI. Yeah.
[00:31:27] Artemy Kaydash: Right. Maybe this scenario that waits for us. I don’t know.
[00:31:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. The truth is we really don’t know. It’ll be an interesting journey. Let’s just, before we round this off, let’s just ground this back into the WordPress space, because obviously that’s primarily what this podcast is about. What have you experienced over the last 18 months, it literally could have been last week, it could have been something from last year. Can you mention any things in the WordPress space connected with AI that you have found yourself being drawn to, coming back to, using, over the last period of time?
[00:32:00] Artemy Kaydash: In WordPress, I’m not sure. I saw that Jetpack now has some AI features, and some of the most popular SEO plugins already allow you to like generate meta descriptions or something like this. I know about this feature, but I don’t use them for now. And I think that Gutenberg has some potential for AI features.
Elementor, I actually used Elementor AI features, and Divi AI features. It’s not perfect right now, but I think it’s great that you can tell those builders, like I want to have a section with an image, and a text in the center of it, and it generates it. You didn’t have to code it. You didn’t have to write HTML and CSS what I had. So these tools can be very useful in this case. And I think that Gutenberg may have something like this.
[00:32:50] Nathan Wrigley: I think the content piece, the creation of content, just getting yourself over the hurdle of that blank page. If it can create some content for you, which then you can tweak, make it your own. But you’re right, the whole enterprise of laying things out, once you’ve done that a hundred times, it’s probably not as interesting as it was the first time. And if you can get the AI to do those kinds of things, and then you adapt it within the tool that you’re using, whether that’s a page builder or the block editor or whatever. Yeah, that’s really interesting.
And I think we’re moving into a future where the whole site is potentially under the purview of AI. The moment you first log into WordPress, it seems like there’s a lot of tools coming down the pike at the moment that will ask you a series of questions. It’s like an onboarding to the creation of your website, and based upon the answers that you give it, it will create a bunch of pages. An about page, a contact page. It will style it. It will give it colors. It will put content in there, which is not the content that you want, but it approximates what you want.
It knows, for example, that you’re a baker. And so it puts in pictures of baking, and it will have text which is adjacent to the baking industry, and that kind of thing. So I feel that all of that is coming. And again, I guess it sends us right back to the beginning of our conversation. Whilst that’s brilliant on the one hand, it does also raise concerns about the long term future of many of the jobs that we’ve been doing for the last 10 or 15 years and whether or not we need to adapt.
[00:34:21] Artemy Kaydash: As I said before, we can use these tools as our tools, not like our replacements, right. So for example, if I need a website, and I need a good website that’s going to attract some customers, I still need to have an understanding of what people are looking for, what are their preferences?
I need to understand some marketing stuff, some design stuff. Yeah, I think that if you want a basic website, of course you can already use some of these tools to create this website. But they won’t be perfect. they won’t be so detailed for a specific customers you try to attract. And in this case you need designers, you need marketers, you need developers, that’s going to take this basic website and they will make a perfect website from it. It will allow you to spend less money on this, but you still need an expert’s perspective on this.
[00:35:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think you’re right. It’s easy to forget because the things like ChatGPT, because their responses are so really remarkable, it is easy to forget that basically at its heart it isn’t yet, I say yet, it isn’t yet intelligent. It mimics intelligence. It’s giving us the next word and the word after that and the word after that, or the pixel next to that and the pixel next to that, whatever it may be.
And it mimics brilliantly based upon the consumption of lots of previous human knowledge. But you’re right, it doesn’t cut to the heart of what a human can do. And the human having more experience about, it’s not just a website. It’s a website where we have to throw SEO, in because that’s a piece of the puzzle. We have to throw in the marketing. We have to throw in what humans do, because UX and UI, that’s important as well, if we want people to actually make use of this website. It’s got to behave in a certain way.
It’s easy to forget that as of 2023, no AI is capable of taking this job on, it can make things look nice. It can pretend to be intelligent, but as yet, it truly isn’t. And so, yeah, adapting, being novel, creating a new future for yourself based upon what the AI can bring seems like the road to go.
Artemy, thank you so much for joining us today. Just before we leave, if people have been intrigued by this conversation and they want to talk to you about AI or anything in particular, is there a place where we could send them? I will, of course, link to your website, but you may want to mention that again, but is there like a social network that you use that you want to drop? Anything like that.
[00:37:03] Artemy Kaydash: My website contains all social links I use. You can also try to connect me on LinkedIn or you can drop me an email.
[00:37:10] Nathan Wrigley: Artemy, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. I really appreciate it.
[00:37:16] Artemy Kaydash: Thank you.
On the podcast today, we have Artemy Kaydash.
Artemy is a WordPress and WooCommerce freelance developer who focuses on backend development. After realising his passion lay in back-end work, he shifted his focus from full stack development to creating, supporting, maintaining, and editing WordPress and WooCommerce plugins. He also runs a personal website where he shares his expertise through blogging about WordPress and WooCommerce.
Most of this episode centres around the impact of AI on the landscape of web development. We explore the implications of AI tools for web developers, firstly talking about the way that AI systems have rapidly become somewhat essential and the developer’s toolkit.
We discussed the pivotal role AI may have in the future and how it could become an indispensable time-saver, relegating many uninteresting tasks from needing to be carried out manually.
We get into the intersection of AI and web development, highlighting the need for developers to adapt and harness the potential of AI tools to remain at the forefront of innovation.
We deliberate on the potential ramifications of AI on job roles within the WordPress space, underscoring the enduring need for human expertise in deciphering customer wishes, refining marketing strategies, and crafting compelling design experiences.
Although Artamy is not sure how the future will unfold, it’s clear that he sees the present as a pivotal moment in which those who adapt to the realities of AI can flourish, whilst those who do not might be left behind. His perspective allows us to glimpse a future of web development in which AI can be a force for positive change, to be embraced, not feared.
If AI has piqued your curiosity in the past, especially in the WordPress space, this episode is for you.
LinkedIn post #1 mentioned in the podcast
LinkedIn post #2 mentioned in the podcast
by Nathan Wrigley at December 05, 2023 03:00 PM under podcast
Robert Abela from Melapress shares his story of rebranding his business and also shares some insights into the under-rated user roles in WP.
>> The post Rebranding Your WordPress Plugin Business with Robert Abela appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce and WordPress Builder Podcast .
by BobWP at December 05, 2023 08:32 AM under Podcast Guests from Europe
The WordPress Security Team is aware of multiple ongoing phishing scams impersonating both the “WordPress team” and the “WordPress Security Team“ in an attempt to convince administrators to install a plugin on their website which contains malware.
The WordPress Security Team will never email you requesting that you install a plugin or theme on your site, and will never ask for an administrator username and password.
If you receive an unsolicited email claiming to be from WordPress with instructions similar to those described above, please disregard the emails and indicate that the email is a scam to your email provider.
These emails link to a phishing site that appears to be the WordPress plugin repository on a domain that is not owned by WordPress or an associated entity. Both Patchstack and Wordfence have written articles that go in to further detail.
Official emails from the WordPress project will always:
@wordpress.org or @wordpress.net domain.
The WordPress Security Team will only communicate with WordPress users in the following locations:
The WordPress Plugin team will never communicate directly with a plugin’s users but may email plugin support staff, owners and contributors. These emails will be sent from plugins@wordpress.org and be signed as indicated above.
The official WordPress plugin repository is located at wordpress.org/plugins with internationalized versions on subdomains, such as fr.wordpress.org/plugins, en-au.wordpress.org/plugins, etc. A subdomain may contain a hyphen, however a dot will always appear before wordpress.org.
A WordPress site’s administrators can also access the plugin repository via the plugins menu in the WordPress dashboard.
As WordPress is the most used CMS, these types of phishing scams will happen occasionally. Please be vigilant for unexpected emails asking you to install a theme, plugin or linking to a login form.
The Scamwatch website has some tips for identifying emails and text messages that are likely to be scams.
As always, if you believe that you have discovered a security vulnerability in WordPress, please follow the project’s Security policies by privately and responsibly disclosing the issue directly to the WordPress Security team through the project’s official HackerOne page.
Thank you Aaron Jorbin, Otto, Dion Hulse, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and Jonathan Desrosiers for their collaboration on and review of this post.
The People of WordPress series shares inspiring stories of how people’s lives can change for the better through WordPress and its global community of contributors.
Artemy Kaydash discovered that working with WordPress has opened possibilities greater than he imagined. For him, the “active, responsive, and enthusiastic community” makes the software fresh and alive with many ways to experiment and practice adapting it for clients’ needs.
Back-end development with WordPress has proven to be a rewarding career choice for Artemy. He believes developers can inspire others to choose the same career path by sharing the opportunities and satisfaction of working with the content management system (CMS).
Learning new software can be daunting, but Artemy realized that learning with and from inspiring people makes a real difference: “I vividly remember my first WordPress experience. I was confused, had many questions, and was desperately trying to understand how to do the most simple things.”
Working initially in a small agency in Ukraine, Artemy had basic HTML/CSS skills and had just started learning PHP development. His senior colleagues helped him take his first steps in web development and were patient with his questions.
The agency director later gave him the responsibility of creating a WordPress website for a friend. He recalls being nervous, as he was not yet confident in his PHP skills. Colleagues reassured Artemy as he worked, and he went on to build a career in international web development.
Like many others, Artemy found that experimenting with WordPress intrigued him, and he wanted to learn more about it. Looking back, he said: “The first theme I built was awful. It was composed of my own creative solutions and code snippets I found in searches. It had lots of bugs, but as people say, ‘the first pancake is always a bit tricky.'”
Artemy is a great believer in reflective learning, going back and reviewing a piece of development. He said: “No matter how bad it was, it was my first experience, and I learned a lot about the basic concepts of WordPress. That’s why I believe that learning by doing is the best way to learn something new.”
He added: “My advice to others is don’t be afraid of doing something awful when you create something for the first time. It’s okay. We’ve all been through that initial phase.”
“It’s nice to have a mentor when you learn something new. Luckily, you don’t need a person sitting next to you anymore. All of us have got the best mentor possible: the Internet. If you don’t know how to do something, then search for how other people have done the same thing,” Artemy said.
“No wonder some say that one of the most required skills of every developer is the willingness to learn and to know how to search for information. This is one of the reasons WordPress is one of the best options for beginners. Now there is so much more information and help available to learn, more than there was when I first began.”
Artemy feels that the willingness of others to share their experience and problem-solve together is a big strength of the WordPress community and also the reason for its ongoing success: “When you stumble upon a problem, there’s a high probability that someone already asked the same question on one of the forums or websites. If you’re lucky enough, someone already wrote a post about your problem with a great explanation of how to solve it with examples and code snippets.”
WordPress is not a software with strict limits, and it can be adapted and used in many different ways by beginners and advanced developers.
I like to learn something that excites me and makes my brain work. With WordPress, I am able to find interesting and creative solutions.
There are so many new things to learn that Artemy decided to stay in web development, and he sees it as a perfect channel for his creativity and abstract thinking. It may seem very different from his initial education in literature, sociology, and philosophy. Still, he has found those studies sharpened his skills for understanding, communicating, and working with clients on creative solutions to challenges.
Artemy enjoys the client side of his work and interacting with different studios and agencies. His international work allows him to use WordPress and WooCommerce in many different environments, both large and small, which keeps the software exciting. He said: “I believe if you want to learn something you have to practice using it a lot. Open source is a big advantage in this.” Artemy found that the more he experiences various sites and clients, the more flexible and helpful he can be in helping them find the right solution.
A willingness to share and grow skills together is what open source environments champion. This collaborative environment inspired Artemy to focus on using WordPress professionally and to share what he learned. “There is a lot of free code and snippets available for anyone to use. I have been grateful to all of the people who have written answers on sites like Stack Overflow, written blog posts, created free plugins, and other helpful materials. It made me want to help others when I was able to.”
In August 2021, Artemy began blogging about using WordPress: “I like to think that this way I am repaying my learning debt for all the content I have consumed. It makes me happy to see that people really read my posts, and it helps them solve their WordPress problems. So, today, when I face a problem and can’t find the solution, I think it might be a great idea for a new post!”
He also likes to keep up with how other people use WordPress by visiting Stack Overflow, WordPress Facebook groups, and other communities where people ask questions almost daily. He helps where he can in those channels or gains inspiration for new content. He believes Learn.WordPress.org and the Developer Blog are valuable resources for beginners and more advanced developers too. As those resources grow, they will increasingly become a place where others can share their development knowledge and use cases.
Artemy encourages everyone to become a part of the WordPress community. “There are a lot of opportunities for everyone,” he said. “You can help with the translation of your favorite plugins or themes. You can create your own plugin or become a contributor to an already existing open source plugin. You can write tutorials. You can write reviews helping other people to choose the best option for them. You can help people on support forums.”
Every contribution, big or small, makes WordPress better. It is a great experience to be part of it.
Help share these open source contributor stories and continue to grow the community. Meet more WordPressers in the People of WordPress series.
To discover more about how to use WordPress, and start your own story, visit Learn.WordPress.org.
Thanks to Artemy Kaydash for sharing about his adventures in WordPress, and to Abha Thakor, Nalini Thakor, Meher Bala, Mark Smallman, Nicholas Garofalo, Chloe Bringmann, and Mary Baum for interviews, editorial, images, and reviews.
This People of WordPress feature is inspired by an essay originally published on HeroPress.com, a community initiative created by Topher DeRosia. It highlights people in the WordPress community who have overcome barriers and whose stories might otherwise go unheard. #HeroPress
by Abha Thakor at December 04, 2023 02:28 PM under People of WordPress
BobWP from Do the Woo will once again attend State of the Word. The SOTW 2023 will be in Madrid this year to celebrate Spain's WordPress community.
>> The post Do the Woo is Headed to State of the Word 2023 in Madrid appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce and WordPress Builder Podcast .
Howdy,
The Winter in Munich comes with big steps. If you are interested, I shared a photo from last night on X (former Twitter) . I am all excited as I haven’t seen that much snow since I visited a friend in Vancouver in 2021, but that was only for a couple of weeks. Now I have to live in this weather. 🥶 I might venture outside long enough to take some more pictures. Stay tuned.
In this edition, I share a ton of links to updates about tools, plugins and themes, tutorials and how-to articles. I have a feeling, I also missed a few, so please notify me, so I can add them next week.
Wishing you and your loved ones a Happy Holiday season 🎄 And if you don’t celebrate, have a wonderful weekend!
Yours, 💕
Birgit
Monday, I was on the panel of the 277th episode of This week in WordPress, Mysterious cosmic rays -together with host Nathan Wrigley, Michelle Frechette, Wendie Huis in t Veld, and Jeroen Rotty. We covered, the new feature of Live preview for the plugin directory, with a shout-out to Alex Shiels and the meta team, and also, as a surprise to me about Keeping up with Gutenberg Index, the call for speakers and diversity efforts for WordCamp Europe was also a topic, as was the new Showcase on the .org site and the new line-up of shows on the Do the Woo network. Participating on the panel is a fun way to start a week in the WordPress world. Don’t be shy, 🙂 connect with Nathan Wrigley and see when there is a free slot on the show. You definitely should subscribe to the YouTube channel and the Podcast.
Are you looking for a State of the Word watch party near you? A few are already planned. Take a look at the events landing page. The countdown will start soon: December 11, 2023, at 15:00 UTC Matt Mullenweg will give the State of the Word keynote talk directly from Madrid, Spain. It’s the first time it is broadcast from outside the US.
It will be livestreamed on YouTube on the WordPress channel. A Q & A section will follow, where Mullenweg will answer questions previously submitted to ask-matt@wordcamp.org. You will be able to submit questions during the event via the Slido App. The QR code will be available on the day of the event.
🎙️ Latest episode: Gutenberg Changelog #93 – Gutenberg 17.1, Command Palette, Data Views and Grid Layout – a chat with Isabel Brison
Gutenberg 17.2 RC1 is now available for testing. The stable release will come out on December 6th, 2023.
Save the date! Hallway Hangout: Let’s explore WordPress 6.5 on January 16 at 21:00 UTC. Anne McCarthy and Saxon Fletcher will talk through some of what’s to come in the next WordPress release, with a proposed schedule for March 26th. This is being shared early to help encourage more folks to tune in and to build some excitement for this next release.
On “The WordPress Way” show, Abha Thakor chatting with Anne McCarthy and Bud Kraus About all things WordPress 6.4 Great conversation that goes in a lot of fun and insightful directions with these three.
Aki Hamano created the Responsive Image plugin. It adds settings to the Image block to display different images depending on the width of the screen. He cautions you to use it on a production site, as it’s under active development and might change behavior with new versions.
In the latest video, How To Create a WordPress Image Gallery, Ellen Bauer of Elma Studio gives you a look behind the scenes on how she built the demo page for the style variation in their latest block theme, Moog.
If you want to test the Gutenberg Nightly plugin, but don’t want to set up a test site, you can now use it with a WordPress Playground instance. Head on over to the Gutenberg Nightly & Playground page on my personal tech blog and click on the Get Started button. It’s a proof of concept for now. I still need to add the daily automatic deployment of the build.zip file to the site. Please let me know what you think about it and how you use it.
Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s trunk branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.
Have you been using it? Hit reply and let me know.
Seth Rubinstein of Pew Research Institute announced on X (former Twitter) that he just released a small plugin to add responsiveness to the core group block. (GitHub)
Michelle Schlup-Hunt published her base Full Site Editing theme, that is meant to be used to build other projects on top of, but probably simple enough to use as-is too: Alicorn-Theme (GitHub)
The fine folks at 10up, just released the 1.1.3 version of their Block for Apple Maps, which integrates Apple Maps directly into your WordPress site. It’s a mighty block with a ton of features to create customized maps right on your WordPress site. You would need to have an Apple ID and sign up for their Developer program to get the right API keys, though. The code is available in the GitHub repo
Ben Ritner of Kadence announced the arrival of the Advanced Query Loop block to their pro-version of the plugin. It’s an enhanced version of the core query loop block, incorporating many user-requested features. It allows you to specify which post types and taxonomies to display, along with the number of posts per page. Not only that, but it also comes with options to custom transition animation which can be used when viewers click between pages, search, or apply filters on the front end.
If you are not a Kadence Blocks customer, or only use the free version, there is also the Advanced Query Loop available by Ryan Welcher. It might not be as polished and as frontend oriented as the Kadence version.
In his post How to show the “Choose a Pattern” modal by default on new pages, Brian Coords walks you through the few steps to create a full-page layout patterns for your theme or site.
“Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2022”
A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test, and Meta team from Jan. 2021 on. Updated by yours truly. The index 2020 is here
With his post, Jamie Marsland helps you Understanding the theme.json File in a WordPress Block Theme and he breaks down the various sections and how you can configure them. Marsland also added a section on how to lock certain areas down for end users, so they won’t change important design settings.
Mary Baum published the 3rd part of the Series, Make your site’s typography make a statement. A great read—four simple steps to your best body copy ever, and she provides code examples for theme.json on how to combine settings of measure, line height, spacing to make your text as readable as possible.
