Wordpress

Today, WordPress powers more than 40% of the web. That’s a massive reach—one that comes with a similarly large responsibility. With so many people using the CMS, the WordPress community should always consider strategies for improving the visitor experience. This is where website performance plays a crucial role. How fast a web page loads, how quickly a page reacts when you click a button, or how smoothly it scrolls can all significantly impact the end-user experience. A more performant site can lead to higher reader engagement and more conversions. Thankfully, over the past few years, the WordPress project has made major performance improvements across the board for the core platform, plugins, and themes. Many enhancements are available out of the box, with no configuration required. They improve the website frontend’s performance—the part visitors see—and various parts of the administrative experience, such as the editor. Here’s a partial list of performance upgrades from the past year: WordPress 6.3 brought several enhancements to image loading. This resulted in an improvement of up to 21% in loading time for any WordPress page with a hero image. WordPress 6.5 launched with a more efficient translation engine. In benchmark testing, it improved WordPress response time by 23% for all localized WordPress sites. More than 55% of all WordPress sites worldwide use a language other than US English and would benefit from this enhancement. WordPress 6.5 also included several performance optimizations for the Block Editor, leading to 5x faster typing processing and 2x faster load times when creating or editing content in the site and post editors. In addition to the Core enhancements listed above, the WordPress project continues to work on several efforts that indirectly benefit the ecosystem’s performance. For instance, WordPress Core leverages automated tooling for continuously monitoring its performance, covering every product update. This helps measure new features’ performance improvements and enables contributors to detect potential performance problems during the development of a new feature or release so any issues can be proactively addressed long before end users are affected. A project is currently underway to make the same tooling used by WordPress Core developers available to plugin and theme authors as well. Additionally, the new WordPress plugin checker allows checking any plugin for performance best practices, among other requirements and recommendations. The plugin checker should lead to more performance awareness in plugin authors and, eventually, faster plugins. If you develop plugins, consider integrating this tool into your development and testing workflow. Last but not least, WordPress 6.5 introduced the Interactivity API, which is a technical foundation that facilitates more performant user interactions. This new infrastructure drastically simplifies the implementation of interactive website features and can even centrally control certain aspects of performance, keeping multiple independent plugins operating efficiently. These performance updates result from a collaborative effort from all corners of the community, including the WordPress Performance Team. This team, founded in 2021, underscores the WordPress project’s commitment to performance. And the results are substantial: Compared to a year ago, 8% more WordPress sites deliver good load time performance at scale—significantly better than the overall web’s 5.5% load time improvement. The web is getting more performant, and WordPress is leading the way. WordPress contributors are determined to continue this trend by working on further performance iterations. Whether you’re a WordPress end user, administrator, site builder, or developer, you can contribute to this effort. Anyone can test the performance features before being released in Core through individual feature plugins. Each feature can be tested via the Performance Lab plugin, so please try them! Testing features early helps the team assess their impact and collect valuable feedback. Are you eager for more WordPress performance news and updates? Then check out the 2024 performance roadmap. Thanks to the entire community for your hard work. Not only does it ensure WordPress’ continued improvement and growth, but it benefits the entire open web. Thank you to @annezazu @clarkeemily @tweetythierry @swissspidy @westonruter @adamsilverstein @joemcgill for content review and @provenself @dansoschin for editorial review. View the full article

