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In the thirty-sixth episode of the WordPress Briefing, Josepha Haden Chomphosy revisits the Beginner’s Guide to Contributions to the WordPress open source project. Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Credits Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Beatriz Fialho Production: Santana Inniss Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod References Performance Team InformationWordCamp US Contributor Day Table Lead InfoCall for Testing #15: Category Customization Contributor Quizlet Transcript [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:10] Hello everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing. The podcast where you can catch quick explanations of some of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project and the community around it, as well as get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:40] WordPress is an open source software project and, like many other open source software projects, has an entire community of people who show up to help improve it however they can. Most of you probably use WordPress every day in some way. And I’m going to assume that since you listen to this podcast, you’re also interested in how this all works. One of the things I mention practically every episode is that WordPress works and continues to work because of generous contributions from people all around the world. I consider my work with WordPress to be my way of giving back for everything that this software enabled me and my family to do. But I once was a first-time contributor, and I remember what it felt like before I knew everything. I felt like it moved at the speed of light and that I could never tell what to do now, let alone what to do next. And that everyone around me basically already knew everything. And if you are feeling that way right now, I encourage you to take a big deep breath [breathe] and let me help you get started. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:43] I’m a roadmap sort of person. So I’m going to start by sharing the stages I’ve observed for folks who are contributing to open source. That way, you can tell where you are right now, which spoiler alert is probably a bit further along than you realize. Then I’ll give you some questions you can ask yourself for each stage to figure out what is a good fit for you. Think of it as a guided exploration. All right, the five stages. So these are they: Connecting. That’s when you’re first learning about the community. You know WordPress exists, but now you’ve just discovered that the community exists. That’s where you are. The second phase is Understanding. It’s when you are researching the community, like, you know it exists, you think you want to give back, and so you’re trying to figure out where everything is. The third phase is what I call Engaging. It’s when you’re first interacting, you’ve downloaded the CMS, you have figured out which team you think you’re interested in, and you’re headed to events or meetings or whatever. The fourth stage is one that I refer to as Performing. And that’s when you’ve decided that you’re gonna volunteer and you’re gonna take some action. You’re going to like a contributor day or running a release or whatever. I think that’s probably not the first place you land, running a release is probably a lot, but, you know, coordinating work on the release or something like that. And then phase five, which is the Leading phase. That’s when you’re taking responsibility for things getting done. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:08] Before we get any further, there are four important things to remember about those stages. The first thing to remember is that there is no set time between any of those stages. You can start in one and then three years later go to the next one, or you can start in one and go into the next stage tomorrow. The next thing to know is that each stage builds on the one before it. In my observation, anytime I have seen a contributor who feels like they’re really struggling, it’s because they skipped a stage in there, which really causes some trouble for them. The next thing to remember is that not everyone will make it through these stages, which is okay. The majority of the community stops at three. Most contributors stop at four. And that is perfectly fine. That is expected. That is normal and completely in line with what we expect from contribution. Uh, and the final thing to remember about that list of the phases is that very few people make it into that leadership stage. If we assume, like I do, that 1% of the people who are using WordPress also show up and contribute back to WordPress, then it’s kind of safe to assume also that about 1% of those people who have shown up to contribute to WordPress are moving into a space where they feel like they’re willing to take responsibility for making sure things get done in WordPress. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:31] Like we all collectively feel responsible for WordPress’s success, but in that leadership area, you’re kind of taking responsibility for 40% of the web or whatever’s going on there. And not a lot of people make it there, and that is completely fine, too. So that’s our basic terminology today. Those are the caveats that go with our basic terminology. Most difficulties that arise for new contributors happen because a stage got skipped somewhere along the way. It’s almost never intentional, but from what I’ve observed, that’s what makes it really difficult to get started and what makes it difficult to keep going once you’ve kind of already gotten in there. So, all right. Big breath, folks with me again [breathe]. Alright, it’s guided exploration time. First phase, the connecting phase. Remember, this is where you’ve just learned the community exists, people are talking about it, you don’t know much more. The first step for you is asking yourself what it is you could do. Or if there’s a project out there that looks particularly interesting. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:36] So you can ask yourself questions, like, am I a writer? And if I am a writer, do I write technical or prose. The other thing you can ask is, am I a PHP developer, a JavaScript developer, Python, Go; which language am I writing in because I find it most beautiful. Another thing you can ask yourself is, am I a teacher or a mentor, or do I just generally like to be a mighty helper? And I like to make sure that things keep running. So once you’ve asked yourself those things, it’s on to phase two, the understanding phase. This is when you’re looking around at this new-to-you community to see what is happening where. So you take a look at the teams that are around, you think about whatever it was you said you were good at in the last question and you look at which teams might be a good fit. So if you said that you’re a good technical writer, then Docs probably is for you. Have you been training others to use WordPress for years? Then you might wanna look into Training. There are a lot of other things, obviously, like if you think you’re good at working with code PHP or JavaScript, you’re probably gonna end up in Core. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:46] If you are particularly good at any of the other tech stacks that we have around in our Trac area or an Openverse, then that’s where you’ll land over there. You have design options. Like if design is really your thing, we have a Design team, but we also have a Themes team. There are plenty of places that you can land depending on what it is that you feel like you are the best at and could really help the WordPress project. And so that’s your phase two. Now that you have gotten a good guess at a team, we’re gonna swing through to phase three, which is the engaging phase. This is the phase that is the scariest for most people, but it’s okay. I am here for you. I am here for you in this podcast. So you have figured out what you want to do in order to contribute, and you’ve got a sense for the team that looks right. There are two things that you do next. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:34] One is that you can go to a meeting. There are many kinds of meetings. There are team meetings, bug scrubs, and testing sessions, but they’re all in Slack, which means that you can attend one from anywhere. When they kick off, you wave, you introduce yourself, you let everybody know that you’re there and you’re observing. Folks will welcome you and just kind of give you some concept of what they’re working on. Easy as that. You’ve done your first time meeting attendance. Another good option is to keep an eye out for specific events. Some of those events happen online, like Global Translation Day. But also some of them happen in person like, Meetups or WordCamps. And there again, you show up, you wave, you introduce yourself, see if you can make a connection or two, let people know that you’re new and you’re just trying to figure out where you are and what you wanna do. If you’ve made it now, all the way to phase four, the performing phase, then give yourself a little pat on the back! Figuring out where you want to go and who your friendly faces are is the biggest challenge when you get started. So congratulations! [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:08:37] Phase four is the phase where you’ve decided you’re brave enough to volunteer – to do some contribution. You’re volunteering your time. That’s where you are now. So oddly enough, you start this phase by assigning yourself something, assigning yourself, a task. This seems counterintuitive. There’s this feeling that you can’t say that you’re gonna do something. That you can’t just assign something to yourself and say that you’re gonna do it. But in open source projects, you always can. You find a task where you’re comfortable, and you just mention that you would like to give it a try while the team is having their weekly meeting. And it’s simple as that. And not big things either. Like organizing an event or maintaining a component, those are probably too big for your first time around. I’m talking things like, ‘I will test that patch that you mentioned in the meeting.’ Or ‘I will review the docs and make sure that they’re up to date with the most recent release.’ Or ‘I can help run meetings for the next release.’ [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:09:40] And then you have phase five, where you just repeat phase four until you are leading something! And I don’t mean leading in the 1950s sort of way, where you have like a corner office and you’re ordering people around. I mean, in the warm, inviting millennial way where you’re leading by inspiring people to do something or you’re leading because you make sure that the meeting happens every single week. Or you’re leading because you added screenshots to tickets that needed testing and so you moved something forward in a way that was helpful. Easy peasy. You can go to your first contributor today or a WordPress Slack meeting and just be a contributor by the time you leave, right? You might feel like ‘easy as that isn’t quite the right set of words right there. And as a matter of fact, you might be thinking to yourself, this woman is just plain wrong. It could not possibly be that easy. And I agree. It really isn’t literally quote-unquote just that easy. Just like handing someone a notebook and a pen will not instantly make them an award-winning novelist, handing someone a wordpress.org profile and credentials to Slack won’t instantly make them a contributor. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:10:46] For both of those examples, what makes someone good is the ability to try and fail and still be encouraged to try again. So if it’s been a while since you contributed and you’re thinking about returning, or if you’ve been listening to me for a while and you’re ready to give this contribution thing a try, I hope this helps you to feel brave enough to try and brave enough to fail. And I encourage you to be brave enough to try again. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:11:20] Let’s take a look at our small list of big things. My friends, we have a Performance team. This team has been a working group for a long time and is focused on some deep, inner workings of WordPress and its surrounding ecosystem to make sure that we are as fast and slick as possible. You can check them out on make.wordpress.org/performance, their brand new site, and see when they’re meeting, what they’re aiming to get into the WordPress 6.1 release, and if that’s something that you would like to contribute to. The second thing is that there’s a brand new call out for testing. This time it’s focused on templates and retroactively applying them to an entire category of posts. So it’s a little bit workflow testing, a little bit technology testing, and we could really use your help in bug hunting for both of those things. And the final thing is that you know since contribution is obviously the focus of today’s podcast, we are looking for table leads for WordCamp US’ contributor day that’s coming up in September. There’s a whole blog post about it, I’ll link to it in the show notes so that you’ll have all the info and can raise your hand if you want. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:12:25] And speaking of things that I’ll have in the show notes, I also am going to put like a contributor quizlet guide thing. If the guided, figuring out of the teams in the phase two section, if that didn’t make any sense to you and you just need something to direct you specifically to potential teams, I’m gonna link to the contributor kind of sorting hat quiz that came out with WordCamp Europe. And that should help you work your way through phase two and get ready for phase three if that is where the spirit takes you. 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. And I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. View the full article

WordPress 6.0.1 is now available This maintenance release features 13 bug fixes in Core and 18 bug fixes for the Block Editor. WordPress 6.0.1 is a short-cycle maintenance release. You can review a summary of the key updates in this release by reading the RC1 announcement. The next major release will be version 6.1 planned for later in 2022. If you have sites that support automatic background updates, the update process will begin automatically. You can download WordPress 6.0.1 from WordPress.org, or visit your WordPress Dashboard, click “Updates”, and then click “Update Now”. Thank you to these WordPress contributors The WordPress 6.0.1 release is led by @sergeybiryukov and @zieladam. WordPress 6.0.1 would not have been possible without the contributions of more than 50 people. Their asynchronous coordination to deliver several enhancements and fixes into a stable release is a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress community. Adam Zielinski, Addie, Adil Öztaşer, Andrew Serong, annezazu, Bernie Reiter, Carlos Bravo, Carolina Nymark, Channing Ritter, Colin Stewart, Clement Boirie, Daniel Iser, denishua, Dion Hulse, Erik Betshammar, Gabriel Rose, George Mamadashvili, George Stephanis, Glen Davies, Grant M. Kinney, Greg Ziółkowski, ironprogrammer, James Koster, Jb Audras, jnz31, Jonathan Desrosiers, Jonny Harris, Kelly Choyce-Dwan, Knut Sparhell, Luis Herranz, Maggie Cabrera, manfcarlo, Manzur Ahammed, Matias Ventura, Michal Czaplinski, Miguel Fonseca, Mukesh Panchal, navigatrum, Nick Diego, Nik Tsekouras, Pascal Birchler, Peter Wilson, Presskopp, Ramon James Dodd, Ravikumar Patel, Riad Benguella, Sami Keijonen, Sergey Biryukov, Timothy Jacobs, tobifjellner (Tor-Bjorn Fjellner), Trinadin, and Ulrich Pogson. View the full article

In the thirty-fifth episode of the WordPress Briefing, Josepha Haden Chomphosy tackles questions about the true intentions of the Five for the Future initiative. Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Credits Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Beatriz Fialho Production: Santana Inniss Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod References New Create Block Theme pluginOpen Sourcing Theme Designs Exploration in Meta to improve DevHub Tragedy of the Commons definition Transcript [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:10] Hello everyone. And welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of some of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project and the community around it, as well as get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go! [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:40] Today I’m talking about Five for the Future– again. Before we get stuck right into the heart of it, 10 episodes ago, in episode 25, I focused on the Five for the Future initiative and I recommend that you listen to that before you join me in today’s episode. It’s only eight minutes and it gives you a history of the Five for the Future initiative, as well as some information on the Five for the Future program. It then goes on to talk about some of the original intentions behind that original initiative. The reason I bring this back up today is partially because one, I will talk about both the program and the initiative it’s based on literally anytime. I believe strongly that they are both a vital part of what will result in a triumph of the commons of WordPress, and keep this empowering project around for years to come. But I also bring it up today because there’s conversation about a post I published a couple of months back that has generated some dialogue around the intentions of this catchy call to contribution. So to make sure that as we move through this discussion together, we are working with as much factual information as possible, I present to you some facts. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:46] First and foremost, the pillars of this initiative. The 5% in Five for the Future is aspirational. Contribution to open source is a question and indication of privilege. So the 5% is not a requirement, but rather it’s an aim. It could refer to 5% of your time or 5% of your resources, or just any amount of your time or resources around. Regardless of how you’re defining it, it is an aspiration, not a requirement. The second pillar, pledges show your intention and whatever contributions you are able to offer after you’ve made your pledge are always welcome. No one is out there checking for 100% completion of the hours that you intended to give back to WordPress versus the hours that you actually succeeded at giving back to WordPress. There are so many volunteers that make sure that this project is running and functional and has plenty of people knowing how to get things done and how to teach others how to get things done. It’s all coming from generosity of heart. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:52] And speaking of generosity, the third thing that is important about this initiative is that it insists on and wants to celebrate a culture of generosity. Beyond the concept of a pledge, is the idea of generous collaboration toward the long term health and stability of our project for the future. As contributors, we understand that we are greater than the sum of our parts and what we build within WordPress empowers those who build with WordPress. So those are the pillars that went into that initial thought, that opening Five for the Future call to action that Matt gave to everybody in 2014. And so now I want to share with you some of the pillars of the program that has grown up around it. So the Five for the Future initiative, if you’re not familiar, was started in 2014 and is a grand call to all of us to remember to give back to the shared commons of WordPress. Its aim was to help guard against what is called the “tragedy of the commons,” where resources are continually taken out and not necessarily reinvested in. No one’s necessarily putting anything back into those. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:06] So that’s the starting point for all of this. So the program, the Five for the Future program, in 2018 was built as a collaborative effort with full participation and buy-in from the contributors who were active in the project at the time. It allowed anyone to raise their hands, to show support of WordPress via a pledge and also started a multi-year discussion of how to define contributions in a way that let us automatically provide props and therefore more effectively put badges on people’s wordpress.org profiles. And then in 2019, there was an additional pilot of the program, which kind of offered some team structure, which was intended to not only take on work that I don’t like to ask volunteers to do, but also to provide some checks and balances to an absolute raft of sponsored contributor hours that we had started to see show up. Which brings us then to the post that I mentioned at the start. Knowledgeable supporters of the WordPress open source project have debated next iterations to Five for the Future activity and programming. So, to bring the conversation to a central set of questions, or rather to bring the conversation to a central spot, I raised these two questions. One, what activities can we see inside our contributor networks? So wordpress.org, make.wordpress.org, the Rosetta sites that we have, Slack, et cetera. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:30] So what activities can we see inside the contributor networks that we can flag to enable easier distribution of props and therefore badges? The second question is, what activities can we see also in those contributor networks that appear to be contributions, but in the end are only benefiting the person or company that provides the contributions? For what it’s worth that discussion then also raised a third question that I don’t think we’ve even started to tackle, which is what about the activities that are not in the contributor network, but still do move WordPress forward? Cause there are so, so many of those things and it’s a great question. I don’t have an answer and just so that I don’t leave you all with a series of questions for which there are no answers provided in this particular podcast, I do have a few answers for questions that I have seen floating around this discussion. So the first question is actually a bunch of questions. There are like three parts to it. What are props, who gives props, and who tracks them? So ‘props’ is a term used in WordPress to describe shared recognition of a contribution. Think of it as like a hat tip or kudos or an assist. However you think about it, it’s recognition of the other people who helped to solve a problem along the way. That is what props are. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:47] The second part of that question is who gives props and historically developers have given props, which tends to mean that it’s mostly developers who get props. But now, also, any team rep during a release cycle can provide props to folks on their team, volunteers on their team who were really helpful during the course of the release. And recently we also added the functionality for ad hoc props to be given in the Slack props channel, and those get added to your profile activity. So that someone can give you basically a public thanks for having helped on something that they were working on. And then that gets logged in your activity tracker on your WordPress.org profile. And then the final question in that first big question is who tracks these props? And the answer is human beings! Which is why folks feel like they have to do a ton of things before they even get props. And that’s also why I’d like to automate more and more of them so that you don’t have to do a ton of things in order for someone to show up and acknowledge that you are part of a solution. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:51] So the second question that I’ve seen kind of running around is, where do props start? And that is a great question that has been asked year after year. And one that I think we should continue to ask. The reality is that we won’t be able to see every contribution to WordPress, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t valuable. And it doesn’t mean that they don’t matter. Building our culture of generosity helps us to better recognize and celebrate each other for all of our contributions, whether they are for a major release or a major event, or one of these new ad hoc props that you can offer to people. And if we see more and more of the same type of contributions being celebrated, then we can also work toward automating those as well, so that you don’t have to do a super ton of them before someone has noticed that you’ve done even one of them. And the third big question that has been running around is, what about the people who don’t want the props? If people want to be literally anonymous, then deletion requests are probably your way to go. But I actually don’t think that’s the question here. I think the question is what if a prop holds no intrinsic value to you and then, you know, I wanna thank you for that spirit of generosity. And I also wanna say that I’m so glad you’re here. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:09:02] Hopefully, all of these answers clarify what lies at the heart of what is intended with the Five for the Future initiative and the program that’s built on top of it. And why I care so much about fixing the ways we offer props to folks. For me, it’s not about assessing the worthiness of people or companies or any of their contributions. For me, it’s about reinvesting in the shared commons of the WordPress ecosystem, by finding a way that our economy can entice folks to put back into WordPress, something close to the benefit that they receive from it. And that brings us now to our small list of big things. Thank you all for making it into the final stretches with me. These three things that I’m sharing also have companion blog posts to go with them because they are very big questions or very big features, very big plugin kind of things that we’re looking at. And so you’ll be able to find those in the show notes, or you can go to wordpress.org/news if you’re listening to this in a podcast player of your choice that is not wordpress.org. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:10:10] So the first one on my list is a new plugin. It is called Create Block Theme. And it’s gonna make it easier for theme builders to use the existing site editor tools to create new block themes. I’m very excited about this. Uh, you can find it on make.wordpress.org/themes. And I will also include a link to it in the show notes below. If themes are not your area of expertise, but you are interested in documentation or the DevHub or to an extent design things, then the improvements that are being worked on for the DevHub are definitely in your area. That’s kind of a Meta task, but has a few other pieces involved as well. That can be found on make.wordpress.org/meta. But again, I will have a link to the very, very detailed blog post in the show notes. It’s got a bunch of hypothetical changes that are being suggested for the WordPress developer docs, uh, especially when it comes to the function reference. And so there are gonna be some slight design questions, but not like, graphic design/visual design, more in the like, can humans read this design area of things? And so that will be a good one to look at. If you are sort of in the Meta or Documentation vein of things in the way that you like to contribute to WordPress. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:011:30] And then the final thing is about open sourcing theme designs. So open sourcing everything obviously is important to us. And the design tool that we use, this tool called Figma, is open to the public. And so it’s possible for folks to be able to kind of get in there and use and reuse any design elements. And so there’s a discussion happening over on make.wordpress.org/design about how that can and should look in the future. And so if design is definitely your area, and again, this kind of lines up with themes a little bit, then wander over into that one, for which there will also be a link in the show notes. 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. And I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. View the full article