“For now, let’s leave it at this: if you set a gray wall of type, your reader has to want your information very urgently before they’ll slog through to the end. If you break up your copy into approachable chunks, every subhead has a chance to persuade your reader to go on and read further. “
Mary Baum, on the Developer Blog
Brian Gardner shared a designer’s insight into Gradients and how to use them in WordPress Blocks. Default Gradients in the WordPress Block Editor. Anyone who listened to the Gutenberg Changelog podcast knows, I am a big fan of gradients, and so I am delighted, they are now available for almost all Core blocks.
Justin Tadlock shared in on the fun of Styles, patterns, and more with the Details block. The Details block combines two HTML elements: <details> and <summary>. It is an HTML-native way to show and hide content: the summary part is a title that hides the details until your user clicks on it to trigger a reveal of the details. It can be used for various use cases, on your website. After covering the out-of-the-box styles of the block, Tadlock shows you how to adopt its look and feel for a Spoiler section, and a list of FAQs.
There have been a few quality-of-life improvements to the Create Block Theme plugin over the course of the WordPress 6.3 and 6.4 releases. In this tutorial, Jonathan Bossenger gave a brief introduction to these improvements.
On Thursday, December 7, 2023 – 14:00 UTC, Jonathan Bossenger will introduce attendees to the new WordPress Interactivity API. The main goal of the Interactivity API is to provide a standard and simple way to handle the frontend interactivity of Gutenberg blocks. This standard would make it easier for developers to create rich, interactive user experiences, from simple cases like counters or popups to more complex features like instant search, or carts and checkouts. In this session, you will learn more about this new developer API, through a live coding example. Sounds like great fun!
In his article Block Notes: Generate a Reference to a Block, Tom McFarlin explains the benefits of generating block references and how they can be utilized in block development. He provides code examples and step-by-step instructions on how to create a reusable block reference using JavaScript and jQuery.
Block extension plugins in WordPress are quick and straightforward to build and are quite formulaic once you have built a few. During the latest Developer Hours: How to extend Core WordPress blocks, Ryan Welcher and Nick Diego walk through building an extension for the column block that allows users to reverse the display order on mobile devices. It uses JavaScript on the front end for accessibility. You’ll learn three ways on how to do this: a Block Style, a Block variation and a custom block. The example code is available on GitHub.
Questions? Suggestions? Ideas? Don’t hesitate to send them via email or send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.
For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com
Featured Image: A Slice of Rainbow Cake by Ajith R Nair
Don’t want to miss the next Weekend Edition?
by Birgit Pauli-Haack at December 02, 2023 06:08 AM under Gutenberg
How much can ChatGPT tell me about WooCommerce, and doing the Woo. Well, I found out and am sharing it in this weeks WooBits.
>> The post ChatGPT Told Me How I Can Do the Woo appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce and WordPress Builder Podcast .
Ian and Philip from Kanuka Digital talk about WooCommerce, Magento, web specializations and the open source community.
>> The post Working on Different Open Source Platforms and More with Ian Gordon and Philip James Wylie appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce and WordPress Builder Podcast .
We are thrilled to unveil the latest updates to Gravatar, better empowering you to personalize and own your online identity. Today, we introduce a new Profile Editor, three new profile fields, and enhanced Privacy settings for all users.
Gravatar stands for “Globally Recognized Avatar” and is your digital signature across countless websites. By associating a single avatar image to your email address, Gravatar makes maintaining a consistent online presence simple.
Having gained popularity as a way to display avatars in blog comments, Gravatar has since extended its reach across the web — you’ll find your Gravatar in Slack, Open AI, Salesforce, and more. In addition to the avatar, you can build a free online profile to share with those you meet, bringing together all your social media and web accounts.
We have completely redesigned the Profile Editor, providing an intuitive interface to customize and preview your Gravatar profile. Express yourself by adding a bio, verifying ownership of your social profiles, adding links, and more. The new Profile Editor lets you curate your online persona, making it easier for others to discover and connect with you.
It is faster, works great on mobile devices, and with this update, you can change the URL of your profile page too.
Log in at gravatar.com now to try out the new editor.
We’ve added new privacy settings that when enabled will ensure your profile data is private. We’ve also added new settings for users who want to discourage search engines from crawling and indexing their profiles.
We believe in transparency and empowering users to fully control their digital profiles. With many of the websites you use, there is confusion about the information being collected, how it is used, and when it is shared with third parties. As more Gravatar features are rolled out, you’ll see how we are flipping that model on its head by offering a transparent and open profile experience that puts you in the driver’s seat of your online identity.
There are three new fields available in your profile, all of which were popular requests we’ve received.
You asked. We delivered:
If you’re paying close attention, you might notice that the profile image above looks a bit different from what you’re used to. We’ll be introducing some design improvements to public profile pages in the next few weeks.
We’ve got more exciting stuff in the pipeline that we can’t share just yet, but we’d love to hear from you. Drop a comment below with your thoughts and feedback!
[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case creating materials to help other people learn about WordPress.
If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you could do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the form there.
So on the podcast today, we have Pooja Derashri. Pooja is a co-founder of WPVibes, a plugin development company based in India. With a passion for WordPress, Pooja has been actively involved in the community since 2013. Her journey as a contributor began in 2017, when she attended her first local WordCamp. Her expertise and dedication have earned her various key roles in the WordPress ecosystem. She currently serves as a co-team rep for the training team, and GTE for the Hindi locale. In addition, she holds key positions in the WordPress release squad for version 6.3 and 6.4, where she headed up the test team.
Pooja was on the podcast a few weeks ago talking about diversity, but this time the focus is on creating learning materials for WordPress.
We begin discussing Pooja’s background and her involvement with the training team. She shares how she stumbled upon the training team during a WordCamp event, and got started by finding a simple spelling mistake in a lesson plan. From there she became more involved with the training team and gradually took on roles such as reviewing code and leading the test team.
We get into the importance of training materials in helping new users understand and navigate the WordPress platform, highlighting the learn WordPress website. Pooja emphasizes that contributions to the training team can be as small as reviewing existing content, or as involved as creating new lessons or video tutorials.
If you’re curious about how to get started with the training team, Pooja explains the comprehensive onboarding program available in the team’s handbook. Additionally, there’s a mentorship guide program for one on one guidance for new contributors. Whether you have a few minutes or several hours to spare each week, there’s a place for everyone to make a start.
A key topic of the discussion is the need to keep the training materials up to date, as WordPress is a dynamic and ever-growing software. Pooja explains the team’s process of reviewing and updating content, particularly in light of new WordPress releases, and frequent changes in terminology.
We also talk about the importance of translations, introducing the opportunity for contributors to help with translating materials into different languages. Making WordPress accessible to a global audience.
Towards the end, Pooja highlights the supportive and collaborative nature of the training team. She shares her experience of making friends and connections across the globe while contributing to the team. There’s a sense of community and camaraderie amongst the contributors, making it an enjoyable journey for all involved.
If you’re curious about helping others learn WordPress, this episode is for you.
If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
And so without further delay, I bring you Pooja Derashri.
I am joined on the podcast today by Pooja Derashri. Hi, Pooja.
[00:04:27] Pooja Derashri: Hello, Nathan.
[00:04:28] Nathan Wrigley: It is so nice to have you back. You were on the podcast just a few weeks ago now, talking about something completely different. We’ll point you in the direction of that episode in the show notes. But today, Pooja, we’re going to be talking about learning WordPress. About the training team and about the Learn WordPress website and resources.
Just before that, for those people who didn’t hear the previous episode, would you just give us a short biography? Tell us a little bit about yourself, your journey with WordPress and so on.
[00:04:59] Pooja Derashri: Yeah, sure. My name is Pooja Derashri and I’m from Ajmer, a beautiful city in India. I’m a co founder of WPVibes, a plugin development company. I’m also an active contributor to WordPress community. I served as a training team representative for the past two years, and now I’m serving as a test team rep. I was also in the WordPress release squad for 6.3 and 6.4 version, where I led the test team.
[00:05:27] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. That’s really great. So obviously you’re very, very committed to WordPress. And one of the big things about WordPress is getting people to understand how the software works. If you’re like me, and like you, Pooja, I suspect that it’s pretty obvious what to do with WordPress. You’ve used it an awful lot before, and you’re committed to it, and you understand how it all works.
But people who are new to the platform, or people who are trying to explore something that they haven’t used with it before, obviously have to learn a little bit about how that works. And it may be that people do not know. But there are training materials that are being created over at Learn WordPress. I will give the links in the show notes.
And that is being done and coordinated by the training team. Would you just tell us a little bit about how you got involved with the training team? When did you begin your journey and what kind of things have you been doing, personally, with training and learn materials?
[00:06:26] Pooja Derashri: Yes. Before telling me about my involvement, I would like to tell about how I got started contributing to the training team. I was attending a WordCamp, WordCamp Ahmedabad. There was a contributor day. There are several teams over there, and I decided to learn more about the training team.
On that day, Chetan Prajapati, the table lead of training team, guided me about what is Learn WordPress, and how I can contribute to it. So he guided me to review some lesson plans. When I was reviewing the lesson plans, I found a spelling mistake in one of the lesson plans. And I suggested a correction, simple correction. That was my first contribution to the team.
Basically I had a development background, so I was not sure how I can use my skills in creating content, or something like that. So I was not sure how I can get involved with the training team more, where all other team members were working around content.
But at that time Courtney Robertson and Hauwa Abashiya were the team reps. And the whole team was working on the initial launch of the Learn WordPress .org website. They, guided me on how I contribute to reviewing code in lesson plan. That was my cup of tea and I am fascinated about it. So I joined the forces, at the time, and soon felt very comfortable with the team.
Basically the training team overall helped me a lot in learning and growing. With the team’s help, I gradually started feeling more confident and part of the inaugural team. That time with my consistent contribution, or my involvement with the team, I was nominated and selected as a team rep back in 2022.
[00:08:09] Nathan Wrigley: That’s absolutely fascinating. So your entire journey started out by spotting a spelling mistake, and it grew from there. That’s lovely. But it also points to the fact that you don’t need to do something really seismic. You don’t have to be involved in the training team. You don’t have to do anything super major, it is possible to be involved to do little things.
You don’t have to dedicate absolutely ages of your week over to this. Would that be right? There’s no commitment in terms of time, or the amount that you’re going to do. Making little changes is just as important as contributing in a big way.
[00:08:45] Pooja Derashri: Yes, definitely. It was started just with his spelling mistake correction. And now I’m more involved with the administrator related things, running weekly meetings with other co-team reps, posting monthly updates, monthly newsletter, reviewing other team’s content, other team members content. I’m also a translation coordinator for my Hindi language.
Yeah, and in past I was also wrote few lesson plans. So yeah, it started with a small thing, and gradually with more involvement, I learned many new things.
[00:09:16] Nathan Wrigley: If somebody was interested, let’s say that they’ve listened to this episode and they are keen to, at least have further discussions about what it is that they could do. I’m, interested in you describing how the team is structured. So, as an example, if I’m new, how do I get onboarded, and how is it decided where I would be most useful?
So you mentioned a couple of things there, you know, you were talking about the fact that you were able to change spelling mistakes. But you also talked about the fact that you could do things in your own language.
Do you get to show up and pick what it is that you’re going to do, or is there a hierarchy? Are there people, such as yourself, who’ve been contributing to this for a while, who have their hands on what needs doing, and kind of farm out those projects to people?
[00:10:05] Pooja Derashri: Yes. At the beginning of this year, my co-team rep, Benjamin Evans, who worked on a project for an onboarding program for new contributors. And desperately it helped us win half of the battle. New contributors found learning and getting involved with the training team is very easy. They can find the complete getting onboarded program in our handbook. That is available on make.wordpress.org/training/handbook.
There is a section, getting started. There is a complete video and tutorial format, where they can find the step by step process about how they can involve. And by reading that handbook, they can find their own way to start contributing. That is very easy and concise way to get involved.
And there is also, a program, run by Courtney P. K., that is a mentorship guide program. There is a one on one mentorship program, where few mentors guide mentees about how they can start contributing to the training team, and help them to make meaningful contributions.
[00:11:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thank you for that. So, you’re obviously extremely keen on doing this, and it sounds like you dedicate quite a lot of your time. Again, for the listener who is maybe just coming across this subject for the first time, are there any guardrails, or are there any things which you would suggest, in terms of the amount of time that you need to dedicate if you want to be involved?
I know that you mentioned the handbook, but for people who don’t quite make it there and are using this podcast audio only as their guide, is there any level of commitment? Do you wish to have people who are willing to give a certain amount of time per week, or can commit to a certain number of weeks or months? Or are you happy to have anybody on board, even for a short period of time? People who drop in, drop out. Are you taking all comers?
[00:11:53] Pooja Derashri: Yes, definitely. If our listeners have only a limited time, like let’s say just half an hour, or one hour in a week. So they can review the content the other content creators are creating, already created content.
In every few months, we review our published content as well. Because as a new version, WordPress version launches, some of the content get outdated. So we always do the auditing the existing content, so people can go through with that content.
If they found any outdated content, or anything that is missing from lesson plans or video tutorials, they can report our issues on GitHub that is dedicated, learn repository over there. They can report issue over there, and other team members can have a look and try to fix them.
So that is the lesser time. If new contributor have lesser time to contribute, they can go through with that reviewing process.
[00:12:45] Nathan Wrigley: So there’s no need to commit a great deal of time. Small contributions are just as welcome as large contributions.
I’m just going to turn the conversation to you, Pooja, just for a few minutes. And I’m curious as what you get out of it. I don’t mean that in the way that it maybe sounds, but I’m keen to know why you commit so much of your time.
You mentioned at the top of the podcast recording that you’ve obviously got a business to run. You’ve got other things to do. You’ve got to generate revenue for you, and the people close to you, and all of that. So I’m just wondering why it is that you do this. What are the reasons you do it? And I suppose we should clear up the fact that getting paid is not one of them, because this is an entirely voluntary position.
[00:13:29] Pooja Derashri: Yeah. I’m volunteering all my time to the training team, I’m self sponsored. So no, I’m not getting paid from anywhere. But, as I already told you, that I was having a background of development. So, in contributing in training team, I got to know more about how content works around. How we can record a video tutorial, how we can write a lesson plan, many things around SEO.
And when we work together, other content creator experts, we learn a lot. So by contributing into training team, I learned a lot about content creation, and that newly gained skills, I can use in my business. So it’s kind of win win situation.
[00:14:13] Nathan Wrigley: That’s nice. In terms of how the team is organised, if I was to join in, and obviously you’ve described that there’s a handbook and it can probably answer many of these questions, but it’s nice to get it out into the audio. How are tasks assigned? How do the training team, and all of the things that they do, how are those jobs coordinated? Is there a piece of software that we need to be familiar with? Is this all done through Slack or something else?
In other words, if we were to join, how would we know what needed to be done? And report the things that we had done so that they could be checked and approved and so on. Basically, how does it all work in the background?
[00:14:51] Pooja Derashri: We manage our work mainly in three places. Our team blog, our Slack channel or GitHub repository. Team blog is make.wordpress.org/training. All decisions are discussed and announced in blog post to allow the widest audience to participate. The team blog is the place where our whole discussion, decisions are announced, or are posted.
And our Slack channel is where we can connect with other contributors in the team in real time. It’s where people can ask our faculty members and other experienced teammates for help, while working through some team tasks. Our training team meetings are also conducted in Slack, but decisions are not made in Slack. If an item needs a discussion or decision, we publish it as a post on the team blog, so that the general public can see the discussion and join in decision making.
And lastly, there is a GitHub repository. This is where individual tasks are tracked. These include content creation or content translation, website management related tasks, and these are all organised in a GitHub issues form.
There are currently like seven major project boards. All the content development related issues fall under this project. There is a team that administrates the related project. There is a content localisation related project where the other people are translating content in their own language. All related issues are under this project.
Then there is a content feedback, if our content has any issue, any outdated content or any spelling mistake related thing. All that type of content feedback falls under this issue, this project. So yeah, we manage all the website related issues, development related queries, and any content, new content request. All the other content that is in process, all are managed under GitHub repository.
[00:16:47] Nathan Wrigley: So there’s a variety of different tools and workflows that you need to become familiar with. But I’m guessing that there’ll be assistance with that if you decide to join. Somebody will shepherd you through that, and there’ll be some documentation, some learn materials, which will enable you to learn about contributing towards Learn and the Training Team, which is a bit meta, but there you go.
In terms of the actual topic areas that you cover, technology, and WordPress in particular, is a really fast moving piece of software. You know, it’s not glacial. The documents that you wrote a year ago, there is some chance that they will still be pertinent, but I’m imagining that in many cases, some of these materials will go out of date fairly quickly.
So I’m wondering what you could tell us about the bits and pieces that really do need a lot of attention at the moment. So for example, it might be full site editing, or something like that. But just give us an idea of how you decide what needs to be covered.
We’ve obviously talked about the way that you communicate that with the tools that you’ve got. But what topics at the moment are really in need of documentation? And that could be things that haven’t been done yet, but also things which are underway, which needs to be completed. So yeah, just give us an idea of the topic areas that are really in need of work at the moment.
[00:18:05] Pooja Derashri: Yeah, sure. There is a GitHub project where when people submitted their topic ideas, are subject matter experts looking into every topic ideas. And they finalise that, yeah, that piece of content is having a high priority and we need to focus on first.
Every month we did a 5 to 10 high priority content list. And we will ask in our every weekly meeting that, yeah, this content is something we need to do on high priority. And we ask for volunteers to help. If they found their area of expertise or their skills match with that content, then they volunteer for that particular project, and they definitely pick that particular piece of content.
So right now, we are working on 6.4 release work. That is something on our high priority. And there are a few issues that need to be completed as soon as we can. In past 6.4 release, training team was the official part of release, and Courtney PK and Courtney Robertson was the lead at that time in the release.
And they are working hard for matching our lesson plan content, or our tutorials, with the release work. So yeah, right now we are looking for people, or volunteer, who can help us in working. Those issues can be easily found on GitHub. There is a label assigned on 6.4 on GitHub. That is something we are looking for on high priority right now.
[00:19:35] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you. In terms of the content that you submit, are there any kinds of content that you prefer to have? So what I mean by that is, so for example, there is video content, there’s text. But I don’t know if you also produce content in different ways. For example, I don’t know if you do audio content, the kind of thing that I’m producing with you right now. Or whether you do live webinars, which end up as a video. So that might be something that people could actually participate in. So just give us an idea of the kinds of different contents that are being created. So video, text, audio, et cetera.
[00:20:11] Pooja Derashri: Basically, there are four types of content available on learn.wordpress.org website. Lesson plans, tutorial, courses and online workshops. Lesson plan and courses are the text based format, and video tutorials and online workshops are like video format. The overall content can be used by both learners and teachers, but lesson plan is specifically created for teachers. And video tutorial, courses and online workshop are for targeted learner audience.
