When I shared 20 years of WordPress community at WordCamp Lisboa, I touched on the future of the community. Today I elaborate on that part.

When we choose a spouse, we choose someone who matches our values. When we choose a home we choose a space that matches our needs. We look for all the green flags, all the boxes to be checked, and we don’t accept red flags. We say no to cockroaches, no to cheaters, no to leaky plumbing.

When it comes to a job, though, we take what we can get. We fear losing, we let red flags slide and when it’s bad, we still stick around and hope it gets better. We tell ourselves it’s the only option we have.

We don’t imagine that there could be real fulfillment. We believe this is it: the 9 to 5, the endless grind. Work for the man and hope you end up with a retirement plan, at best. Hold on to that job – you never know how far and how hard you could fall without it.

A space without hierarchy, a space where everyone has a voice, a space where inclusion and diversity are virtues seems like a smoke dream.

And so it went for me. Deep in the work, sleep, die cycle. Thinking this was it. I kissed my dreams goodbye, succumbed to being a slave to my paycheck because after all, I have a family to feed. Priorities, Amy. Priorities.

Discovering WordPress

Sometimes you aren’t even looking and you trip over something, not knowing what you’ve stumbled into. Then suddenly five years have passed and you have lasting friendships and a whole a$$ career. Your kids are fed, your bills are paid and you are happy.

And that’s how it happened for me. I did what I had to, grabbed what job I could, worked hard and then got shoved face first into the lap of WordPress, without a clue what I was getting into. Without a clue that my life had just changed. I was actually quite angry. I was supposed to be promoted from my wildly underpaid tech support job to a wildly underpaid live chat supervisor job. How DARE they change their minds and pigeonhole me as a WordPress Tech!!?

But the reality unfolded rather quickly after that. That when it comes to WordPress, there are only green flags. There is only a match in values. There is only a world where people’s human needs are met.

The need for community, the need to be part of something bigger than you, the need for connection, the need to learn, to grow, to watch something else grow. The need for one step to lead to the next, where paths are abundant and there are no dead ends. I had no idea what I had just been shoved into.

I made the best of it. I helped form a new WordPress dedicated support team. I fixed websites, I trained other agents, I determined policies and practices, and I started going to WordPress.org team meetings. At first I thought that I was just supporting the endeavors of my employer, but the truth is, it was much more than that.

Finding the Community

My first meeting was with the Hosting team. I hopped on Zoom unaware that I would already know every face in the room. Unaware that I would be going to these meetings every week for the next five years. Unaware that I’d become a Team Rep and get my fingerprints all over the Open Source Project. Unaware that I would find friends, learn so much, build skills and be offered jobs. Unaware that there were 30,000 people on the other end of the keyboard, and 400 million opportunities.

I stayed in that job for years, and I extended myself way beyond my technical support role. I had ideas for how to support WordPress users and brought them to the leadership team. They were interested, though not completely onboard, but still gave me the greenlight to go ahead and try.

I started offering developer services to their enterprise WordPress customers, instead of turning them away saying “we don’t do that here”. The customers were into it. They wanted and they needed that type of support. I stumbled upon more and more customers that needed developer help and offered them that help. I got my teammates involved. We were seeing results and the results were good.

Happy customers, new streams of revenue and increased customer retention. Instead of being angry and at a loss, tech support customers had real options for resolution. They were willing to pay extra and they kept coming back for more. They praised us and our work.

The VP of product and the CEO started noticing. They decided to mentor me and trained me in product development, agile software development and leadership. I started to flush out user journeys, product packages and made a two-year strategy for the growth of the developer service that is now a full blown product offering. After the first year they had me do a win loss report, and we found that the service had earned revenue just through word of mouth, before it was even established. Boom.

And yet I was struggling to buy food. I was living under the poverty line. I was being praised, but not paid. Business owners take heed, this is how you lose good employees.

I was a tech support agent who was helping run a team, fixing customer problems, developing a product, pushing code, creating business strategies and making revenue for the org. All while starving. All while witnessing my developer friends at the same company make six figures. I became disgruntled, I became more vocal about it, and I lost the favor of leadership by complaining – despite the fact that my complaints were valid. Lesson learned. After a while, I was just too unhappy with what I was paid for my numerous roles and quit out of frustration.

I had no idea what was going to happen next. I started studying code and blogging. I was elected into a Team Rep position on the WordPress Open Source Project. I practiced making WordPress themes and plug-ins. I learned Symfony, I learned some Javascript and Python, I learned how to have faith in myself and how to acquire clients outside of the stream of tech support. I became a Meetups organizer and got involved in WordCamps. I started sharing skills that I had learned and had used to survive in the tech field.

I never wanted to be a freelancer or a web developer though. I actually prefer doing system administration over web development – so I kept looking for a full-time gig. After a few months, I landed a job as a WordPress Tech Lead. I got to work with design and development and build out pipelines, work with servers, clients and code.

Then Covid happened, and I think everyone can agree what a nightmare that was. I got hit with the first strain of Covid and was so, so sick. I couldn’t move for three months. I lost my job and I was too sick to care. I was blessed that my colleagues in the WordPress community cared, though. They supported me and some of them even prayed for my recovery. One of my hosting teammates suggested applying to a job with his employer. I said “alright whatever”, found an easy tech-support role that I definitely could do and applied.

They interviewed me and turned me away, saying I was overqualified. Bummer. Then a few weeks later, I got a phone call from them offering me an interview for a different position. A job as a Web Development Manager. I liked the idea despite my wicked imposter syndrome, and after some rounds of interviews, they offered me the job. I was there for two years and I loved my team. I was working with designers and developers, leadership and marketers. I got to work with servers, various tech stacks, DevOps pipelines, design systems, accessibility and SEO.

From there, I was recruited into a Solutions Architect position. Then I was recruited again for a Developer role. I didn’t apply anywhere, I wasn’t looking and all I did was work hard, invest in my skills, be open to options and oh yeah – get involved with WordPress.

Now I keep picking up clients and I have more work than I can realistically handle. I’m going to have to start hiring other people to help me out soon. Maybe I’ll file for an LLC and take all that knowledge and experience, all that momentum and roll it up into one big future as a boss lady. Bring the WordPress values I feel so aligned with to the table on MY terms. The tech industry needs more boss ladies.

I don’t honestly know what’s coming next, but I know I don’t need to worry because I have the right community, the right skills, the right resources and endless opportunities.

All because of one little package of code. All because of the amazing people behind it. All because of WordPress.

This Week at WordPress.org (June 5, 2023)

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Apple almost never fails to wow, and they had a lot of cool announcements at WWDC yesterday. Apple’s previously favorite (app of the year!) journaling app was Day One, one of Automattic’s products, but they announced their own Journal app. One nice thing about competing with Apple is they only really interoperate with their own devices, and they’re usually not good at social. Day One is launching Shared Journals soon, a social feature so you can have fully end-to-end encrypted shared private journals with friends and family. It’s been the thing I’ve been most excited about since we bought the app. (Paul can attest how much I ask him about it!)

That complements another advantage Day One has, which is being cross-platform. If you have a family member on Android, you don’t want to ostracize them from your Shared Journal. Apple doesn’t care, their priority is getting everyone on the Apple ecosystem. You care, and Day One/Automattic does too, that’s why it works great on all Apple devices, Android devices, and the web itself.

Carl, Zach and Sean cover a lot of WooCommerce developer ground in this show. And I mean a lot.

May has been a month of celebrating WordPress and the open source community that makes it possible. In honor of the project’s 20th anniversary, WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy reflected on this journey and the opportunity to build a better future for those who come after:

Read on for highlights of this milestone and the latest updates in the WordPress space.

WordPress at 20

May 27, 2023, marked the 20th anniversary of WordPress’ first release. Since its inception by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little in 2003, the project has transformed the digital publishing landscape and enabled millions of people to craft their stories.

WordPress enthusiasts from all over the world gathered at more than 130 events to celebrate this important milestone. WP20’s commemorative book, Building Blocks: The Evolution of WordPress, was published in tandem and documents some of the most significant moments and changes of the last decade of the project.

WordPress 6.3 is expected on August 8

WordPress 6.3 aims to bring a cohesive site editing experience by introducing expanded functionality, richer interfaces, and a dedicated focus on refinement.

WordPress 6.2.2 security release

WordPress 6.2.2 became available for download on May 20, 2023. This release was a quick response to resolve a regression introduced in 6.2.1, specifically with shortcode support in block templates, and to further patch a vulnerability already addressed in the previous version.

New in the Gutenberg plugin

Team updates: Next-generation WordCamps, proposal for a Sustainability Team, and more

Feedback & testing requests

WordPress events updates

Have a story we should include in the next issue of The Month in WordPress? Fill out this quick form to let us know.

Join WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy in the 57th episode of the WordPress Briefing as she discusses the Contributor Mentorship Program to help increase the success of new contributors over time.

Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording.

Credits

Show Notes

Transcript

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.

Over the course of this year, there has been a lot of research and examination of the contributor funnel in the WordPress community. That research confirms some assumptions about what most contributor stories have in common: the hurdles, the general paths taken, and the way that problem-solving was done. Then in February of this year, Hari Shanker published a proposal for a mentorship program for WordPress.

And now we’ve got a pilot program that’s been defined and is waiting for your feedback. If you’ve not read the post about the contributor mentorship program, for one do it. But if you would rather hear a synopsis from me, don’t worry, I’m about to give you a 10-cent tour.

First up, who is doing this? This pilot program has been outlined by a community working group. We often have working groups in WordPress, and they almost always have specific projects around events or programs, or code updates. Since this working group is focused on a project-wide program, there is project-wide representation in it. All the names are at the bottom of the post, which you can find in our show notes. But it’s got folks who contribute with code or contribute with time or contribute with design folks who are self-sponsored or corporately sponsored, just a nice mix of people. The program as a whole, though, is being stewarded by Hari Shankar, a longtime supporter of and contributor to WordPress.

So next, what is this for? There are a few goals for the program. But the overarching goal is to increase the success of new contributors over time. We can all agree that if we were to have 1000s of new contributors every day, but they couldn’t find their way to impactful contributions or meaningful connections quickly, then we would have done them a disservice. And they probably won’t continue to be part of the community without a bit more effort.

The when and the where are essentially “right now and right here,” so that brings us finally to Why. Why are we doing this mentorship program? Apart from to help people who want to contribute have an easier path to success – which frankly is enough of a reason anyway – the why is wrapped up in our overall philosophies in the project. If we believe that good ideas can come from anywhere and that contributions of any size matter. And that open source is an idea that can change our generation and that we are democratizing publishing, then bringing new people brings new ideas, and beginner contributions can grow over time. We can maintain this idea, this concept of open source, into the next generation and to future generations. And always keep our sights on the open web. To learn more about this and other project-wide initiatives, swing by make.wordpress.org/project or check the links in today’s show notes on wordpress.org/news/podcast.

First on the list is WordCamp Europe. That’s coming up at the end of the week on June 8 through 10th in Athens, Greece. There will be a major update from Matt and friends, so even if you aren’t there in person, keep an eye out for those recordings. But for those who are there and you’re curious about the mentorship program or anything else to do with WordPress and contributing to the project, you can come find me or Angela Jin, Hari will also be there, Chloé will be there, Héctor will be there, lots of people, and we want to hear your thoughts and answer your questions.

Second is a call for brainpower! A call for your brainstorms! On the subject of the next generation, we’ve got a discussion going on about the next generation of WordCamps. We’ve been discussing what new types and varieties might be available, and that might make sense for people as we get back to in-person events. So if you’ve got a kind of WordCamp that you’ve been desperately wanting to try, now’s the time to let folks know about it.

And the final thing is the second volume of The WordPress history book called Building Blocks: The Evolution of WordPress is now available for download in several formats as well as on GitHub. Stop buy, give it a read, and relive some of the highlights of the past ten years of the WordPress project.

And that, my friends, is your smallest of big things. Thanks for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host Josepha Haden Chomposy, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks.

Before, I got the reward of seeing my WordPress buddies, friends, and colleagues in Athens, I had to work hard with the moving company to get our furniture organized in our new flat. I wasn’t hopeful, if I will find the packed lanyard with all my pins in time for WordCamp Europe, so I will start a new one. Get ready sponsors, I will hunt for swag again 😎

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

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

Nick Schäferhoff published for the Torque Magazine: Gutenberg vs Classic Editor: 29 Reasons to Switch (Or Stay Put). “You might be one of those people asking yourself whether you should switch from the Classic Editor to Gutenberg or stick with what you know. To help you make an informed decision, this post looks at key differences and features of the two editors and offer advice on which one is right for your website. Whether you’re a novice or experienced developer, by the end you’ll have all the information you need to decide which editor to stick with.” He wrote.

Ryan Welcher released a new version of his Advanced Query Loop plugin. With this version, you can now inherit the default query and still control the post count and sorting options!

If you want to connect with Ryan Welcher at WordCamp Europe, he made his calendar public, too. He tweeted: I’m going to be attending WCEU 2023 and would love to chat with you! If you’re interested, please grab some time on my Calendly link!

Sarah Snow just published a short tutorial on How to switch from a classic to a block theme on Learn.WordPress. “Are you curious about the process of how to switch from a classic theme to a block theme? If so, this tutorial is for you! Watch to discover what you can expect when you switch from a classic to a block theme, learn the recommended steps to switch a site safely, and find additional resources to get you started in a block theme’s site editor.”

Hendrik Lührsen tweeted about his new plugin: Citations for WordPress (GitHub). Make sure you download the zip-file from the release, and not the source code. If you use proper HTML < a /> tag notation. you can add links into the citation field popping up. I tested it, and it works as an MVP, it has it’s quirks. The block is a starting point for customization. I hope this might come as a plugin to the repository.

On again, off again, Ella van Durpe has been working on a Footnotes feature for the Gutenberg project. The latest PRs are:

Carolina Nymark published a new lesson: Creating sidebars with blocks. “If you want to use the same sidebar in multiple places, I recommend using the template part method because it will save you time. Editing a template part is similar to adding block widgets to a traditional sidebar. The difference is that you now choose exactly where you want the sidebar to show without depending on a developer to add the code.” she wrote.

New tutorials on Learn.WordPress

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

Bill Erickson, freelance developer and early adopter of the block editor, just posted A starter theme for building Hybrid WordPress Themes. Erickson also explains the interdependencies between Theme.json and Figma Design tokens and how to work within such a design system.

Brian Gardner took a deep dive into Intrinsic Design: Building Responsive WordPress Websites. He walks you through the built-in responsiveness of the Block editor with fluid typography as well as fluid spacing. Gardner also anticipates ” that future updates to Gutenberg, and consequently WordPress core, will give builders the flexibility to modify targeted media queries and even the scale factor.”

“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

Nathan Wrigley discussed with Mike McAlister on why Block Themes are the future in episode 78 of the WPTavern Jukebox podcast. In the introduction, Wrigley wrote: “Mike explains what the key differences are between a block-based theme and a classic theme. How it’s possible to create themes inside the editor, and how you can do this without needing to know much code. We talk about the fact that, if you’re a coding expert, you could always create complex themes, but this fresh approach opens up the possibilities for those with less technical backgrounds. The experience in the editor might not be exactly what everyone wants, but it’s evolving quickly and maturing with every new release of WordPress.” It’s definitely worth listening to, and checking out the resources shared.

For the third part of the Twitch Stream series Building a developer-focus block theme, Ryan Welcher teamed up with Justin Tadlock to take a deep dive of theme.json and block theme development. Building a developer-focus block theme. Part 3.

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.

While redesigning his blog, Rich Tabor wanted to add a link that navigates to a random post. I created a custom block using the Create-Block script and ChatGPT. It only took a few minutes. He recorded a YouTube video, so you can follow along: How to Build a Dynamic WordPress Gutenberg Block with AI (ChatGPT)

In his latest posts on the WordPress Developer Blog, Ryan Welcher posted a tutorial on using block inspector sidebar groups. With the introduction of block inspector tabs in WordPress 6.2, block developers have more control over where custom controls should appear by leveraging the group of the InspectorControls component.

Ross Morsali wrote SlotFills and fillProps in the block editor. After explaining briefly what SlotFills are and offering some user cases for their implementation, Morsali shows an example of how to use is in combination with opening a modal.

Jeremy Felt built an HTML Converter – It parses WPHTML into JS/JSON with a direct copy of Gutenberg’s Block Serialization Default Parser. Felt explains the workflow on the GitHub repo: “When first building a template of blocks to be used as part of a block variation or other template, it is useful to do this work in the block editor. When adding the template to JavaScript in an innerBlocks property, it needs to be formatted differently and again differently when reusing it in PHP. As your templates get more complicated, so does this translation—when done manually.” Hence, the Converter tool.

Questions? Suggestions? Ideas? Don’t hesitate to send them via email or send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.

Featured Image: Greek architecture of a rock archway in Crete by Lusp (Luke) found on WordPress Photos

In this episode, Cory Miller and Corey Maass discuss their progress on a project related to image generation and sharing. They explore the use of Open Graph (OG) images, social media platforms, and the importance of consistent branding. They mention the need for a logo and discuss the design concept, leaning towards a fun and vibrant style. They also touch on website development, pricing, and marketing assets. The conversation revolves around simplifying the image generation process and creating a user-friendly product. Overall, they aim to finalize the project’s features, branding, and logo to move forward with the launch.

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Transcript

Session 15 Corey & Cory Launch a WordPress Product Live

[00:00:00] Cory Miler: All right. Hold on before we go live. Okay. Um, what’s on your mind

[00:00:21] Corey Maass: today to talk about? It looks like you’re streaming to YouTube, but I’m not recording.

Hey everybody. Welcome back to Corey and Corey on launching a product lot has been happening in the background. Mainly Corey’s been on a manic work streak, but we have a working version of the plugin on post edit and uh, he gave me a walkthrough yesterday setting stuff. Corey, what are we, what’s on your mind today to talk, talk about?

[00:01:03] Corey Maass: Uh, I think we are, uh, getting close to the first milestone of actually having a product that you, you specifically could start using. My clients could start using maybe, um, I’m gonna install it on all of my websites. Um, But I think we can start. I’ve got a, after the installing it on post status yesterday, which we chose not to do live, which worked out just fine.

Um, but we’ve got a, a pretty slick little product, um, a short punch list of bugs to fix that I’m working on, um, over the next couple of days. Um, But I think we could start pivoting to how we’re gonna present this publicly. Um, you know, start setting up the marketing site. I’ve got the e-commerce set up. I think it works to actually take money.

We haven’t tried that yet, but that’s okay. Um, so yeah, I think it’s the, the next steps to talk about here now are, you know, what we need. So, I mean, for us, but also talking abstractly about. You know, once you have a product, uh, what do you do? So

[00:02:33] Cory Miler: yeah, with the product, we’re in this interesting phase, which is working.

It’s working. When we put it up on a live site, yesterday, we were both making notes about where the product is. But I, I still go back to, I think this is so valuable. Me putting on the client customer hat and actually using it. And more so than I think any product I’ve had before is really using it and thinking about it creatively.

How I want those things to come out, I think is gonna formulate back to products. So, so while it already has like our initial OG image, open graph image for site wide. We did some reviews in the past episode. Um, I did some work and I, I really saw some patterns in the synthesis. Mm-hmm. What, like, it is gonna go do.

Well, you, you were like almost simultaneously building it, which is awesome. Um, I gotta tell you from yesterday, um, we got, we got some polish that we, we know we’ve been working on, um, that you even saw and were like, oh, we need this. Um, I love your openness again about hearing feedback and, Hmm, before using it just shows how good of a data of an entrepreneur you are.

But the, the one I’m really eager to is getting to the blog posts because for this product, uh, it’s, it’s more so than just an open graph image. It’s like a social image to share with the post to make it compelling. I think all that work we did with Crop Express, So it’s all good. Mm-hmm. Helped, like think through what we’re doing now.

But I, I got giddy, you know, that I did some of the work when we did the pattern for the home, home or site default. Uh, I went on with some of the blog posts and I was like, this right

[00:04:34] Corey Maass: here is the money. Yep. Yeah. I’m, I’m with you. I think I, one of the. Pivotal moments for us with crop.express was you said, you know, I’m, I’m mental octopus.

I’m all over the place, you know? Yeah. Over here we do this and then we could do this, but it could do this, and over here it’ll do this and, and you’re like, what if we start with the feature image? I was like, that’s. You know, brilliant dart to the center of the dart board kind of thing. Um, and so with this, I really liked you, you did essentially the same thing where you’re like, OG image for the site.

And it was an easy lift for me to add that. So on activation, the plugin takes you to a little welcome screen, which doesn’t look pretty yet, but that’s fine. You upload a logo and you click a button and your site has an OG image. And so we are, I love that you install the plugin and a handful of clicks and we are offering value.

We are taking it already to um, Bringing, bringing your site. You know, we keep de debating about how we actually do this wording, um, but, or, or how we word this. But, you know, within a few clicks, our plugin makes your website more professional. Um, if you’ve got Yost installed, maybe you’ve already got an OG image.

If you don’t, we provide one, um, and our plugin will override. The image. So it’s like whatever you’ve done in Canva or elsewhere, you know, you can update, you can update regularly, that kind of thing. Um, so yeah, I’m, I’m with you. We’re, we’ve, we’ve reached that minimum viable product mentality in that we are immediately offering value, which I think is really cool.

Um, and then, The next, next thing following that OG image thread is, yeah, for each blog post, for each product, um, figuring, you know, again, initially it’ll be a, uh, a manual process of like, oh, you’re, you know, essentially for every blog post you, you are adding going forward, um, Once you’ve set up the blog post, you then can go set up your OG image.

Um, so we get there and that, that honestly is about 60%, 70% of the cleanup I need to do anyway. I. We are product complete, we are ready to sell a product. Um, and then, yeah, down the road, uh, there’s, there’s obviously lots of fun and, and interesting things. One, you know, like I wanna be able to, we’ve talked about, but I wanna be able to, like for you on post status, you’ve got, you know, dozens or hundreds of posts that already exist and so they will benefit from the Sitewide OG image.

But wouldn’t it be nice if you set up a template for a stand, you know, a template that goes with a blog post and click a button and it retroactively goes back and creates OG images for each of those blog posts, stuff like [00:08:00] that. Um, but I kind of think that that’s one that’s neat. You know, that’s icing on the cake.

That’s a version 1.1 kind of feature. Um, but also I, I do think we want a little bit of validation. Before that happens. Um, and or if we find ourselves twiddling our thumbs and you’re like, yeah, for post status, I we really need this, then we can call that validation and I can implement it. But, um, but yeah, it’s, it’s flushing out.

Being featured complete as far as OG images is, is the way to start. And obviously right along with that, it’s easy enough to create, um, a duplicate image that is square so you can throw it on Instagram or whatever. Yep.

behind the scenes, I think what’s really cool is. We kept, but after doing the, the first install yesterday on post status, Corey set up a first basic OG image. And then due to caching, we couldn’t see it. We could verify that it was there by viewing the source. And we knew the image was there, but we couldn’t see it.

And just now during our call, uh, Basically what’s funny is our Slack, private Slack conversation is just us posting post status.com back and forth, back and forth, trying to see the damn thing work and uh, Corey just posted it and adjusted it did just show up and that is one of the most satisfying things ever.

[00:09:48] Cory Miler: Absolutely. I do think if I just put on the post status as a customer hat, Um, we do a fair amount of content and we want to, we have a significant following on Twitter and in, uh, LinkedIn and I particularly camp out on LinkedIn for a second. It’s really compelling to me and, and I, a couple years ago, I kind of, okay, I’ve just accepted invitations over the years.

Now I’m gonna see what this is about. I, I really think, especially with Twitter’s implosion, There’s a real value back to LinkedIn. Um, even more so than was there. But when I think about post customer for a second, we do a piece of content. We could just do the typical thing, copy, link, paste into Instagram, put a couple of words in it, do that thing.

Um, I think there’s value though, that image of like, I was just thinking like we do these weekly roundups with tech and business and like, or make wordpress.com for instance, or make WordPress, um, having like just the headlines. Mm-hmm. You know, like weekly roundup is the tech roundup and then there’s three or four bullets of like what goes into that.

So they’d know a preview of like, oh, I’m interested, I’m gonna click through, go to the link. That’s valuable to me because right now I’m just gonna take a link post in there. Hope the featured image looks decent, cuz it always pulls that. So, like, to me that’s value for, for post status. Client hat is like, it’s just right there.

Um, I can take a couple steps while I’m in the post. When I get it done is when I usually put it over there. And now somebody, somebody might schedule that, that’s cool. However, I kinda like post share it. Sure. Uh, and having that right there with like, I keep going back to my slide content slides I’ve done for talks and do different things and you know, some header with wall points and, and I think what I worked on the.

Image templates that you also mentioned was like holding in an actual image to that. Right. That’s always capture thought to me. But if it’s there, pulled in, adds a little visual pair pto where it’s just not like a slide.

[00:12:20] Corey Maass: Yeah. We’re gonna, it’s, there’s, there’s all these, from a text standpoint, there’s these, these loops that, or these circles we’re gonna want to close.

Um, Because it’s the, and, and we’re gonna have to think through the, the workflow, the UI for this, um, which, and it might be as simple as a button, but there might be some setup beforehand. So, we’ll, we’ll have to walk through this, but it’s like, that’s why I tried to wa I tried to talk this all out. I, I don’t know, two or three calls ago where I was like, okay, the first step.

And just a minute ago, in fact, the first step is the OG image. For the site. The second step is the OG image per post, which you’re gonna have to set up manually. Fine. Like we’re, we’re, we’re building a product. The, uh, one of the, the circles that I want to close for you and for, for the product pretty quickly is you, you’ve created a blog post or, again, I, I want to keep harping on product too.

Neither of us are in e-commerce. Particularly, but I, I think this is gonna be a lot of value. Um, but whatever it is, a post of some kind, you up upload a featured image. That featured image gets used in an OMG I M G, an OMG image. We’ll call ’em that. And then a, and then there’s an option to replace the featured image, right?

So it’s like you’ve uploaded a temporary featured image that then gets incorporated into a template. And generated as an an OMG image that then replaces the featured image so that the, essentially the headline on the blog post, wherever, however the featured image was used, which like you said, a lot of the time when you share.

The featured image comes up and I, I, there’s going to be instances where an OG image is almost moot because the featured image works has two purposes. One is as a featured image, like if you’re looking at a blog post, and the second is if somebody shares it. You know, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn will automatically pull in the first image, usually the featured image, which will be, which will act as the OG image.

So, so it’s one asset, multiple purposes. Um, but in both instances, I think that there’s, you know, when we were first really exploring this, we went and looked at, um, WP Beginner, I think we looked at, um, Prius’s blog and, and we saw that a bunch of them, or the two, I think the two of those, and a and a bunch of other sites, the featured image, it was almost redundant, but the featured image itself was s shareable because it had the blog post title and stuff in it.

Um, and I liked what you said a minute ago of like, often, right now you upload a featured image of. You know, business person at laptop looking businessy, you know, it’s, you know, and it might be a photo of, of somebody. But, but then you go and you share it and you hope that it’s relevant and you hope that the people will see a title that’s, that’s, you know, links the image to the content.

Whereas we’re, we’re talking about is, um, Yeah, is inserting, inserting the title right into the image. So again, it might end up being a little, it might feel redundant, or as you’re doing the workflow, it feels redundant, but you’re, you’re guaranteeing that every image has more value. Um, and then, yeah, here you’re illustrating the second.

Loop that we wanna close, which again, feels kind of meta, but it’s the like, create a blog post, take a picture of the blog post, pull that that picture in, um, to an, an OMG image, and then use that to share, or even as the featured image. So you’re gonna end up with, and in theory if you do this, uh, A couple if you, if you create a template using the featured image or create an OMG image using the featured image, and then take a picture of it, you could end up with, you know, a picture of a picture of a picture of a picture all the way down, which is kind of fun.

Anyway. Um, But I think that that’s, you know, we’re talking about value and, and a, one of the ways that we achieve value is information. So, headlines, excerpts, bullet points. The other way we, a, we add value is something com is, is by creating a compelling image. And I think at least right now, with the way or a current trend, That achieves, this is exactly what you’re showing, which is, um, an image of content, but in the context of a device.

So on a screen or, um, yeah, on a cell phone, on a desktop, that kind of thing. Yeah.

[00:17:37] Cory Miler: Was, uh, just looking at this for a second, thinking about when you’re saying the featured image, Is how, like I don’t mm-hmm. Feel like super, uh, energized by what I did here on these two. And I was like, okay, well, you know, when you go, like there’s, there’s two parts.

There’s the social value, we’ve already talked about that, but there’s the search value. Mm-hmm. The image is a piece of content that summarizes mm-hmm. Inspire someone to click through, but like almost go, like that’s thinking of it as a piece of content that is an image piece of content, but it has valuable stuff on here.

Um, and like it’s really that slide format is, you know, everybody takes a picture of really good presentations when they’ve got slides. Cause they’re like, this is cool. I don’t know what this is called in Google, Emmett Google search, Google Images, but, Makes me think when we get to this part, we need to have a caption.

Mm-hmm. Um, that when the image is out there, there’s a caption. It seems like, I don’t know what this is called within Google, the image side of things, but like, it’s an opportunity I haven’t seen really explored that I would mm-hmm. That I would like. You’re, you’re searching and those, that image side comes up too, um, where there’s.

Interesting content summarized for you, like right there, right. Um, that’s really valuable. So I was trying to think like, okay, how would you really want that to look like if you don’t have a featured image, which is my problem easily. Um, you know, would we put, even if there’s, I I was just thinking about

Well, I like the idea too of, um, And I hadn’t thought of this before, uh, essentially a default featured image like we are using a logo. So let’s, like for post status, you’ve got, you’ve got the little PS infinity symbol everywhere. Um, but also the ev I think a lot of people associate like the homepage of post status has that image of people at.

One of the, the, you know, the post status conference years ago, um, that hasn’t changed in 10 years, excuse me. Um, but, uh, you know, but that’s, it’s now, it’s now it’s a bit of your branding, right? Like that’s now a photo that, that people might actually associate with post status. So if that was, um, if that was the standard featured I, the default featured image that got pulled in everywhere, you know, even if, like one of the things that we’ve talked about is.

Image, uh, is, is tr image treatments. So it’s like as a ba if the background was two women chatting with that was, you know, converted to black and white and had, and had an orange filter over the top. And so it was just, again, these are, these are all of the things that humans find compelling, even if it’s not obvious or.

Upfront or obtuse. Um, you know, having, having two eyes and a s and a smile is known to be compelling to humans at a subconscious level. So it’s stuff like that that, um, these little simple effects that we can start to explore down the road, or, I mean soon, sooner than later, but it’s like, as we’re going along, as we’re learning about this stuff, we can go, oh, right, let’s just add a default option for, you know, these background treatments.

it’s interesting. Yeah. I mean these are, you know, most of these featured image as a background. Yeah. Title pulled in and selected. Put this at the top of the bottom, and some of them have an excerpt below the title. That’s the whole thing. You know, and so it’s, it’s up to the authors or you know, publishers since this is New York Times to find compelling images.

Yeah. I mean, and so un you know, we’ve talked about that at various points. That’s not a problem we’re choosing to solve right now. Um, so as the publisher of a given blog, you still have to go find that compelling image. But once you do, we give you all these options to do something with it. And what I really like is we’re defining a, a process.

So it’s once you, yeah, that’s the picture. Um, once you essentially define your style, So it’s like I, I, I’ve talked about, I’m a musician as a hobby, and I actually have a, a new track coming out tomorrow. And so I’ve put that on my band camp and, um, you know, for every track that I finish, every re you know, release that I do, I now go into Canva.

I hit copy or duplicate from the last. Release image that I created. Yeah. And I changed the title, the text, and I changed the image. But that way the font is always the same. The font size is always the same. The colors, font, colors are always the same. So that’s what we’re talking about here is like you creating exactly what you’re doing.

Say this, you created this and saved this for a first blog post. The idea would be then to say, save this as the default. Blog post featured image template. So then you go into, you, you say word in WordPress, you say add new, you write a new blog post. When you jump in to OMG I M G, this is gonna come up first.

Do you want it, you know, right away create your, you know, A an OMG image from your saved default blog post OMG image template, and you say, yes. And it sucks in the headline, it sucks in the featured image and you might go in and tweak it a little bit. You know, like if the headline’s really long or it’s more fun to have like, just like you showed on that New York Times Instagram a second ago.

Depending on the image, you might want the title at the top or the bottom, but most of the work is done with you done for you. You tweak a couple of things, you know, move a couple of sliders and then you’re good. Um, I’m excited about that. I think that that’s gonna be neat. I think that it’s going to be, it’s one of those things that

one of the challenges is going to be for, because it, because they are associated with publishing. It’s. It’s a, it’s a hurry up and wait kind of product. That’s one of the only things, red flags that I have. So it’s like, if there’s a button for creating these images for all existing posts, that’s huge value.

Right? But this is also one of those, like you install it. And then you have to go write a blog post. And that’s why I’m really glad that we’re creating a sitewide OG image. We can create sitewide social images, you know? But if you don’t have, if you’re not gonna write a blog post until tomorrow, you don’t have a reason to use the plugin until tomorrow.

[00:25:32] Cory Miler: about assigning. Mm-hmm. You could go back to a previous post. Mm-hmm. So I wonder if there’s a thought where we put a preview of a post, you know, To get ’em started or

[00:25:47] Cory Miler: one of the big things I took for that is the fact that people do are in the rhythm of doing a featured image.

I think I defaulted to these templates because I don’t. Mm-hmm. That’s my mindset. So I just was trying to play for a second. I go, I think these things still apply, you know? Oh, for sure. Image on left. Image on right image as background with opa. I was trying to find an opacity here, but, um, yeah, and then you want headline, like pin on the photo.

[00:26:18] Corey Maass: Right. You don’t want it, you wouldn’t want it to cover a person’s face, so you’d move it to the bottom left. But if the image has people on the bottom, then you want it at the top or whatever. So, yeah.

Yeah, I’ve, you know, as I’ve been developing, so I, I did a, for anybody listening to this who didn’t watch the last one, go watch the last one. Um, because we did a, a little walkthrough, um, and, and showed my initial approach to the product specifically, we are not, Canva, we are not drag and drop like I and I at various points.

Like the developer in me wants to take this to the obvious extreme. Um, and, and that in many respects is Canva, which is drag and drop and, and infinite options. And. And I think, I mean, part of that, it it part of, I don’t want to go down that path because it’s just a hell of a lot of work and I want to just get this damn thing out the door.

But I also do think objectively that I, at least for now, prefer this approach because of what we’re talking about. Like if you want to go, if you wanna be in Photoshop, be in Photoshop. If you don’t, if you’re, if that’s a bit too much. Go jump into Canva, get creative, go wild. But this is, to me is meant to be quick and dirty as underselling it, but you know, quick and useful.

It’s just another step in your workflow. And that was, which is kind of the conclusion we came to out of Crop Express was like, you’ve got this workflow, here’s a pain point in your process, but it shouldn’t be the entire process. Yeah.

[00:28:14] Cory Miler: Well, just like playing with this, I go, okay, I get it. You know, put it in the background.

We’ve got left and we’ll have a right version of all this stuff. Yeah. But there’s an option of like set featured image as background. Then they can play with the color options you’ve given them. And I mean, I call that pretty good. Yeah. If, if you’re in the, if you just want headline and photo. This is an option if you want, I think, which is gonna be even BA could be even better, is like there’s a piece of content, like

Yeah. Again, I think that that’s like, that’s version 1.2, right? Where we, you know, one of the things that got us really jazzed talking about this early on was you brought up slides. Um, we’ve talked a few times about, um, drop, uh, poll quotes, drop quotes, block quotes, whatever you call ’em. And so, you know, I’m excited about, again, version 1.2 or whatever, where.

We actually have a little wizard that says like, here are the quotes from the page. Ah, and this is where we bring in ai and that’s why we, we make 2 million. Um, but, you know, throw this content at, at our integration with ai and it come and it comes back with three different bullet point summaries of the content.

And then we, as we automatically just drop that content in. There you go. We figured out the AI integration. I knew it was just a matter of time.

[00:30:10] Cory Miler: I’m using in a service called podway. Test it out. Yep. Um,

[00:30:24] Corey Maass: would look. Yep. Exactly. And this is where, again, like once, once a, once a template is defined, cuz these are all placeholders, right? So you’ve got a placeholder for the photo, the, the, the image of. The content, you’ve got a placeholder for the title, and then you’ve got a placeholder for a three bullet point summary.

Now either you can write that summary or again, we could have something write it for you, or you could have something write it for you. Um, but I love the idea. So one of the things that, so I’ve been playing with chat g p t, like everybody else for one of my products. I went into chatGPT, and I said, Write 20, um, 20 tweets.

Yeah. Broadly speaking, you know, for the topic of my product. And then I said, write 20 tweets that target creatives. Specific to my product and then business people, you know? And so it was very similar content, but slightly different. And so in the end, instead of 20 tweets over and over again, I wound up with 60 tweets.

And so I scheduled them one a day. Right. And so I’m picturing something very similar here where it’s like, you know, If you, if you had your featured image for the, for the, you know, the, the one you’re doing in right in front of us, you’ve got three bullet points. You’ve got a title, you’ve got a featured image.

Right. But like this is just one and. In, in our world now, you can’t, you’re never going to, or you shouldn’t, uh, just tweet about something once. You don’t write a blog post, tweet about it, and then forget about it. You need a long tail of content to be able to share, right? And so ideally, Not only would you say generate, like, say if this, what’s in front of us right now is, is your, you know, saved template.

Not only would you say generate this, but you would say, generate five variations of this. And you, I, this is again where I think I AI is a perfect candidate. You’d say, you know, Hey, chatGpT, here’s my article. Summarize it. With three bullet points in five different ways, and then we suck all that in. And then picture a page that just has this template with the different content.

You know, so there’s six versions right down, and you, and you go, which ones do you wanted to use? Bang, bang, bang. Save them all, you know, and then schedule them all. And that way, and you’ve got one that goes out each day or you do two days, four days, eight days. 16 days. So again, you get this long tail of content that isn’t identical but is all relevant.

Yeah. Assuming that people are actually promoting their content the way they’re supposed to. Right.

[00:33:37] Corey Maass: Yeah. Yeah. I think that I, you know, your emphasis we’re on call 15, right? So your emphasis throughout all of our conversations on agencies and on professionals, teams, et cetera, while it’s not, I’m very much like the solopreneur in entrepreneur.

Whatever other funny way you wanna say the preneur word. Um, but I think small, I build small products for myself and so other people in my shoes. And it’s not at all that I won’t use this, but again, I, you know, I’m, I’m working with clients that have dedicated social media managers. They’re the target agencies that are doing full-blown marketing campaigns.

They’re the, they’re the target because again, it’s these, this long tail of content that that’s going to require variation, that are going to benefit the most from this. Yeah.

[00:34:49] Cory Miler: Yeah. I’ve been thinking really much in that regard as like, okay, what would I want? How do I, it’s like, This slide for that post, you know, something like this, like a treatment over here doesn’t take up too much space for the the brand, but at least brands it.

Yep. This is a post status thing, and then this is really informative content like mm-hmm. It’s really that summary. Too long, didn’t read. Yeah. Take this for any post. It’s like you said, you can throw that into Chatgpt and get a bunch of these things, but like, yeah. I don’t know if I worked on something like that, but I go, this case study warrants a lot like headline.

This is a roundup we do about what’s happening in WordPress core based. Basically, she has these every, every week. These are the things you would just pull from it. Three things you need to know. Have chat. ChatGPT, help you with that if you want, and then to put it here and then you go, okay. What I would normally do is say, save this as an image, and I’d go over to what if I should do that real quick.

Stay right there. I need to work on the image, image size, of course, but then you’re just putting in alt text. I dunno why the logo didn’t show up. Oh, it’s right there. So you know, if you think about it, right there. You’re okay. You’re, you’re a member of Post, so select the idea is you can look at this and see it a glance, some of the things going mm-hmm.

And then decide to click on. That’s value for the social right there. We’ve already mm-hmm. We’ve already talked about that, I think, but I think philosophically, I’m shaping this a little bit up and my mind is, it’s the too long, didn’t read now. Mm-hmm. You get this and whatever this. Uh, Google image. Like what would be example where if I, here, lemme see how to change a light pole, light switch.