With WordPress 6.1 already in the works, a lot of updates happened during June. Here’s a summary to catch up on the ones you may have missed. WordPress 6.1 is Slated for Release on October 25, 2022 Planning for WordPress 6.1 kicked off a few weeks ago with a proposed schedule and a call for contributors to the release team. This will be the third major release in 2022 and will include up to Gutenberg 14.1 for a total of 11 Gutenberg releases. Matías Ventura published the preliminary roadmap for version 6.1, which is expected to refine the full site editing experience introduced in the last two major releases. Stay tuned for a companion post with more details on what’s to come. Tune in to the latest episode of WP Briefing to hear WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden discuss planning for major releases and how you can get involved. New in Gutenberg: Versions 13.4 and 13.5 There are two new versions of Gutenberg since last month’s edition of the Month in WordPress: Gutenberg 13.4 includes 25 enhancements and nearly 30 bug fixes. This version adds support for button elements in theme.json and introduces axial spacing in Gallery Block, among other new features.Gutenberg 13.5 was released on June 22, 2022. It comes with an improved featured image UX, expanded design tools for the Post Navigation Link block, and solid accessibility fixes. Follow the “What’s new in Gutenberg” posts to stay up to date with the latest updates. Team Updates: Gutenberg Page Redesign, Meetup Venue Support Funds, and More The Gutenberg page got a new redesign! You can rearrange the page content the way you want and experience the flexibility that blocks allow. Learn more about the inspiration behind the new look in this post.WordPress Community Support (WPCS) restarted its meetup venue support funds for community organizers.The Themes Team ​​released a new plugin called Create Block Theme that makes it easier for theme builders to create block themes.Matías Ventura, the lead architect of the Gutenberg project, shared some early thoughts on the future of the WordPress admin interface.Each month, the Training Team publishes a list of new resources available on the Learn WordPress platform. Check out what’s new.The Polyglots Team kicked off conversations for planning the next WordPress Translation Day.The Documentation Team posted a series of onboarding sessions to get started with documentation.After reviewing feedback raised by the community, the Performance Team proposed a new approach to add WebP and MIME support for images.The Themes Team updated its recommendations for hosting webfonts to follow Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).In a step towards open sourcing theme designs, the Design Team made some themes authored by WordPress core and other theme developers available in a Figma file.The Marketing Team started a discussion to gather feedback on promoting WordCamps with the official WordPress.org social accounts.The Openverse Team released version 2.5.5 of the Openverse API, which brings an important change regarding anonymous API requests.The Plugin Review Team shared a comprehensive post on invalid plugin reviews.The June edition of the Meetup Organizer Newsletter is now live with a list of ideas on reactivating meetups.Check out the Polyglots Monthly Newsletter: June 2022 to stay up to date with the latest updates from the Polyglots community.The latest edition of People of WordPress features the story of web developer Leo Gopal.The Museum of Block Art (MOBA), a virtual initiative that showcases creative uses of the WordPress block editor, is now open for submissions.Last month the WordPress community was saddened to hear of the passing of Wolly (Paolo Valenti). Wolly was a long-time WordPress contributor and one of the founding members of the vibrant Italian community. He will be missed. The BlackPress community is a great place to connect with black African descent people in the WordPress space, access tech resources, and advance your career skills. Join the BlackPress Community. Feedback/Testing Requests The Core Team is looking for help in testing a rollback functionality for failed plugin and theme updates.There’s an open call for feedback on a proposal to make building features and plugins on top of the WordPress REST API easier. Share your thoughts by July 18, 2022.The Training Team suggested a public content roadmap for Learn WordPress development. Comments are welcome until July 15, 2022.Version 20.2 of WordPress for Android and iOS is now available for testing.Some members of the Meta Team did some experiments with hypothetical changes to the WordPress Developer Docs. They welcome feedback on the next steps. Want to get involved in testing WordPress? Follow the “Week in Test” posts to find a handy list of links and opportunities. WordCamp Asia 2023 is Calling for Sponsors WordCamp Asia 2023, the first flagship WordCamp event in Asia, recently opened its Call for Sponsors.WordCamp US 2022 is sold out. General Admission tickets went on sale on June 30, 2022, and were quickly claimed the same day. If you couldn’t get yours, the organizing team recommends checking this page periodically to see if any become available.Curious about why WordCamp US is hosting fewer people this year? The WordCamp US team explained why in this post.WordCamp Europe 2022 was successfully held in Porto, Portugal, from June 2 to 4, 2022. The event saw 2,300 in-person attendees and a record 800 participants at Contributor Day. All the sessions will be available on WordPress.tv soon.In 2023, WordCamp Europe will be hosted in the city of Athens, Greece. The Call for Organizers is now open.Josepha Haden covered some important questions from WordCamp Europe on a special episode of WP Briefing. Be sure to give it a listen! The #WPDiversity group has organized a free, online speaker workshop for Indian women in the WordPress community. The event will take place on September 24-25, 2022. Registration is now open. Have a story that we could include in the next issue of The Month in WordPress? Let us know by filling out this form. The following folks contributed to this Month in WordPress: @mysweetcate, @dansoschin, @lmurillom, @webcommsat, @chaion07, @rmartinezduque. View the full article

In this series, we share some of the inspiring stories of how WordPress and its global network of contributors can change people’s lives for the better. This month we feature Leo Gopal, from South Africa, a back-end Developer and Customer Support agent on the encouragement and learning support the WordPress community can give. Writing as a channel of expression Curiosity, writing, and resilience are recurring themes in Leo’s story, and have mapped with his WordPress journey. High school was a difficult time for Leo, as he had a speech impediment which only subsided when he was with close friends or family. He began writing a journal as an avenue of expression and found every word arrived smoothly for him. It all began with WordPress 1.2 ‘Mingus’ In 2004, Leo discovered the joy of blogging as a way of combining keeping a journal with ‘conversations’ he could have with those who commented on his blogs. The potential and power of blogs would be an influence in the rest of his life. As Leo’s confidence grew through expressing himself in writing, he was determined that his stutter would ‘no longer hold power over him’. In 2005, with the encouragement of his blog readers, he spent his school summer break in his room working on reducing his stutter. WordPress would be the tool that would enable him to connect with his blog readers and to express his creativity and thoughts. Making WordPress your own In high school, Leo had opted for programming as one of his subjects. In 2008, he built his first website using WordPress for the students at the school. This was the first time he saw the real value of WordPress and open source. During the following years, he increasingly spent time searching online for information on ‘Customising WordPress’ and ‘Making WordPress your own’. Leo wanted to keep busy and as soon as he finished school, he applied for every entry-level web-related job that he could find. He was hired by a company for the role of webmaster for its Marketing team focused on WordPress. He continued to grow his skills as a WordPress developer with the help of useful documentation that he could find and through his helpful local WordPress Community. This helped him earn a living and support his family. Helping yourself through helping others in the community In 2015, Leo moved full-time to Cape Town, South Africa, and started as a developer at a web development agency, eventually progressing to its Head of Development and managing a small team. He chose WordPress as his main platform for development mainly because of the community behind it. “Had it not been for those searches on how to make WordPress your own, my life would have turned out a lot differently.” Leo Gopal Leo felt he had a hurdle to overcome working in web sector. He didn’t feel like a ‘real developer’ being self-taught. However, through the community, he realized that there were many self-taught developers and he was not alone. Alongside his development path, Leo faced a mental health journey. He had suffered from depression and found the community to be accepting and understanding of this. At WordCamp Cape Town 2016, he stood in front of an audience and gave a talk: “The WordPress Community, Mental Wellness, and You”. Following this talk, he was greeted by many attendees who thanked him for talking so openly about mental health issues. Leo speaking at a WordCamp Cape Town, 2016 Leo has been diagnosed with bipolar, previously known as manic depression. In 2017, he hit a low period and struggled to keep going. He found support and understanding in the community in WordPress. He has openly written about his experiences with depression and started an initiative where topics of mental health and general wellbeing can be freely and non-judgmentally discussed. He said that by helping others, he is helping himself, every day. Contributing to WordPress Leo has contributed to the community as a Co-organizer in South Africa for the 2016 and 2017 WordCamp Cape Town, WordPress Meetup Cape Town 2015 – 2016, and WordPress Durban 2017 – 2020. He has also spoken at a number of WordCamps. Maintaining connections with people he had met through these events Leo felt was a great aid to his mental wellbeing during the Covid pandemic. He has contributed to core and plugins and believes that WordPress and its community make it extremely easy to contribute. “The cost to start contributing is extremely low – start now”. Leo Gopal When the ability to create and add patterns to the WordPress.org library came out in 2021, Leo used it almost immediately and created a call-to-action box which could be used by both his clients and the community. He plans to release a few more complex patterns. Yes, we can. Leo’s mantra is “I can do it!” Leo speaking at a WordCamp Cape Town, 2019 Getting over a stutter, overcoming poverty, being urgently self-taught, growing up in a country with “load shedding” electricity outages, and one of the slowest rated internet speeds in the developing world, and strengthening mental wellness are not easy feats., And yet, he knows he can do it. “Never, ever think you do not have the ‘right’ circumstances for success. Just keep going, progress over perfection – you can do it.” Leo Gopal As Leo puts it, the WordPress community doesn’t just power a percentage of the internet; it empowers too. 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 Nalini Thakor (@nalininonstopnewsuk), Larissa Murillo (@lmurillom), Meher Bala (@meher), Abha Thakor (@webcommsat), Chloe Bringmann (@cbringmann) for work on this feature, and to all the contributors who helped with specific areas and the series this last few months. Thank you too to Leo Gopal (@leogopal) for sharing her experiences. Thank you to Josepha Haden (@chanthaboune) and Topher DeRosia (@topher1kenobe) for support of the People of WordPress series. This People of WordPress feature is inspired by an essay originally published on HeroPress.com, a community initiative created by Topher DeRosia. It highlights people in the WordPress community who have overcome barriers and whose stories might otherwise go unheard. #HeroPress View the full article

In the thirty-fourth episode of the WordPress Briefing, hear WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy discuss planning for the major release and how you can get involved in the WordPress 6.1 release cycle! Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Credits Editor: Dustin HartzlerLogo: Beatriz FialhoProduction: Santana InnissSong: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod References WordPress 6.1 Planning Roundup Core PostAll WordPress 6.1 posts on Make CoreSpeaker Workshop for Indian Women in the WordPress CommunitySubmit photos to the WordPress Photo Directory Transcript [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:10] Hello everyone. And welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of some of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project and the community around it, as well as get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go. All right my friends. So it’s been about a month since WordPress 6.0 came out and you know what that means. It means we are already looking at the next major WordPress release because, as most of you know, WordPress never sleeps. Y’all are honestly up and hustling like 24/7 as far as I can tell, which is great! And is one of the many benefits of being a global community, I suppose. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:05] But anyway, back to this major release. There was a high-level roadmap shared by Mattias Ventura at the start of June. And it lists some focus areas for the Block Editor, continued refinements to the template editor and navigation block, and some work on global styles and more / better blocks and design tools that are slated to ship with WordPress 6.1. From the WordPress core side, though, there are a couple hundred tickets that are milestoned for the next major. Being milestoned for a release means that either a ticket wasn’t ready for the last release and was moved to the next available one, or a ticket has become ready for a release since the last major release occurred. That list as it stands might be a little bit too big for a single release. However, honestly, no list is too big if we have enough folks contributing. So if you’ve never contributed to a major release of WordPress before, and you’re interested to know how that works, there are some things to keep an eye out for over the next few weeks. We are in what is considered the planning phase for the next big release. And so there are two or three things you’re gonna see pretty soon. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:11] First is a planning kickoff post. That post gets published on make.wordpress.org/core, and it includes notes on volunteering for the release squad, some guesses at areas of focus based on the tickets that we’re seeing in track, a schedule, the whole kit, and caboodle. It’s all in there. If you are wanting to know how to lend a hand and how to take your first steps to core contribution, apart from the new contributor meeting that happens before the dev chat, that post is the place to start. So keep an eye out on make.wordpress.org/core for that. And then the second thing that shows up in the planning phase for any major release is bug scrub and ticket triage meetings. Like I mentioned, there are the new contributor meetings where they scrub tickets and talk through the basics of what we’re seeing on good first bugs. And I mentioned that here often, I just mentioned it in the last, in the last bullet point, but there are also regular bug scrubs and ticket triaging sessions where a kind contributor chooses a set of tickets to review and then leads other contributors through the process of checking to see if a ticket is valid to see if it can be replicated to see if it has a patch. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:23] If there are decisions that are blocking it and how to move those decisions forward, and generally just kind of discuss what else has to be done in order to take the ticket to the next step. Those get announced in the dev chat every Wednesday, but also there is a post that will go up on make.wordpress.org/core. I wish I had a faster way to say that instead of just racing through the whole URL every time. But it’ll be okay. We’ll put it in the show notes in case you would rather just click some stuff. And the third thing to keep an eye out for. If development is not your thing, so writing code is not already part of your tool belt, that’s totally fine. There are many other important areas where you can contribute, too. Design, training, support, polyglots, marketing, documentation, and more. These teams all do work in and around a release that is vital to WordPress’ overall success. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:19] And a final thought of all. If that felt a little too intense if you want to see where this ship is headed, but you can’t quite commit to grabbing an oar today, that’s fine, too. The most important thing is that if you are a member of the community, as an extender or a user or a die-hard contributor, or a new contributor, the most important thing is that you have some general awareness of what the overall direction is. You might do that by experimenting with blocks in your products or by testing screen readers against your workflow or even by setting aside an hour to participate in the latest testing prompt. Being aware of what’s happening in and around your area of the project will help to keep you kind of prepared and knowledgeable to lend a hand whenever it is that you are ready. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:14] And that then brings us to our small list of big things. My friends, registration is now open for the WordPress Speaker Workshop for Women Voices in India. That’s taking place on September 24th and 25th. Uh, it’s happening over Zoom, so location or travel shouldn’t really be an obstacle for you. I’m going to leave a link to some information about that in the show notes. It should be an excellent opportunity that [the] WP Diversity initiative that WordPress has, that the community team helps to foster, is really an excellent experience. And so I hope that you register and attend that. And the second thing actually is a bit of a celebration. The Photo Directory recently hit a huge milestone of 3000 photos! And you also can submit your photos to wordpress.org/photos. If you feel so inclined to make a contribution of that type. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:07] And then the third thing on my smallest of big things is actually kind of a, a WordPress tooltip a little bit of a WordPress project did-ya-know? So, there is a special channel in WordPress Slack for sharing thanks to folks who were especially helpful to you. It’s called the Props Channel. And when someone shares props with you, it even shows up in your activity on your wordpress.org profile. Pretty cool, huh? Props to the Meta team for that one. 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. And I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. View the full article

In the thirty-third episode of the WordPress Briefing, hear Josepha Haden Chomphosy recap important questions from WordCamp Europe, and a selection of Contributor Day interviews. Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Credits Editor: Dustin HartzlerLogo: Beatriz FialhoProduction: Santana InnissProduction Assistance: Héctor PrietoSpecial Guests: Milana Cap, Daugirdas Jankus, and Jonathan DesrosiersSong: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod References L’esprit de l’escalierFlexbox Layout BlocksTranslating Content on Learn WordPressTranslating SubtitlesCollaboration Across Cultures (Blog)Collaboration Across Cultures (YouTube Video)WordCamp Europe Athens: Call for Organizers6.1 Release Planning Twitter Thread6.1 Release Planning Roadmap PostMake WordPress Meetings Calendar Transcript [Daugirdas Jankus 00:00:04] Honestly, it’s not a secret. It’s a big part of our business. And I think it’s like WordPress is a big part of all the hosting company, company’s, businesses, you know? So for us, it is like, we want to make it better. We want to give back. We want to understand, you know, where we can contribute the most. And we see it as a, you know, win, win, win situation for everyone, for clients, for the whole ecosystem. And for us as a business, of course! [Milana Cap 00:00:32] My favorite WordPress component is WP CLI. That’s my crush, haha, because I love terminal. I love doing it. I’m not a really UI type of person, I get lost in UI. But in terminal, you just type command and it does what you want. And a WP CLI is much more powerful than WordPress dashboard. You can do so many things there and you can have fun. Uh, so that’s my go-to tool! [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:10] 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! [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:36] Many, many people were at WordCamp Europe a couple of weeks ago. And at the end, Matt and I closed out the event sessions with a little question and answer time from the community. I was excited to see everyone and excited to answer their questions. But as with all spur of the moment answers, I experienced this l’esprit de l’escalier and I found that there were a few things that I would have answered a little more completely if I had taken more than two seconds to think about them. So today I’m going to augment some of the answers from that session with a little more context and clarity. There was a question from Laura Byrne about favorite blocks in recent WordPress releases. And given that I was exclusively holding WordCamp Europe information in my brain at the time, I couldn’t think of which block was my favorite. While I was sitting there on that stage, I realized that one of my favorite things about WordPress’s 6.0 release, like Matt, wasn’t really a block, but it was a functional workflow sort of thing. So my favorite thing was the ability to lock blocks, but I mean, the question was about favorite blocks. And so I do know that some of the most anticipated blocks are the Flexbox layout blocks. Whew. What a sentence! [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:46] Try to say that three times fast! Those blocks are the Flexbox layout blocks, they are sort of shortcuts that show up when you’re selecting multiple blocks and allow for easy side-by-side layouts. I’m not explaining it in a way that does it much justice, but I will share a link in the show notes that has more information and you can kind of see how empowering that particular block is in the block editor. The next question I wanted to give a little more context to came from Courtney Robertson. She asked about how to make translated content more readily available on learn.wordpress.org. My answer was pretty far ranging and talked about why it’s harder to commit to prioritizing that over, for my example, translating WordPress core. But I also understand that there are people who want to help and just need someone to point them in the right direction. And so I want to be clear that it is possible to have workshops in any language on learn.wordpress.org right now. We just don’t have a lot of people contributing those translations. So there are conversations going on right now in the training team about using Glotpress on learn.wordpress.org, and also how to translate subtitles. So, if you are looking for ways to give back through translation and training is an important kind of area of your focus. I will have links to both of those things in the show notes as well. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:11] I also gave a quick answer, uh, after this question about how hard it is to recognize contributions that are separate from a major event or major release. In this case, when I say recognize, that’s recognized as in thank, not recognize as in, know it exists. In case it’s not clear why that was connected, why that answer was connected to the question, training materials are self-serve and not always specific to individual releases of WordPress. So that means the maintenance of any content around training happens routinely over the course of time, rather than because of a specific release or a WordCamp. What sometimes can make it a little harder to entice people to join us in that work. And now the third question I’d like to tackle is the one that came from Megan Rose. She asked how we can encourage better diversity as we go back to in-person events. My answer was more about the big picture, program-wide work that has been done and specific awarenesses that I, as a leader, have been keeping top of mind. That answer is still true and is still important, but again, it doesn’t really help anyone who’s wondering how they can show up today in their own communities, and do the hard work of fostering an inclusive space there so that we can confidently welcome more diverse voices together. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:27] A great place to start is to have conversations with people who aren’t like you and really listen. Also recognizing that we all come from different backgrounds that give us more or less opportunity and always be asking yourself, who is missing from this conversation and why, how can I find them and invite them into our own WordPress spaces? If that all kind of feels right up your alley, I would check out the show notes. I’ll have some links in there to the community team’s site, as well as a few posts that will help you to explore that a bit further as well. There were also a couple of questions about market share slash usage of WordPress, and Five for the Future that I really do want to answer, but as I was writing up the context and just kind of exploring the questions that people were raising, it turned out to really be quite a big set of answers. So I will do those in either two separate episodes of their own or one surprisingly long, for me, episode. And so there you have it, a lightning round, deep dive on a few questions from WordCamp Europe. [Jonathan Desrosiers 00:06:41] Yeah, it’s definitely great to be back in person. Um, it’s been a long two years, two or three years for a lot of people and it’s, it’s, it’s great that we’re such an asynchronous community and we can all stay connected online through Slack and different means. Um, but there are some things that you can’t replace, like making friends with people and learning people’s demeanors and having some discussions in person that you can’t replace. And so, uh, I’m really excited to see people I haven’t seen in a long time. Meet new people and, um, you know, have some of those discussions here today in Portugal. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:21] Which then brings us to our small list of big things. If you missed the announcement, WordCamp Europe will be in Athens next year. And the call for organizers is open already. It’s an experience that is absolutely irreplaceable. So I’ll link to that in the show notes, in case you’ve always wanted to give back to WordPress that way. The second thing on my list is that work on the next major release of WordPress is already underway. There is a post with roadmap info that was published recently, as well as a slightly more casual thread on Twitter. I’ve linked both of those in the show notes, so that you have some concept of what it is that we are aiming for in 6.1, and also a concept of where to go to get started working on it if that’s what you feel like doing, uh, for the next three to four months– 120 days, roughly. Uh, and finally. This is less of like a thing to be aware of in the next two weeks and kind of a little WordPress project tool tip. Did you know that we have a calendar that shows all meetings for all teams all week long? It will make you feel tired by the amount of work that gets done in the WordPress project every week, but it’s right there on make.wordpress.org/meetings. So you never have to wonder where folks are meeting to talk about things ever again. 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, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. [Santana Inniss & Héctor Prieto 00:09:11] Hello! Mic test. One, two, one, two. We are testing the USB microphone. Let’s hope we’re using it actually. I think so. I think so. Yes. Because now I am far, and now I am much closer to the microphone. Yes. And I am sitting in the same spot. Good. Hello? Hello! Mic test one, two. Mic test one, two. [record scratching sound effect] [laughter] And, close. Mic check. Mic check. [record scratching sound effect] I’m close to the mic. I’m far from the mic. I’m far from the mic. Wow. Not so far. [laughter] View the full article