People who wanted to contribute in text based format, they can go to contribute into lesson plans and courses. And there are several topics submitted on our GitHub repository. They can choose from them. And if there is not, they have any specific topic in that their mind, they can reach out to us or submit their topic idea into GitHub repository, and our subject matter expert can review them, vet them, and approve them. After that they can start working on it.
Video tutorials, in the similar way, if they want to helping existing submitted topic, they can pick from there. And if they have any topic they want to create video for that. So for creating content on their own, they need video. They need to just submit their topic idea on GitHub repository. That is the basic workflow we follow.
[00:21:35] Nathan Wrigley: In terms of the quality of the materials that you put out, obviously, not everybody is equal. For example, let’s take the situation of video. Some people are just absolutely fabulous at working with video. You know, they’ve got the software, they’re familiar with it, they can make the whole presentation look really slick and all of that.
Other people may be new to writing that. Other people may not have written text too much before, and they may not have too much confidence about that. So I’m just wondering if you’ve got any guard rails around the project. You mentioned that people inspect the content that’s being offered, in order to make sure it’s of a certain quality.
What do you do with content that doesn’t live up to what you’d hoped for? Content that maybe needs to be redone, to be improved, to be rewritten. Are there processes in hand to sort of help people who are beginning, who maybe need that little bit of extra support to get them over the hurdles in order to get that content live?
[00:22:31] Pooja Derashri: Firstly, we have a detailed guide on our handbook about how you can create a tutorial. As your question is very interesting, in a few months back, Jonathan Bossenger, he was our video tutorial content creator. What he did, he just wrote some script, and it was some like a cohort kind of thing.
He wrote a script, other volunteer recorded him, recorded that script. And with collaboration of both, they created a masterpiece, and they published in a collaboration video. Jonathan’s video creation expertise helped other volunteer to master the skill.
So others volunteer also learn about the video creation. Like this, many other team members are willing to help a new contributors, or other people who are not that much expert in this video creation. But they can learn from others. There are many other video tutorials available on our Learn WordPress website.
And our mentors are also there, who help them by one on one call to guide them about what recording tool they can use, what speed they can use. And after they have completed their recording, they can submit their recording on our Slack channel or something. So other content editors then review and provide their feedback, so they can improve also.
[00:23:56] Nathan Wrigley: There are procedures in place to support and help people who may feel that their contributions need a little bit of help. You’ve given a good example there of Jonathan Bossenger willing to help people up the standard of their videos. So yeah, that’s really nice.
If you were to submit, let’s say a piece of video, are there minimum criteria in terms of things like, let’s take the topic of accessibility for example? Obviously video is available for some people, but there’s a subset of the population who are unable to access that video. Do you have guidance around things like transcriptions and things like that? If you submit certain types of content, do you have to then be mindful of things like accessibility or other topics before things get published?
[00:24:40] Pooja Derashri: We take accessibility very seriously. Every video tutorial is followed by transcript. You can find easily transcript under video.
[00:24:50] Nathan Wrigley: And so presumably, that’s another role which needs to be fulfilled. If you are able to listen to a video and transcribe it, that’s yet another portion of the work which needs to be done.
[00:25:02] Pooja Derashri: Every video tutorial is followed by transcripts. And there are three or four video editors available. They review the transcript, the video quality and what the video is going to explain to our learners, or our targeted audience. So yeah, there is a whole team and process works around.
So accessibility is not an issue in the content. And if some people find any accessibility issue under Learn WordPress content, they can easily reach out to us under our Slack channel or our GitHub issue. Anywhere they can reach out to us and ask about yeah, I’m having that certain issue and, can you please help me with that?
So we can have in our mind about, yeah, this kind of scenario is also available and we need to work on it also. There is a checklist available where we check every single point before publishing the content.
[00:25:56] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. I’m just wondering about translations as well. Now, you did touch on this a few minutes ago, but I just want to drill down on that a little bit. Presumably this work also needs to be, not just transcribed, but translated into some other languages.
And so, again, let’s just highlight that there are opportunities there if you speak a language other than English. There are opportunities to take these materials and get them taken over into a whole variety of different languages. So that’s some important work, I would guess as well, right?
[00:26:28] Pooja Derashri: Yes. Many content is already available, and for that we are looking for volunteers who can help us in translating text based content, and video content as well. So that can be reached out to wider audience, so they can easily learn in their language. That said, learning in your own language is very much easier.
[00:26:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, indeed. Okay, so we’ll just round it off. I’ve got a few more questions just to sort of round it off. But the first one is around the way that this content sticks around and for how long. So, for example, we mentioned earlier that some pieces of content need to be updated all the time. Full site editing would be a perfect example, you know, the language changes, the words that we use to describe certain things change, the whole UI changes from time to time.
So I’m just wondering, how much of the work is not new work, but is going back and checking that the things which are already published are in fact up to date? So just going through the materials, checking, making sure that in the situation where, I don’t know, full site editing was mentioned, it’s now changed to site editing so that everybody’s got the right data.
[00:27:35] Pooja Derashri: Yes. There are basically two processes. First process is our team faculty members, they review or they audit the content. For example 6.4, there was a dedicated two faculty members, Courtney PK and Courtney Robertson. They reviewed the issues, the features that is going to be included in 6.4.
They map with our already published content. And they filtered out like, yeah, these issues are outdated, and these lesson plans and video tutorials, we need to update. They made a list, and that issues list is available on GitHub. So from that list, our volunteers come and pick a issue to work on it.
That is the first process. And the second process, people are eager to learn about full site editing. For example, like they are learning our full site editing course, they are taking our full site editing course. And they found it like, yeah, their full site editing is now site editing. So they reported that issue in GitHub. And our faculty members reviewed it, and just gone through the course and updated the content. So that’s how the updates work for learn content.
[00:28:41] Nathan Wrigley: Obviously, if somebody was to commit a fairly large amount of their time to this, or even just a small amount of their time, it would be nice to know that your endeavors were appreciated, that the people that you were working with were a nice bunch. And I know this is a bit of a bizarre question, but I’m just keen to drill down into that a little bit.
How does that team feel to you? You know, is it a nice place to be? Are they thoughtful individuals that you would regard as friends? Because I think a lot of people in the WordPress space would regard many of the people that they collide with as friends after a period of time. And so rather than the work being a chore, oh goodness I have to go and translate this piece of Learn material, it might be that you, you know, you relish it and you enjoy it because you interact with, what have become good friends in a nice environment.
[00:29:29] Pooja Derashri: Yes. When we contribute we met so many new people, networking happens. We work together with many experts. And by the time we will make friends. If I talk about myself, I have so many friends across the globe, by just contributing to the training team.
Firstly, like Courtney Robertson, Hauwa Abashiya. With these people, I’m working with them every week or every few days. So, it was like creating a connection with them.
[00:29:57] Nathan Wrigley: Oh that’s lovely. I mean it really is, my experience at least anyway, is that many of the people that I have interacted with in the WordPress project, have become really dear friends, and it’s really nice to know that’s the case for you as well.
So there’s a lot of work to be done. There are lots of areas which need work. Lots of different skills which you can acquire, or bring to bear on this work. So I guess the next thing we need to know is, where do we, sign up? Where would be the best place to go if we’re curious about taking this further?
Pooja, I wonder if you could just, I don’t know, dig out a URL, or name a page which we could Google. Some of the good places to begin that journey.
[00:30:34] Pooja Derashri: Begin journey with Learn WordPress. You can go to make.wordpress.org/training. That is official team blog, where all the discussion happens. Under this there is a handbook page available that is a detailed step by step guide available to help you.
Another one is learn.wordpress.org website. There is content available in the video, and text format that helps you learn about the training team, and about the WordPress as well. There are good places where people can learn about the team, and they can join and contribute as well.
[00:31:10] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. I spoke with you just before we hit record on this particular episode, and you mentioned that from the previous episode, you’d been contacted by some people who wished to communicate with you about that subject. So we’ve got this different subject.
I’m wondering if you wouldn’t mind telling us where we can find you personally. If people want to speak with you directly about this and get some more knowledge about your own experience.
[00:31:33] Pooja Derashri: Yes. I’m available on Make WordPress Slack. My profile username is webtechpooja, and they can find me on Twitter. They can find my handle is Pooja Derashri. They can also find me on LinkedIn, by the same name Pooja Derashri handle.
[00:31:48] Nathan Wrigley: Well Pooja, thank you so much for talking to us today about your experience with the Learn and Training teams behind WordPress. Really appreciate you coming on the podcast and talking to us today. Thank you so much.
[00:32:00] Pooja Derashri: Thank you for having me Nathan. So I can share my journey and about the training team.
On the podcast today we have Pooja Derashri.
Pooja is a co-founder of WPVibes, a plugin development company based in India. With a passion for WordPress, Pooja has been actively involved in the community since 2013. Her journey as a contributor began in 2017, when she attended her first local WordCamp. Her expertise and dedication have earned her various key roles in the WordPress ecosystem. She currently serves as a co-team rep for the training team and GTE for the Hindi locale. In addition, she holds key positions in the WordPress release squad for versions 6.3 and 6.4, where she heads up the test team.
Pooja was on the podcast a few weeks ago talking about diversity, but this time the focus is on creating learning materials for WordPress.
We begin by discussing Pooja’s background and her involvement with the training team. She shares how she stumbled upon the training team during a WordCamp event and got started by finding a simple spelling mistake in a lesson plan. From there, she became more involved with the training team and gradually took on roles such as reviewing code and leading the test team.
We get into the importance of training materials in helping new users understand and navigate the WordPress platform, highlighting the Learn WordPress website. Pooja emphasises that contributions to the training team can be as small as reviewing existing content or as involved as creating new lessons or video tutorials.
If you’re curious about how to get started with the training team, Pooja explains the comprehensive onboarding program available in the team’s handbook. Additionally, there’s a mentorship guide program for one-on-one guidance for new contributors. Whether you have a few minutes or several hours to spare each week, there’s a place for everyone to make a start.
A key topic of the discussion is the need to keep the training materials up to date, as WordPress is a dynamic and ever-evolving software. Pooja explains the team’s process of reviewing and updating content, particularly in light of new WordPress releases and frequent changes in terminology.
We also talk about the importance of translations, introducing the opportunity for contributors to help with translating materials into different languages, making WordPress accessible to a global audience.
Towards the end Pooja highlights the supportive and collaborative nature of the training team. She shares her experience of making friends and connections across the globe while contributing to the team. There’s a sense of community and camaraderie among the contributors, making it an enjoyable journey for all involved.
If you’re curious about helping others learn WordPress, this episode is for you.
#95 – Pooja Derashri on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging in WordPress
Onboarding session for new contributors – https://make.wordpress.org/training/handbook/getting-started/
Team blog – https://make.wordpress.org/training/
Slack channel – https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C02RW657Q
Github Repository – https://github.com/wordpress/learn
People Pooja mentioned in podcast:
Courtney Robertson – @Courtney
Courtney P. K. – @Courtney P.K.
Chetan Prajapati – @Chetan Prajapati
Sarah – @Sarah (She/Her)
Hauwa Abashiya – @Hauwa Abashiya
Destiny Kanno – @Destiny
Benjamin Evans – @Ben Evans
Jonathan Bossenger – @Jonathan
by Nathan Wrigley at November 29, 2023 03:00 PM under training
David Callaway from Woo.com joins BobWP as they take a deeper dive into the latest WooCommerce branding.
>> The post The Backstory of the New Woo Branding with David Callaway appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce and WordPress Builder Podcast .
by BobWP at November 29, 2023 10:27 AM under Podcast Guests from North America
Anne McCarthy and Bud Kraus join Abha for a chat about the earlier release of WordPress 6.4 filled with insights and experiences from all.
>> The post All Things WordPress 6.4 with Anne McCarthy and Bud Kraus appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce and WordPress Builder Podcast .
by BobWP at November 28, 2023 10:50 AM under Podcast Guests from North America
The first release candidate (RC1) for BuddyPress 12.0.0 is now available!
This version of the BuddyPress software is a development version. Please do not install, run, or test this version of BuddyPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it’s recommended that you evaluate 12.0.0-RC1 on a test server and site.
Reaching this phase of the release cycle is an important milestone. While release candidates are considered ready for release, testing remains vital to ensure that everything in BuddyPress 12.0.0 is the best it can be.
You can test WordPress 12.0.0-RC1 in four ways:
svn co https://buddypress.svn.wordpress.org/trunk/git clone git://buddypress.git.wordpress.org/The current target for the BuddyPress 12.0.0 release is December 6, 2023. Get an overview of the 12.0.0 release cycle, and check the BP Development updates blog for 12.0.0 related posts.
Thanks to the BP Rewrites API, we were able to give site admins a choice as to whether their community should be fully public or only accessible by logged-in members. In future versions, we hope to add granularity to this choice, so that community administrators can choose to highlight their members but share activities only inside the community “gates” for example.
BuddyPress is open source software made possible by a community of people collaborating on and contributing to its development.
Testing for issues is critical to developing the software and ensuring its quality. It’s also a meaningful way for anyone to contribute—whether you have coding experience or not.
If you think you’ve found a bug, you can share it with us replying to this support topic or if you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on BuddyPress Trac.
Do you speak a language other than English? Help us translate BuddyPress into as many languages as possible! This release also marks the string freeze point of the 12.0.0 release schedule.
by Mathieu Viet at November 28, 2023 12:58 AM under releases
WordPress Executive Director, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, returns to a recent episode of the WordPress Briefing, which discussed two resources for openly licensed media in the WordPress project– Openverse and Photo Directory– and how they differ from one another!
Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@WordPress.org, either written or as a voice recording.
Host: Josepha Haden Chomphosy
Editor: Dustin Hartzler
Logo: Javier Arce
Production: Brett McSherry
Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod
[00:00:00] Josepha: Hello everyone. And welcome to the WordPress Briefing. The podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks.
I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go.
[00:00:28] (Intro music)
[00:00:40] Josepha: Today, we’re going to take a listen to last year’s episode about Openverse and the Photo Directory. A lot has changed in that project, well in, in both of those projects since then. For instance, the Photo Directory just passed a 10,000 photo milestone. And Openverse, in the past year, got their own URL and have been hard at work strengthening the reliability of their APIs.
[00:01:03] Josepha: But for some folks, it might still be a little unclear just what the difference is between these two projects. So let’s take a listen, and don’t forget to catch the updated small list of big things at the end of the episode.
[00:01:13] (Music interlude)
[00:01:21] Josepha: About 18 months ago, the Openverse project became part of the WordPress open source project, and at roughly the same time, we also welcomed in the Photo Directory.
Since that time, we’ve seen growth of teams supporting both of these initiatives. But if you’re not involved in the day-to-day, it can be hard to know how those two things fit together or if they fit together at all.
[00:01:41] Josepha: Today, let’s take a brief tour of those two projects and why they came to be. In my timeline, work on the Photo Directory started before the work on Openverse, so that’s where we’ll start.
For as long as I can remember, the WordPress community has raised the need for WordPress-first ways to have and host GPL-compatible photos for use in themes, site builds, and marketing efforts as a whole. As recently as 2016, that was still coming up as a question at various flagship events and among the career photographers that contribute their time to WordPress.
[00:02:13] Josepha: So, in 2017 and 2018, as attention started to turn toward rebuilding the CMS using blocks, it dropped down the list of priority items. But it never really went away as a thing that people were hoping we could do for the project as a whole. So in 2019, it was becoming clear that having open source-first tools of all varieties for people whose businesses were built on our software would help broaden the availability of the open source freedoms we believe in.
This began the work on the Photo Directory with the intention of providing a GPL-friendly, community-driven repository of images. It has since launched, and we have photos in it now. We have a whole team around it. It’s wonderful. But that is how that all kind of came to be.
[00:02:58] Josepha: Openverse, on the other hand, was launched as CC Search in 2019 with the laudable mandate to increase the discoverability and accessibility of open access media.
Late in 2020, while work on the Photo Directory was underway, Matt shared with me that the team was looking for a new project home. When I first met with them, they shared an overview of the product, which they shorthanded as an open source search engine that searches openly licensed images. We were working on a repo of openly licensed images, so clearly, this was all written in the stars. And so you might be asking yourself at this point, great, how does it work together?
I think for most of us, the timeline there kind of covers the question of what is the difference between these two things.
But because I never know which of you will want to strike up a conversation about open source on an elevator, I’ve also got the elevator pitch version as well.
[00:03:52] Josepha: Openverse is an open source search engine that searches, indexes, and aggregates copy left media from across the web using sources such as WordPress’s Photo Directory, Flickr’s CC Tagged Media, and Wikimedia, to name just a few.
Another key difference between the Photo Directory and Openverse is that in order to contribute to the Photo Directory, now that it’s all built, that’s mostly done by submitting photos or reviewing photos. So, you don’t really need to be a developer to join in.
Openverse not only is a developer-centric contribution opportunity, but it also uses a different tech stack than WordPress as a whole. So, it’s a good place for folks to go if they’re looking to broaden their horizons.
[00:04:37] Josepha: So that’s your elevator pitch of what is Openverse and how does it use the Photo Directory.
You have a couple of ways that you can get involved with these two projects. For the Photo Directory, as I mentioned at the start, you can always contribute photos, and they could always use more photo contributions.
I’ll include a link to the submission guidelines in the show notes below, and as I mentioned, it is a no-code way to give back to the WordPress project. So, no code is required, no development environments, no testing skills. The Photo Directory team also could always use more contributors to help with the moderating of photo submissions.
And so I’ll link to their making WordPress page in the show notes as well so that you can get started there.
[00:05:22] Josepha: And as I mentioned before, Openverse is an aggregator, so it doesn’t host any media itself, but it is always accepting suggestions for new GPL-compatible media providers. I’ll link the area where you can leave suggestions in the show notes as well.
And if you are more code-inclined, there’s an open issue for adding Openverse browsing to the block editor right now.
So I’ll link that issue in the show notes in case you thought to yourself, gosh, that sounds like my most favorite thing to do. That is where you can go.
[00:05:53] (Music interlude)
[00:06:01] Josepha: And that brings us now to our November 2023 small list of big things.
[00:06:07] Josepha: The first thing that’s on the small list of big things this week is that the countdown is on for this year’s State of the Word. If you missed the initial announcement a few weeks ago, you’ll want to mark your calendars for December 11th, 2023. State of the Word will include a Q&A session, and if you want to participate, you can send your question to ask-matt@wordcamp.org. Or, ask during the event via the Q&A app Slido. A QR code for your submission will be provided during the event live stream, so if you’re choosing that option, don’t worry; there’s not anything to do right this second.
[00:06:40] Josepha: The second thing on the list is that WordCamp Asia has extended their call for sponsors for the conference that is slated to take place in Taipei, Taiwan, March 7th through 9th, 2024. The new deadline has been extended to November 30th, 2023, and so if you have been on the fence about whether to sponsor that event or not, for one, please do sponsor it, and for two, you still have a little bit of time to get over there and show your support.