Something. You, you know what I’m saying? Like this, people also ask, there’s some, uh, search criteria. They come like this, you know, the video content that shows up. There’s sometimes, I guess it’s more pinteresty type stuff like,

Like of a better word, video show up. But isn’t there a section where images show up sometimes?

[00:38:08] Corey Maass: Yeah. Search for a product, search for, um, say like that. So, um, there you go.

So it’s like in shopping is what I found. Okay. This one. So now hold on, hold on. Um, click and start dragging one of those images like this. Yeah. Did it? Yeah. I just discovered this this morning. So you can drag an image into Google Lens to do, uh, to find out more meta information about. That image and whatnot.

Oh, really? Which I think is, so right now it’s sort of a hidden feature, but I think that that’s coming down the road too. But it’s like, you know, Google, pretty much any, any of these services now can do image parsing, or excuse me, text parsing from images. So they’re also going to be reading these images, which is really, really cool.

Anyway, I, I felt like there was, it’s, it’s more of the Pinterest thought. You know, it’s like you go, oh, office.

So when we think about the blog post stuff, This is pulling something here. It’s gotta be OG based, right? That’s what I’m trying to find. Say look at that six is, and then give it a little icon.

[00:40:43] Corey Maass: Be honest. There’s no direct way to make your images show up, but somebody has to have figured this out.

[00:40:48] Cory Miler: Yeah. Because if we can get the specs we haven’t, we give the client a per a potential to let that show up. Yeah.

Because man, that’s compelling. I don’t know. Like this is Zoom ideas. So look at all these images in this display. There we go. See this. Well, I don’t know how they’re getting all that. This, this search comes up sometimes. See this? Mm-hmm. That’s what we’re unlocking. Whatever this is, we’ll figure it out and say This is what you want.

This is what it’s called. And um, OMG mg does it? Yep. Do the possibility to do it, because I think this is where you start going into, I wish I had an idea for this, but I mean, the PINTERESTY type content. Mm-hmm. Recipes.

All of these are really interesting, um, personality tests too, to see what you come up with on the spot. No, I

[00:42:08] Cory Miler: was like, they’re gonna know I’ve been liking an celery recipes,

[00:42:29] Cory Miler: it’s 92 by 92 or that ratio, whatever, that Nope, that’s not.

[00:42:34] Corey Maass: That’s not it. It’s a slightly rectangle, but it’s not. And so what’s, what would be interesting is, um, view the view the actual source rather than inspecting. So just right click anywhere and say view, source

[00:43:04] Corey Maass: content so that, that you’d populate by like description you’d do in Yost and we certainly could do more. Um, like if you don’t want to have Yost installed since we’re already adding header, we could add more headers.

[00:43:52] Corey Maass: cropping, that’s all it’s doing is Google. So the ogn, yeah. So it’s right. So, um, but it’s, but where is it? Why, why does it take the square? Because it doesn’t necessarily know, I mean, not all these websites are gonna have that auto cropping, right?

So, so somewhere too, it’s saying there’s a square image. Let’s, let’s throw that into the search results. Look at this. They’re, they’re pulling the Twitter card too. Mm-hmm. It’s

[00:44:24] Cory Miler: already baked in, I think. Yep. Interesting. I I just go, man. Um,

you know, some of this, like, these are appealing photos for sure, but I go, if you can put some piece of content right here, That’s helpful. Yep.

[00:44:52] Corey Maass: Yeah, I mean, and that’s the presumption, is that, so actually before you jump, um, go click on the one you just talked about or ultimate click on Ultimate, you know, any of these with that, that has a title, right?

So go to that website. Oh, it’s you. That might be YouTube. That’s not gonna help us.

So they’ve got these big pictures, but I, what I’m trying to determine is if they have, like they’ve explicitly set an OG image that has this extra value in it.

Yeah, so they’ve got two two, oops. Oh, that’s fine. I’m sure the first one just gets sucked in

Yeah, I, so we’ll do a little research. We’ll find one of these, find a good example of this, and then see if we can’t decipher, you know, and or, um, do some more Googling to find out a, you know, when and what is what, when, and why does Google pull in an image in their actual search results? And, and not others.

You know, is it, is it just an OG image and they’re cropping? It, is it, is there some other tag we don’t know about,

but I’m, I’m anxious to get. This like when the first couple of templates done and out the door and in front of people, because I think it’s, you know, kind of like how your brain has said, oh, but what about this? And then, oh, I found this other thing over here. Like, it’s also, you know, but we started with, here’s what post status is.

Branding already looks like we want recreate that as a starting point. Um, other people are gonna come to us. Vva from FIUs and Sayed from WP Beginner and whoever are gonna be like, okay, but you know, we need a way to accommodate our, our branding or the way the treatments we’ve already decided on in Canva if we’re gonna, you know, because we want our images to be pretty consistent, you know, across all socials forever.

You know, how do we create recreate hours? And it’s like, oh, okay, so we need the option to do background treatments or turn the whole thing 90 degrees, whatever. It’s, you know.

Yep. But that means that one Corey needs to finish the thing once and for all, and then two. Yeah, we wanna start getting the, the marketing asset aspects, assets out there, um, shopping cart finalized and stuff like that. Cuz it’s like, even if we get some beta testers, um, and we give them licenses or let them sign up for free or discount or something, you know, first year free, whatever it is, like we wanna get that sorted out.

[00:48:30] Cory Miler: Started with that yesterday and we didn’t need it. Didn’t get it finished. So I’ve got my screen up here where I started it, the logo, and then the website is part two. Uh, going back

[00:48:43] Corey Maass: to pause, squeeze, I started, um, flushing out just putting rectangles on a page for the homepage of O M G I M g.co. So it’s quite literally just boxes of color, but ready to have, [00:49:00] um, content float into it.

[00:49:08] Cory Miler: carve off some time. Gotta get the logo going in process and then, uh, the website stuff. So

[00:49:16] Corey Maass: I think, yeah, it’s like I’m, I think standard, standard formula, you know, compelling tagline, value prop, a buy now button, you know, three icons with. With compelling value, props good enough.

[00:49:45] Cory Miler: I have an hour, um, I can get that cranked, cranked enough to start flushing out our page.

[00:49:57] Corey Maass: Simpler is better. So, you know, feel free to delete or [00:50:00] hide rows. Like yeah, but just enough that we, it looks like something, um, like

[00:50:08] Cory Miler: here a box headline, what it does for you, how benefits you, three things show up in social.

Yeah. And then features are like the nuts and bolts things and Yeah. Pricing. Yep. Yep.

[00:50:31] Corey Maass: And yeah, and I’ve been waiting to do, like, there’s, there’s, at this point I’ve used e d D enough that I’ve got standard styles that I copy from site to site and ways to set up, like being able to sign in and manage your subscription kind of thing.

Um, obviously they make it very easy, but I have a way that I like to lay things out. Um, but I’ve been waiting to do that. We, we need a logo, which helps us define a style and colors. To then carry that throughout the rest of the site. So our branding is somewhat consistent. So I’ve, I’ve been holding off on that.

Um, you know, but all that takes an afternoon once we’ve got, yeah. The general look and feel

[00:51:16] Cory Miler: conversation to, uh, put into there, do we want to go, I know we talked about this in Slack. Do we want to go with a. The eighties funky thought.

[00:51:32] Corey Maass: I, I mean, because of the OMG part, like I definitely think we want something fun. Um, but I don’t have any religion around how the rest of it, since I’m not creating the logo, like I’d rather.

Anybody grabs, whatever, whatever comes to their mind, like, that’s why we pay them. It’s like when I get on Fiver, I hire five people to do logos because I’m, I’m honestly paying them, not so much to create a logo, but to apply their own thinking to, you know, here’s a, here’s the color palette that, that jumps out at me when you tell me what the, the product does kind of thing.

[00:52:23] Cory Miler: It’s kind of almost like a Mac app. You know, you’re, it’s the thing that’s solid that helps you look, look good and do things faster. Yep. Um, with images, Paula Showcase, I’m looking at some of these icons in my tray

Yeah, I started walking through, um, uh, product hunt, uh, um, featured, uh, uh, what was it? Make logo.ai. And I started plugging things in to kind of, and they, they want to charge you for the actual logos, but it was kind of neat that they came up, they present you with a bunch of concepts and so it was like, um, A magic wand over an image.

So it’s like image generation or, um, cuz I, in the description I put in sharing and I put in, um, open graph image, you know, image generation. And so it was like, you know, do you want. Uh, a canvas or the, you know, the, the thing that the artist uses to put the paint on, um, the palette. I was like, eh, you know, do you want a magic wand to poof, an image appears?

Eh, that’s getting closer cuz I want it to be that easy. You know? Do you want an icon of, they had one that was like, um, you know, a picture like a. A fake painting that had people all around it, like, you’re sharing that? I was like, no, definitely not. That’s terrible. You know, so it’s like these concepts of, um, of what we want, want it to represent.

To me it’s image generation, because that’s part of, that’s the, if you’ve got a workflow in the middle, you know, you’ve gotta write words, but you’ve also gotta generate images. And to me, that’s the problem we’re solving. But that’s also, that’s, that’s feature not benefit. Yeah. I,

[00:54:36] Cory Miler: I’m looking to pro probably kind to get some thoughts here to put into the designer.

[00:55:00] Corey Maass: man. I, I just need a logo that looks really good because I’m gonna have a t-shirt made for Word camp us.

[00:55:19] Corey Maass: That actually helps me frame it to me, to me again, because of. Because of the OMG in the name, and we talked about going all, all caps, it’s like not a rainbow, but gradient of bright colors, you know, big fun font. Like I don’t want it to be goofy.

I don’t want it to be clown like, um, and that’s why I guess I’m shying away too from. Um, actually your, your MAC icons concept is, is a good idea of like, over to me. A lot of them are overwrought, three-dimensional, big drop shadow kind of thing, and it’s like, eh, I want, I want something, you know, more fun than that.

Like if you, if you were gonna have a magic wand, like you’d want a bend in it, you’d want it to be almost cartoon-like or something. But then it’s, but then it’s not professional enough, so I don’t know. I don’t know. Uh,

it has to, it has to look good on your baseball cap there and it’s gotta go look good on my chest here. Yeah.

[00:56:45] Cory Miler: a good frame for me though, is like, how would that pop and how would we want that to look?

All right. Let’s be done today. Um, I should have an update for you soon this week. Um, addressing all the, um, the bugs and extra bells and whistles that we talked about. Um, And in particular, I want to, like we said, I want to cut everything over to we’ve, we’ve got the sitewide handled, we need the post per post handled, like you said today.

Um, and then plug in a logo, plug in a little, uh, style once we’ve got a style defined and then the plug-ins, I think ready to share. So that’ll be cool.

This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.

The second in our series where we hear more about the sessions and tips from WordCamp Europe 2023 speakers.

With WordCamp Europe 2023 in June, we feature Stefano Cassone, a web designer, photographer and volunteer translator, who believes his life has been transformed through WordPress and its community.

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.

Stefano has always been fascinated by the internet. His initial learning in the 1990s was through joining friends at a local pub where they could explore how websites were structured and learn to use chat software.

This led to Stefano creating websites for fun in 1998, and his first paid job was for the shop where he bought comics. He turned to content management systems (CMS) to speed up the creation process for sites, but found he needed more documentation to really understand their capabilities. Then he read a magazine article about WordPress, a CMS which was being used to make incredible blog sites, and was supported by an international community and documentation. Over time, Stefano started using that documentation to work on websites in Italian.

WordPress provides a life-changing turning point

Stefano describes himself as an introvert. He found that WordPress helped him to work from home, to develop his skills and the quality of what he could produce, as well as build his self-confidence.

A catalyst for the turning point in his life and career was the discovery of an area for events on the WordPress dashboard. On this page, he found a forthcoming local meetup in Rome.

In November 2017, Stefano took the step to go along to this event, led by a curiosity of what he might discover and intrigued by how a software could be supported by a vast community. The topic at the event was on WP-CLI, a command line interface for WordPress. He recalled that he felt outside his comfort zone as he did not regard himself as a developer and at that point, had only used the software for simple jobs. He wondered whether using the software as his only CMS was going to be a long term option and if these meetups were suitable for him.

At the meetup, people were talking about a forthcoming event, called WordCamp Rome. Through his research, he saw that there was a lot of enthusiasm for this event. This intrigued him and he wondered if it would show him that he could have a career using the software after all.

Unfamiliar with WordCamps, Stefano found it difficult at first to know what he could go to and how to get involved, but he persevered and attended the event.

From this event, Stefano was encouraged by those he met to consider applying as a volunteer for a future WordCamp.

There was also much talk at the event about ‘Slack’. It was new to Stefano, but with help from those attending, he signed up for the messaging tool Slack, used by the WordPress community. He was still unsure how he could contribute, and if he would be welcome.

Joining thousands of volunteer translators of WordPress

Stefano took the plunge and was excited to find there was a team called Polyglots. In this team, people from across the world translate the WordPress software into many different languages. He started with translating a theme he was using in his work. Little by little he became more interested in plugins and attended meetings with other translators. He offered his skills to translate into Italian themes and plugins in general and as his experience grew, he took on the volunteer role of a General Translation Editor. He also took care of the translation into Italian of the WordPress Core. More recently he has joined the group of translators for the HelpHub, which is part of the WordPress documentation system.

He said: “Participating in the WordPress Slack has helped me enormously: I’ve met a lot of people who I now call friends. Moreover, by translating, I learned a lot about how themes and plugins work.

“It’s a great way to contribute to WordPress, especially for someone like me who is not a developer. Translating also allows me to fully understand how WordPress works.”

Sharing skills to support Open Source WordPress

Stefano’s growing commitment to the open source WordPress project was further boosted through his volunteering. He was a volunteer at WordCamp Rome 2018 and participated there in his first Contributor Day where he had the opportunity to translate the software with others.

He was also able to bring his own hobbies and skills to help the project grow and reach others. One example was his passion for photography, and he volunteered as a photographer for many other events in Italy organized by the WordPress community. He said: “This commitment to the community also allows me to have fun: being a photographer means having the opportunity to walk around the halls and capture moments of the life of a WordCamp.” The more WordCamps he attended, the more he wanted to be part of and keep contributing to the wider WordPress community.

Contribution to WordPress is inspiring

When Stefano was asked to become an organizer for the WordPress meetup in Rome in October 2019, he knew he wanted to be part of reaching and supporting more people in his area. He faced challenges with finding venues, but a greater issue was to come: the Covid-19 pandemic.

Spurred on by the Italian WordPress community as a whole, he was determined that the meetup was still needed. The regular event was transformed into an online meeting. He was able to gain help from people he had met as a volunteer to share their expertise with meetup attendees.

The community in Italy also worked together to put on WordCamp Italia online. It brought together the organizers of previous meetups and WordCamps, and new contributors too. Stefano volunteered in both online editions of this camp, including being part of the social and communication team. He found it to not only be a fun experience but also one that helped him grow professionally and learn from so many others.

He went onto help restart the Rome WordPress meetup in-person meetings in May 2022, was an organizer for the third WordCamp Italy, and has been volunteering for camps in 2023.

What will WordPress bring you?

“Persona and professional growth and friendship” are some of the things they have brought Stefano. Contributing boosted his confidence and willingness to try new opportunities in his work.

He said: “The best thing I got out of joining the WordPress community was the chance to collaborate with some people on a working basis and, I have to say, that was incredible. Being with many of them you have an incredible opportunity to grow in knowledge, you just have to be ready to learn. With WordPress you never stop learning.”

His top recommendation is: “Join your local meetup or think about organizing one, it will introduce you to an amazing world. Don’t be afraid to meet people at WordCamps and Contributor Days, because you will learn more there than in dozens of courses. Talk to people at those events and don’t worry. The WordPress community is inclusive so you’ll always feel welcome, and you will see enthusiasm like you’ve never seen at other IT events. Sign-up and get involved.”

Share the stories

Help share these stories of open source contributors and continue to grow the community. Meet more WordPressers in the People of WordPress series.

Contributors

Thanks to Stefano Cassone (@deadpool76) for sharing about his adventures in WordPress.

Thank you to Abha Thakor (@webcommsat), the late Surendra Thakor (@sthakor) and Meher Bala (@meher) for interviews, writing the feature and collaborating on images, to Chloe Bringmann (@cbringmann), Mark Smallman (@marks99), Nalini Thakor (@nalininonstopnewsuk), Mary Baum (@marybaum), and Maja Loncar (@majaloncar) for help with reviews.

The People of WordPress series thanks Josepha Haden (@chanthaboune) and Topher DeRosia (@topher1kenobe) for their support.

This Week at WordPress.org (May 29, 2023)

News

Related News:

This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

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Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, a journey inside creating a block-based theme.

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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.

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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 all your idea featured on the show. Head to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the form there.

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We released these podcast episodes every Wednesday, but next week there’s going to be a break. I’m going to be heading to WordCamp Europe in Athens to record some more interviews. And if you’re there, I do hope that our paths cross. Normal service will resume soon.

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So on the podcast today we have Mike McAlister, and he’s here to talk about his experiences creating a block-based theme.

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Mike is a veteran product developer and designer in the WordPress space. He founded and sold multiple WordPress products, like Array Themes and Atomic Blocks. Now he’s focused on the future of WordPress with his new product brand, Ollie.

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Mike kicks off the podcast by telling us about his WordPress journey, and how WordPress blocks have renewed his passion for the platform. We get into some history and talk about the era when WordPress themes were extremely popular. Marketplaces like in Envato made it possible to sell themes and creates a career in ways hitherto unimagined.

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Mike explains what the key differences are between a block-based theme and a classic theme. How it’s possible to create themes inside the editor and how you can do this without needing to know much code.

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We talk about the fact that, if you are a coding expert, you could always create complex themes, but this fresh approach opens up the possibilities for those with less technical backgrounds. The experience in the editor might not be exactly what everyone wants, but it’s evolving quickly and maturing with every new release of WordPress.

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The conversation moves onto why Mike is so confident that block-based themes are going to succeed. You don’t need to use one, and your trustee classic theme and the associated customizer, will work for the foreseeable future.

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We then turn our attention to the technical hurdles that Mike has had to overcome. What new workflows and tools did he need to adopt and master to make his work possible? Mike’s been really focused on using WordPress core blocks to create his themes, digging into the weeds of what they can do and what their limitations are. It’s been a part of steady learning punctuated with minor setbacks when the editor and blocks are updated in unexpected ways. Thankfully, these bumps in the road are now relics of the past, as breaking changes have given way to stability.

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We then talk about a specific theme that Mike has just released. It’s called Ollie, and it’s the focus of the rest of the podcast. How did Mike build Ollie, and what is he hoping to achieve with this new brand?

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Patterns feature heavily in Ollie we talk about how it’s possible to alter the look and feel of your site quickly. Typography and colors are easy to change with the new suite of design tools which ship with WordPress.

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If you’re wanting to develop block-based themes, or are just curious about how other developers are building them, this podcast is for you.

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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 of the other episodes as well.

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And so without further delay, I bring you Mike McAlister.

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I am joined on the podcast today by Mike McAlister. Hello, Mike.

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[00:04:51] Mike McAlister: Hello. Thanks for having me.

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[00:04:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you’re very welcome. Mike is going to be talking to us today about block based themes, block patterns, blocks in general, I’m sure. And if you haven’t been in the WordPress space for any great length of time, you are about to learn about Mike’s pretty impressive history in the WordPress space.

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So Mike, it’s a fairly generic question, but I hope you don’t mind us asking you at first, just to orientate the listeners. Would you mind just telling us a little bit about yourself and your history, coding, theming, and whatever kind of other work you’ve done in the WordPress space.

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[00:05:24] Mike McAlister: Absolutely. Yeah, I’ve been around WordPress for some time now, probably since about 2010. 2009, 2010. So fairly early on. And I think I came upon WordPress like many folks, building client sites and looking for just a better way to do it. You know, when you’re in that world and you stumble upon WordPress, you’re like, whoa, light bulb moment. This is going to be a game changer.

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So yeah, I started pretty early on using WordPress to build websites for clients. And then at some point, I started to see the commercial aspect of it, right? Instead of building one theme for one client, I could build one theme and maybe sell it to a thousand different clients.

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And so I experimented pretty early on with, you know, I have a history in design and so that was my focus. I thought that could be a differentiator for me. I’ll make themes that are just beautifully crafted, really lightweight. Maybe they don’t do everything under the hood, but they do specific things very well.

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And so Array was the first theme shop that I had. And I operated all over the place. I had themes on my own site. I had them on the Themeforest marketplaces. I was selling themes on wordpress.com. So I was kind of everywhere and growing. And then at one point blocks became a thing, and so I dipped into there and started experimenting with blocks, via the Atomic Blocks theme which grew really quickly, it was one of the first block themes out there. And I think it was, blocks were still a really new thing and people were trying to understand what they were and what the benefits could be.

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And so having a plugin out there with all these examples in it, and kind of showing that, oh no, you can replace all kinds of stuff. Like short codes and all of these other archaic ways of building could be done with blocks now.

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So I worked on that for a bit. And then in 2018 WP Engine acquired both the theme shop and the Atomic Blocks plugin. And worked there for four and a half years, and then just recently I have gone back into the freelance and entrepreneurial space.

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[00:07:21] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much indeed. That’s really, really interesting and it sounds to me at least anyway, as if you arrived on the WordPress scene, not only with the right products, but also at the right time. You kind of managed to hit that tidal wave just as it was creating out in the ocean somewhere.

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And you had the product. Everybody was buying themes at that time. Became really, really popular. Do you consider yourself to have had a lucky break there, in the sense that, do you feel that that is something which can be repeated in the year 2023? Or do you think that block themes and just themes in general, the shine and the commercial prospects of that has dwindled a little bit?

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[00:08:04] Mike McAlister: That early era was certainly something special. I think there was just so much attention focused on themes, and as this new shiny thing. And they unlocked a lot of capabilities for people. They were able to go from, trying to make their own sites. To making their own designs. To having these tried and tested templates.

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And so that was a huge thing. And the rise of the Envato market at the time was a huge part of that success. Love it or hate it, at the time, that was a huge thing and proliferated WordPress themes out into the world, beyond our bubble. And so that I think was a huge deal at the time.

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Now, whether or not now we can kind of replicate that is really tough to say, because since then the market has become quite saturated, in that there are so many different ways of building with WordPress. And you have things that are spinning off like Elementor going off into their own world.

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They’re still kind of one foot in WordPress, one foot out. And we have all of these other. website builders that we didn’t have back then, other platforms. So there’s just so many different ways to build a website. WordPress is still massively popular, even if it’s slowly declining.

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We still have such a huge footprint on the web that it, there’s a ton of potential So, I don’t think we’ll see the same wave we saw before. I do think though that this whole new world of the block paradigm and block themes. It is the biggest opportunity commercially in WordPress I think that we’ve seen in a very long time. It may be the biggest we see for a long time.

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[00:09:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I think we should probably stray into that right, the outset, if that’s okay. Because, there’s probably a proportion of people who are listening to this podcast who are very, very technical. They completely get what you mean by block based themes and the opportunity afforded there.

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But equally, there may be a bunch of people who are listening to this who genuinely have no idea that there is such a thing as a block based theme. They’ve got a, what we would now call a classic theme, and it’s installed and it has been for a long time. And as far as they’re aware, there’s no change in their WordPress website. Things just carry on as normal.

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But are you able to describe to us, I know this is a difficult question, and certainly trying to cram it into a portion of a WordPress podcast is a big ask. But are you able to give us a high level view on what a block theme is, and how it differs from a classic theme? Something which you might know, if you’ve got access to the customizer, you have a classic theme. If you don’t, you don’t. And so let’s take it from there. What are they and what do they promise?

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[00:10:34] Mike McAlister: Absolutely. So, let’s first just do quick block refresher in general. So blocks, instead of throwing your content all into TinyMCE or the content area, and kind of making it mostly text-based, and throwing some other little elements in with things like short codes, like we used to do in the past. Blocks, they’re basically content elements. It could be anything from a button, to a paragraph, to an image gallery, to a slider.

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And all of these things you add to the WordPress editor. And they could be used to build, you know, more beautiful content. They could be used to build page sections. They can be used to build a full page. And you put together enough blocks, and you can build an entire theme with it, right? So, WordPress comes with many blocks built in. And all of these things you use to build your website now.

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So with that in mind, block themes are effectively entire WordPress themes that are built entirely with blocks. And the benefit of that is that it makes your website almost entirely editable by you, in the editor. So instead of having to, you know, if you want to change your header, instead of going into the code and opening up the code editor and tinkering there and saving and going back to your site. You can go into the site editor and WordPress, which is effectively a interface inside the WordPress admin, where you can create your header.

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You can modify it. You can change the colors. You can add new links. You can change out your site logo. And all of that happens in the editor. It can be a no-code or low-code experience for you. So the benefit here is the customization, right? We can now get closer to the experience that you might have seen at something like a Squarespace or Wix where the interface and the experience is tailored around creation, and it’s more focused around that.

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[00:12:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess if you are an expert themer and you’ve been creating themes for years, what it brings to the table, the way that you construct them is different. But you’ve always been able to achieve whatever it is that you wanted to achieve because you could write the code. But I suppose what this is bringing is the capability for non-technical people to be able to modify just any part of the site.

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I guess the header is typically fairly constrained, you know, header, navigation, logo, that kind of thing is normally what we see. But perhaps a better example would be a footer. Because typically your footer would be controlled by the theme and you’d go into the customizer and modify whatever options were available to you.

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Whereas now you can just build out rows, columns, put in images, put in contact forms, whatever you like, other navigation menus, anything. If you can imagine it as something that you can build in the block editor, that can then become your footer. You don’t need to dabble in any code at all. There’s a lot going on there, but you don’t need to be involved in that.

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And so non-technical people can become involved in that process and, you know, enjoy creating different aspects, different parts of their theme. That being said, what are your thoughts on the state of the UI for editing themes at the moment? We’re in May 2023. Version 6.2 of WordPress is the current latest version.

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And I think it’s fair to say that it’s not where it probably wants to be in the end, but how do you think about it? How do you think about the UI? You’ve probably been in there, you’ve ironed out all the kinks, and got over all the road bumps that were in the way. But for a typical user, a non-technical user, do you feel it’s delivered on the promise that it hoped to?

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[00:14:09] Mike McAlister: I don’t think so yet. I talked to all kinds of WordPress users from novices to veterans. And the number one thing that always comes up is the UI the UX, the experience. And, you know, I get it because we’ve known WordPress for 20 years now. We’re celebrating a 20 year anniversary right now.

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And it has been one way for a very long time. And even some of the big changes that came, like the customizer, they weren’t that big of a change, right? They were bolted on and they were additive and iterative. But the block editor and going into the site editor and full site editing, these kinds of things, it’s quite different.

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It’s adding a lot to WordPress. It’s a lot of new context. It’s a lot of new paradigms. It’s a lot of new workflows, and I think that is a very difficult thing for people to figure out. Especially with the past few years where things have been shifting so much and people don’t know quite when to hop in. And then when they do, it doesn’t work exactly like they had anticipated.

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Or some of the features are released as working prototypes. We’re kind of met with these things. And so I get the frustration when you hop in there and somebody’s telling you, oh, it’s way better, and you can do all this stuff now, and you’re, you install a block theme from dot org and it’s like half busted, and the styles don’t work and you don’t know your way around. So I get it. It can be a very frustrating experience.

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I will say the past few releases I think have been a lot better. And they’re ironing out a lot of the kinks. The ground underneath the software isn’t moving as much from release to release. And if you follow along on some of the GitHub tickets or you stumble into some of those, there’s a great deal of discussion going on about the many shortcomings of the UX. And so it is something that’s always being worked on. And I think it’s important to just remember that.

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It is never going to be easy to change, to drastically change, a piece of software that is being used for so many use cases, for so many people. We know it powers half the web and to make a leap into the block era like this, it was never going to be easy. It was never going to be comfortable.

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We hope that it will be worth it in that, these kind of growing pains in this transition will give us a new era. It will refresh WordPress. It will make it viable for another 10, 20 years. It will give us the new tools to keep up with these other platforms that are maybe outperforming us. And so while the growing pains are there and the experience is a little rough, I do think that it is all for the greater good of the software.

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[00:16:45] Nathan Wrigley: Let’s explore the sort of reverse of that, if you like. And I’m going to use a product that I have as an example. I use Gmail to do my emails. And I have this Chrome extension, and the Chrome extension alters the Gmail interface in a way, which allows me to be slightly more productive. I won’t get into the detail, but it does that.

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And every couple of weeks something breaks, because Gmail alter some aspect of their interface. And the guy that makes the Chrome extension, he’s not in the loop of that. And the thing breaks and he has to contact all of his users and say, right on it. And gets it fixed and so on and so forth.

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And I feel, as we’re going to discuss in the future, you are now really committed to having a proportion of your income come from block based themes, and yet at the same time, although you’ve got, you’ve got a voice there and you’ve definitely got skin in the game. You are reliant upon the technology stack that is WordPress and it’s in a constant state of flux.

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You said it’s not quite there yet. I just wondered, and I don’t wish for you to become incendiary or anything like that. I wondered if you could highlight some of the grievances that you, well, not grievances, some of the things that you wish were better right now. Some of the areas where, if you could be in control of just fixing it by clicking your fingers, what would you amend?

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[00:18:03] Mike McAlister: Ooh, that’s a, that’s a really good question. Although I’m just releasing a block theme now, I’ve been dipping into and exploring block themes for years now. And only until recently did I feel like, okay, this is ready enough to put something out there. Because I’ve run a product business before, and a WordPress theme business before and support is a huge part of that, right?

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And in these early days of the block editor and block themes, with it being, you know, on a bit of shaky ground. Putting something out there I’ve seen it as like a support nightmare. I’m going to end up not just supporting my theme, I’m going to end up educating people on tons and tons of WordPress features, which I think that’s okay and great. And I think it’s actually a business model in itself.

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You don’t want to take on the frustration of the users, and have them funnel that through to something that’s your product, right? And they look at something I’m making and say, this thing sucks, or whatever. When really it’s just they don’t know this new WordPress yet, or they haven’t had the time, or that the pitfalls and the UX hurdles are being kind of painted onto your product. So yeah, I think up until recently I’ve felt like, okay, this is, it’s still going to be a bit of a transition, but I think it’ll be less painful.

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So that being said if I could snap my fingers and have one thing, well I’ve just recently written a post about responsive controls, which is another big hurdle. But I think even more than that, I would snap my fingers and bring together this UI UX in a way that makes a lot more sense.

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I feel like we’re in two worlds here. I think we have many remnants of the old WordPress. In fact, if you’re not in the site editor, you maybe wouldn’t even know that there’s a new WordPress. You’re looking at the same sidebar, same posts, pages. All of that is the same and that’s great. That’s worked well for a long time.

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But now we have our other foot in this whole new era of the site editor and block editor and blocks and block themes. And then when you’re in the site editor you can edit things live and do all this stuff. And so I feel like there are two entirely different WordPresses existing in WP admin. And it is, to me, not a great experience. I feel like if we’re going to go this route, I feel like it should be almost entirely wrapped around the site editor experience, and we’re able to do almost everything in there.

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And that gives us an opportunity to maybe rethink, and this is, I know, grandiose and big ideas, and there’s probably a lot of people who are cringing at the thought of redoing a lot of WordPress. But I think that there is an argument to be made about kind of moving forward in a more bold and meaningful way. And tying that experience together. So that when you’re editing a page, it looks like you’re editing a page, and not like you’re editing a page with content field or something like that, you know? So the great unification of sorts.

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[00:20:57] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. That’s really fascinating. In terms of the skillset that you’ve had to adopt over the last period of time. When you decided, okay, I’m going to go all in on blocks. And it sounds like you’ve been doing this really, right from the beginning, which is fairly impressive. Very prescient of you.

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What are the new interesting, perhaps difficult, things that you’ve had to learn? The new tooling that you’ve had to acquire? What has had to become part of workflow over the last few years, which is different from how it would’ve been five, six years ago?

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[00:21:26] Mike McAlister: Yeah, it’s It’s quite fascinating actually, because I think those of us who are in WordPress a long time, you would typically think that the answer would be like, oh, I had to learn Webpack or React or whatever. And if you’re building blocks, that might be the case. When I’m talking about block themes, it’s not a technical skillset that I’ve had to pick up.

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But literally just spending the time in WordPress and understanding how all these things work together. Learning fluently how to build with all of the core blocks, in a way that you can build a layout using columns and groups, and the alignment settings, and justification and the row block. It is a skill that has to be learned use all these things fluently, and to just know it like the back of your hand so that you can go and build out a pattern, a page, whatever it is.

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And that did take, even for a WordPress veteran like me, quite a bit of time to get fluid with that stuff. But learning all of that stuff and then kind of dipping into block themes, that made that process a whole lot easier. Because block themes are just all of those things. It’s the row block. It’s the group block. It’s using the padding settings and building a design system with theme json.

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So that becomes a skillset in itself. And that’s where I spent so much time. And I think that’s why when I released this Ollie theme that we’ll talk about, I think a lot of people were kind of like blown away. Like, oh, you can do all this with this new stuff. And it’s all core and native features.

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But it took me a long time to pull all that stuff together and to be able to present it and a package that was like, oh, okay, this is coherent and well made and well designed and it actually works.

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[00:23:07] Nathan Wrigley: How much does the sand shift beneath your feet? So you mentioned earlier about getting skilled with the interface and using the group block and managing it to make these pixel perfect, really beautiful layouts which we’ll get onto in a moment. How steady has that process been?

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Or have you noticed that your designs from, well, let’s not say month to month, maybe half a year to half a year. Are there things which come along in the core blocks, changes which are made in the core blocks, which upset what you’ve managed to lay out in this perfect way? Or has the progress been steady away? Everything looks the same today as it did a year ago.

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[00:23:43] Mike McAlister: At this point, it’s very steady. The core blocks, the group blocks and things like this, buttons. These are not changing in any major way. There are little additions being made, but they’re iterative, and they’re backwards compatible as far as I’ve seen. There might be every once in a while, the spacing’s a little off or something like that and usually gets fixed pretty good.

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But I think with the amount of people using the Gutenberg plugin, where a lot of these big features are tried and tested and workshopped. I think there’s a good amount of eyeballs on these features there. That definitely helps, by the time it gets to core, it’s been vetted, it’s been worked out.

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People actually build with Gutenberg enabled. So I think there’s that. And so these days, when creating a theme, I didn’t have any major issues with the fundamentals.

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[00:24:31] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. I’m going to direct everybody listening to this podcast. Maybe just pause and go to this URL. The URL is olliewp.com. It is, as you might expect, o l l i e w p .com and have a little poke around. Have a look at what Mike has built, and what’s on offer. But just tell us about the theme itself. I’ve had a little bit of a play.

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I downloaded it. Currently, we can get onto this and the reasons for moment, it’s on, available on GitHub. You download it from there, and I installed it on a local install and had a play. Tell us a little bit, what’s the thinking here? Are you trying to make one theme that anybody can use? Do you have a particular niche in mind? What’s going on with Ollie?

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[00:25:13] Mike McAlister: I think Ollie started as an experiment for myself. I used it as an opportunity to, like I was saying, to learn all of these features. And one of the best ways to learn them is to build a block theme. Because it forces you to use all these different things, like patterns and global styles, and theme json. All of these features that make up a good block theme.

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So, I started it as an experiment to learn, and then along the way, you know, as a product minded person, and somebody who’s had a theme shop before, I thought, no, there is some commercial value here. I don’t know what it is yet. But I thought on top of it being a potential pivot for me to do, I just saw it as an opportunity to dip back into WordPress in a more meaningful way, in the product space.

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And I like creating things that people can learn from. I like putting things together in a package that you can hand off to somebody or send them the repo and they can see, and pick through the code and learn. And so that was the kind of intent behind Ollie. And right now it is, it’s just one theme with a bunch of beautiful patterns in it that you can use to quickly build out pages.

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I’m just using this early phase of Ollie to see what people think. How are people building with block themes? Are they building block themes? I think there’s so much unknown about this space because it’s so new, I’m just kind of sitting back and just learning and listening and watching people.

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Do they want more patterns? Do they want pre-made sites with block themes? There’s so many questions that I have. I’m using it as an opportunity to effectively ask these questions and learn.

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[00:26:41] Nathan Wrigley: The thing that really struck me, I should add at this point that I saw this from an article in the WP Tavern, which Sarah Gooding wrote on April 26th, 2023. I’ll link to that in the show notes. The thing that struck me immediately was the patterns. And I saw screenshots of the patterns and I thought, wow, they look great.

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And there was a video that I think she put together, scrolling through some of the patterns and thought actually that’s new, that’s interesting. They are right on the money for me. They look how I wish I could do things. And so downloaded the theme and really discovered that you really have gone to town with the patterns. I don’t know what the number is. It certainly looks like it’s more than 50 or 60 or something like that.

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That feels like where a lot of your endeavors have gone. So you’ve categorized them, obviously now in the site editor you can you click on the patterns button and then subcategories come down. And then a nice thumbnail appears, and you can enlarge those if you wish, on a big modal, which takes up the whole screen and so on.

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You’ll see straight away that the effort in building a typical website, brochure site for somebody has been taken away. So that’s my question. Did you approach this with patterns in mind? Like this is going to be a repository of great patterns and the rest hopefully will build itself, if you know what I mean.

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[00:27:56] Mike McAlister: Yeah, absolutely. I knew right away patterns were and are going to be a huge deal. Way back, late 2019, I was even playing with this rudimentary idea of what patterns could be with my friend John Paris. We experimented and prototyped out this idea of sections and layouts in WordPress. And it was effectively what would become patterns. This idea that you have pre-designed sections of your site, that you can click together like Lego pieces and make full layouts.

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I’ve always looked at patterns as a huge opportunity because it takes the pain out of building websites or even just sections. If I’m able to put together a beautifully designed hero section, or a featured section with blocks and make it look great and hand it over to you. You can throw that on your page. You don’t have to mess with the design. You just tweak the colors if you want, and change the content. And then you go about your business.

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We’ve removed the pain of even you having to build your own blocks or your own patterns. And hopefully that is the paradigm that we go with. Hopefully people latch onto this idea that maybe I don’t have to tinker with every single part of my website. Maybe just going with these beautiful designs, changing the content, changing the color, and then focusing on my content, and focusing on my audience and focusing on my following. And I think the patterns are going to be a huge deal for sure.

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[00:29:21] Nathan Wrigley: Truly I think the designs are absolutely fabulous. They are categorized into posts, texts, call to action, cards, features, heroes, pages, prices and testimonials. Who knows, maybe that will be expanded over time. But in each of those there’s in some cases a handful and in many cases multiple dozens really of different patterns that you can select.

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And if you’ve never had the experience of doing this in a theme, you just pick on one that you like, and you just click on the icon and there it is. It’s now the next part of your website. And you can then amend it, you can change it.

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Give us a bit of an insight into what people can do in terms of saving things. So let’s imagine that they’re using yours as sort of boiler plate and they’re going to click things in, but they want to amend the colors. Yours is fairly opinionated. It’s nice dark black, and there’s this lovely kind of blue color, which dominates everywhere. But obviously that might not fit with everybody.

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Is it fairly straightforward, again for inexperienced users, to save those and modify them and keep their own modifications with this new site editing interface?

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[00:30:25] Mike McAlister: Absolutely. That’s kind of the beautiful part about this, right? Is that you can go into one of your preexisting pages and click to add one of the patterns I’ve designed, and put it on your page. Or you can throw a full layout, which I’ve included a few full layouts, like home, about, and features, and things like this.

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You throw it onto your page. You customize it how you want. You can change the content inline. You can change the colors on the page if you want. Or you can go to the global styles in the site editor, and you can change that bluish purple color that I’ve chosen to whatever color you want, your brand color. And instead of going through and changing it in every little pattern, it will change that color on every single pattern I’ve included in this theme.

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So you don’t have to go change the colors anywhere. It will literally propagate that color throughout the whole site. Because this whole thing is a live design system, right? It’s effectively a design system that is tied into every aspect of WordPress. So when you’re in the site editor, when you’re in posts, when you’re in pages, all of these styles travel with these patterns.

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Even typography, you don’t like the font? You can change the font. It’ll propagate through the whole thing because that’s how this is all wired up. So yeah, so if you want to go in and change a page, all you do is, you go in there, add a pattern, save it. Save it just like you would any other page. And it’s good to go.