WordPress has a lot to celebrate this month. The newest release “Arturo” is here. WordPress turned 19 years old last week. And WordCamp Europe, the first in-person flagship WordCamp in two years, is starting today in Porto, Portugal. Read on to learn more about these and other exciting news around WordPress! Say hello to WordPress 6.0 “Arturo” WordPress 6.0 “Arturo” was released on May 24, 2022. Named in honor of the Latin jazz musician Arturo O’Farrill, the awaited release brings more customization tools and numerous updates to make the site-building experience more intuitive. Check out the WordPress 6.0 video and the announcement post for an overview of the most important changes. Interested in knowing more about the features that will help you build with and extend WordPress? Then the WordPress 6.0 Field Guide might be for you. Over 500+ people in 58+ countries made WordPress 6.0 possible – Thank you! Download WordPress 6.0 Happy 19th birthday, WordPress! Time flies, doesn’t it? Believe it or not, May 27 marked the 19th anniversary of WordPress’ first release! To celebrate, the community put together a special site (wp19.day) where contributors shared thoughts, videos, live shows, and more. You can still join the fun using the hashtag #WP19Day on social media, or even contribute photos of the swag you used to celebrate to the WordPress Photo Directory. If you haven’t yet, this is also a great opportunity to share your WordPress story. Visit the #GrowYourStoryWP initiative to learn more – We’d love to hear from you. New in Gutenberg Two new versions of Gutenberg were released last month: Gutenberg 13.2 shipped on May 11, 2022, and brings a new API to save editor preferences on the server, visual guides for padding and margins, and improvements to the Comment block.Gutenberg 13.3 comes with a new Table of Contents block and a number of enhancements to existing blocks to provide more ways to display content, among other highlights. It was released on May 25, 2022. Follow the #gutenberg-new posts for more details on the latest updates. Team updates: Five for the Future, guidelines for in-person regional WordCamps, and more Following an earlier discussion on in-person regional WordCamps, the Community team announced new guidelines for these WordPress events.The Five for the Future (5ftF) initiative is key to ensuring the future of the WordPress project. As part of the ongoing efforts to improve this initiative, Executive Director Josepha Haden suggested a definition for 5ftF pledges and contributions.Tonya Mork posted a summary of the core test stats for WordPress 6.0.The Meta and Theme Review teams shared an update on the work done over the past year to improve the theme review process. As a result, the average time for themes to be reviewed has decreased by 90%.Josepha Haden kicked off a discussion post to gather feedback on the Community Code of Conduct section of the new Contributor Handbook.On a similar note, the Community team created a new Incident Response Training. The course, which is live on Learn WordPress and considered a work in progress, addresses how WordPress contributors take and respond to code of conduct reports.The Training team published new lesson plans, workshops, courses, and Social Learning Spaces on Learn WordPress. See what’s new.The #WPDiversity working group organized several Allyship and Diverse Speaker Workshops in April. Attendees reported a 40% increase in public speaking confidence after attending the Speaker workshops. Stay tuned for the next events!A summary of the 14th testing call of the Full Site Editing (FSE) Outreach program – “Rallying Recipe Reviewers” was recently published.You can also find high-level feedback on the FSE Program in this May 2022 post.Learn more about the projects the Design team contributed to over the past month.Anne McCarthy hosted a Hallway Hangout to talk about various FSE pull requests and designs. The recording is available in this post. The May editions of the Meetup Organizer Newsletter and the Polyglots Monthly Newsletter were published.The latest edition of People of WordPress features the story of Dee Teal. The thirty-first episode of WP Briefing celebrated Global Accessibility Awareness Day (May 19) with guest Joe Devon. Open feedback/testing calls The Core team is working on ​​an experimental pull request (PR) to implement fluid typography. They welcome feedback on design, functionality, and API.Version 20.0 of WordPress for Android and iOS is now available for testing.Were you involved in the WordPress 6.0 release? Take some time to reflect on what you learned and participate with your feedback in this retrospective. Angela Jin has asked for feedback to help identify and record Five for the Future contributions from Make teams. Share your ideas in this post. WordCamp Europe is here! WordPress Foundation’s Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship returns for WordCamp US 2022. Visit this post for more information.The WordCamp US Call for Sponsors is now open.Two more in-person WordCamps are happening this month: WordCamp Warsaw, Poland on June 11-12, 2022 WordCamp Montclair, NJ, USA on June 25, 2022The WordPress community is meeting today at WordCamp Europe (June 2-4) in Porto, Portugal. This edition celebrates the return to in-person events and the 10th anniversary of WCEU. For everyone heading to Porto, have a great WordCamp! Traveling to WCEU? Check out Josepha Haden’s open source reading list for interesting reads while you travel! Have a story that we could include in the next issue of The Month in WordPress? Let us know by filling out this form. The following folks contributed to this Month in WordPress: @rmartinezduque, @laurlittle, @harishanker. View the full article

In this series, we share some of the inspiring stories of how WordPress and its global network of contributors can change people’s lives for the better. This month we feature a WordPress development and large project specialist on the difference the software and community can make to your career and life. Dee’s story with computers started at school in New Zealand where discovering how a mouse worked and learning BASIC and Pascal was a catalyst for what later became a programming career. At a time when computers were just becoming mainstream, there were no opportunities for girls in her school to consider this as a further option. She recalls: “No one thought to say, ‘Dee, you look like you’re good at this, you should pursue it…’. I mean, I was a girl (and I was told girls didn’t ‘do’ computers). No one in the circles I moved in really had any idea where this technology revolution would take us.” With no particular career path into technology, Dee was encouraged in her final year of school to apply for a job in a bank where she worked and became a teller three years later. She gained financial independence, which enabled her to travel as a 20-year-old and spend the next three years exploring the US and Europe. Looking back, she noted how the world had changed: the first computer mouse she had seen had come out in 1983, and 20 years later WordPress was founded. Journey into coding During those 20 years, Dee worked as a nanny, working in child care centers, in customer support, and as a temp. In 1999, she packed up her bags once again, and moved from New Zealand to Australia. She took a place at a performing arts school where she honed her singing and performance skills and volunteered her time to the music director who was starting to experiment with sending out HTML newsletters and updates via email. “And so my personal revolution began. On the day after I graduated from that course, I walked into a full-time role as that music director’s assistant and began my journey back to code.” As part of that job, Dee edited and sent HTML newsletters on a weekly basis. This ignited her interest in programming, and she bought books about coding for the web and experimented on her home-built PC making web pages. “I’m sure, like a lot of us, I remember the thrill of creating that first HTML file and seeing a ‘Hello World’ or similar heading rendered in the browser. From there, I was completely hooked.” Dee Teal Later she moved to the IT department and took on maintenance of all the websites. By 2004, she was working full-time as a webmaster. A year later, she was running a small business creating sites on the side. Four years after that, her business became her full-time job as she left employment to pursue her Masters Degree in Digital Communication and Culture. Dee and other volunteers setting up for a local WordCamp Dee found the theory and sociology behind the web, and its facilitation of human and machine communication fascinating. She said: “I love the fact that the tech industry involves a constant constant curve of growth and discovery, which results in a perpetual exercise in finding creative elegant solutions for sticky problems.” For Dee, being able to use her innate curiosity to leverage processes, people, and tools, fuelled by a focus on communicating a message, has been a defining inspiration in her work. This combined fascination coincided with her meeting WordPress in 2009 and subsequently its community. She moved her existing blog to the software and it became the CMS of choice for all her client work. The WordPress community can change your world In 2011, she stumbled across WordCamps and by extension the WordPress community. Dee has reflected publicly that WordPress didn’t change her life, its community changed her world! She flew on a whim from her then home in Sydney to attend a WordCamp in Melbourne she had found after a search for ‘WordPress Conferences’. She said: “I met welcoming people, made friends, connected, and came back home excited and hopeful about continuing this connection with the wider WordPress community.” Building a community locally around WordPress got off to a slow start in Sydney. From an inauspicious early WordPress Sydney meetup in the function room of a pub, her connection and involvement took off. Before long she was helping organize that meetup, and by the time she moved away from that great city it had branched into two meetups, and soon after, into three. She was so inspired by the community that at the end of that first year and her second WordCamp, she raised her hand to help organize a WordCamp Sydney in 2012, and after moving interstate, WordCamp Melbourne in 2013. “WordPress and any other software package exist to serve people.” Dee Teal Dee said: “WordPress, software, technology, the Internet will come and go, morph, and change, evolve. Maybe WordPress will last forever, maybe it will morph into something else, maybe one day it will look completely different than it did when I first started (actually, that’s true now). The thing that doesn’t change is the humanity around it. WordPress and any other software package exist to serve people.” She added: “The thing that I have learned, not only through WordPress but in life, is that if we too serve the people around what we’re doing, we ourselves will grow, develop and change alongside the people we serve, and the tools we use to serve them.” Some of the contributors to the WordPress 5.6 release Dee was a coordinator for WordPress 5.6 release in 2020 and was able to encourage others to learn about the process. Helping others and sharing knowledge through WordPress Dee has been an advocate for cross-cultural collaboration and understanding in both WordPress and her work for a large distributed agency which has people from more than 24 countries and operates across 16 timezones. She has also written about closing the gap between diverse distributed teams and how to meet the challenges of cross cultural remote work. Dee has given talks at WordCamps, including at WordCamp Europe in 2019, on developing ourselves, our relationships, and our communities in increasingly diverse environments. With a strong desire to share her professional knowledge and experience, Dee hopes her involvement in the WordPress community from being part of a Release Squad in the Core Team, and volunteering in the community through organizing and speaking at WordCamp events, will inspire others to get involved. “It’s the connections, it’s the friendships. It’s the network of work, referrals, support, help and encouragement.” Dee Teal talking about the community that makes WordPress specialbenefits of the WordPress community Dee shared her experience with attendees at WordCamp Europe 2019 In contributing to WordPress and organizing community events around it, Dee found that for her: “At the end of the day it isn’t actually WordPress that matters. It’s those connections, it’s the friendships. It’s the network of work, referrals, support, help, encouragement that has kept me wired into this community and committed to helping other people find that connection and growth for themselves.” Dee’s career in WordPress has moved through coding, into project management of large scale WordPress projects, and now into delivery leadership. Her connections to community have helped ‘fuel the transitions’ through these chapters of her life. She said: “I believe that the place I’ve found and the opportunities I have had owe as much to my own desire and ambition as they do to the help, support and belief of the community around me; sometimes even more than I’ve felt in myself.” She feels that she is ‘living proof’ that by helping, connecting, and resourcing other people, you can be helped, resourced and connected into places you had never thought possible. This has enabled her to reach and have a career in technology that she did not know existed as a teenager playing with that first computer mouse and experimenting with code. Dee hopes her story will inspire others in their journey. 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 Abha Thakor (@webcommsat), Meher Bala (@meher), Mary Baum (@marybaum), Chloe Bringmann (@cbringmann), Nalini Thakor (@nalininonstopnewsuk), and Larissa Murillo (@lmurillom) for work on this feature. Thank you to Josepha Haden (@chanthaboune) and Topher DeRosia (@topher1kenobe) for support of the series. Thank you too to @thewebprincess for sharing her experiences. This article is inspired by an article originally published on HeroPress.com, a community initiative created by Topher DeRosia. It highlights people in the WordPress community who have overcome barriers and whose stories would otherwise go unheard. Meet more WordPress community members in our People of WordPress series. This People of WordPress feature is inspired by an essay originally published on HeroPress.com, a community initiative created by Topher DeRosia. It highlights people in the WordPress community who have overcome barriers and whose stories might otherwise go unheard. #HeroPress View the full article

In the thirty-second episode of the WordPress Briefing, WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy shares her open source reading list for that post-WordCamp Europe downtime. Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Credits Editor: Dustin HartzlerLogo: Beatriz FialhoProduction: Santana Inniss and Chloé BringmannSong: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod References Producing Open Source Software, Karl FogelWorking in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Souce Software, Nadia EgbalCollaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy,ed Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Roger F. Malina PhD, Sean CubittHumble Inquiry, Edgar H. Schein (Author), Peter A. ScheinWordPress MilestonesWordCamp Europe 20222022 Annual Meetup Survey Transcript [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00] Hello everyone. And welcome to the WordPress Briefing. The podcast where you can catch quick explanations of some of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project and the community around it. As well as get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go! [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:40] With the approach of various mid-year breaks and the prospect of wandering off for some safe, restorative travel, I’ve been updating my to-read and re-read list. As I was looking at the queued books for my Northern hemisphere summer, there were some common threads, mostly around leadership, but there’s also like a chunk that’s about cross-cultural group theory and economics, and then like some beach reads, but there’s one group in particular that you all might find interesting. And that’s a group that’s sort of like a back-to-FOSS basics list. So I’ll share my top few with you in case you want to pack a copy for your next getaway. The first one on our list is called Producing Open Source Software by Karl Fogel. I think everyone who contributes to FOSS projects has received this as one of their first recommendations. Like, y’all are building open software? Excellent, you need to read Producing Open Source Software. Like, that is just a sentence that comes out of everyone’s mouths. So this was one of the first open source books that was recommended to me when I joined the WordPress community. It was freshly revised in 2020, and I haven’t given it a read since then, which is why it is on my reread list this year. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:54] However, it shaped the early days of the WordPress project’s leadership, and their lead developers, and some of WordPress’s basic philosophies. It’s all available online, under a creative commons, ShareAlike license. And so it’s worth the read. I’ll put a link to it in the show notes so it’s easy for everyone to find in the event that is your preferred beach read. The second one on this list is a book from Nadia Eghbal. She wrote the excellent Roads and Bridges report that also is probably not light beach reading, but you know, this one is on my list to read this summer because Eghbal always delivers truths about the reality of maintaining popular software, popular, open source software, in a way that’s easy for me to access and process rather than getting paralyzed by the enormity of it all. For what it’s worth your mileage may vary on that. I realized that, like, I live and breathe open source stuff. And so just because I am not paralyzed by the enormity of her explanations of things doesn’t necessarily mean that you will have a similar experience. And so I’m just going to claim that elephant in the room for all of us. However, if you only read one book on this list this year, I think that this should be the one that you read. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:14] The third one is called Code: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy. It was edited by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh. I am certain that I butchered that name. And so I apologize on my own behalf to everyone that knows whether or not I said it correctly. This book focuses on intellectual property rights and the original purpose of having anything like copyright in the world. So, right up my alley! The writers who contributed to this work promise exploration of the plight of creativity in the commons, the role of sharing in creative advancement, and a concept of what it would look like if intellectual property were to mean the second closing of an ecosystem versus a triumph of the commons. I mean, obviously, this one is very light reading. You can take this topic to high tea and everyone will not know what you’re talking about. However, this one looks like a really interesting book to me and I am just super ready to read it. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:19] The second to last one on the list is a book called Humble Inquiry. This is a new-to-me book that seems right in line with one of my favorite books to recommend to leaders in the open source space. From reviews of it, I have gathered that it takes a hard look at the value of listening and asking for clarification in a world that puts a high value on an unsolicited hot take. It puts the importance of high trust relationship building, which is at the heart of any cross-culturally aware organization. And for folks who’ve been working with me for a while, you know, that relationship building is an important part of my leadership expectations for myself. So it puts relationship building at the front and center with a promise of practical applications for everyday life. And if you ever have tried to tackle a complicated topic like this, you know that practical applications are really hard to come by and it’s often hard to understand it if you don’t have those practical applications. And so that is why this one is on my read and reread list this year. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:24] And then finally the WordPress Milestones book. So this sounds like a shameless plug for WordPress. And on the one hand, this whole podcast is about WordPress. And so, yes! But on the other hand, I actually am reading this for two specific reasons. I’m rereading this actually. I read it when I first joined Automattic. And so the first of the two reasons that I’m rereading it this year is that volume two of this is, like the second decade of WordPress currently, being researched and written in preparation for WordPress’s 20th birthday next year. So I am rereading this to kind of get that all back in my mind as that work is getting done. And the second reason is that I honestly like to remind myself of how far we’ve come sometimes. I talk about our work frequently. And I talk about what we’re working on right now, all the time. I talk about what we’re looking at three years from now, five years from now. The biggest concerns of today, tomorrow, and the future-future. And it’s very easy to forget how much success WordPress has had and how much growth the contributors that support us have had over the course of our long and storied history. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:40] And so I like to go back to that just to kind of give myself some grounding in our progress, as well as get some concept for how we can move forward together. So that one is also available online. Also under a creative commons ShareAlike license and it is also worth the read. I will share a link to that with the other one in the show notes as well. That brings us now to our small list of big things. Let’s see what we got in the old lineup today. So, firstly WordCamp Europe is happening this week and it’s possible to watch the live stream from the comfort of your own home. There are some smart and talented speakers at the event. So I encourage you to catch a few if you have the time. I’ll include a link to the live stream information in the show notes below, and then also you can always keep an eye out on Twitter. There will be a lot of discussions, a lot of conversation there. And so you can engage with folks that are there at the time and catch up on those conversations, catch up on those presentations in your own time, as it fits into your day. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:50] The second thing is that WordPress’s community team is preparing the annual meetup survey right now. So if you participate in meetup events, keep an eye out for that because your feedback helps us to make plans to improve that program so that it works better for you. And it helps you to learn WordPress better and feel more confident with what you are taking out into the world that way. But, if you are wanting to use this as a chance to contribute, we actually will need folks who are able to translate the surveys as well. So I’ll leave a link to some information about that in the show notes. If all of that stuff about contribution didn’t make any sense, then just like keep an eye out from your meetup organizer and they will make sure that you have that survey so that you can have your voice heard. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:08:33] And then item three is less of an item. I mean, it’s an item cause it’s in this list, but it’s less of, like, a thing to know and more of a general thing to be aware of. It’s a general awareness item. There’s a lot going on in WordPress right now. I can see how hard it is to keep track of some of these things these days. And I know as someone who’s looking at this all day every day that, yeah, it’s a lot. And it’s hard to get your bearings. So if you have a team that you contribute to already, don’t forget to reach out to each other, just to check-in. Sometimes we don’t think to ask for help. Sometimes we don’t think to offer help and you know, if no one needs any help from you at that moment, a little hello also can brighten someone’s day. And that, my friends, is your smallest of big things. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. And I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. View the full article