[00:07:05] Josepha: And then the last thing on the small list of big things is that the documentation team now has a new GitHub repo created for end-user documentation and its translations into all locales. For more information about this, come check out the show notes. I will have a link right there for you. And that, my friends, is your small list of big things.
[00:07:26] Josepha: Don’t forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app or subscribe directly on WordPress.org/news. You’ll get a friendly reminder whenever there’s a new episode. If you liked what you heard today, share it with a fellow WordPresser. Or, if you have questions about what you heard, you can share those with me at wpbriefing@WordPress.org. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Thanks for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks.
[00:07:51] (Music outro)
by Brett McSherry at November 27, 2023 12:00 PM under wp-briefing
Devin Maeztri joins us as a new host and shares more about meetups and how to put together a State of the Word 2023 watch party.
>> The post Meetups and State of the Word Watch Parties with Devin Maeztri appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce and WordPress Builder Podcast .
In this episode, Isabel Brison and Birgit Pauli-Haack discuss Gutenberg 17.1, the Command Palette, experimental Data Views and Grid Layout
Show Notes
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Transcript
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hello, and welcome to our 93rd episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk about Gutenberg 17.1, the command palette, data views, grid layouts. A lot of good things. I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and a full-time core contributor for the WordPress Open Source project sponsored by Automattic’s Five for the Future Program.
Wow, that’s a mouthful. I’m so happy to have Isabel Brison with me. She’s a JavaScript developer at Automattic, working on Gutenberg as a core contributor. Editor co-lead for 6.3. WordPress 6.3 release in August. And also, she mentored the cohort editor tech and triage for 6.4, which just came out at the beginning of November. So, greetings to Sydney, Australia. How are you today, Isabel?
Isabel Brison: Hi. Hello. Very good. Just getting towards the evening, end of the day here. And yeah. Doing pretty well. Thanks.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Excellent. Excellent. Yeah. Well, I just got up. Just so everybody knows, we are an around the globe operation here. And it’s now 9:30 on November 24th in Europe. And Isabelle, it’s about 7 o’clock at your place?
Isabel Brison: Yeah, it’s 7:30 here.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: 7:30. Yeah. So, let’s get started. We have a lot of things to talk about.
Isabel Brison: Yes.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: But first we have … Before we go into the changelog of the latest Gutenberg plugin, let’s talk about other things that happen in the community. The first one is Justin Tadlock published a tutorial on how to create your own commands with the command API. It’s an introductory tutorial, and it shows you how to create … If you want to open up the Experiments page, you can do this with a plugin.
So, you put all the commands in one plugin, and then you activate it. And then, you have command for opening the Experiments page. Or it also has toggle the panel command or toggle the user preference commands. And the last one is also toggle the panel command, but it has some additional sidebar notices in there. Not sidebar. Snack bar. Snack bar are the ones that are on the bottom of screen. So, you know, “Okay, something happened.” Sometimes, with a command palette, sometimes, you don’t get a notification back, something happened. So, adding the snack bar notices is also in the tutorial. So, this is a great way to get started. And there is an advanced article to come, as well, to use command loaders to have additional or a little bit more, how would I say, functionality with it without just opening up and down certain features.
Isabel Brison: Yeah. This is pretty cool because, I guess, you can open any page. You can open setting … You can toggle settings from it. And say you’re a plugin. You could potentially add a command to the palette where you can direct people to your plugin page.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, for own plugin. Of course, yeah. You can add that as an additional feature to your plugin to provide also commands for the command palette. I think that’s really cool. I’m waiting for the point, but I’m always waiting. I’m waiting to the point where I can daisy chain those commands, so certain workflows can happen on key press with the shortcut. Yeah. So, I can say, “Okay. Now, give me a separator block and use that particular variation.” And it would save me three clicks on the mouse on a weekend edition that has, I don’t know, 15 sidebars in there. So, it will be quite a saving, but yeah.
Isabel Brison: Oh, workflows. That would be pretty cool. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I don’t know if that’s … I think that’s part of the idea for the command palette later on, maybe. Yeah. Or maybe that’s plugin territory. We’ll see what comes out of it.
Isabel Brison: I was just thinking and just wildly speculating here, but with all the talk about AI that’s been happening in the past 12 months or so, you can imagine that that would be a flow where you could just … In the future, you would be able to just open it up and go, “Oh, give me this, that, and that.” And your AI assistant would pull it up like a bunch of translate what you said into blocks.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. You could certainly use that search box on the command palette also to create AI commands, and then what comes back in the lower section of the command palette would be some cool stuff. Yeah, some pictures that you were looking for or some … Oh yeah, some summaries or text or translations. Yeah. Yeah. Let’s wildly speculate on the command palette for … I love it.
So, Joen Asmussen, who is part of the WordPress design team, has published his Design Shares that is just showcasing the things that the team is working on or has been working on in the last two weeks. If you want to follow the design make blog, you will get notifications every two weeks and to see what’s going on, because the design team not only makes things pretty, it also thinks through some of the workflow and some of the, “How should this work, and how does the interface work with that?”
And so, you get a glimpse into the future for certain things. And he starts out with the sticky table elements. That’s for the data views or the admin list views. That’s how the header column and pagination, and also that the data inside each cell’s always integrated and the pagination is locked in the same position.
So, then, also, to new and URL popover, tightening up the user interface. They’re working out, also, on the open source audio component for the Creative Commons site, which looks really nice. I really like that.
Isabel Brison: Oh.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And then, some great iterations over a dropdown menu. That is a new component, and you can follow along that and you see what kind of details the team is working on for any of those interface components that not only power Gutenberg or the plug editor, but also are used by plugin developers for their own interfaces if they choose so. So, this is definitely a great insight into how much work and thought goes into some of the interfaces.
Isabel Brison: Oh, definitely. And dropdowns are such a hard area. It’s so hard to get right. And I mean, speaking from the experience developing in Gutenberg for years, and there have been so many problems with the popover component positioning, and there is so many bugs that we’ve had to fix. So, I’m really looking forward to the next iteration of dropdowns, and especially with these flyovers … I mean, a way of making the dropdowns when they’re nested easier to navigate. I think that’s really important.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s not only for menus. It’s for all kinds of interfaces that come in and out of the sidebars and from the top bar and all that. So, yeah. That’s definitely some great work that we can see there. They also worked on a range date picker. That’s more for plugins? I’m not quite sure. Yeah. The range picker is something that you get when you book a flight or a hotel where you say, “Okay, I go from November 11 to December 13,” and you have the range to pick. It’s an initial sketch and, yeah, it’s definitely something plugin can … I don’t know. I’m really having a hard time picking where in Gutenberg that might be helpful.
Isabel Brison: Yeah, I was trying to think where we deal with dates. I mean, post publishing doesn’t usually need a range, so I’m wondering if there’s … Oh, no, actually … So, possibly, because I think maybe that will have someplace in the data views where … Again, I’m wildly speculating here, but I imagine with … Because there’s a fair amount of thinking being done around how to actually make the data views be good to organize data and to organize content. And so, potentially, you’d think you might be able, at some point, to pick, say, a range of posts from this date to that date or something like that.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. Yeah. Would make sense. Yeah.
Isabel Brison: And then, having a range date picker could be useful.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. It could be useful for bulk edits, for instance, or just for viewing, say, “Okay, all the posts around Thanksgiving, give them a Thanksgiving kind of tag” or something like that. Yeah. Bulk things. Yeah. But yeah, you’re right. Yeah, that could be for some of the admin components. Yeah.
And then, the styles panel where … There’s an interesting iteration of the styles panel work where you can have it all on the left-hand side of the site editor. And right now, the style work is all on the right-hand side of the editor, but now you have a middle column between the content and the menu where you can edit or change the colors and the font and this kind of thing. So, that’s a nice iteration. We’ll see how far that gets into the editor.
Isabel Brison: I see that this styles panel … This is referring to what, in my head, I still call global styles.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Isabel Brison: Okay.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And it’s also a combination between the global styles as you know it and the style book. And then, have the sidebar on the left-hand side, so it has more connection between which entity you are actually editing.
Isabel Brison: Because right now, on the left-hand sidebar, we have, in the site editor, we have a style section that allows you, if the theme has style variations, to pick a theme style variation. So, that’s … It’s weird that we have the styles on that side, and then we have the global styles on the other side. So, yeah. Potentially, it would be nice to have everything in one place.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And especially about the style variations … Once you have your theme selected and you select the style variations, then it’s too prominent in the menu because you don’t need it anymore. It can be hidden for something until you need it again. And I think that’s also part of the rethinking how the left menu items work in terms of order of importance or context sensitive. I don’t know. These are some of the thinking behind that. And it comes through some of the GitHub issues where say, “Hmm. Yeah. Shouldn’t we be smarter, or shouldn’t the system be smarter to hide that when you don’t need it anymore?” But that mind reading business is such a hard…
Isabel Brison: Oh, yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: … such a hard tour.
Isabel Brison: Mind reading? Very hard, very hard. Even with AI.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And then, we are still in the design shares by Joen, and he also has a link for the events redesign. There’s … under the community section where the meetups and the WordPress, the WordCamps … they’re working on an events page or events section that is a little bit more modern than what we have right now. And it’s a nice iteration, and it’s really coming together. So, yeah. The community team is working very hard with the design team to get this done.
And then, there is a mockup. We found a mockup for something that was actually missing in the site editor, that … these are the settings around the homepage that are in the general settings, but actually totally removed from all the homepage templates, kind of thing, so … and page edits. So, this is going to … might be … It’s a quick mockup to bring those settings in also into the site editor.
Yeah. So, those were Design Shares. And I always like to do … Go in there and look at it even for … Well, and this was the first, again, that we did it on the podcast because, of course, it’s visual and, on the podcast, you don’t see anything. We can’t show it to you. But I really urge you to, of course, share the link in the show notes. But take a look at that. It’s really very interesting for me and exciting. And when you follow every two weeks, you get an idea of where things are going and what people are working on.
And then, the last thing I wanted to point out for you, dear listeners, is that the plugin directory … About six weeks ago, there was this little kerfuffle that there was a live preview button enabled on the plugin directory, but it wouldn’t work for all plugins. And what it does, it opens up the WordPress playground, installs the plugin so a user can actually test out the plugin in a live environment without having to set up a test site or put it on their production site or any of that. So, it’s a really cool feature in my view.
And Alex Shiels, who’s a longtime member of the Meta Team, enabled it, and it was actually a smart move because, within a day or so, he had all the feedback he needed to take it down again and revamp it, and then come out with it in a way that the plugin developers can work with it. And on the Meta blog, he just published that the preview button is now available for plugin developers, for the plugin maintainers to create a blueprint file on what is all needed for the test site, for the playground to be a good test site for that plugin.
And they can test it out. They can configure the playground with a blueprint file. And then, once it fits our needs, they can opt in for themselves. And then, later on … That’s not yet implemented. They can open it up to their users. So, there’s a double opt-in for that feature, but it had all the … So, it’s all in the control of the plugin developer. But if you are a maintainer of the plugin developer, any feedback you have about this, leave it on the post. They’re very grateful for it to make this better and better and better.
Isabel Brison: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a feature where you really need plugin developers to test it and make sure that it works for their use case because there are so many different types of plugins. And I think, from memory, one of the problems that was flagged initially was that some plugins have dependencies, so they don’t do anything in isolation, and having a preview just doesn’t work unless you can configure the proper environment to have that preview in. And so, I think that’s one of the features that have now been added is that each plugin developer can configure the optimal environment for their plugin to run it.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Exactly. Yeah.
Isabel Brison: … which makes perfect sense.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it has a few … So, the blueprint.JSON … It’s a JSON file that you can have the steps that the playground needs to make to be a good demo site, be it a plugin install, be it a open up … In the block editor, for instance, if it’s a block or a block editor feature to see it right away and not have to go through, “Okay, this is the admin. This is the login. This is …”. You get right to the point of it. It’s really neatly done. So, yeah. Check it out as a plugin developer. Again, it’s not yet open to the public.
All right. This brings us to the section, what’s released. And right now, we’re talking about Gutenberg 17.1. Andre Maneiro was the release lead. And it has PRs from 55 contributors, three of them new. Yay. And they submitted about 200 PRs that are merged in this version.
Andre writes, “The release includes several new enhancements, loads of bug fixes, and continued work on Phase 3.” The release post is, of course, in the show notes, and let’s just dive in. And yeah, say in the foreground though, it’s more quality of life and bug fixes than anything else apart from the data views. But we can talk about it a little bit later about that.
So, the first item I have highlighted is that the template parts now have a fallback to the current theme when it’s not provided. So, that is just make it all a little bit more predictable and not running into errors or confusion for the user. So, if a template part … If a header isn’t … What is that exactly? So … Go ahead.
Isabel Brison:The template part. If there is a template part referred that doesn’t actually exist, then it will fall back to a default template? I didn’t actually read it.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that comes from the theme. Yeah. So …
Isabel Brison: I’m not sure how the internals work.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. No, it’s the fallback is directly to the theme part that comes closest, pretty much. It’s a performance enhancement to make sure that searching for something that’s not there doesn’t slow things down. And now, the next one that I wanted to point out was that the site editor now also shows theme patterns from the directory, showing things from the directory. It wasn’t built into the site editor yet. It wasn’t the post editor. So, any post and pages. You were able to add things, point out to the … So, the theme has … In the theme JSON can point to patterns that are in the directory, and they would show up in the pattern section of the post editor, but they wouldn’t in the site editor, and that’s now fixed. Does that make sense?
Isabel Brison: Yeah, that’s great. Yeah, yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So, for the theme, it means the theme developer doesn’t have to bundle all the patterns with theme if they put it up on the directory and then just can refer it to it with the slug. And that’s a nice way to do it.
Isabel Brison: Yeah, that’s also … I mean, that can also be considered or … Maybe not performance enhancement in itself, but it does make things easier if you want to create a performance theme so you don’t have a dozen, or I don’t know, a hundred patterns bundled into the actual theme.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. That’s true. Yeah. But, of course, they all need to follow the same mechanism. So, if you have more than one theme and you want to refer the same patterns in the directory, it also streamlines your processes a bit. So, there are a few things that are coming for the globalized revisions. So, revisions are something that were supposed to come into 6.4, but they didn’t make it because it was such a huge project that the two months of development time wasn’t enough. But it’s definitely slated for 6.5 and, now, there are improvements with every Gutenberg plugin release.
This time, we have a consistent back button behavior and the scripted text timeline for the revisions. And also, it loads unsafe revision items in the revisions preview, even if you haven’t clicked on Save. So, that definitely helps you not losing content or changes. Those global style revisions are so useful, and I’m looking forward to seeing them in WordPress.
Isabel Brison: So, there is a version of revisions. There’s a very basic global styles revisions already available in 6.4, which you can … From global styles or styles … I always call it global styles because styles is just so vague. Styles revisions. There’s a little section in here, and you can look at the revision history.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So, it was in 6.4, but not fully fledged out. Yeah.
Isabel Brison: Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: You’re right. Yeah.
Isabel Brison: So, it’s ongoing. So, there’s a very basic version that’s been merged in 6.4. There is a lot more optimization, UI improvements, making the whole experience smoother that is still being worked on and due for 6.5.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I think the revisions on posts are so old. They don’t know anything about blocks. So, it’s really hard to make a good, informed decision on how that’s actually going to look visually when you have to show style. So, going from one place to the next and see how that fits in and does it work? I think it’s a longer iteration process than one would seem. And that … Yeah.
Isabel Brison: Yeah, totally. Because for the post edit … So, if you’re revising your content, if you’re looking at the revisions for posts, you still get that. Basically, it’s the classic WordPress admin interface where you see a diff of the content, but it appears in markup form and that gives you no clue. I mean, especially if you have a lot of blocks on the page and you’ve changed the attributes and you’ve changed the blocks. And you just have to go and read through all that markup, and there’s no way of seeing the difference visually, which is important when there’s a very visual-oriented tool, which is the block editor. So, yeah. That will be great. That’s still to come, being actively worked on.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Then, the block editor has the button block got a simple thing, we would think, but it’s … because our muscle memory. So, now, if you use double enter, you skip to the default block and it doesn’t repeat the design of the other block. Is that what I’m reading there?
Isabel Brison: There’s a keyboard shortcut for the button block. Yeah. So, buttons are interesting because, a while ago, it was decided that, if you change a style on a button … Say, if you change button to another style variation, you will probably want the next button to have the same style and you might not. So, the double enter thing. I’m not quite sure how it works because when you click enter from one button, you go into the next button, usually. Right? So, double enter.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: If you do double enter, it skips the styles and goes to a default block way.
Isabel Brison: But to a default button block? Is that what it does? Sorry. It’s just not very…
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So, double enter at the end of a button block.
Isabel Brison: … clear to figure out what it does.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: … moves back to the next line so you continue typing. Double enter in the middle of button blocks.
Isabel Brison: Oh, it takes you out of the button block. Oh. Oh, that’s brilliant. Yes. I see. Cool. Cool. So, it has nothing to do with the button styles. It’s all about making it easier to add another block that’s not a button after the button block.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Isabel Brison: Oh, that’s great. Yeah. Oh, I’m all for keyboard improvements all the time.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Default block, not default button. I read it wrong. Yeah, I’m kind of … Yeah. Okay. That’s a really good behavior. And I knew it was something that I was actually expecting to be because we know it from the list view. We know it from the list block. We also know it from other blocks that, when you do double enter, you’re out of that whole inner block behavior, like the social blocks, and then you go out. And I just read it wrong all of a sudden.
Isabel Brison: Oh, that is such a great improvement.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And it’s like … Some of the things where I say, “Why wasn’t it before?”
Isabel Brison: Yeah. Well, it’s an iterative process. Yeah, true. There are all these … And sometimes, it’s just tiny things make the experience so much better, but they’re not always obvious. And sometimes, they’re actually not very easy to implement. In this case, I don’t know. I didn’t actually look at the pull request for this.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And a similar thing is actually the next one for the design tools where we get block gap support for the quote block. And so, now, it has a good layout support, and you can better control the spacing of the inner blocks. Yeah.
Isabel Brison: Well, that one was actually easy to implement. I know because I like it myself. So, someone else did. So, another contributor submitted a pull request to add layout support to the quote block. This was Tomoki Shimo Mura. I hope I’m saying the name correctly. And so, that added basically support to the quote block, and that means that quote will automatically use the default block spacing. And that is good because it brings it in line with whatever the default theme block spacing is. So, it’ll have the same kind of spacing that other blocks have between them by default.
But then, I and a few other contributors reviewed that pull request, and we started talking, “Well, what would be great would be to actually give explicit block spacing support to the block.” Because now that it is using the default block spacing, it would make sense that, if people want to change it, they have the control available. So, that was just sort of a little follow-up, and it was literally one-liner. Just adding support for block spacing…
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, and this is…
Isabel Brison: … which made sense.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: … blocks JSON? Yeah.