Explore the WordPress Data Liberation project in this exclusive behind-the-scenes episode discussing WordPress migrations. Joining us is WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy, along with special guest and sponsored contributor Jordan Gillman. Together, they’ll look at how the project is expanding opportunities to benefit from the freedom and flexibility WordPress offers. Don’t miss this enlightening discussion! Credits Host: Josepha Haden Chomphosy Guest: Jordan Gillman Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Brett McSherry and Nicholas Garofalo Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Show Notes Idea: translate.wordpress.org tour WordPress Playground Want to get involved with Data Liberation? GitHub – Data Liberation Making WordPress Slack – data-liberation channel Small List of Big Things WordCamp US 2024 Tickets are now on Sale WordPress 6.5 Available to Download Dropping support for PHP 7.0 and 7.1 Have a question you’d like answered? Submit them to WPBriefing@WordPress.org. Transcript [00:00:00] Josepha: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go! [00:00:28] (Intro Music) [00:00:40] Josepha: Today, I want to talk about the Data Liberation project that we first introduced at State of the Word. It’s a very big project with a lot of philosophical underpinning. So today, I have with me Jordan Gillman, who’s going to help us dig in a little bit deeper. Jordan, welcome to the show. It’s so great to have you here. [00:00:57] Jordan: Thank you. It’s lovely to be here. [00:00:59] Josepha: Before we get started, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself? Like what parts of the WordPress project you contribute to, and how long you’ve been hanging around in open source? [00:01:09] Jordan: Yeah, beautiful. I would love to. My name is Jordan. I live on the east coast of Australia, about an hour out of Sydney—about 10 minutes from the beach, which is a pretty great place to live. My relationship with WordPress began 19 or 18 years ago, I guess. I was tinkering with Movable Type, and they changed their license. And I went, I need to find something that’s free. And at that point, I had no idea what open source was. I just knew that I could use this WordPress platform for free to you know, tinker around and build websites. At the time, I was a graphic designer and, so web stuff was just fun. But gradually, that kind of took over, and I ended up doing a lot of front-end development and eventually freelancing for about ten years, building WordPress sites for churches and schools and kind of non-profit organizations like that. And through that, I’ve also then ended up doing some support for WordPress and landed being lucky enough now to be sponsored to contribute full-time into the WordPress project. I do a lot of work with the support team, so working in the public forums, particularly on core WordPress plugins and themes like Gutenberg and bundled themes, Twenty Twenty-Four. [00:02:15] Jordan: But also working with the team itself, trying to make sure the forums are a nice place for people to hang out and answer questions and get their questions answered. And I also help out with a few other things around the place. I have an eye on the work the plugins team’s doing, working with the WordPress Foundation on a few different things. I’m lucky to have my fingers in a few pies but the biggest pie at the moment I have is the Data Liberation project. [00:02:36] Josepha: Yeah. So let’s talk about that. We’re going to give everyone a quick like starting line. If, for some reason, you have not read or seen anything about the WordPress project plans so far in the last four months, you may not know what the Data Liberation project is, and that’s fine, too. Because Jordan and I are here to help you understand what it is. But, the Data Liberation project is something that Matt introduced to the project at State of the Word last year in December. And you, Jordan, are the one who are really helping us to take this project into a space where we have everything that we need, all the kind of tools and guides that users will need in order to do what exactly? Like, let’s go through what this Data Liberation project is from your standpoint and what made you excited to work on it. [00:03:27] Jordan: Thank you. Yeah, so the general idea of the Data Liberation project is it should be super duper easy for anyone to bring their site to WordPress. That’s the first main part of it, is that regardless of the platform you are on currently, be it something that’s pretty open, be it something that’s really kind of walls and closed, be it a social media platform, another web building platform, it should be really easy to bring your content over to a WordPress site, because once it’s in a WordPress site, it’s essentially free. You can then take it and do what you want with it once it’s in WordPress, but we want to make it as easy as possible to get it here, basically. [00:04:03] Josepha: Free as in liberated, not free as in like, now the stuff that was in your mind has no value. [00:04:10] Jordan: Yeah, free as in liberated, free as in you own it and can do what you want with it. So that’s a big part of it. It’s, let’s get, make it easier for people to come to WordPress. I think it’s also important that if we’re talking about Data Liberation and freedom of content and democratizing publishing, that also means we make it easier for people to take their content from WordPress and use it somewhere else if that’s the decision that they make. And there’s some moves we can make to make that easier and nicer for people as well. [00:04:37] Josepha: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So, recently, we just finished up an outreach period where we were making sure that we were talking to, like, folks in the community and anyone, anyone who uses WordPress that wanted to talk to us about what they needed, what they were hoping for, what issues, what pain points they’ve had when they were looking at site migrations. So, what, to the best of your knowledge at the moment, like what are the big themes that you got out of that feedback loop? Out of that outreach? [00:05:08] Jordan: Yeah, thank you. That was really enjoyable, actually. I was lucky enough to, I got to speak to a bunch of people in person at WordCamp Asia, which was great. We’d done some, some online, did a hallway hangout, and we’ve had a survey out for a while to folks predominantly kind of in the hosting agency freelancer space. So, folks who are working with end users who are often the ones doing migrations. We got a lot of feedback about WordPress to WordPress migration and the challenges of different hosting platforms and access from users and a bunch of information, which is useful and interesting but not immediately relevant to the comparison to migrating to WordPress from another platform entirely. But at the same time, talking to particularly agencies who do a lot of big-scale migrations, there’s a lot of challenges just when it comes to, for starters, getting the content out of the platform. Some platforms are kind of helpful, and they’ll even provide a WordPress formatted export. For every one of those, there are… [00:06:03] Josepha: That’s very helpful. [00:06:05] Jordan: Yeah, those are super helpful. For every one of those there are probably two or three who aren’t as helpful, and you start to resort to tricks with, you know, manually exporting databases or getting RSS feeds and trying to convert them, or a lot of agencies said, “You know what? Often, we end up just copying and pasting page by page from the source site into a brand-new WordPress site.” [00:06:27] Jordan: So, there’s challenges about the access to the content. There’s lots of challenges around getting the content from the shape of one platform into WordPress. What constitutes a page? What constitutes a post? How do we handle all of the extra metadata of images and dates and taxonomies, and anything else that might be associated with a blob of content in one platform? How do we translate that into the way WordPress likes to handle those things? And particularly taking that to another level, even just bringing it into the Block Editor? It was great to hear how many people are just migrating straight to the Block Editor like they want the content in blocks, which is wonderful to hear. [00:07:05] Josepha: Yay! [00:07:05] Jordan: But there are challenges. I know it’s great. But there are some, there are challenges with that and getting it to kind of format the way they expect, when it comes in particularly because there’s some kind of functional challenges with that in validating the way the content comes in because it all happens client side in the browser. It’s hard to do that in big batches. So, there was some really great feedback around all of those kinds of places. It was really interesting to see how much of it centers around that getting the content and then getting the content, and yeah, for the agencies I spoke to, they do a lot of trial and error of, you know, custom scripts, and let’s try it. Oh, that did this. Let’s try again with a few tweaks. So I’m excited to see how we can kind of make that easier for them and, you know, maybe get it happening first time. [00:07:49] Josepha: Yeah, absolutely. It has been a long time since I migrated any sites personally, but I remember the first time that I tried to migrate a site. So, I was on Xanga before Xanga was on WordPress, and I remember that when I was like, I can’t figure out this WordPress thing, but I think I need some stuff in it so that, like, I know what it’s going to look like. [00:08:11] Josepha: I know what to move around cause I didn’t know the names for anything in, in CSS or HTML. Like I didn’t know what to look for in the code, but if I had a piece of content in it, I could be like, find the content in the code and then move that. And so I was like, I’m going to export everything because there was an export option in Xanga. And move it into WordPress, and WordPress was like if you can manage to get it out of Xanga, super easy to get it in. But it was actually really difficult to figure out how to get it out. And fortunately, I’d only been writing on it for like four years, three, four years at that point. So there wasn’t like, a huge amount of content, but also, I was a pretty prolific writer. I was a bad writer, but the only way to get better at things you’re bad at is to do it a lot. So, I did a lot of bad writing for three or four years. And I think that in the end, I did, like, just pay some service to scrape everything that was public on it, and then go through and get the private things and pull it out later. [00:09:08] Josepha: I think later on down the road, I did an actual like full migration when it was easier to get it done and got all the content out, including like drafts and private posts and things. So that’s good. But yeah, it was really difficult then. And then, like, we have the blocks now that are supposed to help get a little bit more consistency in the way that you can move content in and out of a WordPress site. And is that something that we are then focusing on with the Data Liberation project? Is that something that’s being done in concert with our Gutenberg plugin, or like how are we accounting for that? [00:09:46] Jordan: That is a great question. The way things are looking at the moment, having come out of this feedback and the way we’re looking at going forward that, that work on getting content coming into blocks is going to be a really, really major part of Data Liberation. And it kind of sits in the middle of things to my mind. [00:10:01] Jordan: The improvements that we can make with handling the way content is transformed into blocks gives us the potential of wins in a lot of places. So, as long as we can get to the content, this work on HTML to blocks for a better, lack of a better way of putting it, gives us wins with importing from another platform because we can take the content in whatever form it is, turn it into blocks in the post editor. It gives us wins with migrating from classic editor because, similarly, we can take the HTML of the classic editor generates and turn it into blocks. That already kind of happens, but there’s definitely some work that we can do to keep improving that. It gives us potential wins around the spaces of moving from between proprietary builders and block libraries and things. Because if we start to have a better-standardized set of ways to handle HTML into blocks. Then, you can essentially move from whatever form your content is in into, you know, core native blocks in the editor. So, I think work there is going to be really important because it gives us a foundation to aim for from whatever the migration is happening from. [00:11:09] Jordan: So, there’ll be some work there. There’s already work happening on the HTML API. Like, ongoingly and regularly and so we’ll be talking to those folks. There’s obviously going to be a lot of overlap with the work within Gutenberg as well, which is doing you know, parsing of content into blocks. So, it’s going to take a lot of collaboration and a lot of work from everyone, but I’m really excited because if we can get that foundational platform of transforming HTML into blocks really, really smooth, then what we can do is we can, you know, activate contributors in the community say, we’ve got this part figured out. If you can get it to here, it’s going to come in beautifully. So what we want your help with is to say, how do I get out of this platform to a format that we can do the rest? So, hopefully, we’re getting a common flow for a big part of that important migration process. And then we can throw it open to others to say, “You’ve got expertise with this platform. That’s excellent. Can you get us to here? And we’ll take it from there.” And maybe we’ll get some wins by doing that work in parallel, and we’ll really start to see some movement. [00:12:13] Josepha: And speaking of the, we’ll take it from there. I know that also, in addition to the work that you are doing with Data Liberation and that is happening on the Gutenberg side and WordPress core in general, we also have a little bit of work happening on the after you get it to here point. So, the folks over at Playground have been doing a bit of research about how to use the guides and tools that are in the Data Liberation repo. To run all of that through Playground so that you can not only like import it, but you can put it into Playground and check it before you launch it in someplace else, which I think is a great user-facing, like, super important thing for an everyday user to be able to have at their fingertips that way. But then also the tour plugin that was built, I think specifically for the Polyglots team, is where we are looking at using, and I can’t remember which little project we’re doing some research on to make this possible, but we’re looking at taking that tour plugin and making it so that anyone can build a tour on anyone’s version of something in a browser so that you can just say, okay, so I did these things. I got it to here as you requested. I’m moving it to here. But now that I have got it into WordPress, what are the literal buttons I have to press in order to make sure it’s live? What do I literally have to press in order to make sure that I’m in the right time zone? Like, things like that. And we tested it on Wix, and it was able to work. [00:13:40] Josepha: Not that we’re trying to get anyone to Wix. But on the subject of, like, getting things out of WordPress and into someone else, that sounds counterintuitive for folks, like, you’re here listening to a WordPress podcast, and we’re talking about how and why we want to make it easier for people to get their content to us, of course, but then also, if needed, get it out of a version of WordPress and either into a different version of WordPress with a new host or, whatever. Or if this is not your long-term destination, which we think it will be once you figure us out, but like, if it’s not, like, how to get out of it, too. So, from your perspective, how does that fit with the basic philosophies of open source or of WordPress in general? [00:14:24] Jordan: Yeah, thank you. If I may, there’s a couple of things I wanted to touch on from what you’ve said. First of all the other work that is going on in the project at the moment that you mentioned, the tour guide and the Playground, I think both of those are going to be super important to the approach we take to Data Liberation. I wanted to elaborate just a little bit on the Playground because I’m particularly excited about the potential that gives for two particular scenarios two particular use cases for migration. One is, where I’ve already set up a WordPress site, I’ve got the theme that I’d like, and I’ve got some, you know, some plugins, maybe I’ve got a little bit there, but I want to import content, but I want to check how it is the potential for the Playground to make essentially a staging copy of my site and migrate the content into that staging copy so I can see how it lands in my chosen theme and check everything out and then go, yep, that looks great. And apply it. That’s great for it’s safe. You can check how it looks before it’s, you know, committed. So that’s brilliant. I’m excited about that. I’m also excited about the potential it has for people who don’t know WordPress, or don’t have a WordPress site, or they don’t have a host, they don’t have anything. [00:15:30] Jordan: But if they can say, I want to see how this would go in WordPress. Playground, through some platform, somewhere, will allow them to just have an immediate in-browser preview of what their site would look like on WordPress. And if they like it, we then move them. We help them find a host. We help them export that in a way that they can use, but it helps the people who already have sites. But I think, more importantly, it helps those who don’t have a site yet. And they don’t have to set up an empty WordPress install in order to start migrating. They can just get into it. [00:16:01] Josepha: And also, you don’t have to, like know who your host needs to be before you can take a look at the back end of a WordPress site and see if it makes sense to you. Like I think that that is a huge, huge win on behalf of users, current users, and future users of WordPress. It’s the try before you buy. Come kick our tires without having to find a server. If you all don’t know what we’re talking about, if you have not heard of Playground yet, you can go to playground.WordPress.net and give it a try. It’s a one-click, serverless local version of WordPress that you can test out themes on and plugins, and just like put all your data into all your content into, and pretty soon also be able to export or just load directly onto the host of your choice. It’s really, really cool. [00:16:44] Jordan: It’s, it’s pretty much magic, I think. [00:16:47] Josepha: Yes, I remember the first hackathon where we took it because we took it basically on a hackathon roadshow for six months. I remember the first one we took it to. Routinely, we could get developers, not me, routinely, Adam Zieliński could get a developer to do the thing, and they’d be like, I can do it if you’re next to me telling me what to do, but it’s literal magic. I don’t know what’s happening. And he was like, okay, I’ll come explain it to you. And like, he was using English, but also I was like, that is still magic. I’m so glad someone understands it. It’s brilliant. [00:17:18] Jordan: Yeah, so the Playground I’m super excited by. I think it’s going to be really important. The tour stuff the tour functionality is going to be really important as well. Because on some level, We’re going to have to wrap all of this work on improving HTML to blocks, the process of taking an export file and importing it into WordPress, the process of telling people how to get the content, all that’s going to have to be ideally wrapped up in a nice user-friendly way so that users aren’t having to, you know, read plain text articles and then going and installing a plugin and all of those kinds of things. I think the potential for the tours is we may have some kind of wrapper plugin or something which will detect the platform of your existing site if you put the URL in, and it will start walking you through the steps. So, part of that might be action you need to take on your existing platform, and we have some of that information already in the guides on the Data Liberation site at WordPress.org/data-liberation. That information is already there, but I’m hoping that we can start pulling those guides into the WP Admin so you just get walked through it while you’re there. And we can start using the tour functionality to really specifically pinpoint: you need to go here, now you can do this, go and click this, and just walk users through that migration process a little bit more neatly. [00:18:37] Jordan: I’m really excited that we’re going to be able to utilize a lot of these existing projects that are exciting and happening at the moment. And I think, ideally, they’re all going to make it much easier for users to not have to jump through so many hoops. And the hoops that they do have to jump through, we can hold their hand while they do it. [00:18:54] Josepha: Yeah, absolutely. Create safe scaffolding for fun, I used to say. [00:18:59] Jordan: So those are the two projects existing that are happening at the moment that I’m excited about rolling into and working with for the Data Liberation work. [00:19:07] Jordan: You also asked about the getting content back out, which is something that I’m particularly passionate about, I suppose. Which may be ironic when a lot of the aim of this project is to get people into WordPress. But I’m a really firm believer that if our mission is to democratize publishing, then that doesn’t mean just get everyone onto WordPress and go, yes, now you’re trapped. It’s like the Hotel California, you can never leave. If we’re going to be, you know, fully all in on democratizing publishing, then that means giving folks the freedom to take their content to do with it, whatever they want. It’s fair to say at the moment that that is possible. So you can export your content from WordPress. We don’t hang onto it. We don’t lock it down. You can take it. At the moment, the format that you get that content in has some limitations. It’s fair to say it doesn’t handle bringing the media of your site particularly well unless you’re turning it into another WordPress site somewhere else. So, the export functionality is very, very focused at the moment on migration to another host, or to a local site, or to another WordPress installation, basically. But if you want to use that content for something else, maybe another platform. Maybe you just want to have a copy of your blog posts that you can. [00:20:17] Josepha: Print it into a book. [00:20:18] Jordan: Yeah, to put into a book. Maybe you want to put it on a thumb drive and put it in a lockbox somewhere. Maybe you want some kind of hundred-year archive of your intellectual property that you’ve written and created. And so I think we’ve got some room to make improvements there. Not only to the way we provide content for other platforms to pick up and bring in but also just in the ways that we provide content to users who just really want to have a physical, digital copy of what they’ve created. There are some challenges at the moment when you get an export, if you’ve got shortcodes in your content, if you’ve got content that’s generated by plugins, all kinds of dynamic content that is great when it’s a website, and WordPress is wonderful. And there’s all of these options, but if you take an export, you have references to those functions, and you have references to those shortcodes, which aren’t actually fully realized. So I think there’s some room for us to investigate what does a better export for other platforms look like and what does a better export for “I want to print it out or turn it into a book or just have a static version of that” content look like. And so I’m particularly excited about that, even though it’s kind of, bring it in, and we want to let them get it out. But that’s part of the whole liberation of data, I suppose, is, you know, the freedom to do with it what you want. [00:21:40] Josepha: Yes, absolutely. And everything that increases freedom on the open web, I think we are in favor of. So, I don’t know if you follow many, like WordPress futurists, our people who are out there saying, if only WordPress had these additional 2,500 hours worth of work, then we could do this with it. Like, I don’t know if you follow a lot of them. [00:22:02] Josepha: But, a lot of them look at that thing that Matt said, like, I want to say, five years ago about WordPress becoming the operating system of the web and putting some thought into what would be required to make that possible. And when we look at composable CMSs, like the option to have something that is a framework and a core of what you are doing in your digital experience of the web. And making it possible to add anything to it required. I think that also the work that we’re doing with Data Liberation to provide a little bit more consistency and just standardization of the way that content comes in and out, I think, can only help with that potential future implementation of WordPress as the operating system for the web so that you have this basic place where you hold and manage all your content and also not only does WordPress cooperate nicely with all these other tools and applications that you can put on top of it but also all of the content has standard conversational touch points and so everything moves quickly in and out including the dynamic content that is maybe being created inside your WordPress core itself. I think that is also a really important not primary focus, but certainly future-like, if only we could get to that state kind of focus. [00:23:31] Josepha: I’m really interested. I think that the Data Liberation project is big, and I know that we expected primarily only new contributors to work on it, but honestly, we know that’s not the case. It’s you’re working on old WordPress in here and so not necessarily new contributors. But I think that you’re right that the place for new contributors to help us is saying like we can get the content to here, we can get the data to here, and then we need help getting it into WordPress or help getting it into something else. So, as like a last question here, or if you have things to add to that, and then I can do last question. [00:24:04] Jordan: Okay, so to loop back to your conversation about futurists and moving content and stuff, I am really excited about this idea that the open web at the moment, I think, is really, really exciting. I just started mucking around with federating my content in the fediverse. Again, recently, I tried it a little while ago and really struggled, but I’ve just started again, and it’s sitting really comfortably with me, and it’s, it’s feeling like it’s a great time for posting and owning your content, and then syndicating it elsewhere. I have seen a couple of really interesting conversations about what you were saying about, like I’ve seen the conversations in the past about, you know, operating system of the web, but also some talk and ideas recently about what would it look like if we stored all of our data in a WordPress instance? What if all of my photos aren’t on Instagram? They are on my WordPress site. What if I pull in my Fitbit or my Strava information and just store it in WordPress so that I can do with it what I want once it’s there? What if I, I don’t know, what if I pull in kind of all of my different sources of data and I, and I house them in WordPress and then I can do with them what they want, would do with them what I want. [00:25:08] Jordan: And that is when the Data Liberation stuff becomes especially important because if it’s your everything, you want to take your everything somewhere else. But I’m really excited for kind of all of that kind of space at the moment and giving people the freedom to own that data and when they create stuff. In actual fact, this is one of the things that you said in your talk at WordCamp Asia, which has really stuck with me was, and I can’t remember the exact phrase, but you said if you’re going to do all of this work of creating something, you may as well do it somewhere where you own it and can keep it. And that, for me, is just such a strong driver for getting people onto WordPress. Particularly from, at the moment, social media platforms. I’ve got two young daughters who are just getting to the age where they’re creating videos at home, which aren’t being published anywhere, but they’re starting to. They’ve got friends who are doing YouTube channels, and they’ve got friends on Instagram. And I’m looking at all of that going, I get the urge to create, and I get the urge to publish, but I want them to have an alternative to do all of that so that in five years’ time, ten years time, whatever it is, when they go, wow, I did all of this stuff. I don’t want that owned by someone else. I’ve created all this, and I’m excited by the possibility of having that become a simpler, more user-friendly, accessible option to folks, where it becomes just as easy to have a WordPress site, which is your Instagram feed or a WordPress site, which is your YouTube channel or something like that, where you own it, and you just create it, and it exists. And Data Liberation means you want to take a copy of all that stuff, go for it, download an archive, you know, print out the photos, do whatever you want, but they’re yours. You have them. And so, it’s really feeling like all of that is coalescing together a little bit at the moment. I think it’s a really exciting time. [00:26:52] Josepha: And also, like, since we’re just meandering around in philosophical spaces, two philosophical thoughts. One, I really, really feel like it’s important and valuable for people to document their lives. I have a pretty private social media presence; mostly, if you’re following me on social media, it’s because, like, you have literally been in my living room or you’re looking for WordPress news. Like that’s it. But I am constantly am documenting my life just for myself, like the folks who are listening, which is everybody, because we don’t do video, will not know that I have back behind me a shelf that is nothing but journals from my leadership journey, like from the moment that I realized that like leadership was something that was a skill and could change people’s lives like I’ve done nothing but document like I ran into this problem. This is the research that I did to figure out what was happening and not, and just like it’s really mundane things in my work now. But the work and the process of documenting, like, what’s happening for you and with you in your life and how you’re interacting with it, like, it’s just important for your mental health and for your understanding of the passage of time. [00:28:05] Josepha: But then also you were talking about, like, having a hundred-year archive of your thoughts and things, like, there will be a point at which digital information being ephemeral because it’s just electricity wandering around between screens, like, it’s prone to getting lost in the same way that physical things are prone to getting lost, but the loss is less acute in the moment. And so you can accidentally lose it. And I think that that’s a real long-term not problem for society necessarily, but I think it is something from a societal standpoint where we’re gonna, at some point in the near future, realize that some of us have huge missing gaps where we, like just got rid of everything that we ever documented because we had a moment on social media or because it seemed like the only way to reclaim our content or our data or our privacy or whatever it was. And so I have a yeah. I love it. I love everything that we’re talking about, about the speculative future and WordPress. And so yes, now, well, now everybody knows all my thoughts on speculative WordPress. [00:29:06] Jordan: There’s an interesting philosophical conversation which we’re like coming towards of what’s the equivalent in a hundred years, in 200 years of now, of the Library of Congress for philosophical and powerful writing. There is so much great stuff that is written on the web, and it just exists there. In a hundred years, when people are writing about the early work of an artist or a politician or, you know, a notable figure, we don’t, we’re not going to have handwritten letters. We’re not going to have correspondence. But we’ll have tweets. We could have blog posts. Like, it interests me to think, like, the stuff that we take for granted of historical creation is happening digitally now. And so, equivalently, in the future, how, how is that gonna get retained? How much amazing knowledge and thinking is gonna just, you know, have their hosting account expire and get removed? And it’s an, it’s it’s a big conversation, but it’s an interesting one. [00:30:09] Josepha: Yeah. Oh, what a fascinating discussion we’ve had today. So, by way of wrapping up our discussion here, why don’t you give us a sense for, like, if you are a user of WordPress and you were like, this sounds really interesting, I want to learn more, where can they go? But also, if you are someone who wants to learn how to contribute to WordPress and this sounds like a good opportunity for you to get started with that. Where can people find more about this project, about how to get started, how to contribute, all that stuff? [00:30:38] Jordan: If you are someone who is hearing about this for the first time and coming to it pretty fresh and haven’t been working in the WordPress community much before. The best place to go will be WordPress.org/data-liberation, that will give you not only access to the tools and guides that exist but also some information on where the development and discussion is happening. That’s the easiest pathway to find your way into those conversations as well. For folks who already have a little bit of experience and, it may be contributed code or a part of discussions already. The place to go to would be github.com/WordPress/data-liberation. That’s where there’s a lot of discussion. That’s where the existing tools and guides are being managed and worked on. So, if you really want to dive in. Please come and join us there. There are discussions to be had. There are ideas to be floated. That’s where all of the boots-on-the-ground work is going to be happening. [00:31:25] Jordan: The other great place is within the Make WordPress Slack organization. And we have a Data Liberation channel in there. That is primarily where we have higher-level conversations, and we chat about stuff, and I’m hoping that becomes a real hub for work-adjacent discussion. So GitHub is going to be for all of this is where all the work’s happening, but the Slack channel is where people can share their thoughts on what’s possible, and big picture ideas, and that kind of stuff. So those will be the three best places. WordPress.org/data-liberation for the overview, github.com/WordPress/data-liberation for where the work’s actually happening, and WordPress Slack in the Data Liberation channel. If you want to come and chat more about the possibilities and, you know, helping get the future of the open web happening. [00:32:17] Josepha: I mean, that is an enticing call to action. We’ll have links to all of the, all three of those in the show notes, as well as links to everything that we kind of mentioned over the course of our conversation. But Jordan, thank you so much for joining me today. [00:32:32] Jordan: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been great. [00:32:34] (Music interlude) [00:32:41] Josepha: And now it’s time for our small list of big things. I’ve got three things for you this week. The first thing on the list is that WordCamp US tickets are now on sale. So that event is happening from September 17th through the 20th in Portland, Oregon. There are general admission tickets and micro sponsor tickets available. And if you have seen the cost of the ticket but had not quite noted the length of the event, I just want to assure you that the cost per day is the same now as it was and has been for years. It’s still that same 25-dollar-a-day ticket that you’ve got; it’s just that it’s four days long this time. We’ll have a link to the tickets in the show notes, but then also you can always wander over to us.wordcamp.org, and it’ll take you right there. The second thing on our list is that WordPress 6.5 is here. It is named Regina. If you listened to our show last week, you know that it was a huge release and kind of has something for everyone. So, if you have not yet downloaded it to take a look at it, do that. If you have not updated your sites yet, run a backup because you should always do a backup and then get that on your site and start testing everything out. And the third thing on our big list, our small list of big things, is actually that we’re looking at dropping support for PHP 7. 0 and 7. 1 in upcoming releases of WordPress this year. It should not be too disruptive a change. However, it is going to take a lot of people to test it and make sure that everything’s working as we want it to work and as we need it to work. And so while we head toward that, I want to make sure you’ve got the resources that you need to know what’s happening, where it’s happening, how it’s going to affect you. I’ll leave some resources in the show notes for that as well. [00:34:27] Josepha: And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Don’t forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app or subscribe directly on WordPress.org/news. You’ll get a friendly reminder whenever there’s a new episode. If you liked what you heard today, share it with a fellow WordPresser, or if you had questions about what you heard, you can share those with me at WPBriefing@WordPress.org. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Thanks for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. [00:34:54] (Music outro) View the full article

Note: Due to an issue with the initial package, WordPress 6.5.1 was not released. 6.5.2 is the first minor release for WordPress 6.5. This security and maintenance release features 2 bug fixes on Core, 12 bug fixes for the Block Editor, and 1 security fix. Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately. Backports are also available for other major WordPress releases, 6.0 and later. You can download WordPress 6.5.2 from WordPress.org, or visit your WordPress Dashboard, click “Updates”, and then click “Update Now”. If you have sites that support automatic background updates, the update process will begin automatically. WordPress 6.5.2 is a short-cycle release. The next major release will be version 6.6 and is currently planned for 16 July 2024. Security updates included in this release The security team would like to thank the following people for responsibly reporting vulnerabilities, and allowing them to be fixed in this release: A cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability affecting the Avatar block type; reported by John Blackbourn of the WordPress security team. Many thanks to Mat Rollings for assisting with the research. Thank you to these WordPress contributors This release was led by John Blackbourn, Isabel Brison, and Aaron Jorbin. WordPress 6.5.2 would not have been possible without the contributions of the following people. Their asynchronous coordination to deliver maintenance and security fixes into a stable release is a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress community. Aaron Jorbin, Aki Hamano, Andrei Draganescu, Artemio Morales, Caleb Burks, colind, Daniel Richards, Dominik Schilling, Fabian Kägy, George Mamadashvili, Greg Ziółkowski, Isabel Brison, Jb Audras, Joe McGill, John Blackbourn, Jonathan Desrosiers, Lovekesh Kumar, Matias Benedetto, Mukesh Panchal, Pascal Birchler, Peter Wilson, Sean Fisher, Sergey Biryukov, Scott Reilly How to contribute To get involved in WordPress core development, head over to Trac, pick a ticket, and join the conversation in the #core channel. Need help? Check out the Core Contributor Handbook. Thanks to John Blackbourn, Ehtisham S., Jb Audras, and Angela Jin for proofreading. View the full article