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[00:31:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it is increasingly becoming a really compelling system. It just requires people like you to get as many people over that hump as possible and experiencing it. But I can only say if you download it, have a go. Within minutes I suspect that you’ll have something that you are very, very happy with and that you can modify.

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In terms of the patterns of themselves, is that an area that you’ve explored? Or would like to explore commercially? So okay, I know you’ve got Ollie, but have you given any thought to the commercial possibilities of just patterns, simply patterns? Not bound to any theme. Just a downloadable set of patterns. And obviously you’re a very, very credible designer, we can see that. That you could then give to people, sell to people, so that they can download them into any site no matter what block-based theme they’re using.

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[00:32:34] Mike McAlister: I always knew patterns were going to be a big deal. But I think, after just releasing Ollie to GitHub and seeing it get picked up by a few news outlets and some people on YouTube, were making videos about it. I think the number one thing everyone always raves about is the patterns. And maybe if they’ve explored patterns before on wordpress.org or used other themes that have patterns.

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I don’t know if they’re just kind of underwhelming typically. But I think I did spend a great deal of time making sure these patterns were making a statement. They are saying, no you can do this in WordPress. I wanted to prove that I can design something as good, if not better, than what we had before. And I’ll do it all with blocks, native blocks. Not one custom blocks in there. These are all just core blocks, and they’re going to be beautiful, and they’ll be fully responsive and fully customizable.

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And so, I think that’s what people see. And when they see these patterns and how they all cohesively fit together. You can pop these onto a page in any different order and they kind of just fit together and that’s part of the overall design system. But yeah, so I see patterns as a huge opportunity and I wasn’t sure commercially. And still I don’t know. I’m using this opportunity to ask a lot of questions.

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But I think the first few weeks, the response has been largely very positive about patterns. And so I’m definitely curious about that. And I think there’s opportunities to do more advanced patterns, and maybe use some pro blocks to make patterns even more appealing. So yeah, pro patterns is definitely something I’m exploring

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[00:34:07] Nathan Wrigley: You mentioned that you’d spent a lot of time learning the core blocks, and you also just mentioned that everything that comes with Ollie is based around a core block. Was that a straightforward experience? Or did you find that there are certain limitations in what you could achieve based upon the capabilities of core blocks? Or would you say basically you can implement almost any design you wish with core block? Certainly looks like you’ve managed to achieve that.

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[00:34:34] Mike McAlister: Sometimes I’d have an idea of what I wanted to do, and couldn’t quite do it. But I think if you get clever, you can get really close, right? For example, I would love if WordPress had a icon block. A core icon block that we could tie into. I don’t want to have to make my own, because there’s a bunch out there.

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And I also, you know, in terms of the ease of distribution and giving customers designs right out of the box. I don’t want them to have to install a plugin to do it. And icons are so prolific. I would just hope that we could have that in core. Well, we can’t have that yet. And so, when doing simple things like wanting to add an icon here for people to see like, kinda like a placeholder for an image or an icon.

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I used the HTML star, right? And I use that in ratings, you know, in design, like if you want to put a rating there, I put like five HTML stars, and I use it on feature sections. So, clever little things like that. It’s giving people enough to understand, oh this is what this is meant to be. This is the design. Oh, I might put my own icon here. Or even things like cleverly using the rows and group blocks to get things aligned how you want. Grouping of blocks to do unique things with them, spacing wise. It’s just a lot of clever usage of what’s there.

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And I think part of that does come from tinkering enough. And if you really want to get that design out of your head and on to the page, you’ll figure it out. But it might take, it might take some tinkering.

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[00:36:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I’m on the install that I have at the moment and I’m on the star rating. You’ve got five stars, and I can see that they’re using paragraph blocks. And then elsewhere you’re using the social icons block to display those social icons. And I guess that’s the experience you would want, is just pick an icon, much like you do in the social icons block and make it more straightforward. That’s really interesting.

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Why GitHub? Why not the WordPress repo? Was there some sort of decision there? Again, I should emphasize it, at this moment in time, if you want to grab this theme, you’re going to be heading over to GitHub and downloading it. Why there and not in the repo? Is there a decision behind that?

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[00:36:36] Mike McAlister: No philosophical decision. I think it will be on the repo soon actually. Like I said, with these block themes, there’s so much to learn and I wanted to put it out there. You know, it worked great for me when I was building it and making it. But I wanted to get it out there and get people using it to understand if there was any major shortcomings or just catch any early usability patterns that I was seeing. Any issues like that and see like, oh, actually people don’t love these patterns.

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Or, is there something about the workflow that I could improve before releasing it to a wider audience? So, I just mostly wanted to iron out all the kinks and GitHub was just the obvious place to do that. But to be honest a lot of the quirks that people have brought up with the theme on GitHub and the GitHub issues and stuff, are largely just Core issues. Just usability, preferences and workflow preferences and things like that.

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I haven’t uncovered any major issues and so I feel like what I’m going to do is kind of wrap it up. It’s already fully tested and gone through the theme check and everything. So it’s pretty much ready to go. And I think I’ll do that in the next week or two.

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[00:37:41] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. In that case, by the time this podcast airs, this question will be somewhat moot. But anyway, worth, asking I think. I noticed as I was moving around on the site, olliewp.com. I noticed buried somewhere was referenced to Ollie Cloud, and that got me thinking, okay, in that case, is Ollie something bigger than simply this one theme?

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And so that’s where I’m going to take the conversation next. Is Ollie, in the same way that you had Array Themes and you had Atomic Blocks. Is Ollie something bigger for you, Mike? Is that a direction that you’re going to take it in? Are you now hoping to, sort of, have a bunch of things wrapped around in the Ollie branding?

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[00:38:22] Mike McAlister: I think so. I wasn’t sure about that initially. Again, this just kind of started as a experimental WordPress theme. But I don’t know the product creator in me, the entrepreneur in me, always tries to see things from that sphere as well. And so as I’m looking at the WordPress ecosystem, and I’m exploring what is this thing like now? It’s been a while since I’ve had a product out there.

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I do see all kinds of opportunities, and I’m still learning what they are. But I also have my own opinionated ideas about how we could wrap up this new, all these new capabilities, and deliver a new experience. A premium experience with some of this stuff. And so, on the Ollie WP website I had, I do have a box at the bottom about Ollie Cloud. And the idea there, I think is it could be Ollie Cloud, it could be Ollie Pro. I don’t know. I’m really just gathering feedback and seeing what people want, as I mentioned.

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But the idea is that all of these new features, these theme assets, patterns and theme json files and all that stuff. They’re all very lightweight, and very movable, and very modular, and they can kind of plug and play in to WordPress. And I don’t know, I think there’s an interesting idea about the experience about how we build sites these days.

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Should you have to start from scratch on every site? And should we still be copying and pasting themes around like it’s the mid two thousands? And is there a better way of doing that? Is there a better way of pulling in a site template?

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There’s a lot of interesting things there and I think, another thing I’m learning, and I think we’ve seen just generally is that, I don’t know, I think users are maybe a little fatigued with that in WordPress. Starting with a blank slate and being like, ugh, I have to find a theme and then I have to maybe try out a few themes, and then I don’t know if I need to pay for one, and then I need a form block, and then all of a sudden I need a buy a contact form.

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And then there’s a bunch of upsells for contact forms. And I don’t know. All that stuff to me, after all these years on WordPress, feels kind of icky. Uh, I guess. And I think customers and users want experiences and solutions more than they want individual themes and plugins. So a premium offering or a premium experience is something I’m interested in. What kind of experience can we do differently that delivers the same result, but takes all of the pain building on WordPress?

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[00:40:46] Nathan Wrigley: It kind of feels as if you may be repeating history for yourself here in that, you know, 2010. Array themes, we mentioned you were right there at the beginning of that tidal wave. Maybe with a fair wind, the same thing may happen again here? You may well have discovered that seam of gold, just as it’s starting to take off. Because all the chatter that I’m listening to at the moment is very much related to blocks and exploring patterns, blocks, block based themes, and how you can maybe tie those three things together.

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And pro blocks, which bring additional functionality. You know, areas where Core perhaps doesn’t cut it. I’m thinking, in my case, one that just keeps coming into my head is a superior navigation block, that does a whole load of styling and what have you. And who knows what’s going to be around in two or three years time? But there do seem to be companies who are straying into this and dabbling with it and trying, like you are, I guess, to figure out what the landscape may look like.

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[00:41:43] Mike McAlister: Yeah, I’m just as unsure I think as anybody about where this thing goes. But I’ve never been afraid to try and put in the work to get something going and see where it goes. Like I said at the top, I think there’s an opportunity here that we’ve not seen in a long time in WordPress and may never see again.

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And if these are the early days of the new generation of WordPress, I’m certainly going to try and throw my hat into the ring and craft a new experience, and maybe rebrand WordPress, and help outside folks see WordPress in a new light. Because I think that’s a huge part of this new reboot. Is that WordPress maybe hasn’t been traditionally like, quote unquote cool, to a lot of web folks.

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It’s certainly very popular and very prolific, but we maybe haven’t attracted the best talent and the best coverage in the wider web world. So, I look at it as an opportunity to rebrand that and maybe grab another cohort of the web that we haven’t had yet. And I think part of that is new products, and different products, and better looking products, and better experiences, and taking some of the pain out of WordPress that we’ve traditionally had.

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[00:42:57] Nathan Wrigley: If somebody listening to this is inspired about block themes in general, because that’s been the broad tenor of what we’ve talked about. Do you have any names to drop or resources that you’ve used, that enabled you to learn this kind of stuff? And if you do mention anything, I will endeavor to link it into the show notes.

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I don’t mean like a laundry list of hundreds of things, but a couple of things which you thought, actually, for those that are exploring this, this is a really great resource. This is a really profoundly interesting person and so on.

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[00:43:24] Mike McAlister: Yeah. First I would start, I’m somebody who I need to work from examples. I need to see the code and I need to see the, a working thing to get inspired and know how to do things. So, on that note you mentioned that Ollie is on GitHub. It will remain there. This version of Ollie that I’m putting out is always going to be free. And always going to be on GitHub. So it is a great resource for picking through the code, especially theme json, where I think there’s so, so much you can do in there, but it is hard to understand what you can do when you’re kind of looking at it from the outside.

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So if you’re curious, start there, because I’ve wired this thing together. I think how it should be, or largely how it should be at this moment in time. And so it’ll give you a great headstart and great understanding of how all these things tie together. So start there.

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And in terms of people, I actually, on my Twitter list or on my Twitter page, I have a list of WordPressers. And on that list is a great many folks who are a lot of voices in this stuff. WordPress Core folks like Nick Diego and Rich Tabor, and Carolina Nymark. These people spent a great deal of their time in WordPress, and listening to WordPress conversations, and taking part in the GitHub conversations. So I would check out that list. I can actually send it over to Nathan as well if he wants to include it?

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[00:44:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’d be great. I will in some way copy and paste it into the show notes or somehow link to it. But yeah, that’s really helpful. Thank you so much.

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[00:44:50] Mike McAlister: Twitter is, love it or hate it. It is where traditionally the WordPress community has hung out, and so it still is the case, even though some people are coming and going. It still is where a lot of conversation happens on WordPress and WordPress development and what’s new. And so it is a good place even if you just want to read and follow along. It is a good place to see those conversations.

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[00:45:13] Nathan Wrigley: I will link to whatever it is that you send me, Mike. Thank you for that. Okay, just one final question. It’s more about people finding you really. If somebody’s listened to this and their interest has been peaked. What are the the best ways, it sounds like it might be Twitter, but it may not be. What are the best ways to get in touch with you, Mike?

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[00:45:32] Mike McAlister: Yeah, I’m most active on Twitter. Like I said, I think that’s kind of where our community is still thriving. And so, yeah, I’m on Twitter largely. My personal account is @mikemcalister. I do a great deal of tweeting about WordPress and design and the intersection of all these different things.

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And then, there’s a dedicated Twitter account for Ollie as well. You can follow that, that’s @buildwithollie. I’m also writing on the Ollie WP blog fairly regularly. So this is another place where I’m able to share my learnings of all of this stuff with block themes and WordPress in general. And, I’m writing some long form content, some short tips and tricks and, that’s all the time I have to hang out.

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[00:46:17] Nathan Wrigley: You have other important things to by the sounds of it. Mike, really appreciate you chatting to us today. Thank you so much, and every success with Ollie, whatever direction you take with that.

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[00:46:28] Mike McAlister: Thank you so much. I love chatting about this stuff and this was a great form for that, so thank you.

On the podcast today we have Mike McAlister, and he’s here today to talk about his experiences creating a block-based theme.

Mike is a veteran product developer and designer in the WordPress space. He’s founded and sold multiple WordPress products like Array Themes and Atomic Blocks. Now he’s focused on the future of WordPress with his new product brand, Ollie.

Mike kicks off the podcast by telling us about his WordPress journey, and how WordPress blocks have renewed his passion for the platform.

We get into some history, and talk about the era when WordPress themes were extremely popular. Marketplaces like Envato made it possible to sell themes and create a career in ways hitherto unimagined.

Mike explains what the key differences are between a block-based theme and a classic theme. How it’s possible to create themes inside the editor, and how you can do this without needing to know much code. We talk about the fact that, if you’re a coding expert, you could always create complex themes, but this fresh approach opens up the possibilities for those with less technical backgrounds. The experience in the editor might not be exactly what everyone wants, but it’s evolving quickly and maturing with every new release of WordPress.

The conversation moves onto why Mike is so confident that block-based themes are going to succeed. You don’t need to use one, and your trusty classic theme and the associated Customizer will work for the foreseeable future.

We then turn our attention to the technical hurdles that Mike has had to overcome. What new workflows and tools did he need to adopt and master to make his work possible? Mike’s been really focussed on using WordPress Core Blocks to create his themes, digging into the weeds of what they can do and what their limitations are. It’s been a path of steady learning, punctuated with minor setbacks when the editor and blocks are updated in unexpected ways. Thankfully, these bumps in the road are now relics of the past, as breaking changes have given way to stability.

Patterns feature heavily in Ollie and we talk about how it’s possible to alter the look and feel of your site quickly. Typography and colours are easy to change with the new suite of design tools which ship with WordPress.

If you’re wanting to develop block-based themes, or are just curious about how other developers are building them, this podcast is for you.

Useful links.

If you are going to be there, and I know I\'m going to be there, hope we get to see each other.

We continue our tradition and highlight some of the voices from WordCamp Europe 2023 speakers.

I think part of what Mike Little showed with his comment on my blog that led to the creation of WordPress, is that it’s not about how many views you have, how many likes, trying to max all your stats… sometimes a single connection to another human is all that matters.

That’s what is beautiful about blogging. It’s too bad the advertising and social media platforms got us all caught up in status games for the past 15 years.

What does that even mean, though? WordPress is the community of people who have built it and contributed to it over the last two decades, and before that, when it was a little known blogging package called b2. So, thank you so much to everyone who has contributed to WordPress over the years.

WordPress has given me, and countless others, many opportunities we couldn’t have dreamed of. Just over two years after WordPress was first released, I joined Automattic. Working on two machines, Matt and I started work on the first WordPress.com. Here I am, almost 18 years later, and still working on WordPress related software. What a journey. Matt marked the occasion by announcing a generous scholarship programme. Matt was also on stage in London with Mike Little and Dries Buytaert last week in a conversation I must listen to yet, but I’ve heard some good things about it WRT Gutenberg.

Anyway, it’s almost midnight here, but I wanted to get some words down on this blogging platform we all love. May we all be here for the next twenty years.

Oh, and before I go, you can hear me say a few words about meetups at Automattic in the latest episode of the Distributed podcast. It’s edited well, that’s all I’ll say!

Today is the 20^th anniversary of the first release of WordPress. None of us knew what we were getting into when it started, but we had a shared conviction that the four freedoms of the GPL combined with a mission to democratize publishing was something worth spending our time on. There will be celebrations in cities around the world, please join if there’s one happening near you.

Twenty years later, I am proud and humbled by what the community around WordPress has created, and jazzed about what we will create in the coming decades.

I’m also excited to mark this milestone by publicly launching the Audrey Scholars program. It is, like all things, an experiment, but I’m curious to see how it unfolds and perhaps one day an Audrey Scholar could even take the responsibility of leading WordPress, when my capacity to do so has passed.

WordPress is 20 years old today, an estimable milestone for open source software running on the web. Parties are happening all over the world – in Geneva, Los Angeles, Istanbul, Bangkok, Lahore, Jakarta, Mumbai – in over 150 different locations.

The software has been downloaded more than 2.8 billion times but the most impressive stat is the project’s staggering 112,000 contributors, past and present, who have improved and energized WordPress with their passion, talent, and hard work.

None of the global collaboration we enjoy today would exist without the inspiration and leadership of co-founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. They worked in a distributed way from day one, having never met when they started WordPress. This way of working created the foundation for a global contributor base that now supports 43% of the world’s websites.

WordPress has had a profound impact on the lives of millions of users, giving them a voice on the web and the tools to launch businesses, create jobs, and bring ideas to life. The #WP20 hashtag is replete with stories of how WordPress and its community have given people a place of belonging and launched them into successful endeavors.

Does WordPress have 20 more years in its future? Two of the biggest challenges ahead are capturing the hearts of the next generation of builders and maintainers, and preserving the open web where WordPress has thrived. The project’s 2022 annual survey showed that the respondent demographic is aging. The percentage of respondents under age 40 has decreased every year, as WordPress enters its third decade.

Ensuring that WordPress remains resilient and relevant to future generations has required some courageous leadership decisions, like introducing the block editor, and may bring some significant shifts down the road, as we enter a new era of AI-powered innovation.

Major milestones are are a good time to acknowledge the efforts that made all of this possible. Thank you, dedicated contributors, for lending WordPress a little bit of your fire and a lot of your patience, nurturing, and support. The code under the hood may look very different from the early days in 2003, but WordPress is still that same scrappy, irrepressible force of good on the web that users can count on for years to come.

Happy 20th Anniversary to WordPress!

Congratulations to everyone working, teaching, developing, designing, writing, supporting, in short: being part of the WordPress community and the ecosystem. Open-Source is a fascinating idea that has been proven no only successful in certain parts of the world but in all 200 countries where WordPress is used! Millions of lives changed with technology and being able to tell their stories online. It’s as some Americans would call it, a BFD, a big ‘fine’ deal. It’s hard to put in words on how blessed I feel as I have had the privilege to earning a living, being involved in the community and now contributing full-time wherever my skills are needed or wanted.

If you’d like to listen to some community voices who talking about their WordPress experience and history: Follow the WP Jukebox Mini-series on WP20 Anniversary – hosted by David Bisset.

The WordPress Marketing team has been giving daily prompts for bloggers, developers, designers, photographers, and contributors in the From Blogs to Blocks campaign for the last 20 days. It has been a huge success! So many people participated. You should make a point of going back and reading the comments from contributors.

David Wolfpaw mentioned the Museum of Block Art as his ‘most creative use of WordPress that you have ever seen.‘ (The Day 5 Prompt of #wp20 From Blogs to Blocks Campaign by the WordPress Marketing team. )

Now, this Weekend edition is not all about the 20-year anniversary. The Day 10 prompt of May 25th, for bloggers: “What upcoming WordPress projects are you most excited to see happen?” is a great segue back to the upcoming WordPress 6.3 release.

What are you excited about when you read through the Roadmap 6.3 post? Please share in the comments or via email.

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

Anne McCarthy continues her series of Core Editor Improvements with a post about the Smoother Site Editing experience. The big improvements coming are Revisions and Block Themes previews. She explains the genesis as well as how the new features are supposed to work.

Jamie Marsland posted It’s Time to Get Rid of the WordPress Gutenberg Plugin. He ruminates that Gutenberg in WordPress and Gutenberg as a plugin confused site owners. Some users don’t know that the block editor has been part of WordPress since 2018, and and think, they need to install the Gutenberg plugin to get it. Marsland does not want to deprive users to get early access to new features, nor developers to test new features with a smaller feedback loop. If I understand Marsland’s plea, he feels a Core Beta program might be more suitable than a separate plugin that confuses users and fragments the development. Marsland makes a strong case. Having a faster release cycle for WordPress core, is something the core team has been kicking around, but it doesn’t seem to materialize.

The deployment of a major WordPress release is coupled with quite a few manual processes. There are many hands needed for a 2-month release cycle. Just look at the release squad for 6.2. There are around 20 people involved just for the release alone. The total number of contributors was over 600. Getting that group together for more releases has been a struggle in the years that planned for four releases instead of the three recently.

In contrast to that, a Gutenberg plugin release every two weeks, is mostly automated and takes about one to three people to put a release together, with 60 to 70 contributors merging PRs for the release milestones. As long as those release processes between WordPress core and Gutenberg plugin are not synced up, keeping new feature development in the Gutenberg plugin seems to be a very WordPress-y solution.

Anne McCarthy published the next call for testing: FSE Program Testing Call #23: Rapid Revamp. Following the instructions it will give contributors great insight in the features slated for 6.3 and their feedback will be instrumental to the quality of the user experience of many of the enhancements. If you decide to participate, you are asked to test five newly built features:

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

Last week we mentioned Riad Benguella‘s post Command Center: Request for feedback. Sarah Gooding picked up the topic again for the WPTavern: WordPress Is Developing a Command Center for Quick Search and Navigation Inside the Admin and wrote: “Feedback so far had been generally positive, but contributors on the project will have the challenge of providing real examples of the Command Center’s benefits in order for some to fully realize the vision for this feature as more than just a fancy shortcut for power users.” The conversation continues in the comments of both posts.

Hostinger’s head of content, Emma Young interviewed Tammie Lister, the first Gutenberg design lead, in this video: How Gutenberg Empowers Users and Its Future in the WordPress Ecosystem. Lister shared her insights on how Gutenberg evolves through experimentation and brings practical value to its users. The show is the second episode of Hostinger Academy podcast.

WPZoom published Foodie Blocks – a block theme with patterns and style variations for modern Food Blogger, that offers “flexibility and customization options to showcase your culinary journey”

Roman Fink, new to WordPress.org submitted his first theme even: Papanek, a theme for freelancers and agencies. “Create simple and clear landing pages effortlessly with 54 ready-to-use patterns. “. The theme as inspired by Victor Papanek, “an Austrian-born American designer and educator, who became a strong advocate of the socially and ecologically responsible design of products, tools, and community infrastructures. “(Wikipedia)

Seed Webs, a design studio from Thailand, added their second block theme to the repository: Pai Page – a one-page block theme with seven patterns and two style variations. It’s certainly a great starting point for an image heavy site. Even if you need more than one page, you can always create more templates and use it for pages and posts.

Sarah Gooding reviewed one theme for the WPTavern: Shufflehound Releases Free Lemmony Child Theme for Agencies and also mentions the accompanying plugin with custom blocks: ‘The Lemmony Companion plugin, recommended when users install the theme, adds a handful of custom blocks that some of the patterns rely on to work. It includes blocks for a counter, icon, post featured image caption, typing text, hero auto-slider, and accordion.” she wrote.

The Learn.WordPress team published a few more quick tutorials for WordPress content creators

Munir Kamal, at Gutenberg Hub, published a tutorial on How to create stacking sections in WordPress. Inspired by the new Community theme Stacks, Kamal teaches you how to create a similar stacking effect without changing your theme, using the Group block and some CSS magic in the Advanced CCS settings.

In his post, WordPress Offers Two Very Different Paths: That’s a Good Thing, Eric Karkovack makes the case that just because there are new features coming in with the Site Editor and block themes, the tried and true classic theme is a valid path to build a site. Both paths are available and with the backwards compatibility promise that WordPress core gives, it will stay that way in the future. All the new features do is make WordPress more flexible and if users and site owners use block themes, they can modify and customize their site in ways, that is not possible with classic themes. Karkovack concluded: “This is what separates WordPress from other platforms. You aren’t stuck with a single way to do things. Sometimes this can create extra layers of complexity. But it’s arguably better than being limited in how or what you can build.”

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

“Did you know that you can customize core block style variations directly from theme.json?” Asked Justin Tadlock on Twitter. In his latest post on the WordPress Developer Blog, Customizing core block style variations via theme.json, Tadlock shows you how, and also points to additional enhancements that are being worked on.

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.

The recording of this week’s Hallway Hangout with the same topic is now available on WordPress.TV. In this information conversation, Nick Diego and Justin Tadlock talked and demoed the various use cases described in the above post and answered questions from the audience. Hallway Hangout: Curating the editor and building block themes for clients

In Episode 56: of the WP Briefing, Josepha Haden Chomphosy had two guests on the show: Rich Tabor and Adam Zielinski who discussed What to Know About WordPress Playground, its capabilities and promise for WordPress eco system.

In the latest episode of the WPTavern Jukebox podcast, Nathan Wrigley talked to Mario Santos and Luis Herranz on what the interactivity API is and how you can use it. The project hopes to absorb complexity and make the creation of interactive objects fairly trivial. Mario and Luis talk about examples of where the API might be used and how it can be implemented.

The recordings of episodes 6 and 7 of Ryan Welcher‘s Series of Bring me your Issues Live streams are now available on YouTube:

On Twitch, Ryan Welcher started the series: Creating a block theme for developers.

Welcher used the work-in-progress started them, Justin Tadlock has been working on. If you’d like to follow along, the theme is available on GitHub, First Draft

Questions? Suggestions? Ideas? Don’t hesitate to send them via email or send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.

You did it and I think congratulations are in order! You, dear WordPress enthusiast, have helped WordPress thrive for the past 20 years. It’s an incredible accomplishment, and I couldn’t be more thankful.

May 27, 2023, marks exactly 20 years since Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little forked b2/cafelog to create WordPress Version 0.70. Quite a bit has taken place in the past 20 years, and imagine how much more we can accomplish together in the next 20!

Whether you celebrate at one of the 100+ meetup events, are strutting your stuff in some limited edition WP20 swag, or joining in a collective reflection on WordPress in your unique way on social media, WP20 is a celebration of you – the WordPress community.

A Common Legacy

As I scroll through the amazing photos and memories shared on social media of past WordCamps and meetups, I think about the people who got WordPress to where it is today. The thousands of contributors who patched bugs and tested new features; organized events and fostered community; or wrote documentation and translated strings — how those contributions paved the road we travel today. A road that allows more people across the globe to use WordPress and contribute to WordPress, advancing the mission of democratizing publishing and giving us a little more freedom in the world. To the giants on whose shoulders we stand, those unsung, tireless, and passionate committers working through long nights and longer weekends: all of WordPress thanks you!

The dedication to and support of open source software has and will continue to ensure that WordPress endures for another 20 years and beyond.

The more our community invests in itself and supports one another, the stronger WordPress and the open source software movement becomes. And WordPress benefits, not just the present community, but future generations of contributors, entrepreneurs, educators, and enterprises large and small alike.

A Shared Future

If the last two decades are any indication of what lies ahead, then wow, the opportunity to innovate, lead, and sustain a versatile publishing platform will be profound!

Looking ahead at the next few years, our community will navigate Gutenberg Phases 3 and 4 together, delivering features that bring easy collaboration and multillingual support directly into the software. These next steps for WordPress will ensure our legacy of creating useful, relevant, and reliable software remains strong while keeping in mind the core elements of our mission regarding accessibility, performance, and stability.

By renewing our emphasis on the Five for the Future program, and continuing to elevate our standing, we can make WordPress the household name it deserves to be. We can be more recognizable in known growth markets such as the enterprise and education sectors, but also every community beyond the open source and developer communities. Opportunity abounds!

There is no time like the present to invest in the future of WordPress. The community is the greatest asset within the WordPress ecosystem. This means every WordPress user, from casual bloggers to enterprise extenders, is invited to rediscover all that our community means and does, and how each one of us can further our positive impact.

Through all our planning, both short- and long-term, we can ensure that WordPress never loses sight of its user. Each one of us individually, and together, can do our part to make WordPress better, just as we have done each day for the past 7,305 days.

WordPress is celebrating its 20th anniversary tomorrow and recently its co-founders, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, joined Drupal founder Dries Buytaert together on stage at a private event for the first time on May 17. They discussed how their lives were influenced by open source and how they built their projects around the freedoms it guarantees.

Founders of both projects expounded on the benefits of open source collaboration, and Buytaert characterized their continued improvements as an example of the flywheel effect, accumulating small wins that compound over time. They discussed the early history of WordPress and how something as seemingly insignificant as a comment on a blog can be the first step towards building a better future for the web.

Mullenweg acknowledged that it may not be possible to reach everyone with open source philosophy so “at the end of the day you have to make the best user experience.” This has been WordPress’ path over the past 20 years, working in tandem with the power of its open source license and the freedoms that has enabled for the community.

“I consider all proprietary software to be an evolutionary dead end,” Mullenweg said. They discussed how AI is changing the developer experience. Mullenweg is optimistic about AI working with open source and reiterated what he said recently on Post Status’ Slack:

Check out the video embedded below to hear this historic conversation between some of the pioneers of open source publishing on the web.

Last week I had the honor of being on stage at the Royal Society of Arts in London with Mike Little, the co-founder of WordPress, and Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, which is one of the open source projects I have the most respect and admiration for. This is the conversation that ensued.

Smaller, local WordPress events are critical to keeping the community strong and vibrant. I know that from my latest personal experience.

WordPress’ Performance Team has published a summary of a core performance analysis they completed in order to identify and prioritize areas for improvement. As part of this process, contributors created a methodology with a standard set of tools that can be used to collect and share profiling data for various components of the application.

The team tested a classic theme (Twenty Twenty-One) and a block theme (Twenty Twenty-Three) configured with the Theme Unit Test data. They tested out of the box functionality, in addition to different scenarios such as a homepage displaying the latest posts, a basic text-only page, a page with a large set of images and default blocks, and a homepage and a basic page with translation.

These tests uncovered numerous performance issues which the team has documented with related trac tickets and detailed in the summary of the findings. The first priority identified for improvement is template loading for classic themes.

Although WordPress contributors are blazing forward on the project’s roadmap for the block editor, with most of the headline release features focused on site editing, block theme adoption is not where one might expect it to be more than four years after Gutenberg landed in core.

“A majority of websites still use the classic theme architecture, so improvements made here could have the largest horizontal impact,” 10-up sponsored WordPress Core Committer Joe McGill said in the summary.

McGill referenced data collected in April 2023 for the HTTPArchive which uses a query based on a new HTTP Archive custom metric to detect block theme adoption. Based on this information, improving template loading and rendering for classic themes should remain a high priority. Most of the WordPress-powered web is still running on classic themes.

The summary highlights the improvements for template loading that would make the most impact:

These improvements are the first of five priorities the Performance Team identified as the result of analysis. The second recommendation is to improve translation loading, as more than 56% of all WordPress websites are using translations.

The other three priorities include improvements for block-powered sites, with the first two ringing up as the most costly operations in terms of performance:

“These efforts will likely require additional research and architectural design before engineering begins,” McGill said. “All other items identified could be worked on directly through individual Trac tickets as capacity allows.”

The Performance Team is considering making the tooling for performance profiling more broadly available so other contributors can extend their work. In the future, they may also consider contacting hosting companies to get them to run analysis on their infrastructure and examine additional use cases, such as PHP versions, Object Caching configuration, and more. Once the methodology used for this analysis is nailed down, future efforts to improve performance may become more frequent and easier to produce.

I was on the Design Better podcast hosted by Aarron Walter and Eli Woolery, we talked about jazz, generative AI, distributed work, and my journey as an entrepreneur.

Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

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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 20th anniversary of WordPress.

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Today is a bit of a departure for the podcast. It’s the second of two episodes all about the last 20 years of WordPress.

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You’re going to hear a round table discussion with four WordPressers talking about their thoughts on the last 20 years. It features Meher Bala, Robert Windisch, Simon Kraft Tammie Lister and David Bisset as the discussion moderator.

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They cover a lot of ground, and it’s fascinating to hear their WordPress stories from the past two decades.

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If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading over to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

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And so without further delay, I bring you David Bisset, Meher Bala, Robert Windisch, Simon Kraft and Tammie Lister.

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David Bisset: We have so much to talk about. We have 20 years of WordPress. We gotta condense in the next 60 or so minutes. Um, for those listening or, um, heaven and forbid if we can use AI to clean up my face. We will be putting this on YouTube maybe hopefully soon. Uh, for video perhaps. We’ll have to figure that out.

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I only promise these people audio broadcast, so I have to see if I have to have them sign another contract. My name is David Bisset. Um, I have been talking to people on the 20th anniversary of WordPress, and I’ve been asking ’em a bunch of different questions, and today we have four more interesting people from the WordPress community and me to talk about some particular th and don’t worry, the, the, the, the humor gets self-deprecating, but it goes up from there.
The next 90 minutes, you know, it’s gonna be fantastic. I have four people here that are fantastic contr, uh, contributors and representatives of the WordPress community. Um, I’m gonna let them introduce themselves and then we’re gonna start getting into some particular areas of WordPress history that I think they’re gonna love to share some memories, and hopefully you can relate.
The first is Mihir. Hello Mihir. How you doing?

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Meher Bala: Hey everyone. Hi. Uh, my name is me. I’m from Mumbai, India. Uh, I’m a front end developer and a codeable expert. I’ve been using WordPress since last 10 years.

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David Bisset: Oh, good. I thought you were gonna say last week. No. All right. 10 years. Wow. I’m sorry. Go ahead.

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Meher Bala: I don’t know.
I think it’s more than 10 years because I quit my normal nine to five job, eight, eight years back, so it has to be more than that. Just giving 10 plus years.

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David Bisset: That’s okay. It’s okay to round.

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Meher Bala: I joined the community quite late because I didn’t know there was a community existing, especially my local and then the global.
So it’s been fun from the time I joined.

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David Bisset: You’re not going anywhere, are you? You sound like this is Oh, I’m fine. I’m still up on Okay. It sounds like you’re about to send off here and I don’t want this to be that type of podcast. All right.

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Meher Bala: No, no, definitely no. All right. I’m here for sure.

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David Bisset: Okay, well good. It’s glad to have you. Thank you very much for, uh, coming. Have we ever met before?

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Meher Bala: No, I have not met you. I’ve seen all your tweets. I love your

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David Bisset: Okay. We can stop there. Alright, we, Robert, Robert, uh, you’re up next?

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Robert Windisch: Yeah. I take over before, uh, David like sings in under the screen.

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David Bisset: Quickly, quickly, Robert.

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Robert Windisch: So yeah. My name is Robert. I am, um, uh, c o of Insight at WordPress agency. I’m in WordPress since 1.52. So for me it’s very e very easy. I’m so old. I can name the release I came in, which was in 2005. Um, and, and people go like, no, you were older. No, no, no, no, no. I’m a late bloomer. Like, I came in like two years already when everybody, when the, the server were already set up, the, the forums was there and I just came in, swooped up and was like, Hey, is can I help with developer stuff? And they got, and the community, German community was like, you can develop here a server admin access. So I just, uh, um, grab a hammer and then like cleaning pipes in the WordPress server community.

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David Bisset: All right. Well, good, good to have you on board, Robert. All right, Tammie. Hello. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

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Tammie Lister: Yeah. So I am Tammie. Uh, I’ve. Uh, I had to check how long, which was quite a thing apparently. Um, according to my profile, 2006. Mm-hmm. Uh, I think I, I came because I was torturing a cms, like everybody back in the day, and someone showed me that there was a better way with WordPress.
Um, I think I might have been a bit before that because I was kind of doing it. Um, so that was on wordpress.org and themes brought me to WordPress. So, and since then I’ve been, uh, doing various core contributions. Um, and that’s me.

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David Bisset: Yeah. Well, well, if anybody’s been word WordPress, any measure of time, I have seen you in some way, shape, or form.
Ah, Simon, bring it home. Hi. Bring it home.

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Simon Kraft: Yeah. Hi, I’m Simon. I started using WordPress in 2008, exactly 15 years ago. Um, I started with like, Easy front end development stuff. Worked my way a bit to the back end and at some point graduated from developing stuff myself. And now I am a product owner at Group One. Um, and I spent like the last 10 years organizing meetups and, and wood camps and stuff like that. So I really love that part of our community. Um, and I’m looking forward to at least the next 10 years of that.

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David Bisset: Oh good. You, you’re okay. Well exercise and eat, eat a good diet and we’ll see. Uh, well thank you all and again, I’m David, if you’ve probably already know. Um, I work, uh, I’m employed at Awesome Automotive. I run a project called WP r WP Charitable or Charitables, the products for non-for-profit organizations. It’s been a recently acquired and I’m a project manager there. I’ve been, uh, I’ve experienced with, uh, work camps. I’ve been. With Word Camp Miami started in 2008, and I think I was around and since, um, WordPress 1.5, whenever that was. Um, that came out with, with I think, uh, themes and pages and that sort of thing. So I’ve been with, with WordPress for a while. This is not gonna be about me today. This is because I’ve talked enough in the past episodes, um, of that. So I want, I want to feel, um, we’re gonna go around. We’re gonna, I’m gonna, I’m gonna get your picks in terms of the categories we’ve selected, but this is an open conversation. So as soon as the, the initial person gets their, gets their words out of their mouth, you’re feel free to have a discussion and I’ll, uh, I’ll poke up accordingly. So, Mihir, um, Let’s start with you. Uh, let’s talk about, one of the things that we wanted to, wanted to talk, and this is gonna be a little bit different than if you’re, if you’re listening right now, you’ve listened to the others. These are slightly different topics and categories I wanted to touch on here, cuz these, cuz I wanted to get some, there’s so much to cover for WordPress’s. 20th, 20th anniversary in 20 years. There’s so much to cover. So I wanted to make sure we, we, on some of the shows and some of the people I talked to, we, we kind of varied our discussion points.

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So first thing we wanted to cover was a memorable design or refresh in WordPress history. Now, some people ask me, well, does this mean this? And does this mean that, um, does this mean project or does this mean that I, when I ask these questions, they’re open for interpretation. So I am not looking, I am looking for something within a scope. But wherever you read that question, you can go from there. So what Mihir, what was your. Memorable design or refresh and WordPress history?

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Meher Bala: Uh, my memorable was 1.3. Uh, one was having a multisite built in the co. Mm-hmm. And one was a 20, uh, 10th heme, which was most stylish, more simple and very readable to normal users who, you know, what, just wanna run the WordPress as a blog because blogging had just begun and everyone was using WordPress. So for me it was, 3.0.

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David Bisset: Yeah. Uh, I was a big multi-site fan back in the day, and I remember he had to download two versions of WordPress. Yes. Uh, and that was, and that’s, but that was, um, and see that was the, what was the theme again? What was the year 2010?

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Meher Bala: 2010 was it? Uh, 2010 was a theme. The year was, uh, 2010.

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David Bisset: Right. That makes sense. I was trying to, I was trying to pull up what it looked like, cuz I’m drawing a blank. Remember we were talking about, um,

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Meher Bala: it’s the white banner on top.

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David Bisset: Oh, there it is. Yeah. I remem Oh yes. Oh my goodness. Yes. That was with the trees in the road. Yes. Is the default picture. Yeah. And it’s kind of hard to describe audibly, but if you just do WordPress 10,000 theme in Google images, you get all the clones appearing and there is some, there was a little bit of styling there, but it was mostly what blogs, what the typical stylish, simple blogs were back then. It was like a large hero image or a large full width image. And then you had your two columns, right?

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Meher Bala: Yes. It was something new for a lot of people.

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David Bisset: Well before that, not too much before that. I don’t know if there was another word. I, I forget when WordPress year theme started, was this the first one?

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Tammie Lister: That was the first default theme? That was the first, that was second one. No, that was the first official default theme. Mr.

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Simon Kraft: Well, there was Kubrick before that.

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David Bisset: No, I see. Dang. I lost a bet. Years. Yeah, because yeah, I was, I, I should have said that’s the first default theme that was named after years because we had Kubrick for like four or five years before that. Oh yeah. So this is kind of memorable because this

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Tammie Lister: is the first default, the one that started the default years
David Bisset: because we got so sick and tired of looking at that, uh, Corick theme. No, I mean, it was nice and pretty, but I mean, it’s like my kids, I can only look at ’em so much before I need something new, new, new to glance at.
So, but yeah, it was perfect. But, alright, so I think that’s pretty memorable. Nice. Round number 3.0, multi-site, no more Kubrick, first year theme. I agree. That’s a pretty good design moment in WordPress history. Um, let’s, uh, so Robert, what’s your, yeah, what’s your, what’s your big, uh, design moment that you wanna share?