Isabel Brison: So, now, you can change. So, now, by default, it will have whatever the default theme spacing, block spacing is. And if you want, you can go into your quote block, and you can change the spacing to make it bigger or smaller as you design.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Now, we get also … So, for the list view, we now have a keyboard shortcut to select all blocks. It follows the common keyboard shortcut for Select All. So, it’s either Command-A or Control-A. Command-A for Mac, and Control-A for Windows. To select all the blocks that are in the list view. And that’s really good, especially when you just hit delete and then gone!
Isabel Brison: Love a good keyboard shortcut. Command-A Delete. Yes.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And then, next one is actually a good thing. It sounds so technical, but it’s the Download blob: remove download js dependency. But what it actually does is … Found that when you export the patterns, the former reusable block being synced patterns now … When you export them and use the JSON to upload them, it works. But if you do this with other patterns, the synced patterns, somehow, it used the different JSON package, whatever, and it was malformed JSON. And now, they streamlined the same mechanism for both of the downloads and exports for the patterns.
So, that was interesting experience that it was implemented in both, but then one implementation worked and the other didn’t. Now, we found out which one is the right one and streamlined it. Sometimes, it is a clear path forward on certain bugs, and sometimes it’s not. But this was clear.
Isabel Brison: Yeah. Oh, yeah. That’s good.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Speaking of patterns, now you can actually add embed blogs to your patterns, and they render correctly on the front end, which was … I think, even in the block editor, that wasn’t always a given that you could use a certain video in the patterns or a certain social post in the pattern. It would only display the link for that, but it didn’t process the embed. So, now, it does. And that’s a really good enhancement there.
Isabel Brison: Yeah, this brings it in line with templates. I guess patterns was one of the areas where it was probably one of, I guess, the last remaining area where embeds weren’t being processed because there’s already logic in place to process them in templates and widgets and things like that. So, this made perfect sense.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And now … Well, we are a travel from all the different things to all patterns, like template parts are patterns. Reusable blocks are patterns. Patterns are patterns. And people are working on the partially synced patterns. So, it’s all … Pattern is what makes it stick now.
Isabel Brison: Yeah. I think it’s a good thing in general. I mean, we’ve had reusable blocks for ages, and patterns was a new version, but they’re very similar in, I suppose, the ways that they’re used in their use cases, I should say. And so, it does make sense for them to be one thing, and you can choose whether they’re synced, whether they’re not, whether they’re partially synced, I guess.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah.
Isabel Brison: So … It’s good to provide a range of options, but I definitely appreciate having the renaming of reusable blocks to patterns so that we all know that we’re talking about the same thing.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And the only so difference from just which content updates and which doesn’t. Yeah. So, the next item … It’s just a code quality or quality of What You See Is What You Get editor that you can now see the post image block is now wrapped in anchor tags, is also in the editor, not only on the front end but also in the editor. So, you know it’s actually working and functioning, kind of thing.
Isabel Brison: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. The What You See Is What You Get editor is a promise, and sometimes it falls down.
Isabel Brison: It’s good to have consistency. It’s hard. It’s a hard problem sometimes because the markup. The editor is an editor ultimately, and you have to have content edits all over the place because the content has to be editable, obviously. And so, there can’t always be a one-to-one match between the markup in the editor in the front end, but the more divergent it becomes, the more chance there is for bugs to be introduced and for them not to be a visual match. So, we are always trying to make sure it works. It’s a very fine line.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. It’s very interesting. Sometimes, you encounter problems when you solve something on the front end, but then you get it into the editor and then it doesn’t work anymore. So, one example was that the gaps between the blocks … You could actually switch off, and all controlled through the interface.
But what happened was, now that the space between the blocks wasn’t big enough, the siblings insert between didn’t have a place to show anymore. So, that was an interesting … I don’t know if you have an issue for that, but it came up in one of the calls for testing, and it was really interesting to … Yeah. Well, yeah. What You See Is What You Get, then it’s not what you see.
Isabel Brison: It’s actually … It’s What You See Is Not What You Want To Get, I guess, because you still want to see … I don’t want to have space between the blocks, but I do want the sibling insert to appear because I do actually need to add something between these two blocks.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And sometimes, you have these competing interests to line up … Just a little tangent here.
Isabel Brison: So, what do we have?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: The next is a component for the … There’s the image link button pressed state on the media text block. Sometimes, the headlines are a little bit obscure. So, in the image block and in the media text block, when the image is linked, the link button in the block tool doesn’t have a pressed state. Okay. So, as such, there’s no visual semantic accessible information for the image to actually be linked. Okay. That is fixed. Cool. Yeah, that’s an important accessibility issue fixed. And then, another one.
Isabel Brison: I’m just going through and trying out all the things. Adding a link to an image and seeing … Oh, yeah. I see. So, now, it actually becomes obvious that there’s something in here. So, now, the button … It becomes a dark background, light-colored text. I think this is the change. Oh, that’s cool.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. The next one is a similar one. It helps you get your focus back when you’re on the toolbar and use the Escape key and then you get back to the editor canvas, and you don’t have to tap around the thing. Escape gets you out of the block tool. It’s interesting.
For those who are more keyword users, that’s definitely a good problem to solve. And that’s the piece that goes with a double Escape coming out of a button block into the canvas. Again, that’s a similar one when you block toolbar doesn’t get you … You have to use the mouse or something like that to get out of the toolbar or tap instead of Escape. Yeah.
Isabel Brison: I think … memory. I’m going to test this. But I think what happened before was, if you were on the block toolbar and you pressed Escape, you would be taken into navigation mode.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, yeah. Right. Yes.
Isabel Brison: But actually, no. I think, now, I’m actually testing this on a 6.4 vanilla, no Gutenberg install. And what I’m doing … I’m in the block toolbar. I’m going around the buttons in the block toolbar, and now I press Escape and focus just seems to go somewhere. I’m not sure where it goes. It might actually … Ah, interesting. Okay. That was definitely a bug. Good job. It’s been fixed.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So, when you say, “vanilla 6.4, no plugin,” means that was before this release came up.
Isabel Brison: Yeah. So, I was comparing. So, I’ve got Gutenberg … Actually, I’ve got Gutenberg trunk on my local development environment, and I have another install of just 6.4 and I just keep comparing it and see what’s changed.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: What’s changed. Yeah. So, this was the time for some of the basic accessibility things to be fixed and bugs to squash. Another one was … It actually sounds like a code quality performance, a code quality PR. But it’s under performance. And the List View Block. It has a lot of calls to the same hooks. And the code quality was to just combine those hooks, those calls, to the ‘useSelect.’ And that actually increased performance quite a bit on the List View. So, yay.
Isabel Brison: Yay for all performance improvements and especially with the List View because it’s becoming more and more important to navigating in the block.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s definitely considerable when the tests were 1,000 blocks, and the call were four calls per block. So, it was 4,000 calls to the same store. It was interesting.
Isabel Brison: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, you don’t want that.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So, there were two documentation issues that I wanted to point out from this release. And there was that there is a new Block Development Quick Start Guide in the Block Editor Handbook and also one for how to create the block templates for the scaffolding tool. So, if you’re a block developer and/or a budding block developer, check out the new quick start guide on your journey from becoming confused to becoming a proficient block developer. And so, that is in part of the revamp of the Block Editor Handbook that has been published. And the second one is also there is a built-in local environment with Gutenberg. It’s called wp-env, and that is now also listed under additional resources for local environments.
Isabel Brison: Oh, nice. That’s good. I mean, it’s a good development environment if you’re okay with running Docker, which, I guess, Docker can be pretty resource-intensive. So, it depends on how powerful a machine you have, if you want to run it or not. But if you’re okay with running Docker, then this is a really easy environment to get set up and running.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And to test whatever you’re developing on the current environment. You don’t have to set up database and PHP and connectings to and the usual MAMP things. Yeah. So, yeah. It’s definitely a good resource, and people worked on it. So, yeah. It’s been around for a while but never really mentioned in the documentation. So, now it is.
And that’s, I think, is all we have from this release. And I guess you probably, dear listeners, agreeing with us. There was not a whole lot of big things in there. There was no big thing in there, but it was all good enhancements and … Performance enhancement as well as user interface enhancements and certain great accessibility improvements as well.
Which brings us to what’s in active development or what’s discussed. And this is just an announcement. Maybe we could have done it earlier, but it’s “What’s new for developers?” a roundup post is published on the developer blog.
If you haven’t signed up for that feed, it’s a roundup post of what’s new between the 10th of the month and the 9th of the month and published on the 10th of the month. And Justin Tadlock and I were compiling that from various sources like being a GitHub, a Gutenberg release, what’s new into core, what’s around on the learn for developers. So, you can go through … It has a huge table of content, but it also gives you an inkling on what’s new, what you should pay attention to, and where things are going, and where you find the information to follow along.
And it mentions the experimental pieces, the form and input blocks, and also the Data View works with links. And then, some major changes that came with 6.4, but this is a repeat of some of the Dev Notes condensed, but just highlighting in case you missed it. And then, moving away from the WordPress/element to React and … Yeah, all these good technical things.
I will share a link to it in the show notes. For instance, it mentions the new Tabs component that replaces the TabPanel or the PluginPostExcerpt slot fill for plugin developers on the block editor and all that good stuff. Is there anything that stands out that you want to talk about?
Isabel Brison: From the developer?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: The “What’s new for developer?” Yeah. We separated into what’s interesting for plugin developers and what’s interesting for theme developers. Sometimes, it has an overlap, and then it’s a toss-up. But that is where you can say, “Okay, I’m not interested in plugin stuff. I just want to see what’s new in the theme stuff.” And that’s also a pattern update.
Isabel Brison: Yeah. I’m very interested in seeing where the Data Views work is going. I think there’s a lot of potential for enabling. It’s already viewable as an experiment in Gutenberg. So, that’s a cool one I’ll be keeping an eye on.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So, if you want to, just as a developer, if you still have trouble, and … I think it’s getting worse that it’s hard to keep up with Gutenberg. That’s why we create this monthly view instead of having just everything new every four months when there is a new release out. So, you can see things coming. And if they were interested and not and follow up on that. Yeah.
So, yes. But speaking about experiments, when you enable the Experiment page on Gutenberg plugin, you see quite a few experiments. But let’s talk about two of them. One is the Data Views, and what you see is the progress on the lists for content types like the templates or the pages. When you have List All Pages, how can that look in the site editor as well as in the template? So the pages in the site editor as well as the template lists show already these new Data Views when you enable that experiment. Right?
Isabel Brison: From memory, I think it’s the pages. Let me check. I’m just going through. I’m not sure the templates…
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. It’s the pages.
Isabel Brison: … has it yet. So, if we go in the site editor and we get the little black bar on the left-hand side, when you go into the site editor. There’s a Pages section, and then, at the very bottom, you have Manage All Pages, which takes you to a list view of all of your pages.
Now, if you have the new admin views enabled, that page … So, that link in the site editor will actually take you to a new view, which is this Data View, which is quite experimental. And the interesting thing, well, for me, because I love layout and organizing things on pages. The interesting thing is that you can change the layout from a list to a grid, or you can even see a side-by-side view where you have your list of pages and then you can just click on a page and preview it in another window.
So, it works a bit more like an operating system, for a browser, I guess a bit more. It has this expanded functionality where you can view things in different ways, which could be quite useful depending on what kind of operation you want to do. So, yeah. I’m really appreciating the work that’s been done on this.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, there’s also quite a filter view that you can review, can add a filter. You see only those four for a certain author, the pages who are just the status, just the scheduled one or the published ones. And in the views, there’s also a Sort By version. So, you can sort it by title, by author, by date. And not only the layout. So, also, you can say, “Okay, I want …”. And these are all features that you know from your WP admin, but it’s actually with a more modern interface and maybe even easier to handle for someone who is new to the system. The grid view shows you the featured image with it if you want to. And the side-by-side is really cool, as well, if you have the space on your screen.
Isabel Brison: Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. You’ll see, right away, the layout of the page. Yeah, it’s really cool. Check out the experiment. It’s all experimental. So, at any time, it can change. Anytime, it can go away. Anytime, it can break. So, that’s the experimental nature of this. But … yeah. In this release, there has been quite some work on these Data Views, so if you go through the changelog, everything that says Data View at the beginning is about this admin section for the pages and the site editor.
Isabel Brison: But also, I want to add. The thing about experiments is that they’re being actively worked on, and they are always looking for feedback. And so, it’s immensely helpful, especially for folks who are invested in this and they want to see this going in a certain direction like, “Oh, this is really helpful” or “This is not good at all.” That feedback is really useful at an early stage, so that the developers know what’s working and what’s not and what might be causing issues for certain workflows or what might be a welcome addition.
So, yeah, the feedback … And I guess the downside of the experiments in Gutenberg is that they’re not always super visible because folks might not even think about going into the Experiment section. It’s like, “What is this?” And you can just click on things and randomly enable stuff, but it’s always super useful to go in and check those experiments and give feedback on them.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I found there are two kinds of people. Those who like to poke at new things and don’t mind if they get lost or confused or can recover quite nicely from it. And then, there are people who need to be secure or safe in safe spaces and they cannot … They just want to get their work done, and they are not interested in how the sausage is made and they don’t want to test things. Say, “Well, I’m not your beta test,” that kind of thing.
In open source, unfortunately, it’s a little bit different because we all work on it and we all use it. So, feedback is really important. But as you said, Isabel, but I also know that experiments can be a scary place for certain people.
Isabel Brison: Oh, yeah. I mean, absolutely. I mean, probably, don’t use it in production, but play around with it on the test website.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. But you will see that there’s actually quite a few things there amongst them. We skipped over that in the release, but there’s also a Forms Block feature or set that you can test out. And I also wanted to talk about the grid layout. When you go to the Experiments page, it tells you in the experiments there’s also grid variation for group block. And when you enable that, what happens?
Isabel Brison: What happens? So, when you enable that, what happens is that, when you then go into your post or template editor and you create a group block, instead of getting the standard three variations that you have, which is the regular group, the row, and the stack, you get a fourth variation, which is the grid. And that variation is also available from the block inserter. So, you can just type grid and it gives you the grid block.
And the grid block is … Essentially, it’s a variation of group. It’s not a block in itself. But what it does is it allows you to set the grid layout on your group block. And it’s only … And most of the reason why it’s still in experimental, even though … That’s actually … I did that a while ago now. More than six months ago. So, it’s been experimental for a couple of cycles. It’s not in core yet.
And the main reason is that it’s only a very basic implementation of grids. So, you have the ability to set the amount. Not the amount of columns, but the column width. That’s the default option that you get. That’s the only option for now, where you can set a width that will be the minimum width of your columns. So, if you squeeze it down onto a really small screen, the columns will not go under the width that you stipulate, but they can stretch if it’s a wider screen.
And the good thing about that is that this is pretty much the only version of grid where you can, with a couple of lines of code, create a block that is responsive. Because what happens is, if you get to a point where you don’t have enough space on your screen for … Say, you have four or five elements in your grid, and you no longer have the space on your screen to have those four or five elements side-by-side because each of them has a minimum width set. Then, the grid just free flows, and it just calculates how many columns will fit on the screen.
That’s the easiest way. It’s the paradigm of responsive without media queries. And that’s the best way to achieve that kind of responsive without media queries layout. But, having said that, there is a bunch of configuration that would probably be useful for folks creating actual layouts with this kind of grid. And I think one that jumps to mind immediately to me is the ability to set how many columns your item or your block is going to span because you might want to block to span a couple of columns. You might not want all the columns, all the elements in your grid to have the same width, to occupy the same amount of columns. You might even want some of them to stretch the full width of the grid. And so, having that sort of configurability for children, I think, would be a really useful addition.
The question is how to implement that. What is the most useful way of implementing that that will satisfy the most use cases? And that’s where I think there’s still a bit of design work to be done. And that’s why that’s still experimental, although it is … So, the secret here is … It’s not quite a secret, but … So, grid support technically already exists in core. The thing is the UI is not exposed. So, there’s no grid group variation in core, but the grid layout already exists because it underlies the grid’s layout in the post template block.
So, that’s already an implementation of CSS grids in post template. And so, that means that if you really wanted to use a grid layout in core, you could go into your block attributes and set the layout type as grids, and that would just work because the code to support the layout type is there. What is not there yet is the UI and the group block variation.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Wow, that’s really interesting. Yeah, I had no idea. Excellent. Are you going to write a blog post about it for the developer blog? I’m asking you publicly, but you can say, “I am going to think about it.”
Isabel Brison: Is this something that I’m going to have to commit to? Yeah, no. I’ll have to think about that. I actually have a fair amount of stuff on my plate right now. I’m not saying no. That would be great. I would like to write … I mean, I love CSS and talking about it and trying out new stuff with it. So, that is definitely a possibility that I will consider.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, I also know that Justin Tadlock is in the start blocks for a while now when he heard about grid layout to write about it. But as it’s still in experiments, it’s … Yeah. We need to wait till it’s out of experiments, and that might take a while. Yeah. What I can see is … I just enabled it on my test site, and it’s really cool. I just added a few pictures in there, so it looks like a gallery but it’s not … Yeah.
Isabel Brison: Hmm. Yeah, it works. I think gallery is actually a block where it would be really cool to have a grid implementation, especially if you could control the size of the child blocks. So, that’s something that I’m looking forward to being able to work on at some point in the future. But there’s a lot … And actually, if you go into Gutenberg and you search for the sort of issues where layout and, especially grid, is discussed, there’s a lot of thinking around how it should work. Everyone has an opinion on it. And it’s one of those things that it has to be done right, and it has to be done in a way that will satisfy the greatest amount of use cases while keeping the implementation fairly simple and lean. So, yeah. It’s not going to be a very easy problem to solve, I think, but it will be a great one to solve. It will be great to see the outcome of that once it’s done.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And it’ll also answer some of the questions about responsiveness and “Where are my viewpoints?” and all that. So, you actually wouldn’t need them because the grid helps you with that. That’s modern CSS to you, but it’s also, what, six or seven years old now?
Isabel Brison: Well, yeah. Grid’s been … Actually, it’s been around. It’s had decent browser support for a long time. The exciting thing now is subgrid, which is … It has also, I mean, in theory, been around for a long time, but actual implementation in browsers didn’t happen until last year-ish. And I think it’s still not stable in all browsers. Let me just check. Can I use CSS subgrid? Because I think that, in Chrome, it’s probably already in Canary, but I’m not sure it’s in Chrome Stable yet. Wait, what’s the latest version of Chrome? It might actually be. Oh, yeah. Released October 31st. Okay. So, it’s in the latest version of Chrome. Actually, it’s looking pretty good. It was very, very recently implemented in Chrome Stable. So, this means that we can start thinking about not only grids but subgrids, which … You know what would be amazing is having your block so your block uses grid and you detect whether a parent block uses grid, and then you can enable that. It nested grid as a subgrid of the parent. I’m thinking that that would be really cool.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s really cool and totally confusing for a user interface.
Isabel Brison: But everything would be beautifully aligned!
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes, the alignment is that one that confuses people. And yeah, I want it. Yeah.