Join WordPress Executive Director, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, as she offers an exclusive preview of the upcoming WordPress 6.5 release, accompanied by special guest Dave Smith, one of the Editor Tech leads for this release. Don’t miss this opportunity for an insider’s look! Credits Host: Josepha Haden Chomphosy Guest: Dave Smith Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Brett McSherry and Nicholas Garofalo Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Show Notes WordPress Download WordPress 6.5 Development Cycle Unblocking WP6.5 – Font Library and Synced Pattern Overrides Data Views WP-Admin Redesign Font Library An Introduction to Block-Based Mega Menus Dave on WP These TINY Link Editing CHANGES Just Made WORDPRESS 6.5 So Much Better Interactivity API in 6.5 Opportunities to Test WordPress 6.5 Small List of Big Things Asia Meetup Revival Project 2024 Upcoming WordPress Meetings Making a WordPress Media Corps Have a question you’d like answered? Submit them to WPBriefing@WordPress.org. Transcript [00:00:00] Josepha: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go! [00:00:28] (Intro Music) [00:00:39] Josepha: Dave, I’m so excited to have you here with us today. Welcome. [00:00:42] Dave: Thank you. I’m really excited to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me on. [00:00:46] Josepha: Yeah. So before we get much further, how about you tell us a little bit about what you do on the WordPress project? And if I recall correctly, that you have a role on the release squad. So just let us know a bit about what that role is and what that looks like. [00:01:00] Dave: Sure. Absolutely. Well, obviously said I’m Dave Smith. I’m from England in the United Kingdom, and I am full-time contributor to WordPress. I’ve focused primarily on the Block Editor during that time. And I’ve been doing it for about three years now. And fortunately for me, I am sponsored by Automattic, so that allows me to contribute full-time to the project, which is fantastic. But my history of WordPress goes back a fair way longer than that, and I used to work in agency land, and so I used WordPress for making things for a living before I worked in WordPress if you see what I mean. [00:01:35] Josepha: I, no, I definitely understand. I also was agency before WordPress. [00:01:40] Dave: I think it’s a common origin story, if you see what I mean. And yes, you’re absolutely right. I’ve been fortunate enough in this release, WordPress 6.5, to be the Co-editor Tech Lead. Obviously alongside my colleague which is Riad Benguella. Some of you may know him. He is the lead architect of Gutenberg. So yeah, it’s been fantastic to work alongside him. [00:02:00] Josepha: Yeah, excellent. One of these days, I’m going to get Riad on here. I think I’ve never had him on. [00:02:05] Dave: Oh, you should definitely. [00:02:06] Josepha: He’s so kind and reasonable. And I was just gonna tell a personal anecdote about Riad, and I don’t know that it makes any sense, but I’m gonna do it anyway. I’m gonna do it anyway. I saw him at an event like right after he came back from his most recent sabbatical, and he was like, it was great being away, but also like, I had forgotten what kind of energy events like this really bring in. And he has always struck me as an introvert, but I think maybe he’s like an outgoing introvert or something. Cause normally, like, introvert introverts are not like, this gives me so much energy. They’re like, I know that this is important work, and I’m here. And so that’s my personal anecdote about Riad, I am, gonna get him on here someday, but be that as it may, we’re delighted to have you. So, 6.5 is coming out are you excited, number one? [00:02:54] Dave: I am very excited. Yeah, it’s been a long road into this release. As you may know, well, as you do know, it’s, it was delayed by one week. That was actually, I think was, was a good decision. We’ve had a lot of work needing to go into the Font Library feature. I’ve seen a few posts saying there were bugs. [00:03:09] Dave: I think mainly it was a decision about where to upload fonts to, which seems quite amazing when you think about it. I was talking to my wife about it the other day, and she said, really, you’re delaying a release because of where to upload things. But, yeah, this is software that runs a considerable part of the web. So when we make these decisions about where things uploaded, we’ve got to be really confident that they are the right decisions. And so, yeah, that decision to delay the release has been good. And we’ve had an opportunity to make sure the release is fully robust and ready to go out. So yeah, I’m super excited to see it land. [00:03:40] Josepha: Yeah. I have some follow up questions about just like, how doing all of that work in public feels. But probably, we should get through the bulk of the sorts of things that people tune into this episode for, so like, let’s talk about some of the big features that are going into 6.5 so that folks have a sense for that. And then we’ll take a look at just like things that you’re excited to get in, things that I’m excited to get in. And maybe like if there’s a hidden surprise for users, things that will be really beneficial to users, but they don’t quite see it yet. We can maybe cover that too, but like, what are the big things going into this release from your perspective? [00:04:17] Dave: Sure. There’s some highlights, I think that the key highlights, and we should probably cover them. So the first one we’ve already touched on it is the Fonts Library. And this has been brewing for a while now, and it’s finally come to fruition. And it basically allows you to manage, install, and upload custom fonts for use on your website. And it’s really, really powerful. It’s, I think it’s going to really change the way people create themes and create their websites. It is unlocking a lot of power for users. [00:04:46] Josepha: And for folks who’ve been listening to this podcast for a long time, you have heard me say for, I think, like a year, basically every release podcast where we’re looking at what’s coming up. I’m like, and this time it’s fonts. I’m so excited. And so I’m saying it again this time, ’cause it’s really happening this time. [00:05:03] Dave: It’s finally here. Yeah, it’s a great feature. There’s a lot of work gone into it. It’s really, really good. [00:05:07] Josepha: So much work. We’ve been working on it for like two or three years. And it’s at the point where like getting it out in front of people is the only way to figure out where the remaining problems will be. And it is the most scary part of any software release, I assume, the things where you’re like, this is time for people to tell us how it’s broken. Please look at it and break it for a while. [00:05:29] Dave: Yeah, absolutely. We’ve been working on resolving any bugs that we could find, but there’s always going to be things we haven’t noticed. So yeah, we can’t wait for users to get their hands on it. Exactly. Other than fonts, we’ve also got revisions that are now in place in the Site Editor. And this is more than just undo, redo that people may be already familiar with in the editor. It actually gives you the ability to fully revert your site back to any state that you previously had it. So you could make some changes in the editor. You could completely close down your computer, go away for a week, come back. And you’ve still got the opportunity to say, “Ah, do you know what? I don’t like the way that looks. I’m just gonna; I’m gonna roll that back.” And there’s a nice UI that shows you what it will affect. And you can even roll back styles, you know, like style changes. So it’s, it’s super, super powerful. And it’s just something we’ve been waiting for for such a long time. Just, it’s fantastic to see it land. [00:06:17] Josepha: I’m really excited about this one personally because I have been to so many meetup events with like new users being taught how to do things with WordPress. And invariably, in the last two or three years, the people who are presenting to new users are saying consistently like, “You can do any experimental thing that you feel like you need to do with your sites because there’s an undo button. WordPress wouldn’t let you do things that fully break your site.” Like there is a lot of trust in our kind of like time machine, roll-it-back kind of implementations. And so I’m really excited about this one. I think that for all of our new and mid-level users. Who like, have a little bit of fear, but mostly joy around it. Like, this will only increase that and so I’m super excited for this one to go in there. [00:07:09] Dave: Yeah, it’s really nice. Other than that, the two things I wanted to touch on as well, which is we’ve got these new views now for key objects in WordPress. So things like pages, patterns, templates, and template parts in the Site Editor. You can now view these in a sort of a table layout or in a grid layout. So it gives you a much easier way to sort them, find them, filter them. And I think it points us forward to the possibilities we’ve got in the future for the editor sort of taking some parts of WP Admin and making them more accessible without having to leave the Site Editor. And it’s extremely powerful; you can search in real-time, find things very, very quickly, do all the things you’re used to from the post listing screen, but all within the Site Editor. And it’s for these key objects that you use quite a lot of the time. So I think it’s going to be really, a really great thing for users to get hold of. [00:07:55] Josepha: Is this related to the Data Views work that we’ve been doing in the first part of the year here? [00:08:00] Dave: Exactly that exactly. The Data Views work has been a major feed into this, and this is where we see the fruits of all that work coming to the fore for the first time. And I expect to see more of that in future releases as well. [00:08:12] Josepha: Yeah. For folks who are really, really watching, like, our administrative side of things, you probably are aware that we, I don’t know, I wouldn’t say that we paused the phase three roadmap for this, but I do think that we made a clear choice to get this Data Views work done first so that we could, in parallel with phase three, do a bit of work on the WP Admin redesign, the dashboard redesign, which we all know, like, we love this dashboard, but also this dashboard, it needs a sprucing up, it needs a little bit of, of polish and a little bit of 2024 style I was going to say design. I don’t know if the design folks would love if I just was like, it needs to be modernized that way, but also like it, it does, right? [00:09:00] Dave: Yeah, and I mean, you know, we all know that the Site Editor is being used more and more. If you’ve got a Block theme, you’re using the Site Editor increasingly, and you’re spending less and less time sort of going between screens in WP Admin. So it makes sense that, you know, these things are accessible within that one interface of the Site Editor. So, yeah, it’s only going to be a good thing for users going forward. [00:09:20] Josepha: Yeah, absolutely. I probably should have like a whole episode about Data Views and what it’s intending to do, what it’s actually doing, what it’s going to look like as it goes because that’s such a big project. And so many things rely on it. And so, note to self and all listeners, that’s the thing that you should keep an eye out for. We’re going to get it done. But you said you had a final thing also. [00:09:40] Dave: Yeah, I’ve got one more which is this is for our users of classic themes. We haven’t forgotten about you. Basically, we now have support for appearance tools. So in prior releases, the Block themes have got these really cool design tools like ability to set border colors, border radius, link colors, you name it. We’ve got all these tools, but they haven’t been always available to classic themes. And classic themes can use the Block Editor; they may not be using the Site Editor in the same way, but they can use the Block Editor. And we’ve not made those things available in the same way, but there’s been work going into this release to allow that to happen. [00:10:11] Dave: So now you can opt into those if you so wish. And it is an opt-in basis. So none your themes will break out of the box if you’ve got classic theme or classic site. But it is a powerful tool to those people who are using classic themes, and that’s completely legitimate. [00:10:26] Josepha: And so is the opt in like something that you can do for yourself or something that your developer needs to do? [00:10:32] Dave: You would need to do it in your theme code. So you’d need to do that with PHP. So, your theme developer, if they choose to update their theme and provide support for these things. Then, they would obviously need to test their theme works with those new tools, make sure it’s ready, and then they would ship that update. And so maybe after 6.5 is released, you may see some themes incrementally adding support. My understanding at the moment is that the core themes, the Block themes, will not automatically add those straight away. I think they need more time to allow them to bed in and more time to get them ready for prime time if you see what I mean, but you know the fact that they’re there and ready means that the wider theme audience and theme developers can start taking advantage of them. [00:11:15] Josepha: Nice, nice. I have been wondering lately, this is only marginally related, but I’m gonna wonder it out loud anyway. I’ve been wondering lately if like, our classic themes, our most favorite, our most loved classic themes do need a little bit of help moving into a Block theme future. And I think that this will help. I think, on the one hand this will help, and on the other hand, like, what would it take for us to just say, and you’re not the theme person I know, but like, what would it take for us to just say, “These are our top five most favorite, most used, classic themes that we’ve got in WordPress. Let’s rebuild it in blocks and just ship the block version of it and help the classic themes users that love the design, love the look, love the features get introduced to this new block territory so that they can see that not only do they have the look, the feel, the features, but also the flexibility that comes with that and a little bit more feeling of safety as they wander around modifying themes.” [00:12:18] Josepha: I have no fear of any code changes and didn’t when I started working with WordPress, as opposed to working in WordPress, but I think that that’s not the way that that works right now. Like there’s a whole lot of like, I need to get it right-ish with folks who are using our software. And so I just wonder if that will help everybody feel a little more confident in what they’re doing, knowing they’re not going to break things because we’ve built it so you can’t. [00:12:45] Dave: It could do, it could do. And I was just thinking as you were talking, like, do we have any themes that already do that? And, of course, we do have 2021. If you can think back that far into the mists of time, we had 2021 classic, which is that it’s called 2021, but we also 2021 blocks, which is doing very much what you’ve just described. [00:13:03] Dave: So we haven’t pursued that for the new default themes or block themes, but, you know, it might be something to look at for onboarding if there are any of classic themes from the more distant past, you know, maybe some of those could do with a block theme equivalent just to let people on board to that experience and just feel comfortable. Yeah, interesting, interesting. You should definitely talk to the theme people about that. [00:13:23] Josepha: I’m going to. They’re going to love it. They’re going to be like, Yay! Of course! Of course! I don’t know, actually. I don’t know if anyone ever loves the things that I suggest, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not going to get suggested. I have all these ideas, and they got to come out somewhere. Okay. So do you have something that you worked on that’s not in this big list of features or that you helped people to really shepherd into the release that you think is really cool? Like, maybe it’s not going to be super visible or something, but like that you’ve personally felt was like a cool feature, excited for it to get into the release. [00:13:53] Dave: Yeah, there are a couple of things, a couple of things at the top of mind. One of them is user-facing and one of them is more developer-facing features. So, I’ll start with the developer feature first. And this one is a change to an API. Now, that API is always a slightly intimidating word, I think, but it just means a set of tools, a standardized set of tools that developers can use to do something. And in this case, it’s the allowed blocks API. [00:14:20] Josepha: Sounds so fun. [00:14:21] Dave: Yeah, I know it’s riveting, isn’t it? But trust me, it does come with some benefits. So the Navigation block is a good example. It’s a block that acts as a container and it’s got child blocks. Okay. But you can only insert certain blocks. You can insert links, you can insert social icons, you can insert search. But if you want to insert, I don’t know, an Icon block, for example. You can’t do that, but you can with WordPress 6.5 because of the change to the allow box API. And what it allows you to do is say, “I want to additionally allow the following blocks to be inserted as well.” So as a developer, you can hook into this filter and change those blocks. Now, okay, so far, so good. “What’s the big deal?” you might say, well, it’s open the door, is open the door to some very, very interesting explorations. Some of which I’ve no doubt that you and your listeners would have already encountered. And one is by a colleague of mine called Nick Diego. And I think it’s on the WordPress Developer blog right now. I think he’s done a fantastic inspiration into mega menus in the navigation block. I’m someone who’s worked on the Navigation block extensively in the past, and I’m very aware of how much users want mega menus to be a part of the Navigation block. [00:15:30] Dave: I was never convinced it was going to be something we were going to do in core, because it requires so many different things. But Nick has actually managed with this allow blocks API and some other tweaks as well to build a mega menu as a plugin for WordPress using the standard Navigation block. And I think that’s just one example of the utility of this API. But for example, I mentioned that you could add icons to your Navigation block and you can’t really do that at the moment. It’s pretty powerful. It’s kind of hidden away. It’s in the release notes, but it’s not massively clear, but it does open some pretty big doors. And I think if you’re a developer or a theme author, indeed, you should you should definitely be looking into that and see what it enables for you. [00:16:06] Josepha: Yeah, we’ll put a link to Nick’s post in the show notes, and we’ll share it around the social spaces. So like, I hear you saying it’s buried, it’s hard to see, it won’t necessarily be exciting now, but will be exciting later, but like mega menus and sliders, those are the most contested things that people want to put on sites all the time. Like from my agency days, like when I was thinking in the mindset of a strategist, a data person, that’s what I was doing. Like, I never wanted sliders. I never wanted mega menus because it just implied that we didn’t have a decision about the sites we were making, like we had not decided the primary purpose, and also it was just hard to track, but it was always literally every single time people are like well if Amazon has it why can’t we have it? You’re like, yeah, I know, but they’re Amazon. They’re not the same like mega menus sliders. I know that from a project perspective that we’re like, that should be a theme thing. That should be in theme territory. But I think it makes sense to have in core because so many people want to be able to do it. [00:17:14] Josepha: And just because like someone like me feels like it’s not the right call for your business doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be able to make that decision for yourself, you know, I think that’s a, I think that’s a great, a great feature to call out. [00:17:28] Dave: Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree. I can look for my agency days. I can exactly imagine that sort of thing. We have a lot of people, a problem that a lot of people are facing. So it’s really important that we provide the tools to allow people to do that now. And we can always look at if it’s valid to include it in core later, then we can look at that as well. Yeah. So that’s, that’s the first one I had. The second one is a little bit more user-facing. I would say it’s hidden away. But I’m not 100 percent sure it is. I mean, Josepha, how often do you create links when you’re working with WordPress? [00:17:58] Josepha: Like every time that I’m in WordPress. [00:18:00] Dave: Yeah, exactly. Same here. I do it all the time, right? And a lot of people do. And for a long while, contributors to the editor have been sort of collecting and collating the feedback that’s come in from people about their frustrations with the built in link interface in the Block Editor. So if you’re creating a hyperlink to, you know, hyperlink to another page or, you know, you’re going to link to Nick’s mega menu article, you’re going to be doing that a lot, right? That’s something that people do when they’re creating content in WordPress. And so we worked a lot to refine that with a contributor who, who you may know, Rich Tabor. Who’s also, I think, on the release squad as well. An influencer in the WordPress space as well. He spent a lot of time looking at the UX and myself and a number of other contributors have spent a lot of time in this release refining that. And I think it’s surprisingly difficult to get right, but I think we’ve, I think we’ve made some nice improvements to that will be nice quality of life for people who, to do this sort of content creation quite a lot. So there’s things like now when you create the link for the first time, it remains open on the initial creation of the link. So that means you can quickly then easily adjust the link. I mean, it seems obvious, doesn’t it? Yeah, but it’s not happening. It just used to just automatically close, and the people are like, “Hey, I wanted to make more adjustments. “ [00:19:08] Josepha: I wasn’t done yet. [00:19:10] Dave: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. We’ve, we’ve streamlined the UI. We’ve removed a lot of clutter, but we’ve also added some useful tools, like ability to copy a link and remove the link directly from the control itself. And lastly along with lots of other accessibility changes in this release. We have worked a lot on refining the implementation. So that is discoverable for, for users of assistive tech because we spent a lot of time talking to core accessibility team and other people, and they were finding it very hard to perceive that the UI was there because of the way that keyboard interactions work and you’ve got the block toolbar in the way and things like that. We think we’ve nailed on a really good solution now that works for, not only uses assistive tech, but actually provides benefits for sighted users as well. It’s kind of difficult to talk about. I mean, I have got a video covering this on my YouTube channel, which kind of shows it in a bit more detail, but we’re happy it’s in a much better place. [00:20:02] Dave: And yeah if people have got feedback about it, and when, when 6.5 comes out, we’re always happy to hear that. And you can go to the WordPress GitHub repository and raise an issue. And one of us will jump on it and see what we can do. [00:20:13] Josepha: And we can include a link to that video also. So like, for folks where this sounded intriguing, but they don’t quite get the concept, like video content all day, let’s pop it into our show notes. And everybody can take a look at it there. I think that’s a great idea. [00:20:28] Dave: Great. Yeah, I appreciate that. [00:20:30] Josepha: So final question, maybe, maybe final question, final planned question. Is there anything from a user-facing perspective again that you feel has not really gotten the airtime that it needs so far? [00:20:44] Dave: I think there’s a lot of technical changes that have happened in this release. So it’s easy to look at those. I mean, we’ve covered quite a lot of the key ones that will be user-facing in terms of Font Library and Revisions. We’ve got things that are going to this release that enable things a lot for people to experience in the future, I think, so underlying changes like the Interactivity API becoming public. Now that’s public, plugin developers can start to make sites much more interactive on the front of the site rather than just in the editor. So I think that once 6.5 has gone in, and people have started to explore the Interactivity API in more detail, we might see more plugins offering sort of interactivity on the fronts of their sites. An example is obviously the lightbox you’ve got with images in core, but I can; there’s way more stuff that you can do with that. So we’re going to see more of that. [00:21:28] Dave: We’ve got Block Hooks that have landed in 6.5, and this is going to open for things like ecommerce plugins and to be able to add, you know, cart blocks or log in, log out blocks to things like navigation, for example, or you might want a ability to like all your comments, and you can do that with Block Hooks and then a plugin developer can just, you know, when the plugin is enabled, they can just make it so that those things just appear on your site, but you still got control over the design. So there’s a lot of like hidden things I think are going to uncover new features for users over time as a result of the community getting involved and changing their plugins and themes to do these take advantage of these new tools. [00:22:07] Josepha: Yeah, so the Interactivity API, obviously it has “API” on it. And so no one’s thinking, well, this is a user-facing thing. And while the API is not a user facing thing, like, I think that you’re right. That what it enables absolutely is going to be really useful and hopefully really engaging for like end-to-end users, like the users that are not listening to this podcast and they don’t know we exist, like they don’t know that WordPress has a community building it, they’re just like, it exists, there’s a software that came out of nowhere, like, I’m really excited to see how our developers in the community start to use that in their plugins and themes and get that out to end users. I’m really, really excited to see how creative they get with it. Did you have a final thing? [00:22:51] Dave: There’s a lot of design changes, I think. I mean, we can’t cover them all, obviously, in verbal form in this podcast, but some things that are just standing out to me if we look at the source of truth for, for WordPress 6.5, it is, it is big. There’s a lot in this release. But there’s some very cool things for, I don’t know, quality. I like to see them as like quality of life design design changes. Things like, if you drop an image, as a background image of a cover block, it automatically sets the overlay color for that cover block to match the most prominent color of the background image. Like things like that, they seem small, but over time, they just, you just drop that thing, and it just does it. And it’s like, this is nice. And it feels like a nice tool to use that just is intuitive. And I think there’s, we’ll see a lot of those things landing in this release that can just make the experience of working with WordPress and working in the Site Editor much, much nicer. [00:23:41] Josepha: Yeah. I remember when I first ran into that particular thing, it was on the Showcase, our most recent redesign of it. We’re using that functionality in there before it was available in core. Obviously, I know, but it was really fascinating. I’m not great with color combinations. Like, I don’t have a sense for, like, oh, that’s the primary thing. That’s not. And so having that being done kind of automatically so that my stuff looks good anyway, despite what my color sense said to do or not. I thought it was great. Makes you look good as somebody who’s running a business. You don’t have to know how things work in order to have excellently functional, really beautiful things. [00:24:21] Josepha: And I think that’s a great thing about all of our releases. Obviously, everything is supposed to work that way, but like this one has a lot of really cool things like that available. I think those are really the questions that I had. Is there anything you want to make sure to share before we kind of give last thoughts and head out? [00:24:39] Dave: Yeah, I was, I was thinking a lot about, you know, the community we’ve got with WordPress, and I think that people outside of WordPress may not really understand that how amazing this community is that we’ve got here, but I wanted to say to people like don’t shy away from contributing to WordPress. I get that, you know, people like myself are fortunate enough to be sponsored to do it. But there’s always something that people can do, even if that’s just spending like 30 minutes testing a release or donating some of your time to run one of the meetings. It can really make a difference overall. Even just filing a bug report for something you see in WordPress 6.5 or testing 6.5 before it goes out, those little things do make a big difference. And if you’re not sure where to go, then we can signpost you with links, no doubt in this, in the podcast description with where where’s to go. But yeah, I just want to encourage people to get involved, basically. [00:25:27] Josepha: Yeah. And it’s all working out in public, like we’ve got developers, designers, marketing folks, community folks like all doing this work out where everybody can see it. And so that, I know, can look really kind of overwhelming. But I want to just highlight, like, you don’t have to know everything about what’s happening in the project in order to get involved in the project. Like every small bit of contribution toward like finding a new bug or confirming that a bug happens across other devices, other setups, things like that, like those all help make things better and keep things moving as quickly as we are able to make them move. And so, yeah, I’ll second that every little thing that you think like that won’t make a difference. It does. We can’t tell that things are broken or things are working or things are in need of some care unless you highlight those for us. And this is the best way to do it is to show up and give 30 minutes to send out a group testing invite to your meetup group or whatever it is that you all have been thinking you should do, like, this is your sign. You can do it. [00:26:34] Dave: Everyone should get involved if they can. [00:26:37] Josepha: I agree. I agree. Dave, this has been such an excellent conversation. Thank you so much for joining me today. [00:26:42] Dave: Oh, thank you very much. It’s a pleasure. [00:26:43] (Music interlude) [00:26:49] Josepha: What an interesting release we’ve got coming out this week. I’m so glad you all made it this far in the pod, and now it’s time for our small list of big things. [00:27:00] Josepha: First up, following up on the WordPress meetup reactivation project that we had in 2022, we aim to revive some meetup groups in big cities that are inactive or help the local WordPress community that are not yet part of our meetup chapter program to join our program. There is a post out on the community P2 on the community site. That is titled Asia Meetup Revival Project 2024. I’ll leave a link to that in the show notes if you want to read more about that and figure out how to get involved. And speaking of getting involved, we have roughly a million meetings. Because it’s a new month, we’re in April now. New month, new opportunities. There are a lot of things happening in April. We will be coming out of a major release, obviously, and so there will be some minor release follow up to do. There will be a lot of discussion about what’s coming next, what’s in trunk, what’s not in trunk. But also a lot of work being done around our next big major events, our next big major training initiatives. There’s just so much happening. Spring is a time when we are looking at stuff that’s new, what we want to invest in, what we want to grow. And so if you have not attended one in a while or even at all if you’ve never attended a meeting in the community, then this is a great time to start and join your fellow community members trying to make WordPress better every day. [00:28:23] Josepha: And then the final thing on our small list of big things is I am looking at helping to shift the focus of our WordPress marketing community. We’ve had a bit of a struggle over the years to figure out what our primary focus and our primary impact can be. So there’s a post up called ‘Making a WordPress Media Corps’. It’s gotten quite a bit of attention, and I do really think that it has a lot of potential for solving some of the issues that we have and kind of getting some quick wins into our recent history of that team so that we can move forward confidently together. So pop on over, give it a read, share your thoughts. And if you are one of these qualified media partners, also let us know. [00:29:08] Josepha: That, my friends, is your small list of big things. Don’t forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app or subscribe directly on WordPress.org/news. You’ll get a friendly reminder whenever there’s a new episode. And if you liked what you heard today, share it with a fellow WordPresser, or if you had questions about what you heard, you can share those with me at WPBriefing@WordPress.org. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. View the full article