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Robert Windisch: So, so first, Mihir taking multisite from me, like, uh, we have a conversation next, next word camp like, and from me by the way.

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David Bisset: So is that your, was that gonna be your pick?

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Robert Windisch: No. Yeah. Uh, I’m the multi side person. Yes.

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David Bisset: Oh. Oh, see, we already have our first

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Meher Bala: right after three, so.

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Robert Windisch: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That, that’s totally, it’s, it’s, you, you are the first one. Um, and I am, I shying away from other things because I want, I know Tammie wants to, wants to mention that that one thing that end ends with a number, probably this, the design refreshed, but like, I, I give Tammie the, um, the, oh, no. Okay. I can take it. I can take it. Okay.

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David Bisset: See, you try to, you try to be a nice human being. Well, well,

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Robert Windisch: yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Because like, I, I’m the second one, so, um, but I have, like, you are welcome to that one. Yeah. But that’s my, would be my second pick. So, um, so I would, with the, with the biggest like, design, uh, um, like seismic shift from like, uh, from, from the, from the feeling was when the, when the menu went from the top to the left. Like that. That was like that. I have no idea when this was. Like, I’m very bad. Right? Like it was eight ago.

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David Bisset: Menu went from the top. You mean the admin making

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Robert Windisch: the WordPress menu was in the top third

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David Bisset: one? Yes, it was. Cuz I remember in one five it was, but I, I can’t, I can’t remember now. You’re gonna have to make me look things up.

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Robert Windisch: I, I would guess, but I’ve, I’ve, I’m bad with like, because it’s, so we’re currently talking about like between like which dinosaur were alive when this happens. So that’s why it’s, it’s so, it’s so far off. And I will simply say like, uh, the biggest, like design wise for the future, for the user interface was really when the, when the top menu, which was not like, it could not scale because you had, uh, determined like link in the menu. We experienced that in the WordPress org menu also that we have a problem with, with link there. So, so that was for me, like a, a, a big, um, like design visible decision that, um, was, was made and then, Like, it’s now the current, the current way of the WordPress backend.

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David Bisset: Okay. For now, I’ll, we’ll, I’ll, I’ll guess that it was around 2.0 cuz I remember it being in one five and it was pretty, and I started using one five, but very quickly after I started using it. Like, I don’t remember the top stuff match for very long, so I mean, I’ll be, I’ll be Googling to fill that in, but, okay. Well, we’re gonna, we’re, we’re gonna put 2.0 as a placeholder, but That’s right. It’s, and just fortunately, I mean, we think the sidebar is a bit of a mess today. Although the stuff that we had, just imagine if it was a top-down navigation menu in the admin.

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Robert Windisch: Yeah. All the, all the, uh, like upsell things now in the top menu bar, that would be like, lovely. What would it be?

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David Bisset: Why, how would that work? You, we all the plugin authors have to add like a second navigation, second dropdown. It’s like a mega menu.

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Simon Kraft: We just, we’ll just like break and add another line, and you have a huge block on top of every Diamond page.

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David Bisset: Tammie’s miming all of the facial expressions as we’re talking here. That’s fine. All right, okay, well, Tammie, now it’s your turn. Robert, I’m gonna get back to you on a version number on that exactly, because

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Meher Bala: I think version number’s, uh, 2014.

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David Bisset: Okay. That’s a year. That’s close. That we’re, we’re, we’re getting closer now. So 2014 is the next clue. 2014, the menu came inside. So that’s four years after the 2010 theme. I know I can do math, but I mean, that would mean it would be greater than WordPress.

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Robert Windisch: No, no, no, no. The the menu, the, the, the, the, it was was already decide when the, when the other thing that I want to mention later, uh, um, come, come.

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David Bisset: No, don’t ruin it. Don’t worry, don’t worry. We’ll figure it out. All I know is that I was. Yeah, all I know is that, um, there’s probably dirt younger than the version number that we’re gonna find, but anyway. All right, Tammie, time, time to go from miming to audio and sharing your, uh, the biggest or most memorable design moment. And this should be right up your alley

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Tammie Lister: 2005 and it’s Kubrick. And the reason is, if you speak to most people that got their visuals or, or some front end work in WebPress, uh, have been around for a while, they got their start because of Kubrick. That was one of the themes that got them into it. Or they started tinkering around with themes. Um, it was one of those themes that you like cut your teeth on, you learnt with, so that, I know we were kinda saying it was around for a while, but honestly it’s what. Most of us learn how to theme from. So for me, I think it’s the most memorable design. Um, mainly for cuz of the gradient. If you think of Kubrick, you see the gradient. So that’s the one for me. It’s gotta be Kubrick.

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David Bisset: Well, for me personally, I may have mentioned this on another episode, um, but Kubrick wasn’t just another design or even a design that stayed for a long time. It was when WordPress was really starting to get popular for blogs. Yeah. And I think visually speaking, at least for me, that whenever you ha if you wanna get a couple of screenshots or photos or memories Yeah. Of just how, when blogging got popular, Um, yeah.

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Tammie Lister: Would, and I set the tone. Yeah. So many people just were never color gradient or had that big header and that header format stayed for a very long time. The big headers. We’ve only just very recently stopped having big headers in our designs and kind of started moving away from the big header design and realizing you don’t have to have that in every design, so,

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David Bisset: well, you know, what they say about big headers.
What’s that?

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Tammie Lister: Um, for, for me, I feel that you, you can’t really include this list without saying that because it feels quite seminal to Yeah. What you learn and at the front end, the code level, because we really learn how to create themes from it as well. Oh yeah.

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David Bisset: Iconic. Iconic, very good choice. So, yeah, we’ve had, um, WordPress 3.0, our mystery WordPress 2.0 theme that we’re gonna go to do, and, uh, Kubrick 2005. So, uh, Simon, what I, can you share with us what your memorable, uh, design. Moment is in our WordPress history. So far we’ve, we’ve, and I’m, so far, I’m glad we have stayed in the past, but are you gonna, are you gonna be there with us, Simon, or are you edging a little closer to the future? Like pick something from the future? Um, no, I mean, I meant far past.

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Simon Kraft: Yeah. Okay. I, I think mine is not that, that long ago. Well, it should be like 10 years. Um, Robert already, um, alluded to it. Um, I pick MP six, the, the redesign of the word presentment interface. Um,

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David Bisset: see, you hear that Si Simon. That means I can Google it and get a year versus Roberts description

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Simon Kraft: it should be what? Press 3.8.

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David Bisset: Well, I’m not gonna fact check-

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Robert Windisch: just keep in mind the new redesign of the interface.
Simon Kraft: Yeah, yeah. It, it’s just 10 years old. That’s, that’s still good. Um, and that was was a point where I really started. Loving the way the WordPress back end looks, because before that it was, it was cool, it was nice, it was usable.
Uh, but with that, it felt like really fresh and still to a certain degree does, uh, today. And I think there were a couple of smaller, um, redesigns, I think WordPress 5.7 at the standardization of, of colors or something it was called, where we had a bit more contrast, a bit more unified set of colors, which is also very nice. I came to really love that. But that’s the interface on the web that I interact with, like every single day of every year, ever since. Uh, so that’s, that’s quite cool.

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David Bisset: I, it looks like, to me, the, I mean, I think this plugin was around a while before it actually officially came out in the WordPress police, because I’m finding posts from 2013. Um, and do you remember why it was called MP six? I mean, must stand for something

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Robert Windisch: Tammie doesn’t know. Nobody knows here.

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David Bisset: Yeah. I’m looking at,

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Tammie Lister: I think it was a project name.

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David Bisset: It had to be Matt, think it was, it had to be probably Matt or who, or I forget the original designer or the original project creator cuz I’m, cuz this was nine years ago.

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Tammie Lister: It was a group, group of people who created it and got together.
It was one of the first projects where a group of people got together and created it and kind of worked on it. Um, it was kind of the first attempt at that, um, to get kind of designed, done collectively, I guess.

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David Bisset: Yeah. Was that the first, what do you call them? Um, project plug-ins. No, that’s not the right word. Um, feature. I’m not even sure. Feature plug-ins turns back then. Yeah. Cuz this, would this been considered plugins or anything? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the term didn’t exist, but it was, I think it was probably one of the first quote unquote feature plugins. Right. Yeah, I mean without that we’d still be looking at the uh, um, now if I can find a screenshot between Robert’s Pick and Simon’s Pick for the WordPress admin where the, it was side navigation, but it’s still an before MP six. Man, I can’t remember it.

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Robert Windisch: People, people will not, people will not like if you show them MP six, it looks very like the current, um, interface. So that’s why, um, oh yeah, we don’t change anything. Just need to like the pre, the pre MP six phase, because that was the new redesign, as I always, I cannot, I cannot emphasize nothing. That was how new this was for, this was for the WordPress people, and we are like, finally someone is investing in the WordPress Pega interface. So that was really like a, a, a jump in in, in, um, in user, in, in, um, user interface, um, and, and usability of WordPress.

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David Bisset: It had a bunch of new dash icons, remember, da remember Dash icons. Um mm-hmm. For those of us who know what those are a redesigned widgets page by Sean Andrews from his Widgets project. If, uh, P six included that. Wow. I didn’t, I totally forgot about the widgets project. Improvements to the customizer color schemes. Is this, is this when we got our color schemes like Ectoplasm or some, I wonder if that’s Yep.

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Tammie’s shaking her head vigorously guess. And a new midnight color scheme. So that’s, thank you, Debbie. Thank you Sarah from 2013 for helping us remind that. Well, that sounds fantastic. So we have stayed. We have stayed pretty, pretty well pre 2015 pre Gutenberg. That’s a i I applaud you all for the biggest, most memorable design moments, not being part of, uh, anywhere beyond the 5.0 release of WordPress.

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Thank you. So just to, just to rehash here, Mihir, uh, WordPress, uh, 3.0 multi-site and the first year themed theme. Um, yes, Robert, uh, we’re still gonna hunt for a version specific for that, I assure you. But when the, but we’re talking about when the big jump made from moving navigation from the top to the left hand side.

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Uh, we’re gonna guess that’s 2.0 WordPress for now. Kubrick, who could forget Kubrick? We didn’t. Tammie thought that was, and that probably one of the most fundamental images and thumbnails representing the blog when blog blogs went. We’re in its heyday when movable type was, was starting to fade and WordPress jumped on the scene, how iconic.

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And then MP six, Simon picked that. And that of course is just, you know, we still have that with us today. And that’s been, it’s been, been probably, it’ll probably around 10 years. So, Fantastic. Well, uh, from design-wise, I really don’t have much to, to say in this department. Um, I, I think we’re, I think the early version of WordPress that introduced pages was great, but that’s not really much of a design feature.

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That’s just, I think it did open it up for a little bit more design. Um, I, if I had to pick something, I, I don’t know if this would be my most memorable, but I use it every day. It is the redesign of the WordPress site, um, wordpress.org. Um, a lot of people don’t remember how that looked way, way, way, way back then.

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Um, with, and then it was all split out into various groups, uh, various categories as we have them today, you know, core and design and plugins and, and all of that. Um, I don’t know, maybe I’m, maybe this is an old person talking, but it was really, really clunky and really plain back in the early days. And now with the learn.wordpress.org and the redesign stuff’s, it’s happening.

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It’s looking so much more professional and grown up maybe is the, is the best word I can describe it in. But anyway, that’s, that’s just me. And maybe for, I will share some, if I can find some old screenshots of that, which I couldn’t initially, um, I would love to, love to share them with you. So let’s move on to our next category.

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Mihir, you are up again. So we are talking about the most notable enhancement to WordPress core that isn’t Gutenberg related. So I definitely, so I definitely put that. That, that qualifier in there, because I think that would be way too easy. Um, we in way too broad. Um, and when I say most notable enhancement to WordPress core, that means this is, um, it, it had to appear in WordPress core at some point.

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Maybe it’s something that’s not there anymore or maybe something that it was acquired or merged into WordPress core. Didn’t have to start there, but it was something, a most notable enhancement to WordPress core. And I had some people say, well, what do you mean by enhancement? Do you mean coding wise or design wise?

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Again, this is up to your interpretation. As long as you don’t say the G word, we will be Okay. Mihir. So go ahead. What is your most notable enhancement to WordPress Core? We had no guten, guten free.

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Meher Bala: Mine is the events, uh, widget on a dashboard.

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David Bisset: I’m sorry, say that again. My, my ears exploded. What was that?

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Meher Bala: The event widget.

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David Bisset: Oh, the event widget, yes. Ooh. This is why I like talking to people that are above the age of 18, cuz that’s all I have in my house for, for like a week, every week. The events widget. Oh, tell us, tell us a little bit about that in case people have have forgotten about that.

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Meher Bala: So, uh, whenever there’s any, uh, meetup happening or WordPress happening, uh, in your locality, the events are displayed there.

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And in our local, what I noticed is once the widget came out, a lot of new people who didn’t know the community started, you know, attending meetups, started interacting with the community. So we had a few different people at every meetup. So that’s something which is memor, which is.

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David Bisset: That for me is an amazing pick. I never would’ve thought of that. And apparently you did.

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Meher Bala: I see the community grow even with that. So for me, that’s still in the mind more than Gooden book.

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David Bisset: That’s amazing because not only does it serve, did it serve a purp? I I, I can’t remember if this is when people realize meetup.com was crap. I can’t remember exactly when. Uh, sorry. Meet, sorry, or sorry to our sponsor meetup.com by the way. Um, I love you. Uh, so mom, uh, who works there? So, meetup.com was probably the only way WordPress people were fighting each other at the time. I do you have a, do you know when that, I guess we’re gonna have to find out when that came about cuz I have no idea.

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Simon Kraft: That was WordPress 4.8.

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David Bisset: And do you have a year for that? No. Oh, well, now that we know a version number, hello. Welcome to a podcast, but we’re doing our research live on the air. Thank you. 2017. 2017 or something like that.
Robert Windisch: Welcome. Welcome to a normal community conversation, by the way, we don’t, we don’t run around and no version numbers and years.
We just go like, do you remember this feature? Oh my God. That’s it.
David Bisset: You get what you pay for the hallway track. People are getting what they

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Tammie Lister: for when someone get, gets their phone out and starts tapping and then finds it, and then you go, oh yes,

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David Bisset: someone’s rolling their eyes right now and starting a letter.
Dear David, oh, well

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Tammie Lister: I can’t believe they didn’t know that.

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David Bisset: David Professional in quotes, uh, we have that before that 2017. The reason why I was wanting a year is because that is before I think Slack and where Press Slack, I believe.

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Robert Windisch: No, no, no. Slack was, slack was uh, in civil already. Slack was there.

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David Bisset: So, yeah. Okay, so. I don’t wanna pinpoint it, I guess. Yeah. Cuz 20, I remember a community summit when they made the announcement, but 20, that could have been as early as 2015. So if that widget came out in 2017, there was still ways. I guess the two top ways you would know about WordPress community would be meetup.com was still probably the biggest way there.
And then maybe if you were on WordPress Slack at the time. Right.

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Robert Windisch: Yeah, but meetup media.com was the, we, we, so we decided on media.com because I remember the conversation we had internally be, Hey, let’s build this. And like, people who know project management was, was like, um, you know, that we want to do democratizing publishing, not democratizing events here.

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So, so that’s why luckily we decided to simply give meetup.com money and let they run all of this. And we simply like hooked the meet, hooked the Meetup API into their system and was simply like, um, doing, let them do all the work.
David Bisset: Oh, I was talking, when I talk about meetup.com, I talk about the interface on meetup.com because my experience with it was, I was running meetups through meetup.com and creating the meetups, um, even searching for meetups, and I’m, I’m sure it got better over time.

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I think Amaz, coincidentally enough, is when Weber, when there was that single. Page for the WordPress meetups. Like you said, they, I think there was some, some deal with the, uh, with, um, with, I don’t know. I would, I’m gonna guess WordPress Foundation on this was, was involved or something, but before a while you would just have random spots of communities on meetup.org.

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Which org, which was hard to find. That’s the experience I remember cuz I was running one of those meetups, or two of them actually for a while. And then there came a time where everything was under one umbrella. Organizational wise, I think it had a dedicated page and probably, I’m guessing at that time is where the widget would probably start pulling that kind of information.

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Right. Cuz it’s all centralized Meetup. It’s probably, it’s probably, um, like a meetup organization or something like that. So apologies for me getting it a little confused. I think it did get better, but I, I remember once we had that widget, I pointed people toward the widget and we would have meetups where I said, how many people found us through the widget and we always had one or

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two people at our meetups raise their hand. So I think that’s an amazing pick. Does any, did, doesn’t, does any, I I’m seeing a few people nod. So is that your experience as well, Simon?

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Simon Kraft: Yeah. I think our meetup in, in Germany, multiple meetups in Germany, like grew tenfold or something in the year following the, the, this update with 4.8. So that’s really huge for the meetup community.

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David Bisset: Yeah. So not only do we get a nice new widget on the dashboard, which doesn’t come by that often, but it had an impact on the community. So I think that’s a really cool pick. Really appreciate you take us down me memory lane and my apologies to meetup.com. Um, Robert. I believe you’re up next. Um, so again, just in case, uh, people have nodded off here listening to us

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Robert Windisch: totally like, yeah, totally fine. I can bring up something that is nothing with five. Oh, that is a feature that influenced many people and that, uh, everybody goes like, yeah,

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David Bisset: just I said Guttenberg related. Now if there’s anything else in five that wasn’t,

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Robert Windisch: no. Not even close. No, no. I’m, I’m still, I’m still in a very old feature. I’m still in three, 3.0. I’m talking about, menus.

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David Bisset: Menus. Oh, you mean like creating menus?

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Robert Windisch: Before that you needed to have pages and pages needed to have redirect because you needed to get some structure. And then the only thing to have a high, high cultural, uh, a structure where you have like a parents and chil uh, children was with pages. And that was like when people like fumbled their menu structure together with external links. And then you had a drag and drop in the WordPress back and with menus.

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David Bisset: You. Wow. That act. Wow. I can’t remember that o That was wor that was 3.0. Yeah.

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Robert Windisch: Wow. That was merged from Wu. Seems the WCI feature of menus were merged in the WordPress core

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David Bisset: wow. That’s so hard to believe. Looking back on that now, 3.0, not so, not only P 3.0 had multi-site and, and, and the new theme it had, it had the menu stuff too. That’s amazing that, that would’ve been so barbaric. It’s probably the reason why my webs

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Robert Windisch: no difference with me. No promise with me with features and breakfast.

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David Bisset: Uh, that’s so barbaric. It’s like, for a long time it’s like, why do all these WordPress sites don’t have barely have any menus on ’em until this date? Co. I remember Cooper, I don’t, I might explain why my early Cooper Gays, I don’t see many, I don’t see many menus. They were on the, they were on the sidebar. A lot of the links for websites. Yeah, I re I don’t know,

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Tammie Lister: it was all a widget or, or kind of lists

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Robert Windisch: and No, that the link, the link, the link feature where you could have like defined what’s,

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Tammie Lister: that’s what it was. Cause that’s all we had. You didn’t have anything else. And then when you had early menus, you had to do those walker things. The, you only knew a few knew special magic words and more wizard. That was because it was really, really difficult.

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David Bisset: Oh wow. Okay. Well, yeah, definitely notable enhancement menus. Where could we be without menus? It’s like a, it’s like a car without, I dunno, a steering wheel or something. All right, Tammie. Uh, notable enhancement to WordPress core and no good. Yeah.

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Tammie Lister: I think I’m back at 3.0, but I want that checked custom post types is where I’m going. Uh, I feel like we’re just settling on that release, but it’s one of those releases where we just kind of, it feels like it grew up or we got the features, which then meant the, not just people could write logs or, or use, you could then pivot and grow and extend.

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That’s really what that release felt about. And custom post types, if you think about everyone that’s made a product or everyone that’s used in an agency or anyone’s done anything with WordPress, they wouldn’t have probably done that if it hadn’t been for a custom post type. So it kind of was there, or, or at least that concept.

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So, and even Emberg has the, the G word, I’m sorry, but that has the roots in that kind of thinking. So yeah, custom post types is the thing for me. That’s, it’s,
David Bisset: that’s, it’s, it’s. It’s really what started to make WordPress more than a blog. Like everybody’s, yeah. But then

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Tammie Lister: you could, like ex you could make it yours and you could take it your your direction and you could build on top of it. You know, we now think about like headless and doing everything you want and all that. That would not been impossible if we hadn’t started thinking about custom post types, which now sounds really like simple. Right? Um, but it’s not that back then that was radical thinking. Yes.

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David Bisset: So yeah, you could start making. And history would rather us not learn this lesson too deeply. But I mean, you, you could make a like WordPress into any sort of application you wanted to. Yeah. Yeah. Not that you should, but I mean, you could. Right. And there was, and there was already custom post types.

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Tammie Lister: It wasn’t just these pages with, with Kubrick, but it was just this flat file. You, you, I mean, as we’ve just heard, you had navigation and, and then you had these different things. You had so much in 3.0. 3.0 was basically like Christmas.

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David Bisset: Yeah. I mean, how much brain matter had this. How much brain matter was scraped off the floor at the Word camp announcement for 3.0. You know, it’s like our minds were blown so much. Just stop it. Yeah, stop it. It’s all, it’s already dead. Uh,

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Tammie Lister: yeah, but if you think back then about the upgrade paths of 3.0 as well, cuz back then it was very different as well. Let’s say we don’t have releases that are that significant now because so many things happen then it’s kind of mind blowing.

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David Bisset: Yes. It’s like you, you went out, you went to, you went to, you went to the customer saying, let’s upgrade you where this is the customer. No. Really? No. Yeah. Let’s, let’s do it. Let’s do it. Let’s, let’s go nuts. Just cup take. All right, Batman. So, all right Simon. So we’ve got an events widget, we’ve got menus, we’ve got custom post types.

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Uh, I don’t wanna put any pressure on you here, but, um, do you have something he’s gonna say entering text into a box? For the win, Alex,
Simon Kraft: and that, that was exactly what I was going for. Now, actually, in the first round, all my picks and the backups and their backups were picked by everyone else.

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David Bisset: But this time I, I said to come, I said To come with a sat.

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Simon Kraft: Yeah, yeah. And, but this time, every single one of my, of my picks is still in the race. And that makes it a bit hard. And I’m going for the, I think most insignificant one of them, because it’s no longer in core. And that’s something we don’t do that often. Oh, no.

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David Bisset: Um, oh, no, I think I know what it is. It’s post formats. Yes.

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Simon Kraft: Um, I, I really loved that feature back in the day. Uh, as I said, I was

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David Bisset: te Tell us a little bit about post formats, Simon.

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Simon Kraft: Yeah. I, I, I was, I was building a lot of themes back then and post formats basically had the idea that you cannot only post a post. So not just a blob of text, but also. Oh, I have lists somewhere here so I don’t have to bumble around like an idiot.

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Um, something that was called a site, like a, a small kind of update kind of post. You had a galleries, links, uh, images, quotes, a status while reading that. I’m not so sure how that compares to a site. Um, video, audio and chat. And they’re gone now. They were introduced in 3.1. Um, but they were like, that was a really fun way of, of styling different kinds of content in blocks.

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David Bisset: I remember Matt talking about it on stage, by the way, and I mean, I’m that old.

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Robert Windisch: I’m so happy that they are gone. I’m so happy that they, I’m not, I’m not at all.

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David Bisset: Robert. Robert, Robert. They’re some confusing for people. Robert, we, we’ll get to, we’ll get to your negative emotions, but let’s, I’ll, I’m sorry Simon, I interrupted. Go ahead. You were telling us about this wonderful feature.

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Simon Kraft: It was so wonderful and at some point, I’m not sure when. It was removed from Core. I think there’s still a way around that. You can still technically use it in some capacity, but it’s not an ongoing core.

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Tammie Lister: I mean, still you can also use a block now you could use a block and, and have it as a, that’s not the same. Yeah. I mean, no, you could sign it.

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David Bisset: Well, it was introduced in 3.1, it says here. So it almost made like we were writing an, we were writing high back then as a WordPress. People we’re like, oh man, 3.0 is so awesome. What’s next? What’s next? Oh, this post format stuff. Oh man, we gotta do this. And then, and then crickets. Why, why do you all think that post formats didn’t make it?

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Simon Kraft: I think, uh, blogging is not that relevant anymore. Yeah.
Tammie Lister: Unfortunately. So I think that’s, that’s one of the things is like, It’s very in the blogging sphere, I think it works just for blogging or not for a particular type of blogging even. Mm-hmm. Um, and there was a, you know, if you think about, what was it?

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Timelines, it was a big thing back then. I went kind of wanna bring them back, you know? Mm-hmm. Um, and like listening to, and I’m doing and status updates. It was kind of in a time before we used social media as well, so people were using their blog to post and syndicate everything on there. And people just started doing that in other places rather than their blog.

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Not saying they’re not gonna come back with, uh, the world as it is and owning your own content. But I think that because it was very particular, and then WordPress was starting to become about more broad in its terms. I think that’s the thing when we moved to plugins being about particular things rather than the interface.

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Robert Windisch: Yeah, I just want to pick on my like, negative thing that I said I, I just wanted, like in terms of the user, for the user, it was very complicated to like decide while writing. And, uh, if we are emphasizing on like for the majority of users and have it very lean, mean, uh, interface, then it’s like going like, okay, what of these seven things, is that what you currently want to do?

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And or nine or whatever it was. And it was not extendable, so it was Oh my God. So that’s why it was very, for the user, not that, that’s why I’m saying like, uh, um, it was not easy to understand and they just want to publish and then we are going like, please do this checkbox and otherwise you cannot like, start the car.
So that’s why I was like, um, really against, uh, the, the post format because they were against the, the, the, the directory of WordPress having like becoming easier to use for people. Yeah. And, and as much as I love the feature, I think that’s a valid reason to, to remove it.

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Meher Bala: Because even a lot of my clients. They want, they choose a, uh, post type, and they expected some result, something else came up. So a lot of people were confused. Users.

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David Bisset: I could see that. S all right, so I have here events, widget menus, custom post types, and r i p to post post formats, although I think it’s in the code somewhere, it’s, and, um, you, you can up to this point, right?

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They wouldn’t just outright kill it. They hit it and it’s still in there somewhere. And it’s just one of those few things in WordPress that had a lot of, uh, fanfare. And again, it just, for one reason or another, it just kind of fizzled a little bit. And the, and so anyway, um, so I’m, I’m gonna throw in mine.

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So, believe it or not, there is something that was once popular. And I don’t know if post formats, you could say it was popular, but I, I like to think it was at least it had a little bit of, uh, runway. There was something early on in WordPress that was popular, that was used quite a bit. And then inversion 3.5, I think at 3.5.
Feel free to correct me, uh, future Self that, um, it, it disappeared. Um, I’m talking about something in the admin. I’m talking about Something was, started very on in WordPress and in fact, it was part of blogging culture for a long time that if you had a blog on your website in the sidebar, I’m looking to see if peopleare starting to think about this.

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You had a list of other people’s blogs that you could l that you would link to, and that was called drum roll. Please think I broke my table. Um, blog roll. That was called a blog roll, but in the WordPress backend, does anybody remember what menu that was? No. Okay. Links. I’m All right. Thanks for reading it.

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Links. Sorry, there was a links menu. No, no, that’s right. I made, so it was the links. So I don’t know if this was in WordPress from day one. I like to think like pretty soon in WordPress it was, I couldn’t find when it was actually officially added, but I’m pretty sure I could have, I put my mind to it. But link management phase out of WordPress, from what I can see around WordPress, 3.5, um, supposedly wordpress.com added them back or something along those lines.
I’m not sure if they’re still there. Um, so when WordPress 3.5 links was gone, and, you know, by the time it was gone, nobody was using it. Very few people were using it. Um, it, because I remember when it was gone, it was like one of those things that like, it was, it was getting old and crusty anyway. And it had, it would needed to be taken out to the refuge, trash bin, dumpster, whatever you kids are calling it these days.

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But I remember using that as one of the first things when I started with WordPress 1.5. Cuz blog rolls were a thing, you would like link the top. Like you people were reading your blog, they wanted something similar to, and you needed something on the sidebar. And believe it or not, um, when people stopped using that, they kind of went over to menus.

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Um, like a menu widget or something, I think was, some people wanted to continue that. But yeah, the links management system blog rolls in the early days of blogging. Those were things, you know. Um, so anyway, um, r i p to R one links management. So that was for me. All right. Lastly,

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Robert Windisch: can I jump, can I jump in?

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David Bisset: Can you link to something? Sure.

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Robert Windisch: Yeah. Yeah. I, um, I cannot like, because it was also hard for me to pick something and, um, uh, Simon, do you do the other thing? Um, yeah. Okay. So, um, uh, one of the, one of the things that, um, was very, was very, very important, but it’s not like really visible to see this to people, um, is for me the, uh, the rest api.

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Um, because, um, if we talk about like what we are currently like doing with all the, the word we cannot mention here because it’s a, it is a, it’s a history show.

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David Bisset: The he who cannot be named yes.

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Robert Windisch: But without the rests api, many things currently would not be possible because that’s the foundation and like the, um, the sheer energy to put this into WordPress against all arts against, like, why do we need this?
It’s not a visible feature. And when everybody was like, but we need a rest api, XML L P C is not gonna make it. We need to have the future to really communicate with the WordPress backend, and this needs to be in WordPress. We really, really need this. And then we got it like, um, some base features in there, and now we have it like as the foundation of, we cannot name it here.
Uh, we have this, uh, foundation that if you would disable that you would like have a really a timeish and jump back in a time with the features that we are currently having.

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David Bisset: Yeah. Yeah. The rest

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Simon Kraft: and probably the next, next iteration of the WordPress interface, like WP admin. Is, I guess, very likely to also be based on the rest api.
David Bisset: So here are some runner-ups. Just thought I’d throw ’em out there real quick. Auto updates, I’m,

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Simon Kraft: that was the one that Robert meant, uh, I, I should mention. Yeah, uh, we discussed that earlier. Um, all updates were introduced in 3.7 and changed, I guess, WordPress forever. Because since then, every WordPress website is updated, at least patched, uh, to its new version, which is really cool.
And until recently we, we also kept like all the, I dunno, what was the last version of, of 3.7 still supported like

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Robert Windisch: 30, something like that. 30 or 30 something. Yeah.
Simon Kraft: So it was really crazy that all these old versions are still still maintained to a degree.

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David Bisset: Mihir, did you? I, I had, I’m sorry. No, I’m sorry. I wanted to get Mihir. Mihir was shaking her head like a bo, like a bobblehead doll. Um, there, did you grasp auto updates because, uh, Mihir as well as everyone else, I think, because I know there was a lot of controverts in the beginning about WordPress back then. Smaller market share than it does now. Were you comfortable with auto updates, Mihir, in your, in, in your, um, decade?

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Uh, well, I’m sorry you weren’t a decade before, but how were you comfortable? Were you comfortable with WordPress updates? Initially,

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Meher Bala: no, because a lot of, uh, sites broke. That was because of the theme and the plugins. But as yours past auto updating WordPress is good because at least people have reduced saying that WordPress is not secure.
Yeah. When it is auto updated people, okay. Find that fine. And WordPress is secure, what we add to it with a theme or plugin. There is some vulnerability over there.

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David Bisset: So you, you, so you, you got warm to it. What were you saying, Tammie? Yes.

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Tammie Lister: Uh, I was gonna take in a different direction, so I’m checking wherever we are done on order updates.

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David Bisset: Oh yeah. Well, uh, yeah. The other two I only wanted to mention in, in, in passing was the customizer. Um, that’s kind of, we’re getting, we’re kind of seeing that maybe in the rear view mirror a little bit. For a while though, that was the true no-code interface to customizing a theme, um, of, in core anyway. And la lastly was the, um, uh, let’s see.

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I pasted a u URL in this URL does not make sense. There is also smaller things too that maybe doesn’t play to, I wouldn’t say. A huge part, but we had things like site health, um, import exporting, WordPress, um, in from core with the plugins, that sort of thing. So lots of little things. Uh, and
Tammie Lister: I had one from 2012, which was, uh, something that’s gonna get redesigned or reworked mm-hmm.

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Uh, in this cycle or this phase, which is the new media management happened in 2012, which sounds a long time ago for it.

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David Bisset: Yeah. I, I can’t remember what it was like before then. I think you had to draw something and mail it to your WordPress blog,

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Tammie Lister: be glad that you don’t remember it. It was, it, it was a big thing. And I think that, and even you could have picked like the old way we used to do revisions, which even now you look at revisions and you think, oh, that’s quite dated. The old way was even more dated back in the day. Um, and why I kind of thought of those ones was because they looked dated to us now, but. We are redoing them now.

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And I kind of think that that’s kind of interesting to think of. Like the cycle of like every 10 or so years is kind of when we kind of redo things, which kind of is kind Oh, that’s healthy.

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David Bisset: It’s a project. Hey, well we’re an open source. If we can get to the 10 year mark, that’s a win, right? Uh, pretty healthy actually.
To, just to wrap, just to wrap this section up. Um, completely forgot about revisions. Um, not that I used them too often, but, um, that and the little thing when the slider came in. Yes.

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Tammie Lister: From when we first got the sliding,

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David Bisset: I’m not sure if I took to the slider very quickly because I’m like, it’s kinda like going to the eye doctor, does a look better to you?
Or B, I worked on that A or B, no, it had nothing to do with the design. It had me trying to keep in my head what, and then the side by side stuff, I think, uh, wa was, was a lot better. But revisions has saved more people’s butts probably than, than one would remember. Oh. Because I, uh, that an auto save. Um, for a while, I don’t think, I don’t remember when, but I know WordPress, when it started, did not autos save your posts as you were typing them.

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And I remember Matt said, standing on stage saying, no, now your power can go out or whatever. And you’ve got that post and revisions, incl. And, and that also for me, blended into later revisions where, uh, you, you’re, there’s a previous revision. Are you sure you want to edit this or do you wanna look at that or go back to it?

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Tammie Lister: But I think back then revisions was, um, Yeah, I think I always kind of forget the words, but it was when we were trying to make things look real, I think skew morphic or something. It was like when you were trying to make like apple, uh, you’re trying to make things look real or those kind of design things.

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And I think unfortunately it did inherit a little bit from that. Um, so I think now we would go a lot more, um, streamlined. Uh, design has come on a little bit. Uh, it’s more information based. It’s more how you are gonna process. It’s more kind of quick. If you look at the way GitHub and all those kind of interfaces are now, you know, we’ve learned.

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But back then we were trying to solve a problem that hadn’t really been. Kind of comprehended. We were trying to visualize issues that we hadn’t. So it was kind of really interesting to think of like, going back to it now with everything we know about the complications of those. And now we know that people probably do want to extend those, probably do wanna export them, probably do find them useful as well.

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David Bisset: We may see a little bit of a change in this department with phase three, with the, um, multi-user stuff too.

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Tammie Lister: Oh, I think we’re gonna see a complete change in that way, at least I hope we do, because honestly, that’s not gonna scale.
David Bisset: Yeah. You think? Yeah, I would. Yeah. I, I always get, I get, my daughter says, I’m trying to edit up, posting your site and it says, you’re still in there.

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Can you close a tab? And I’m like, I, or I can kick you out. I’m like, fine. You’re your mother’s daughter anyway, so. Alright, so we have one last category here. Um, Mihir, you are up first. Now this category is how I described this. And I’m getting them, I’m getting these, these are getting wordier as we go along, but okay, so this is a memorable community moment or community initiative or community Cause that wasn’t a WordPress release and you’re saying, well, why did David put not a WordPress release?

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Um, well, because there have been a couple of memorable WordPress releases focused on who was releasing, who is contributing, all great things. But we’ve got a lot of that feedback in the, in the past about, oh, it was, it was, um, you know, the WordPress releases, especially the ones where, um, the underrepresented groups took over forward word press release.

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Great. That that could be counted as a community moment. Fantastic. But everybody says that when they first think of one. So I wanted us to be a little bit more tougher, no word press releases, but anything else is open game in terms of a community moment initiative or a cause. So, Mihir, I would love to hear what you’ve got to say about this.

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Meher Bala: So, For me, when I joined the community, I always, uh, like the very few women who participated and when I used to go to work camps, also the women were fewer. So I just started, you know, gathering all the women and started taking group fit pictures and it became a thing, like if I was there in Word Camp, it was, you know, I had to do a group with them because everyone got excited, new people added.

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So pre pandemic, each word camp I went to, I had, I mandatory went on stage in the lunch break and decided a time place where, you know, everyone will get together. I heard a few things, but I said, this is helping encourage other women. So I don’t see any problems, so why not? And I used to put on, put on Twitter as well.

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David Bisset: So, so, so you organ Yeah. It’s kinda encouraging someone else. What’s that?

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Meher Bala: It’s kind of encouraging another woman to be a part of the community.

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David Bisset: Absolutely. Um, so like selfies, but good, but selfies representing under underrepresented groups. I, I, they’re there. Yeah. The WordPress, I mean, you can talk about this all, all day. And this is not exclusive to the WordPress community, it’s tech in general, right. We’re always used to that. I have a daughter who is growing up and she kind of grew up in the WordPress community more or less for the last 10 years, you know, with the word camp exposure and everything. And you know, today we kind of take some of the efforts to make people feel welcome for granted a little bit.

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Um, there’s still obviously a lot that needs to be done in the community, but back in the early days it was, um, You know, especially if someone, someone relates to an someone who relates to a subject or a con or a conference, they love seeing people that represent them on stage or representing them organizing an event.

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Right. And maybe it’s not apples to apples. Exactly. But you know, it’s, it’s, it’s like, especially, um, especially if, just think if you’re a young woman, I can’t, but I have a daughter, so, you know, I’ve seen her reactions and, um, it’s, she, she can connect so well with when people, when women were speaking at meetups.
So just imagine like back then we just, you know, their focus wasn’t there cuz we were just happy to have meetups in ward camps, period. And then once we started getting people to speak, then we kind of, like some people especially, started to notice a pattern and that had to be brought to a lot of people’s attention.

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So that kind of, we kind of evolved into a way where, yes, okay, now we’ve got the ba, we’ve got some basics down, but now we’ve got a lot of improving to do because if we want this community to grow and be decent human beings, we should try to make things as as. And you know what that does for me as an organizer, I was focused on speaker stuff, but there were so many people at the work camps like you, Mihir, we’re doing these, um, side, I don’t want to use the wrong term because they’re important, but um, Site events, right?

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Or something like that. But I mean that respectfully in terms of like, yeah, let’s, let’s take a, let’s get this certain group together and take a photo or let’s, or, or have this, um, mini meetup or like an after dinner thing at WordPress meetups and that sort of thing. Or even now online, you know, there’s various, um, communities out there that exist for particular kinds of groups.

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Um, black Press and so forth that, um, that I, at least I’m familiar with. So I think that was a fantastic idea. I don’t know if anybody else is familiar with anything else or wants to jump in, but I think putting down a moment in terms of, now I don’t know how to word this exactly, so maybe you can gimme a term.
I can put in the show notes. I have women’s selfies written down here just because that’s how my brain works and I don’t wanna be canceled later. WordPress, sorry. If you can gimme another term. That’s what I got. What’s that? Women in WordPress. You got it. I will quote you on that.
Tammie Lister: Have you seen that? It’s possible to not just see one of you though, as well, which is what you are identifying.

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You are, you are saying that there’s more than one of you and there’s more than one possibility of you as well, which is really, really important. Um, seeing all the different possibilities that you could do in all the different areas, I think that’s important for whoever you are as well. So I love that. I think that’s amazing.
David Bisset: And more of it, and in the WordPress leadership roles too. So many are women. My family, women are the hardest working ones. Anyway. Okay, we got that on tape. All right, good. All right. Just, just made just a little insurance from, from my wife later. Um, alright Robert, let’s talk, let’s talk a favorite community moment. Or cause Okay. Something along those lines.

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Robert Windisch: So my, my job, uh, my day job is to challenge processes. Now, let’s see if I, if I come, if, if I have a runner up. So I just want to see if it’s like how close I am to the things that are not allowed. Okay. Uh, my, uh, favorite or my, like most re uh, community moment is when the, when the whole room at the, at the state of world guest.