And I think we’re getting, time-wise, to the end of our show. It has been a great pleasure talking with you, Isabel, today. The Gutenberg Changelog. The bad news is this is the last Changelog of the year. The good news is we start one right in the first week of January with episode 94. But I have one question, still. What are you currently working on? Because you worked on the grid log a while ago, but what are you working on right now?
Isabel Brison: Right now? So, my attention’s been a bit scattered here and there with different things.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Welcome to the club.
Isabel Brison: I’m actually trying to get some … I’ve been trying to add in some controls to allow, I guess, website designers … And this is probably going to be an interesting feature for agencies and folks using Gutenberg at a more enterprise level, where … For a long time, folks have wanted to be able to disable certain design controls. And so, I’m adding a few settings to layout so that some of the controls in layout can be disabled at a site-wide or a block-wide level. But that’s not very exciting. That’s not very exciting in terms of new features, something that probably should have already existed in there. So, I’m just going, “Okay, let’s add this in.”
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I know.
Isabel Brison: The thing I’m excited about…
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Isabel Brison: … which I’m just starting to dabble in. I’m starting to play around with Drag and Drop because I think there’s a lot of space for improvement in the current Drag and Drop. And this is not to say that it’s bad because it’s a lot better than it was a couple of years ago. There’s steadily been work and improvement in that area, but I think there’s still a fair bit of stuff that can be done. And I’m particularly excited to try and combine the Drag and Drop functionality with the ability to create layouts. So, add Drag and Drop elements so that they can be side-by-side and things like that. So, I’m playing around with some very experimental stuff and trying to figure out if it works.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I have the vision that when I Drag and Drop something, it actually pops to a grid. And I know there are certain tools out there that actually do that, but it would be phenomenal if that would come to WordPress. So, I’m glad you’re working on things like that.
And I do know people who are going to get excited about the disabled, site-wide, some layout stuff. So, yeah. You do some great work there as well. And people are waiting for it as well. Yeah.
So, okay, dear listeners. Now, we have to say goodbye to this year and wishing you not only happy Thanksgiving, but also happy holidays for those who celebrate it. And before we end the show, as always, the show notes will be published on the GutenbergTimes.com/podcast. This is episode 93, and if you have questions, suggestions, or news for the next one, in 2024, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. That’s changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. And Isabel, it’s not the first time that you’re on the show, but maybe we have a few new listeners. Where can you be reached when people want to reach out to you?
Isabel Brison: Oh, I am on GitHub as Tell the Machines. I am on WordPress Slack as Tell the Machines, also.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Good.
Isabel Brison: I’m not very inventive. That’s my username pretty much across all the WordPress sphere. Feel free to ping me, ask me questions and … Yeah, I’m around.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, thank you so much and all the good wishes for the last month of the year. Also, to you, to Australia. You have summer now?
Isabel Brison: Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: We are coming into the winter, and it’s my first winter in Munich. So, I might turn into a hibernation and go … like Mama Bear always goes into hibernation when it’s too cold. That sounds like me. So, I sleep longer.
Isabel Brison: That’s great.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I go earlier to bed.
Isabel Brison: Sounds like it’s going to be chilly. Yeah, it’s going to be warm. Well, Sydney’s pretty warm. So, expecting a fairly hot summer here.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. All right. Well, I wish you all a good New Year and see you all in January.
Isabel Brison: Happy holidays for everyone.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Happy holidays. Bye bye.
Isabel Brison: Bye.
by Gutenberg Changelog at November 26, 2023 12:06 PM under WordPress
Howdy,
If you celebrate it: Happy Thanksgiving. Enjoy the weekend with your family and friends.
It’s the first time in over twenty years, when Thanksgiving was just another Thursday in our workweek. Here we have plenty of bank holidays around Christmas and New Year’s. I am not complaining. It was merely one of those first Living in Munich things. Similar to seeing the first tiny snowflakes when walking down the street and temperatures below 49 °F (ca. 9 °C) during the day. 🥶❄️
Stay warm, my friends.
Yours, 💕
Birgit
November 29, 2023 16:00 UTC
Developer Hours: How to extend core WordPress blocks
Nick Diego and Ryan Welcher will discuss how to extend core WordPress blocks and why this approach can be preferred over creating a custom block.
State of the Word 2023 has a landing page now. Matt Mullenweg’s annual keynote address will take place on December 11 at 15:00 UTC on livestream or in person (in Madrid, Spain)
Andre Maneiro released Gutenberg 17.1 version. 200 PRs by 55 contributors, 3 of them first timers. The release includes several new enhancements, loads of bug fixes, and continued work on Phase 3 features. Here are the highlights:
Isabel Brison and I discussed the latest Gutenberg release, Gutenberg 17.1, Command Palette, Data Views and Grid Layout. It was a great chat, hope you enjoy it, too. It is also the last episode of 2023. In a few days, it will become available on your favorite podcast app.
🎙️ Latest episode: Gutenberg Changelog #93 – Gutenberg 17.1, Command Palette, Data Views and Grid Layout – a chat with Isabel Brison
Joen Asmussen posted the Design Share: Nov 6-Nov 17, in which he lists the following work of the WordPress design team:
Anne McCarthy invites you to the next Hallway Hangout: Let’s explore WordPress 6.5 on January 16, 2024, at 21:00 UTC, when she will talk through some of what’s to come in the next WordPress release with a proposed schedule for March 26th. This is being shared early to help encourage more folks to tune in and to build some excitement for this next release.
Watching the pros is always a fabulous way to learn. Brian Gardner, developer advocate at WP Engine, shows you in his video how to create a page with sidebar template in WordPress. You’ll learn how to add columns, how to use the List View, how to group blocks, and change the blockGap, how to add a custom style and make the sidebar accessible for screen readers by assigning a semantic HTML element to it. From beginning to end, a great tutorial.
In the YouTube video, Pro-Themer builds a WordPress website with Twenty Twenty Four, Maggie Cabrera, co-lead on the default theme development and Dave Smith, JavaScript developer on the open-source project, used the Twenty-Twenty-Four theme to build a fictional business site with core blocks only. And I just learned how to change the template on the home page instead of editing the existing template. The choices are gorgeous.
I also shared the video and some screenshots on X (former Twitter)
Felix Arntz posted some changes you might want to double-check on in Main query loop handling for block themes in 6.4. In WordPress 6.4, a change has been applied to how the main query loop is being handled for block themes. For singular content, the output of block templates (e.g. single.html or page.html) will be automatically wrapped in the main query loop. This might have ramifications for how your theme works.
If you are keen to learn more about the design and development process for this year’s default theme Twenty-Twenty-Four, Rich Tabor quizzed Beatriz Fiahlo and Maggie Cabrera for his article: Introducing Twenty Twenty-Four, that gives you a behind-the-scenes look at “the most expressive and capable WordPress default theme yet”, alongside WordPress 6.4.
Justin Tadlock just published the new Theme Handbook chapters Getting Started and Core Concepts. While the Getting started section aims at new theme developers, it also provides a resource for seasoned theme developers who are learning how to build block themes for the first time. The meat of the matter is to found in the Core Concepts chapter.
style.css file and how to use it.functions.php) and how to add more functionality to a theme.theme.json file works in themes with learning pathways to more detailed articles.With these two chapters now updated/published, it effectively replaces the old Block Themes chapter. The first five chapters of the handbook are now almost entirely focused on block theming, with classic theming relegated to the Classic Themes chapter. There is still more work to be done (get involved!)!
“Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2022”
A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test, and Meta team from Jan. 2021 on. Updated by yours truly. The index 2020 is here
Nick Diego wrote about Redesigning Developer Resources and a call for testing on the Make Met Blog. This project consists of a new design for the Developer Resources section of WordPress.org, which houses the official Code Reference, Block Editor Handbook, Theme Handbook, and much more. The design effort aims to refresh the aesthetics, convert the site to a block theme, and improve the overall developer experience.
With his newest tutorial, Justin Tadlock helps you Getting started with the Command Palette API. Learn build command to toggle a Discussion panel, open the Experiments page of the Gutenberg plugin and toggle the buttons from icons to text and back to site and post editor.
WordPress Developer are called to help with Exploration to support Modules and Import Maps. Luis Herranz, sponsored contributor by Automattic, posted a call for comments on how you think you should be able to leverage the latest web standards for writing and consuming JavaScript code.
In his latest Twitch stream, Ryan Welcher was Looking at block deprecations. and walks you through the nature of block deprecations for static blocks and starts with a very basic block.
If you don’t know what that means, you can also read up about it in Michael Burridge’s article on the Developer Blog Block deprecation – a tutorial.
Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s master branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.
Have you been using it? Hit reply and let me know.
Questions? Suggestions? Ideas? Don’t hesitate to send them via email or send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.
For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com
Featured Image: Screenshot of Openverse on the search for “wooden blocks”.
Don’t want to miss the next Weekend Edition?
by Birgit Pauli-Haack at November 25, 2023 07:23 AM under Weekend Edition
There is a LOT going on this week! For one thing, this newsletter is no longer coming to you from the HeroPress Network site! It’s being rolled into HeroPress.com. The old archives will stay on the old site, but new issues will be here.
The same holds true for the Tip Of The Week.
People have suggested for years that HeroPress raise funding with affiliate links, but I didn’t want it to become a link farm either. The solution is to make a plugin that lists all of our affiliate links on one page with easy sorting. You can find it at https://heropress.com/affiliates/
This week’s WPPhotos Info is called “Sunset Camel“.
This photo was taken by salsel while on a journey through Morocco. She traveled alone from France and then joined an organized group trip from Marrakech to the Merzouga. The trip was her own birthday gift.
PressItWP.com has been a part of the HeroPress Network for almost a year now, if you ever release Press Releases, please consider PressItWP!
Get 50% off on GravityKit’s toolkit of essential add-ons for Gravity Forms. Enhance Gravity Forms and build powerful web applications.
There were twenty-six WordPress podcast episodes released this week! There’s also a new podcast this week, The WordPress Edge!
There are new episodes every single day, so be sure to stop by WPPodcasts.com and search for things that interest you!
Here are some of the great photos submitted to the WPPhotos project this week!
Be sure to check out the hundreds of other great photos!
The header photo for this post is a CC0 licensed photo by Yam Chhetri from the WordPress Photo Directory.
That’s it for this week! If you’d like to get this post in your email every week, make sure you sign up!
The post HeroPress News! Camels at sunset! Weddings! Castles! Everything! appeared first on HeroPress.
A bit of reflection and good feelings seeing more meetups being organized. Plus a teaser for State of the Word and watch parties.
>> The post WordPress Meetups Have Always Had a Place in My Heart appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce and WordPress Builder Podcast .
by BobWP at November 24, 2023 12:29 PM under Podcast Guests from Asia
[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, the revamp of the WordPress showcase website.
If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea featured on the show. Head to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox and use the form there.
So on the podcast today we have Nick Diego. Nick is a sponsored full-time contributor at Automattic. His official position is a developer relations advocate, which allows him to focus on creating developer orientated content. Apart from his regular responsibilities, Nick is also involved in a separate project called the WordPress Showcase, and this is the focus of the podcast today.
The WordPress showcase is a curated collection of websites built with WordPress. Its purpose is to inspire, and show the breadth of what WordPress can achieve. Currently the showcase features around a hundred sites, including large enterprises like the New York Times and NASA. It aims to challenge misconceptions about WordPress, and highlight the platforms scale and reach.
The design of the showcase is contemporary and visually impactful. It shows that whatever proprietary platforms can do, WordPress can also do.
During the podcast we talk about the intricacies of the Showcase project. We discuss the selection criteria for featured sites, including the possibility of case studies to show the process behind their creation.
We also explore the importance of block themes within the Showcase, and the ongoing efforts to make wordpress.org fully block-based.
We also get into the future iterations of taxonomies and navigation on the site to enhance its functionality. Nick suggests that the categories in the showcase will serve as a valuable resource for novice users, trying to understand the capabilities of WordPress.
The redesigned showcase aims to highlight WordPress in a modern way, inspire web design, and convince clients that WordPress is a credible choice. Everything that you see on the website is open source, meaning that you can download all the theme files for the showcase site to see how it was all put together.
If you’re curious about block development, or how you might convince clients that WordPress is a credible CMS, this podcast is for you.
If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
And so without further delay, I bring you Nick Diego.
I am joined on the podcast today by Nick Diego. Hello, Nick.
[00:03:49] Nick Diego: Thanks for having me.
[00:03:50] Nathan Wrigley: You’re very, very welcome. Nick has been on the podcast before, but he’s here to talk about something completely different this time. He’s here to talk about something called, well, I’m going to call it The Showcase. I don’t know if that’s the correct name for it. It might just be the WordPress Showcase or just Showcase. We’ll get into that in a moment.
First of all, Nick, it’s a fairly generic question, but I always begin this way. Could you just tell us who you are, who you work for, what your relationship is with WordPress? All of that kind of quick bio stuff.
[00:04:16] Nick Diego: Absolutely. So I am a sponsored full time contributor working for Automattic. And I work in the. org division. My official title is developer relations advocate. And so a lot of my work is around creating developer oriented content, speaking with developers, kind of helping them navigate modern WordPress development techniques, and that sort of thing.
But what we’re here to talk about today, is about the WordPress Showcase. And that’s kind of a separate project, but also in the .org space, improving the .org website, one component being the Showcase. I’m also working on that as well as my developer content.
[00:04:55] Nathan Wrigley: So you have your fingers in a variety of different pies. But the pie that we’re concerned about today is the WordPress Showcase. I suspect that it may be useful, if you are sitting near a computer or a mobile phone at this point, it may actually be quite useful to pause the podcast and go and have a little poke around the following URL.
It’s really easy to capture. So if you go to wordpress.org/showcase. That’s nice and straightforward. wordpress.org/showcase. You’re going to be presented with a site, and you may think to yourself, well, what’s the purpose of this? Because there’s no real calls to action. There’s nothing really that we are requiring the users to do. But I guess that’s the intent.
So Nick, what is it? Why does this page exist? We’ll talk about its history later. Let’s just outline what it’s for.
[00:05:39] Nick Diego: The page is designed to Showcase what can be built with WordPress. And right now there’s about 100 sites, and this is kind of looked at as like a beginning. You know, the Showcase can grow as folks submit entries to the Showcase. But it’s really just to highlight and kind of inspire people about what can be built with WordPress.
We have sites like NASA and, you know, government sites like wordpress.gov. We have artist blogs and portfolios and businesses, and there’s a construction company on there. I mean, it’s just to try to show all the different types of sites that can be built with the WordPress platform.
[00:06:14] Nathan Wrigley: So given that WordPress has been around for a really, really long time now. We’re into the second decade, we’ve gone through 20 years already. So it’s been around for absolutely ages and, you know, people have been building websites.
Does the WordPress community or the wider world, maybe that’s who it’s aimed at more. Do they not know what WordPress is capable of? In other words, is this here for people who are trying to make a decision about whether to use WordPress or not? And it’s trying to encourage them that, look, there is no perfect template. There isn’t one size fits all. WordPress can do more or less anything.
[00:06:43] Nick Diego: Yeah, I think so. I think that part of this new Showcase, and we’ll kind of talk about, again, you said the history of the page and, you know, how it came to be. But the Showcase is now a top level navigation item when you go to wordpress.org. And the idea is for somebody who maybe is very new to WordPress, never used WordPress before, is just looking to get a presence online. It’s a quick place for them to go to just see what’s possible.
But there’s all sorts of different audiences that come to WordPress. And there’s a lot of people who have some idea, or thoughts about what WordPress is. Oh, it’s just a blogging platform. Or, oh, it can’t do certain things, or it can do certain things.
This is trying to show the breadth of what WordPress can do. Whether you’re a new user or whether you have some, you know, misconceptions about what the WordPress platform can do. This is trying to capture all the different ways to build with WordPress.
[00:07:33] Nathan Wrigley: It’s fairly impactful in terms of its design. In other words, the design is very contemporary, and it’s quite stark. There’s a lot of black, there’s a lot of white. And essentially you are putting the sites, there’s these little, they look like desktop versions of the site in every case that I’m looking at, at the moment.
And there’s just dozens and dozens of them lined up after one another. And each of them is really incredibly different from the other. But the thing that I’m taking away from it all, is just how large the reach of WordPress is. So more or less everything that I can see is something that I’ve heard of. So there’s museums here, there’s software companies, there’s enormous publications, and so on.
So is there a bit of that thrown into it as well? We’re trying to sort of impress with the scale of what WordPress is able to achieve. So I’m looking, I can see the New York Times, and various other different enterprises. Is that a part of it as well? Just look at the enormous projects that WordPress has captured, NASA and so on.
[00:08:27] Nick Diego: Yeah, I think so personally. There are a lot of other competitors, quote unquote, that WordPress competes with. We have things like Squarespace and Wix and others. This Showcase was not a direct response to those sites. The Showcase has been around on WordPress for a very long time. But one of the unique things about WordPress powering 43 percent of the internet is that, there’s a lot of high quality sites built with WordPress.
Being able to Showcase that the breadth of what you can build with WordPress, I do think is one of the unique things that WordPress has that allows it to stand out from maybe some of the other platforms.
And so showcasing things like the New York Times, again, I said NASA. NASA is at the top of mind because they recently just converted everything over to WordPress, which is a massive undertaking.
But, I mean, showcasing these kind of sites, as well as smaller sites. There are some restaurants on there. There’s a couple, ones that were built purely with the block editor, which is pretty cool. And so really having that juxtaposition of large enterprise sites versus small. Small business, you know, individual portfolio.
Hopefully, that shows a new user, someone who is just exploring WordPress all the different ways that you can build with the platform. And hopefully inspire them to dig a little deeper, download WordPress, get hosting, so on and so forth.
[00:09:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So just a couple of things on the navigation. For a start, it really is front and center on the wordpress.org navigation. Currently, as things stand, we’re recording this in November 2023. It’s the second item in the menu. After news comes Showcase and after that is hosting.
But then also if you actually go onto the Showcase site, there’s a couple of menu items on the right hand side where it says submit a site. And then there’s view all sites. But it’s the submit a site bit that I’m interested in. I wonder what the guidelines is around what would ever make it onto this page.
I can imagine if you were an agency, it would be incredible to get your website listed here. Presumably there’d be some kudos to that, and perhaps even other people coming to your agency.
So I wonder around that if there are criteria about what can appear here, what will appear here in the future. And the number a hundred, which is the number of websites that’s there at the moment, seems too coincidental. Is that the target number that you’re always going to feature or does that possibly go up and down depending on submissions?
[00:10:38] Nick Diego: So it’s funny you call out the hundred, because there were some proposals back in March around trying to keep the Showcase to 100. And from some community feedback it was like, oh, that’s a numbers too small. Do we really want to remove people from the Showcase once you’ve been added? You know, so kind of keeping that 100 as it stands right now, based on my understanding, that’s not a hard and fast number to be stuck with.
Interestingly enough, a lot of sites that were on the previous version of the Showcase were pulled over into the new Showcase. And there were some that were in the queue still, that hadn’t been processed, that also got pulled over. There are a handful of new ones as well.