Say hello to WordPress 6.5 “Regina,” inspired by the dynamic versatility of renowned jazz violinist Regina Carter. An award-winning artist and storied jazz educator known for transcending genre, Regina’s technical foundations in classical music and deep understanding of jazz have earned her the reputation of boldly going beyond what’s possible with the violin. Let the stunning twists and subtle turns of Regina’s genre-bending sound surprise you as you explore everything 6.5 offers. This latest version of WordPress puts more power into the details. It offers new and improved ways to fine-tune and enhance your site-building experience, letting you take control in ways that make it your own. You’ll find new ways to manage your site’s typography, more comprehensive revisions available in more places, and a collection of Site Editor updates paired with impressive performance gains to help you get things done smoother and faster. “Regina” also marks the introduction of some breakthrough developer tools that will start transforming how you use and extend blocks to craft engaging experiences. The Interactivity API opens up a world of creative front-end possibilities, while the Block Bindings API makes dynamic connections between blocks and data seamless. These, among other developer-focused improvements and updates, are ready to help you evolve how you build with WordPress. Download WordPress 6.5 “Regina” What’s inside 6.5 Add and manage fonts across your site The new Font Library puts you in control of an essential piece of your site’s design—typography—without coding or extra steps. Effortlessly install, remove, and activate local and Google Fonts across your site for any Block theme. The ability to include custom typography collections gives site creators and publishers more options when it comes to styling content. Get more from your revisions—including revisions for templates and template parts Work through creative projects with a more comprehensive picture of what’s been done—and what you can fall back on. Get details like time stamps, quick summaries, and a paginated list of all revisions. View revisions from the Style Book to see how changes impact every block. Revisions are also now available for templates and template parts. Play with enhanced background and shadow tools Control the size, repeat, and focal point options for background images in Group blocks so you can explore subtle or splashy ways to add visual interest to layouts. Set aspect ratios for Cover block images and easily add color overlays that automatically source color from your chosen image. Add box shadow support to more block types and create layouts with visual depth, or throw a little personality into your design. Discover new Data Views Every piece of your site comes with a library of information and data—now, you can find what you need quickly and organize it however you like. Data views for pages, templates, patterns, and template parts let you see data in a table or grid view, with the option to toggle fields and make bulk changes. Smoother drag-and-drop Feel the difference when you move things around, with helpful visual cues like displaced items in List View or frictionless dragging to anywhere in your workspace—from beginning to end. Improved link controls Create and manage links easily with a more intuitive link-building experience, like a streamlined UI and a shortcut for copying links. What’s fresh for developers in 6.5 Bring interactions to blocks with the Interactivity API The Interactivity API offers developers a standardized method for building interactive front-end experiences with blocks. It simplifies the process, with fewer dependencies on external tooling, while maintaining optimal performance. Use it to create memorable user experiences, like fetching search results instantly or letting visitors interact with content in real time. Connect blocks to custom fields or other dynamic content Link core block attributes to custom fields and use the value of custom fields without creating custom blocks. Powered by the Block Bindings API, developers can extend this capability further to connect blocks to any dynamic content—even beyond custom fields. If there’s data stored elsewhere, easily point blocks to that new source with only a few lines of code. Add appearance tools to Classic themes Give designers and creators using Classic themes access to an upgraded design experience. Opt in to support for spacing, border, typography, and color options, even without using theme.json. Once support is enabled, more tools will be automatically added as they become available. Explore improvements to the plugin experience There’s now an easier way to manage plugin dependencies. Plugin authors can supply a new Requires Plugins header with a comma-separated list of required plugin slugs, presenting users with links to install and activate those plugins first. From fast to faster: Performance updates This release includes 110+ performance updates, resulting in an impressive increase in speed and efficiency across the Post Editor and Site Editor. Loading is over two times faster than in 6.4, with input processing speed up to five times faster than the previous release. Translated sites see up to 25% improvement in load time for this release courtesy of Performant Translations. Additional performance highlights include AVIF image support and improvements for registering block variations with callbacks. A tradition of inclusion This release includes more than 65 accessibility improvements across the platform, making it more accessible than ever. It contains an important fix that unblocks access to the admin submenus for screen reader users and others who navigate by keyboard. This release also adds fixes to color contrast in admin focus states, positioning of elements, and cursor focus, among many others, that help improve the WordPress experience for everyone. Learn more about WordPress 6.5 Check out the new WordPress 6.5 page to learn more about the numerous enhancements and features of this release—including short demos of some of the highlighted features. Explore Learn WordPress for quick how-to videos, online workshops, and other free resources to level up your WordPress knowledge and skills. Check out the WordPress 6.5 Field Guide for detailed technical information and developer notes to help you build with WordPress and get the most out of this release. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Developer Blog for developer updates, feature tutorials, and other helpful WordPress content from a developer perspective. For more information about installation, file changes, fixes, and other updates, read the 6.5 release notes. The 6.5 release squad Every release has many moving parts with its own triumphs and challenges. It takes a dedicated team of enthusiastic contributors to help keep things on track and moving smoothly. 6.5 is made possible by a cross-functional group of contributors, always ready to champion ideas, remove blockers, and resolve issues. Release Lead: Matt Mullenweg Release Coordinators: Akshaya Rane, Héctor Prieto, Mary Baum Core Tech Leads: David Baumwald, Pascal Birchler Editor Tech Leads: David Smith, Riad Benguella Core Triage Leads: Ahmed Kabir Chaion, Jb Audras, Rajin Sharwar Editor Triage Leads: Anne McCarthy, Fabian Kägy Design Leads: Benjamin Zekavica, Rich Tabor Marketing and Communication Leads: Dan Soschin, Lauren Stein Documentation Leads: Estela Rueda, Leonardus Nugraha, Steven Lin Performance Leads: Joe McGill, Mukesh Panchal Test Leads: Olga Gleckler, Patrick Lumumba, Vipul Ghori Default Themes Leads: Carolina Nymark Thank you, contributors WordPress believes in democratizing publishing and the freedoms that come with open source. Supporting this idea is a global and diverse community of people collaborating to strengthen the software. WordPress 6.5 reflects the countless efforts and passion of around 700 contributors in at least 57 countries. This release also welcomed over 150 first-time contributors! 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J. · Mark Howells-Mead · Mark Jaquith · Marko Heijnen · Marko Ivanovic · Markus · martin.krcho · Mary Baum · mathewemoore · Matias Benedetto · Matias Ventura · matiasrecondo77 · Matt Cromwell · Matt Mullenweg · Matteo Enna · Max Lyuchin · Maxime Pertici · Mayur Prajapati · Md Hossain Shohel · Md HR Shahin · Md Sahadat Husain · Meg Phillips · megane9988 · Meher Bala · Mel Choyce-Dwan · melcarthus · meta4 · metropolis_john · mevolkan · Micah Wood · Michael Showes · Michal Czaplinski · Michalooki · Miguel Fonseca · miguelsansegundo · Miikka · Mike Bijon · Mike Jolley (a11n) · Mike Schinkel · Mike Schroder · Mikin Chauhan · Milen Petrinski - Gonzo · mimi · mkismy · mnydigital · Mohammad Jangda · Monique Dubbelman · Monzur Alam · Morteza Geransayeh · mreishus · mrwweb · Muhammad Usman Iqbal · Muhibul Haque · mujuonly · Mukesh Panchal · Mumtahina Faguni · Musarrat Anjum Chowdhury · Nahid Khan · Naoki Ohashi · Narendra Sishodiya · Naresh Bheda · Nate Allen · Navjot Singh · Nazmul Hasan Robin · neffff · Neil Hainsworth · nendeb · NerdPress · Nick Diego · Nick Halsey · Nick Martianov · nickpagz · Nico · Nicole Furlan · Nicole Paschen Caylor · nidhidhandhukiya · Niels Lange · Nihar Ranjan Das · Nik Tsekouras · Nikita · nikmeyer · Nilambar Sharma · Nilo Velez · Niluthpal Purkayastha · Nirav Sherasiya · Nithin John · Nithin SreeRaj · Noah Allen · nosilver4u · Nowell VanHoesen · Nudge Themes · nwjames · obliviousharmony · ockham · oguzkocer · okat · Old account · olegfuture · Olga Gleckler · Paal Joachim Romdahl · Pablo Honey · Pacicio · pannelars · partyfrikadelle · Pascal Birchler · Patricia BT · Patrick Lumumba · Paul Bearne · Paul Biron · Paul de Wouters · Paul Kevan · Paul Wong-Gibbs · pavelevap · Peter Baylies · Peter Rubin · Peter Westwood · Peter Wilson · petitphp · Philipp Bammes · Philipp15b · Phill · Pieterjan Deneys · Pippin Williamson · Pitam Dey · pmeenan · Pooja Derashri · Pooja N Muchandikar · pooja9712 · pouicpouic · Prashant Baldha · Pratik Kumar · Pratik Londhe · Prem Tiwari · Presskopp · presstoke · prionkor · Rafiq · Rajin Sharwar · Ramon Ahnert · Ramon Corrales · Ramon James · Rashi Gupta · Ratnesh Sonar · rawrly · rcain · rebasaurus · Remy Perona · Renatho (a11n) · Rene Hermenau · retrofox · Riad Benguella · Rich Collier · Rich Tabor · Rishi Mehta · Rishi Shah · Robert Anderson · Rolf Allard van Hagen · room34 · Roy Tanck · Ryan Boren · Ryan McCue · Ryan Welcher · Ryann Micua · Ryo · Sé Reed · Sébastien SERRE · Sabbir Hasan · Sachyya · Sadi Mohammad Zaman · sadpencil · Sahil · Saiduzzaman Tohin · Sakib MD Nazmush · Sal Ferrarello · samba45 · Sampat Viral · Samuel Rüegger · Samuel Sidler · Samuel Wood (Otto) · Santiago Cerro López · Sarah Norris · Sarath AR · Satish Prajapati · Satyam Vishwakarma (Satya) · Saxon Fletcher · Saxon Fletcher · Sayful Islam · Scott Kingsley Clark · Scott Reilly · Scott Taylor · scribu · Sean Fisher · Sergey Biryukov · Sergio De Falco · Seth Rubenstein · Shaharia Azam · Shail Mehta · ShaneF · Shannon Smith · shaunandrews · Shawn Hooper · shidouhikari · Shipon Karmakar · Shreyash Srivastava · Shubham Sedani · siddharth ravikumar · Siobhan · Sirajum Mahdi · sjregan · Soren Wrede · SourceView · sruthi89 · stacimc · Stefano Minoia · Stephen Bernhardt · Stephen Cronin · Stephen Edgar · Stephen Harris · Steve Jones · Steven Lin · strarsis · Subrata Sarkar · Sumi Subedi · Sumit Bagthariya · Sumit Singh · SunilPrajapati · Svitlana Sukhoveiko · syamraj24 · Sybre Waaijer · Syed Balkhi · Syed Nuhel · Synchro · Takashi Irie · Takashi Kitajima · Tammie Lister · Tapan Kumer Das · Tara King · Taylor · Taylor Dewey · Taylor Gorman · tazotodua · Teddy Patriarca · Tellyworth · Thakor Darshil · them.es · thinkluke · Thomas Griffin · Thomas Kräftner · threadi · Tim Nolte · timbroddin · Timothée Brosille · Timothy Jacobs · tmatsuur · TobiasBg · tobifjellner (Tor-Bjorn Fjellner) · Tom · Tom Cafferkey · Tom Finley · Tom J Nowell · tomluckies · Tomoki Shimomura · tomsommer · tomxygen · Toni Viemerö · Tony G · Tonya Mork · Toro_Unit (Hiroshi Urabe) · torres126 · Torsten Landsiedel · Toru Miki · toscho · Travis Smith · tropicalista · Trupti Kanzariya · Ugyen Dorji · upadalavipul · Utsav Patel · Utsav tilava · Uttam Kumar Dash · Vagelis · valerogarte · Vicente Canales · Vijayan · vikram6 · viliamkopecky · Vipul Ghori · vivekawsm · vladimiraus · vortfu · Vraja Das · Wasiur Rahman · welaunchio · Weston Ruter · WHSajid · WilliamG · WP Corner · xlthlx · Yan Sern · Yannis Guyon · Yui · Yuliyan Slavchev · Yuvrajsinh Sisodiya · Zack Tollman · Zane Matthew · Zeba Afia Shama · zieladam · Zunaid Amin · Česlav Przywara Over 70 locales have translated 90 percent or more of WordPress 6.5 into their language. Community translators are working hard to ensure more translations are on their way. Thank you to everyone who helps make WordPress available in 200 languages. Last but not least, thanks to the volunteers who contribute to the support forums by answering questions from WordPress users worldwide. Get involved and contribute Participation in WordPress is not limited to coding. If contributing appeals to you, learning more and getting involved is easy. Discover the teams that come together to Make WordPress, and use this interactive tool to help you decide which is right for you. One more haiku 6.5 is here! Play, interact, build better, Stronger and faster. View the full article