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Um, the point was when met stopped the release cycle, so when, when the, uh, before like, uh, before the, um, um, five oh release, um, like we had this like every three months we had to release and then, um, this was like, it not going to, it was not gonna cutting it because the, the changes we needed to do, um, were really, were too big.

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So we cannot, we, like I heard from so many core people that was not, um, um, Like was, was not gonna like cut it in a few months back to just get it in. So my question is, does counting of a re uh, like starting a release cycle counts. So because, um, that was like, I, we were in the room and was like, yeah, and now that’s why we, uh, need to explain.

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Matt explained that and that’s why we stopped the release cycle now and everyone was like, what the hell just happened for me? That was like, he dropped the mic amenable

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David Bisset: moment. I think he dropped the mic too. I can’t remember. Uh, when was that?

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Robert Windisch: Um, 2017, like, uh, weekend as Tammie, because she was uh, um, uh, design, I think Design team rep after that. Yeah. And like Matt was simply,

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Tammie Lister: it would’ve, I think it would’ve been, well it would’ve been 4.9, but we didn’t do that. Uh, and so yeah, it was four, 5.0. Then we. Had a pause, ended it. So yeah, I think it was 17. I dunno the year exactly. 17. There’s many years. 17, 18 blended into each other during that time.

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David Bisset: But there was a 4.9. There was a 4.9, wasn’t there?

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Simon Kraft: It were many 4.9 s.

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Tammie Lister: It would’ve been like 5.0. It was after 4.9. It would’ve been. So,

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David Bisset: so it’s kinda like 3.0, sorry. It’s kinda like walking toward a, walking halfway toward a wall and then walking halfway toward a wall. There’s 4.9, there’s 4.99, 4.9 9, 9, 4 0.99, nine, oh, not 5.0 yet very

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Tammie Lister: long. 4.9 release,

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Robert Windisch: Yeah. But the, the, the beauty was really that, that there was no release. So there was like, we will have a release when we have a release and like there wasn’t release in between where we like fixed small stuff because we still needed to do while like Tammie and other people were like, okay.

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How, what are we doing? How do we, like, what is the goal here? And, and that’s why it was really for me, like it sh it, it really, uh, in this, in this moment, in this room at the Word camp us, you really could, like, you could feel a needle drop in the room because like, it was something that never happened before, because like you could, uh, um, um, you can set your watch to Roberto releases.

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Mm-hmm. And then we simply stopped doing that while deciding that we, like, stop doing it because it doesn’t make any sense. So it was really, really weird and really good because it, it helped us to make this leap that we not talking about right now, but it, it helped us to really, uh, prepare for that.

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Tammie Lister: It was also a stop and help was also kind of part of it.
It was a stop and this is how you can get involved. I think that was kind of the other bit like once everyone kind of gets over that Uber stopped, it was, and then here’s how you can get involved. So it kind of had that double um, or this, that was my, my through the haze of time impact, um, was it brings about the, okay, now I can get involved cuz people do like a release circle.

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Right. Um, so consistency. Now I get involved and now I can do that. And it, it did get us to 5.0, it absolutely got us to it. And without that we would not have had the 5.0. You know, there’s no point in releasing something there. We are radically different from what we were, but there’s no point in releasing something that would’ve been half-baked. It wouldn’t have worked.

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David Bisset: Yeah. So we have actually done that once in our, at least once in our WordPress history. Right. Yeah, I, I, I don’t know if we’ll see a moment like that again, at least anytime soon. It seems like Gutenberg phases seem to be planned out, or at least not like that drama ish type of thing.

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Right. It’s not, it wasn’t a press release Rob Robert’s. Right. I remember. I remember saying Matt, Matt said it, and I think a few people had to change their pants. It was that kind of a moment where you just kind of expected like, this is all, this is all we’ve known, you know? And that’s funny because, you know, fast forward to a few days before working at us and, and, uh, you know, me in a hotel room, super caffeinated trying to finish something as Matt is in a chat room saying 5.0, it’s coming out now, whether we like it or not, it’s coming out, you know.

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Anyway. I better stop with the analogies. It was ready. Oh, it was, it was, it was ready. Kind of kinda like I’m on top of this, uh, on a heel skiing and somebody says, oh, you’re ready, you’re ready. And slowly pushing me off the ledge. It’s, it was that type of ready. Oh yeah, it was ready. It was ready. Um, I just did, you know, just, just thinking my life flashing before my eyes right before it came out though. Um, let’s see, Tammie, I think your next, um, community initiative, cause whatever,

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Tammie Lister: I’m going to take you back to 2014 to, I don’t wanna go Miami and the first ever kids workshop.

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David Bisset: Ah, you actually snagged something.

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Tammie Lister: Oh. Cause that fell. I still have. Really fond memories of it. It kind of felt really incredible to, it wasn’t even really that organized. It wasn’t really that.

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David Bisset: Thanks Tammie, really appreciate it. It was that big in,

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Tammie Lister: I’m sorry, but there’s no, like back then we were David all over initiative. I’m sorry. We weren’t, we weren’t trying to do we, we were just gonna be doing the event. We weren’t gonna necessarily try and do anything bigger with it.

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And I think it planted a good seed that maybe took a bit of time before anything else happened, but that was absolutely fine. Um, and it was really important for just to start that. I think it’s both important for representation, but also important for an open source project doesn’t work with older people only working on it.

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So for me it was incredibly special if I think of the people that were in that room as well, who were passing on. Many of them are still involved, contributing, in fact, all of them that I can think of. And it was just really special for me. Yeah. Yeah.

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David Bisset: Um, that, now, just to be clear, for someone who was about to write that email to us, this is not the first kid’s camp ever in a work camp.
It was the one Tammie attended? No, it was a kid’s workshop. Workshop. It was a, well, I don’t like to use the word kids and work very close to each other because people get sensitive about that.

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Tammie Lister: Yeah. It was 2014. It was no like kids camp or anything like that. It was, it was just, I, I don’t think it was that long, either, we weren’t doing it for or anything like that.

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David Bisset: Kids don’t exactly have long attention spans. So, yeah, that’s under we,

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Tammie Lister: no, it was, it was nothing official. It was no official kids camp. It was nothing. And it, it was, it was long time ago, so there was no kind of officialness of it. Um, but no, it was, I think we got them set up on a blog and we got them to customizing a theme and writing their first post.
That was as far as we got. That was our goal for the day.

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David Bisset: Some people vowed never have children after that. Our younger, uh, younger volunteers look, well, I mean, I, I, it was there at Miami because I was at Phoenix and saw something very similar. I think it was a one day event at Phoenix. I saw there, I was there watching the kids.

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Which nowaday, it sounds creepy when you say, are you here? Do you have any kids? No, I’m just watching them seeing how they do things. All right. Sarah, security and, uh, but I was watching how they did it in Phoenix, and this was, I don’t know, maybe it’s 2 20 12 or 2013 or something like that. And then, yeah, that’s when we started doing in Miami and now it, now there’s lots of kids’ camps.

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There’s a whole kids’. Section now of learning and, and people in charge of that type of thing now. And there’s probably gonna be something at, uh, us, I know there’s something at Europe coming up, uh, which is fantastic. So it’s exploded. And then when we did our 10th anniversary word pr, our 10th anniversary were Camp Miami.

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It is prog, it progressed to a point where we had the kids, I forget what the ages were, I’ll be gonna say like seven to 11 or seven to 12, seven to 13. That age group doing what you said, more or less. But then we kind of took the pe, the teenagers, 14 to like high school level. And then we had a day where we taught them WordPress.

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And then a day after, like we taught them WordPress and how to build a store in WooCommerce. Then the next day we taught them s e how to market it.

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Tammie Lister: Wow. I think it was also back then we were being very experimental with what could a word count be? Remember the day of rest and all the different kind of buddy camps and different things.

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Oh, yes. I think we were just kind of experimenting with different formats as well. Yeah, exactly. We were just, uh, I think that was part of it as well as like, how can we start? And it’s great to kind of think about that as well. So I think that was kind of amazing.

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David Bisset: Fantastic. Memories. Still one of my mentions. So Simon, um, let’s, let’s cover, let’s cover the, um, anything from a community moment standpoint that stood out for you.

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Simon Kraft: Yeah, I’ll, I’ll stay in the, um, event space, I guess.

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David Bisset: Oh, he’s, he’s choked up. This is a, this is gonna be so good.

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Simon Kraft: Um, and I just noticed that we’ll stay in the 2013 ish, uh, kind of timeframe.
David Bisset: It’s the WordPress 3.0 3.0 of years, right? Yeah.

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Simon Kraft: Um, because in, I think it was early October, 2013, uh, we had the first word Kim Europe in, in Liden and it was such a stupid idea, um, back then and still.

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David Bisset: Wait, let me, let me write that down, Simon. Yeah. Stupid. Okay, go ahead Simon. Just wanna make sure I got this cuz

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Simon Kraft: it’s just the, the kind of stupid idea that hold on and exploded into the kind of mega event that what computer is today. And it was totally different back then, but the idea to bring like a whole continent together and have a joint event, um, It was beautiful and also it was a nice event.
Um, I have to say that, um,

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David Bisset: possibly the first regional event, although I don’t know if Word Camp Asia or it’s forced in existence. What’s that?

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Simon Kraft: Yeah, yeah. Oh, it really was. And uh, there was no word can be asked before that, at least. No, no official one.

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Robert Windisch: There was none. There was just the, just San Francisco, the global one as, as we European call that. Yeah. And I think it’s,

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Simon Kraft: it’s some, sorry.

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Tammie Lister: No, you go. As it was the first, and it was done in an incredibly short time. Uh mm-hmm. I don’t think anyone ever realizes how short a time it was done in the end as well.

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David Bisset: Somebody only had a few people, only had one change of clothes was that quick.

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Tammie Lister: But yeah. And, uh, so as, as someone that was involved in it, I, um, it was one of those things that I, I think you, I.
Rarely get to experience, but the venue was incredible. Mm-hmm. I plus one that mm-hmm. That was one of those venues. Um, we, several of us had gone to a conference before in that venue and got to see that venue and it’s was one of those venues that I would love to use again for something. It’s just a great venue.

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David Bisset: It really also symbol started to formulate the idea that we could have larger word camps and the community had matured to that point where we could bring in a larger event and we could coordinate across multiple countries for that sort of thing. Um, before that, um, you all you had was cities or I think in a few places or, you know, general regions like Word Camp Southeast or Midwest or something, some direction in the us.

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Um, but that was a very memorable moment in terms of community history. Cuz again, I don’t know, I, I think, I don’t know when Japan. I know Word Camp Japans have been very, very long standing, but, but for Europe it was, it was got a lot of attention and I think rightly so. So I’m, I’m really good for that cuz it kind of set the, it set the pattern for all for, for camp us a bit.

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It set a precedent for, um, the scene. There’s War Camp Asia and there’s probably, I feel like I’m leaving somebody out. I think there’s one on the books and I just can’t remember what region is now gonna be. I know they want to have a war camp, Africa War Camp

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Robert Windisch: Nordic. You had a WordCamp Nordic regions in, in, in Europe.
Mm-hmm.

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David Bisset: Yeah. And you know, who knows in 30 years War Camp Mars. So anyway, that, I think that’s a pretty, pretty, pretty good thing to put a pin on in terms of the community there. Now I, uh, I could, as, as much as I like my, uh, work camp Miami, there really was nothing. Uh, there’s, there’s nothing that equals that level.

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So I’m gonna leave that out because I’m biased anyway, I do wanna put together. You mentioned two things, um, from a community, uh, cause or initiative standpoint. One was reco, and I may have mentioned this in the past episode, so listener, I apologize if I’m repeating myself, but it’s also when we talk about the community, recognizing those that we no longer have in our community.

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Um, so I thought, uh, one thing that stood out to me, that representative was the Kim Marshall’s Memorial scholarship. Um, and you know, and because a lot of the old, old timers remember her, um, I remember her at Work Camp San Francisco. Um, But also like all those other people that, you know, our community, the older community gets, people get old.

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Um, that’s, that’s life, uh, currently. So people will leave the community, uh, in that manner. Not, you know, not, not, not drama wise. I’m never coming back community, but people pass away or people have, uh, accidents and that sort of thing. So it is that, that kind of represents to me, not just the scholarship itself, which is a great initiative on its own, but it’s a recognition of, you know, we have important people that we want to remember the WordPress community, whether it’s in the form of scholarship or honoring them on social media every year, seeing their names and releases.

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I know there’s a couple of people, and I am really, really bad at remembering his name right now, but he created a plugin. He was race, he was into a race car driving. I remember him in a race car. What’s that? Wipo? Yeah, VI, right. But what was his name though? Yeah. What was the name I, I’m gonna kill my why was 0 0 7?

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Yes. The user name. Yeah, but I’m talking about his real name and I’m frustrated with myself. I can’t remember it, but I remember when he passed away, I forget what plug-in he did. I guess I’ll have, I’ll include that in

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Simon Kraft: Shownotes, but he did the regenerate thumbnails plugin and his Alex,

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David Bisset: yeah. Oh, okay. So we, we remember ’em by reputation, but it’s all of those people that do these plugins and Alex Mills. There you go. I’m horrible at remembering names, but yes,

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Robert Windisch: I’m googling ju just like,

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David Bisset: oh, I don’t judge. Just keep your hands here. So we have Kim Parcels, we have Alex Mills, all of these people that, that are involved, that with the community that, that we, that we’ve taken their plug-in, we’ve taken their plug-ins and their work and they’re, you know, and it’s in WordPress core now to our popular plug-in now.

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And the other, the other thing I wanted to point out as a community initiative or, or moments was the Wampoo itself has, and, and I see one behind, um, Tammie, hopefully she knows it’s there. And we have so many, it’s incorporated, like every word camp now has a wpu. Um, it was also a lot of the kids’ stuff had wpu involved as a cartoon character and, you know, that was part of the kids’ camp stuff.

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And, um, I’m sharing a link with you all right now. One of the, one of the coolest swag moments I ever had was, um, for, I don’t know which, where Camp Miami was, but we came out with these UNO cards, with wpu s on them, and. I put it on his open source on GitHub and be, this is the community angle, like a couple of work camps from like the other side of the world.

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I think from, I think from India or Indonesia, I believe it was somewhere in that general area. They pinged us and said, can we use these? I said, yes, they’re open source. So what they did was they just changed the design a little bit. Like they, they put the work camp logo on it and made it, maybe translated it a little bit in their language, but now people are saying, oh, those are cool cards.

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And like, you know, I have a little bit of pride. I said, yes, those, I, those are cool when we thought of them over in Work Camp Miami. But I am, so I’m even more happy to see people repurposing swag like that. And I thought the Wampoo, um, was an original great idea and I’m glad that, um, um, Matt kind of adopted that as part of the unofficial slash. Unofficial. I’ll say unofficial mascot cuz I’m not seeing it on official.

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Robert Windisch: Unofficial. Official. It’s the official term for the, it’s unofficial official.

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David Bisset: Just think of all the pins, all the badges, all the shirts. I don’t know if you ever saw the Work Camp Wpu shirt from Work Camp Miami that had the face,

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Tammie Lister: there was an actual physical wapuu.

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David Bisset: Yes. The one walking around there.
wapuu became physical. I was wandering around. It was the best work camp Miami 2019. I know the people that were in that suit. It was like a walking Cheeto, but it was so worth to see a walking wapuu around.

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But yeah, it’s just, think of all the swag and like the MAs, the just the very thought of a mascot, um, itself. Not a logo, but a mascot I thought really helped shape the WordPress community was a great community moment. So anyway, thumbs up to all those people. I have one to, what’s that?

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Tammie Lister: Yeah, I have one to add. I think the sustainability initiative, which is a newer one. I think that’s just getting started. But I think. And gathering momentum and finding out what it means. But as someone that’s organized a word camp before and tried to do it, sustainability when we in Brighton, um, I think it’s really good from that app. But I also think it’s really good from just the impact as a project that we leave and like the technology, I think it talking about like trying to be around as a project for a while, we kind of have to be aware of all those aspects.

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So I think that initiative deserves a kind of mm-hmm. Call out because it crosses so many of our areas and it doesn’t necessarily get and so much kind of eyeballs I think.

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David Bisset: Yeah. Make sure to throw that in the show notes by the way, cuz. We’ve shared so much here today. And, and, uh, no, I’ll include everything that you’ve mentioned. Everything you thought of, throw it in the show notes. I’ll do a array matching thing so we don’t get duplicates. Um, all right, so I, we’ve covered kind of the categories and we’ve covered a lot of stuff and I’m really happy cuz a lot of stuff we’ve talked about here today is, is not been mentioned in depth in my other conversations.

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So that’s fantastic. I got exactly what I wanted out of you all. But, so what I wanted to do is I wanted to go around one last time and see if there’s any random thoughts that appeared in your head about anything else. Sky’s the limit. In terms of, in terms of any moments. Um, you know, I was gonna say good, bad and ugly, but let’s just, we’ll, let’s just keep it or good or bad because I don’t have time to cover ugly.

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Um, Mihir, um, what have we left out here? What did we not mention that you think could, could be mentioned real briefly?

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Meher Bala: Uh, recently Michelle has created a side WP speakers.

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David Bisset: Ah, yeah.

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Meher Bala: So this. I see this helping the organizers with finding out, uh, speakers in their areas or n nearby do not go and approach them. So that is one thing which just came across my mind right

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David Bisset: now. Yeah. Kudos to her for that initiative. She does so much now, the job things on Wednesdays and all her, all her community work, which we don’t have time to go into here. That’s fantastic. Yes. So speakers of speakers project. My, um, Robert, anything we might have, we haven’t touched on at all briefly?

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Robert Windisch: Yeah. Um, so small thing, um, the time when W P C L I became a make project, Because it was a project outside. And, uh, it’s really like if, if people like, cause the people who work, um, professional with WordPress sites and like on local, on local, um, machines and like automating stuff like the W P C L, I be becoming like a, a real make project with all the um, good and bad things around it. It was really, really good for the project and for Daba P c I to jump the simply make sure it stays around

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David Bisset: wp I, yeah, develop. If, if you’re a developer and you’re not familiar with that, slap your face twice and get reading in the documentation. Tammie, what have we not mentioned here at all?

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Tammie Lister: This is almost like project management, but I’m gonna say in core, when started to have more organization core meetings and recognizing roles for releases, I think that that started to allow people to see where they could be part of it.

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Um, and. Gave enough order to those meetings that someone could follow along, you know, you can follow the agenda. Um, so those kind of things. Having enough project management, uh, so that someone could belong. So just being able to have a call. We didn’t do that. We didn’t have calls for releases and Oh, yeah.

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And people being part of it and, and having like, Hey, would you like to have these roles? And people been able to step up and have those roles, that’s really important. And it’s not that far, but we’ve had that. So I think that is really, really important for us. Yeah.

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David Bisset: You take that stuff for granted sometimes, not realizing how you do, it’s never been, and

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Tammie Lister: it’s not just like tech, it’s like documentation and it’s growing.
Right. The options that people can step up and be part of. So yeah, I think that,

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David Bisset: and that’s what some people that have come into the WordPress community in the last couple of years, they haven’t known a time before that. It’s kind of like

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Tammie Lister: no. And Core Chats used to be a lot, there used to be a lot to be part of and try and follow and keep up with. Um, and it would put off a lot of people. So this is an incredibly welcoming, so yeah, more inclusive.

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David Bisset: It’s trying to explain what a V H S tape is to my daughter today. Yes. That was, there were times before digital media. So Simon, what? And one or two things briefly. We may not have covered that. Yeah. Could see.
I can see your gears turning. Sorry.

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Simon Kraft: No, no. I have something, uh,

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David Bisset: stuck in your teeth . Oh, um, oh, I’m sorry. I thought I could read, I thought I could read people. God, what else? You got anything in the tank?

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Simon Kraft: I would like to give a shine a light on a make team that I think has its work a bit undervalued sometimes. Um, the accessibility team. Uh, you do like a really great job speaking of inclusivity, um, in making sure that more people can use WordPress, and I think that’s part of democratized publishing. So they do very, very important work.

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David Bisset: Yeah, I can’t argue with that. I, I am always amazed at the new, it’s especially so much harder now with all the more complex technologies, especially in the admin, right?

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And that’s still a work in progress. I think all the initiatives that we’re doing today, you know, ev moving forward, I, I want, I wanna, I wanna see more attention to them, um, because a lot of accessibility needs that kind of attention and just like performance or anything else. And so many times accessibility is, is not a first brain thought type of a thing.

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So I really think that deserves a real good shout out as far as I’m concerned. I’ve got three random things left. I, we’ve talked about acquisitions in the previous. Shows, but I always thought the Tumblr acquisition really stood out to me in terms of a potential that it has for WordPress moving forward that isn’t WordPress.

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Um, Gutenberg is supposed to transcend WordPress. Maybe, maybe that’s, uh, Matt’s made that comment a couple of times, so it’s interesting to see where that might go. Um, P two. Speaking of things that, like some, somebody just said, does he need to do at the restroom? No. The letter p and two. Is a, if you don’t know what that is, Google it.

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But because, but when, when, when Tammie said something about the structure of, of, of backend WordPress organization, um, it is a blog that Matt and Matt actually talked about this a number of times, and I think they have a new version called oh two. Um, I’m not sure if that’s out yet in terms of a, like a plugin or a theme you can download. I think, I, I can’t remember. All I remember is it was, Cutting more cutting edge in them. But we used to,

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Robert Windisch: it’s a hosted version on wordpress.com. Yes. The

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David Bisset: hosted version version. It’s like halfway. It was halfway. They’re like, you can’t get it, but you can. You can get it because it’s hosted this place. So if you don’t know what those are, just go ahead and Google ’em.

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But P two was fundamental to the organization of a lot of WordPress stuff, even it as it exists today. So like as early as last year, I remember like Word camps, having a P two doc with people organizing writing notes in there. And Matt was always a big, big fan of P two in terms of like, you know, because it’s basically more or less a block for teams, right?

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A big, big, big use at automatic. And I’m pretty sure it still does. And finally, I have elevator advertising at work camps, and we’ll just leave it at that. So thank you very much for everybody. Um, Mission here wasn’t to cover everything. That’s impossible. But I wanted to cover things from your brains, cuz all you I respect and are unique and I you brought the game today.

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Thank you very much. I greatly appreciate it. So, um, let’s go around and then do your, do your, let’s, let’s say we’re people, I was gonna say do your closing remarks, but this isn’t a talk. Um, where can people find you, uh, on social if they want to cont if they wanna follow you, because these days we, we, it’s, who knows? It’s social blog, whatever you want to, whatever you wanna share. But here you go first.

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Meher Bala: Uh, I’m on Twitter, me, I’m on LinkedIn and my website meher.com.

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David Bisset: Yes. And we’ll also put these in the show notes too, so I don’t have to worry about spelling everything out cuz I can’t spell. It was very nice to have you, um, Robert, um, the, yeah, if, if, uh, yeah, go ahead.
I was gonna say, where can we buy that hat? But I don’t think that exists anymore.

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Robert Windisch: That’s very like with pins or without. Um, so it’s, uh, it’s nubis on, on Twitter and otherwise it’s nubi it on the WordPress profile.

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David Bisset: Thank you very much, Robert. It’s good to see you in the hat again. And, um, if you ever wanna sneak into a Word camp, just don’t wear the hat and people won’t recognize you. Um, Tammie, uh, where can we find you?
Tammie Lister: You can find me at karmatosed on all the things.

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David Bisset: Yes. Pretty much still and don’t What about, yeah, well, we’ll just put show notes. Just that. And well, people will find you again. You also have a, um, you also have you started a new blog recently too, or am I, I have now next slab.

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Include that in show notes as well, because we’ve been, I’ve been reading, I’m, I, I, I’ll, I, I be ashamed to admit, I don’t know when you started it, but I’ve been picking up the last couple of posts, so they’ve been very insightful. It’s only been a couple of weeks. Thank I’m so God. I put myself out there and it will work.
I’m sorry, go ahead. Yeah,

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Tammie Lister: I’m just starting to write just generally about where could WebPress go in the now and the next. Oh yeah.

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David Bisset: Okay. I’ll throw that into show notes as well. Just some thoughts. Yeah. Well, you’ve always had some good thoughts. I think it’s worth sharing. Simon, where can people be finding you?

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Simon Kraft: I think the easiest is https://simon.blog/ . Yeah. Yeah. I was an early adopter.

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David Bisset: Um, you don’t have to rub it in, but Okay.

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Simon Kraft: And I think I’ll link to basically all the other things from there. So I won’t try and, uh, spell out my masteron username and domain thingy.

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David Bisset: Sorry. Please don’t, because it sets off my Amazon Echo for some reason when you start saying master on things. Nope, we’re good. All right. We’re fine. Uh, yes. Yeah, Simon Dolo. Wow. And you’ve got an English translation too. Oh, that’s great. Last crappy Twitter in beds, please. Ooh, I’d like to read that one. All right. So Simon Dolo for you. So, um, just if you’re hearing this and you wanna follow me, um, best place to go would be either david bis.com or David bi.social.

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But thank you all for coming. Your time is precious. Greatly appreciate it. And, uh, we will talk later. Thank you.

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Simon Kraft: Thank you. All right.

Today is a little bit of a departure for the podcast. It’s an episode all about the last 20 years of WordPress.

You’re going to hear a round table discussion with four WordPressers talking about their thoughts on the last 20 years. It features Meher Bala, Robert Windisch, Simon Kraft and Tammie Lister, with David Bisset as the discussion moderator.

They cover a lot of ground, and it’s fascinating to hear their WordPress stories from the past two decades.

To honor WordPress’s 20th anniversary I locked myself in a room with four wonderful community members to talk about some highlights in it’s history.

There’s also lots of ‘forgotten’ history and features also come up in the discussion. So, regardless of how long you’ve been involved with WordPress, you’ll learn and maybe have your memories jogged!

Discussion subjects and links:

Robert Windisch

Sjoerd, the global lead from WordCamp Europe joins us to talk more about the event and his life with WooCommerce and WordPress.

A new MariaDB Health Checks plugin is now available on WordPress.org, thanks to the efforts of contributors involved in the 2023 CloudFest Hackathon which took place in Germany. MariaDB is a popular open source database used by those looking to further scale their websites, as it is generally faster than MySQL with better support for a concurrent number of connections.

“At the moment it appears WordPress is dominating the PHP world, so this seemed to be the perfect target,” MariaDB Foundation Chief Contributions Officer Andrew Hutchings said about creating the plugin at the hackathon.

“The MariaDB Foundation loves WordPress (I’m writing this post in WordPress right now) so it seemed like a logical project.”

The plugin helps users debug their MariaDB databases by displaying important information, such as logs, locale, connections, character set and collation, and options. It also shows a graph of the number of queries and the execution time over the last 24 hours.

The plugin also integrates with WordPress’ Site Health feature with two checks: an end-of-life check and a check for whether Histograms have been run. Histograms are an optimizer that can help improve MariaDB performance, and the plugin enables calculation of histograms to run on WordPress tables with the click of a button under the plugin’s Tools menu.

“There are a few features now and it is a good framework to add more features to in future,” Hutchings said. “This is a community project and is open to suggestions and pull requests. This is a project that we at the MariaDB Foundation want to support in the future.”

MariaDB Health Checks is developed on GitHub where developers can follow the plugin’s progress, contribute to new features, and report bugs.

This Week at WordPress.org (May 22, 2023)

News

Related News:

This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

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Jukebox has a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes and in this case, how you can start to make your sites more interactive.

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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.

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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.

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So on the podcast today, we have Mario Santos and Luis Herranz. They both work for Automattic but are sponsored to work full-time in WordPress.

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The main focus of their work is the block developer experience, and they are part of the group of contributors that worked on the Interactivity API proposal.

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The Interactivity API is the main focus of the podcast today, and if you’re working with blocks and dynamically displaying data, this is sure to be of interest to you.

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We start out the podcast today with the usual introductions, and get to know Mario and Luis. And then we learn what the Interactivity API is and what it can do.

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The conversation is framed around a blog post written by Mario entitled, The interactivity API, a better developer experience in building interactive blocks.

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In this Mario shows examples of what website interactivity is. In short, it’s the ability for content to be amended on the fly without a page refresh. Of course, this is nothing new on the web. We’ve been seeing this for years in WordPress sites and elsewhere. But now you’re going to be able to create interactivity in a standard way across the different blocks on your site.

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The project hopes to absorb complexity and make the creation of interactive objects fairly trivial. Mario and Luis talk about examples of where the API might be used, and how it can be implemented.

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We also discussed the fact that in the past developers have gone their own way to make their sites interactive. It all works, but it means that no two implementations are the same. This causes issues if the project is taken over by another developer. But it’s also a drain on resources.

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Mario and Luis make the point that having a standard way of creating interactivity will benefit everyone in the long run. We get into the weeds a little and talk about the approach the team took when building the API. They decided to use directives and we find out why this was, and what benefit it brings over other possible solutions.

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The project is still experimental, and they’re looking for people to test and report back on what they find to move the interactivity API forwards.

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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.

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And so without further delay, I bring you Mario Santos and Luis Herranz.

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I am joined on the podcast today by Luis Herranz and Mario Santos. Hello.

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[00:04:15] Luis Herranz: Hey, hello Nathan.

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[00:04:16] Mario Santos: Thanks for inviting us.

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[00:04:18] Nathan Wrigley: You’re so welcome. We had an introduction on Slack from Anne McCarthy, who listeners to the podcast may very well have heard of, and she wanted me to chat to these two about the Interactivity API, so we’re going to get onto that. It’s a brand new project. Could be very interesting if you’re a developer implementing it, but also if you’re an implementer of WordPress websites and not a developer, you’ll be interested in the outcomes of it.

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Before we do that, the usual questions at the beginning. I’m going to go to Luis first, if that’s all right. Would you mind just giving us your backstory, how you’ve come to be on a WordPress podcast, how long you’ve been working with WordPress, who you work for as much or as little as you wish.

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[00:04:57] Luis Herranz: Okay, thank you. I started creating websites with WordPress 2010, I think, maybe nine, I don’t know, a long time ago. And I wanted to start a company in 2013, with Pablo Postigo. And we thought, okay, we wanted to create native apps for different companies, like services and so on.

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And we knew WordPress, so we basically started with what was later known as headless WordPress, but back in 2013. And since then we iterated, we created a team. We got some investment and we started doing things on top of WordPress. Mostly in headless. First with native applications. Then we moved to just web have applications, but still on headless. Very focused on React.

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And in 2019 we launched a open source framework for headless WordPress, powered by React. So we were very focused on developer experience and performance.

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And in 2021, that company, Frontity was acquired by Automattic, so we could become like full-time contributors and focus on, well, basically what the Interactivity API proposal is today. Bringing some of those user experiences, what are possible with other solutions, to WordPress itself, on top of full site editing, or block themes.

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[00:06:31] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. That’s really interesting. I appreciate your nice history there. Thank you. And we’ll ask the same question this time of Mario. So Mario, backstory please.

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[00:06:41] Mario Santos: Thank you. Actually, my story is really similar to Luis. Well first, when I finished the degree, I studied industrial engineer, but I didn’t want to be an engineer. So I started trying different things, and while I got my first job, I created a store in WordPress with WooCommerce. And then, that is when I started to learn about WordPress and all those things.

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And later, based on that, I joined Frontity. I don’t remember exactly the year, 2015 maybe. And from there I really learned what was WordPress because we started going to meetups to WordCamps, and we started to, well at least I started to learn from the community.

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From there the story is mostly the same as Luis. We were working on headless mainly. We were working with WordPress. And at some point, we were acquired by Automattic, and now I’m a sponsored contributor, working full-time. And as Luis said, we are focused on the developer experience, and the Interactivity API that we are going to talk about is part of it.

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[00:07:45] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much for that. So the Interactivity API, I’m going to link in the show notes to a post which you can find. Now the post you’re going to be looking at is on the make.wordpress.org website. It’s written by Mario. It was on the 30th of March, 2023 that came out, and it’s entitled, Proposal, The Interactivity API, A Better Developer Experience in Building Interactive Blocks.

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Now, if at any point during this podcast you become a little bit confused or you wish to have some more background, I would recommend pausing and going and reading what is an incredibly lengthy and detailed post, with actually a boatload of interaction and comments as well. It’s really heartening to see so many people chipping in, and giving their thoughts on this Interactivity API.

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But I guess the best place to kick this conversation off simply asking, what is it? What is the Interactivity API? What does it do? Why does WordPress need such a thing?

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[00:08:47] Mario Santos: I can start with this one. So, the Interactivity API is what we are proposing. The group of contributors that are working on that. It’s basically a new standard system to easily add front end interactivity to your blocks. Until now, most of the Gutenberg APIs have been focused on the block editor side, and there was unintentional gap on the front end.

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So block developers could choose whatever they want. They could choose any Javascript framework, or other solutions. And the Interactivity API aims to cover that gap. Creating this standard.

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So imagine functionalities like, like this post or e-commerce functionalities like add to cart, or the checkout, the instant search, page transitions, the comments form, without a page reload. So those are the user experiences that the Interactivity API aims to cover.

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In a way that is real easy to build them, and block developers don’t have to deal with complex scaffolding or external tools. And it’s important to note also that it’s completely familiar and compatible with PHP and the block ecosystem. So overall, that’s what the Interactivity API is. Basically a standard to easily create any interactive experience that your users want.

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[00:10:06] Nathan Wrigley: Luis, anything to add?

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[00:10:09] Luis Herranz: No, it’s really filling that gap, or even that opportunity of absorbing as much complexity from the developers. Standardizing everything in a single solution, and making sure that it’s performant, and so on.

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So yeah, there’s some advancement in web development in other places, mostly in the Javascript ecosystem and WordPress has never been opinionated in the front end, so this is kind of the first time for WordPress.

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But yeah, we think that it’s an opportunity as well to absorb a lot of complexity for the developers, and to enable some of the user experiences that were not possible with WordPress before.

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[00:10:52] Nathan Wrigley: Now we have some show notes, and we’ve got a list of questions that we’re potentially going to run through, but I’m going to skip to the end, more or less of the list of our questions. Because one of the things I think to do at the beginning would be to provide listeners concrete examples of how this might be used.

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So do you have any examples that you think would demonstrate clearly the kind of things that the Interactivity API is touching on? I’ll just mention one. Which is the very first thing you’re going to see more or less when you open up Mario’s article, and it’s a video. It’s pretty short, two minutes long. And it demonstrates something a little bit like Netflix, where you’ve got, a view of three or four different video thumbnails. There’s a bunch of different movies there.

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And the intention is that you would like to preserve your favorites. And so there’s a little heart icon, which is lodged in the top left of the thumbnails for each video. And as you click on that thumbnail, the heart becomes colored in. It goes from gray to red. But also in a different part of the UI, in the right hand of the view, the menu, traditional place for the menu, there’s a little total which goes up from two to three to four, and if you remove the hearts, it goes back down to two and so on and so forth.

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So that’s one example of how you might use this. It’s able to do things on the page without needing to do page refreshes. And the idea is that this will be a standard way of doing it in blocks. And I wonder if you could give us some other examples. You mentioned WooCommerce and things like that. But let’s go into that a little bit. Some examples of where this might be useful for developers and end users to know.

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[00:12:35] Mario Santos: Yeah, so basically the use case is anything that is interactive and requires Javascript should be able to be done with the Interactivity API in an easy way. So imagine like a slide show or light boxes in the image. So when you click on it, it zooms, and when you click out or scroll, it goes out. Some models like search, subscription, quizzes, e-commerce integrations, like you just have mentioned.

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And one of the features that is enabled by having a standard is the client site navigation that basically is navigating through different pages of your WordPress site without triggering a page reload.

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It’s important to know that this is something that is going to be enabled by the Interactivity API, but it’s going to be completely optional. So if you don’t need it, you don’t have to use it. But it powers other features like you can see in the movie, that we are paginating between the different pages. We are in the query loop. You have the pagination block, and you can go through the page one to the page two without page reload.

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And for example, well, in the movies demo, we are showing that you can play the trailer and you can keep navigating and the video doesn’t stop. So those kind of user experiences that, for example, in this podcast you could be listening to this podcast in WP Tavern, and you could navigate to the articles.

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So, maybe you can be reading an article while you are listening to the podcast in the same way. And the podcast will keep playing. Those kind of user experiences are enabled by client side navigation. And you can also find in the movies the instant search that you start typing and the list of results is automatically updated.

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Infinite scroll could also work. Client size submissions like the comments form right now, in typical WordPress sites, when you submit a new comment, it triggers a page load. So this could be done directly in the client. So those are the kind of user experiences that we are talking about. And yeah, I think it’s important that this is totally compatible with the current block templating system. So whatever you change in the editor is going to keep working.

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[00:14:54] Nathan Wrigley: That’s great, yeah. Luis, anything to add?

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[00:14:57] Luis Herranz: I would add that I really like that demo. Because it’s a demo that we didn’t come up with. It was a demo that existed before. There is a version of that demo created with all the major Javascript frameworks out there. So there is one for React using Next, Vue using Nuxt, Svelte, Quick, Astro and so on.

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So, you can compare now the WordPress version with the other Javascript frameworks, out there. I’m super happy to say that it really, in terms of user experience now with Interactivity API, you can provide the same user experience than the others. And this demo was created to show these type of complex or great user experiences.

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With WordPress, now with the Interactivity API, you’re able to create that type of user experience, but leveraging the server side and the block editor. So the other Javascript frameworks version is 100% code, where this movies demo version of WordPress is done with Gutenberg and everything is a block, and you can go and change wherever you want. Which we think it’s really powerful.

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And there’s yet another thing there, in comparing with the other frameworks, and it’s that if you look at the performance is a top performer there. It’s only 13 kilobytes of Javascript. Only a new experimental mode of Solid is able to be as performant as that one. So yeah, I’m really happy about enabling those user experiences, but with full compatibility with the Block editor and block themes, and with such performance.

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[00:16:44] Nathan Wrigley: It’s true to say, I guess, that if you go to that demo, you will not be seeing anything that you haven’t seen somewhere else online. You’ve seen the ability to like things, and you’ve seen infinite scroll before, and you’ve seen elsewhere online the ability to paginate without a full page refresh, and you’ve seen comments being added, again without having to submit a new page and so on and so forth.

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But this is creating a standard inside of WordPress. Why did you feel it was important to do this? Why not just leave developers to do their own thing? Again, we’ve seen WordPress websites implementing this. You know, I’ve been to countless WordPress websites where I’ve seen these features.

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Clearly somebody’s dealt with it before and implemented it in their own way. I guess you’re just trying to make it so that everybody can build on top of the work that you are doing, rather than everybody going off in their own way and implementing a completely different solution based upon, well, however they wish to do it?

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[00:17:43] Luis Herranz: Yes. It’s about absorbing complexity. So, definitely anything you can imagine, it’s possible with WordPress. The thing is how easy is to do it. And with this kind of standard, our hope is that those user experiences are not only easy, but also working practically out of the box.

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[00:18:05] Nathan Wrigley: I’m guessing that this standard is going to be something that you are aiming at developers. Presumably the developers will then make it fairly straightforward for end users to interact with blocks and what have you, to make this available to them. But how would the standard actually work? What is going on in the background? How are developers going to implement this?

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[00:18:25] Mario Santos: If I can add one note to the why this standard, is I think it’s also important to note apart from what Luis says, is that it absorbs a lot of complexity. In an ecosystem like WordPress where there are a lot of plugins interacting with other plugins and those kind of experiences that we have.

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It’s important that following a standard enables things like block communication. For example, we can see what we were talking about in the demo that you are liking a movie and it’s updating another block, in another place. So if different blocks, created by different block developers, in different plugins are not using the same approach, it’s really difficult to be able to communicate those blocks. And having a standard solves that. And yeah, that composability and compatibility to nest the structures of different interactive blocks is possible thanks to a standard.

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[00:19:21] Nathan Wrigley: Right. Okay, so you’re really opening it up so that any block developer can implement this so that, I don’t know, a different block developer can hook into the exact same standards so that two completely separate blocks, created by completely separate individuals can have interaction via the Interactivity API, right?

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[00:19:42] Mario Santos: Yeah, that’s it.

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[00:19:43] Luis Herranz: And they also use this, the same code, the same framework. Because if each block developer starts choosing their own framework, maybe some developers like React, some developers like Vue, some developers like Svelte or whatever comes next. Then WordPress sites could end up loading a lot of unnecessary Javascript.