As we went through, double checking, oh, this is still a WordPress site, making sure there were no problems, we randomly got to 100. It was like 108 at one point, and then just like, oh, this is not WordPress anymore. And then it got down to 100, so that’s purely coincidence.
[00:11:27] Nathan Wrigley: In terms of criteria for submission though, what would those be?
[00:11:31] Nick Diego: Exactly. So right now, the submission for submitting to the Showcase has not changed from the previous version. The project around updating the aesthetic, and the design of the site is part of a broader effort across wordpress.org, to kind of modernise and update the site as a whole. The main focus is aesthetics, and also changing all the themes to a block theme. So the new Showcase is entirely a block theme. Previously it was not.
Content moderation and how the submissions are managed, you know, how often new sites get added, that was not within the scope of the project. How the previous Showcase was managed, prior to this new redesign, is all the same.
That being said, there is a lot of work that needs to be done. And this needs to be handled from a community perspective, around content moderation, what is the process around that? So as we move forward in the next few months, that needs to be a focus for the Showcase site, in kind of improving that pipeline for new sites.
As of right now, we get a lot of submissions to the Showcase, because it’s wide open. Anybody can submit. So there is a lot of contributor time that’s needed to go through each submission, double check that it’s WordPress. So there’s a lot of work and man hours that is required for that.
And that’s something that needs to be sorted out in a Make post, and get some folks around that who want to commit time to helping manage that process. So, unfortunately that wasn’t part of the scope of this project, but it is very important to the continued success of a Showcase, and will need to come in the future.
We also have a few issues that were highlighted during the launch and the development of the site, that will also get improved as we go along. So I do really want to stress that, while the aesthetics of the Showcase right now, very different from what was before, so it really feels like a new experience. It is just another iteration, and more iterations will come as, you know, we fix things and improve things.
[00:13:22] Nathan Wrigley: In terms of the criteria for a minimum basic requirement, if you want to feature on this site. I mean, if you click through to any of the websites, the first thing which springs to mind is, you know, it has to be responsive because it’s shown in two different ways. There’s something suggestive of a desktop, and there’s something suggestive of a mobile phone.
It doesn’t actually have the sort of, it’s not encapsulated by the phone UI or anything. But it’s pretty clear that’s what you’re looking for. So that would be a minimum. But beyond that, do you have any things which are utterly essential? So one thing which jumps into my head would be, I don’t know, this website is accessible, for example. Or this website is, well, I’ll hand it over to you. Are there any criteria which, just don’t submit unless you meet this, this and this?
[00:14:01] Nick Diego: Right. So there are currently three bullet points under the submission criteria, and they’re purposely quite broad. You need to be using WordPress in a unique and innovative way, representing a notable organisation, government entity, or corporation as a official blog or website.
The key piece here before I say the last one is that, you need to be doing one or more of the following. So one or more of these, and or you need to be using modern WordPress. So for example, a small little restaurant might have a really cool, interesting design. They’re not a notable organisation or corporation, but they’re using it in a unique and innovative way. Maybe they’re using a block theme to do so. So you don’t have to apply it to all of these, but these are kind of the broad criteria around that.
So when it comes to being things like accessibility, and responsiveness or whatever. These are things where there is no criteria right now around a site passing a certain level of accessibility, or a certain lighthouse score. And it’s not to say that those criteria couldn’t exist, but they would need to be decided on collectively as a community. Identified what those are, and then that criteria can be implemented to the sites in the Showcase.
That process is highly opinionated, not highly opinionated, but it requires a lot of group consensus. And that is partially why the whole submission process and, you know, the content moderation was not part of the redesign. Because that requires an, at least personally, that requires its own consideration, its own thought processes, its own discussion with the community. And hopefully that could happen relatively soon as well.
[00:15:38] Nathan Wrigley: It seems like a not particularly onerous submission process, in that case. So long as you hit two out of the three of the criteria that you mentioned, you’re eligible. And then we must wait for the community to decide which go in, and add to the pool that we can currently see.
Doing a quick refresh, there’s always one website which dominates, if you like, it’s in the, you know, the hero section. And there’s one website which get featured. But every time I click refresh, broadly speaking, I get what seems to be something random. Although having refreshed probably 50 times or so now, it would appear that the ones which get into the header, there’s a few that seem to be earmarked.
There’s maybe five or six that I’ve seen so far. I’m seeing the New York Times. I’m seeing Meta. I’m seeing a variety of others that come up. Is there some other criteria there to get right to the top, if you like, of that page?
[00:16:26] Nick Diego: There is not. Behind the scenes, they’re basically a sticky post. And so there’s a server cache that refreshes, I believe it’s every 120 minutes, or every 60 minutes. And once that refreshes you’ll see a new page. The sites that were up there were selected as part of just the redesign aesthetic process just to have something there.
But the mechanism around those six sites can completely change. So if the community decides some brand new site really should be part of that six, then it can be. Should be considered kind of a default just to get the site launched. But I kind of put who those six are, kind of falls into that content moderation bucket, and it really can be anything that the community wants. Obviously that’s within the Showcase.
[00:17:09] Nathan Wrigley: When you click through to any of the particular websites in question, it looks like one of the submission things is A, give us the name. B, give us some imagery, or presumably you scrape that imagery somehow. But then it’s categorised by country, by the word category in this case, I’m looking at one which is categorised as business.
Then there’s flavor, which is quite an interesting term. Publish date, and then there’s a bunch of tags, which obviously refer to the industry that you’re in. So I’m looking at art, hospitality and so on. But there’s probably some more there.
You get a link, which seems to go directly, I don’t know what kind of a link that is, but maybe it’s just a regular old link, going directly to the property itself. And then you get some descriptive text, where you get to establish what this business is, and how the website has been put together.
But it doesn’t seem on the whole, this isn’t really a promotional tool for agency X. This is not a technique for an agency that’s big in the WordPress space, we know all the names. For them to push something and say, look what we did. There’s no link to them anywhere as far as I can see.
[00:18:08] Nick Diego: Correct. And this is something that, again, we tried to stay out of because it really falls into kind of content moderation again. But ideally, the Showcase should be a very exciting, place to Showcase your best work.
So it would be amazing if, you know, some of the largest agencies, even small agencies, submitted their work to the Showcase for review. Because we know that there’s a hundred sites in this Showcase, right? We know that there’s millions of sites out there. Probably many that are better than the ones that are in the Showcase, right? And so having folks submit their work will be awesome.
Now, you’re right. It is not a tool to show off the agencies or promote the agencies. That being said, when you submit a site, you include a description about the site and how it was built. And it would be kind of nice, you know, in the future of these kind of became little mini case studies. Hey, you know, we built this nasa.gov, and we’re using Multisite.
And it’s fine to highlight the agency dimension who built it, that’s okay. But it’s really about showcasing the work, and showcasing what can be built with WordPress. An agency can kind of inadvertently promote their work by being on Showcase, but that’s not the intended purpose. And I don’t know if we want to jump right into it, but I do want to share some thoughts around the taxonomies because you mentioned you have category and flavor.
[00:19:27] Nathan Wrigley: Categories and flavors. Flavor, by the way, you have three options that I can see at the moment. You have WordPress, WordPress enterprise, you might want to pick that one apart for the audience, and WordPress Multisite. They’re the options that you’ve got. So yeah, throw all the taxonomy stuff at us. That’s good.
[00:19:41] Nick Diego: So the taxonomy stuff is an area of the site that needs a future iteration. A lot of it was just pulled over from the old site to make sure that, you know, we kind of had feature parity as we moved over.
Flavor is an interesting one. And I think this is where we can really, maybe flex in the future. You could imagine a flavor being block theme, or hybrid theme. You know, maybe it’s different flavors of how the sites are built. WordPress is just like the catch all, just like normal WordPress. Presumably everything is WordPress.
But in enterprise, again, kind of a nebulous thing around sites that, and there’s only a handful of them that are listed as enterprise, where in doing this and reviewing the sites, we knew that this was a massive site that was enterprise grade, quote unquote, like NASA. With, you know, 60,000 pages. Really massive sites. And then Multisites, obviously for folks that are using Multisite.
Flavor, the current setup for the, you know, the taxonomy needs some work. We left it because it could be reused in a really interesting way in the future. And if folks have ideas around how this taxonomy can be used and additional terms to add, by all means, let us know.
Category is, and this goes back to thinking about some of the competitors of WordPress. Where we have Squarespace and Wix and so on. If you go to their Showcases, they have some very simple categories. You know, these are like five or six, that kind of bucket the sites. So it’s a little bit easier to navigate.
Right now, the category just looks like a normal taxonomy. But one of the ideas, perhaps in a future iteration is like, when you land on the Showcase, maybe there’s, visually you have some, you know, nice little buttons or something to say like business and portfolio. To try and help users navigate around the site a little bit better.
For this iteration of the Showcase, we left it very simple. It’s just another taxonomy term. But it leaves the door open for a new, updated design in the future that kind of leverages those categories a bit more. Makes the site a little bit more navigable for users, especially who are coming there for the first time.
And then your site tags are, it’s supposed to be like a fun expression where, we could have a thousand tags. It’s just a way to provide additional context about what a site is like. So tags are free form. Ideally we’ll have hundreds of them, that really help provide a little bit of fun to the sites and explain a little bit more.
[00:21:57] Nathan Wrigley: I think the categories will be really useful for novice people coming to WordPress, because it really does break out what WordPress is capable of, as much as anything else. So currently, at the time that I’m looking at the screen, the options are business. I would imagine a lot of people would immediately grasp what that is, but community. Oh, okay, WordPress can do that kind of thing. Can it? Okay.
Creative publication, obviously capturing people who are creating blogs or newspapers or whatever that might mean. But also store, you know, okay WordPress can handle that as well, can it? And whilst it’s obvious to you and I that those things are well within the purview of what WordPress can do, it may not be to other people.
So, yeah I think they’ll be really, really useful. And you can stack them on top of each other. So you can filter two or three things at the same time. And it strikes me that that will be, yeah, incredibly useful.
Now you threw out there, dare we say it on a WordPress podcast. You threw out there the name Squarespace, I don’t know if you mentioned Wix. But we know who the commercial competitors are. And you also said, if you look at their Showcases. So I haven’t looked at their Showcases, but I’m guessing that there must have been, in order for this redesign to happen, there must have been a moment in time where the WordPress Showcase, perhaps fell behind in terms of the appeal, or the design or what have you.
Did the WordPress Showcase, in times gone by, a few months ago let’s say, did it not live up to what it does now?
[00:23:18] Nick Diego: I want to be very clear and not disparage anybody that was involved in the original Showcase. It served its purpose, but it felt as old as it was. You know, I don’t know when that original site was launched, but it felt many years old, and it was.
And so when, I mean, WordPress.org is not a commercial entity. But at the same time, we are trying to grow the user base of WordPress. And other proprietary platforms, like Squarespace and Wix are also trying to grow their user base. And part of that is showing off what those platforms can do. And that was, that’s the point of the Showcase, to kind of show what WordPress can do.
And I think it was very fair to say that the previous aesthetic of the Showcase did not showcase WordPress in the best light, especially compared to some of these other tools that people can use.
And what we’re thinking about here is really not, you know, not an agency that already knows WordPress, not people who already know WordPress. But those folks who are just want a website, just want a presence online. And so if you were to compare the old Showcase, and something like Squarespace and Wix, it was a very stark difference there. And it was very clear which direction a user might go if they knew nothing else other than, this looks pretty, I want this.
And so yes, there was a lot of consideration around what others were doing when the Showcase was designed. And it’s not necessarily to compete with these other platforms, but it’s just to really showcase WordPress in a modern way that allows WordPress to kind of, allows us to be excited about directing people to the Showcase, other than perhaps cringing that it was a little bit out of date, and not reflective of the best that WordPress can be.
[00:24:51] Nathan Wrigley: It strikes me that this has lots of layers of use as well. Because, not only could you go to this website, obviously there’s a hundred at the moment, but that number is going to be in flux. Let’s imagine that there’s more in the future. Not only could you go there and just get bucket loads of inspiration, because really, genuinely there’s not one that looks anything like the other. They really are truly different in nature. And I guess that’s part of the Showcase, is to maintain that originality, as you said.
So you can go there to get inspiration. But also, it was always a part of the arsenal, I thought of a freelancer, and an agency when trying to persuade clients that WordPress was a credible choice. It was always really great to, not only show the designs, but also to name the names.
So, you know, The White House, NASA, you just list it. Well, these people are using WordPress, and immediately credibility just falls out of your mouth. I just wondered if there was any bit of this which was designed for that? You know, to help the community to be able to sell WordPress to their clients.
[00:25:54] Nick Diego: Absolutely. I think that WordPress has, in some circles, a negative connotation. You know, it’s just a blogging software. People decry security issues, which we know is not necessarily founded. And, you know, these are things where being able to send some customer or client somewhere and say, hey, do you know Noma? One of the most famous restaurants in the world? They’re using WordPress.
Hey, do you know the Ray Charles Museum? You’ve heard of Ray Charles. They’re using WordPress, so on and so forth. Rolling Stone is using WordPress. And I really think that that, not that we need to prop up the credibility of WordPress, but I think that having something like this really helps with that. And, you know, establishing that credibility, and also showcasing what WordPress can do.
[00:26:33] Nathan Wrigley: This could be completely wrong. Apologies if this comes out and you think, no, no, no, that really wasn’t the intention. The ones that I’m looking at, I’ve got a screen full of, and it probably is by some sort of random query of the database. I’ve got a screen full of things where everything is in English.
I doubt that that’s the case because now that I’ve gone onto the second page, I can see there’s one or two where English as the first language is not there. So is that just a coincidence? It’s not like there’s a proclivity here to showcase English things. Any language is possible. It’s the design that’s the point, not the language.
[00:27:05] Nick Diego: I think that may have been unfortunate happenstance because there was a really strong effort to make sure that there’s a diversity of sites across other languages. Actually, we do have one on the homepage, the Denmark Museum of Design. The featured name is Design Museum Denmark, but then all the navigation is in Danish, I believe.
So that was definitely a huge effort as well. Because WordPress is not just the United States, and the state of the word that’s coming up is taking place in Madrid to kind of show off all the amazing contributors that we have in Spain. You know, so this is really a global Showcase, and it really should reflect that.
So perhaps we need to add a few more items to the homepage that are from different areas, but absolutely not. We really want to have a broad spectrum of sites across the world.
[00:27:51] Nathan Wrigley: So, WordPress is doing a really good job here, we can see that. WordPress is also doing a really good job in the amount of materials that are being created in order to learn how to use WordPress. And I know this isn’t directly within your wheelhouse, but i’m kind of interested where this would go.
I wonder if in the future it would be kind of interesting to match up some of these designs with learn material. So, you see them on YouTube all the time. Somebody dissects a site, and then quickly rebuilds it in WordPress, with blocks or whatever it may be. This just seems to be enormously popular.
You know, people love to consume that kind of content because they learn. They’ve got a template that they can work towards, and they can see how it’s scaffolded and built on the screen. So I’m not holding you to anything, but I do wonder if the Showcase might lean in that direction to help people, not just see what’s beautiful, but also, this is how it was built as well. That would be kind of nice.
[00:28:42] Nick Diego: Absolutely. And I think that there is some work, and I don’t want to, again, put words in anybody’s mouth, but there is some work around. So we have an enterprise section. wordpress.org/enterprise. And I know that there’s some work being done exploring how to create more case studies.
So if you look at a site, take NASA for example, massive site. And I go, how do you even build that sort of thing? Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a case study that said, hey, this is what we did. Hey, we had 50 custom blocks, you know, we did this X, Y, and Z. Being able to show what went behind each Showcase entry, in some sort of case study, would be really, really, really cool.
So I love that idea. And I think that there’s some exploration around how we can do that. Because it’s not only enough to show the site that was built, but how it was built. Maybe even in broad terms, would be incredibly helpful for folks to help kind of recreate that sort of thing.
[00:29:30] Nathan Wrigley: Get the excitement going, but also getting people learning how to build it. You may have already answered this question, towards the beginning of the show. I don’t think you said that all of these, or even many of them, are based upon block themes. Let’s just firstly clear that up. There’s no proclivity here of, well, it must be done with, in air quotes, modern WordPress block based themes, no?
[00:29:51] Nick Diego: Nope. There’s a lot of sites in here that are not. There are some that are, and I think that as we move forward, it would be cool to have maybe a flavor that could clearly call out, okay, this is a full on block theme. Because I think that we do kind of lack some examples of real world examples of block themes.
But to go to the broader effort, so Showcase is just one piece of this wordpress.org redesign. We want wordpress.org to be fully block based. You know, because it’s a massive site. There’s a lot of different pieces of it. There’s a showcase, there’s plugins repo and themes repo. Having that all block based really showcases the power of blocks. So we’re not even close to that yet.
But the cool thing is, is that the Showcase is entirely block based. So if you want to build a site like the Showcase, you can with blocks.
[00:30:34] Nathan Wrigley: I’m going to get you to, somewhat unexpectedly, change the hat that you’re wearing, because I want to just ask you about blocks actually, and block based themes in particular, if that’s okay? So it wasn’t exactly why I got you on the call, but I hope I can smuggle the odd question in.
How is that enterprise going? Because, I’m specifically talking now about block based themes. We’ve had these around for a little while now, and it would appear at least on the face of it, that the stats, if you just took the raw stats, the pendulum doesn’t seem to have swung in the direction of adoption for block based themes, perhaps as much as one would have imagined or hoped, whichever word you prefer there.
What’s your opinion of that? Do you think people are just sticking with what they’re familiar with? They’re waiting for the right moment. Or do you think this is a permanent thing that WordPress is going to face going into the future? Where we’ve got this, well, you have to make a decision right at the outset. Are we going to go with a classic theme? Are we going to go with a block theme?
And that decision will never get resolved. There’ll always be the option for those two things. Or you have some sort of intuition that, perhaps in the future, block based themes will start to consume that pendulum swing?
[00:31:39] Nick Diego: I think that there will always be a choice between the two. But I think that, actually the development of the Showcase site and the other sites that we’re doing for wordpress.org, is a very interesting exploration. Because you’re talking about applying a block theme to a massively trafficed site.
So one of the other projects that we’re working on right now is overhauling the developer resources section. So this takes into account the block editor handbook, the themes handbook, a lot of handbooks. You know, it’s hundreds and hundreds of pages.
Exploring how to build a block theme that supports that sort of thing, can be challenging. And so, I think that there is a certain level of tension around transitioning from an architecture that you already know, to something like a block theme, where you’re going to have to implement things in different ways. Learning how to do that at scale can be challenging.
A good example is that, every page, or almost every page in wordpress.org, actually needs to stay in version control so it can be translated. So when you’re editing things in the block editor, if you’re just on your personal site, when you save something to the site editor, that change is saved in the database.
We can’t do that in wordpress.org. All those changes need to be synced back to the actual template files that power the theme. This is getting very in the weeds I know, but it’s just one of these things you have to kind of account for when building a block theme, on a site of this scale.