The latest release candidate (RC4) for WordPress 6.5 is ready! This release candidate is an addition to the existing WordPress 6.5 release cycle. It allows more time for testing to ensure every feature and improvement is in the best shape possible. The updated target for the WordPress 6.5 release is April 2, 2024. Get an overview of the 6.5 release cycle, and check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.5-related posts for further details. If you’re looking for more detailed technical notes on new features and improvements, the WordPress 6.5 Field Guide is for you. What to expect in WordPress 6.5 RC4 There’s been a lot of helpful feedback regarding one of this release’s highlighted features: the Font Library. This has resulted in some additional improvements needed to make sure the greatest number of sites possible can benefit from this anticipated new feature. This release also includes six bug fixes for the Editor and 10+ tickets for WordPress Core. For more technical information related to issues addressed since RC3, you can browse the following links: GitHub commits for 6.5 Closed Trac tickets How to test This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it’s recommended that you evaluate RC4 on a test server and site. While release candidates are considered ready for release, testing remains crucial to ensure that everything in WordPress 6.5 is the best it can be. You can test WordPress 6.5 RC4 in four ways: PluginInstall and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. (Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream).Direct DownloadDownload the RC4 version (zip) and install it on a WordPress website.Command LineUse the following WP-CLI command: wp core update --version=6.5-RC4WordPress PlaygroundUse the 6.5 RC4 WordPress Playground instance (available within 35 minutes after the release is ready) to test the software directly in your browser without the need for a separate site or setup. Here comes the haiku With some extra time Test, rinse, repeat, and refresh WordPress will really shine Thank you to the following contributors for collaborating on this post: @dansoschin. View the full article

The third release candidate (RC3) for WordPress 6.5 is ready! This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it’s recommended that you evaluate RC3 on a test server and site. While release candidates are considered ready for release, testing remains crucial to ensure that everything in WordPress 6.5 is the best it can be. You can test WordPress 6.5 RC3 in four ways: PluginInstall and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. (Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream).Direct DownloadDownload the RC3 version (zip) and install it on a WordPress website.Command LineUse the following WP-CLI command: wp core update --version=6.5-RC3WordPress PlaygroundUse the 6.5 RC3 WordPress Playground instance (available within 35 minutes after the release is ready) to test the software directly in your browser without the need for a separate site or setup. The current target for the WordPress 6.5 release is March 26, 2024. Get an overview of the 6.5 release cycle, and check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.5-related posts in the coming weeks for further details. If you’re looking for more detailed technical notes on new features and improvements, the WordPress 6.5 Field Guide is for you. What to expect in WordPress 6.5 RC3 Thanks to the many contributors testing up to this point, this release includes 10+ bug fixes for the Editor and around 15 tickets for WordPress Core. For more technical information related to issues addressed since RC2, you can browse the following links: GitHub commits for 6.5 Closed Trac tickets How to contribute to this release WordPress is open source software made possible by a passionate community of people collaborating on and contributing to its development. The resources below outline various ways you can help the world’s most popular open source web platform, regardless of your technical expertise. Get involved in testing Testing for issues is critical to ensuring WordPress is performant and stable. It’s also a meaningful way for anyone to contribute. This detailed guide will walk you through testing features in WordPress 6.5. For those new to testing, follow this general testing guide for more details on getting set up. If you encounter an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums or directly to WordPress Trac if you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs. Curious about testing releases in general? Follow along with the testing initiatives in Make Core and join the #core-test channel on Making WordPress Slack. Search for vulnerabilities During the release candidate phase of WordPress 6.5, the monetary reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities is doubled. Please follow responsible disclosure practices as detailed in the project’s security practices and policies outlined on the HackerOne page and in the security white paper. Update your theme or plugin For plugin and theme authors, your products play an integral role in extending the functionality and value of WordPress for all users. Thanks for continuing to test your themes and plugins with the WordPress 6.5 beta releases. With RC3, you’ll want to conclude your testing and update the “Tested up to” version in your plugin’s readme file to 6.5. If you find compatibility issues, please post detailed information to the support forum. Help translate WordPress Do you speak a language other than English? ¿Español? Français? Русский? 日本? हिन्दी? বাংলা? You can help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages. Release the haiku Another RC We are getting really close Have you tested yet? Thank you to the following contributors for collaborating on this post: @dansoschin, @audrasjb. View the full article

WordCamp Asia 2024 was a dynamic three-day celebration of collaboration, diversity, and innovation in the WordPress project. This week, Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy shares her insights and experiences from the event, which featured one of the largest Contributor Days in the region, a variety of speakers, engaging panel discussions, and workshops. Josepha offers her thoughts on the latest topics being discussed within the community and forming the future of WordPress. Credits Host: Josepha Haden Chomphosy Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Brett McSherry Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Show Notes WordCamp Asia 2024 Contributor Day WordCamp Asia Playlist Small List of Big Things WordPress 6.5 is on target for release on March 26, 2024. Get involved with WordPress events: Find events near you on events.WordPress.org and WordCamp Central Learn more about organizing your own local event Proposal: Non-editable Footer for all Event Website Pages Have a question you’d like answered? Submit them to WPBriefing@WordPress.org. Transcript [00:00:00] Josepha: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go. [00:00:29] (Intro music) [00:00:40] Josepha: I have returned from WordCamp Asia and struggled my way through some truly aggressive jet lag, so that means it’s time for a little WordCamp wrap-up. I spoke with a couple hundred people at the event, and I came away with a few topics that seemed to be on everyone’s minds. Those topics are: making business in WordPress, the business of making WordPress, and how to communicate both sides a little better. [00:01:04] Josepha: So first, let’s start with making business in WordPress. This comes up at every event, and that honestly just makes sense. WordPress is a tool that people use to power their businesses across our global economy, and sometimes the businesses are closely related to WordPress itself. They are creating custom themes or plugins, building WordPress powered commerce sites for clients, or offering any number of agency services. But there are also businesses that are a little less close: restaurants, museums, local governments, schools. But it was clear that they all rely on the software just as much as the other. So, it was nice to see some sessions that focused specifically on business matters in WordPress. And I heard so many people tell me about a conversation they had had earlier in the day with someone who helped them figure out their pricing or advised them on early errors they made in their business journey and generally helped them feel a little less lost. I always love seeing this. Hearing how people are accomplishing their goals because of connections they made at one of our events, it’s enough to keep me coming back for years. [00:02:10] Josepha: The next thing that came up a lot was the business of making WordPress. I don’t know if that came up a lot because of the sorts of conversations that people are willing to bring to me these days or because there was overwhelming interest in knowing how we keep all these trains on their tracks. But either way, it was refreshing to be able to have so many conversations about the invisible work that goes into a project like this. There was a Contributor Day that hosted over 600 people, if I recall correctly, which makes it the largest Contributor Day in the area to date. 35 percent of those people had never attended a Contributor Day before, so there were a lot of people who were discovering the WordPress community for the first time. And for folks who’ve been here for a long time, it’s so easy for us to forget how much there is to learn at first. Even if you happen to show up with a skill set that fits a contributor team’s needs exactly, you still have to learn where we collaborate, how distributed contribution works, and all these rules and guidelines about open source freedoms and copyleft. [00:03:10] Josepha: And then also you have to come to terms with the fact that we define and design all of our spaces and programs with belonging in mind. I mean, for every one question that you get answered, there are going to be six new ones that you didn’t know you had yet. So I came away from a lot of these conversations with the reminder that it’s important in so many ways for us to talk about the work that we do, even when it’s boring, even when we think it doesn’t really matter, because a lot of people have questions about how this works, how it runs, and how they can be part of making sure that it’s around for the long-term. And the final thing that came up all over the place last week was how to communicate these things better. It’s easy to forget that folks who listen to this podcast don’t actually make up like a hundred percent of the people using WordPress; that’s on me. So just cause I’ve said here that, you know, enterprise is our next big space for biz dev or that, our primary growth markets are APAC, or that events are our best tool for brand expression. [00:04:08] Josepha: Like, just because I said it doesn’t mean that everyone heard it. And we absolutely have to get those messages to more people, more frequently, and with more certainty. You’ll hear often from WordPress pundits that rising tides lift all boats, and the bigger the pie, the more the slices. We believe fully in the spirit of coopetition here, that we are all better together. But I can’t shake the feeling that we’re mostly just talking to ourselves about it. It’s hard to get outside our own little bubble, but I believe completely that doing so is the best thing for our project in the long term. Not only so that we can continue to grow and provide access to the opportunities we know we offer but also so that we can do more to dignify our profession. WordPress developers are not taken seriously, and yet you all are some of the smartest and most compassionate people I’ve ever met in my career. And I’d like to see how we can fix that perception together. And so that’s it. Those are the big, big, giant, old topics that came up a lot in conversation last week. [00:05:14] Josepha: Don’t forget that you can catch up on all the sessions via the live stream, or if you are feeling inspired to contribute, reach out to the community team and see what sorts of meetup events you can host. [00:05:24] (Music interlude) [00:05:32] Josepha: Which brings us now to our small list of big things. I have two big things and one slightly less big thing, but they’re all fairly big. So, the first thing on the list is that the latest version of WordPress, WordPress 6.5, is on target for release on March 26th. That’s, I think, a couple weeks from now. So keep an eye out for that. In the event, I mean, we have auto-updates everywhere, and probably you are on a WordPress-specific host and, so you won’t necessarily need to do anything. But if you have any desire or concerns about seeing the software a little bit ahead of time, you can always go and download the beta, give it a quick test or the release candidate, give that a quick test. See if there’s anything that’s not functioning as you expected it to function, and let us know if it’s not. But yeah, there are auto-updates. You don’t have to go out and proactively do anything if you don’t want to, that’s just in case you do want to. That’s coming up March 26th. [00:06:27] Josepha: The next thing is that I want to give everybody a general call-in for event contribution. So, WordPress events is where I entered the community. It is one of the most affirming and life-changing types of contribution I’ve ever done because you get to see a bunch of people succeed in their own goals because of something that you were able to tell them. It’s like teaching, but with people who elected to be there. So we have a lot of opportunities, for contribution by volunteering at events, either as volunteering at the event itself or to volunteer to organize it. We have small-scale, easy-to-do meetups, but we also have slightly larger WordCamps that can be done. If you have any hope for doing that or are just kind of interested. I’ll leave a link for you in the show notes. [00:07:19] Josepha: And then the final thing on here is that we actually have a pretty substantial proposal out at the moment. It’s for non-editable footers on all event website pages. This might not sound interesting to you, but it actually is kind of interesting. So, it’s been proposed to add a non-editable footer to all of the event website pages moving forward. So that’s everything that would be displayed on a WordCamp or on any of the new formatted event sites that we have. This proposal intends to meet two goals. One, it fills any legal requirements a site or country might have about displaying the privacy policy and other items. And two, it brings visibility to the new events.WordPress.org website, where a community member can find more events in their area. The last day to respond to that proposal is March 20th, which I think is two days from now. I think it’s on Wednesday and this is airing on Monday. So, I’ll have a link to that in the show notes as well in case you have any thoughts about it. [00:08:15] Josepha: And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Don’t forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app or subscribe directly on WordPress.org/news. You’ll get a friendly reminder whenever there’s a new episode. And if you like what you heard today, share it with a fellow WordPresser. Or, if you ended up with questions about what you heard, you can share those with me at WPBriefing@WordPress.org. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Thanks for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. [00:08:43] (Music outro) View the full article

The second release candidate (RC2) for WordPress 6.5 is ready! This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it’s recommended that you evaluate RC2 on a test server and site. While release candidates are considered ready for release, testing remains crucial to ensure that everything in WordPress 6.5 is the best it can be. You can test WordPress 6.5 RC2 in four ways: PluginInstall and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. (Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream).Direct DownloadDownload the RC2 version (zip) and install it on a WordPress website.Command LineUse the following WP-CLI command: wp core update --version=6.5-RC2WordPress PlaygroundUse the 6.5 RC2 WordPress Playground instance (available within 35 minutes after the release is ready) to test the software directly in your browser without the need for a separate site or setup. The current target for the WordPress 6.5 release is March 26, 2024. That’s a mere two weeks away! Get an overview of the 6.5 release cycle, and check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.5-related posts in the coming weeks for further details. What to expect in WordPress 6.5 RC2 Thanks to the many contributors testing up to this point, this release includes approximately 20 bug fixes for the Editor and 30+ tickets for WordPress Core. For more technical information related to issues addressed since RC1, you can browse the following links: GitHub commits for 6.5 since March 5 Closed Trac tickets since March 5 Update on content overrides for synced patterns As synced patterns evolve and improve, every enhancement must continue to provide the best experience possible. With this in mind, WordPress 6.5 will not include the ability to override content in synced patterns. This allows more time for feedback and testing to ensure it can really shine. Expect this feature to debut in the next major release! Contribute to this release WordPress is open source software made possible by a passionate community of people collaborating on and contributing to its development. The resources below outline various ways you can help the world’s most popular open source web platform, regardless of your technical expertise. Get involved in testing Testing for issues is critical to ensuring WordPress is performant and stable. It’s also a meaningful way for anyone to contribute. This detailed guide will walk you through testing features in WordPress 6.5. For those new to testing, follow this general testing guide for more details on getting set up. If you encounter an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums or directly to WordPress Trac if you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs. Curious about testing releases in general? Follow along with the testing initiatives in Make Core and join the #core-test channel on Making WordPress Slack. Search for vulnerabilities From now until the final release candidate of WordPress 6.5 (scheduled for March 19), the monetary reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities is doubled. Please follow responsible disclosure practices as detailed in the project’s security practices and policies outlined on the HackerOne page and in the security white paper. Update your theme or plugin For plugin and theme authors, your products play an integral role in extending the functionality and value of WordPress for all users. Thanks for continuing to test your themes and plugins with the WordPress 6.5 beta releases. With RC1, you’ll want to conclude your testing and update the “Tested up to” version in your plugin’s readme file to 6.5. If you find compatibility issues, please post detailed information to the support forum. Help translate WordPress Do you speak a language other than English? ¿Español? Français? Русский? 日本? हिन्दी? বাংলা? You can help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages. Release the haiku RC2, a bridge, From development to launch, One more step forward. – submitted by @huzaifaalmesbah Thank you to the following contributors for collaborating on this post: @dansoschin, @get_dave, and @audrasjb. View the full article