Welcome to “Arturo” Say hello to “Arturo” and WordPress 6.0, inspired by Grammy-winning jazz musician, Arturo O’Farrill. Known for his influence on contemporary Latin jazz, Arturo has pressed more than 15 albums spanning a body of work across five decades. Take some time to explore WordPress 6.0, built to help you unlock your creative aspirations and make your site-building experience more intuitive. And check out some of Arturo’s inspirational sounds that span Afro Cuban jazz, contemporary Latin jazz, and so much more. With nearly 1,000 enhancements and bug fixes, the second major release of 2022 is here. Download it now! As of today, WordPress powers more than 42% of websites worldwide.1 Site owners and administrators should upgrade to take full advantage of the many stability, performance, and usability enhancements today. WordPress content creators will enjoy a suite of new features geared toward improving the writing and designing experiences. Expanding Gutenberg into a full site editing experience in WordPress means that all of the problems the community had to address were complex and far-reaching. WordPress 6.0 is an example of the community’s commitment to tackling these tough challenges together. With thoughtful updates to the writing experience, building better block functionality, and adding a new intuitive style switcher, I’m really proud of the work that’s been done in this release to make a great site editing experience. Josepha Haden Chomphosy, Executive Director Download WordPress 6.0 What’s Inside Enhanced Writing Experience Writing improvements abound, whether you’re writing a brand new post or adding elements to an existing page. Explore more ways to streamline your content creation process, including: Select text across multiple blocks for easier copying and pasting.Type two open brackets `[[` to quickly access a list of recent posts and pages.Keep existing styles when you transform some blocks from one kind to another—from a Paragraph block to a Code block, for instance.Create customized buttons and any new buttons you make will retain the style customizations automatically.Make tag clouds and social icons even more appealing with updated settings and controls, and a new outline style for the tag cloud. Style Switching Block themes now include the option to contain multiple style variations. This expands the new Style system even further and enables shortcuts to switch the look and feel of your site all within a single theme. In block themes that support this feature, you can change both the available settings, like the font-weight, and the style options, like the default color palette. Change the look and feel of your site with just a few clicks. More Template Choices WordPress 6.0 includes five new template options for block themes: author, date, categories, tag, and taxonomy. These additional templates provide greater flexibility for content creators. Tailor each with the tools you already know or with the following new options in this release: Featured images can be used in the cover block.New featured image sizing controls make it easier to get the results you want.While editing a template, at the root, or between blocks, the quick inserter shows you patterns and template parts to help you work faster and discover new layout options.The query block supports filtering on multiple authors, support for custom taxonomies, and support for customizing what is shown when there are no results. Integrated Patterns Patterns will now appear when you need them in even more places, like in the quick inserter or when creating a new header or footer. If you’re a block theme author, you can even register patterns from the Pattern Directory using `theme.json`, enabling you to prioritize specific patterns that are most helpful to your theme’s users. Additional Design Tools Design tools grow more powerful and intuitive with each release. Some highlights for 6.0 include: A new color panel design saves space, but still shows your options at a glance. New border controls offer a simpler way to set your border exactly as you like it. Transparency levels for your colors allow for even more creative color options.Control gaps, margins, typography, and more on a collection of blocks, all at once, in the Group block.Switch between stack, row, and group variations to position groups of blocks with more layout flexibility.Use the gap support functionality in the Gallery block to create different looks – from adding spacing between all images, to removing spacing altogether. Better List View New keyboard shortcuts enable you to select multiple blocks from the list view, modify them in bulk, and drag and drop them within the list. List View can be opened and closed easily; it comes collapsed by default and it automatically expands to the current selection whenever you select a block. Block Locking Controls Now you can lock your blocks. Choose to disable the option to move a block, remove a block, or both. This simplifies project handover, allowing your clients to unleash their creativity without worrying about accidentally breaking their site in the process. Improved Performance in WordPress 6.0 This release includes several updates focused on improving the performance of WordPress. These enhancements cover a range of performance areas including improving the page and post-load speed, reducing the execution time of various query types, caching, navigation menus, and much more. The performance team working group is an important focus area of the core development team. For more information on this group’s work, please follow their work on Making WordPress with the #performance hashtag. Enhancing WordPress 6.0 Accessibility Accessibility is an integral part of the WordPress mission of fostering an inclusive community and supporting users of all types around the world. With this in mind, WordPress 6.0 includes more than 50 updates specifically focused on enhancing the accessibility of the platform. You can read about these updates and learn more about the accessibility initiatives that are ongoing. Learn More About WordPress 6.0 See WordPress 6.0 in action! Watch a brief overview video highlighting some of the major features debuting in WordPress 6.0. Explore learn.wordpress.org for quick how-to videos and lots more on new features in WordPress. Or join a live interactive online learning session on a specific WordPress topic. Developers can explore the WordPress 6.0 Field Guide. It is overflowing with detailed developer notes to help you build with and extend WordPress. Read the WordPress 6.0 Release Notes for more information on the included enhancements and issues fixed, installation information, developer notes and resources, release contributors, and the list of file changes in this release. The WordPress 6.0 Release Squad The group listed below tirelessly supported the release, from conception to ship date, and beyond: Release Lead: Matt Mullenweg Release Coordinators: Héctor Prieto and Anne McCarthyCore Tech Lead: Peter WilsonEditor Tech Leads: Adam Zieliński and Greg ZiółkowskiCore Triage Leads: Ahmed Chaion and Colin StewartEditor Triage Lead: Nick DiegoDocumentation Leads: Birgit Pauli-Haack, Milana Cap, and Abha ThakorMarketing & Communications Lead: Dan SoschinTest Leads: Piotrek Boniu and Brian AlexanderDesign Lead: Channing Ritter Thank you to 500+ Contributors WordPress 6.0 would not have been possible without the contributions of more than 500 people in at least 58 countries. Their asynchronous coordination to deliver hundreds of enhancements and fixes into a stable release is a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress community. Aaron Jorbin · Aaron Robertshaw · Abdullah Ramzan · Abha Thakor · Adam Silverstein · Adam Zielinski · adi64bit · Adil Ali · agepcom · Ahmed Chaion · Aki Hamano · Akira Tachibana · Alain Schlesser · Alan Jacob Mathew · alansyue · Albert Juhé Lluveras · albertomake · Alefe Souza · Aleksandar Kostov · Alex Concha · Alex Lende · Alex Mills · Alex Stine · aliakseyenkaihar · Alkesh Miyani · Alok Shrestha · Amanda Giles · Andrea Fercia · Andrei Draganescu · Andrei Surdu · Andrew Dixon · Andrew Nacin · Andrew Ozz · Andrew Serong · Andrey "Rarst" Savchenko · André · Andy Fragen · Angelika Reisiger · Anh Tran · Ankit K Gupta · Anne McCarthy · Anoop Ranawat · Anthony Burchell · Anthony Ledesma · Anton Vlasenko · antonrinas · arcangelini · Ari Stathopoulos · Arne · Arpit G Shah · artdecotech · ArteMa · Arthur Chu · Asaquzzaman mishu · atomicjack · Aurélien Joahny · Aurooba Ahmed · Barry · Barry Ceelen · Bartosz Gadomski · Beda · Ben Dwyer · Benachi · Bernhard Reiter · BettyJJ · Bhrugesh Bavishi · binarymoon · Birgir Erlendsson (birgire) · Birgit Pauli-Haack · Blair Williams · BlogAid · Boone Gorges · Brandon DuRette · Brandon Kraft · Brian Alexander · bronsonquick · Brooke · Brooke. · Bruno Ribaric · caraya · Carlos Bravo · Carlos Garcia · Carolina Nymark · cbigler · Chad Chadbourne · Channing Ritter · charleyparkerdesign · charlyox · Chintan hingrajiya · Chloe Bringmann · Chouby · Chris Lubkert · Chris Van Patten · chriscct7 · clonemykey · Colin Stewart · conner_bw · Cory Hughart · Courtney Robertson · Crisoforo Gaspar · Dan Soschin · Daniel Bachhuber · Daniel Richards · danieldudzic · darerodz · Dat Hoang · Dave Smith · David Baumwald · David Biňovec · David Calhoun · David Gwyer · David Herrera · David Shanske · Deb Nath Utpol · Delowar Hossain · denishua · Dennis Claassen · Dennis Snell · Dhanendran · Dharmesh Patel · dhusakovic · Dilip Bheda · Dion Hulse · Dominik Schilling · donmhico · drago239 · Drew Jaynes · dromero20 · Eddy · ehtis · Eliezer Peña · Ella van Durpe · Emmanuel Hesry · Enrico Battocchi · eric3d · Erik Betshammar · espiat · Estela Rueda · etaproducto · EverPress · Fabian Kägy · Fabio Blanco · Faison · Felipe Elia · Felix Arntz · Femy Praseeth · Florian Brinkmann · Florian TIAR · FolioVision · Francesca Marano · Francisco Vera · frankei · furi3r · gadhiyaravi · Garrett Hyder · Garth Mortensen · Gary Jones · Gary Pendergast · genosseeinhorn · George Hotelling · George Mamadashvili · George Stephanis · geriux · Glen Davies · Grégory Viguier · Grant M. Kinney · Greg Ziółkowski · gregoiresailland · Guido Scialfa · gumacahin · gvgvgvijayan · Hareesh · Hasanuzzaman · Hasnain Ashfaq · Hauwa Abashiya · Haz · Helen Hou-Sandi · HelgaTheViking · Henry Wright · Hilay Trivedi · Hitendra Chopda · HristoK · Hugh Lashbrooke · Héctor Prieto · Ian Belanger · Ian Dunn · ianatkins · ianmjones · ImanGM · imokol · Isabel Brison · ishitaka · itsamoreh · Iulia Cazan · Ivan Lutrov · jadpm · Jake Spurlock · jakeparis · James Koster · Jamie · Jan Weiss · janh2 · Jarret · Jason Johnston · Jason LeMahieu (MadtownLems) · Javier Arce · Javier Prieto · Jay Trees · jazbek · Jean-Baptiste Audras · Jeff Bowen · Jeff Matson · Jeff Ong · Jeff Paul · Jenny Dupuy · Jenny Wong · Jeremy Felt · Jeremy Herve · Jeremy Yip · Jez Emery · jhned · jhnstn · jigar bhanushali · jiteshdhamaniya · Joe Dolson · Joe McGill · Joen Asmussen · Johannes Kinast · John Blackbourn · John James Jacoby · John Regan · John Watkins · Jon Brown · Jonathan Champ · Jonathan Desrosiers · Jonny Harris · Jono Alderson · Jorge · Jorge Costa · José Arcos · Josepha · Josepha Dambul · Joshua Fredrickson · Joy · jrivett · jsnajdr · juanlopez4691 · JuanMa Garrido · Juliette Reinders Folmer · Junaid Ahmed · Justin Ahinon · Justin Busa · Justin Tucker · KafleG · Kai Hao · Kajal Gohel · kapacity · Kapil Paul · Kaspars · kbatdorf · Kelly Choyce-Dwan · Kemory Grubb · Kerry Liu · Kev Provance · Kharis Sulistiyono · Kirtan Gajjar · Kjell Reigstad · KMix · Knut Sparhell · Konrad.K · Konstantin Obenland · kpegoraro · kubiq · Kukhyeon Heo · Lauren · Lena Morita · lenasterg · leskam · Lew Ayotte · linux4me2 · Lisa Schuyler · lkraav · Louis · Lovekesh Kumar · Lucas Karpiuk · Luis Felipe Zaguini · luisherranz · Luke Cavanagh · Lukman Nakib · M. van Dam · macbookandrew · Maciej · Maggie Cabrera · maguijo · Mahbub Hasan Imon · malthert · manfcarlo · Marcelo de Moraes Serpa · Marco Ciampini · Marcus Kazmierczak · Marin Atanasov · Marius L. J. · Mark Jaquith · Markus Kosmal · marv2 · Mary Baum · Mat Lipe · Mathieu · Matias Ventura · matiasbenedetto · Matt Chowning · Matt Martz · Matt Mullenweg · Matt Royal · Matt Stoney · Matt Wiebe · maur · Mauriac AZOUA · Max Kellermann · Mehedi Foysal · mgol · Michael Burridge · Michal Czaplinski · Miguel Fonseca · Mike Auteri · Mike Schroder · miken32 · Milan Dinić · Milana Cap · Minal Diwan · Mirco Babini · MMDeveloper · Mohadese Ghasemi · Mohammad Ahsan Habib · Mohammad Rockeybul Alam · MohammadJafar Khajeh · Morten Rand-Hendriksen · moushik · mqudsi · Muhammad Faizan Haidar · Mukesh Panchal · Mustaque Ahmed · Nabil · Nagesh Pai - a11n · Nalini Thakor · Nathan · Nayana Maradia · Nextend Support - Ramona · Nicholas Garofalo · Nick Ciske · Nick Diego · Nicolas Juen · nidhidhandhukiya · Nik Tsekouras · Nil · nmschaller · Noah Allen · oakesjosh · oguzkocer · Oliver Campion · Omar Alshaker · opr18 · Otshelnik-Fm · overclokk · ovidiul · Pablo Honey · Paolo L. Scala · Paragon Initiative Enterprises · Pascal Birchler · Paul Bearne · Paul Biron · Paul Ryan · Paul Von Schrottky · paulkevan · Pavan Patil · Pavlo · pbking · Pedro Mendonça · Petar Ratković · Peter Smits · Peter Westwood · Peter Wilson · petrosparaskevopoulos · Petter Walbø Johnsgård · pgpagely · Phil Johnston · Pieterjan Deneys · pikamander2 · Piotrek Boniu · Pooja Derashri · Pooja N Muchandikar · Pravin Parmar · Presskopp · presstoke · Priyank · pypwalters · r-a-y · Rachel Baker · Rafi Ahmed · Ramanan · Ramon Ahnert · Ramon James · Ravi Vaghela · ravipatel · Razvan Onofrei · Rehan Ali · Remy Perona · Riad Benguella · Rian Rietveld · Rich Tabor · Richard B. Kreckel · ricomoorman · Rob Scott · Robert Anderson · Rolf Allard van Hagen · Rolf Siebers · Rostislav Wolný · Rufus87 · Ryan Boren · Ryan Fredlund · Ryan McCue · Ryan Welcher · Sébastien SERRE · Sören Wrede · Sabbir Ahmed · Sabbir Hasan · Sami Falah · Sanjeev Aryal · santosguillamot · Sarah Norris · Sarah Snow · sarayourfriend · Sathiyamoorthy V · Sayedul Sayem · sbossarte · sclayf1 · Scott Buscemi · Scott Reilly · Scott Taylor · Segayuu · Sergey Biryukov · sheepysheep60 · Shital Marakana · Shreyas Ikhar · siddharth · Siddharth Thevaril · silb3r · Simon Blackbourn · Simon Prosser · simonhammes · Siobhan · Smit Rathod · snapfractalpop · socalchristina · Spencer Cameron-Morin · stacimc · stefanfisk · Stefano Lissa · Stefano Minoia · Stefanos Togoulidis · Stephen Bernhardt · Stephen Edgar · Stephen Harris · Steve Grunwell · Subrata Sarkar · Sumit Singh · Sumit Singh · Sumon Sarker · SunilPrajapati · sunyatasattva · Sven Wagener · Sybre Waaijer · Synchro · Takashi Kitajima · tharsheblows · Theo H · Thimal Wickremage · Thomas McMahon · Thomas Patrick Levy · Thomas Pike · Till Krüss · Tim Blankenship · Tim Nolte · Timothy Jacobs · tobifjellner (Tor-Bjorn Fjellner) · Tom · tomasztunik · Tomek · Tomoki Shimomura · Tony Tahmouch · Tonya Mork · Toro_Unit (Hiroshi Urabe) · Torsten Landsiedel · Tracy · trex005 · tszming · tumas2 · twstokes · Tynan Beatty · tzipporahwitty · Uday Kokitkar · ugljanin · Ugyen Dorji · Ulrich · Utkarsh · valer1e · versusbassz · Vicente Canales · Vishal Kumar · vlad.olaru · Volodymyr Kolesnykov · vortfu · WebMan Design | Oliver Juhas · Wendy Chen · Wes Theron · Weston Ruter · whoisnegrello · wpcharged · wpmakenorg · wpsoul · WraithKenny · wslyhbb · Xidorn Quan · Yui · Yunus Ertuğrul · Zebulan Stanphill · znuff · Česlav Przywara By release day, 76 locales had translated 90-percent or more of WordPress 6.0 into their language. Community translators continue after a release ensuring more translations are on their way. Thank you to everyone who helps to make WordPress available in 205 languages. Many thanks to all of the community volunteers who contribute to the support forums by answering questions from WordPress users around the world. If contributing to WordPress appeals to you, it’s easy to learn more and get involved. Discover the different teams that come together to Make WordPress and explore the product roadmap on the core development blog. The WordPress Mission & You WordPress is software designed for everyone, emphasizing accessibility, performance, security, and ease of use. The project believes great software should work with minimum setup, so you can focus on sharing your story, product, or services freely. The basic WordPress software is simple and predictable so you can easily get started. It also offers powerful features for growth and success. WordPress believes in democratizing publishing and the freedoms that come with open source. Supporting this idea is a large community of people collaborating on and contributing to this project. The WordPress community is welcoming and inclusive. Our contributors’ passion drives the success of WordPress which, in turn, helps you reach your goals. Learn more about WordPress and how you can join our community to help shape the future of the world’s most popular website platform. A Release Haiku Six-point-oh is here Time to download and upgrade Let’s pause, celebrate 1 According to W3Techs as of May 5, 2022. View the full article

WordPress 6.0 is scheduled for release next week on May 24, 2022! This RC3 release is the final opportunity for you to test and help contribute to making the 6.0 release great. You can view changes since the RC2 release via Gutenberg and Trac. Installing RC3 This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, and test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it is recommended that you install RC3 on a test server and site. You can test WordPress 6.0 RC3 in three ways: Option 1: Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream). Option 2: Direct download the release candidate (zip). Option 3: When using WP-CLI to upgrade from Beta 1, 2, 3, 4, RC1, or RC2 on a case-insensitive filesystem, please use the following command: wp core update --version=6.0-RC3 Plugin and Theme Developers All plugin and theme developers are encouraged to complete testing of their respective extensions against WordPress 6.0 RC3 and update the “Tested up to” version in their readme file to 6.0 this week. If you find compatibility problems, please be sure to post detailed information to the support forums, so these items can be investigated further prior to the final release date of May 24. Review the WordPress 6.0 Field Guide, for more details on this release. Review additional information on the full 6.0 release cycle. Check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.0-related developer notes in the coming weeks which will detail upcoming changes. Translate WordPress Do you speak a language other than English? Help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages. How to Help Test WordPress Testing for issues is critical for stabilizing a release throughout its development. Testing is also a great way to contribute to WordPress. If you are new to testing, check out this detailed guide that will walk you through how to get started. If you think you have run into an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. If you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, you can file one on WordPress Trac. This is also where you can find a list of known bugs. RC3, An (Almost) Final Haiku It’s near time for six The reward is the journey Just one week to go Thank you to the following contributors for collaborating on this post: @dansoschin, @webcommsat. View the full article