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So yeah, it’s important. Now that sites are, are a mix of blocks from different developers, these blocks are like small units. Yeah, it’s important to agree on a single kind of solution.

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[00:20:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good point. Okay, so how is it actually going to work then? You mentioned in the article, and I think one of you mentioned it just a moment ago, that you’re trying to make it so that people are familiar with PHP, don’t necessarily have to get into the whole space of learning React or what have you. I’m not entirely clear on what the position is there, but is the intention to make this as simple as possible for people who are steeped in WordPress’s PHP history.

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[00:20:44] Mario Santos: Yes. We wanted to make it as easy as possible to everyone. So yeah, that’s included. And yes, we said this is compatible with PHP, and it has been designed to be block first and PHP friendly. So yeah, it’s should be easy.

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And going back to the question, how this standard work. Basically a system based on directives. I’m not sure, for those who are not familiar with directives, they are a way to extend HTML. They are custom HTML attributes that tell the Interactivity API to attach a specified behavior to a DOM element, or even transform it. So for those familiar with Alpine. it’s really similar, but it has been designed to work with WordPress.

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[00:21:32] Nathan Wrigley: I know it’s potentially a bit on the technical side, but you talked about the CSS nature of things there. I’m wondering if you can give an example of how that might be implemented. What would you actually be doing, declaring those directives?

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[00:21:47] Mario Santos: Okay, in order to create an interactive block using Interactivity API, you have to add directives to your markup. So you have some HTML, so you add custom attributes that are directives, and they call an action that is defined in Javascript in the view.js file of your block.

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[00:22:06] Nathan Wrigley: What is the benefit of doing it in that way? You mentioned that you want it to be available to everybody. Is this the kind of thing that, obviously experienced developers can probably pick this up in a heartbeat, but are you trying to get people, how do we describe this, who are less experienced say. Is this going to be something that you could pretty quickly learn even if your developer chops are not all that impressive?

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[00:22:29] Luis Herranz: Yes. The initial goal for this proposal is more enabling user experiences for WordPress that were not possible before, or were very difficult to do before. We also have a focus on developer experience, but that’s something that we think we can also keep improving over time.

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This doesn’t have to be like the final API of creating blocks. We can work, keep working on simplifying things over time. For example, right now none of these touches like the editor part. So if you are creating a block, the edit is just, is still done in the same way that it is done today using a React component. But maybe in the future we can explore how we can kind of extend these directives also to the editor and if it makes sense to unify and simplify the templating for both use cases. But is not the main goal of this proposal at this moment right now.

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[00:23:32] Nathan Wrigley: When you were making decisions about this, and you decided to go with directives instead of things like using React or something. Was there quite a lot of toing and froing? Was there a lot of soul searching, what the best way to do it was? Or was it just fairly straightforward from the very beginning that using directives was the way you were going to do it? How long did the conversation take before you settled on this? is it fair to say that everybody’s on board with this? This seems to be the way to do it.

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[00:23:58] Mario Santos: We believe so. I mean, we have researched a lot of alternatives. Actually, as we mentioned, we come from Frontity, that it was a React framework. React was like the first alternative we had in mind, but we defined as a list of requirements and we started researching different possibilities, and at the end we come up with the solution to be the only one that it was the only one fully compatible with WordPress.

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Just to explain this a bit better. As directives are custom attributes that we have in the HTML, we are using the HTML as the templating system. And this comes with many benefits, for example, were not possible with React. As HTML is the templating system, the service rendering is supported by default, for example.

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That is something really important in WordPress, or WordPress, APIs like WordPress hooks, that we are used to WordPress hooks in plugins, to extend some functionality, or translations. Those things, with directives using the HTML as the templating system work out of the box. And we can keep using those APIs to even extend the directives.

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And I think this was one of the main blockers to not use React. This system, the service rendering is supported, and the WordPress API are supportive as well. That using other approaches can get tricky or even impossible, I would say.

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[00:25:32] Luis Herranz: Yes. I think we spent like a year or so researching this. And at first we tried with Javascript, JSX, or even JS templates like Vue or Svelte, and so on. But yeah, I think that that direction, things start getting like super complex. And once we switched to using HTML as the templating language, it was like boom. Like everything works out of the box. Everything is like super simple. Everything is compatible. So yeah, it was like seeing the light a little bit.

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[00:26:04] Nathan Wrigley: if I’m a current block developer, there’s obviously now going to be this conflict of, do I carry on with what I’ve been doing so far? I’ve got some kind of interactive component in my blocks. Do I carry on with what I’ve been doing up until this point? Or do I flip over and start using the Interactivity API?

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You’ve obviously just mentioned some reasons why that could be the case. But I’m wondering if there is anything else buried in there. In other words, what’s the use case to switch? There’ll be a bit of retooling, you might have to rewrite a whole bunch of stuff that you’ve already rewritten.

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Do you think the benefit’s going to be in there purely for people who are creating new things? Or do you think there’s going to be a benefit for people who already have existing things out there in the real world, to go and rewrite what they’re doing using the Interactivity API?

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[00:26:54] Luis Herranz: Of course, as everything in WordPress, this is optional. Even though we want it to become a standard. It’s optional. But there’s going to be some kind of sitewide experiences that can only be enabled if all the blocks use this language, or this standard. So yeah, our hope is that there’s not going to be any reason for new blocks to not use this.

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Because it absorbs a lot of complexity and it works out the box with all these things. But there’s also going to be some benefit on migrating existing blocks to this system if you want to make your blocks compatible with these new user experiences. And also, get rid of all the complexity that you have to deal with in terms of bundling and performance and things like that.

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[00:27:42] Mario Santos: And actually it can also improve the user experiences, beause due to this complexity, we have seen many cases of blocks using React in the front end, but having issues with the server side rendering or not having server side rendering at all. So it could be a good approach to migrate to the Interactivity API, because it’s going to be easier to improve their blocks to support server side rendering, hooks, or other user experiences. There may be cases that they could benefit from that as well.

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[00:28:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess the intention would be for a slow but steady migration over to using the Interactivity API, to the point where it just doesn’t make sense to use anything else. One of you, I can’t remember which one of you it was, mentioned performance implications there. I’m just wondering if you could dwell on that a little bit. Have you, in your testing so far, really noticed this? Has it speeded things up, made less use of resources and so on.

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[00:28:39] Mario Santos: Yes. We’ve been testing and we want to test everything better and we will keep testing it in real sites. But it’s something that we had in mind from the beginning, that it has to be as performant as possible. And that’s why the runtime code is so small. It’s around 10 kilobytes. And yes, Luis before compared with other Javascript frameworks is performing pretty well.

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I think we did mention this, but it’s using React under the system. So that’s why it is so small. And yeah, it is actually performant and we are looking for other ways of optimizing it. For example, we want to only send the directives that are needed by the blocks that are in the page. Or we want to send the scripts so they don’t block the page rendering.

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Or for example, we are also exploring the possibility of the scripts, so they are only load when they are in the view port. So, yeah, overall I would say it’s performant. It’s been designed to be performant. The code is relatively small, and we are still looking for ways to optimize it even more.

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[00:29:51] Luis Herranz: Yeah, I think that’s important. It’s not only performant today, but you have the guarantee that it’s going to be performant in the future, in the terms of you don’t have to, as a block developer, you don’t have to deal with performance in that sense anymore. Because that’s absorbed now by, well will be, hopefully absorbed by WordPress at some point.

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And then if there’s something new in the web platform that can be leveraged to increase the performance and so on, it will be done in the WordPress side. So your block will just benefit from that, from just adopting this standard.

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[00:30:29] Nathan Wrigley: In the article that you wrote, Mario, the first word is the word proposal. Which implies that this is a work in progress, shall we say. And I’m just wondering how far down the path of usability you would say you’ve got. In other words, can developers begin using this out of the box? Have you seen real world examples of people using this?

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And have you had some interest from developers who perhaps haven’t implemented it, but certainly want to get on board? Because I’m guessing the more yes’s we can answer to that question, the more likely it is that other people will say, okay, yeah, let’s take a, let’s take a look at this. So, can you use it, and have people been using it?.

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[00:31:08] Mario Santos: I would say, yes, you can use it, but we remind that this is still experimental, although we included the proposal word there. This is still experimental, very likely to change. So the APIs that we are using right now, that are used for example in the movies demo site, we are confident that they work, but maybe the syntax change.

\n\n\n\n

So we haven’t promoted it yet to be used too much. There are people experimenting with it and giving feedback. For example, there’s an ongoing experiment in WooCommerce to replicate some of their blocks using directives. But there’s nothing in production yet because, as I said, this is still experimental.

\n\n\n\n

There are some missing functionalities that may break your site, and it doesn’t have any documentation yet. So, I would say you can use it at your own risk because it’s experimental. We would love people to test it. To give feedback. We want to understand better if it’s easy to use the blockers that people may face.

\n\n\n\n

Just to to clarify. In order to be able to use it, we are working on repository in GitHub. It’s a plugin that you can install, and from there you can create your own interactive blocks. Or if you prefer, there’s also the repository for the movies, with some examples that you can take a look and modify or whatever you want to do.

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[00:32:34] Nathan Wrigley: Are those repositories linked from Mario’s article on make.wordpress.org?

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[00:32:40] Mario Santos: Yes.

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[00:32:41] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so perfect. So if you want to find those, you can just go to the article, which is going to be in the show notes and you can find them all there. Now you’re both working at Automattic, and although it was only about 30 minutes ago that you gave me your bio, I wasn’t quite sure.

\n\n\n\n

I know that you’re both sponsored full-time in WordPress. Is this project, the Interactivity API, is this a focus for both of you at the moment? In other words, are you being asked to implement this, full-time, part-time? Are you tasked with making this happen?

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[00:33:12] Luis Herranz: Yes, we are. But we are not the only ones. It’s a large group of contributors. But yes. It was part of when we stopped developing Frontity the headless framework, and joined Automattic, it was precisely to focus on this. And we thought it made a lot of sense. Yeah, and thanks to Automattic for sponsoring us to be able to work on this for WordPress.

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[00:33:40] Mario Santos: One note on this, as you said, there are more contributors working on this Interactivity API, and yeah, we are part of a bigger group that is working on the whole developer experience of Gutenberg. So this is just a project to improve the front end interactive parts of your blocks, but there are ongoing efforts to improve the whole developer experience.

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[00:34:04] Luis Herranz: Yeah, and maybe it’s a good moment to say that if anyone is interested in this topic, just come to the repository and so on. And contact us and join us.

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[00:34:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I was going to ask about exactly that. How open are you to contributions? Presumably any people that you can get interested in this, the more the merrier.

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[00:34:24] Luis Herranz: A hundred percent open. We need people. We need people testing these. We need people using it. We need people giving feedback. Sharing different ideas. The most exposure, the better. How do you say that?

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[00:34:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, exactly that. So I guess really if this podcast serves to do anything, it would be exactly that. It would be to encourage people to go over. Read the post on make.wordpress.org, and if you’re interested and you think that you can help, then certainly it looks like your help would be most welcome. Testing, getting involved.

\n\n\n\n

In terms of what’s coming, you mentioned that there are things which you desire to have. So I guess that’s a roadmap question. What is on the roadmap? What do you want to have in there that is not in there? Don’t worry about timeframes. It might be a year off, two years off, six months, doesn’t really matter. What are you hoping that it will do that it currently is unable to do?

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[00:35:16] Mario Santos: Basically finish the Interactivity API, because it’s not finished. But, for example, our initial idea is to create the list of core directives that covers, I don’t know, 90% of the use cases, most of the use cases. Although then developers can create their custom directives.

\n\n\n\n

So for example, that list is not finished yet. We still have to ensure that the APIs work for most of the use cases. We have to finish. And our idea for this is to, at some point, include it as experimental in Gutenberg. Start testing it in real core blocks, for example. Doing some experiments there.

\n\n\n\n

Ensure that those user experiences are easy to create with the Interactivity API. Start receiving more feedback. So yeah, the idea is that. Keep experimenting. Keep developing the API. Receive feedback of users using it. And I think that’s it.

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[00:36:16] Luis Herranz: It’s going to be important the moment when we add, we added as experimental API in Gutenberg. Because that’s going to increase the exposure by, I don’t know, ten fold.

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tenfold.

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[00:36:25] Nathan Wrigley: One of you mentioned before we click record that you are going to be giving a presentation at WordCamp Europe around the Interactivity API. By good coincidence, this podcast episode is going out just prior to that. So it may be that people listening to this are very soon going to be getting in the car train or a plane to head to Athens. Which one of you is giving that talk and what is it that you’re going to be covering exactly?

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[00:36:51] Luis Herranz: That would be me, Luis. I hope Mario helps.

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[00:36:55] Mario Santos: Yeah, I will help.

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[00:36:57] Luis Herranz: It’s going to be a workshop. I don’t know if it’s a two hour workshop or two hour and a half workshop. It’s going to be hands-on. A step by step introduction to the Interactivity API and creating some interactive blocks and user experiences.

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[00:37:12] Nathan Wrigley: So very much a hands-on experience. You are going to be teaching people and hopefully getting them to learn in real time. Do you know if any of that gets recorded and put on WordPress TV?

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[00:37:22] Luis Herranz: I don’t know if workshops are recorded or not. Presentations are, yes. I don’t know.

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[00:37:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. So you can very much be seen at WordCamp Europe, in Athens. Hopefully both Luis and Mario are going to be there. Head over to the workshop and say hi, and get involved. If people want to reach out to either of you, be that on social media or email or whatever works best. Maybe we can go to Luis first. Can you give us some details of where people could get in touch with you, specifically around this topic?

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[00:37:53] Luis Herranz: Sure. I actually started like, I left Twitter for a while and I’m back from last week or so. I’m going to try to answer any question that people may have about the Interactivity API and to share the progress there at my personal account, which is @luisherranz, like my name and surname in Twitter.

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[00:38:11] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much, and Mario, where can we reach you?

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[00:38:14] Mario Santos: I would say Twitter as well. I’m not actively tweeting, but if someone writes to me, I will answer for sure. Handle is @santosguillamot. It’s a bit difficult, so maybe it’s better to include the link?

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[00:38:28] Nathan Wrigley: I will link to it in the show notes because yeah, that might be the best way of doing it.

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[00:38:33] Luis Herranz: And probably I would say come by the Block Interactivity Experiments repository. So in GitHub, WordPress slash block interactivity experiments. And then there’s, open a issue, open a discussion. Yeah.

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[00:38:47] Mario Santos: And if people don’t use Twitter, I think they can reach both of us also in WordPress Slack, if they prefer to do so.

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[00:38:55] Nathan Wrigley: I will link to both of those things as well. I will include both of your Twitter handles and both of your Slacks, plus all of the links to anything that we mentioned during the course of the podcast. So yeah, an interesting discussion about the Interactivity API. I know it’s not just the pair of you, but Luis and Mario, much appreciation for taking on this work, which hopefully in the near future will be improving, not only the performance, but the interactivity of our WordPress websites. Thanks very much for joining me today.

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[00:39:21] Mario Santos: Thank you a lot for inviting.

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[00:39:23] Luis Herranz: Thanks, Nathan.

On the podcast today we have Mario Santos and Luis Herranz. They both work for Automattic, but are sponsored to work full-time in WordPress. The main focus of their work is the block developer experience, and they are part of the group of contributors that worked on the Interactivity API proposal.

The Interactivity API is the main focus of the podcast today, and if you’re working with blocks and dynamically displaying data, this is sure to be of interest to you.

We start out the podcast with the usual introductions and get to know Mario and Luis, and then we learn what the Interactivity API is, and what it can do.

The conversation is framed around a blog post written by Mario entitled The Interactivity API, a Better Developer Experience in Building Interactive Blocks. In this, Mario shows examples of what website interactivity is. In short, it’s the ability for content to be amended on-the-fly without a page refresh.

Of course, this is nothing new on the web, we’ve been seeing this for years in WordPress sites and elsewhere, but now you’re going to be able to create interactivity in a standard way across the different blocks on your site. The project hopes to absorb complexity and make the creation of interactive objects fairly trivial. Mario and Luis talk about examples of where the API might be used and how it can be implemented.

We also discuss the fact that in the past developers have gone their own way to make their sites interactive. It all works, but it means that no two implementations are the same. This causes issues if the project is taken over by another developer, but it’s also a drain on resources. Mario and Luis make the point that having a standard way of creating interactivity will benefit everyone in the long run.

We get into the weeds a little and talk about the approach the team took when building the API. They decided to use directives, and we find out why this was and what benefit it brings over other possible solutions.

The project is still experimental, and they’re looking for people to test and report back on what they find to move the Interactivity API forwards.

Useful links.

Hello, my name is Rita Robles Loaiza, I am a computer systems engineer and I live in Cartago, Costa Rica. Today I want to tell you a little bit about my story and how WordPress saved my life.

About the beginnings

I am the youngest of 4 siblings, and the one who for many reasons as we say here in Costa Rica “went out of the basket”. Since I was a child I had an affinity for technology, I will never forget the first time I used a computer and how my older sister taught me to use Windows 95 back in 1997 or the first time I was able to program a Lego controller in Robotics class at the age of 12. Even with that affinity at 17 years old I said I wanted to be a chef, and I refused the idea of being an engineer. When I left school and the bubble in which I was I could identify that I had a whole world ahead of me and that I had to follow one of the best pieces of advice my mom could have given me: “Try hard”.

About My First Job and Entering the University.

In 2013 I had the opportunity to start with my first job, that experience opened my mind and was my school, pure and hard about survival and behavior. This job was as an assistant in a Laboratory of chemical and microbiological analysis, the biggest WOW of my life I lived here, in the middle of test tubes, beakers, Erlenmeyer’s I realized all the potential I had, and that creativity and enthusiasm would be my two great weapons, this without knowing that my main virtue is and will be resilience. In the middle of that job and against my wishes I started to study programming, I really did not feel fulfilled even though I liked technology, the Rita of now believes that in the midst of so many changes that rejection was my defense mechanism to everything that was happening around me.

Leaving the Laboratory and the change of university

After 2 years I suffered an extremely unfair dismissal disguised as economic problems in the company, after many years I understood that they did me a favor and that this action gave me the wings I needed to join the world of technology, while that happened to me and in the middle of my search for the true taste for what I was studying, I changed University, what a decision, so far has been the best I have taken in terms of education, thanks to that change I found what I really liked and was a breeding ground to achieve complete engineering. Finally, after all this, I was incorporated in different organizations with various roles focused on technology.

Rita turned to dust and ashes.

After a while and finishing my career, I decided to start my own business and entrepreneurship journey with 2 friends. Together we founded a boutique technology and innovation company, in the midst of our business empiricism we managed to meet many people and develop many projects, it was here where I had my first approach with WordPress in a meetup organized by the community of San Jose. At a certain point, my 2 friends abandoned the project and I decided to continue alone (big mistake), the company kept growing, I kept building many more projects, I incorporated more people until everything blew up in my face, it was absolutely unsustainable, and alone, without a job, and without any hope I became dust and ashes believing that I could not get up.

Teaching as a weapon of defense

In 2018, the career director of the University where I studied contacted me to offer me the opportunity to be a Database teacher. I refused, believing that I did not have enough skills to assume that role, that thought was a product of everything that was happening with entrepreneurship, my director insisted, and I accepted, and that was how on May 19, 2018 I taught my first university class. From that moment until now, 5 years later, I can say that it was one of the smartest decisions I could make, teaching opened the doors to the possibility of rebirth, rebuilding myself and learning from my students. It was the university that in times of difficulties made me grow and get up from everything that was happening, it was here where I understood that resilience is and will be my greatest virtue.

WordPress before my eyes

In 2019, in a meeting of a women’s collective, I met the person who pushed me the most in this world, my great friend Ericka, she invited me to go to meetups of the WordPress San Jose community, I knew I had to make an extra effort to just limit myself to go to Meetups, so thanks to her and everything she told me about WordPress I took the initiative to look for tutorials and start learning on my own. It was in this year where I developed my first project with WordPress and opened the doors to one of the career paths that have made me feel happy and fulfilled.

WordPress saved my life

Excited by that project, I continued studying and getting involved in the community, participating in meetups, and organizing WordCamps, to the point that this year 2023 I had the opportunity to be Lead Organizer of WordCamp San Jose 2023. In 2019 in the midst of so much uncertainty came to me a job ad in GreenGeeks web hosting in the role of WordPress Specialist, without any expectation I sent my resume until I got the pleasant surprise that I was hired in February 2020.

WordPress and the COVID-19 pandemic

It was thanks to this opportunity that I fully potentiated my taste and career towards WordPress, managing to get many projects for Foundations and NGOs in which through WordPress we can reach many interested people. It was also in this instance in which I managed to participate for the first time as a speaker at a WordCamp, this nourished my love for WordPress and the desire to continue sharing with all the people who have the same passion.

WordPress changed my life, put it in order and gave me guidelines to grow personally and professionally, the opportunity that the Universe gave me is called WordPress and all my life I will be grateful for that.

Sobre como WordPress me salvo la vida

Hola, mi nombre es Rita Robles Loaiza, soy Ingeniera en sistemas de computación y vivo en Cartago, Costa Rica. Hoy quiero contarles un poco sobre mi historia y como WordPress me salvo la vida.

Sobre los inicios

Soy la menor de 4 hermanos, y la que por muchas razones como decimos aquí en Costa Rica se “salió del canasto”. Desde que era niña tuve afinidad por la tecnología, jamás olvidare la primera vez que utilice una computadora y como mi hermana mayor me enseñó a utilizar Windows 95 allá por 1997 o la primera vez que pude programar un controlador de Lego en la clase de Robótica a los 12 años. Aun con esa afinidad a los 17 años decía que quería ser chef, y me negaba a la idea de ser Ingeniera. Cuando Sali del colegio y de la burbuja en la que me encontraba pude identificar que tenía todo un mundo por delante frente a mis ojos y que debía seguir uno de los mejores consejos que mi mamá me ha podido dar: “Esfuérzate”.

Sobre Mi primer trabajo y el ingreso a la Universidad

En el 2013 tuve la oportunidad de iniciar con mi primer empleo, definitivamente esa experiencia abrió mi mente y fue mi escuela, pura y dura sobre la sobrevivencia y el comportamiento. Este empleo fue como asistente en un Laboratorio de análisis químicos y microbiológicos, el mayor WOW de mi vida lo viví aquí, en medio de tubos de ensayo, beakers, erlenmeyers me di cuenta de todo el potencial que tenía y que la creatividad y el entusiasmo serian mis dos grandes armas, esto sin saber que mi principal virtud es y será la resiliencia. En medio de ese empleo y contra mis deseos empecé a estudiar programación, en serio no me sentía plena a pesar de que me gustaba la tecnología, la Rita de ahora cree que en medio de tantos cambios ese rechazo era mi mecanismo de defensa ante todo lo que sucedía a mi alrededor.

La Salida del Laboratorio y el cambio de Universidad

Después de 2 años sufrí un despido sumamente injusto disfrazado de problemas económicos en la empresa, después de muchos años entendí que me hicieron un favor y que esa acción me dio las alas que necesitaba para incorporarme laboralmente en el mundo de la tecnología, mientras me sucedía eso y en medio de mi búsqueda por el verdadero gusto hacia lo que estaba estudiando, me cambie de Universidad, vaya decisión, al momento ha sido la mejor que he tomado en temas de educación, gracias a ese cambio encontré lo que realmente me gustaba y fue caldo de cultivo para lograr completar la ingeniería. Finalmente, después de todo esto, me fui incorporando en distintas organizaciones con diversos roles enfocados en tecnología.

Rita convertida en polvo y cenizas

Después de un tiempo y terminando mi carrera decidí iniciar el viaje al negocio propio y el emprendimiento con 2 amigos. Juntos fundamos una empresa boutique de tecnología e innovación, en medio de nuestro empirismo en negocios logramos conocer a muchas personas y desarrollar muchos proyectos, fue aquí donde tuve mi primer acercamiento con WordPress en un meetup organizado por la comunidad de San José. En un momento determinado, mis 2 amigos abandonaron el proyecto y yo decidí continuar sola (grave error), la empresa siguió creciendo, seguí construyendo muchos más proyectos, incorpore más personas hasta que todo exploto en mi cara, era absolutamente insostenible, y sola, sin empleo, y sin esperanza alguna me convertí en polvo y cenizas creyendo que no podía levantarme.

La docencia como arma de defensa

En el 2018, el director de carrera de la Universidad en la cual estudie me contacto para ofrecerme la oportunidad de ser profesora de Bases de Datos. Yo me negué, creyendo que no tenía las habilidades suficientes para asumir ese rol, ese pensamiento era producto de todo lo que estaba sucediendo con el emprendimiento, mi director insistió y yo acepté, y así fue como el 19 de mayo del 2018 impartí mi primera clase universitaria. Desde ese momento hasta ahora, 5 años después, puedo decir que fue una de las decisiones más inteligentes que pude tomar, la docencia me abrió las puertas a la posibilidad de renacer, reconstruirme y aprender de mis estudiantes. Fue la universidad la que en tiempos de dificultades me hizo crecer y levantarme de todo lo que estaba sucediendo, fue aquí donde entendí que la resiliencia es y será mi mayor virtud

WordPress ante mis ojos

En el 2019, en una reunión de un colectivo de mujeres, conocí a la persona que más me impulso en este mundo, mi gran amiga Ericka, ella me invito a ir a meetups de la comunidad de WordPress San José, yo sabía que debía hacer un esfuerzo adicional a solamente limitarme a ir a Meetups, así que gracias a ella y todo lo que me contaba sobre WordPress tome la iniciativa de buscar tutoriales y empezar a aprender por mi cuenta. Fue en este año donde desarrolle mi primer proyecto con WordPress y abrir las puertas a uno de los caminos laborales que más me han hecho sentir feliz y plena.

WordPress salvo mi vida

Emocionada por ese proyecto, seguí estudiando e involucrándome en la comunidad, participando en meetups y organizando WordCamps, a tal punto que este año 2023 he tenido la oportunidad de ser Lead Organizer del WordCamp San José 2023. En el 2019 en medio de tanta incertidumbre llego a mi un anuncio de empleo en GreenGeeks web hosting en el rol de WordPress Specialist, sin expectativa alguna envié mi currículo hasta llevarme la grata sorpresa que me contrataron en febrero del 2020.

WordPress y la pandemia del COVID-19

Fue gracias a esta oportunidad que potencialice completamente mi gusto y carrera hacia WordPress, logrando conseguir muchos proyectos para Fundaciones y ONG en los cuales por medio de WordPress podemos llegar a muchas personas interesadas. También fue en esta instancia en la cual logre participar por primera vez como speaker en un WordCamp, esto alimento mi cariño hacia WordPress y el deseo de poder seguir compartiendo con todas las personas que tenemos esta misma pasión.

WordPress cambio mi vida, la puso en orden y me dio pautas para crecer personal y profesionalmente, la oportunidad que me dio el Universo se llama WordPress y toda mi vida estaré agradecida por eso.

Automattic has published a new project called wp-now that creates a local development environment in seconds. The tool is a NodeJS app that is powered by WordPress Playground, an experimental project that uses WebAssembly (WASM) to run WordPress in the browser.

wp-now allows developers to quickly spin up a new WordPress site with their chosen theme and then open it in the browser automatically logged in as admin without having to enter any credentials. It uses the SQLite Database Integration plugin for its database and developers can quickly swap out versions of PHP and WordPress for testing.

wp-now can be installed directly from npm. It works across all platforms (Mac, Linux, and Windows). Although it doesn’t support custom domains or SSL yet, Automattic has it on the roadmap. wp-now contributors are also looking at auto detecting when a file is modified and automatically refreshing the browser, importing a database from another WordPress site, and adding a deploy feature for SSH/SFTP hosting, among other features.

Corey Maass and Cory Miller continue the development of their new WordPress plugin, Crop.Express. They delve into the world of image-generation tools for content marketing. In this insightful conversation, they explore creating customizable templates to generate visually appealing images for blog posts, social media, and other channels. Discover how these tools can help marketers enhance their content, highlight important quotes and summaries, and streamline sharing. Dive into the workflow and envision a future where content creators can effortlessly generate eye-catching images that elevate the presentation and value of their posts.

$\"🔗\"$ Mentioned in the show:

$\"🐦\"$ You can follow Post Status and our guests on Twitter:

Transcript

Session 14 Corey & Cory Launch a WordPress Product Live

[00:00:04] Cory Miller: All right. Session 14. I had to go on YouTube and look, but golly, that’s been. Three months, three and a half months. Been good stuff. Had fun on these, but we have some good things to talk about today. I think you were gonna show me some of that stuff and come up with a punch list of what you’ve been manically working on.

Yeah, I’m meager man. And I know the other part of the agenda is now baton is. Getting handed over to me to really drive marketing and the work of, that I can actually do with your class. Yep, exactly. Genius and insight and feedback. All right, you want to any thoughts or do you want to kick

[00:00:53] Corey Maass: it off and No, lemme share. Which 1:00 AM I sharing? [00:01:00] Share, update, plugin. Let’s make it smaller. Come on window.

Real life needs and leads of a dog. Must be in the office with me at all times. Okay, go lay down. All right we have a blog WordPress install. I’ve been testing with Yost, but for the fun of it, we’ll leave that. Deactivated general settings. Oh, it’s interesting that didn’t reset. But anyway, the title of this blog tagline, so this is the description of this blog.

So I’m just like, some things I [00:02:00] want to sensible, sensible defaults basically And looking at these variables because they’ll show up later. If you go, so you have a WordPress install you’ve just downloaded O M G I M G we need Oh, you have that WorkFlowy document I think I shared with you.

Yeah. Did. So these are, I’ll take notes here. Plug in marketing. So it’s like, what do we call the damn thing? I plugged in. It’s O M G I M G and all capital letters we decided on, which I love. And then what do we call it? I’m, so a couple of neat things with this. We, I think we, we touched on it a little bit or I was thinking it earlier today, is we don’t need, because we’re not going in the plug-in repo, we don’t need a readme, we don’t need there’s a bunch of SEO [00:03:00] stuff that we don’t need to worry about, that we were messing around with Crop Express.

But I think we still want, we still need a description for here. We still need do we just call it O M G I M G? Do we want another word? Image builder, maker, candlestick maker, something in there. So yeah, what do we call it? What should be like, What we see on the plugins page,

Description name oops. All right. So anyway we activate it. It takes you to a welcome screen. Right now it says, welcome to O M G I M G. Let’s get you started creating your first image, an open graph image for your site. The first image is the image people see when they share your [00:04:00] sites on socials.

So we can review all this copy later, but Roger that we just need an icon I’ve been using, actually let’s do, if I go to post status, it’s gonna be the real lit litmus test, right?

Is there a high res version? Hey, look at that. Holy leash. Nikes. No, that’s good. It’s an svg. Okay which we don’t support currently. We’re gonna want to I can. I got it. Because we can just go SVG to p and g. It’s one of my favorite. These are my favorite sites. There’s this whole series of sites that look just like this.

It’s compress P and g. Yeah, compress jpeg, compress All these are my favorite sites. With the elephant. And I contacted this person once and I was like, can I give you money because I use your websites,[00:05:00] every day. And he is no, I make more from ads than you could ever give me.

What size do you need? I’ve got just as big as possible with the transparent background.

I had these made for Different social platforms. So they’re already scaled down.

[00:05:55] Cory Miller: We’re illuminating some of the things that we’ve talked about,

Yep. Yep. This is compelling listening and watching for anybody out there. There we go. I got it. And I’m being a little pedantic because I want this to be a good demo for you. Oops. Export p and g thousand by a thousand giggles. Heat export. Having fun. Download save. All right, I got it.

[00:06:44] Corey Maass: Tertiary dancing. All right, I’m gonna drag in the PS logo, see if this works. Hey, you get a little preview. So there’s a bug. Go bugs [00:07:00] dropping image shows preview, but placeholder doesn’t. Disappear.

Doesn’t matter though. So you create, so this is going to automatically generate the first one based on I think it’s the, oh, let’s find out. And there’s a fatal error because get options hasn’t been set site. There’s a little live coding for you.

Oh, I know what I did. Yeah. So change this to until good options. [00:08:00] There we go. Let’s try that again. Refresh. Grab the PS logo, P and G

and nothing happens. Okay, skip. Anyway it should have created one, but we’ll create one. So this is the other workflow, basically the idea being that welcome screen, you drop in a logo and then it just spits one out. Yep. So that you’re not, so that you’re, on board you, and obviously we’ll tweak that.

But I wanted to get that we had talked about. The experience of it. Essentially you drop an image and it’s just done and then you’d click then option to set it as an OG image. But here we’ll say created open OG image. Right now we’ve got logo only and then side by side are mostly working.

Top bottom isn’t done and simple was the old version I need to clean up, but we’ll start with logo only. Let’s see if this works.[00:09:00] We’re close. Line app, line one 20. Oops. Of course I’ve been hacking away at this, so lots of errors. I get it. No issue here.

There we go. So real simple options here. You’ve got a background and you’ve got an image. And so that’s all the options that you’ve got here on the left. So you can set a background color. So if we go to Do you know what color the post status orange is? It’s the,

[00:09:53] Corey Maass: oops, I spelled you wrong. Post status.com. There we go. [00:10:00] Inspect.

It’s that one. Okay, so hypothetically you’d come in, you’d say, oh, and I’ve added global options. So there’s under settings, you can set a site name if you want it different than the WordPress name, site description, site url. There’s also going to be Default colors. So it’s if you create a new one, instead of you having to set the background color every time it’d import these.

I also think I showed you, I just added or showed a screenshot. I just added support for Google. Fonts a little clunky but is working, which is cool. Ah, okay. So this is what it was supposed to do, is it creates your first project With, here’s your channel, here’s your template. So logo only, open graph.

So anyway, back in the editor, so you changed the [00:11:00] background color to be the post status one, and of course it doesn’t paste FC 78 15.

FC 78 15. So there’s the post status low color. I added an overlay just by default, so if you wanted to add like, A gradient, something to make it a little more dynamic. I’m gonna add a little toggle for this so you can turn it off all, all together. You can also rotate it so you can make the gradient come from a different direction if you want.

I guess the hack right now is you would just go in here and make this the same as that orange. Okay.

Looks like it’s still adding a gradient, but anyway. But the idea is right now I’ve added, I’m basically flushing out. I’m trying to flush out like one of each option, like a color picker, a or slider, [00:12:00] a bunch of different things. And so we can keep adding these selectors basically. So you can, you’ll have options all day long.

You come over here and. So that’s how you could figure the background, right? And then for the image this should by default, say site logo, which is the thing we uploaded. But I’ve added support for the media library. So if you wanted to do let’s grab one of my testing document WordPress.

Nope. Testing. So I’ve been using this gear, so you could also select an image from the media library or the default site logo. You set the size, you could rotate it. Rotate it if you want to.

So dead simple. Save your changes. And it’s there every time, right? There’s an option to view it, [00:13:00] full screen. And then there’s the, you saved say download. I don’t know if you, I don’t think you can see that part, but it downloads right now. It’s a funny name, but we’ll give it a better name when you download it so you’ll know what it looks like in the download.

And then there’s also the option to save it as your open graph image. And so we don’t really have a way to demo that, but what it does is it will it’ll write headers to your, to, to the website so that anytime your website is shared this’ll be your OG image. Okay. And then also so I think, so it’s saving it as OG image.

Yeah. Puts it into your media library and then. And then that’s what gets shared out. So another bug here or an extra feature we want is to save. In addition, to save as to download, we wanna be able option to save to media Library. [00:14:00] So it’ll just show up in the media library. And saving is the OG image.

So when you go back to projects, there’s a little flag that says this is your OG image, cuz you can only have one obviously. And so it’s if you set a different one. So here’s that same menu you can download directly from here. Or save it as the OG image. And then, and this’ll replace whatever one is the OG image.

[00:14:26] Cory Miller: another one. But how did you get the name Project five? Number

[00:14:29] Corey Maass: five. So it’s, these are just like posts. So if you create A post has an id. So project number five. So yeah, one of the Go

[00:14:39] Cory Miller: ahead default, or we just naming that by default or do they have the

[00:14:47] Cory Miller: No, I was it. Do we, do they have the option to name it

[00:14:52] Corey Maass: something different? Oh, they don’t yet. So let’s add that to the list. Custom project [00:15:00] name

because, yeah, I thought about that too, like that once it gets up to 1,986,426, it’s like, what’s, which one are we talking about?

[00:15:12] Cory Miller: I’m just thinking too, for sorting, like we probably want to say it’s O N G I M G and then they name it like default homepage or something. And then when we get into the single post pages and stuff, maybe it’s post ID or post name and number or something like that.

[00:15:37] Corey Maass: Yep. Yeah, the here it says SITEWIDE images. I don’t think this is working right now because I’ve made a bunch of changes to the site version. There is a menu option here for O M G I M G per post. Yeah, it’s totally broken right now.

But it’ll, when it’ll look similar, [00:16:00] but it, but up here it says, Name of post, today’s specials or whatever, and then it, and then has your images, so you do have context. But yeah under the project number name we’ll want to come up with some naming convention. The other thing that I, so let’s do that custom project name, but right off the bat, maybe a date or we could do the name of the template.

Default project name, using date or template or both because it would be like April 26th. OG image would at least give you some context.

[00:16:40] Cory Miller: Ni picky. But when you say CRI project, that button right there. Yep. C. Could that be create O n G? Im G.

Not nitpicky. That’s the kind of stuff I please jump in. Okay. Especially cuz most, most of those changes are small. Yeah. Yeah. I

[00:16:58] Cory Miller: think coming back to the branding, like [00:17:00] that’s what we’re doing is M G I M G and that’s what they’re getting and I think

[00:17:04] Corey Maass: that’s good. Yep. Okay. Let’s do another open graph.

Actually let’s do an Instagram and again. So instead of logo only now we get into side by side, so it’s a bit more complicated.

So this is a logo on the left and text options on the right. So again, we do a background color. See there’s a little bug of. That border.

[00:17:35] Cory Miller: You’re a very daring dev. I always like doing this stuff though, but a lot of devs have worked with her, like they don’t want to see, they don’t want you to see some of this. I’m like,

[00:17:45] Corey Maass: Hey. Oh, I want you to see it as broken as possible. Cuz then it’s like one, one, it’s part of the journey and what we’re trying to illustrate with all of our, everything we, we’ve been doing in public Mo honestly, most of our conversations have been [00:18:00] public.

And that’s I also wanna show, this is as part of our journey. You have barely usable products, but it’s, then you clean it up. So same thing, overlay color, make it nice and ugly for you. So let’s just do white and green. With that angle. The image, again, you can choose, that’s supposed to be site

Just clicking through to see that it all works, so it changes to this other thing. Or you jump back and it’s the site logo, make it bigger title. So this is the stuff that I’ve been really working on right now. I’m, I don’t have Google fonts enabled. I. But you still get the idea. So we’ve got some default font families basically.

So if you wanted handwritten I [00:19:00] don’t know if bold works. No, I was just doing that this morning. But you will have the option to ignore this input and you will have, but you will have the option to say bolder italics, cuz it’s I want you to be able to customize the text to your heart’s content.

Text color. So you might hear, you might match the orange type of thing, text size,

but you’d say, I want this tighter. There’s line height. If you wanna get, what’s that tweak to your heart’s content. Exactly. And again, these are not quite the, like you gave me some comps of the ultimate post status. Social image. And so based on that, I want to give us, give you all the options.

If you were a customer coming in, you’d say, okay, I’d upload my logo here. I might choose a a font that not looks like that. [00:20:00] Like that. I’d want it bold, I’d want it all caps. So we want all those options. And then, Be able to make it look good in the context of this template. There’s the title, then you go to the subtitle.

And so you’d have site url, site description. Remember I said, this is where we put in the description of the blog. But it’s like most likely you’d want the title of the blog and the url, so you’d do that, but it’s, and there’s a setting for let me save this. So there’s a setting again. So by default, if you’re like, our webs, our website is http and www, but we really just want it to be post status.com or if you had a short u r l, po.st or something like that, you could put that in here.

So let’s do post status.com. [00:21:00] Save. Go back to here. Oh. So you know, this is what your project screen looks like. So you’ll see all of your projects. And yeah, we’re gonna want ability to sort projects by name most recently updated, et cetera. So we’ll add that to that screen. Jumping back in here, Seesa.