Over 1,300 attendees gathered at the Taipei International Convention Center in Taiwan for WordCamp Asia 2024. This three-day event emerged as a vibrant celebration showcasing the collaboration, diversity, and innovation that drive the world’s most popular web platform. The Asian WordPress flagship event started with a dedicated Contributor Day, followed by two days of engaging talks, panels, hands-on workshops, and networking. Notable guests, including WordPress Cofounder Matt Mullenweg and Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy, joined the diverse lineup of speakers. Popular topics featured cutting-edge web technologies and trends, use cases, open source dynamics, and more. WordPress enthusiasts seized the opportunity to gain insights from international and local industry experts and to learn about the project’s future. Converting walled gardens into community gardens On March 8, Josepha Haden Chomphosy took the stage for an insightful journey comparing and contrasting the “walled” and “community” gardens in software ecosystems, drawing an analogy between closed and open source platforms. After exploring both concepts, she posed an important question to the audience. What would it take for someone to move from a walled garden to a community garden? Open source software, symbolized by community gardens, represents freedom from copyright restrictions and usage limitations. Unlike proprietary software (described as walled gardens), the core value lies in long-term empowerment, giving people control and ownership of their digital presence. Acknowledging the longstanding values held by WordPress and its open source community for two decades, Josepha focused on the importance of caring for foundations that make us strong, managing what distracts us, and nurturing growth by embracing new opportunities. She celebrated the strengths of the WordPress community and how its shared ethos furthers a thriving ecosystem. Quoting artist and activist Audrey Hepburn, Josepha expressed that, much like a community garden, the power of contributions—whether through time, knowledge, or product use— sustains and maintains shared spaces like WordPress. In the Q&A portion of her presentation, Josepha addressed inquiries about community involvement and contributions. Highlighted resources included the WordPress job board for opportunities within the ecosystem and the Data Liberation project, emphasizing its role in fostering a more open web and helping the transition out of proprietary platforms. Q&A with Matt Mullenweg WordCamp Asia concluded with a live audience Q&A session featuring WordPress Cofounder Matt Mullenweg. Attendees gained insights into the future of WordPress, including ongoing projects like Data Liberation, community inclusion initiatives, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and more. The atmosphere was filled with excitement when Matt revealed that this year’s State of the Word will take place in Tokyo, Japan, on December 16, 2024. Additional questions from this session will be addressed in an upcoming post on the Make WordPress Project blog. Stay connected WordPress events enable technologists, open source enthusiasts, and community members around the globe to meet, share ideas, and collaborate to drive WordPress and the open web forward. Don’t forget to mark your calendars for WordCamp Europe (Torino, Italy), WordCamp US (Portland, Oregon, United States), and next year’s WordCamp Asia in Manila, Philippines! Thank you to @angelasjin, @dansoschin, @eidolonnight, @bmcsherry, and the WordCamp Asia organizers who made this event and post possible. View the full article

February saw significant progress towards the upcoming WordPress 6.5 release and final preparations for WordCamp Asia. The results of the annual WordPress survey were released, and discussions began on the next steps for the Data Liberation project. Read on for the latest happenings in the WordPress space. Get ready for WordCamp Asia The stage is ready for the first WordPress flagship event of the year in Taipei, Taiwan. WordCamp Asia 2024 will kick off on March 7, promising three days of learning, networking, and inspiration. This year’s schedule features an extensive lineup of speakers, including guests Josepha Haden Chomphosy, Ben Thompson, Noel Tock, and JU-CHUN KO. To conclude the summit, attendees can engage with WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg in a Q&A session. Find out how to submit your questions. Can’t make it to Taipei? Watch the event live stream on the WordPress YouTube channel. https://wordpress.org/news/2023/10/episode-64-patterns-in-wordpress/ Countdown to WordPress 6.5 WordPress 6.5 is on track for its much-anticipated release on March 26. Following last month’s beta releases, the first release candidate (RC1) is now available for testing—marking another significant milestone in the development cycle. This major release will add finesse and fine-tuning to how you control your site-building experience, with lots to explore specifically for developers. Get a detailed overview of highlighted features in the Beta 1 announcement. Stay on top of the latest updates in WordPress development with February’s edition of What’s New for Developers? New in the Gutenberg plugin Two new versions of Gutenberg shipped in February: Gutenberg 17.7 introduced multiple performance improvements, refinements to the link control UI, and shadow support for more blocks, among other notable highlights. Gutenberg 17.8 focused on stability updates. New features included a grid layout variation for the Group block, bulk export of patterns, and the ability to browse and try alternative templates from the editor’s sidebar. Beyond major features, many small yet mighty updates are coming in WordPress 6.5 that will make a big difference in your WordPress experience. Read more » Team updates Results of the 2023 annual WordPress survey were announced last month. An update on the Data Liberation project informs about the next steps towards this initiative and how to contribute to current conversations. The Community team shared key findings from the 2023 WordPress meetup survey. Meet the new cohort of the Contributor Mentorship Program. The Photos team posted recommendations for improving alternative texts when submitting images to the Photo Directory. Following discussions on the evolution of the Outreach Program, a new outreach group has been created on GitHub. This group aims to provide expertise and feedback to those seeking additional testing or voices on a new feature or solution. Core team members introduced the WordPress Core Trac Sustainability Focus, a part of the Sustainability team’s effort to enhance the sustainability of the WordPress codebase. A new release of WP-CLI is now available. Learn WordPress is regularly updated with new tutorials, online workshops, and more learning resources. Check out what’s new. The latest edition of People of WordPress features Sunita Rai, a content marketer and volunteer translator from Nepal. https://wordpress.org/news/2023/10/episode-64-patterns-in-wordpress/ Requests for feedback and testing Your help testing WordPress 6.5 is key to ensuring everything in this release is the best it can be. New to testing? Read this post for more details on getting set up. The Training team is discussing how to bring accessibility-first approaches into their content creation and processes. Feedback is open until March 9. Version 24.3 of the WordPress mobile app for iOS and Android is ready for testing. WordPress events WordCamp Europe 2024 is looking for photographers. The WordPress Kerala Photo Festival wrapped up with great success. The event received over 1,500 images from 163 participants, contributing to the Photo Directory passing the 15,000 photo milestone. Winners were announced in this post. Don’t miss these other WordPress events happening soon: Women WordPress Day, Costa Rica, on March 8 Switzerland Community Day on March 23 WordCamp Torrelodones, Spain, on March 23-24 Find out more local events or apply to organize one on the Events page. Have a story we should include in the next issue of The Month in WordPress? Fill out this quick form to let us know. Subscribe to WordPress News Join other subscribers and receive WordPress news directly in your inbox. Subscribe View the full article

The first release candidate (RC1) for WordPress 6.5 is ready for download and testing! This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it’s recommended that you evaluate RC1 on a test server and site. Reaching this phase of the release cycle is an important milestone. While release candidates are considered ready for release, testing remains crucial to ensure that everything in WordPress 6.5 is the best it can be. You can test WordPress 6.5 RC1 in four ways: PluginInstall and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. (Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream).Direct DownloadDownload the RC1 version (zip) and install it on a WordPress website.Command LineUse the following WP-CLI command: wp core update --version=6.5-RC1WordPress PlaygroundUse the 6.5 RC1 WordPress Playground instance (available within 35 minutes after the release is ready) to test the software directly in your browser without the need for a separate site or setup. The current target for the WordPress 6.5 release is March 26, 2024. Get an overview of the 6.5 release cycle, and check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.5-related posts in the coming weeks for further details. What’s in WordPress 6.5 RC1? Thanks to the many contributors testing up to this point, this release include more than 20 bug fixes for the Editor and more than 40 tickets for WordPress Core. Get a recap of WordPress 6.5’s highlighted features in the Beta 1 announcement. For more technical information related to issues addressed since Beta 3, you can browse the following links: GitHub commits for 6.5 since February 27 Closed Trac tickets since February 27 Want to look deeper into the details and technical notes for this release? These recent posts cover some of the latest updates: Introducing Plugin Dependencies in WordPress 6.5 Unification of the Site and Post Editors in 6.5 Updates to the HTML API in 6.5 Interactivity API in 6.5 I18N Improvements in 6.5 (Performant Translations) WordPress 6.5 adds AVIF support Core Editor Improvement: Power in the Details Core Editor Improvement: Robust Revisions in the Site Editor All 6.5-related developer notes How you can contribute WordPress is open source software made possible by a passionate community of people collaborating on and contributing to its development. The resources below outline various ways you can help the world’s most popular open source web platform, regardless of your technical expertise. Get involved in testing Testing for issues is critical to ensuring WordPress is performant and stable. It’s also a meaningful way for anyone to contribute. This detailed guide will walk you through testing features in WordPress 6.5. For those new to testing, follow this general testing guide for more details on getting set up. If you encounter an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums or directly to WordPress Trac if you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs. Curious about testing releases in general? Follow along with the testing initiatives in Make Core and join the #core-test channel on Making WordPress Slack. Search for vulnerabilities From now until the final release candidate of WordPress 6.5 (scheduled for March 19), the monetary reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities is doubled. Please follow responsible disclosure practices as detailed in the project’s security practices and policies outlined on the HackerOne page and in the security white paper. Update your theme or plugin For plugin and theme authors, your products play an integral role in extending the functionality and value of WordPress for all users. Thanks for continuing to test your themes and plugins with the WordPress 6.5 beta releases. With RC1, you’ll want to conclude your testing and update the “Tested up to” version in your plugin’s readme file to 6.5. If you find compatibility issues, please post detailed information to the support forum. Help translate WordPress Do you speak a language other than English? ¿Español? Français? Русский? 日本? हिन्दी? বাংলা? You can help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages. This release milestone (RC1) also marks the hard string freeze point of the 6.5 release cycle. Release the haiku What’s this? RC1? Three weeks left until it’s done. Come and test. It’s fun! Thank you to the following contributors for collaborating on this post: @dansoschin, @courane01, @hellosatya, @huzaifaalmesbah View the full article

WordCamp Asia 2024 is just a few days away—starting on March 7 in Taipei, Taiwan. This unique three-day summit will feature a distinguished lineup of speakers, numerous networking opportunities, and a closing Q&A experience with WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg. The live Q&A session will be streamed for WordPress enthusiasts worldwide, beginning at 3:30 p.m. China Standard Time (7:30 a.m. UTC) on Saturday, March 9, 2024. Watch the event live stream on the WordPress YouTube channel or visit the event website for more details. What: Q&A Session with Matt Mullenweg When: March 9, 2024 at 7:30 a.m. UTC (Start of live stream) Where: Taipei International Convention Center Streaming: Watch the live stream on the WordPress YouTube channel. Have a question for Matt? If you want to participate, please submit your question via Slido from March 7 until about 10:00 a.m. UTC on Friday, March 8. Given the expected volume of submitted questions, only some will be answered live, while others will be covered in a follow-up post published after the event on make.wordpress.org/project. See you in-person and online on March 7! 谢谢! Thank you to @rmartinezduque, @eidolonnight, @cbringmann, and @bjmcsherry for reviewing this post. View the full article

Explore the impact you can make on WordPress without coding in this WordPress Briefing episode hosted by Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy. She’ll guide you through diverse non-coding contributions suitable for all skill levels, including content translation, photo submissions, event organization, and software testing. Listen and discover how you can enhance the WordPress community in ways that align with your interests and expertise. Credits Host: Josepha Haden Chomphosy Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Brett McSherry, Chloé Bringmann Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Show Notes WordCamp Asia 2024 Contributor Day WordPress Photo Directory Polyglots WordPress Support Forums Upcoming WordPress Events Make WordPress Testing Learn WordPress Small List of Big Things 2023 Annual Survey Results and Next Steps Gather Press Pilot Program Transcripts [00:00:00] Josepha: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go. [00:00:29] (Intro music) [00:00:40] Josepha: At the end of this week, WordCamp Asia is happening. It’s one of our largest events dedicated to WordPress, and it will cover a wide range of topics. From advanced concepts like running thriving businesses to more beginner things like building your first theme, there is bound to be something for you at this event. For folks who have the opportunity to attend in person, you might also be going to your first-ever Contributor Day. Now, as much as I want there to be something for everyone there, I recognize that it’s a little more frenetic than your average WordPress event. It’s not any less welcoming than the event that has like a schedule and, tracks, and rooms. [00:01:19] Josepha: But in my experience of any group of open source contributors, they get really excited when they are tackling problems together. And that’s most of what happens at a Contributor Day. It can make it a little difficult to see how you can join in. But never fear; the crew at the WordPress Briefing has you covered. We’ve got a couple of ways you can contribute immediately, no code required, and a handful of good next steps when you’re feeling comfortable and ready to level up. For total beginners, so you’ve got a WordPress site, or you know, you’re about to launch one. And you’re here to learn and meet people and hopefully find someone who answers the questions you feel too shy to mention in public. So these two ways of contribution are for you. First, you can contribute photos. WordPress has a photo directory for openly licensed photos, which are included in Openverse searches. Users can submit photographs to be used by folks all over the world. There are some basic guidelines, such as no faces or identifying characteristics. It can’t be overly edited or processed, but even photos taken on a smartphone are accepted. Because we understand that the best camera is the one you have on you. [00:02:30] Josepha: You can also contribute translations. If you speak a language other than English, you can visit translate.WordPress.org and help translate not only the WordPress software but also plugins, themes, and other parts of the WordPress project into your native language. Since more than half of all WordPress installations are in non-English languages, adding or improving translations is really impactful. We are actually at WordCamp Asia trialing a new self-serve translation day process. So that’s a great place to have a double impact. [00:03:03] Josepha: So those are your two completely code-free ways that you can contribute, completely beginner friendly ways to contribute at Contributor Day coming up later this week. And then for your next steps, so say that you’ve had your site for a while, you are an absolute expert in the admin, you’ve had to answer a few tough questions for yourself, you’ve watched a lot of tutorials, and so now you’re thinking of ways you can share that knowledge. [00:03:29] Josepha: Here are a few ways that you can exercise your new knowledge and really solidify it in your brain. Firstly, you can contribute help. Supporting other WordPress users is a great way to give back to WordPress. This can involve answering questions, providing guidance, or even providing the right resources to users. You can check out the WordPress support forums for more information, and they actually have a dedicated support team as well that works toward making sure that WordPress users have answers to the questions they are asking. You can head over to WordPress.org/support/forums and just pick an appropriate area for you, something that you are currently an expert in, and start answering questions. Start contributing. [00:04:10] Josepha: Second thing you can do is you can contribute patterns. So WordPress has a dedicated Patterns directory, which stores a list of Block patterns. So custom designs that were created using blocks in Gutenberg that then can be used across any WordPress site, anyone’s WordPress site. You can submit those patterns, any pattern that you built, to the directory, and then they can be used by people all around the world. Basically, like anything with WordPress, if you put it in there, it can be used by anyone all around the world. The third thing is that you can contribute events. This is one of my favorite ways to contribute. Organizing in person events to an extent has no code requirement to it, but also it does kind of require that you have a good understanding of your local community and have a willingness to get out there and build your network. WordPress is where it is today thanks to its excellent community and all the lovely in-person events that happen all over the world. They bring our community together, and anyone can contribute by helping to organize just a small gathering or support an in-person event. [00:05:13] Josepha: The fourth way that you can level up your contributions is to contribute by breaking things. I know that sounds weird, but testing the software to see where it breaks is actually a really valuable contribution. It’s as easy as downloading the WordPress beta tester plugin and the test reports plugin to a WordPress installation, Preferably a testing one, not one that’s currently publicly in use. But you can test out the newest version of WordPress before the release and provide useful feedback to the development team. And the fifth way that you can level up your contribution is to contribute learning. Not that you are learning as a contribution, but what one person can learn through a tutorial or documentation, another person has to learn through discussion and hands-on learning. This team, the folks over at learn.WordPress.org, they are the official team and official learning platform and resource for WordPress. They host video tutorials. Yes, but also host live online workshops, courses and even provide lesson plans on different topics related to WordPress. So if you are an educator or otherwise really like to help spread knowledge around, pass around the knowledge that has been hard-earned by you, this is an excellent opportunity. [00:06:28] Josepha: And of course, if you are brave and afraid of nothing, then you can just go to Contributor Day and move from table to table until something sounds interesting to you. You don’t have to have a plan. Your whole plan can absolutely be to wander until you are found. [00:06:45] (Music interlude) [00:06:52] Josepha: That brings us now to our small list of big things. It’s actually a very small list today. I’ve got two things on it. [00:07:00] Josepha: The first is that a couple of weeks back, we published the results from the 2023 annual survey. So, each year, we collect some high-level data about trends and themes across this vast ecosystem of users and site builders, people who extend WordPress core, and contributors who build WordPress core to help inform decision-making and provide valuable feedback on the project status. I looked at the results from our last survey. We had a bit of an increase in the respondents, not as much as we would have liked, but still a little bit greater number than we had in the past couple of years. And I have a lot of questions myself about what we are doing compared to what we are being asked to do and so go take a look at the blog post that has some highlights from it. It’s got a couple of contextual pieces of information in there as well, and come with your questions to WordCamps around the world or ask them in community meetings as you find them. [00:07:58] Josepha: And then the second thing is actually that we have kind of a pilot program going on. There’s a proposal out right now about GatherPress. It’s a group of community leaders that have built a tool, a community plugin, to help gather WordPress events a bit better and a bit more “open source-ely”. It’s open currently to anyone who is running a WordPress meetup group that is interested in learning more about how a WordPress-first and open source first community gathering tool might look. [00:08:32] Josepha: I’ll have a link to the proposal in the show notes that’ll give you more detailed information and give you an opportunity to figure out how you can join that pilot and help us figure out whether it will work or not ultimately for WordPress. And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Don’t forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app or subscribe directly on WordPress.org/news. You’ll get a friendly reminder whenever there’s a new episode. If you liked what you heard today, share it with a fellow WordPresser or fellow brand new WordCamper. But if you had questions about what you heard, you can share those with me at wpbriefing@WordPress.org. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. [00:09:13] Josepha: Thanks again for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. View the full article