In the thirty-first episode of the WordPress Briefing, GAAD Co-Founder Joe Devon joins WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy to discuss Global Accessibility Awareness Day and the role of open source in accessibility. Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Credits Guest: Joe DevonEditor: Dustin HartzlerLogo: Beatriz FialhoProduction: Santana Inniss and Chloé BringmannSong: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod References About GAADGAAD Foundation PledgeWorld Health Organization on Disability The Dress PhenomenonThe Guardian on Yanny or Laurel Empathy vs. Altruism in Modern Leadership, Josepha Haden Chomphosy The WebAim Million 2022 ReportWordPress 6.0 Development Cycle WordCamp Europe 2022 Transcript [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00] 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! [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:40] Y’all, we’ve got an absolutely jam-packed couple of weeks in WordPress. We’ve got events happening and releases shipping and contributor days being coordinated (I almost said contributor days being contributed). That’s also what they’re doing. I’ll share some of those highlights in today’s small list of big things, but I did want to specifically call out something that’s coming up this week on Thursday (May 19, 2022), and that something is Global Accessibility Awareness Day. The team of contributors over on the Accessibility team has participated in the Global Accessibility Awareness Day in the past. So I thought it would be interesting to hear from one of the co-founders of this particular day of awareness. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:27] All right. And with that, Joe Devin, would you like to tell us a little bit more about yourself? [Joe Devon 00:01:34] Sure. So I am the co-founder of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, which is a day that goes viral every year on the third Thursday of May. We typically have the Twitter reach on the GAAD hashtag on Twitter of 200 million users, which is, I think, pretty much their active user count. We stopped counting once we hit their daily active user count. And then, I am Chair of the GAAD Foundation, which we launched last year. And then I have a day job too, where I’m CEO and co-founder of Diamond, which is an inclusive digital agency that builds software accessibly by default. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:15] Wonderful. Well, we are so excited to have you today. I said we like it’s me and the mouse in my pocket—we in the WordPress community that’s going to listen to this. Super excited to have you today. So you mentioned GAAD, Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Last year was your 10th anniversary, which is very exciting, but like with so many good things, I hear it all started with a blog post and a blog post on WordPress, no less. So I’d love to hear about how GAAD evolved from that, with, as I understand it, your co-founder of Jennison (Asuncion). That must be where you met him, I assume. [Joe Devon 00:02:51] Yes. Yes. So what happened was I started a WordPress blog called My SQL Talk. So it’s a database blog, and I just thought it was a brilliant name. I mean, My SQL Talk, like that, should be super popular. And it probably had maybe ten people who ever looked. Um, and then my dad was getting older, and my dad was a survivor of the concentration camps, and he was a genius. He spoke ten languages. It, he was one of those people. That, when he walked into a room, he just commanded respect. You knew that there was history. I don’t know how to explain it really, but it was special when my dad walked into the room. And considering all of this that he suffered in his life, watching him get older and struggle, particularly with his banking, was very painful to see. And the bank wasn’t accessible, so I wrote this blog post proposing that we create a Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Sometimes I get these visions, and they never turn into anything. But while I think about it, I’m like, “all right, let’s write this blog post and this can definitely work. Right?” And then you finish the blog post to hit send, and you’re like, “this is not going to work.” But I wasn’t even smart enough to do social media on it. But fortunately, WordPress had an auto-tweet feature, and it tweeted it out, and Jennison Asuncion, my co-founder, happened to be around and not out that Saturday night. And he read the blog post, and he said, “this is a great idea. Let’s make it happen.” And we had two busy people, but we both had a community. He had the accessibility community, and I was building a tech scene in Los Angeles. And what I discovered is if you combine a great idea with the community, great things can happen. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:49] Oh man, you’re speaking my language over here, helping people find their communities, knowing that community is the thing that is the lifeblood of society. That sounded like a tautology. It is not a tautology. You can have a society with an attempt to not have any sort of community around it, but I bet it doesn’t work very well. Well, that’s, that’s very interesting. And so you all just kind of talked through what that would look like, I assume in confidence, or that would have to take place, right? Or was it on Twitter in those days? [Joe Devon 00:05:24] Oh, you could still look in the comments and see the back and forth of Jennison and a bunch of other people that got pretty involved with GAAD that are some legendary folks in there. It’s kind of mind-blowing because I dunno how, how you feel, but for me, when I used to code, uh, three months later, I’d look back at old code and be like, “oh, I suck,” you know, or write an email even and you look back on it a day later and are like “what a stupid email, how stupid am I?” You know? But I look back on that one after ten years; I was scared to look at it because I’m like, it must’ve been really bad. But you know, it kind of held up, and exactly what I wrote in there happened – to my utter shock. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:06] But also, it’s kinda nice, though, to look back and be like, “oh, I used to be much dumber.” Cause then you’re like, look how far I’ve come. I’m no longer that dumb. I’m a different kind of dumb now; good for me. I always hope to be a different kind of dumb as I go forward. So then, okay, so that was your ten-year anniversary last year. GAAD, in general, now has been going on for 11 years, and at the time of this recording, in a couple of weeks, but then probably a week when it finally publishes, you have your next, your next round of that going. I think it seems safe to assume that awareness of the need for accessibility has increased during that time, but we all know that the work of accessibility is ongoing. And so, I’m just curious to hear from your perspective if the awareness of the need for accessibility has generally started to permeate developer communities. And are you seeing more developer awareness around the need for accessibility in tech in general? [Joe Devon 00:07:12] Yeah. You know, it’s not enough. It’s certainly improved a lot. I keynoted a conference probably four years after GAAD started, maybe five, and I kind of assumed nobody would have heard of accessibility, and I was taken aback when I asked who had heard of it, and a good chunk of the room had. So even then, there had been a difference, and I’d say now I see accessibility mentioned a lot more in conferences and stuff. But when it comes to actually building it, there’s a tremendous amount of ignorance. There, there still needs to be a lot more awareness. And I think partially people are a little bit scared to dip their toe because they’re scared that they’re going to be told that “no, it’s not accessible,” or that they’re going to say the wrong word or offend somebody. So I’d say that there’s some degree of trepidation, but also developers, and it’s not just developers, designers, and product people. There’s so much to learn, and it’s like, “oh God, there’s another piece that I have to learn.” And I’m so glad that you invited me on this podcast because it’s the developers that, you know, I am a developer, not anymore, I haven’t touched code in years, but that’s where I came from. Right? This is my peach, right? Particularly WordPress folks, because I had done a fair bit of WordPress before I moved on to some other things. And, I think we have to talk about usability and understand that accessibility is so much more than how we look at disability. And if you don’t mind, I’m going to ask you a question. How do you think the typical WordPress developer or designer would define disability? [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:09:05] in the kinds of conversations that I’ve had over the years, it frequently has to do with visual things. Because it’s just screens all day, right? And that’s a primary area where our designers and developers really have made some effort. But my personal favorite sort of, of example, for like, when you’re looking at how to make sure that your products are accessible is, what, if you have to use your website, or you have to build your website using only one arm. Because that gives you an opportunity to kind of look at disability from a permanent standpoint. Like if you have lost permanent use of one arm, but also gives you an opportunity to look at the temporary options for that sort of lack of mobility. Like you’re a mother with an infant, and so you have to be able to, you know, get your stuff done with one arm. And so I know that we paid a bunch of attention to screen readers and what works in not way back in 2018 and 2019 did a lot of work with. Literally zero screen. And can you still do the thing that you need to do, which was incredibly difficult. And I was really excited to see what our developers came up with around that. But I think that that is quite a bit of that discussion as we’re going through it from the beginning to the end. [Joe Devon 00:10:27] Yeah. I mean, that’s a great answer, and you definitely understand some of the nuances way better than I think that the average creator, digital product creator, I’m including the, you know, the product people, the designers, and the developers. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:10:42] We’re very fortunate to have more than just developers in WordPress. [Joe Devon 00:10:50] The reason I bring this up is that the WHO (World Health Organization) had to; they’re the ones that did massive research across the globe. And they had to, they had to come up with a definition, and in their definition, they needed to draw a line. Typically, I don’t remember the exact thing cause it’s a 350-page report, and I kept looking for where they defined it again. It was a little hard to find, but essentially it’s if there’s a major disability or a disability that impacts some significant portion of your day-to-day activities. And that’s really great when you’re trying to do a report on how many disabilities there are out there; what percentage of the population has a disability? And their figures are something like 15% of the population has a disability, which is a huge number. But at the same time, they also mentioned that 2.2 billion people have a visual impairment. And we also know that over 33% of the population is over 50, and I’m included in that population. And I can say that when you’re over 50, you know, I’ve got clouds in my eyes. I don’t know where they came from, but they definitely make it harder to see. When I’m in a restaurant, I can’t focus on the person across from me the same way. My hearing is not the same, and anybody over 50 is going to have certain impairments and won’t see as well; color contrast issues are a big deal. Being able to raise the font is a big deal. And I think that accessibility is connected in most people’s minds with disability. And they’ll attach that to something like being blind or being deaf or hard of hearing or having a missing limb or having some other kind of disability. And, as a result, they’re like, “well, I don’t even know any people in that category possibly,” and as a result, they’re like, “well, how important is this?” Yes. They might feel guilty. I should do the right thing. This is the right thing to do. But honestly, like how much money should I spend on it? How much, what percentage of my time should I spend on it? And it’s because they don’t realize that everybody has different abilities. And so, I’m starting to go away from even talking about disabilities and asking people to remember that all of us perceive things differently. Do you remember the gold dress where they were trying to say, what color is this dress? Is it gold and white or blue and black? And it is blue and black, but to me, all I see is gold and white. And then there was Laurel or Yanny. Do you remember that?. And some people heard it, and typically older people heard it as Laurel, and I’ve, and I do this in some of my presentations. I play that, that sound. And usually, it’s Laurel for me, but sometimes it’s Yanny. Even personally, it changes. And so, we have a totally different perception. Now think about memory. There’s a different kind of blindness. If you try and remember, let’s say a relative or a friend that is no longer. How well do you see that picture? Because for me, it is very, very vague, but for some people, they say, and I’ve been asking people, and I’d love your answer as well. How vivid is it? And some people say, I can read the, I can see the pattern on the shirt. It’s as vivid as if I see with opening my eyes, seeing, you know, the regular in front of me, and I can even read a name tag in the memory. And I’m like, Woah, so maybe I’m blind in a way. Right? So how do you see it? How do you remember things? [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:14:42] Oh, I’m a, I’m a real visual person and a tactile person. And so, like if I interacted with someone, I’m very likely to be able to picture, like, recreate that mental picture pretty well in my mind. I recently, very recently, met some of my first people in that executive leadership space who were like, yeah, I don’t, I don’t visualize things. And I was like, what are you, how do you do this work? Because like, you have to be able to do that. And they were like, no, I don’t have mental pictures. [Joe Devon 00:15:13] Some people don’t have an inner dialogue. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:15:17] I don’t understand that either, [Joe Devon 00:15:19] Me either. So accessibility studies all of these differences with respect to how you’re presenting all of this information. And if you don’t pay attention to accessibility, you’re really just missing out. And then there’s colorblindness. If you’re creating something like slack that has an online/offline indicator, and you only use red and green for people who are colorblind, they see gray and gray. And so what I’m trying to teach the community with digital product creators is that no, you cannot ignore it. You can ignore accessibility, but then you’re not good at your job. I mean, I don’t mean to say it in an offensive way, but you’re not good at your job if you’re unaware. If you break a rule on purpose, great. But if you don’t know the rule, it’s just a lack of craft, and you absolutely should make it a priority. And you’re not doing it as a charity. You’re doing it because you care about your users, and you care about your craft, and you want to build things well, and it’s a necessity. And I think that this is the kind of message that our community needs to hear. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:16:31] I want to touch on something that you sort of brought up a bit, um, at the start of the answer there. So you brought up the concept of usability. And in the last time that I did a podcast about accessibility, I defined accessibility as a subset of usability. Do you think that if we were to consistently draw that line for people so that it’s not just like accessibility is this thing that you should do outside of usability? If we were to more consistently draw that line, do you think that that would help people to see and understand better that its shades of existence, usability, and accessibility? [Joe Devon 00:17:10] Oh, 100%, a hundred percent. And in my company, we kind of realized that that’s exactly what we have to do. We have to see this as usability. And I don’t, we talk about accessibility a lot, but I don’t want to. It’s part of the plumbing for us. We’ve made it part of the plumbing, and I can tell you it’s a struggle to take accessibility and make it part of an organization, even when you’re bringing it top-down, believe it or not. For our teams, particularly the designers, they are blown away by what they’re learning because they’re improving their craft. And design is typically where there’s a struggle to get accessibility accepted because there seems to be a very strong idea of what a design should look like. And I think it’s really about the approach because UX and design it’s all about empathy for people. And when you approach it, not as, even though empathy should mean that, that, you know, do the right thing at the same time, it’s more about empathy for your user, and your user includes so much more than just people with disabilities that you haven’t run into somebody that has that disability and therefore you build it better, and it’s, it’s completely blown their mind. They love it. They love doing it. And I’m not hiring people with accessibility coming in. We’re training them to work accessibly. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:18:34] So I think it’s interesting that you talk about empathy as part of being able to make sure that you’re creating something that’s accessible because I actually feel like empathy is. Like it’s being considered this gold standard for many, many things right now. And I think it actually is more harmful in the long run than instead making altruistic choices. And so, I have a blog post that I will link in our show notes that will kind of help everybody see more fully my concept there. But when you rely on empathy, you do kind of have to rely on one, being able to run into all of the issues you were mentioning. You have to know people who have problems in order to know that the problems exist. And then you also kind of have to assume that once you have willingly put yourself into the discomfort of that kind of disability, whatever, wherever it exists on that spectrum, your experience of that discomfort is the same as someone who lives with it. And I just don’t think that we can necessarily do that. I always think that trying to do the altruistic thing, like doing your research and figuring out what it is and trying to make decisions on behalf of other people as best you can, which is a terrible thing. Still, like decisions that take into account the experiences that people are sharing with you and then going to them and saying, “does this make that experience better or worse?” is the more sustainable option from my perspective, this is specifically leadership. Still, I think it’s true for accessibility as well, and probably product design as a whole, but it’s very difficult. Like people really feel like they understand the concept of empathy right now. And I do think that sometimes that leads us down the wrong path for things. What’s your thought on that? I think you kind of agree based on what your answer was [Joe Devon 00:20:33] Oh, no, absolutely. And you know, we, you, can’t never about us without us, as the common saying, and we’ve gathered a group of a hundred people with a wide variety of disabilities for research. Whenever we do any UX and research, and sometimes we’re asked to just do research projects, we go out and ask the users. We had some really interesting companies approach us to do innovation and accessibility, and they had strong assumptions. We looked at the assumptions and agreed with it, but we’re like, all right, they were smart. They said, “vet this with users for us, please,” because they didn’t want to gather their own group. We vetted with users, and we’re blown away, always blown away because there are so many things you just don’t know unless you’ve lived with a particular disability. You can’t guess, and you’ve got to speak to your users and a wide variety of them. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:21:30] Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. What role does open source play in expanding accessibility, either in specifically the digital space or just accessibility in general? [Joe Devon 00:21:42] I guess if the question is, what role does it play? I would say the role it plays is it is, unfortunately, it makes accessibility worse because, for the most part open source is not very accessible. And it’s a personal passion of mine, so I’m really glad that you brought that up. You know, it is so bizarre. You write a blog post and then it goes viral, and it goes viral every year to a degree that you can’t even believe it, that all these companies that you know are running events. Privately, publicly talking about it. And then you get all these people thanking you for what you’ve done year after year. And then one year, you read on Twitter, The Blind Onion; I’m sure you’re familiar with The Onion, the satirical clip, there’s the Blind Onion. And they tweet out, “Now that Global Accessibility Awareness Day is over, we look forward to 364 days of global accessibility oblivion.” And that really hurt at the time, but at the same time, and I was told to ignore it, don’t worry about it, but I’m like, no, this is coming from a place of pain. And the point of GAAD was to make a difference. It wasn’t too to just give everybody an opportunity to say, “Hey, look at what we’re doing,” and then not make a difference. So, as a result of that, I started to think about, well, where are we with this? And, and so I’ve created a state of accessibility report that through my company, we’re able to run for a few years, and it’s not, you know, the state is not great. And I’m like, well, what can we do to change things? So, as a result of all of this, I really wanted to figure out, well, what can we do to make sure that GAAD does make a difference? And so, I came up with the idea of the GAAD pledge, which is specifically meant for open source frameworks. And the idea of the GAAD pledge is that an open source framework, when they are ready, takes the pledge to make accessibility a core value of the framework. Now, terms of what that actually entails are different for every single project because every project is unique. We did create a bit of a framework, which had the idea of saying, okay, you’re going to, first of all, create an accessibility statement that says that this framework is going to conform to whatever, WCAG, which is Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, to whatever WCAG level is decided and is appropriate for the framework. That there’s going to be documentation for anybody that is downloading this piece of open source project and trying to implement it, that there should be guidelines for them, that all of the examples should be accessible. It’s really important because even the frameworks that try to pay attention to accessibility. You’ll often see that people from the community will provide examples, and they’re inaccessible. And it’s really sad when you see that because so many people are just copy-pasting. That’s typically how it works, and they’re going to copy-paste something bad. So putting a statement around it, I think, would be really great. And what we’re hoping to see is that lots and lots of big open source communities decide to take the pledge. And then it’ll sort of be table stakes that any new open source projects as well look, all of these frameworks that made it, they took the pledge and therefore we should take the pledge as well. And so the very first year, we had React Native take the pledge, and they put a lot of effort into their accessibility. The second group to take it was Ember.js, and they always put a lot of effort into their accessibility, and they continued that effort. We’re about to announce the next one, but we’re still two weeks away. So I can’t say anything yet, but yeah, we’re, uh, we’re hoping for a lot more uptake on, on the gap pledge because it, it affects so many people downstream. WordPress’s what percent of the web right now? 43%? So there you go. That’s so many people. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:25:57] So many people. Yeah, fun fact Gutenberg, our current rewriting of the editing experience in WordPress, primarily uses React. And so, I’m glad to hear that they have taken that pledge as well. As with any good cooking, it starts with good ingredients. [Joe Devon 00:26:12] You said it. That was great. I wish I was a cook, though. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:26:23] I love it. All right. Let’s what keeps you up at night when it comes to the state of accessibility? [Joe Devon 00:26:29] What keeps me up at night is how to move the needle. It is such a big thing to change. And there are so many angles that you can approach this with, but at the end of the day, it’s, it’s a monster. It’s a monster. There are so many legacy sites out there. If you look at WebAIM, they do a yearly report on the state of accessibility as well. They call it the WebAIM Million, and they’re typically seeing 97% inaccessible, 98%. It goes up and down a little bit every year. And that’s, that’s just a huge boat to move. I think we need to at least get the newer, uh, newer websites and mobile apps to move. And what we’ve seen in our state of accessibility report is that only the very top companies seem to put in the effort to make their products accessible. There is a big push with the enterprise companies to do it. The CEOs are starting to talk about it, but what we need is the entire culture of software development to change. Or I should even say digital product development change and to move that boat is massive. And that’s I put it in my tagline in my email like that’s my mission in life, and I hope to achieve it before I die. So that keeps me up at night. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:27:52] I think that would keep me up at night as well. I mean, it seems like you are really just personally mission-driven and impact-driven. Do you feel like, in the event that the work that you’ve accomplished so far is what you accomplish, you feel still like you’ve had an impact? I feel like you have had an impact. [Joe Devon 00:28:13] I’m not one of those people that tries to have a legacy or like tries to focus on what my impact is and all of that. I just try and do good work. And hopefully, it just shows at the end of the day. I’m just trying to have the impact without the accolades. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:28:34] I get it. Well, Joe, thank you so much for joining us here on this episode of WP Briefing. You have been a delight to chat with. [Joe Devon 00:28:42] Likewise, it’s really been a pleasure to meet you, and uh, and I appreciate the opportunity. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:28:54] And now it’s time for our smallest of big things. As I mentioned at the start, it is packed. Number one tomorrow, May 17th, RC3. So one of the final RCs that we’re going to have for the WordPress 6.0 release, unless something goes horribly, horribly wrong, which I don’t think it will. And then, two days after that, Global Accessibility Awareness Day, as I mentioned, will be on May 19th. So, this coming Thursday. And then next week, we have the 6.0 release. We have the WordPress 6.0 release on May 24th. Three days after that, WordPress turns 19 on May 27th, starting its final teenage year before we turn twenty in 2023. So that was the rapid-fire dance card for the next two weeks. The stuff that is happening with and around WordPress for everyone to know. As a heads up, also, many people are headed to WordCamp Europe in Porto(, Portugal). The first week of June, I am going to do a live from WordCamp Europe episode. It will not be live. I’ll just record it live. And so. You know you’ll get to hear me with my hoarsest voice and maybe singing to my computer. Cause that almost always happens at these things. 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. And I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. View the full article

The next release candidate for WordPress 6.0 is now available! WordPress 6.0 is scheduled for release on May 24th, 2022 – just two weeks from today. “Release Candidate” means that this version of WordPress is ready for release! Since the WordPress ecosystem includes thousands of plugins and themes, it is important that everyone within the WordPress community check to see if anything was missed along the way. That means the project would love your help. Thank you to everyone who has contributed towards testing and logging issues to help make WordPress 6.0 stable (and awesome). WordPress still needs your help testing, especially theme and plugin developers. Since the RC1 release on May 3rd, 2022, there have been approximately 40 issues resolved in Gutenberg and Trac. Installing RC2 This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, and test this version of WordPress on a production or mission-critical website. Instead, it is recommended that you RC2 on a test server and site. You can test WordPress 6.0 RC2 in three ways: Option 1: Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream). Option 2: Direct download the release candidate version here (zip). Option 3: When using WP-CLI to upgrade from Beta 1, 2, 3, 4, or RC1 on a case-insensitive filesystem, please use the following command: wp core update --version=6.0-RC2 Additional information on the full 6.0 release cycle is available here. Check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.0-related developer notes in the coming weeks, which will detail all upcoming changes. Plugin and Theme Developers All plugin and theme developers should test their respective extensions against WordPress 6.0 RC2 and update the “Tested up to” version in their readme file to 6.0. If you find compatibility problems, please be sure to post detailed information to the support forums so that these items can be investigated further prior to the final release date of May 24th. Review the WordPress 6.0 Field Guide for more details on this release. Translate WordPress Do you speak a language other than English? Help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages. How to Help Test WordPress Testing for issues is critical for stabilizing a release throughout its development. Testing is also a great way to contribute to WordPress. If you are new to testing, check out this detailed guide that will walk you through how to get started. If you think you have run into an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. If you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, you can file one on WordPress Trac. This is also where you can find a list of known bugs. An RC2 Haiku for You Anticipation Sprinting toward G/A now Please — test, translate — thanks! Thank you to the following contributors for collaborating on this post: @dansoschin, @priethor. View the full article