Now, the, by default it brings in post status.com, but there’s also an option of custom text. So if you wanted to put in dot, something or post status.com, link to, something specific, a blog, something like that, right? Text color X size, but you get the idea.

[00:22:05] Cory Miller: So from the premise of the Sitewide OG image probably when I was doing that for, it was so good. Can I show you some stuff

[00:22:16] Cory Miller: Okay. So I was playing, this is off topic, but I was playing with some of this, like more into the blog post stuff. So you can see some of these things. I was just like trying to be the client. This is not it. Okay. Where did that play with it?

But this side by side image, I think side by side thing is gonna be really great for the in, in just what we need for. Initial stuff. Yep. So I was running around with like logo on top here.

[00:22:52] Corey Maass: Yeah, your number 15 is what I was emulating and then. Once, once I’ve got all the kinks worked [00:23:00] out, it’s easy enough to duplicate it to, I called it top and bottom or something.

So logo above, and so that becomes your like 14 or 13 where it’s the same elements on the page. Just, up and down instead of left and right. Yeah, I really, as I was

[00:23:18] Cory Miller: doing this just for post, I was like, this is what, this is really what you need. You just need. Logo, brain thing, tagline. And so that was really good for me to go through that experience.

But yeah, I guess I’ve got four cards here. Put it on the right, put it on the left, but it above, but it below.

[00:23:40] Corey Maass: Yep. And I, and so actually I’m now thinking, so maybe I. Like I do the, just an image, cuz that was one of the ones we saw on that gallery. And then, and I think it’s a really good place to start.

Basically it’s the simplest. And then we will, [00:24:00] and then I will adjust the side by side to be, we’ll call it the, like the default business card. And I will put in little toggles that are like, Because again, it’s, I’m trying to flush out potential options, right? And so if there was an option that was like logo left top, right bottom, cuz it’s all essentially the same.

All of those cards from our perspective are the same, just reordering of things. But logo, title, U R L. And I just lock that shit down and then we’re ready to publish, essentially, like I, as you saw, like I wanna, I want to clean up the welcome screen a little bit more cuz I do think that onboarding’s gonna make a big difference rather than it just being a blank screen when you sign in and it’s done.

[00:24:58] Cory Miller: Go ahead. Just go to the experience [00:25:00] is like those five are all we need. Yep. Specifically for the homepage you saw here, just this is for next level step stuff. Yep. But I was like, when you told me I could have a screenshot, I was like, oh yeah.

[00:25:16] Corey Maass: Oh yeah. When once I add that, like that’s gonna be a lift. Because it’s, a screenshot within a screenshot kind of thing. But so I’ll circle back to that. But is, so is this your official, the official font of post status? Yes. And what font is it?

[00:25:43] Corey Maass: Okay. And do you make it bold or is it just, is that how it comes? I

[00:25:49] Cory Miller: I did for this stuff. I don’t know the original, how this is all done, but I was trying to match it and Sure. That won’t work for me. It is bold.

[00:25:58] Corey Maass: Okay. [00:26:00] So by having Google fonts right now, so there are 1500, I think 1,508 Google fonts, and we, just so you know, right?

So that we are not, because a plug-in, can’t call, dial out without permission and you can’t get Google font information without an API key. We can’t expect our users to go through all those steps, so you have to enable Google fonts within the plugin. But I set it up so that now I’m just bragging, but I’m proud of myself.

I got us a Google a p i key Once a day we hit the Google Fonts API and get all the information. We store it on omg.co. I created a little API there, and so the plugin, anybody’s [00:27:00] plugin will hit omg img.co. That meaning our website to get all the font data, and then it’ll be, and then it’ll be cashed on in their own website too, but, so it was, The sort of clever way if I do say so myself, not, it’s not super tricky, but so we, so pretty quick, I was able to pretty quickly add Google font support the without the user having to do much, which is cool.

However, right now all it does is create a dropdown that has 1,508 names of fonts For you, for now that you can, you would just go, sorry, select Vare around from that dropdown. But we’re gonna have to add some way to preview all of those fonts, anyway, I wanna make sure that Varela round bold works for you.

You don’t do italics, you don’t rotate anything, but I had fun implementing that [00:28:00] stuff. And for you, it’s just a white background. Yeah. Oh, so I want to add, toggle the background overlay. So you can just disable it and just say, set a white background. And then that default. Color picker. I couldn’t, I had to type in the color.

I couldn’t paste it in, which was a pain in the ass doesn’t support pasty. So I think we want a better color picker so that somebody could go copy an eight. Most people are gonna have a hex code color and so they’re gonna want to paste it in. Yep. Okay. So gimme 20 minutes. Just sit there quietly for 20 minutes and I will have this ready for you.

[00:28:50] Cory Miller: be quiet. So then I went a little further into thinking through how we want those, and I came back to this. [00:29:00] Yep. Featured image stuff and going and let you know, just try to present some what we probably want on things. I did show, I did see. Yep. There, I did it. Let’s see if I can, your

[00:29:21] Cory Miller: I showed you that thing. I just saw some from Twitter, but it was just a quote with a person’s picture on it. I was like, that’s cool. Cuz a lot of the podcast stuff we’re doing

Like something like this where you have the person you’re interviewing with their little quote. I’ll keep working on those. Thinking about those, cuz those outputs were really good. Like we do so much audio, video stuff. And really been working with content journey to break those down more and more where you get clips and stuff like that, that then go out on social that are more valuable content on there [00:30:00] than just listen to 45

But what you just said more valuable, we were talking earlier about like taglines and concepts and stuff. More valuable images.

Okay. Because we were talking like. Making you look more professional, which I bucked at cuz it’s it implies you don’t look professional now or as opposed to like we are. And also going back a handful of conversations that we had where it’s like crop Express was solving a problem.

We were a wrench, you had a bolt. We could help tighten the bolt faster kind of thing. Whereas this, technically you can live without this, but we are making ev making your website better.

[00:30:52] Cory Miller: It’s the polish. Yeah. It’s like you said, the last mile of Polish, yep. Done work doing [00:31:00] the 45 minute thing, doing the thing.

And then this is that last mile that you said, I’d like that toughest mile of just polish. Yep. We’re making that really to display that. When I was thinking through the blog post stuff, I was like, that’s what I’d want is, when we shove out a podcast episode that’s not guy, oh, they did another thing.

But if we have that quote from somebody in there that really resonates, then it’s I should go and look more. And what we’re trying to do on the content side is break those up better and better with transcripts, show notes and stuff like that.

[00:31:36] Corey Maass: Yeah, initially, so I’ve added that. Basically it’s a content field, so it’s like you pull in the title of the website, you’d pull in whatever, right?

But that, that the last option was custom text. And the label on the left would say quote, and then you’d say custom text. And you’d put in a quote and you’d have [00:32:00] this saved as a default. So you’ve got post sta, a white background and the post status logo and U R L in the bottom right print that, that’s quote number one.

You’re now looking at that screen that has all of your projects and you’d say duplicate post or duplicate project. You change the name to quote number two. You’d go in paste in the second quote, and now you’ve got two of those images, same picture of the woman, but two different quotes. So you’d download one to post on socials on Tuesday and you’d download the second one to post on socials on Thursday.

[00:32:39] Cory Miller: So it’s been a bit a second on this blog post thing. So all those, I gather, you’re probably setting it up where it’s set in the front. When you do a post, there could be these options that you could fill in to create all those images. And right there I can do that. So I’m looking at [00:33:00] the post, oh, that quote there is the template plug and play.

I think that’s where we’re gonna get in. The valuable part is something that looks nice enough and allows me to share those things out.

[00:33:25] Corey Maass: Yeah, and I think, like we’ve talked about, I. A number of those different templates of, or scenarios, an image that you generate that’s got a picture of a per, for your interview, you’ve got their picture on the left, and then you’ve got a quote and you can make five of those five different quotes, but it’s essentially the same image.

And initially, Today, tomorrow, this week, like I’ll set up that template next week. You’re using it and you’re plugging it. You know you’re gonna have to cr [00:34:00] recreate that template every time. But a week from now, I’m gonna give you the option to duplicate a template and or save a template. For reuse, essentially.

So then step two is gonna be okay. It’s I set it up once for each post and then and then I’ve gotta manually plug in those quotes and then step three, like basically to verify that, that we are using it this way and that these are loops that we want to close or processes that we wanna make faster.

It’s like I’m picturing a. A screen where essentially you can quick generate, if you’ve got a bunch of these templates that like, opens up in the sidebar, your, you go and you look at your blog post and you highlight something, and then you select from a dropdown like, plug this, whatever text I’ve highlighted into this template.

So it’s highlight a quote. Generate a quote, image [00:35:00] highlight, quote number two, generate quote, image, highlight bullet points you instead of the quote template, use a, use the bullet point template and you just go bang. Okay, all done. Go back to I M G O M G I M G project screen and there’s all of those different templates populated, already with your logo, but quote one, quote two, quote three, bullet 0.1, bullet 0.2, bullet 0.3.

[00:35:27] Cory Miller: okay, let me just make sure we’re on the same page. And I’m sorry if I missed this, but, so I was thinking post templates I’d want for most post ads content. I put down quote and summary slide. It’s probably the two big ones, just summary slide about what this content is about and then actionable cool quotes on that.

So I started plugging up MGM G. I could create a template for the post things that would show, then [00:36:00] set there for its to global, and then I’m in post writing, post and go ready for the OG images, click. Oh, I want to do, I gotta have a summary slide that’s already in my template over you on the post. And then same thing with quote, I’d have that option too.

because right there, from a workflow standpoint, I’m thought about, I’ve done the work of thinking about some of the key things that would drive value on the post content summary slide, which is our featured image thought. And then the quote Thing and I’ll, maybe the bullet point would be the third for me is like we, we talked about these three things, which could be a variation of the summary slide.

Sure. And if I did that, what that would do for me on my social channel is just talking this out as opposed to as, okay, I’ve already illuminated in a graphically appealing way what this long form post is about. Then I have those images for [00:37:00] those channels. LinkedIn, Twitter primarily for us at the appropriate sizes and stuff.

[00:37:10] Corey Maass: Yep. Yeah, I like we’ve talked about the baseline is an OG image, ideally auto generated The moment you hit publish, you’ve based on a template being populated with the title of the post and then down the road with a screenshot of the post, and or the featured image.

But once you’ve done kind of what is considered the word press basics, you’ve added categories, you’ve added a featured image, you’ve written your blog post, you’ve hit publish. Already when you share it, it looks damn good. There’s maybe a little bit of setup, but if you haven’t set up an OG image template or an OG image template for a, for that post, [00:38:00] then at least when somebody shares it, they get the sitewide business card, like you’re describing it.

But with the next step. Every post that gets created automatically has a business card, but has the title of that post built in. And then step three, you could essentially recreate reuse that same one, let’s say make it a square for Instagram. And so again, you’re going, up and out with all these things and it’s just a matter of how you use it.

So like at post status, your. You’re going, okay. Baseline is an OG image, but we also then want and that’s gonna cover your LinkedIn and Facebook. But you’re like, but we need a square for Instagram. Copy. Change it to, I didn’t show you that part. So it’s like that we select that channel.

You saw that the second image I created was for Instagram. You can actually change that live. So you could take a rectangle image, you could replicate it, so [00:39:00] now you’ve got another one. But you could say, now make this square and it’ll just change. And things might move around on the screen.

So you might want to go tweak, tweak some of those sliders. But if you’ve already done the work once, copy change screen size.

[00:39:14] Cory Miller: Okay, let me talk this through. From a marketing customer Perspective. So what I’ve gathered, cuz I want us to capture this for the market, my marketing work, but I’m, I need to say that out loud to you.

So what this has done for me as the content marketer at Post status is it’s in my workflow. It’s creating I’ve said my templates, I’ve thought these things, o n g has helped me. Do those, think through those these are the basic things you can do to add value to your post.

So it’s in my workflow. It’s great cuz I’m going to my post. I’m adding new podcast, new blog posts, whatever. I’ve already done this initial workflow work to set my templates that are there for me when I need it. It looks nice, [00:40:00] like it doesn’t look like shit. It looks nice. And then the third is it, this is just direct speed.

It illuminates the value of the post better. I’m pulling out the things to showcase what the post actually is, so I’m enticing people to do that. The fourth I didn’t add down here though, is making it super easy to go off and share. So for marketing wise, right there, we talk to content marketers first.

They’re already doing this work. Yep. It’s in your workflow. It’s gonna look nice. It’s gonna share, showcase the value of the landing page better, and then it’s easy to share.

[00:40:43] Corey Maass: So that last mile talking about the last mile is the hardest mile. Is also an aspect that I think. Mar like marketers and marketing agencies, it’s going to make sense to [00:41:00] them that we don’t close the loop on actually publishing to your average person.

I th I anticipate this being a discussion. This we’re gonna have to have over and over again. Corey, with his little music blog. In a perfect world, We would generate images for each channel and then we’d click a button that would say, push these to these channels. Yep. But it’s, but that is so a big, messy step.

Yeah. And there are tools that already do it. And again, from a marketer or an agency is already going to be using a radar, a buffer, a hoot suite to queue up and publish this content.

[00:41:59] Cory Miller: Yeah.[00:42:00] So I was thinking though, like your Instagram, I go, huh, when am I gonna use that? But the Vida bars company, Lindsay has an investment in helps.

She’s got shampoo and conditioner bars. She primarily uses Instagram, right? So she’s creating a post, wants something that then she can download and just upload back to, that publishing option. They’re great services that do all that. To me, it’s yeah, we’ve handed it on the thing, now go use your tools, your workflows.

Yeah. You’re already in that workflow. But man I think that’s awesome. Okay. I’ve only, sorry, I’ve only got four more minutes, but here’s my question to you. What do you think needs to happen for it to be ready for

[00:42:39] Corey Maass: production on Postex? Like I said, I need to clean up some of these bugs and I am now going to, so I’ve already created options that, that post status based on the template you gave me, I think we’re [00:43:00] pretty much covered.

Like we’ve got Google font support. You can upload a logo, you can pull in a title, and I am going to clean it all up so that it works and you stop seeing errors when you first install it. But I’ll make sure that essentially the first template covers. The post status template and I need to replicate it.

Like I said I’ve been hacking away at the Sitewide version, and so I’ve done this a couple of times. I just need to copy all my updates over to the post version. And then you’ll have all the same features on for sitewide images or for post specific images. And then we’re, and then you can at least start messing around with it.

[00:43:43] Cory Miller: Do I need to do a little bit more work for you, like sh on the post templates, take a podcast or whatever content we have and think through. I’d want to quote from here. I’d want the summary slide for here. Do you want me to do a little bit of that work? [00:44:00] Like with live action stuff and Google Slides?

[00:44:02] Corey Maass: Yes. Like the more work you do thinking through these templates, I don’t think we’re gonna I’m not gonna be able to deliver most of it tomorrow, but we can create one, yeah. Or we can create the one that’s similar to the Sitewide business card that just covers your basics. It’s got a logo, it’s got the title.

So it, and then you like, cuz I wanna get this to you so that you’re like, you are pub, you publish and you’re like, Hey Corey, I’m trying to publish this for tomorrow. I need X, Y, Z. I’m like, okay, now we have a real world scenario, let me go add that. Here’s

[00:44:41] Cory Miller: what I’m gonna do. Then I’m just gonna think about, I get one featured image template thing.

Yeah. And to just showcase the value of the post. And and work on a couple of thoughts with, I’ll take one post and start doing it. Maybe take another [00:45:00] one and start doing it, and then deliver that and go, Hey, I think these are the basics for that one thing. And that gets me huge way into showcasing the value post and everything else.

[00:45:14] Corey Maass: do that. And then like I said, I mean we’ve I’ve set up the technical side of serving, of selling this thing using e D on the website. Yeah. So we need to start thinking about a homepage, cuz we’re not gonna be selling tomorrow.

But you and I both know that the first version is 10 versions, in a day, or, in, within a week before we actually let something stay online. Yeah. We wanted you sent over a design you like and then we’ll but we need some words to start putting on that page. So start thinking about that.

[00:45:58] Cory Miller: really for me it’s [00:46:00] homepage and the post template.

[00:46:12] Cory Miller: Yeah. Too, and I love the way we’re doing it. It’s like we have a live action thing that we’re making it better and I’m putting on the hat of actual users cuz I am Right. Helping formally, I think that’s such a good way to do product that sometimes has been a mismatch for me, but I’ve got the live action, thank you.

This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.

In this episode we take a deeper look at Sendcloud with Wilson and what shipping automation means to a developer or freelancer.

Gutenberg 15.8 was released with some exciting features that were included in the tentative WordPress 6.3 roadmap. Users are getting closer to a more unified content editing experience with the addition of the Pages menu to the Site Editor. Clicking on Pages will load the ten most recently updated pages with a link to “Manage All Pages” at the bottom of the list. Users can quickly jump into editing content by selecting a page.

The interface also includes a little reminder about the nature of pages in WordPress: “Pages are static and are not listed by date. Pages do not use tags or categories.” It will be interesting to see how page editing in the Site Editor is received, whether it is too confusing for users to understand what they are editing, or whether the baseline expectation is that content can be edited anywhere.

Revisions for design changes have landed in 15.8 with a basic UI inside the Global Styles panel. It shows a timeline of saved changes along with who made the change, so users can easily revert back to previous design changes. This creates an extra cushion or safety net for those who are designing their own sites and should provide a greater level of user confidence when making design changes.

Version 15.8 also introduces theme previews for block themes, a feature that has been sorely missing for early adopters of block themes. This is made possible by a new theme_preview parameter, which allows the user to see what the site would like if a different theme was active.

Check out the full changelog for all the details on enhancements and bug fixes in 15.8.

Shufflehound made a big splash in March when it released Lemmony, a free WordPress block theme with more than 30 patterns. This was the company’s first block theme on WordPress.org and it is already active on more than 1,000 websites. Building on the success of this theme, Shufflehound has created a child theme for agencies.

Lemmony Agency bears a strong resemblance to its parent theme but with more agency-specific patterns. This theme ships with 25 new custom block patterns, on top of the ones already included in Lemmony, for a total of more than 50 patterns.

The patterns unique to this theme suit agencies but would also work well for non-profits, advocacy, portfolios, or businesses of any kind. These include a hero with services, accordions for things like FAQ, counters, more pricing tables, services with icons or images, a blockified sidebar, testimonials, and more.

The theme’s creators have done an excellent job in organizing all the patterns available to users. Inside the pattern explorer/inserter, they have been separated into different panels for the patterns specific to the Lemmony Agency theme, the Lemmony patterns, and the Lemmony full-page patterns. This makes it easier to build pages, since users won’t have to hunt through all the patterns lumped together.

The Lemmony Companion plugin, recommended when users install the theme, adds a handful of custom blocks that some of the patterns rely on to work. It includes blocks for a counter, icon, post featured image caption, typing text, hero auto-slider, and accordion.

This might be the best way to ensure these features are styled exactly to match the theme and give users more creative control inside these particular blocks. Sometimes using third-party plugins to add sliders or icons can look like it’s bolted onto the design in an unsightly way. A companion plugin designated specifically for this theme makes sense in this instance.

Shufflehound made an interesting choice creating Lemmony Agency as a child theme of what is already a very flexible multi-purpose theme. This certainly could have been shipped as full-page pattern but it would have also greatly expanded the patterns packaged with the parent theme. In these early days of block theming, it’s not yet clear what users might consider “pattern bloat” or too many patterns, especially since they can easily be categorized under various panels inside the explorer.

Lemmony Agency is a solid option for building websites that need to showcase their services, display pricing, or simply maintain an informational web presence. It’s available for free from WordPress.org and will auto-install the parent theme at the same time.

Please join us in welcoming SiteGround to the 2023 WordPress global community sponsorship program! SiteGround’s pledge to sponsor all official WordPress community events (WordCamps, Meetups, and more) all around the world provides support and stability to our hardworking crew of volunteer event organizers. Thanks for everything, SiteGround!

SiteGround‘s hosting services are crafted to make managing websites easy, whether you’re building a site for yourself, your small business, or your clients.

We host over 2.8 Million domain names on a powerful Google Cloud Platform infrastructure, optimized with an array of in-house tools for seamless, faster and more secure WordPress performance:

Our long-term expertise in helping WordPress users succeed online extends into our award-winning SiteGround Optimizer and SiteGround Security; plugins, free to download and install on any hosting platform.

Join guest host Rich Tabor and WordPress Playground innovator Adam Zielinski as they discuss the capabilities and promise of WP Playground in episode 56 of the WordPress Briefing. Stay tuned for your small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks.

Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording.

Credits

Show Notes

Transcript

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.

Today we’re gonna spend a little time talking about WP Playground. This is a project that debuted at State of the Word in December 2022, but it was demoed for me about a month prior in November.

I was, and remain, absolutely floored by the potential future applications, as well as the innovative thinking behind it. So I’ve invited a couple of excellent WordPress futurists to the show today so that we can listen in on their conversation.

Hey everyone, I’m Rich Tabor, and I’m here today with Adam Zielinski to talk about WordPress Playground. So for those of you who don’t know what WordPress Playground is, can you tell us a little bit more about it, Adam?

Absolutely. WordPress Playground is WordPress that works in your browser like there’s no server with PHP or database like there’s just your browser and JavaScript, and you can run it in so many more places that we’ll all get to. For example, I just came back from WordCamp Gliwice, where on a Contributor Day, a couple of developers got set up with WordPress in just a couple of minutes, whereas normally, it can take hours to do that.

Yeah, that’s, that’s pretty impressive. Do you think that, particularly for WordCamps and other demo-type areas, this would be something that’s very useful? Or what do you think would be the other problems that could be solved with WordPress Playground?

Playground solves one primary problem, and that is WordPress is pretty difficult to get started with. I’m not even talking about creating your website, but let’s say, someone told you there’s this WordPress thing that you should try. Well, you Google for it, and you find installation instructions, and there’s like three hours of work for you there.

So then maybe you’ll find a hosting company, and you have to pay some money. So with WordPress Playground, you can actually try it for free because there’s no cost to run it. It just runs on your device. If you’re a developer, and you want to start learning WordPress, normally you have to go through quite an extensive setup process, and there are some tools to make it easier, but maybe there’s still friction like you have to even own a computer, like a PC device or a Mac. Playground can run on your phone, and it can power interactive tutorials that you can use and just start learning there and there with zero setup.

Like if you work on a product team and someone asks you to test a code change, with Playground you can just click a link and test it with no infrastructure behind it. And if you’re a company creating a plugin, you can just show your plugin in a live demo to people. And this isn’t something many plugins are doing because it’s quite hard to get a live demo set up.

Ah, that’s pretty impressive. So, you know, amongst like tutorials, code changes for developer environments, the mobile application running, do you think that, since there’s such a wide brevity of ideas that WordPress Playground can kind of plug into, would this be more of a developer tool?

Is that right? Or is Playground more of a like a click and play-type application that can run anywhere and demo anything?

I’d say it’s both, but it’s more transparent for the users. So there are a whole lot of things you can do with Playground as a developer, as I just mentioned. But who are you doing these things for? Well, some of them are for the users, as in live demos, or there’s a WordCamp Europe coming, and I know some people are doing workshops there. They are going to use Playground to get everyone set up. So now that’s, well, maybe a workshop that teaches you how to build a theme, for example, right? Now you can just get started without any setup process. So there’s both, it’s very useful for development teams, and it’s very useful for them to build stuff for the final users.

That’s great. I know you, and I have probably both been in the same scenario at WordCamps when you’re trying to get dev environments set up, and it takes, you know, the better half of the workshop to get to step one. So this is really gonna be interesting to see it, especially at WordCamp Europe, and to see it getting into action.

Absolutely, I will have a table at Contributor Day, a WordPress Playground table. So yeah, everyone’s invited to come over. I’ll show you a lot of cool stuff. And then at WP Connect on Saturday at 10:00 AM, there will be a WordPress Playground session where you’ll be able to learn more and see some cool demos.

Super cool. So how else can people find out a little bit more info about Playground and perhaps even get involved and contribute to the project?

There’s a developer.WordPress.org/playground website. There’s a link in a show notes where you’ll be able, like this is the perfect entry point to the entire rabbit hole of WordPress Playground.

There’s a quite a few projects under the WordPress Playground umbrella, and they all live in a single GitHub repository where you can just find any issue that interests if you want to contribute and just start contributing. Also, there’s a Slack channel in WordPress org space called #meta-playground, and I highly encourage everyone interested in coming over to say hi.

And probably one of the best places to ask questions and get acquainted with the community.

Oh, that’s great; I’m very intrigued about the project overall. I think that there’s an immense amount of potential, for WordPress Playground. Just last question here, like, where do you see the future of this project going? What is the most interesting application that hasn’t been done yet, or the things that are really gonna be the next level in unlocking Playground for everyone?

There’s quite a few. Imagine being able to go to WordPress.org and have a WordPress demo right then and there without having to download anything. Then you customize it, and you have a button to host your website anywhere or just to download it.

Imagine having a live preview for all the themes and plugins in the directory and even in WordPress core, but these are sooner than later. Maybe like, let’s talk more grandiose, shall we? So there’s this term, 1 billion new users coming online in the next, like in the nearest future, and plenty of them doesn’t even own a desktop device. Maybe they have a mobile phone, maybe they have a tablet, maybe we’re talking about a young, prospective developer somewhere. And currently, if you don’t own a desktop device, you cannot contribute to the WordPress plugin ecosystem at all.

Like, we’re seeing more and more of creating themes with no code, which is really exciting. But you cannot build the plugin, really. Well, with WordPress Playground. Suddenly you can do development on a mobile device. So development tools and code editors and just the entire suite of things we use as the developers on our desktop of devices like this may come online and be available in your browser.

And if you’re on a train and you just have a phone with you, but you still want to learn, how to build a plugin, well, you’ll be able to do that. Furthermore, there’s a lot of exciting opportunities with ChatGPT, as in, well, here’s a WordPress running entirely on your device. So maybe if that’s connected to ChatGPT, you’ll be able to say, well, I like fish, or like, I want two columns and a photo of a racing car on top of it.

And because ChatGPT can output HTML, we connect the two, and suddenly, you can build a website entirely in your browser using natural language.

Man, that’s, that’s really interesting. It really does unlock the next, potentially the next like, wave of innovation in the WordPress experience, especially removing all the complications of getting set up and actually seeing what’s there. I think that it really could, be huge for users every day.

Oh, here’s one more. So, edge computing is big lately, and it’s going to be bigger in the future. WordPress Playground runs on this new technology called Web Assembly, and it just happened so that a bunch of edge computing providers allows you to run web assembly on their gear. So imagine having WordPress running entirely in edge infrastructure with no centralized server.

Truly decentralized WordPress. It could be big for a well cost of operating, but also for speed, but also even further down in the future. Imagine downloading the actual, you know, even WordPress around time to your device and having the entire website on your phone. So then you know, you’re on a train, you enter a tunnel, but you can still browse that WooCommerce store and add things to your cart even though there is no range at all.

Wow, that’s, that’s pretty crazy. How far out there do you think something like that is?

It’s hard to tell. I mean, technically, it is possible. There are a lot of challenges with regard to privacy, right? And data security for the edge computing case specifically. As for the development tools, there was a Cloud Fest hackathon earlier this year where I was with Daniel Bachhuber, also from Automattic, and we led this exciting project that brought the WordPress development environment into the browser using a couple of editors that are out there, and this is too much of an MVP for actual production use yet, but we got it working, and we build an actual plugin on a phone without internet access.

Oh, that’s awesome. That’s really cool, man. Well, this has been quite a pleasure. Thanks, Adam, for chatting all about WordPress Playground. Folks, just be sure to check out developer.WordPress.org/playground to explore, experiment, and play with WordPress Playground.

What a remarkable new way of working with and experiencing WordPress. I would love to be able to find ways across the project and ecosystem to help folks see what they’re getting into before they get into it, but also, who knows what the future holds for that project. Keep an eye on it.

That brings us to our small list of big things happening right now in the WordPress project. The first one is that the Kim Parel Memorial Scholarship for WordCamp US 2023 is open, and applications for it are the WordPress Foundation will once again be offering that scholarship for Travel to WordCamp US.

It is for specifically for women in technology, women in the WordPress space. I’ll include a link to that in the show notes.

The second thing is WordPress’ 20th anniversary is still coming, as we heard in the last podcast.

So we have reached over 100 events that are scheduled on or around May 27th, which is WordPress’ launch date. There is still time to find your closest location and attend one of those events. And probably, there’s also time to pull together an event of your own. Head on over to wp20.WordPress.net if you would like to see events in your area.

And the third thing is WordCamp US 2023. I realize WordCamp Europe comes before that, but the programming team actually has a really interesting thing that they’re doing this year. They have some changes to the way that they are organizing the event and finding speakers for the event. But as always, they are working very hard to make sure it is an attendee-focused event.

I’m gonna include a link or two to some announcements that are really worthwhile there. Head on over to the podcast page to see those. And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Thanks again to my guests, and I’ll see y’all in a couple of weeks.

Fabian Kägy and Birgit Pauli-Haack discuss the new enhancements in Gutenberg plugin releases 15.7 and 15.8 as well as the Experiments available in the plugin.

Special Guest: Fabian Kägy

Announcements

What’s released

WordPress 6.2.1 + 6.2.2

Gutenberg 15.7

Gutenberg 15.8

Experiments in Gutenberg

Zoomed out view	Test a new zoomed out view on the site editor (Warning: The new feature is not ready. You may experience UX issues that are being addressed) (#41156)
Color randomizer	Test the Global Styles color randomizer; a utility that lets you mix the current color palette pseudo-randomly. (#40988)
Command center	Test the command center; Open it using cmd + k in the site or post editors. (#50128)
Grid variation for Group block	Test the Grid layout type as a new variation of Group block. (#49018)
Details block	Test the Details block (#49808)
Block Theme Previews	Enable Block Theme Previews (#50030)
Navigation block	Test the Navigation block using the Interactivity API (#50041)

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hello and welcome to our 83rd episode of the Gutenberg Changelog Podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk about WordPress Point Release, 6.2.1, Gutenberg 15.8, and of course the previous one, Gutenberg 15.7 as well, and some of the experiments featured hiding in the Gutenberg plugin. I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator of the Gutenberg Times and WordPress developer advocate, and a full-time core contributor for the WordPress Open Source project.

I’m so happy to have, again, Fabian Kägy back on the show. It’s been a while since we talked and so much happened. We just found out, it was the episode 59 and it was in February 2022, well, it’s a whole world happened in between. So for our new listeners, Fabian Kägy is the Associate Director of Editorial Engineering at 10up and a core contributor to the Gutenberg project since 2017, I think. So welcome back on the show, Fabian. How are you today?

Fabian Kägy: Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be back on this.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I’m glad you’re here. So I have to ask, editorial engineering, what does that entail at the agency 10up?

Fabian Kägy: So that is a special, in quotation marks, “made up role”, where I started down the path of a front end engineer and over time became more and more passionate about all things editorial experience. So that is now a special role where I get to focus part of my time on actually coming up with best practices and solutions for working with a block editor and helping the entire team level up and carved out my niche.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s awesome, especially because in view of the next phase of Gutenberg where it is actually all about collaboration on an editorial team, so making that a smooth experience is definitely something we all will be working on for when 6.3 come out, I think. Your input will be invaluable for your clients, as well as for the team, I think.

Fabian Kägy: Yes. I’m very, very excited about all the things that are lined up for all of us to work on and to explore, and it’ll be fun.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So with the developer blog, I’m part of the editorial team that does reviews and works with writers. Once in a while, we start out with Google Docs and have everybody comment on it. Some writers say, “Well, I’m waiting for that moment where I don’t have to use Google Docs anymore to collaborate with people on a post and not have to copy/paste it over.” So we are very much looking forward to that collaboration and we will be eating the Gutenberg dog food, so to speak, on the developer blog.

Announcements

Speaking of the developer blog, Justin Tadlock just published the What’s New for Developers in May 2023 on the developer blog, and that’s a series of roundup posts that were started in February, where we look at all the publications that come out throughout the month, what’s new in core, the Gutenberg plugin, the keeping up with Gutenberg index page, and so much more, and just pick those things that are relevant for developers not to teach them how to use them, but more like, “Watch out, this is coming,” and prepare them for an X release pretty much.

The main one has quite a few items in there that are highlighted there. One is the Block Selectors API, which has definitely the markup of a larger tutorial, but it got quite a few developers excited about CSS and their blocks and being more in control of it. Another one as we will also talk about it is the first community theme and all things. So it’s pretty much a roundup of a lot of things that are interesting for extenders like plugins, developers, theme developers, and also agency developers.

So we share the latest blog post link in the show notes, but if you haven’t looked at those yet, and if you’re a developer, subscribe to the feed of the developer blog or just for the roundup post so you get a heads up on many things.

Fabian Kägy: I would highly encourage everybody to take a look at those because they’re super valuable, just quick shares of what’s going on, what are the things to look out for, and even if you’re not developing for the actual experimental Gutenberg plugin, it is something. It makes it so much easier when the next big WordPress update comes around to know what’s in the pipeline, what are the things that are being talked about and already have some grasp of just what’s coming.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, thank you so much. Justin does a great job in putting it all together and also shares some resources that are available on Learn WordPress. Then there were two new posts since we had the last show. There was one on how Webpack and WordPress packages interact by Ryan Welcher. That really gets you a little bit more theory around how WordPress and Webpack work together. For those that are not like me, I trust the things … I trust in God. I trust in things that if I put an NPM, run something, that it’s all going to work out, but some people want to really dive into Webpack some more and this gives them a great introduction to that. How are you doing with Webpack? Are you manipulating Webpack for your own development?

Fabian Kägy: So I used to do it a lot, especially in the early days of the WordPress Scripts package. There were so many things that were not yet a part of it, and I was very actively adding hacky solutions to add post CSS and all of those SaaS things to WordPress Scripts. That was my introduction to actually working with Webpack. Now, WordPress Scripts takes care of most of our needs or for some of the things, we have a similar tool at 10up that is a helper so we don’t have to deal with custom Webpack configurations.

I read through that post from Ryan about how that interacts, and it’s a really solid deep dive. If you want to understand the areas, the inner workings of how some of these Webpack plugins interact, which you don’t need to, but if you want to, that is very, very useful.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Then the other blog post was the per-block CSS with theme.json. The per-block CSS came out out of feedback from the community that custom CSS were not available anymore to put in custom CMS for the block themes and for sites, and it was introduced with 6.2, but it also needs some additional handle. Justin wrote a blog post about it, how best to think about per-block CSS with theme.json without getting too deep into the weeds and how that’s offered to the user. So definitely read up about it.

For the FSE program, Anne published two summary posts and you make your part of coffee first because they’re both very long but also very detailed from the latest testing calls. One was Build Your Block Theme with the great block theme plugin and the other one was the testing call 21 for the FSE program for the front page fund summary. There will be a new testing call coming out of the FSE program.

So if you are into block themes and users use them and all that, it’s definitely a good overview on what are the pain points, what are the team working on because Anne is very, very thorough in adding to all pain points or discussion points, also the PRs or the issue that is on GitHub about that particular topic. So you can chime in with your opinions, with your experiences, and with your testing, and it would really help if you chime in and be encouraged to actually be part of the testing project. That’s it.

Community Contributions

Another great announcement and community contribution is the first theme coming out of the community theme project where community members and team members are working together on creating block themes and the first one is called Stacks. It’s a theme with which you can build slide decks. It’s a very interesting approach to a website that is more a slide deck rather than have navigation from page to page to page. It’s more like a guided tool that you can use it or you can use it for your next presentation, but you don’t have to use a third-party tool for that if you want to spin up a website and just use it for your presentation.

It’s quite interesting to see how that comes together. The code is certainly available on GitHub and we share both the announcement post, as well as the write up by Sarah Gooding on the WP Tavern for you.

Fabian Kägy: These explorations and these themes and plugins that allow you to build your slide deck in the block editor, I’m always amazed when I see that. I think a couple of years ago, Ella was maybe one of the first ones who did talk at a React conference and blew my mind in the end when they revealed, “Hey, and all of this was created in the block editor and these slides are powered by it.” I think Nick Diego also did it at WordCamp US or at WordCamp and it’s always pretty cool to see.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: You’re right. Nick Diego did it at WordCamp US for his talk, Build A Block in 15 minutes, and he built actually that slide back there as well. It’s very interesting how this can be used on your own website. Yes, Ella had a slide. It was actually a block that she added. I think it was the same for Nick Diego and now we have a theme for it. So it’s really cool.

What’s Released

All right. That brings us into what’s released and, of course, let’s start with the minor release for WordPress, the 6.2.1 Point Release that just came out this week and there were a few hiccups there. Do you want to talk about this and what’s happening there?

Fabian Kägy: Sure. So 6.2.1 was released, I believe it was at some point early this week. One thing, there was a security issue that the security team took care of and made sure that that gets resolved as quickly as possible, but that security issue essentially resulted in short codes no longer working in block templates. So in a block-based theme, if you have a short code inside a block template, that will no longer actually get converted to the dynamic data. That has caused some issues for folks, especially around auto updates because it’s just a minor patch release, but it is breaking some existing sites, which as always, it is a very difficult choice to make and a very unfortunate thing when that has to happen because of security thing.

There is an open issue in track where a lot of this is getting discussed right now, and it was discussed in the core chat yesterday, where essentially, it is very unfortunate when something like that has to happen. From my perspective, I think the team, if there is a security issue, that is the only thing that can be done. The only thing that I think we as a community can try to be a little better at is communicating those types of things ahead so folks are more aware of that, “Hey, we needed to make a difficult decision here. Beware, you should make this update, but here are some things that you can do instead to help your site still be up there,” because the communication around the issue could have been a little better.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I don’t think there’s no maybe about it, but it was a little obscure in the change log and it wasn’t saying, “Okay. It’s going to break sites,” but I think it’s really hard to also suggest a solution right now. So Jean Baptist Audras was one of the release leads together with George Mamadoshvilli, and he wrote in the core dev chat on Wednesday night, “The release itself went pretty well. Thanks everyone for your patience. However, as you may know, one security fix led to the important issues with the short codes used in templates, but it was not templates per se, but block templates in block themes. So the issue is currently actively discussed in the security editor team and some hypotheses have been made to sort this out in a quick followup release. No schedule is available right now because the discussions haven’t been finished yet, but it will depend on the followup patch currently discussed by the editor team.”

So to just point out, and Paul Byron had actually … All the solutions on how to deal with it right now in the emergency situation when you see dozens or even hundreds of page breaks, one is to roll back to 6.2 with a core rollback plugin, use the short code, and put them in template parts. That seems to be working in the block themes that you put the short code in a template part and add that template part to the template or have … In the ticket that you mentioned, Fabian, there were also a code example on how to introduce making the shortcuts work again, but all three of them introduced the security issue again.

So I’m not sure quite how to advise people to work, but there are no good choices right now because you are caught between you want your client’s side to work, but you also don’t want their security issue to be out there too long. So the core editor team is definitely working on a solution to fix the security fix, but all, what I just said, is actually just introducing back the security issue into your sites.

So there are also opinions that short codes might be a legacy way of dealing with things. Maybe it’s a good call for converting the most important short codes to blocks and use them for the block editor instead of … but not everybody has the capacity for it, not everybody has the time for it or they’re just not there yet, but the plugins that they use are also not converting the shortcuts to blocks. So it’s the nature of the beast. I don’t think the shortcuts will ever go away, but there’s a better way to handle that.

Fabian Kägy: Yeah, definitely. In regards to the various options that we have right now, rolling back and that plugin that exists and that code that you can add to your theme, those all add back the vulnerability, like you said. I wasn’t sure from my understanding whether putting the short code in the template part actually caused any issues. I thought that that was the best proposed solution even though it’s clunky to have to deal with template parts for those areas individually, but from my understanding, that was the best outcome where you’re not really introducing the security vulnerability, but also can retain your feature or the look of your site. So I think that is the best option right now, but yeah, it is a little opaque.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Good point. Thank you for pointing that out again. Okay. The rest of 6.2.1, quite a few bug fixes for core, as well as for the editor that were found during the release of 6.2 and didn’t make it into 6.2, but that’s why the followup release was really on the schedule relatively to the 6.2 release. We will also share the changelog for the release in the show notes, as well as the tickets for the discussion. Paul Byron also added that solution with the template parts to the ticket so you have it all in one place to look up for if you want to follow up on that.