WordPress 6.5 Beta 3 is here and ready for testing! This beta version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it is recommended you evaluate Beta 3 on a test server and site. You can test WordPress 6.5 Beta 3 in four ways: PluginInstall and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. (Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream).Direct DownloadDownload the Beta 3 version (zip) and install it on a WordPress website.Command LineUse the following WP-CLI command: wp core update --version=6.5-beta3WordPress PlaygroundUse the 6.5 Beta 3 WordPress Playground instance to test the software directly in your browser without the need for a separate site or setup. The current target date for the final release of WordPress 6.5 is March 26, 2024. That’s only four weeks away! Get an overview of the 6.5 release cycle, and check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.5-related posts in the coming weeks for more information. Catch up on what’s new in WordPress 6.5: Read the Beta 1 announcement for details and highlights. How to test this release Your help testing the WordPress 6.5 Beta 3 version is key to ensuring everything in the release is the best it can be. While testing the upgrade process is essential, trying out new features is equally important. This detailed guide will walk you through testing features in WordPress 6.5. If you encounter an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums or directly to WordPress Trac if you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs. Curious about testing releases in general? Follow along with the testing initiatives in Make Core and join the #core-test channel on Making WordPress Slack. Vulnerability bounty doubles during Beta/RC Between Beta 1, released on February 13, and the final Release Candidate (RC) scheduled for March 19, the monetary reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities is doubled. Please follow responsible disclosure practices as detailed in the project’s security practices and policies outlined on the HackerOne page and in the security white paper. Beta 3 updates and highlights WordPress 6.5 Beta 3 contains more than 45 updates to the Editor since the Beta 2 release, including more than 35 tickets for WordPress Core. Each beta cycle focuses on bug fixes; more are on the way with your help through testing. You can browse the technical details for all issues addressed since Beta 2 using these links: GitHub commits for 6.5 since February 21 Closed Trac tickets since February 21 Double the haiku for Beta 3 Find a Beta bug, it will help the team a lot, and improve WordPress! – submitted by @lada7042 In code, dreams are bold, WordPress’s story unfolds, Beta journey’s told. – submitted by @huzaifaalmesbah Thank you to the following contributors for collaborating on this post: @dansoschin, @swissspidy, @adarshposimyth, @davidbaumwald View the full article

WordPress 6.5 Beta 2 is now ready for testing! This beta version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it is recommended you evaluate Beta 2 on a test server and site. You can test WordPress 6.5 Beta 2 in four ways: PluginInstall and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. (Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream).Direct DownloadDownload the Beta 2 version (zip) and install it on a WordPress website.Command LineUse the following WP-CLI command: wp core update --version=6.5-beta2WordPress PlaygroundUse the 6.5 Beta 2 WordPress Playground instance to test the software directly in your browser without the need for a separate site or setup. The current target date for the final release of WordPress 6.5 is March 26, 2024. Get an overview of the 6.5 release cycle, and check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.5-related posts in the coming weeks for more information. Catch up on what’s new in WordPress 6.5: Read the Beta 1 announcement for details and highlights. How to test this release Your help testing the WordPress 6.5 Beta 2 version is key to ensuring everything in the release is the best it can be. While testing the upgrade process is essential, trying out new features is equally important. This detailed guide will walk you through testing features in WordPress 6.5. If you encounter an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums or directly to WordPress Trac if you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs. Curious about testing releases in general? Follow along with the testing initiatives in Make Core and join the #core-test channel on Making WordPress Slack. Vulnerability bounty doubles during Beta 2 Between Beta 1, released on February 13, and the final Release Candidate (RC) scheduled for March 19, the monetary reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities is doubled. Please follow responsible disclosure practices as detailed in the project’s security practices and policies outlined on the HackerOne page and in the security white paper. Beta 2 updates and highlights WordPress 6.5 Beta 2 contains more than 50 updates to the Editor since the Beta 1 release, including 40+ tickets for WordPress core. Each beta cycle focuses on bug fixes; more are on the way with your help through testing. You can browse the technical details for all issues addressed since Beta 1 using these links: GitHub commits for 6.5 since February 14 Closed Trac tickets since February 14 A Beta 2 haiku Help out with testing Contribute! Make an impact Let’s find all those bugs Thank you to the following contributors for collaborating on this post: @dansoschin, @huzaifaalmesbah, @rajinsharwar, @swissspidy, @courane01. View the full article