This past month saw a lot of preparation work for WordPress 6.0, due to release on 24 May 2022. This major release brings exciting improvements – read on to find out more about the latest happenings in the WordPress project. WordPress 6.0 Release Candidate 1 The first release candidate (RC1) for WordPress 6.0 is now available for download. Help improve the project by testing and translating this version to non-English languages. Check out the RC1 release post to learn what’s new and how to contribute. For a more in-depth look at the upcoming changes, you can refer to the WordPress 6.0 Field Guide. WordPress 6.0 is packed with all kinds of improvements for everyone. It brings new blocks, accessibility enhancements, refined design tools, the ability to switch theme styles easily, multi-block partial text selection, and a new block locking interface, to name a few of its highlights. Listen to the latest WP Briefing episode for a sneak peek into the exciting features included in WordPress 6.0. Gutenberg releases: Versions 13.0 and 13.1 are here Gutenberg 13.0 shipped on April 14, 2022, and introduced the final updates that will be part of WordPress 6.0. These include an improved editor experience (with the ability to select text across blocks), better responsive blocks, and prominently exposed block patterns.Gutenberg 13.1 landed on April 27, 2022. This version adds border support to the Columns block and accessibility and Comment block improvements. Follow the #gutenberg-new posts for more details on the latest updates. Team updates: Updated guidelines for in-person events, redesign of the Gutenberg page, and more The Community team announced updated Covid-19 guidelines for official WordPress events.The redesign of the Gutenberg landing page on WordPress.org is nearing completion.#WPDiversity announced new meeting times for Asia-Pacific (APAC) areas. You can express your interest in this post.The Training team plans to migrate the Contributor Training materials to Learn WordPress. This move will help consolidate all the community-based training content in one place.All learners on Learn WordPress can now enjoy using a live WordPress demo site as they go through courses on the site.Read the latest edition of the Meetup Organizer Newsletter.Everyone is welcome and encouraged to join the new Photo Directory team meetings. They are held on the first Friday of every month at 14:00 UTC in the #photos channel of the Make WordPress Slack.The Performance team published a follow-up post with the next steps on the WebP proposal.Check out the projects the Design team contributed to over the past couple of weeks.Official Featured and Beta plugins now limit ownership and committer changes.The April 2022 edition of the Polyglots Monthly Newsletter was published.The latest edition of People of WordPress features Meher Bala, a frontend web developer and community builder from India.The #props channel of the Make WordPress Slack is now connected to the WordPress.org profile activity! This way when you give props, it will be included on your WordPress.org profile and the profile of those you mention. This change is part of a larger project that will help credit more non-code contributions. How do you feel about in-person WordPress gatherings? The Community team wants to hear about the challenges in returning to these events. Open feedback/testing calls Following this proposal for a WordPress Project Contributor Handbook, Executive Director Josepha Haden opened a round of discussions to share feedback on the various handbook sections.Version 19.8 of WordPress for Android and iOS is available for testing.Join the 14th testing call of the Full Site Editing (FSE) Outreach program – “Rallying Recipe Reviewers.” This call focuses on testing blocks that help recipe authors make their recipe blogs more interactive. Leave your feedback by May 18, 2022. Are you interested in helping test out new WordPress 6.0 features but don’t know where to start? This detailed guide will walk you through how to get started. Get ready for WordCamp Europe in Porto We are four weeks away from WordCamp Europe. After being postponed twice due to the pandemic, the WordPress event is taking place in Porto, Portugal, on 2-4 June 2022. Check out the schedule and get your tickets if you haven’t yet!WordCamp US announced a new program to support underrepresented speakers.WordCamp Irun (Spain) is happening this month on May 21 and 22, 2022. The Call for Volunteers for WordCamp US in San Diego, California, is now open. Newcomers to WordPress are always welcomed. Apply today! Have a story that we could include in the next issue of The Month in WordPress? Let us know by filling out this form. The following folks contributed to this Month in WordPress: @rmartinezduque, @cbringmann, @dansoschin. View the full article

The first release candidate (RC1) for WordPress 6.0 is now available! This is an important milestone on the 6.0 release cycle journey. “Release Candidate” means that this version of WordPress is ready for release! Before the official release date, time is set aside for the community to perform final reviews and help test. Since the WordPress ecosystem includes thousands of plugins and themes, it is important that everyone within the WordPress community check to see if anything was missed along the way. That means the project would love your help. WordPress 6.0 is planned for official release on May 24th, 2022, three weeks from today. This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, and test this version of WordPress on a production or mission-critical website. Instead, it is recommended that you RC1 on a test server and site. You can test WordPress 6.0 RC1 in three ways: Option 1: Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream). Option 2: Direct download the release candidate version here (zip). Option 3: When using WP-CLI to upgrade from Beta 1, 2, 3, or 4, on a case-insensitive filesystem, please use the following command sequence: Command One: wp core update --version=6.0-RC1 Command Two: wp core update --version=6.0-RC1 --force Additional information on the full 6.0 release cycle is available here. Check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.0-related developer notes in the coming weeks which will detail all upcoming changes. What’s in WordPress 6.0 RC1? Since Beta 4, various items have been addressed, including (but not limited to): Backport updates of Comment blocks tests (#55643)Backport a bugfix of Comment Template block pagination (#55658)Editor: Backport bug fixes for WordPress 6.0 from Gutenberg (#55567) WordPress 6.0 is the second major release for 2022, following 5.9 which became generally available in January. This release includes nearly 1,000 fixes and enhancements spanning most areas of the WordPress platform. Some key highlights within the content creation and site-building feature sets include: Style Switching: switch up the look and feel of your site, all in one block theme. No need to change themes!More template options: use blocks to edit five more templates (author, date, categories, tag, and taxonomy).Multi-select: Easily select text across multiple blocks. Edit to your liking.Retain Styles: Keep your custom styles in place, whether transforming between blocks or creating new buttons. More patterns in more places: the Quick Inserter surfaces patterns that might work well for the condition you’re in, baking in relevant patterns for template parts and pages you’re working on. List View improvements: New keyboard shortcuts (shift + click) let you select multiple blocks to modify in bulk (reposition, delete, etc.), see your content at a glance with a collapsed by default view, and more.Refined design tools: Explore a new color panel, transparency options, more group block variations to create new layout options (Stack, Row), the ability to set your featured image in a Cover block, control the exact size of your featured image, gap support for the Gallery block, and more.New blocks: Various Post Comments, Read More, No Results in Query Loop, Post Author Biography, Avatar blocks. Block Locking: Choose to disable the option to remove a block, move it, or both, right in the editor. Export block themes: Explore the improved block theme export tool, as WordPress heads closer to codeless visual block theme building. Plugin and Theme Developers All plugin and theme developers should test their respective extensions against WordPress 6.0 RC1 and update the “Tested up to” version in their readme file to 6.0. If you find compatibility problems, please be sure to post detailed information to the support forums, so these items can be investigated further prior to the final release date of May 24th. Review the WordPress 6.0 Field Guide, for more details on what’s contained in this release. Translate WordPress Do you speak a language other than English? Help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages. This release also marks the hard string freeze point of the 6.0 release cycle. How to Help Test WordPress Testing for issues is critical for stabilizing a release throughout its development. Testing is also a great way to contribute to WordPress. If you are new to testing, check out this detailed guide that will walk you through how to get started. If you think you have run into an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. If you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, you can file one on WordPress Trac. This is also where you can find a list of known bugs. Haiku Fun for RC 1 Release candidate Our journey nearly done Get ready, WordPress Thank you to the following contributors for collaborating on this post: @dansoschin, @webcommsat, and @annezazu. View the full article

WordPress 6.0 Beta 4 is now available for testing! Beta 4 was not part of the originally published development cycle. It is aimed at providing an opportunity for testing some specific issues that were resolved since Beta 3. WordPress will continue with the regularly scheduled release milestones on May 3rd, 2022, with the RC1 release. This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, and test this version of WordPress on a production or mission-critical website. Instead, it is recommended that you test Beta 4 on a test server and site. You can test WordPress 6.0 Beta 4 in three ways: Option 1: Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream). Option 2: Direct download the beta version here (zip). Option 3: Use WP-CLI to test: wp core update –version=6.0-beta4. Do not use this option if your filesystem is case-insensitive. The current target for the final 6.0 release is May 24, 2022, which is in less than a month! Additional information on the full 6.0 release cycle is available. Check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.0-related developer notes in the coming weeks which will detail all upcoming changes. Explore What’s in Beta 4 Since Beta 4, various items have been addressed, including (but not limited to): Update post content placeholder (#40177)Comments block: Fix glitches found while backporting (#40628)Show add pattern label when patterns are being prioritised (#40598)Fix regression with featured images in latest posts (#40662)Navigation Link: Avoid unnecessary re-renders (#40696)Navigation: Improve selector performance (#40700)Comments Title: Count toggle working in ‘Singular’ editing mode (#40728)[Writing Flow]: Try to fix multi-selection with shift+click (#40687)Fix alignment issue with comment author name (#40610)Comment Content: Show moderation message (#40612)Display paragraph breaks in comment contents block (#40667)Fix style comment awaiting moderation indentation (#40681)Fix: Page patterns don’t show when only one pattern is available (#40707)Update the placeholder for post excerpt (#40178)REST API: Fix regression in the Pattern Directory endpoint. (#55617)REST API: Fix the scheme for the Block Directory search endpoint. (#53621)Show comments previews in the Comment Query Loop. (#55634)Avoid DB error in comment meta queries. (#55218) How to Help Testing for issues is critical for stabilizing a release throughout its development. Testing is also a great way to contribute to WordPress. If you are new to testing, check out this detailed guide that will walk you through how to get started. If you think you have run into an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. If you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, you can file one on WordPress Trac. This is also where you can find a list of known bugs. Another Haiku, Just for You Beta four, surprise! Iterating all day long Time to share and test Thank you to the following contributors for collaborating on this post: @dansoschin, @annezazu, and @costdev View the full article

In the thirtieth episode of the WordPress Briefing, Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy and special guest Channing Ritter give listeners a sneak peek into the WordPress 6.0 release ahead of the Release Candidate 1 (RC1). Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Credits Special Guest: Channing RitterEditor: Dustin HartzlerLogo: Beatriz FialhoProduction: Santana Inniss Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod References Twenty Twenty-Two ThemeBlock LockingBeginner’s Guide to Contributing, Josepha Haden ChomphosyWordSeshSocial Learning SpacesWordCamp Europe Contributor Day Transcript [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00] 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! [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:40] Tomorrow’s a big day. It marks the beginning of what is called the RC period, or release candidate period, for the current major release of the WordPress CMS. If you’re not super familiar with the way release cycles work, this is the point in the process where the code should pretty much be done changing. That way you can call in your designers, developers, and anyone else who builds things for others using your software. And they can either start testing their products on it, or they can figure out what new things they need to be able to teach their clients, whichever is most relevant to them. That is generally true for WordPress as well, but in true open source fashion, there is a caveat built in that helps us to get in last-minute, vital changes from contributors. We have a two-person sign-off rule that’s been around for about as long as I can remember, but lets things be added late in the release cycle, as long as there are two sign-offs from qualified contributors. Most of the time, those qualified contributors are lead developers of the project, but not always. We have a good group of people who are around helping us make sure that this is doable and the best thing that we can offer to all of our users. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:50] And so, yeah, two-person sign-off, that is the little bit of release process trivia that you never knew you needed. And since we’re looking at a release trivia, kind of hidden bits of how software is made, I actually have a guest with me today, Channing Ritter. So Channing is a product and visual designer based in Brooklyn, New York. She’s a design director at Automattic and has been working on the WordPress project as a full-time sponsored contributor since January, 2021. She is joining us to share some behind the scenes intel on what’s going into the 6.0 release, her role in that process, and then we’ll just kind of see how the conversation goes from there. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:40] Well, and with that, I’d like to welcome Channing to the WordPress Briefing. Hi Channing! [Channing Ritter 00:02:45] Hey Josepha. Thanks so much for having me. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:48] I’m excited to have you here. If I understand, you are working on the design side of things with the release. So why don’t you tell me a little bit about the role you’ve played? [Channing Ritter 00:02:59] I am. I am the design release lead for the 6.0 release. And if I understand correctly, this is a position that has been unfulfilled for the past few release cycles. So I’m kind of the first person to step in over the past few releases. And I think that’s really exciting, especially because design has started to play such a more important role in the WordPress project over the past few years. So it makes sense that design would have a seat at the table, and I’m really excited to be helping advocate for the design team and learning from other folks on the release squad. Who’ve been doing this for a while. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:33] So. First big question about 6.0, what is the feature that you are most excited about? [Channing Ritter 00:03:39] I’m most excited about the style switcher within the global styles panel. Um, so if folks still don’t know what I’m talking about there, it’s the ability to change between different variations of the theme.json without actually switching the theme. So this is a way to get a drastically different look and feels across your site with just a single click. And I see it as a really fun place to experiment and kind of get inspired for the different ways your site could appear without ever having to change your theme. And in terms of the Twenty Twenty-Two variations, they’re just really gorgeous and all so diverse. Like you have the main default theme that has the deep green and kind of peachy colors and this really elegant type treatment with a really thin Serif typeface. But then the variations are so different from that. And I think my favorite one is the Swiss variation. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:36] The Swiss variation? [Channing Ritter 00:04:38] Yeah, every graphic design nerd loves Swiss design. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:42] Oh, ok! Now I know! [Channing Ritter 00:04:38] Really awesome things found in there. It’s a really high contrast, bold variation. It’s kind of black and white with red accents. I just love how different it is from the default style and how easy it is to change up your site and just get a whole drastically different look and feel. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:00] That’s excellent. So for folks who do not know what we’re referring to, when we talk about the Twenty Twenty-Two variation, that is the default theme, Twenty Twenty-Two. I’ll put a link to both the classic and block-based versions in our show notes, but you’ll want to use the block-based version to look at these style variations that Channing has mentioned here. [Channing Ritter 00:05:24] You know, we’re really excited that the first-ever default block theme was released with 5.9, which is when Twenty Twenty-Two first went out and was bundled with 5.9. But now, with 6.0, I think even more so it’s starting to showcase the real power of block themes and what can actually be done there. And style variations is a huge kind of first step into this new world of block themes and starting to really open up the possibilities and all the flexibility that you have there. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:55] Yeah, absolutely. So when we’re talking about the Twenty Twenty-Two default theme, when we’re talking about switching these variations inside the theme itself, that seems to me to be a very user-focused kind of feature. And when we talk about users in WordPress, there’s a lot of room for interpretation. Like if we look at it kind of in a framework of three types of users of WordPress, you have, like end-users. So people who are site owners using it as a site to, like, enable their business. But you also have mid-end users—people who use it to build sites for others. And what I like to call back-end users, people who are using WordPress as a framework. And of course at the start of the Gutenberg project, way back in forever, a million years ago, one of the big calls to action that we had around even, like, trying to do this, was that we wanted to make WordPress easier for users. Just plain users. And, and to me, that means making WordPress easier for those mid-end users, people who are creating WordPress sites for other people. But also should give some power and autonomy back to those end-users, the people who are using sites to enable their business or are site owners. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:14] And so in that context, between 5.9 and 6.0, do you feel like we have features that are really giving that kind of power and agency back to our end-users? Do you feel like we have some features that are really focused on those mid-end users, as opposed to our backend users? For a long time, we focused heavily on enabling our backend users, and now Gutenberg kind of moves us into those other two areas. And so do you think that things like being able to switch between your style of variations, other things like that are moving us closer to that particular goal of Gutenberg? [Channing Ritter 00:07:51] That’s a great question. I think it’s both. I think some of the features being released in 6.0 are absolutely going to empower that end-user. Particularly in terms of improvements around design tools and some of the quality of life improvements. For example, partially selecting across multiple blocks and being able to partially select texts there. That’s the type of thing that really brings the writing experience in the editor to be on par with how you would expect a text editing experience to work. And there are tons of small quality of life improvements in this release that I think are really gonna help those end-users. But there are also improvements around what we might call the maintainers who are building sites for others. I think block locking in particular is something that is really going to start filling a gap between people who build the sites and then people who do the day-to-day maintenance within a site. For example, in 6.0, we’re introducing some interface UI around block locking, but also there’ll be control around the ability to lock user roles. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:09:03] Which I think makes a lot of sense. I mean, we have all of these user roles in the CMS itself, and for a long time, we’ve just been like free for all on blocks, which was great and is great and should be available to people. But also if we are saying, like, it makes sense to have this gradient of users and their abilities for the CMS itself, and we are saying that we want to move control of the website and the content to be at the base layer in these blocks, then it also makes sense that we should be able to provide that same sort of granular level of access in the blocks. So I think that’s a great thing. If you all, if dear listeners, you do not know what we mean by “block locking,” I’m sure that I can find a link for us in our show notes below as well. If for anyone who’s been talking through Gutenberg things with me for a while, you know that this is one of the primary use cases that I think has been a long time coming. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:10:05] It was one of the first examples that I offered to folks when we had that question of like, who is this being built for? In what way is this beneficial to that mid-end user, as opposed to just giving all of the power and autonomy to users in a way that maybe is not the best for their visitors? This is one of those use cases that made the most sense to me being able to say, okay, well, the opportunity to, as somebody who runs an agency and is building websites for people to be able to say, yeah, ‘You can do anything that is possible in this instance of WordPress and all the things that you are allowed to do will not break your instance. It won’t break your website’. And so it gives a lot of time back to agencies to focus on their client’s most important problems, as opposed to not knowing how to update the hours in their footer or something like that. And so I’m very excited about that particular feature. [Channing Ritter 00:11:01] It’s such a long-requested feature. I mean, we’ve been hearing requests around this particular feature for years and, you know, often when something gets requested over a span of years like that, it’s because there are some complexities to figure out how it works. And that’s definitely been the case with moving forward with block locking. And there are a lot of nuances there. But I think what you were saying, I totally agree with. There’s always a push and pull. And as we enable more and more flexibility for end-users, there needs to be a little bit of push from the other side to kind of give more granular controls, more locking options, and make sure that everything can still be easily maintained. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:11:43] Yeah, we mentioned in that answer the concept of maintainers. If you are a contributor, it’s not that kind of ‘maintainer.’ So if you’re a WordPress contributor and we said maintainers there, um, just know that that’s not what we’re referring to. If you don’t know what I’m talking about when I say ‘contributor,’ there is a whole community of open source people and maintainers are people who specifically take care of a particular part of the WordPress software or the WordPress project, um, that makes all this possible. So there’s, ya know…. [Channing Ritter 00:12:19] So true! The maintainer has another meaning in this context. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:12:20] Yeah, we have a mix in our audience and I love it, but it also makes me frequently spend like 10% of my podcast being like, by the way, when I said this, I didn’t mean you, but I did mean you, which makes it harder. I know. So. You’ve been with the project for a little bit, but if I recall correctly, this is the first time that you were, like, leading part of a release. So what would you say was the most challenging part of that? [Channing Ritter 00:12:52] Another great question. This is my first time being this closely involved with the release. Although I was involved with the 5.9 release, but mostly in a release assets capacity. So I helped with the About Page and the welcome banner that goes on the dashboard. So I did get some insight in the last release cycle. Which was great preparation for being more involved as a release lead on this cycle. From the design perspective, one of the hardest things is always going to be figuring out what exactly goes into the release and what needs more time. In the sense, you know, that there might be some features that need to stay in the Gutenberg plugin for a while and get more testing before they get released to a much wider audience in a major WordPress release. So I think on the design side, we definitely have some goals that are big, long-term projects that are likely going to span across, you know, many releases, maybe even over many years. And I think the full site editor is a great example of that in a sense that it’s not something that you just were gone in one release and then it all gets released and then it’s all good to go. [Channing Ritter 00:14:06] It’s something that has to be staggered across many releases, and there’s a lot of thought that goes into it; does this make sense in this more limited capacity, and what else needs to go in in order for this feature to go in? And the most complex things about the WordPress project is how interconnected things are. So when you start making those decisions about what should go in, what should get pulled out, often there’s sort of a domino effect of like, well, that would affect this feature and then, well, maybe they shouldn’t go in, or maybe this does need to go in. And that is really one of the most challenging, but also one of the most fascinating aspects of the release process. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:14:46] Yes. It is very, very true that there are kind of no small problems left in WordPress. *laughs* Yeah, when we, when we first started with this like bigger release squad, cause that has not been routine for the history of the project. When we first started with that, I know that expanding out the exposure to like how much one change affects 25 different things was really, it was really good for all of us to be reminded. And as I mentioned at the top of our episode today, tomorrow begins the RC period. It begins the release candidate period, which is when it’s supposed to be, as locked down as possible. But if you all have been following along with our release process in general, which if you’re listening to this, you probably have, you know that last week or a couple of weeks ago, we had this whole question about the Webfonts API, and we had that conversation in a public space as best we could, Like, there are always things that you can’t, like, fully disclose in public spaces, but we had a very open and transparent conversation about, like, who is most affected by putting it in, in the state that the API was in. And, who’s most affected if we take it out. And where can we make compromises on either side so that both sides are a little happy and a little unhappy? [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:16:09] And, like, that is all so hard to do. Not only in general. We have a 20-year-old code base and a five-year-old code base. And it’s all a big, big undertaking to understand what is happening and where it happens. And so there’s this moment always when we are trying to decide, like, is this baked enough? Did we put it in too early? Should we pull it out? How, if we pull it out, did we ask people to do too much work before we decided to pull it out anyway? Like, you always have those kinds of questions about it. And honestly, I think that most of us weren’t around the last time, that WordPress was, was this experimental in public, like it’s always been open source. It’s always been experimental and iterating publicly, which is just the hardest way to work on anything. We like, we shipped our best guesses. Don’t be mad. It’ll be… we’re coming for it. We’re going to fix it. Like, that’s always hard, but the last time around, when it was this substantial a change was, like, 2008 or something, like, it was ages and ages ago. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:17:14] And we were smaller than, we had a smaller number of contributors. We had a smaller group of people actually using the CMS. And so over time it has gotten more and more complicated. And, and I don’t think that we can ever understate the complexities of that. And so for you, you had a little bit of exposure to it in 5.9 and then showed up for like really doing it in 6.0. Has it been a surprising change? Like, were you surprised much more by how complicated it was when you were closer to it? [Channing Ritter 00:17:47] Yeah, definitely. It’s been a real learning process, especially coming to understand how much there really are no easy answers. I think a lot of us are in the release squad are real problem solver types of people and, and want it to, you know, be a really neat, tidy answer. And it’s not always the case. You know, sometimes parts of the feature might go in, or some contingency plan might get put into place and things didn’t go exactly as planned. But what you said of being an experiment and being on kind of the cutting edge of trying out new things, I think there is a lot of passion around that in the WordPress project. Right now, we’re in such a transitional period for the project, you know, moving from classic themes to block themes and really changing the ideas of how we approach designing sites. And because of that, I think there is a lot of momentum and energy around getting new features, as many new features as possible into each release. But there’s also, you know, a lot of testing and stuff that needs to happen. And to make sure that, like you said, these things aren’t going out too early. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:19:01] Well, and there’s always that difficulty, we’re going to just leap right into open source areas now. There’s always that difficulty around, like, there’s this concept that when, like, we always want to ship something that doesn’t break backward compatibility when possible, we don’t want to ship vulnerabilities. Like, that’s always true, but we are in an open source project, and open source projects are necessarily kind of tolerant of like, that’s not our best, but like it skates, right? This was, we aimed for Ferrari and got a skateboard because sometimes you got to start with a skateboard, right? *laughter* Like if it gets you from one place to another, that’s kind of where we’ve got to aim some days. [Channing Ritter 00:19:45] Totally. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:19:46] And that’s always so, so difficult, especially cause, like, for the big change that 5.0 represented, and that 5.9 represented– 6.0 is not as big a shock as 5.9 was. But, like, as big a change as those represented, it still skates. And that’s, I think what makes the work especially hard, especially nuanced. And like, we haven’t gotten together as human beings in two years. And so sometimes people just kind of forget there’s a human being back there. We’re humans. Everyone be nice. Yeah. I don’t know that part of running a release definitely was surprising to me. My first release that I ran was 5.0 and… [Channing Ritter 00:20:31] Oh, wow! [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:20:32] Yeah, it was, like, that was 2018. And then I became the executive director at the top of 2019. And I distinctly remember one core chat where I showed up and just was like the most transparent, vulnerable person we’ve ever experienced in life. That’s not true. We have very vulnerable people in the project and very transparent people, but I told everyone like, there are a million of you and one of me, and it’s kind of terrifying that you’re leaping on me in this—like you’re scaring me a lot right now. And that was quite a thing to say to like, all these… it’s terrifying! Right? [Channing Ritter 00:21:12] I love when you see that type of vulnerability in the project. I think it takes… it takes a degree of comfort and familiarity with the project to even be able to admit to that. And to me, that’s a real sign of growth in the project. Like when I first started contributing, I don’t think I ever would have just said, like, ‘How is the feature supposed to work? I have no idea.’ That’s something that I say all the time now. *Laughter* And you know, that is completely fine and more than okay. It’s a massive project. There are folks who have done deep thinking about a feature over the course of years. You know, and there are experts who can help shed light on various problems that maybe you just haven’t had a chance to dive into yet and really understand the nuances of yet. So that’s the amazing thing about open source is that you can lean on folks who do have expertise in that particular area. You’re not expected to be an expert-expert in every single domain. It’s okay to say, I don’t really have a good idea or a good concept of this feature. I don’t have a good feeling for it. What do other folks think? [Channing Ritter 00:22:24] And even people who have been in the project for a long time, decade plus, still say that all the time. You know, or you might just say, like, I have a really rough idea of how this works, are other people seeing this the same way? Or did other people have a different, you know, mental picture of how this might work? Even if, sometimes it feels like you’re over-communicating, it’s really helpful because often people do have really dramatically different ideas about how a feature might take shape. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:22:49] And I hope that’s one of the things that we never lose in the project. Like we are an old, old project now and we support a bunch of the web with a tiny, tiny group of people compared to the amount of the web that we support. And I hope that we always have that opportunity as senior leaders, which I am, and all of our upcoming leaders to all of us, just at some point, be like, can we stop the train? I don’t understand. I don’t understand that. Um, and not necessarily feel that that has made us a worse contributor. Cause I think that it’s when we are transparent about our lack of understanding. That’s when we have the opportunity to make what we’re offering to the world more solid and always better. [Channing Ritter 00:23:35] I love it. I think it’s the, one of the most lovely things about the WordPress community. There’s really low judgment around those types of questions and people are really inclusive and more than happy to take a moment to explain something to you or shed some light on an issue you might not have thought that much about. I think that’s one of the best things you can always reach out for help. And folks are always willing to provide guidance or context or even historical information about, you know, whether it’s been tried in the past or previous explorations and that sort of thing. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:24:10] All right. Well, that covers all of my questions for you. Do you have a final thought about the release that you would like to share with everyone you don’t have to, if you don’t want to, not everyone has like a final sign off. [Channing Ritter 00:24:25] Yeah. One of the things I’m most excited about for this 6.0 release is all of the improvements around design tools. And these are just small improvements around a ton of different things, like the color panel, border controls, gap support, typography options, flexible container blocks, etc. These are the types of tools that are a designer’s dream. You know, they really make the difference between being able to make a really crisp, finished looking final product and having something that’s a little rough around the edges. And as a designer, like those are the things that your eye goes straight towards. And all of these nuanced new tools, they really allow designers to have that fine detailed control to create really pixel perfect sites. And I think that’s something that, you know, myself and a lot of others on the design team are just so beyond excited about. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:25:25] Excellent. Well, Channing, thank you so much for joining us today on the WordPress Briefing; it has been an absolute delight. [Channing Ritter 00:25:32] Thank you for having me. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:25:41] And now it is time, woohoo, for the small list of big things. My favorite part of this podcast, that’s not true. I have a lot of things that I love about this podcast. I just, in particular love being able to share like three things that are coming up in the next couple of weeks that everybody should be aware of. And I really particularly like the list I have this week. First as of today, we are two weeks away from WordSesh. If you’re looking forward to your first in-person WordPress event, but feel like you could use a little foundation information, a little bit of a WordPress primer, then this event has a lot of excellent thought leaders in the project that you can learn from. If you’re looking for more practical or hands-on opportunities, uh, you can also check out social learning spaces. All of those are free for anyone. So I will include links to both of them in the show notes. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:26:30] Second, as of today, we are four weeks away from WordCamp Europe. This is one of our flagship events. So it also includes a contributor day, which I encourage you to look into. If you have never heard of one before. I will be there to meet some of the contributors that have joined the project since the end of 2019. And hopefully, I will see you there as well. If you’ve never heard of a contributor day, then I’ll include a link to the beginner’s guide to contributions, a little talk that I gave in 2017 in the show notes that should help you get your bearings or at the very least know what questions to ask yourself to figure out if a contributor day is right for you. And then the third thing as of today, it has been one week since Ian Dunn and the Meta developers… Um, that sounds like a band… Ian Dunn and the Meta developers connected the props channel in the community Slack to WordPress.org profile activity. I’m really excited about this. It’s the first in a long list of changes that are part of a larger project to credit more non-code contributions, more contributions that are not specific to a major release or event. And also to set us up to be able to provide more quality checks and balances for our growing Five for the Future program. If you’ve not been over there lately, if you’re not super sure what I’m talking about, there’s a link to the discussion post that we had about it, but also you can wander right over into the Making WordPress Slack and check out the props channel to just kind of see a running list of contributors that people are really grateful for. Which, frankly, if you ever are having a bad day, that is a wonderful place to just kind of wander in and see all of the positive vibes that people are sending around to each other. Uh, yeah, so the props channel, is always good. Uh, 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. And I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. View the full article