Once you figure that out, once you figure out a process for it, it’s not that big of a deal. It’s not that bad. But figuring that out can be a little challenging. For anybody that’s interested in this sort of thing, all the theme files for Showcase and rest of .org. It’s all open source. It’s all available to the public in the WordPress repository on GitHub. So if you want to know, how do they do this block that does the big banner image on the homepage? It’s a custom block, and it’s available in the GitHub repo for you to check out.
So I’m hopeful that as we go through these things and we can actually, you know, show how some of these implementations are done, that might help get others over that hump of transitioning. But there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s going to take some time, especially for large sites like this.
But I know, from somebody who, I didn’t do the development work, but I did a lot of, you know, editing and, you know, we’re doing more work now and other sites. Being able to go into a block editor page and scaffold out a design in blocks is so much easier. Like it is so much better.
And it also requires much less development, because you can scaffold out a page and how you want it to look. You can move blocks around. And once you’re done, then you can pass it off the development team. They push it into a theme template, and you’re good to go. So it really cuts down on the development time, once you have the entire architecture set up.
And it also really empowers, which was kind of the promise of the block editor and site editor, empowers the content creator, or the designer, to build most of it themselves. And we’re starting to see that with this .org project. We’re getting to a point where a lot of the ground work is done, a lot of infrastructure is done. And now we can start really moving quickly because it’s just designing in the editor, which is great.
[00:34:32] Nathan Wrigley: I think by pure coincidence, a bit of serendipity, it’s the 7th of November, and it’s a big day for WordPress because 6.4 has landed. I don’t know if you’ve got to get off the call go quickly triage things or anything like that.
It does appear, from my perspective anyway, I keep a pretty close weather eye on what’s happening in the project. It does seem that version by version, minor release by minor release, the promise of what blocks can do and block themes can do, is becoming more and more compelling. I do understand, you know, if your agency is embedded in a workflow which just is going to be so difficult to untangle, I can understand why that inertia might be there.
If you had point somebody, Nick, in the direction of a resource, a good website. I mean, we can probably give it, take it as given that you’d point them in the direction of learn.wordpress.org and various other properties like that. I wondered if you had any good advice as to where to go, to learn about block based themes.
[00:35:24] Nick Diego: Yeah. So, learn.wordpress.org is fantastic. I’ll also give a little self plug from me and my team. I have a small team with a few others and we’re on the developer relations team, and if you’re interested in more developer oriented content, the learn team does a great job with user content and some developer content, but our focus is all developer content.
And so once a month or once or twice a month, we do a developer hours, which is a live series. And it’s always a very specific topic. The last one we just did was theme oriented. We had Jessica and Maggie who helped build the new 2024 theme, and they went through how that theme was built. Code examples and, you know, how the whole thing was built.
And so every month we have these sessions that are very developer oriented, whether it’s building custom blocks, whether it’s building block themes. And that’s where, if you’re a developer and you really want to learn how to build this stuff, as opposed to using a block theme, that’s great for learn. I highly recommend that.
I also want to say again, another shout out. We’re doing a lot of work to overhaul the block editor handbook document, basically the documentation on how to build blocks, and work with the editor. Justin Tadlock, who used to write for WP Tavern, he’s been undertaking a massive project to overhaul the themes handbook.
And so with these two efforts, it’s going to take into 2024 to kind of complete them. But the idea is that both the block editor handbook and the themes handbook will be much more robust, especially when it comes to building with blocks, whether it’s a block theme or building custom blocks.
And we hope that better documentation leads to better projects that people can build. Because right now there’s some, definitely some holes in both of those pieces of documentation which we hope to fix.
And we’re also going to get a brand new design very soon for that developer resources section, which will make navigating the documentation much nicer.
[00:37:17] Nathan Wrigley: And lest anybody forget, this is all free. It’s entirely free, ready for you to utilize.
Nick, thank you so much for chatting to us about the Showcase. My hope is that people listening to this will be able to, A, make use of it, you know, perhaps to pitch their own work, but also perhaps submit their own site so that the number there 100, will continue to rise and we can all benefit from the wonderful things that have been produced.
Where might people find you if they want to communicate with you directly?
[00:37:46] Nick Diego: Absolutely. So anybody is welcome to reach out in the WordPress Slack channel, @ndiego, and also on Twitter, X, whatever we’re calling days @nickmdiego. But happy to answer any questions about block development, block theme development.
[00:38:00] Nathan Wrigley: Nick Diego, thank you so much for chatting to me about the Showcase. I really appreciate it.
[00:38:05] Nick Diego: Thank you so much for having me back.
On the podcast today we have Nick Diego.
Nick is a sponsored full-time contributor at Automattic. His official position is a developer relations advocate, which allows him to focus on creating developer orientated content. Apart from his regular responsibilities, Nick is also involved in a separate project called the WordPress Showcase, and this is the focus of the podcast today.
The WordPress showcase is a curated collection of websites built with WordPress. Its purpose is to inspire, and show the breadth of what WordPress can achieve. Currently the showcase features around a hundred sites, including large enterprises like the New York Times and NASA. It aims to challenge misconceptions about WordPress, and highlight the platforms scale and reach.
The design of the showcase is contemporary and visually impactful. It shows that whatever proprietary platforms can do, WordPress can also do.
During the podcast we talk about the intricacies of the Showcase project. We discuss the selection criteria for featured sites, including the possibility of case studies to show the process behind their creation.
We also explore the importance of block themes within the Showcase, and the ongoing efforts to make wordpress.org fully block-based.
We also get into the future iterations of taxonomies and navigation on the site to enhance its functionality. Nick suggests that the categories in the showcase will serve as a valuable resource for novice users, trying to understand the capabilities of WordPress.
The redesigned showcase aims to highlight WordPress in a modern way, inspire web design, and convince clients that WordPress is a credible choice. Everything that you see on the website is open source, meaning that you can download all the theme files for the showcase site to see how it was all put together.
If you’re curious about block development, or how you might convince clients that WordPress is a credible CMS, this podcast is for you.
You can reach out to Nick in the WordPress Slack channel: @ndiego
by Nathan Wrigley at November 22, 2023 03:00 PM under showcase
Dear end users & site owners,
Never heard about BP Classic? You should read the Add-on’s first version announcement post. Please note version 1.2.0 is now available for upgrade/download.
3 issues have been fixed:
NB: BuddyPress 12.0.0 is still under development (final release is scheduled to December 6). You can contribute to BP Classic to check it makes sure the third party plugins – not ready yet for the BP Rewrites API (to be introduced in 12.0.0) – you are using will behave as expected thanks to this backwards compatibility add-on. To do so simply test it & your BP plugins with the BP 12.0.0-beta4 pre-release and report issues adding a reply to this topic.
by Mathieu Viet at November 21, 2023 09:01 PM under releases
On Emerging Tech, Timothy Jacobs of SolidWP explores passkeys, a security tech for WordPress. Eliminating passwords, it uses biometric data, ensuring user safety and resisting phishing. Adopted by major firms, passkeys promise enhanced WordPress security.
>> The post Now is the Time for Passkeys in WordPress, All the Time with Timothy Jacobs appeared first on Do the Woo - a WooCommerce and WordPress Builder Podcast .
by BobWP at November 21, 2023 08:39 AM under Podcast Guests from North America
First, I’d like to repeat my comment to Sarah:
Sarah, you are amazing. Your insightful writing and journalism has been a gift to the WordPress world, and shaped how the project has evolved for the better. It’s a key and major contribution to the community. Thank you, deeply, and I can’t wait to see what you do next. Ten years… wow!
I’m sorry I haven’t had the time to find a new writer for the Tavern in the time between when Sarah gave her notice a few weeks ago and now. There’s never a dull moment in tech and my priorities with WordPress core and Automattic ended up taking more time than I expected. Funding and supporting the Tavern to do independent WordPress journalism is an important part of the WP ecosystem—we need a site that covers our space without care for affiliate links.
If you have:
Please send an email to matt at my last name dot com, with [wptavern] at the beginning of the subject, and the following things in the email:
And please send in the application by November 24th! We’ll take this week off but hopefully come back blazing after Thanksgiving. I’ll review everything over the weekend when I have some time off planned.
We’ll try out a number of folks on an hourly contract ($25/hr, same as Automattic) as a trial, and if that goes well we’ll aim to hire two full-time writers by the end of the year. A full-time offer also includes generous benefits including full coverage on health care and 6% 401k matching. You’ll be an employee of Audrey.
The job is to write frequently about the goings-on in the WordPress world and foster a healthy discussion and community here on the site. If you’re doing your job well, it should be reflected in traffic and comments on the site. You will set the tone and discussion in the WordPress community, and drive the narrative. Every post will be syndicated to every wp-admin in the world. You don’t have to start out a WordPress expert, but you’ll become one. You’ll have a ton of autonomy, so need to be self-driven and able to manage yourself. (You can ask previous writers how much I was in their hair. 
)
Midjourney prompt: a stunning landscape scene with a tranquil atmosphere. The foreground showcases a calm, crystal-clear lake reflecting the serene blue sky above. On the horizon, a majestic mountain range rises, covered in lush, green vegetation. The central focus of the image is the sun, just starting to rise above the peaks, casting a warm, golden glow across the entire scene. Its rays create a mesmerizing play of light on the water’s surface, symbolizing hope, new beginnings, and the promise of a brighter future.
This might get lost in the OpenAI earthquake happening, but it’s important so I wanted to post about it. (And gosh! A Starship launch, which is amazing. We live in interesting times.) On Tuesday, Nothing, who makes the cleanest and most interesting Android phones (and whose earbuds sound great), announced via my favorite tech video channel, MKBHD, that the phones would support iMessage on Android, so you can be a blue bubble with your friends. This got a lot of pickup!
It got a little buried, though, because on Thursday Apple said it was going to support the RCS standard, which Google and others had been lobbying hard for. However, it’s doing the bare minimum: RCS isn’t actually encrypted, and Apple’s not doing the Google proprietary thing to encrypt it, and so non-Apple people still get green bubbles. (More on that later.)
iMessage on Android (and Windows!) is on the roadmap for Texts, the all-in-one messaging platform Automattic acquired last month. The Texts team is obsessed with security, and that’s part of why the platform is desktop-only right now—to keep everything 100% client-side and fully encrypted in a way that could never be accessed by the team, or have any compromise in the middle, they’ve been taking their time to get the engineering right on the mobile versions. So they poked around the Sunbird app that Nothing partnered with, and it wasn’t pretty. Here’s Texts founder Kishan Bagaria:
The BlueBubbles thing might be a mistake, but seeing the unencrypted data on the wire definitely wasn’t. Sunbird replied and doubled down on Twitter, citing some ISO standard and claiming it was “encrypted.”
Okay! Now you’re caught up to Friday. Texts says Sunbird isn’t secure, Sunbird says it is. He said, she said, right? Not quite—there are receipts. This blog post lays out even more than Kishan tweeted originally and shares code so you can confirm this yourself. tl; dr: Sunbird puts all your iMessages and attachments into Firebase.
What should you take away from this?
Nothing (the company) still makes amazing hardware that you should absolutely check out and use. It’s my favorite Android experience. I think the company got bamboozled by Sunbird, and unfortunately this went mainstream on MKBHD.
Sunbird appears either not to understand security or to lie about it, and probably misled Nothing. I would recommend double-checking what that team claims in the future.
Who should we actually be upset with?
Apple.
You shouldn’t need to jump through all these hoops to have a blue bubble on iMessage. Design can create great things; it can also harm. Apple’s design decisions to “magically” upgrade SMS or texts or RCS into iMessage, which is better and more secure, creates a green-bubble ghetto that’s also a terrible user experience for anyone not on an Apple-made device.
I’ve heard stories of teenagers being ostracized because they couldn’t afford an iPhone, of group chats rejecting people who turn the chat from blue to green. I know that sounds petty, but do you remember middle school? It’s about status, and Apple knows that. Everything they make bleeds status and signaling. They’re the best in the world at it, and I should know—I’m typing this post from a M3 Max black MacBook with 128GB of RAM. But while status signaling with amazing hardware and design touches is harmless, in software and social settings in can be harmful.
Regardless of how it started, today the green bubble indicates cheaper, lower-status, less secure. Apple’s half-hearted support of RCS just continues this. Sunbird (and others) shouldn’t need to jump through so many hoops around this stuff by reverse engineering. Apple should open up iMessage APIs so it can be natively supported just like every other 100M+ messaging platform is: Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp, et al. Teens who can’t afford or don’t want an iPhone should be able to have an app that lets them connect with their friends as peers, securely and with all the features that are easy to support in messaging.
Tim Cook, Apple, we love you. Trillion-dollar company, and lots of room still to grow. Allowing iMessage/FaceTime to interoperate (like it used to!) might take .01% off your growth rate, but it’s the right thing for humanity. Yes, I know Google is shady too, and they’re locked in this smartphone death match with you. But take person-to-person communication out of the struggle, make it a DMZ, and be content to compete in all the other areas you’re currently crushing: design, silicon, Continuity, security, privacy, customer experience, retail stores, spatial audio, the list goes on.
I have no idea how to get in touch with YouTubers, but Marques, if you see this, I’m happy to chat about the future of technology, open source, freedom, and privacy.
Update: As I was writing this, the Nothing Chats app has been pulled from the Play store.
Update 2: From my colleague Batuhan:
Howdy,
Now the Fall has come to Munich, Germany and as the Floridian weather wimp, I have to go into hibernation like Mama Bear. To counteract the urge to crawl back into bed, I practiced some exposure therapy with at least 6,000 steps outside in full gear (tuck, gloves, cape, and shawl), even in the rain. It helped a little, and I am not afraid of the cold anymore. That’s my win for this week. I will let you know how it goes when snow falls. What are the small wins in your life right now?
I am sad that Sarah Gooding, after a decade writing for the WPTavern, is moving on to a new endeavor. She has been a great supporter of the Gutenberg Times, and an even greater supporter of the WordPress Community as a whole. Over three thousand articles. Day in, day out, she kept her ear on the pulse, separated the wheat from the chuff, and helped thousands of WordPress users understand how WordPress works, how businesses thrive in the open-source market and explained some of the more technical decisions and development to us mere mortals. She’ll be missed for sure, and we wish her a great start into the new adventures.
Gutenberg wise, there is some wonderful work being done. Learn more below and enjoy the newsletter.
Yours, 💕
Birgit
On December 11, 2023, at 15:00 UTC, Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress, will give the State of the Word keynote. This year for the first time ever not from the United States.
If you want to be there in person, join a watch party near you or watch the live stream, Dan Soschin has the details in his post. State of the Word 2023 – Madrid, Spain. For the Q & A session, you can send it your question via email or wait for the Slido APP QR code at the event.
In her post Proposal: 2024 Major Release Timing, executive Director and release lead of WordPress 6.4, Josepha Haden Chomphosy proposed the release schedule for 2024. She envisions again three major releases of WordPress:
Giving a Gutenberg release cycle every other week, the last Gutenberg plugin version that will make it into the next WordPress version 6.5 is 17.7. That’s six more versions to get new features ready and tested before they make it into core. Speaking of testing, Andre Maneiro just released Gutenberg 17.1 RC 1 for testing.
Meanwhile, the work for WordPress 6.4 is not done: Femy Praseeth, release lead for documentation, published a Call for volunteers to help with 6.4 end-user documentation. It’s a great chance to apply your knowledge of how to use WordPress and help others to understand it too. You’ll find onboarding information, a list of tasks and links to the handbook in the post.
🎙️ Latest episode: Gutenberg Changelog #93 – Gutenberg 17.1, Command Palette, Data Views and Grid Layout – a chat with Isabel Brison
For the default theme, Twenty-Twenty-Four developers had three uses cases in mind and provided patterns and page layouts for bloggers, portfolio artists and small business owners. Jamie Marsland took them by their word and he created five new websites using Twenty-Twenty-four. In his video Is this the best WordPress Theme ever! he shows you how he built five sites, only using the built-in patterns, block variations and style variations. The examples, are one-page, a woo-commerce theme and also a small business website.
If you are looking for a second (or third or fourth) opinion on the Twenty-Twenty-Four theme, Matt Medeiros, feels you should Watch this before you try Twenty Twenty-Four theme for WordPress. Medeiros top four takeaways:
“While not yet perfect, Twenty Twenty-Four shows the direction WordPress is headed for easy site building without needing page builders or premium themes.” he wrote.
In his video, Mastering WordPress 6.4 in under 5 Minutes: every feature revealed, Dave Smith walks you through the key features of the new WordPress release: new default theme, image Lightbox, background image for group block, List view updates and enhancements to patterns management, vertical text orientation and adding buttons to the Navigation block. It’s a great overview if you want to know what’s new in WordPress 6.4 for content creators.
Using the site of the Museum of Block Art, Anne McCarthy demonstrated in this video the impact of the enhanced pagination that came with WordPress 6.4 to the Query block. Effortless Pagination: How a new WordPress 6.4 feature elevates the user experience.
Last week, we mentioned the new block theme by Ellen Bauer and Manuel Esposito.. Sarah Gooding gave it a review, ElmaStudio Releases Moog: A Free Block Theme for Blogs. “It features a minimal and bold layout with a responsive, masonry style grid on the homepage. Moog is well suited to blogs or even small magazine websites, with options to radically change the style with the click of a button.” she wrote.
A new version of WooCommerce is now available. Nigel Stevenson has the release notes for you. WooCommerce 8.3.0 Released. He highlighted:
Sarah Gooding shared more details in WooCommerce 8.3 Makes Cart, Checkout, and Order Confirmation Blocks Default on New Installations
On Learn.WordPress, Laura Adamonis posted a tutorial on How to create a menu with the navigation block. The description reads: “This tutorial will walk a user through how to create a menu with the navigation block in the site editor of updated 6.4. The tutorial will use the 2024 theme. It will also touch on moving menu items, creating a second menu, adding a button and a sub-menu”.
Brian Coords wrote in his post Custom Settings Screens in Block Themes about his approach and considering all API options available. Customizer and Settings API after suitable for the task, Coords selected the Gutenberg design language and components and their more contemporary look to get started.
Jamie Marsland is running a WordPress Block Theme Live Special on YouTube with Rich Tabor, on the 13th December, 20:00 UTC “If you are looking to get into WordPress Block Themes then this session is for you. Rich Tabor, Core Gutenberg Product Manager, is helping me explain the basics and more advanced features of Block Themes.” he wrote in the description.
“Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2022”
A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test and Meta team from Jan. 2021 on. Updated by yours truly. The index 2020 is here
The latest recipe of Ryan Welcher’s Block Developer Cook Book, is about Connecting to Post Meta and you’ll learn to extract and update data from WordPress custom post meta, “adding a flavorful twist to your post meta management.” he wrote.
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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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Don’t want to miss the next Weekend Edition?
by Birgit Pauli-Haack at November 18, 2023 09:49 AM under Weekend Edition
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December 08, 2023 06:30 AM
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