Gutenberg 15.7

All right. Next one up was Gutenberg 15.7 and it had quite a few enhancements. One is that as group and media texts have now allowed blocks attributes that can be passed to the inner block props, so to speak, that means that you can control which blocks can be added to a certain group or a media text block if you wanted to.

Fabian Kägy: That is a really useful thing for extenders or theme builders or if you create a pattern that is meant to be a certain thing, you’re now able to restrict which other blocks can be used within that area, which can be super useful when you build a call to action and have some styling around that and don’t want to support a table to be in that call to action, for example. This is so useful to be able to do that. So we don’t have to build the custom block for it, but instead we can create a pattern and have all those options and can curate that editorial experience to really, the level that we want to curate it to. With the template and template block, we were able to do some things, but now with the allowed blocks, we have most of the controls of an actual inner block area also exposed for these blocks that support inner blocks, which is very useful, I think.

Fabian Kägy: Next up, we have the site logo added a replacement flow that allows you to change out the actual logo using the inspector control. That is just an addition, an alternative way that you can deal with the site logo essentially. You can still use the inline controls, but while you are in the sidebar tweaking your spacing or any other visual controls, you can also quickly swap out the media there, which I think is an interesting approach to this.

For this one in particular, I’m interested to see the feedback around it because for the most part, we’ve been very strict about there should be direct manipulation of content right in the editor canvas and not many controls should live in the inspector controls. It’s not removing it from the inline, but it’s also adding that secondary way of manipulating it to the inspector controls. I’m very curious to see how that will play out and how that may affect just how we use this.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So inspector controls is just another way to say sidebar, just make sure where those tools are when you first encounter them. I think it comes more like we want to be a parity with a customizer. That’s one more step. Then in the inspector in the sidebar, when you replace the media, you are going right directly to the media library and select that. So you don’t have to … It seems to be a slightly different workflow than it is from the toolbar.

So the next feature is actually a really cool addition or enhancement of the fluid typography. So when the fluid typography was introduced first in 6.1, it still had the problem that if you have very large fonts, they wouldn’t go small enough for the mobile version because the calculations would stop and it would still be too big. This feature introduces a logarithmic scale factor to calculate the minimum font size and now the font adopts to all screen sizes. Even if you have a 68 or 102 pixel font, it will scale down to a mobile version and not stop at 50 or something like that.

Fabian Kägy: The next thing on the list here is the behavior of the top toolbar has been changed, and that is for a long time now you’ve been able to using that user settings menu in the upright corner change the behavior of the block toolbar to no longer be attached to the actual block, but instead always be fixed at the top of the editor. The behavior of that has been changed so that you can collapse that toolbar and still have it available there, but because the space in that top toolbar is quite sparse, that allows for just some more flexibility with how things are getting laid out there.

There are a couple more things that we’ll talk about later that were changed about the overall layout of that tool toolbar. Actually, I like it very much the way that it’s coming together and with some of the explorations happening there. I really like the direction where a lot of this is going right now.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It also fixed … One particular thing that was still missing is that you now have access to the parent block, which on the block toolbar you were always able to select the parent toolbar and then the sidebar changed and everything. When you had the toolbar fixed on the top, you wouldn’t have that particular icon available to click on to manipulate the parent block. That has changed too, and it came in with that particular feature there.

I was always 50/50. Some weeks I like having the block toolbar right on the block, especially when I’m further down on the block page, and sometimes I just want it on the top and I’m changing it all the time. I don’t know how you do it. So I have not tested this new toolbar fixed setting yet, but I definitely will. I read through the comments and there are some discussions. So please add your feedback and your experiences to it and what you think about it to make it the best it can be.

The next is that the image block now also displays … No, it’s not the image block, it’s when an image is in a block or in a template, it now also displays the borders on the placeholder. So if you have a template that gives you all the series of blocks and each block you want the feature image there, you will also see now in the placeholder the color of the borders, including the color of it. So it makes your choices of images maybe even smoother. It’s very subtle, but it’s definitely a live quality enhancement that I definitely like because sometimes you just need to have a picture that does not clash with your borders if you had a design option that image has borders.

Fabian Kägy: It just makes your life a lot easier when you’re creating a template and you don’t … Before this when there was a placeholder where no actual image was selected for the post, it was just difficult to gauge, “Hey, how do these border controls actually affect this?” Having the placeholder resemble the actual image much closer and retain all of those border controls is just a very good thing.

Next up, we have a change in experiment for the actual pattern insertion modal, which I am really excited about. When you use the pattern instruction modal, you know that all of the various patterns are displayed in a grid, and that grid can look a little weird sometimes because it’s very staggered how these … Some patterns are very tall, and then the next one is very narrow, very short. There’s a lot of white space in that modal. This option here tries a masonry layout where they actually … If you’ve ever used Pinterest, it’s essentially that type of layout where it just fills all that white space and it’s showing all of those, I think, in a more elegant fashion and it just makes that look a little more refined. I’m very happy to see that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s definitely a more natural look for the pattern modal. The next feature is that duotone block controls are now added to the sidebar. They were hidden before in the block toolbar and you had to know that they are there and the icon was a little bit obscure. Then the options when you do it in the block toolbar is it feels like you are in the wrong place to make those decisions, and now you can make them from the sidebar. I really like that. It’s a clear adoption to the interfaces that we saw from other design tools.

Fabian Kägy: Next up, in the accessibility section, there are some refactors of how the ARIA attributes for the list view have been modified, which makes it much easier and much more accessible to navigate through the list view. It’s always good to see those enhancements over time.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Those ARIA levels, there were quite a few in the list view, so there was a major overhaul of the display of the list view. I think Alex Stein did some great work there to make it happen and put it over the finish line.

So I’m scrolling a little bit further down to the changelog and I have the feeling we are done with 15.7. It was a smaller release, but it had definitely some great features in there.

Gutenberg 15.8

We are now coming up with 15.8. Fabian, you were the release lead on that. Do you want to kind of kick it off and let us know what’s in there?

Fabian Kägy: Sure. So there were a couple of major features which get their introduction here, which is always fun. One of them is the addition of a command center. There actually is … There was a post on the make blog from Riad that I’m sure will get added to the release note or to the podcast notes here that explains a little bit more in depth what this command center actually is. Right now, it is an experiment, but it essentially like spotlights on a Mac, for example, or some of these launchers. You have a quick keyboard command. In this case, it’s command K, to launch essentially, an open prompt field where you can put in your prompts and jump to different places of the editor or create new pages or just perform quick actions.

It’s also meant to be extendable and meant to be something that plugin developers can hook into and allow users to actually quickly navigate their site and perform actions. I’m really excited to see if this comes to life and explore how this ships out in the future. With this feature, I’m so here for it, I’m so excited about it. I cannot wait for the day where this gets expanded outside of the editor view and is just available in all of the screens of WordPress because right now, it is limited to the editor screens, but I think in the future, this will be available in all of the pages of the admin of WordPress. I’m so looking forward to that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Riad’s post on the Make Core Blog … Blog and block, sometimes I get it mixed up, but I did it right this time. It’s the Make Core Blog. It’s called Command Center and Request for Feedback. So he explains what the prototype is. There’s also a small little video that quickly shows you how it works and then explains the API and the static commands and also what dynamic commands are, definitely, and the contextual commands. So there are three commands that you can have it use, but it’s also the extendability in mind for plugin developers.

I think it also triggered a few things. If you want to employ an AI to use within the block editor, having a standard interface that can call AI commands is certainly beneficial to the editor. So as Fabian said, I will share the post in the show notes so you can chime in and see what you think about it and how it works. It’s really hard to describe on a podcast, audio podcast, for that reason.

Fabian Kägy: As somebody who has championed extensibility and plugability in the editor for such a long time, I’m so happy to see how this feature is getting rolled out and how it is built with that extendability and plugability from the very beginning. So I’m really excited about this.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: If you want to try it, it’s still behind the experiment flag. You need to go to install the plugin 15.8 and then go to the Gutenberg menu on your WP admin and then there’s an experiments page and you need to check the mark for the command center to actually be able to test it.

The next item on the list is a new feature as well, and the first version of the revisions UI for the global styles, so all the talk about global styles and new features and new options to change things. Some people want to try just something out and then revert to the previous version and there was no revision available for the global styles. Now, there is, and it has actually some nice features. When you have the site editor style, the style site open and click on the revisions, it will show you a history of the revisions, and when you click on the items, it will show you a version of it on the canvas and you can also compare versions.

So I think it’s getting there. It definitely needs some more refinement in terms of what information will be there, how many revisions are we showing, and all that. So that’s a really interesting progression on this global styles editing.

Fabian Kägy: If you’ve ever used revisions of a standard post or a page since the block editor was introduced, this is a great feature for global styles and I think it’s the right thing to roll it out for this first, but the live preview of a revision in a rich preview makes me so excited for a future where we can eventually get rid of the existing code view of revisions for standard post content stuff and actually show rich previews of that because, especially since the introduction of blocks, the revisions UI is just really, really difficult for non-technical people and even technical people to really manage because you just get a code view and are trying to figure out what changed.

This year is a visual preview of what revisions look like for global styles and it’s making me so excited about what’s to come for more other visuals or revisions in the future.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I totally agree that revisions for the posts and pages are on the board for the collaboration project, the phase three of Gutenberg and making revisions be aware is definitely something we are all looking forward to.

Fabian Kägy: Next up, we have the inspector panel. So again we’re talking about that right-hand sidebar of the global styles panel is now getting or got a refactor to make it work and look more similar to how it works on the standard post. I think that for a long time had been an area of confusion for me where if you wanted to change the typography options or color options in the global styles, the interface was just structured completely differently to how it is structured when you just select a paragraph block, for example, in the standard editor. This is unifying those two experiences to be alike and that just lifts a whole bunch of cognitive load that you have to think about and just makes it work the same way in both of those areas.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Excellent. In the same way, there is now a details block. We talked about it on the show before. That is in experiments and it now has been enhanced to be able to use InnerBlocks in the details of the spoiler alert block. I call it spoiler alert because the detailed summary that’s as broad idea that some people don’t know what we’re talking about, but you have a sentence or just a headline, and then you get an arrow and then it reveals additional content. You can use it to talk about spoilers in your book review or in your film review or you can hide details that only a certain amount of readers will need about a technical thing or so. In the earlier versions, you only could add a paragraph to those details or only paragraph blocks and now you can add images, you can add quotes and all that. So this is definitely an enrichment of the details block. Also an experiment though.

Fabian Kägy: That is really something … I know I have been involved with those conversations of the details block for way too long already, but I’m really looking forward to getting the community feedback of just what’s available there. It’s a very difficult thing because the detailed summary is essentially an accordion, but there are some accessibility issues that make it not the best use case for an accordion. So with these changes, just I’m interested in the feedback of the community of how they’re able to use all of the design tools to make it function the way they want to or whether there are struggles because this changes a little bit of what was there before and there were some more design options that you had with that earlier approach, but it also was a little less intuitive because it had more levels of nesting and the summary element was its own block and was just more complicated, and this is a much simpler implementation of that block. Also, it therefore removes some of the options that you have available. I’m really interested to see how that plays out and what people will think about it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Many, many, almost all block collections that came out when the block editor first was released had an accordion block in there. A lot of people liked it for FAQs and for how-tos and all that, but it was interesting, I really didn’t really know why there wasn’t an accordion block in core until I read through the discussions about the details and summary. Some people will make it work as an accordion, but what the accordion does, it knows about the other block. So you have an accordion. The first is the tab on top and then you have details and then you have another tab and then the details and each accordion knows about the other one being open or not open. That’s very hard to replicate in a model way how the block editor works.

I tested the details in summary block that’s in the experiment right now with 15.8 and I didn’t find it particularly easy to navigate because it had some hiccups. I don’t know how to get out of it. Normally, if you have a list block, when you hit enter twice, you’re out of it and then you can add additional blocks to it. There are no visual cues when you are in the block writing or adding additional blocks. There are no visual cues, are you still in the details section or are you not? The summary, there is no way to get from the summary to the details block per keyboard. You need to change controls on it.

So there are a few things, but that’s why it’s behind the experimental flag and not yet completely released. So do as a favor and enable that test, that experiment so you can also test it. As Fabian said, community input is wanted and necessary.

Fabian Kägy: Next up, there is another addition to the site editor and that is in the main sidebar of the site editor. There now is a new menu item called Pages that allows you to view the 10 most latest edited pages of your site and directly jump in and edit them. That is one step of actually making content editing in the site editor more possible. Again, that was one of the features that was there in earlier revisions of the site editor but then got taken out before it got released in I believe it was 6.1. These are explorations of slowly adding that content editability back into the site editor. It’s really interesting to see how that works. It is so difficult how to best communicate with the user when you’re editing parts of a template versus when you’re editing parts of the actual content of a page.

I think that that will still be the most difficult issue to solve for here, but this is slowly introducing that back into the site editor and it is really cool to see just having all of those things in there.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Look at the menu item on the left-hand side, as other people say the dark side of the site editor, but it’s there. So the next item or feature that got introduced makes Fabian really, really happy and it’s the introduction of the plugin template settings panel slot, which means on the sidebar, there is now a way for plugin developers to extend the feature set that’s displayed to the user. Have you tried it out yet? Have you looked at that feature?

Fabian Kägy: I’ve not yet had a chance to play with it, but yeah, more slots and more places for extenders to add to the experience and showcase custom settings and those types of things always make me happy, especially when they’re done right, and this seems pretty cool.

Next up, we have an update that is very useful for extenders again. It consolidates and adds some more documentations to the storybook. If you’re not familiar with the storybook, that is actually something when you go to the GitHub repository of the Gutenberg plugin, in the right-hand sidebar there is, I think it’s called pages or deployments. You can actually jump to that storybook right from GitHub and view it. The storybook essentially is showcasing all of the various React components that were built as part of the Gutenberg plugin and are available in WordPress core and is showing live previews of them with some controls. You can tweak some of the settings right there visually and also have some of the documentation there. This consolidates and changes a little bit of just how that is structured and how that appears. Just in general, the storybook that has been there for a long time is a super valuable and great tool and it’s always nice to see additional enhancements for that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I definitely want to point that out that at WordCamp Asia, I heard from a few people that were at the contributor day and working with the core editor table there, they were really surprised that many developers that came and wanted to work on things did not know about the storybook. I think we have not done a good job in explaining what it is and pointing people to it. I think it’s part of the documentation that is in the components, but it’s not referred to … Most of the time, it’s not referred to in the documentation on the developer site in the block editor handbook. We are going to change that a little bit and add more links to the storybook for the various components because it’s such a rich developer experience where you can change things and then you click on a button and it gives you the code for it for the changes that you made and you can immediately reuse it in your own code base. Definitely, I take any chance when I can talk about the storybook now.

The next part is a feature for the block editor that is talking about the dimension controls and it’s not always visible. So now, it’s an attempt to show all the dimensions control at the beginning and not hide them so much where you had to open them and then decide do you want to see the padding, do you want to see the margin. It’s now easily available so you don’t have to look for it, what padding and margins is, because we all talk about padding and margins, but we never talk about dimension controls. So when the words appear on the screen, you don’t as easily recognize that that’s what you’re talking about.

Fabian Kägy: This, again, is also something where it is just difficult and interesting. The vertical space that we have available in the sidebar is very limited and it’s always an interesting balance to strike of how much do we show by default versus how much do we hide behind the setting so it’s not overwhelming for somebody that is new to the editor, but also makes it discoverable for somebody. So it is not changing any of the features that are available, but it is trying to show some more by default. I’m very interested to see how folks will react to that, whether it feels overwhelming or whether it makes it more approachable. The only real way to find that out is by actually testing that. So I’m glad to see those explorations happening in the plugin.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It might go away again or will be tweaked later on. So your comments are certainly wanted and necessary. We share in the show notes the release post for 15.7, the release post for 15.8. By the time you listen to this, Fabian will have published it, and I’m sure also, Sarah Gooding will talk about both releases or already has on 15.7 and 15.8.

What’s in Active Development or Discussed

or I just wanted to at the end of it … So those were all the releases and we are now talking about what’s in active development or discussed. We have right now the largest number of experiments in the block editor since the beginning. I think there are now seven experiments hiding on the experiments page for the plugin. So let’s talk about them. Some of them we already talked about. So it starts out with a zoomed out view and it’s test a new zoomed out view on the site editor. So I’m reading from the page now and it also has a warning attached to it, “The new feature is not ready. You may experience UX issues that are being addressed.” UX means user experience, just to clarify that. Did you test that before?

Fabian Kägy: Yeah. So the zoomed out view essentially means that you can more quickly navigate through or get a more holistic view of your page and not appearing in the same size as you would always see it, but instead, it zooms out and shows you more of your entire page smaller in the canvas. That is very useful when you want to make changes to your global styles and just want to see how it affects your site more holistically or when you tweak those things. Especially when you switch between block theme variations, that is just useful to see how it will not just affect that very small area of the site that you see in your viewport, but instead see it more broadly for an entire page.

So I think this is a great thing to work on. Right now, as the warning says, there are some issues that are being worked on. Especially for working with global styles, having that more zoomed out view is very useful.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So if you tested it and you have an idea how to make it better, definitely air those on GitHub and filing an issue of that. So the second one, it says color randomizer, test the global styles color randomizer, a utility that lets you mix the current color palette pseudo- randomly. I think it’s one of those features where it said, “Okay. It’s cool to have and cool to test things out, but it’s not something that a lot of people would think they needed.” Do you have any thoughts on it?

Fabian Kägy: It is one of those features where from my perspective as somebody who works a lot in the large agency space, that is not a feature I would’ve ever come up with, but I can see how, especially if you’re somebody who’s just playing around in the editor trying to build a new design, it can be a useful partner to give you some inspiration of maybe you’re not the best with color theory and coming up with an accessible color palette yourself, and that can be a great way to get some inspiration for just showing you different variations of what your site could look like with different colors and spark some of that imagination, but it is one of those features that I know for a client site that has a design guide with strict color I would want to disable that feature and would not want to expose certain clients to that feature. So it’s definitely one of those where I can see it being useful for some, but also rather distracting for others. So I’m interested to see how that will actually get rolled out.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It might also be part of the explorations, but the design team does in figuring out is there a way to include different palettes that are on third-party sites that can come in and you can choose from, but I think it’s not a high priority right now for the team. That’s why it’s all still in the experimental phase and it hasn’t gone that route yet. I heard Matt Mullenweg and one of his state of the word talking about making color palettes that are out in the universe interesting, available to site builders or site owners in some way or shape.

The third test item on the page is the command center, a test of command center, open it up using command K in the site of post editor. We talked about it. I don’t think we need to elaborate some more, but that’s where you find it.

The fourth one is the grid variation for a group block, test the grid layout type as a new variation for the group block. Right now, that only works on the site editor because it’s actually a template or site design approach to the grid. Grid, it’s actually a CSS feature. So this tries to explore how you can make templates that adhere to a certain grid layout, but I’m not as knowledgeable about design to be able to use that. I think I need a little pre-beginner’s tutorial for that.

Fabian Kägy: It is. I am really happy to see this exploration being done right now. In the last couple of years, we got that row and stack variation of the group block, which essentially as a developer, that is my flex box. Flex box allows you to layout content in one direction, so either horizontally, the row, or vertically with the stack. The grid, you can achieve some of those grid layouts with the columns block, but the columns block, it is very difficult for it to wrap around. So if you wanted to, let’s say, have a three column grid that is not just one free column layout, but instead has two rows of those two columns, that is not really or is technically possible, but it is not ideal. That is where grid layouts come into play and are, I think, so much more powerful.

I think there also is an exploration that is not listed here of adding an actual grid layout or using CSS grid layout for the grid in the query block. We weren’t able to use grid when the editor first came out because it was too new of a CSS feature and we needed to support more older browsers, but that browser support has changed so much in the last couple of years that we’re now able to use grid in the editor. It just opens up so many new design possibilities and makes it so much easier.

I’ll say on the custom development side, grid block is one of the first things that we build on one or a grid block is one of the first things we build on many custom sites because it is just much more powerful than the columns block and also easier to use in a way. So I’m excited for these explorations.

I will say though, a couple of releases ago, the group block changed to show that variation picker when you first insert it where you have to pick between the variations. I’m not yet sure I’m in love with that approach of … I like the various variations of the group block, but when I add a new group, it always pauses me a little too much because I need to step back and, “Hey, I just want to start with a default grid or a default group and then continue with it.” So I’m happy for more of these variations of the group block and for more of those layout controls. I’m not quite sure we have found the best way to expose them.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I hear you. Making the decision to use a group block now becomes also a decision of what kind of flow you want and you are not there yet. When you get the group block, I understand that, but I’m also excited for the grid layout in terms of it is a feature that was requested quite a bit in the early days of the block editor layout site editing things, and it’s still missing. So now, certain plug-ins and block collections and theme collections have stepped in and allowed that already. So core is a little bit behind on that, but of course, core has a different outlook for the site editor than plugin developers have.

The fifth experiment in the experiments page is the details block with the detailed summary block. We talked about it. It’s there for you to test out.

The sixth one is the block theme previews, and it enables block theme previews. That’s not much of an explanation, but what it allows you is on your site … So the customizer had the live preview of themes that were already installed on your site so you can see how your site would need to change to when a theme would be activated. It’s more a decision making tool rather than a good design tool.

So with many, many block themes coming online, we are now beyond 300 in the directory. I think the largest number is 306. I think it helps with the decision if you want to change your theme out to have a better preview, and the customers that preview doesn’t work with it. This is the first iteration. I ran that through themes through the preview and it was a great experience, so much better than the original one to review certain parts of an existing site.

It also revealed that not all block themes are alike. There are significant differences, and having a tool to actually explore those differences or even notice them is invaluable, definitely. Not every theme behaves with this live preview feature in it, so if you are working on themes and either you have a starting theme in an agency or you use a collection of themes to build your sites to choose from, you might want to test them with this theme preview so you can turn on and off features and showcase a few things that are available in the preview.

Also, please, please comment on the issues or file issues on GitHub after your tests. I already found one that when I look for style variation and I want to see how a page changed the style variation, I don’t have a way to do this because the page that is linked, the link doesn’t go to the preview, it goes to the page in the template editor, and all of a sudden, I’m out of my mindset on a preview, but all of a sudden it gets me into the editor. So that’s common for things that are in testing, but it also needs to be pointed out that that’s a major stumbling point for someone who uses the feature for the first time.

The last one of the tests has just come in. It’s a navigation block that uses the still in Experiment interactivity API, and I have not used it. Did you look at that, Fabian?

Fabian Kägy: I looked at it briefly, but the summary of it is if you’re using it and you notice a difference that worked before, there’s a bug because this essentially swaps out the engine, but you should notice it as an end user. It changes how the front end JavaScript of the site works to use that interactivity API, but instead of some custom JavaScript that was purposefully written for this, using that interactivity API to make it more declarative, but as an end user, toggling that setting should not change anything about it works. Yeah, it may produce the actual bundle size, therefore make your site a little bit faster, but usability wise, there should be no difference and there should be full-on feature parity with how the navigation works today before or after you switch that setting.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Good to know. So if you don’t notice anything, it’s okay. Excellent. So this brings us to the end of the show today. Well, I think we talked a lot about all the new things that come to block editor and to WordPress. Thank you so much for joining me today. Fabian, is there anything that you want our listeners to know about the block editor, about WordPress, about 10up? Now is the chance to talk about it and we’ll add links to the show notes. I just wanted to say about 10up, you have a wonderful educational site about the block editor with quite a few white papers and tutorials. How did that come about? Is it your work or…?

Fabian Kägy: Yeah. The gutenberg.10up.com website, our block editor best practice site has been my baby for the last year and a half or so, where I got to spend a lot of time actually writing down how we as an agency approach working with the block editor and setting up the best practices for how to do that in the agency setting for that special type of client. Whereas the main documentation of core is more geared to end users, which is the right thing, but because of that, we decided that there is space for an additional resource to focus on the things that are important for those very curated experience for big clients and so forth.

So that is one thing that I would mention, just taking a look at that gutenberg.10up.com website, and if you have any feedback on that, feel free to reach out anywhere on the Make Slack or on Twitter or Masévon or Blue Sky or wherever you can find me pretty much always talking about block editor stuff.

Then the other thing that I will just mention is the 10up block components NPM package, which is my passion project and has been for the last three years or so, which essentially is a collection of React components that work like all of the WordPress packages, the WordPress components, WordPress block editor components. It is a collection of additional components that are adding sometimes very complex, sometimes easy functionality for you to build. If you build custom blocks, making that a whole lot easier so you have to write less code and know that it’s tested and is working with the way that it should, and doing that in a way that feels 100% like it is just core WordPress. I’m very happy and proud of that project. If you find it useful or if you have questions or feedback about that, always happy to chat.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, thank you so much. There’s some great resources. You mentioned custom blocks. There has been discussion around static block with this dynamic blocks. Where do you land?

Fabian Kägy: The way I think about it, if I’m building a plugin that is meant for the official directory where I as a developer do not have access to the site where the code is running on, I would go with a static block unless I need to show dynamic data. If I as the developer can access and have maintenance over the site I built dynamic blocks, and that means in the agency context where we’re often changing designs, making quick iterations, we are, for the most part, only building dynamic blocks because of that because we cannot spend the time to deal with deprecations and all of those things.

It really comes down to that where if you have … The thing that you should ask yourself is, “What should happen when I need to change something about this block on a code level? Should all of the old instances that maybe were published three years ago, should they also get those updates automatically or should I not … Should that historical content stay untouched and just stay the way that it was?” If it should stay in touch, static blocks is your right answer. That is the way to go. If it should update in all instances or if you need to modify the block structure very often and have access to the maintenance there, dynamic blocks are much easier to deal with and are … So I’m coming down most of the time on the dynamic side.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Dynamic blocks side. All right. So well, thank you for answering these quick questions and having some insight in how you work as a longtime block editor adopter and in the agencies. It was a great pleasure talking to you, Fabian. We will share all the links that you mentioned, of course, in the show notes. Before we end the show, oh, what’s your Twitter handle, Fabian?

Fabian Kägy: My full name spelled out, so F-A-B-I-A-N-K-A-E-G-Y, just all spelled together. You should be able to search for it and it should come up.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s just for the people who don’t go through the show notes. We, of course, have all the links in the show notes. As always, the show notes will be published on gutenbergtimes.com/podcast. This is episode 83. If you have questions, suggestions, and news that you want us to include in the next show, please send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. That’s changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. Thank you all for listening. Thank you for being here, Fabian. This is goodbye and I wish you a wonderful weekend.

WordPress 6.2.2 was released early this morning as a rapid follow-up to 6.2.1, which introduced a bug that broke shortcode support in block templates. Version 6.2.1 was also an important security release, but due to the catastrophic breakage for those using shortcodes in block templates, some users were implementing insecure workarounds or simply downgrading to 6.2 to keep critical functionality working on their websites.

WordPress contributors worked quickly over the weekend to ensure that users can now update to 6.2.2 with their shortcodes intact. The release post identified the removal of shorcode support in the previous release as “a regression” and a bug. This is an important recognition, as shortcodes are still a tool that users frequently rely on to insert functionality from plugins that haven’t made it available as a block, as well as a necessity for things that won’t work without inline shortcodes.

Version 6.2.2 is also a security release, as core contributor Jonathan Desrosiers said that the issue patched in 6.2.1 “needed further hardening” in this update.

Users are advised to update immediately and automatic updates are rolling out. Many reported having turned automatic background updates off for core after 6.2.1 broke their websites. Users who did so will need to manually update as soon as possible.

Hubby and I are almost settled in our new apartment, except we are still missing our furniture. They are scheduled to arrive on June 1, which would make it exactly 74 days, since they all got packed up in Sarasota. Yesterday we measured all the rooms, so we can decide where we can place the big items, and how to organize our offices. So, when I write “settled”, I mean getting accustomed to living in our neighborhood, organizing our infrastructure of daily life and using all the transportation choices, rather than being settled in the apartment.

I am excited about exploring the city a couple of days prior to Contributor Day.

This Weekend edition is again full of updates on the open-source projects, tutorials, and videos. Hope y’all enjoy it.

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

For each focus area, she described the scope and listed GitHub issues and PRs of the work in progress.

On the heals for the Roadmap, Hector Prieto published an update on the WordPress 6.3 Planning Roundup, confirming the release scheduled as it was proposed earlier and announcing Matias Ventura as the release lead and all other members of the release squad.

During the latest Hallway Hangout, contributors discussed what is in the works for the Site Editor and what can be expected for WordPress 6.3. Anne McCarty posted a summary and shared the video recording in Hallway Hangout: Let’s chat about the Site Editor & 6.3.

In his Design Share: Apr 24–May 5, Joen Asmussen shared what the WordPress design team has been working on the last two weeks. He lists quite a few avenues with their respective GitHub PR/Issue links, so you can follow along and chime in.

Justin Tadlock published the monthly roundup What’s new for developers? (May 2023) on the developer blog. It’s again full of focused notes about changes in the WordPress worlds relevant for extenders, plugin and theme builders and agency or freelance developers building sites for others.

Anne McCarthy published the next FSE Program Testing Call #23: Rapid Revamp. “With the roadmap to 6.3 published and another version of Gutenberg out in the wild, it’s time to test some of the upcoming features that are in the works to upgrade and polish the experience of using the Site Editor:” she wrote and listed all eight of them.

Led by Fabian Kägy, Gutenberg 15.8 was released on May 18th, 2023. The number of PRs merged for this release was considerably higher than for 15.7 and it’s expected to rise with the urgency of the upcoming WordPress 6.3 release. There are only three Gutenberg plugins releases left until Beta 1 on June 27.

It’s always a great pleasure to connect with Fabian Kägy. We had a great time geeking out over the blog editor while recording episode 83 of the Gutenberg Changelog. We discussed Gutenberg 15.7, 15.8 the feature available on the Experiments page and 6.2.1, Gutenberg Storybook and 10up tools. The episode is at the editor now, and it will arrive in your favorite podcast app over the weekend.

Riad Benguella published the post Command Center: Request for feedback asking for testing and review of a new feature that will come out of the experimental phase for Gutenberg 15.9, for now called the Command Center, and the Marketing team is probably recommending a new name: The Wayfinder.

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

Caroline Nymark published an Introduction to the Site Editor for creators. This tutorial is meant for Beginners and no-code creators and covers everything available since WordPress 6.2 and Gutenberg 15.7. Although it’s title Introduction, it is quite comprehensive and covers the Site Editor, Navigation, Styles, Templates and Template parts. Then she dives deeper into the Design Tools via the Styles menu item. You will be creating or modifying themes in no time!

Maxi Blocks – a template library for site builders using WordPress Block editor. It came recently out of beta and offers developers a whole range of design tools in an interface that has been built on top of Gutenberg, yet using custom components to offer additional design features. The plugin comes with hundreds of icons, patterns, templates and sixteen custom blocks. The Pro version is available at MaxiBlocks.com. It’s meant for designers looking for all the tools, not so much for beginners or site owners. There will be a learning curve due to the additional UI components.

MahdiAli Khanusiya built the plugin PatternWP – a pattern block library for WordPress. The first version offers patterns on many categories. for the busy site owner. The plan is to be adding new patterns and templates on a consistent basis.

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

Lots of feedback has been provided during the Call for Exploration. Anne McCarthy published FSE Program Build a Block Theme Summary. The TL;DR: “Using the Site Editor alongside the Create Block Theme plugin supercharges the experience, mainly by filling in gaps around font management and offering more nuanced creating/exporting options. With these added features, the Site Editor is both left to shine as a theme building tool and the current known pain points impacting regular site building come to the surface, like needing more clarity around where layers of styles are coming from. In general, feedback fell into three categories: Create Block Theme plugin pain points, missing options in the Site Editor (font management, synced patterns, desire for more styling options with certain blocks), and UX considerations for the Site Editor that match the site building experience. ” she wrote. The videos shared from the contributors are certainly eye-opening.

James Koussertari explained Using Layout Sizes in theme.json. “The layout setting in theme.json is great for developers, as they can set default container sizes for their design system, easily in one place. It also means that content editors do not have to think about which container sizes to set manually each time they add a block.” he wrote on the blog of the Gutenberg Market

The latest call for testing ended last week, too and Anne McCarthy recounts the feedback: FSE Program Front Page Fun Summary. The high-level feedback revealed: “In general, the call for testing was relatively tame bug wise, with only a few obvious ones found, mainly in the Navigation block. The usability feedback related to many ongoing projects in the Site Editor underscoring the impact of solving these consistent problems, in particular the clarification of the content <> template relationship and confusion around the overall experience of managing pieces of navigation. ” and “While the new Grid layout type was the primary focus of the testing call, feedback on it was limited to suggestions for consolidating the various options between the grid layout, Columns block, Gallery block, and Table block.” McCarthy wrote.

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.

Alfredo Navas, WebDevStudios was Having Fun with Query Loop Block and published a post to tell you all about it. He takes you along to explore the usefulness of the Query Loop block and learn how to extend its capabilities.

In his latest post for the Developer Blog, Michael Burridge created a tutorial on useEntityRecords: an easier way to fetch WordPress data. If you have simple data fetching requirements and don’t need additional customization or resolution checks, the useEntityRecords function can be a straightforward choice. Burridge shows how it simplifies data handling in contrast to useSelect + getEntityRecords.

Don’t miss next week’s Developer Hours about the new WordPress tool called Playground. Adam Zieliński will introduce the app and demo some great use cases for it. There are two events, so all timezones get a chance to participate live.

WPCampus will take place from July 12 to the 14th, 2023 in New Orleans. The organizing team released their schedule. WPCampus 2023 is a hybrid event. Join in-person or online.

Questions? Suggestions? Ideas? Don’t hesitate to send them via email or send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.

WordPress 6.2.2 is now available!

The 6.2.2 minor release addresses 1 bug and 1 security issue. Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately. All versions since WordPress 5.9 have also been updated.

WordPress 6.2.2 is a rapid response release to address a regression in 6.2.1 and further patch a vulnerability addressed in 6.2.1. The next major release will be version 6.3 planned for August 2023.

The update process will begin automatically if you have sites that support automatic background updates.

Security updates included in this release

The security team would like to thank the following people for responsibly reporting vulnerabilities and allowing them to be fixed in this release.

The issue above was originally patched in the 6.2.1 release, but needed further hardening here in 6.2.2. The Core team is thankful for the community in their response to 6.2.1 and collaboration on finding the best path forward for proper resolution in 6.2.2. The folks who worked on 6.2.2 are especially appreciative for everyone’s understanding while they worked asynchronously to get this out the door as quickly as possible.

Thank you to these WordPress contributors

WordPress 6.2.2 would not have been possible without the contributions of the following people. Their asynchronous coordination to deliver security fixes into a stable release is a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress community.

How to contribute

The WordPress 6.3 development cycle has begun and work is already underway on an ambitious list of features that will debut in the upcoming major release. It will cap off Phase 2 of the Gutenberg project, with an emphasis on polishing customization features and making them easier to use.

WordPress 6.3 Editor Triage co-lead Anne McCarthy published a roadmap to 6.3 this week, which summarizes what users can expect:

In addition to polishing and wrapping up phase 2, McCarthy’s post outlines the new features that are coming. Here are a few of the highlights:

This is a tentative glimpse at some of the user-facing features that may be coming in WordPress 6.3, but the roadmap includes many more items, screenshots, and quick demos.

“As always, what’s shared here is being actively pursued, but doesn’t necessarily mean each will make it into the final release of WordPress 6.3,” McCarthy said.

Gutenberg Lead Architect Matías Ventura will be leading WordPress 6.3. Beta 1 is expected in a little more than a month on June 27, 2023, with RC 1 on July 18, and the general release scheduled for August 8.

WordCamp Europe 2023 is just under three weeks away from happening in Athens on June 8-10. More than 2,700 tickets have been purchased and 527 remain, along with 49 micro-sponsor tickets.

Speaker announcements have concluded and the official schedule was published today. WCEU will be running three tracks of presentations and two tracks for workshops. Organizers have also announced a Wellness Track that will feature different activities throughout the day, including a Yoga class, a Tai Chi class, and a group hike.

“The Wellness Track is an important addition to WordCamp Europe because we need to find a balance and be more focused on taking care of our minds and bodies, taking care of the whole community and in turn the one world we have to live in,” organizer Ohia Thompson said.

“This means seeing our interconnectedness and moving forward with a focus on wellbeing, diversity, and sustainability. The Wellness Track this year is just the beginning of a more intentional future for everyone connected to WordPress.”

Last year the team hosting the event in Porto was called out for a lack of diversity on the organizing team, which performs critical tasks like selecting speakers and managing a speaker support program. In what appears to be an echo back to that controversy, a public interaction on Twitter earlier this month caused community members to question the organizing team.

WCEU was once again forced to reaffirm its commitment to diversity after Sjoerd Blom, one of the Global organizers, accused StellarWP’s Director of Community Engagement, Michelle Frechette, of “being prejudiced” when she questioned the lack of diversity in the first few rounds of speaker announcements.

Blom has since publicly apologized for his response to the criticism this week, reiterating that diversity matters to the team, but only after WCEU received overwhelmingly negative feedback regarding the incident.

WordCamp Europe has not yet published anything to mitigate the effects of this public altercation but damage control measures are likely in the works, as Blom indicated a more official response will be coming from the team.

We have a great conversation of tips and experiences when it comes to speaking at WordPress events.

This Week at WordPress.org (May 14, 2023)

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This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.

WordPress may soon be getting a Command Center, which would function as a quick search component for navigating to other areas of the admin, and would also be capable of running commands. The feature was introduced in Gutenberg 15.6 under the Experimental flag and currently has limited use in the Site Editor context while navigating and editing templates.

The Command Center project is intended to be expanded to the whole of wp-admin in an extensible way so plugin developers can register their own commands. This would also allow for AI-powered extensions to expedite design, content, and layout creation.

“One aspect worth highlighting is the proposed API to interact with the command center,” Gutenberg engineer Riad Benguella said in a post requesting feedback on the project. “The command center has been developed as an independent @wordpress/commands package. It offers APIs to render and register commands dynamically. These extension points allow plugins to inject any commands of their liking and opens the door for interactions with LLMs.”

Benguella shared a video of the prototype navigating between templates and template parts in the Site Editor:

Feedback so far had been generally positive, but contributors on the project will have the challenge of providing real examples of the Command Center’s benefits in order for some to fully realize the vision for this feature as more than just a fancy shortcut for power users.

“Neat, but I’m unclear what practical problem this actually solves?” WordPress developer Jon Brown said.

“Currently there is a clear easy to find and use drop down at the top center of the editor. Are people really having problems using that? This seems to complicate things where users have to know the names of the items to type them in. Does the average user know to type in ‘post meta’ to edit that?

“There are couple plugins that have done this admin wide, which again while neat, seems better aimed at power users that already know what they’re looking for.”

Benguella responded that the Command Center is being developed as “a complementary UI tailored specifically for average and power users,” and that users would not be required to remember technical terms in order to use it.

Other participants in the conversation asked that contributors consider not releasing the Command Center in WordPress until it can serve contexts beyond just the Site Editor.

“Initially we’ve added the command center to both post and site editors but I expect that we’ll be adding to all WP-Admin once we’ve proved its behavior and APIs,” Benguella responded. The API is currently still in the experimental stage in Gutenberg and it’s not yet known if expansion to wp-admin would be added before or after the Command Center lands in the next version of WordPress.

“Love the concept, hate that it’s limited to the Editor,” WordPress developer Dovid Levine said.

“This would ideally be implemented holistically – either as part of a push to modernize the long-neglected dashboard or API efforts to interact with GB data outside of the Editor. We’ve seen how slow developer adoption is when done the other way (GB first/only) – and worse, how painful it is for the early adopters/advocates if/when considerations beyond the Editor are finally taken into account.”

The first milestone, powering quick search for content and templates in the editor, is outlined on GitHub where contributors can track the progress. The Command Center will also be tested in the future as part of the FSE Outreach Program. Benguella is requesting feedback on the feature and its API on the post published to the core dev blog, specifically regarding the user experience and whether the APIs detailed in the post are capable enough to address third-party use cases.

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Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

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Session 15 Corey & Cory Launch a WordPress Product Live

WordPress provides a life-changing turning point

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