In this series, we share some of the inspiring stories of how WordPress and its global network of contributors can change people’s lives for the better. This month we feature a Indian-based WordPress developer and long term contributor on how it helped her find a career and a local and global community to belong to. WordPress is an inspiration to Meher Bala, a frontend web developer and community builder from India. From using the software as a basic website tool to helping entrepreneurs and good causes around the world fulfill their aspirations, she has overcome personal barriers and now aims to inspire others. Meher found her vocation and learned new skills through WordPress. She also discovered a way to encourage other women to consider careers in IT. Finding her interests As a child, Meher was diagnosed with dyslexia (difficulty in reading the written word) and dyscalculia (difficulty in comprehending numbers and mathematical functions). With the support of her parents and a tutor, she was able to overcome this learning obstacle. She developed coping techniques and a determination to work to overcome challenges as they appeared later in life. In school, she got an opportunity to replace one subject with computer studies as an alternative. This proved to be an eye-opener to future career possibilities. She began to research not only what the internet had to offer but also how it worked, including the new and fascinating concepts of email and websites. Her father bought the family’s first desktop computer so she could do her research at home. Meher’s father wanted to turn her love for computers into something that would serve her well in the future. In 2005, he enrolled her in a short computer course from a global IT training provider. The course tutor was so impressed with her performance, she was advised to enroll in a four year software development course. That meant she had studied the software development course alongside her higher education college course. Looking back, she enjoyed the dual challenge of the degree course in commerce, and the experience prepared her well to keep learning software while working as a developer. Within three years, she had learned C#, C, C++, HTML, Java, and .NET. After graduation, she was in a dilemma to choose between commerce and IT. What to choose? She had a compulsory one-year technology internship to complete, and her choice of focus for that year would prove to be a defining moment. In 2009, on her birthday, Meher was offered an internship. On the first day of the internship, she was introduced to WordPress. Her initial assignment was to change the look and feel of the WordPress dashboard — in just six hours. But there was a problem – she had never worked with WordPress before! “I stared at the whiteboard and thought that task given was impossible and difficult to meet the deadline. I wondered if my boss was joking and did not know then what you could do with WordPress as a developer and how it could slot into your toolbox. It opened my eyes.” Meher Bala Meher used her research skills to know more about using WordPress. She found a plugin that would help her achieve her task. She met the deadline and it ingrained an interest that she would never lose. Re-discovering WordPress Five years after her initial WordPress experience, Meher was assigned to lead an international project in WordPress. She was hesitant — she had lost touch with the CMS during that five years, but the project was a great opportunity to become a team leader and lead from the front. She decided to update her WordPress skills, relying again on the strength of her research skills and determination. In the process, she also taught her team all about WordPress, inspiring many of those members to continue to develop their WordPress skill set. The success of that project was a pivotal moment for Meher and a new dawn as a developer specializing in WordPress. As a team lead, Meher soon found it was not possible to always have all the answers straight away. She found internet searches gave practical solutions—but rarely explained the theory behind it. So she went looking for a WordPress group to help her expand the scope and depth of her knowledge. Finding the Community Meher enjoying being part of WordCamp Nagpur in 2017 In 2015, while browsing Facebook, Meher came across an advertisement for something called WordCamp Mumbai, an event that had taken two days before. She did a little digging to learn what a WordCamp was, and about the people behind it. She took the plunge and joined the WordPress Mumbai Meetup group. Her first Meetup experience was not love at first sight. She felt the topics were for advanced users, and the timing late in the evening made it difficult to attend. But a few months later, the Meetup addressed a topic that could help her resolve an issue in one of her current projects. She made the effort to show up and came away with a number of important tips. The speaker had taken the time to speak to individual attendees. When he came to Meher, she took the opportunity to ask a couple of questions about her project issues. Thereafter she went to more Meetups and got to know the people behind this group, just as they started talking about WordCamp Mumbai 2016. A WordCamp Adventure Meher discovering WordCamps in Mumbai in 2016 Meher expressed interest in being a part of the coming WordCamp Mumbai and started in an entry-level role with basic responsibilities. At first, she thought WordCamp was a formal conference with about 100 people. So on the first day of WordCamp Mumbai 2016, she was surprised to see so many WordCamp enthusiasts attending and enjoying such a relaxed and friendly conference. After that great experience, Meher went to many more meetups and did more volunteering. She started taking on responsibilities in the coming WordCamps and getting to know the different aspects of the camp. In the following years, at each WordPress, she took up a new role like speaker vetting, sponsors, and volunteer coordination. This allowed her to know more about what an organizer needs to do, from planning to execution, to make WordCamp a successful event. With the team at WordCamp Mumbai in 2017 Meher is grateful for her WordPress journey which was fostered in the Mumbai community. It has been filled with beautiful surprises. When people ask why she’s chosen to specialize professionally in WordPress, Meher says WordPress is easy to teach a non-technical person, yet it is still highly customizable. Being a WordPress developer has given her the opportunity to work remotely for global web development companies that let her think out of the box. And she learns new skills with every release. The community makes WordPress special Meher says that some of her most memorable WordPress moments have revolved around special friendships, trying new things, and participating in community building. WordPress has let her explore different parts of India, make new friends locally and internationally, and encourage women to be a part of meetup groups and events across India. One of Meher’s biggest dreams was to lead WordCamp Mumbai as a lead organizer and show others what could be achieved working together in open source. In 2019, she did just that and has volunteered at international WordCamps and meetups, and been a very active contributor to a number of WordPress.org teams. Taking to the stage at WordCamp Mumbai in 2019 As part of her enthusiasm for sharing the opportunities WordPress can give people, especially women, she has given time to co-organize two global WordPress Translation month long events and contributor events in India. Meher said: “I was first introduced to translation at one of the meetups which was organised to support the WordPress Translation Day. I realized this was another way to support my local communities and bring the power of WordPress to them by contributing in Gujarati and Hindi. I did not imagine I would a few years later be a global organizer for the event itself!” With her commitment to ongoing learning as a developer and to model what she believes about the value and community growth opportunities of open source, Meher has given time and energy to the Marketing Team, where she has been a Team Rep, to the Training Team, and to the Core Team contributing to multiple releases. The developer adventure with WordPress is unlimited At the start of my software developer journey, I always thought the C++ and Java were the only skills you required to excel in your career. From the time I started exploring WordPress in depth, I realized the potential and the power of WordPress in web development. Meher Bala Being a part of the WordPress community, Meher learned that there is so much more than just building blogs on WordPress. She started exploring different features of WordPress, created her first theme, and eventually specialized as a frontend specialist. Meher now works as a consultant and front end developer with an international agency specializing in WordPress. Asked what she thought was the best thing about being a WordPress developer, Meher replied: “Through WordPress, I have an opportunity to build unique out of the box websites and work remotely for global web development companies that encourages you to think out of the box. There is always opportunity to continuously advance my coding skills and learn new techniques with every release.” She believes that there is no limit to where using the software can take you and what you can combine it with to find solutions to projects big and small. If you earn a living from WordPress, her advice is from the heart: try to give back to the WordPress community. “I am sure you will learn or teach something new and definitely make friends across the world. There is no shame in making mistakes, as you can learn from them and develop your skills further. You can also help others as they build their skills.” Meher added: “Don’t let the things you find difficult get in the way of your success.” 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 Abha Thakor (@webcommsat), Larissa Murillo (@lmurillom), Mary Baum (@marybaum), Chloé Bringmann (@cbringmann), and Meg Phillips (@megphillips91) for interviews, writing and image work on this story. Thank you to Meher Bala (@meher) for sharing her experiences and to Josepha Haden Chomphosy (@chanthaboune) and Topher DeRosia (@topher1kenobe) for their support of the series. This People of WordPress feature is inspired by an essay originally published on HeroPress.com, a community initiative created by Topher DeRosia. It highlights people in the WordPress community who have overcome barriers and whose stories might otherwise go unheard. #HeroPress View the full article

WordPress 6.0 Beta 3 is now available for testing! This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it is recommended that you test Beta 3 on a test server and site. You can test WordPress 6.0 Beta 3 in three ways: Option 1: Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream). Option 2: Direct download the beta version here (zip). Option 3: Use WP-CLI to test: wp core update --version=6.0-beta3. Do not use this option if your filesystem is case-insensitive. The current target for the final 6.0 release is May 24, 2022, which is in less than a month! Additional information on the full 6.0 release cycle is available here. Check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.0-related developer notes in the coming weeks which will detail all upcoming changes. See What’s in Beta 3 Since Beta 2, various items have been addressed, including (but not limited to): Twenty Twenty-Two: Implement alternate json files #55433Fix duotone rendering in site editor #37727 Create Comments Title block with simple styling #40419 Navigation block: After choosing an option from Select Menu, focus after block render #40390Add comment id to all comments inside comments query loop #40268Add post-comments-form block to comments template #40256Elements: Add styles to the footer before the block is rendered #37728Add default comment status to discussion settings #55567Fix styles for nested elements (link color) #55567Move wp_enqueue_block_style() to wp-includes/script-loader.php, for better consistency #55182, #55148Move administration related hooks to admin-filters.php #54795 Update on the Webfonts API and Style Variations in Twenty Twenty-Two A prior announcement for WordPress 6.0 Beta 1 included a reference to “Webfonts API: Manage local fonts with PHP or theme.json”, as a feature that would be included in the release. WordPress 6.0 Beta 3 will allow theme authors to use webfonts in theme.json, with a public API for plugins to register and enqueue webfonts available in a future version for WordPress. Beta 3 will also include three style new variations to the Twenty Twenty-Two default theme. How to Help Testing for issues is critical for stabilizing a release throughout its development. Testing is also a great way to contribute to WordPress. If you are new to testing, check out this detailed guide that will walk you through how to get started. If you think you have run into an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. If you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, you can file one on WordPress Trac. This is also where you can find a list of known bugs. Thank you to the following contributors for collaborating on this post: @dansoschin @webcommsat, @audrasjb And now another WordPress haiku: Release day is near 6.0 abounds with joy New features soon here View the full article

WordPress 6.0 Beta 2 is now available for testing! This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, and test this version of WordPress on a production or mission-critical website. Instead, it is recommended that you test Beta 2 on a test server and site. You can test the WordPress 6.0 Beta 2 in three ways: Option 1: Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream). Option 2: Direct download the beta version here (zip). Option 3: Use WP-CLI to test: wp core update --version=6.0-beta2 Do not use this option if your filesystem is case-insensitive. The current target for the final release is May 24, 2022, which is about five weeks away. Additional information on the full 6.0 release cycle is available. Check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.0-related developer notes in the coming weeks, which will detail all upcoming changes. What’s New In Beta 2 Since Beta 1, contributors have fixed 209 tickets in WordPress 6.0, including 110 new features and enhancements. More bug fixes are on the way with your help through testing. Here are a few of the changes you will find in Beta 2: Block Editor: Prevent styles from being added to the site editor (#55567)Patterns REST API: Add ‘inserter’ to the schema (#55567)Don’t load remote patterns twice in WP_REST_Block_Patterns_Controller::get_items (#55567)Add the ability to filter the whole notification email in retrieve_password (#54690)Avoid translating empty plugin headers (#54586) Note on Webfonts API Last week’s announcement for WordPress 6.0 Beta 1 includes a reference to “Webfonts API: Manage local fonts with PHP or theme.json,” as a feature that would be included in the release. This specific functionality was not included in Beta 2 but may be available at RC. How to Help Testing for issues is critical for stabilizing a release throughout its development. Testing is also a great way to contribute to WordPress. If you are new to testing, check out this detailed guide that will walk you through how to get started. If you think you have run into an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. If you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, you can file one on WordPress Trac. This is also where you can find a list of known bugs. Thank you to the following contributors for collaborating on this post: @dansoschin, @annezazu, @costdev, @priethor And now a WordPress Haiku: We code fervently A breathless pause for the test ‘Collaborative community’ to the rescue Key tapping resumes View the full article

In the twenty-ninth episode of the WordPress Briefing, Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy reminds us of our WordPress roots — blogging — and discusses the basics of starting your first blog on WordPress. Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Credits Editor: Dustin HartzlerLogo: Beatriz FialhoProduction: Santana Inniss Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod References Getting Started with WordPress: Get Setup6.0 Product WalkthroughHow to Make a WordPress Blog Social Learning Space Event Upcoming WordPress EventsWordPress Meetup Groups Transcript Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:00:00] 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. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:00:39] All right. So you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while. You may be one of these contributors I keep mentioning; you may be an agency owner or freelancer. Maybe you’ve wondered how to make a WordPress blog for your big idea. Or, maybe you’re one of the many people who use WordPress for their project or business. Before WordPress was known as a content management system, as a way to get sites online fast, it was a blogging tool. We have long since outgrown that, but even 19 years into our journey, blogging is still a key part of what WordPress enables you to do. That’s because even after those 19 years, the mission of WordPress is still the same. And that is to democratize publishing, to help people have a place online where they can tell their stories or share their projects or set up their businesses. If you’ve ever tried to set up a blog, you know that there isn’t a lot of information about what to know before you get going at all. So I’m going to talk about that a little bit today. And just by the way, if you heard the word blog right now and thought, oh, Josepha, how old fashioned? I think it’s important to remember that there’s a business advantage to having well-written, relevant content on your website. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:01:59] And if you’re not blogging for business, because not all of us are, then the benefits are a little different but still important to my mind. Things like the cathartic benefits of journaling, a chance to build community, and the general importance of preserving wisdom for the ages. Anyway, back to the topic at hand. Before we can get to any of the fancy things that WordPress can do nowadays, it’s important to know a few things as you get ready to set up your first ever website. So let’s dive in. Here is how you need to get yourself started. First, have an idea and a plan. So have an idea for what you’re doing, the concept of your content, who you want to reach, and some concept of a domain name. I would encourage you to not necessarily get your heart set on a domain name at first. Cause, like, if you want the domain name, wordpress.org, like we own that, you can have that! But if you know that you want a domain like WordPressbloggingforthefuture.com, like that one might be more available. And if you know the kind of words you want in your domain, you can be a bit flexible about what is there. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:03:09] The second thing that you need to do is that if you are just getting started, ask yourself the question, what sort of host do I want? We kind of mentioned all along the WordPress process that, like, you need a good host, but it’s not always clear where that decision has to happen. It happens right here at the start, before you even know what WordPress is most of the time. So, the earliest question that you have to answer for yourself is what sort of host do I want? Where do I want my site to live? So ask yourself how much you want to get into the maintenance and configuration of your website and the hardware that it lives on versus creating content or keeping your shop up to date. There’s this whole spectrum of hosting options, and they range from full service where they will keep your WordPress software up to date, provide daily backups, and have customer support if something goes really wrong. So it ranges all the way from full service like that all the way down to essentially zero services, just kind of hands-off. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:04:11] They give you a space to keep your WordPress software, to keep your WordPress site. But they leave everything else up to you. They leave the backups up to you. They leave updating up to you, things like. So that’s the first thing you have to ask yourself. And the first question you have to be able to answer. Most of the time, you will want to start with one of the full-service options. That way, you know that your software is set up correctly and safely from the start. And as you learn more about the software and what you want and what you need, and you have the ability to learn in the time that you have, the more that you can add on either service with the existing hosts that you chose or moving to a different host; however that works out for you. So if that one sounds like the right option, then you choose a host, go to their site, and actually most of them will have a way to walk you through how to set up a WordPress site inside their system. Most of the time, it’s just one click and then they ask you some questions to get some configurations right. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:05:10] The other option that on the like zero, zero service side, that’s not quite fair, but you know, the other side of that spectrum that probably will be appealing to you if you are already familiar with code or already know how to manage a server or, or you know how to work in this thing called c-panel, et cetera. So if you already have a lot of information on how all of that works, you can, if you want to, head over to wordpress.org/download, and you can download a zip file of the WordPress software and set that up in your own environment. Okay, quick check here. If this all sounds roughly doable to you, or at least it feels like we’re in the right starting point, but you find yourself thinking, gosh, I just wish she would slow down a little. I’ve got you covered. In the show notes, you’ll find a link to one of the Learn WP courses for getting started with WordPress. There’s a section on choosing a host as well as various other early steps of this process. So if you felt like I blazed through all of that, which honestly I kind of did, you can work through those lessons in that course, at your own pace, and it’s, and it’s really a very good guide. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:06:24] All right. Let’s pretend we did all of that. Now you’ve got yourself a website. The thing that you will want to do next, or rather the first thing that you’ll notice once you get your site up and running, is that there’s this ‘Hello World’ post– there’s a post that already exists in there. The Hello World post is a placeholder for the common features of a blog post. There, you can find your featured image, your title, your content, and even some fake comments. You can either edit this post so that you can see how your writing will look from the start, and you can kind of compare like, okay, the Hello World part over here on this page, exists in this field over here on this page. So you can kind of see where everything works, how it all looks together. Or, if you’re more familiar with WordPress or CMS in general, you can simply remove that and start fresh. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:07:17] So we’ve got now a website, we know, kind of, how to look at our posts and create posts, where comments are, where they can kind of be moderated and stuff. And so, the most fun task for everyone is choosing a theme. But if it’s not a fun task, if it doesn’t sound like a fun task to you, I can help you kind of do some, choose your own adventure guiding questions here. Firstly, you can ask yourself how you want the site to look. Do you want it to mostly be a lot of photos or entirely words, mostly animations? You can head to the theme directory and search for a theme with most of the features that you want. There’s like a filtering system where you can put in, like, you want three columns so that you can have three columns of text if you want it to look kind of like an old school newspaper kind of layout and things like. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:08:12] There’s also a way to look for themes inside your instance, your WordPress site, but like, if you haven’t set that up yet, but you do still want to see kind of what your theme options are, you can go to wordpress.org/themes and and take a look at what’s out there. Just as a quick side note, if you get to that theme directory, if you get to wordpress.org/themes, and it feels overwhelming, which I can understand, I recommend starting with a theme that is designed for blogging specifically so that you can see how things look right away. And there’s actually a theme that does come with every WordPress site. So if you’re not ready, you can skip this thing entirely and just work with the theme that’s already there. Every word, press instance ships with a theme and it is fully functional when you, when you get your site up and running. So you don’t need to choose a theme right now if you don’t feel ready. And then the other very fun thing that people do with their WordPress sites is to add plugins to them. So plugins are these little pieces of software that you add on to the WordPress software that lets it do additional things. It adds additional functionality. The questions that you can ask to kind of guide yourself through what sorts of plugins you might want, what sorts of functionality you might want to add to your site are a little similar to the ones that you want to ask for figuring out which theme. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:09:36] So figure out if there are tasks that you need visitors to do. Do you need them to contact you? Do you want them to watch a video? Should they review and respond to questions? If you have a concept of the things that you want users to do on your website, then you can head to the plugin directory and search for a plugin with features that you need. Also, there are just endless lists of recommended plugins out there; if that is something that you find valuable as part of your research, those are also easy to find. And as a general side note here, there are even more plugins than there are themes. So if you have gotten to this point and feel like you don’t quite know the answers to the questions that I shared, and, and it’s going to be a while until you feel like you can know what those answers are. That’s totally fine. I’ll tell you this. I have never seen a site without a contact form. So feel free to begin your journey there. There are a lot of great plugins for contact forms and it can kind of help you figure out how to work with plugins in that way. So yeah, I made it sound like you can get a WordPress website built in like seven minutes and on the one hand you definitely can. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:09:36] And on the other hand, it’s still a little bit more complicated. So here I have a final note for everyone. You will hear around the WordPress ecosystem. And obviously, here, are some things that could make you feel a little nervous about doing this for the first time. Things like the five-second installation, which WordPress has been famous for years. But also about how easy and simple it all is. And as somebody who was once in the position of learning WordPress for the first time, like I first encountered a WordPress site in 2009 and I started learning how to use WordPress in 2010. So I can say with confidence that once you learn it, it’s easy. We are the easiest of the hard options for CMS. Like content management systems are just complicated, but we are the easiest one out there. And so, as you’re learning, I want to just remind you to celebrate your small wins along the way. If you feel like you’re late to this blogging game, like you should have had a website for years. I mean, sure that could be true. And yes, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. But the second-best time to plant that tree is today. WordPress didn’t start out powering over 40% of the web, and your first site can’t be immediately measured in the millions of readers. So, what will your small beginning lead you to? Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:12:25] And now that brings us to our small list of big things. The first one, the next release of WordPress, WordPress 6.0, has reached its beta phase. That means the full focus is on finding and fixing the bugs we accidentally created during this development cycle. Beta two comes out tomorrow and you can follow along in the core channel in the Making WordPress Slack. If you’ve never seen how those releases get packaged, and if you just want to keep an eye on what everybody’s doing so that you can be the first to know, yeah, Making WordPress Slack is the way to go. The second thing on our small list is that speaking of WordPress 6.0, we had the public walk through a couple of weeks ago, which means that in a few weeks, I’ll do a WordPress 6.0 sneak peek. I’ll share some highlights of the release features and why I think they are super important for you to take a look. Sooner rather than later. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:13:22] And then the final, big thing, if you are new to WordPress and this episode has you all fired up to start your blog, we have a bunch of contributors over on the Learn WP team that have just the thing for you. You can join the online social learning space called How to Make a WordPress Blog. It’s a free online event that will help you get started. I’ll link the information in the show notes below. And I’ll also share in the show notes, a list of WordPress Meetup groups, where you can find more opportunities to learn and get support from other people locally who are also doing things with WordPress. But you can also find a list in the dashboard of your newly installed WordPress blog you no doubt have after this podcast. 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, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. View the full article

WordPress 6.0 Beta 1 is now available for download and testing. This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, and test this version of WordPress on a production or mission-critical website. Instead, it is recommended that you test Beta 1 on a test server and site. You can test the WordPress 6.0 Beta 1 in three ways: Option 1: Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream).Option 2: Direct download the beta version here (zip).Option 3: Use WP-CLI to test: wp core update --version=6.0-beta1. Do not use this option if your filesystem is case-insensitive. The current target for the final release is May 24, 2022, which is about six weeks away. Additional information on the full 6.0 release cycle is available. Check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.0-related developer notes in the coming weeks which will detail all upcoming changes. Keep WordPress Bug Free – Help with Testing Testing for issues is critical for stabilizing a release throughout its development. Testing is also a great way to contribute. If you have never tested a beta release before, this detailed guide will walk you through how to get started. Testing helps make sure that this and future releases of WordPress are as stable and issue-free as possible. And anyone can do it – especially great WordPress community members just like you. Want to know more about testing releases like this one? Read about the testing initiatives that happen in Make Core. You can also join a publicly-accessible channel on the Making WordPress Slack workspace. If you think you have run into an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. If you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, you can file one on WordPress Trac. This is also where you can find a list of known bugs. To review features in the Gutenberg releases since WordPress 5.9 (the most recent major release of WordPress), access the What’s New In Gutenberg posts for 13.0 (release pending), 12.9, 12.8, 12.7, 12.6, 12.5, 12.4, 12.3, 12.2, 12.1, and 12.0. Beyond the noted changes, which include more than 400 updates and 500 bug fixes for the editor, contributors have fixed 189 tickets for the WordPress 6.0 core, including 91 new features and enhancements. More fixes are on the way. Some Highlights Want to know what’s new in version 6.0? Read on for some highlights. The WordPress 6.0 release will be packed with all kinds of improvements. Here are just a few: Style Switching: switch up the look and feel of your site, all in one block theme. No need to change themes!More template options: use blocks to edit five more templates (author, date, categories, tag, and taxonomy).Multi-select: Easily select text across multiple blocks. Edit to your liking.Retain Styles: Keep your custom styles in place, whether transforming between blocks or creating new buttons. More patterns in more places: the Quick Inserter surfaces patterns that might work well for the condition you’re in, baking in relevant patterns for template parts and pages you’re working on. List View improvements: New keyboard shortcuts (shift + click) let you select multiple blocks to modify in bulk (reposition, delete, etc.), see your content at a glance with a collapsed by default view, and more.Refined design tools: Explore a new color panel, transparency options, more group block variations to create new layout options (Stack, Row), the ability to set your featured image in a Cover block, control the exact size of your featured image, gap support for the Gallery block, and more.New blocks: Comments, Read More, No results in Query Loop, Post Author biography, Avatar blocks. Limit block changes: Choose to disable the option to remove a block, move it, or both. Export block themes: Explore the improved block theme export tool, as WordPress heads closer to codeless visual block theme building.Webfonts API: Manage local fonts with PHP or theme.json. Thank you to the following contributors for collaborating on this post: @annezazu, @marybaum, @priethor, and @webcommsat. View the full article

WordPress 5.9.3 is now available! This maintenance release features 9 bug fixes in Core and 10 bug fixes in the block editor. WordPress 5.9.3 is a short-cycle maintenance release. The next major release will be version 6.0. You can download WordPress 5.9.3 from WordPress.org, or visit your Dashboard → Updates and click “Update Now”. If you have sites that support automatic background updates, they’ve already started the update process. For more information, browse the full list of both Trac and GitHub changes in the release candidate post, or check out the changelog of version 5.9.3 on HelpHub. Thanks and props! The 5.9.3 release was led by Jb Audras and George Mamadashvili. Special props to Sergey Biryukov for running mission control. Thank you to everyone who helped make WordPress 5.9.3 happen: Aki Hamano, Alex Stine, aliakseyenkaihar, Anton Vlasenko, binarymoon, Carlos Bravo, Colin Stewart, David Baumwald, Dion Hulse, George Mamadashvili, glendaviesnz, Greg Ziółkowski, ironprogrammer, Iulia Cazan, Jb Audras, Joe Dolson, Joen A., Jorge Costa, jsnajdr, Marius L. J., Nick Diego, Paul Biron, Peter Smits, pgpagely, Rafi Ahmed, Richard B. Kreckel, Robert Anderson, Rufus87, Sergey Biryukov, Tor-Bjorn Fjellner, Tonya Mork, Abha Thakor, Oliver Juhas, and Weston Ruter. View the full article

We hope that you and your beloved ones are staying safe and sound during these difficult times. If you’re looking for a way to help support the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, a list of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) was shared earlier last month in the 26th episode of WP Briefing, Matt Mullenweg on Ukraine, Community, and WordPress. In parallel to the work the community is doing in preparation for the next major release, WordPress 6.0, March has seen the launch of some exciting new projects and proposals. Read on to find out more about the latest updates and how to get involved. The Pattern Directory is open for public submissions The new WordPress Pattern Creator is live and allows anyone with a WordPress.org user account to build, edit and submit their best block patterns to the Pattern Directory. If you’ve used patterns in WordPress, you’ll know that they make it easy to add unique layouts to your website, such as galleries, call-to-action sections, testimonials, pricing tables, and more. Opening the directory to public submissions enables any WordPress user to enjoy a wider variety of patterns to customize and use on their sites. Check out the Pattern Creator announcement to learn more WordPress 6.0 Walkthrough scheduled for today, April 5 A few updates to the WordPress 6.0 planning were published last month. In case you missed them, today (April 5) at 15:00 UTC there is a live and interactive WordPress 6.0 walkthrough hosted by contributors of the release squad. The event will take place via Zoom and include a discussion on the new features, potential blockers, and a Q&A session with the community. Attendance is open to anyone who wants to know more about what’s coming in WordPress 6.0. Join the WordPress 6.0 product walkthrough Gutenberg releases: Versions 12.8 and 12.9 are here Versions 12.8 and 12.9 of the Gutenberg plugin were released last month and with them, some new exciting features and updates. Gutenberg 12.8 includes a new Webfonts API, iterative UX enhancements, and bug fixes to increase the editor’s stability.Gutenberg 12.9 introduces the new block locking UI, support for spacing between Gallery images, and many other improvements that give you more control over what is editable and presented to users. Follow #gutenberg-new to stay updated on the latest Gutenberg releases Team updates: Team Reps for the Photo Directory team, community proposals, and more WordPress 5.9.2 is available for download. This security and maintenance release features one bug fix in addition to 3 security fixes.The Team Representatives for the Make Photo Directory team for 2022 have been announced. Congrats to Marcus Burnette (@mdburnette), Katie Richards (@katiejrichards), and Topher DeRosia (@topher1kenobe)!The Community team considered revisiting the existing guidelines for in-person regional WordCamps. Conclusions and next steps will be shared soon.On a similar note, Cate DeRosia (@mysweetcate) is looking for ideas on how the Community team can support organizers who are trying to restart in-person events in their communities. Share yours by April 13, 2022.The Training team published new lesson plans, workshops, and social learning spaces on Learn WordPress. Check out what’s new in March 2022.How has WordPress helped grow your story? The Make Marketing team wants to hear about your experience!The Performance Lab plugin, a set of modules that aim to improve performance in WordPress, was released last month.Openverse released new updates in March, including a redesigned content reporting flow and new image detail pages.WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy posted a public statement on the removal of the Zamir plugin a few weeks ago.The March 2022 editions of the Meetup Organizer Newsletter and the Polyglots Monthly Newsletter were published.The latest edition of People of WordPress features the contributor story of the Argentinian web developer and product manager Juanfra Aldasoro.WordPress community members launched the Museum of Block Art (MOBA), a new initiative that seeks to inspire creativity and push the limits around what can be done with WordPress. All of the art curated in this virtual museum is built using the block editor. Help us build a thriving and inclusive community. Share your thoughts on this proposal to introduce WordCamp and Meetup organizers to #WPDiversity programs by April 8, 2022. Testing requests: WebP feature, template for author pages The Performance Team has published a proposal to integrate the WebP image format by default into WordPress core. Your feedback on this feature is appreciated.Version 19.6 of WordPress for iOS is available for testing. There’s a new call for testing as part of the Full Site Editing Outreach Program: Authoring an Author Template. The deadline to participate is April 21, 2022. The first flagship in-person WordCamp Asia is looking for organizers After two years since the WordCamp Asia organizing team announced that the first flagship WordCamp Asia was canceled due to the pandemic, they are back together and looking for more members to join them in planning the event tentatively scheduled for February 2023.The Call for Speakers for WordCamp US 2022 is now open. You can submit your application by April 17, 2022.Three in-person WordCamps are happening this month: WordCamp Genève, Switzerland on April 9, 2022 WordCamp Athens, Greece on April 9-10, 2022 WordCamp Vienna, Austria on April 23-24, 2022Check out the latest episodes of WordPress Briefing with Josepha Haden:Coming to a WordCamp Near You: A Return to In-Person WP EventsIs WordPress Made for Me? The Call for Volunteers for WordCamp Europe 2022 is still open. If you want to get involved with the WordPress community and have a lot of fun, this is your chance! Have a story that we could include in the next ‘Month in WordPress’ post? Let us know by filling out this form. The following folks contributed to this Month in WordPress: @rmartinezduque, @mysweetcate, @anjanavasan. View the full article