In the latest WordPress Briefing, Josepha Haden Chomphosy discusses the Interactivity API, a new foundational tool that helps developers create memorable interactive front-end experiences. She is joined by special guests and sponsored contributors Ryan Welcher and Mario Santos, who share more about this impactful addition to the WordPress developer experience. Credits Host: Josepha Haden Chomphosy Guest: Mario Santos Guest: Ryan Welcher Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Brett McSherry Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Show Notes Create block template for the Interactivity API GitHub tracking issue changes in the API Interactivity API docs Interactivity API Movies demo Interactivity API GitHub discussions Ryan Welcher Codes Small List of Big Things Online monthly Docs Team Contributor Day Share your feedback about the new WordPress Events Page! Improving block development documentation: 2023 recap and a look ahead Transcripts [00:00:00] Josepha: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go. [00:00:29] (Intro music) [00:00:40] Josepha: I have with me today a couple of guests, Ryan Welcher and Mario Santos, who have joined me to talk about the Interactivity API. This is an API that we’ve been working on for quite a while, and it’s a fascinating thing. It’s really specifically user-facing in its functionality but makes a lot of work streamlined for everyday developers, whether you are building something for yourself, for your family, or for a client. This whole project probably is gonna really speak to you. [00:01:10] Josepha: Hi, guys, and welcome to the show. First-time guests, both of you. Right? [00:01:15] Ryan: Yes. First time for me. [00:01:17] Mario: Thanks for inviting us. [00:01:18] Josepha: Yeah. Well, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself, like your name, what you do with WordPress, how you contribute to the project, something like that? [00:01:27] Ryan: I can go first. My name is Ryan Welcher. I’m a developer advocate and sponsored by Automattic. Then, I contribute full-time to the WordPress project by creating documentation, doing live streams, creating videos, and just generally trying to be helpful in in the space to help engineers and extenders work with the various APIs in WordPress. [00:01:46] Josepha: I love the just generally trying to be helpful part. Mario, what about you? [00:01:52] Mario: He really is. He really does it. [00:01:54] Josepha: I know. [00:01:55] Mario: I’m Mario Santos. I’m also a sponsored contributor, and I’m more focused on the project management and developer. I consider myself a mix of both. Right now I’m working on projects that are focused on improving the developer experience especially. That can go from the Block API to the Interactivity API; that is the topic today. [00:02:16] Josepha: Very nice. Very nice. Just lots of helping that everyone’s trying to do. I think that’s a good thing. So, we’re talking about the Interactivity API today. And, Mario, I believe it was almost a year ago that you first put this proposal out into the WordPress project. Do you wanna tell us a little bit about just, like, where the idea of this came from? Like, I know it wasn’t originally called the Interactivity API, but, like, what was you said you do some a bit of product, a bit of development. Like, what was it about this idea that was so important to you? [00:02:48] Mario: Yeah. Sure. So, basically, well, the proposal came, like, one year ago, but it has been in the works, like, for many years, I would say. Just to give a bit more context, previously, before being a sponsored contributor, I was working at a startup called Frontity Framework, and we were building a React framework to enable rich user experiences on top of WordPress. [00:03:13] Mario: So basically, it was a framework for headless WordPress. And at some point, we became sponsored contributors, the idea was to bring those user experiences to those rich and cool websites that lead to WordPress. So, you don’t need an external framework to create them, and you can do that directly in WordPress. So that’s where the idea of the Interactivity API comes from. From there, we started exploring different possibilities and tailoring it more to WordPress to ensure it works with its APIs. And I think after many many months working on that, the Interactivity API is the result. [00:03:54] Josepha: I just wanted to note that you started that answer with, like, the proposal was about a year ago, but the work had been happening for a long time. I think that’s generally true, and it’s not something that we always really acknowledge. This happens with patents also. This is going to be a strange tangent, but this is how we do in in my brain. This is how my brain works. So frequently, you’ll see a brand new product, but the patent for it was, like, 30 years beforehand, like, way before you ever see anything. And I think that’s kinda how this works also with software development. Like, the idea, has been going for a long time. [00:04:27] Josepha: The problem was identified a long time ago. And by the time you see something that helps to solve the problem or bring a new set of features to you, like, you didn’t know, but it had been being worked on for, like, five years or something. And I think that’s such a fascinating thing. That’s always apparent to me, but I think it’s not really apparent for a lot of people in the, in I don’t know, who use software. I was gonna say in the space, quote, unquote, but that’s not even it. Like, it’s the people who are using software. We don’t know how long anything’s been under development. We just know that at some point, a magical thing appeared, and we get to use it. [00:05:03] Josepha: So speaking of the problems that we have identified that we’re trying to solve with this. Like, was there an inherent problem that you all were trying to solve as you were coming up with this idea around the Interactivity API itself? [00:05:16] Mario: I would say that trying to summarize it, it covers many things, but the main problem was that creating those kinds of interactions in the client was kind of difficult. You had to manage many things many tools, and each developer could come up with different solutions, and maybe they don’t combine well together. So, the idea is to provide an extended way so developers don’t have to take care of many things. They just have to take care of the interactions they wanna create. And ensuring that it works well with the WordPress way, it works well with the block system, and any block created with this Interactivity API can communicate with each other. You can combine those blocks, and you are not gonna encounter any problem. So, I would say that the main issue we were trying to solve is that there wasn’t a standard solution. There were different approaches taken by different developers, and that could create some issues. So, until now, Gutenberg has been mainly focused on the editor side and how blocks are created. And this is a first attempt to to cover the part of the front end, the interactions that users may want to create in the front end. [00:06:31] Ryan: It solves a ton of problems. But, I mean, coming from someone like, I have a fair amount of agency experience. I’ve been, you know, you’re working on large projects. And every time someone solves a problem, they solve it slightly differently. And that’s problematic because you switch teams or, you know, someone else picks up the code base, and all of a sudden, now they have to learn your custom system that’s slightly different from the one that I built last week and the one that, you know, someone else built two weeks earlier. And this takes the guesswork out. It takes the sort of the plumbing out of the equation. One of the reasons I really loves working with WordPress when I started working with WordPress was that when I was building for clients, I didn’t have to worry about building the CMS. I didn’t have to worry about building a menu system or figuring out how to handle media. [00:07:10] Ryan: I just had to do the things that that client was paying me to do. Like, I just had to make their site look the way that they wanted it to. And with the Interactivity API, I think there’s a bit of that where I don’t have to worry about figuring out how am I gonna get all these pieces to talk to each other on the front end. It’s all there. I just have to connect the dots, and it makes it very, very simple. I’m building the site right now for a workshop that I’m gonna be giving a WordCamp Asia, which is a a shameless plug. Sorry. [00:07:33] Josepha: Coming up so fast, y’all. WordCamp Asia is, like, two weeks away. [00:07:37] Ryan: I’m so excited. I have so much work to do. But I’ve built an entire voting system on a website where people can pick what we’re going to be talking about in my workshop, and I built it in the Interactivity API, and it took me, you know, probably five hours. And that’s me trying to learn some things and mess around with it. And to do that without the Interactivity API would have probably been an entire React-based, you know, completely outside of WordPress. I would have loaded one thing on the page and had it build out my whole application, and now I’m doing it with blocks and I’m doing it with a block theme. So if I wanna move those blocks around. I can move the blocks around. I can change anything that I wanna change inside of WordPress the way I would normally, and all that in interactivity just still works. And that’s It’s awesome. I just I love it. I can’t like, the Interactivity API, not my website. [00:08:26] Josepha: But also both. Like, it can be both. [00:08:28] Mario: I wanted to say that I think it’s a great point. I like to think about it like having the best of both worlds. Right now, we have modern frameworks like React, Vue that are used to create these cool websites. And I think the Interactivity API plus WordPress brings everything together. Like, you can create those cool user experiences while keeping the full power of WordPress, its management system, the Block editor, and to be honest, I don’t think there’s anything like that out there. Like having the best of both both worlds because we are still working with blocks, and that’s amazing. [00:09:04] Ryan: Given that it’s still, it’s not even been released yet. Like, it’s coming very soon. But. [00:09:08] Josepha: Yeah. This is all still in the Gutenberg plugin. So, like, if you don’t know what we’re talking about, get the Gutenberg plugin. [00:09:16] Ryan: But just how mature the API is now, considering it is still kind of not even fully released, it’s only gonna get better? I just think it’s awesome. So, kudos to Mario and your team for doing all this stuff. [00:09:28] Mario: Thank you. Kudos to everyone involved. [00:09:32] Josepha: So, I’ve a question that I think probably, Ryan, you can start with, but then also probably, Mario, you’re gonna have some opinions on also. In this conversation so far, we’ve done a lot of, like, when you want to have these interactions and also when you want to have these cool experiences. For folks who actually do not know what the Interactivity API is yet, and they don’t know what we’re talking about when we say these interactions like, what exactly are we talking about from a user perspective? Like, what types of things will users be able to see when they are experiencing the Interactivity API’s features and functionality. [00:10:07] Ryan: I think it’s a great question. From a user standpoint, it’ll just look like your regular website, I think. Depending on what you’re doing. So, like the interactions that we’re talking about is when you’re in the browser and you wanna click a button and expand something, for example, or you wanna click an image and have the lightbox pop-up, which is in core now, that’s driven by the Interactivity API, but these interactions are basically when a user wants to interact with something, what it does. That’s a really generic way of saying it. [00:10:34] Josepha: Our current favorite example and, Ryan, it sounds like you also have another example. But our current favorite example is like a movie collection site, you know? And so, like, when we’re talking about what the Interactivity API is going to power, it’s things like, when you favorite a series of movies, and then you can, and it just updates that on the fly, and you’ll be able to in essentially real-time as instant as reasonably possible based on your computer and stuff. [00:11:03] Josepha: Like, then look at your list of things that you favorited or things like that. Like, for folks who don’t understand interactive site like, all of us know that that, like, if you get on a site, you have interacted with it. But when we’re talking about Interactivity API, we’re talking about types of direct actions users can take. Right? [00:11:19] Mario: I would say yes. They are just only triggered by some actions. It could be scrolling, clicking, or, or whatever. But, it can go from a simple example like drop down or a popover to more complex things like the movies demo, where you can navigate and the page is not reloading, and that allows you to play a trailer. It starts in a pop-up, and you can keep navigating through different pages, and the trailer keeps playing without reloading. Another example could be instant search; like you start typing the search, and it directly updates the list of films, in this case, that are shown, those kinds of things that happen In the browser. [00:12:00] Josepha: And Ryan said you, you said that you, like, built a whole survey system, A whole polling system. [00:12:06] Ryan: Yeah, a voting system. So there’s a series of buttons, each one representing a certain topic, and people can vote, and it tallies the amount. So each, I’m calling them recipes, has amount of time associated with it, and then so you vote until you run out of time, at which point, like in its tracking it all, and it’s showing you how much time you voted, how much is left, and once you’ve run out of time it blurs like it disables all of the voting buttons so you can’t add more because you run out of time. [00:12:30] Ryan: So if you remove one, you can add again. It’s very, very powerful. And, like, before the Interactivity API, you would have to have, I would have built that whole thing in React, and it would have been one single application that just get loaded on a page. And I just think it’s amazing. And, like the, the ability to create what are called, like, single page applications or what have always sort of been called SPAs or single page applications where you’re not reloading the browser every single time you click on a link. You have to do some things to make that work, but that’s just available to you and in WordPress. That’s amazing. I just think that’s so neat. I mean, it’s already powering things like the Query Loop block has the ability to move pagination without reloading the page, which is, sounds like a sort of a like a okay, great, like sort of, you know, mundane thing but imagine you had two or three different query loops sitting on your homepage and you wanted to be able to paginate through each one and not refresh the page. That’s a fantastic user experience that now is just enabled and otherwise was not possible prior to the Interactivity API. [00:13:28] Josepha: I feel like the Query Loop block was, like, a three-year project four years ago. And I had forgotten about it, which is surprising because I was so concerned with it when we were working directly on it all the time. But yeah. Yeah. That’s exactly the kind of example. So we’ve talked about kind of the user thing and people who are gonna build stuff for clients. But, like, if you’re a contributor and you want to figure out more about either how to use this or how to expand on what is already there. [00:14:01] Josepha: We already talked about how it’s in the Gutenberg plugin. It’s kind of experimental over there. But, like, do you all have like, good first bugs? Things that can be worked on in there? Or is there, like, an experiment zone where people can just be like, this is what I tried with the Interactivity API until it broke? How do people work with that? [00:14:20] Mario: I would like to clarify first, it’s right now, it’s private in, it’s a private API in WordPress core in 6.4, And it’s public in Gutenberg, but it’s gonna be a public API already in WordPress 6.5. So, yes. Anyone can start testing it. The best way to get involved is first sharing what interactions you want to see. I mean, everyone has different ideas, and we will love to know the interactions that people want to create using the Interactivity API, so that would be the first step. Then, test it, create your own blocks or site, and send feedback what do you like what you don’t like. Raise issues, and for that, we are mainly using GitHub. We created a new category in GitHub in the Gutenberg plugin discussions, and we try to to keep everything there. [00:15:13] Mario: So if you have any questions any feedback, you can share it there. You can also find more discussions about the road map, the change log, many things that are going on right now. And, yeah, I would say those are the ways of getting involved, and I can also expect, maybe Ryan can tell you more here, to start working more on tutorials or videos or whatever. And for me, personally, I would love to see the community working on that as well. [00:15:43] Ryan: Yeah. I can, yeah. I think that from a contributor standpoint, especially those who are trying to get into contributing, because, I mean, it’s not not complicated. Let’s put it that way, like the Interactivity API. And that’s not meaning to be a barrier to anyone, but a great place to start is documentation. A great place to start is going through those docs and making sure they’re up to date and, you know, saying, oh, well, that’s supposed to do this, so let me go try that. And if it works, great. If it doesn’t, you know, file a bug, update the documentation, that’s a great way to get started. It’s gonna familiarize yourself with the code base and what it’s supposed to do. And then, sort of, just through osmosis, you’ll start to pick up more about it. And for anyone starting to contribute to the WordPress project in general, I would say starting with documentation or unit testing is a really, really great way to kinda, dip your toe in the water and not feel too frustrated. And tutorials and demos and show us what you’re building. We wanna see it. I mean, send it to me, and I will show everyone that I know. [00:16:40] Ryan: I mean, we wanna see what what people are building with it and because, you know, just like WordPress, I always use this example, but, like, people used to hack WordPress until we got a hook added for that particular thing that they were adding. So, if we don’t know what people are building or wanting to build with it, we can’t make those things happen. So knowing what people are building, how they’re building, and what they can’t build, what they’re running into, what issues they’re running into is the best way to contribute. So, so people smarter than me can build it for you. [00:17:08] Josepha: I love that call out, frankly. So there’s, you know, the theory of tech adoption. And for things like the Interactivity API where we’re still kind of in the early adopter phase like, Ryan, you’re an early adopter. You’re doing everything you think you want to be able to do until it breaks. And, like, I love, like, test it till it fails as a concept of how to get involved in something because, like, you’re just experimenting, and we encourage experimentation in open source and in open source software and certainly in WordPress. And so, like, it is an unusual thing to think of, like, the best way that I can give back to this project, that I can contribute to this project and make sure that it continues to succeed long term is by using it until the wheels fall off and then tell people what made the wheels fall off. Like, that is a change in thought, But you’re right. Like, it’s a very old school open source idea to just get in there and see where it breaks, and tell us. That’s it. That’s all we need. And I love it. [00:18:08] Josepha: But I just passed my 9-year anniversary being a sponsored contributor, and I was in WordPress for a little bit before it. And so, like, I’m officially the old guard of us, and so the fact that I’m, like, so excited about the fact that people are gonna come in and break Mario’s stuff. Mario, don’t be scared. It’s how it works. But also, like, I do find that very exciting. [00:18:31] Mario: I’m willing to see how people break things; that’s what we need. I totally agree with your reasoning. [00:18:38] Josepha: Exactly. So I do have kind of, just, like, a final question for y’all. If there were one thing that you wanted the people who are listening to the WordPress Briefing to know about the Interactivity API, like a hidden gem, a little secret trick. Like, what would it be? [00:18:57] Mario: For me, the most exciting part of the Interactivity API is the functionality the client-side navigation enables because there are many, many things there. And I’m sure that there are many things we haven’t thought about yet, and the community will come up with some ideas and that would be amazing. [00:19:17] Ryan: For me, the thing is, I love how integrated it is with WordPress, and I know a lot of thought has gone into that without getting too into the weeds. The reasons the decisions that were made were made was so all the hooks and filters and all that goodness that we’ve had for 20 years is still gonna work. And with the HTML API, the tag processor stuff that’s going on behind the scenes, it’s just so cool. It works so well with WordPress. It just works and that’s probably it for me. When I work with it, I’m not having to do any weird janky filtering or stuff that, like, you know, the things that I want to do are not hindered by the Interactivity API. The rather, I’m able to do more things because of it. [00:19:58] Mario: I prefer Ryan’s answer. [00:20:00] Mario: It’s something really important and it’s something we usually take for granted that it just works with WordPress APIs and the Block Editor, but if you think more about it, it’s amazing. Like, It’s what makes it really powerful, I I believe. [00:20:15] Josepha: For what it’s worth, I think that’s true for a lot of, like, the R&D type things that we’re working on in the project right now. Right? Across Our ecosystem, like WP Playground. It is mind-boggling how progressive that is as a concept, and we currently have, like, you know, 25 ideas about what we could do with it, and we’re currently working on, like, five because we’ve got two and a half developers on it or something. But, like, the expectation that it will just work is there for everybody who has, is not part of the R&D process, but for everyone else who’s, like, been watching its development over time, shocking. Shocking that it works at all. Not because it wasn’t supposed to work, but because, like, if someone had asked you five years ago if it was gonna be possible to run WordPress development environments locally and then also just export it and import it into whatever host you want. Like, without a host, without a server, we would all think that you were nuts. [00:21:22] Josepha: Amazing what’s happening there and, like, some of the things that we’re seeing, people who are, like, researching with AI in the WordPress space doing? Equally shocking. All of these things. Like, had you said anything to me about it five years ago, I’d be like, well, that is a mystery. So, every once in a while, I do have wild ideas about things that I wish we could do with our software. And so yesterday, I went and looked at a prototype for something that someone built based on a wish that I had in 2019. In 2019, I was like, you can play Skyrim on an Amazon Dot using just your voice. So like, why can’t we build a website? [00:22:01] Josepha: And then in 2021, someone prototyped that for me. It was ridiculous. It was very bad. It was hilarious. But, also, like, it took 35 minutes to create a ‘Hello world’ page, which was ridiculous. And now, like, what we’re looking at, the research that I keep seeing from that AI space is people saying, like, I’m gonna put in a plain text prompt. I need a website as a yoga instructor who also makes custom hats. Right? And then, like, poof. You have this thing that kinda looks like a website with your basic functions and features using the blocks that we have created for WordPress. Like it’s fascinating how far it’s come. And that’s in 2021. It was literally impossible the last time that I was talking about it with anyone, equally literally impossible. Everyone’s like, plain language prompts for stuff, like that is just a pipe dream. Get away from us. And now I keep seeing, like, these demos of the research, and it’s not as far away as we all thought it was. For all these things, Playground, Interactivity API, The AI research is being done. Like, we’re just a walking R&D group over here in WordPress, and I love it. It’s fascinating. We’re just making the impossible possible every day, and I think that’s really cool. [00:23:16] Ryan: So cool. [00:23:18] Josepha: Sorry. I got really sidetracked. Do y’all have anything that you wanted to be sure to share about either the Interactivity API or anything that’s coming up? Something you wanna make that our listeners know? [00:23:29] Mario: I would just like to emphasize that we love feedback. Please share your feedback. If you test it, yeah, if you think it’s bad feedback, share it with us as well. That’s especially the feedback we like. I don’t like this part. That’s great. We we want to know because the idea is that it serves all purposes for this kind of interactions. That nothing new, but I would like to emphasize that part. [00:23:56] Josepha: You know what? There’s nothing new under the sun. It’s fine. You’re good. You should always tell people what you need. [00:24:01] Ryan: If you’re interested in getting started with the Interactivity API and just don’t have any idea where to begin, there’s actually a pack there. There’s a Create Block template. So the Create Block package allows you to to quickly scaffold blocks. And there’s a template that’s part of the Gutenberg repository. It’s been published on it and NPM. And it will scaffold a very simple block out for you and it’ll give you, it’ll show you all the plumbing and how all the pieces work together. So, I think that’s a fantastic place to get started. It’s a very simple block. It just basically shows and hides a message, but it’s all done via the Interactivity API, but it’s a really, really great sort of, like, like, ‘Hello world’ style. I’m gonna shamelessly self-promote myself at WordCamp Asia. I’ll be at WordCamp Asia this year doing a workshop where I will be doing some stuff with your Interactivity API. But, if you’re there and you wanna chat more about the Interactivity API, I am all ears, and I love talking about this stuff. [00:24:51] Josepha: Cool. Ryan, Mario thank you so much for joining me today. This has been a wonderful conversation. [00:24:58] Ryan: Thank you. [00:24:58] Mario: Thank you. [00:25:01] Josepha: So I hope that you all find that whole project as fascinating as I find it. The Interactivity API is, I know, something that we’ve kind of been talking about for a while. It showed up specifically in State of the Word, and it’s hard to understand how important, how vital that work is going to be until you really get your hands on it. So I recommend you get in there. You take a look at it. I think also Ryan has a few live streams that he does, and he’s planning on a couple for the Interactivity API coming up. And so just keep an eye out for all of that as we go. [00:25:37] (Music interlude) [00:25:49] Josepha: Now that brings us to our small list of big things. Today, it’s a bunch of feedback and documentation. So, first things first. Did you know that the Documentation Team holds an online monthly Contributor Day on the fourth Tuesday of every month. It’s just an online docs day, and I love it. So, the next one that’s coming up is February 27th. We’re looking for folks to help. So show up, figure out how to get some docs done, and make the WordPress project easier to follow, one bit of documentation at a time. [00:26:16] Josepha: The next thing that I have is a request for feedback. So, we announced in December that we have a new centralized WordPress events landing page on WordPress.org, and we wanted to give more visibility to all kinds of WordPress events across the globe. But as always, we really could use your feedback about what is useful for you, what you had hoped to see, what you didn’t see. So, leave your comments with any relevant feedback about how you would improve those pages and the text on it. If you’re missing anything relevant, if there are ideas that you have for what could be there, all ideas are welcome. And then, the third thing that I have on our list today is another documentation thing. So, over the last year, a group of contributors have been working to improve the block development onboarding experience within the Block Editor handbook. That contains over 400 published pages, and the effort in 2023 to kind of overhaul that and make it easier was just the beginning. So, it’s a daunting task. It’s big. It’s complex, but improving documentation is one of the easiest ways to contribute to the WordPress project, especially If there are just quick fixes like typos or formatting. Feedback on the existing content, such as the new block tutorial, is invaluable. And so, if you have not taken a look at those yet, wander over to the show notes, click a link or two, take a look, get some feedback to us. [00:27:41] Josepha: And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Don’t forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app or subscribe directly on WordPress.org/news. You’ll get a friendly reminder whenever there’s a new episode. If you like what you heard today, share it with a fellow WordPresser. Or, if you had questions about what you heard, you can share those with me at WPBriefing@WordPress.org. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Thanks for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. [00:28:09] (Music outro) View the full article

Each year, WordPress seeks to collect high-level data about trends and themes across the vast ecosystem of users, site builders, extenders, and contributors to help inform decision-making and provide valuable feedback on the project’s status. For 2023, the survey process was updated to enhance accessibility, usability, analysis, and multilingual support. Additionally, a few questions were replaced or updated to ensure the survey captures relevant data on current and future WordPress topics. The data collected is used as one of many signals that inform the project’s road map and areas of focus, both near and long-term. Highlights from 2023 Overall, awareness and/or use of block-based features is up year over year, as well as resources such as Learn.WordPress.org. This reflects project-wide efforts to increase utilization of these respectively. However, positive sentiment about WordPress is down modestly, and more so among contributors. The analysis of the annual survey highlights certain areas that could benefit from increased attention in 2024. Here are the highlights split into three parts: logistics, general trends, and contributor sentiment. Logistics Completions were up 17% in 2023, though short of a goal to double them, despite increased promotion and partnership with some hosting partners. The Polyglots team translated the survey from English into 9 different languages, the most ever for the survey. Debuted a new platform, Alchemer, for improved accessibility, usability, data collection, administration, and analysis. The completion rate increased again from last year’s high of 63% to 79% in 2023, proving that investing some time in the new platform and clarifying wording was well worth it. General trends NPS was 30.1 overall, with contributors at 27.9 and non-contributors at 32. The NPS has trended downward since 2021, when it was 45. 60% of respondents indicate usage of Gutenberg, 8% are unsure, and 12% use something other than Gutenberg and/or the Classic Editor. This is up from 2022 (54%). 45% of respondents indicate that the WordPress Site Editor meets their site-building needs, 26% are indifferent, and 29% disagree. 61% of respondents indicate familiarity with block themes and plugins. While this question was not asked previously, in 2022, 53% said they had used blocks “In the new site editor.” Security, performance, and stability were the top three critical areas respondents considered when building their website, plugin, theme, or style variation. 63% agree that WordPress is as good or better than other CMSs, down from 68% in 2022 Respondents indicated that the best things about WordPress are that it is open source, has ample plugin options, incorporates good customization, is easy to use, and offers flexibility. This is similar to 2022. Limitless configurations, performance, scalability, accessibility, integration, hosting, and support all saw 100% or more increases compared to 2022 regarding favorite things about WordPress. Respondents cited “too many plugins,” “the site editing experience,” “security,” and “performance” as the top four worst things about WordPress. Most interestingly, though, 16% indicated that none of the 20 topics were terrible, and there was a 43% decrease in the number of people indicating that “site editing is difficult to learn.” Search engines and YouTube continue to be the two most common resources for finding information about WordPress, while those writing about WordPress, in general, saw a sharp decline year over year. Contributor sentiment 58% of self-identified contributors to WordPress said they agree with the project’s roadmap plans for “Phase 3” and “Phase 4” as a good plan to enhance the WordPress experience for developers, creators, and publishers alike. While about one-third of respondents indicated they contribute to the WordPress project, only about half knew how to get involved, knew about WordCamps and meetups, understood the difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com, and knew the benefits of open source. Of 22 topics, the distribution of the top three things that WordPress needs to focus on from the perspective of contributors was broad, with only a 13.5% raw percentage point (1350 basis points) difference between performance (18.6%) in first position and collaborative editing (5.1%) in 22nd position. This shows a need for more consensus among contributors regarding where to focus resources and/or illustrates that the project has many essential elements with passionate supporters. Fewer contributors had a positive experience in 2023 (55%) versus 2022 (64%). Similarly, the feeling of being welcome in the WordPress community among contributors decreased to 57% versus 64% in 2022. Furthermore, contributors feel appropriately recognized less in 2023 (46%) than in 2022 (51%). Bringing it all together The 2023 annual WordPress survey participation and results highlight the possibility of survey burnout within the WordPress community and some declining overall satisfaction among contributors. There is an opportunity to increase awareness regarding critical initiatives such as WordCamps and other resources for WordPress users and contributors alike and to increase messaging on improvements made within the project to the CMS. What’s planned for 2024 In the next iteration of the survey, the plan is to improve the survey’s questions further to ensure they continue to provide valuable insight into the project’s trends. This means some questions will be replaced while others might be refined. Additionally, plans are being explored to distribute and promote the survey at each of the three annual flagship WordCamps (Europe, U.S., and Asia). This would be in contrast to a single yearly survey. More exploration on this topic will take place in the months to come. View the 2023 Slide Deck View a web-based version of the results. Note that this link may expire in the future. Thank you to @dansoschin for the analysis and editorial support. Thanks also to @angelasjin, @eidolonnight, and @cbringmann for their reviews and final edits. View the full article

WordPress 6.5 Beta 1 is ready for download and testing! This beta version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, you should evaluate Beta 1 on a test server or site. Test WordPress 6.5 Beta 1 in four ways: PluginInstall and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. (Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream).Direct DownloadDownload the Beta 1 version (zip) and install it on a WordPress website.Command LineUse the following WP-CLI command: wp core update --version=6.5-beta1WordPress PlaygroundUse the 6.5 Beta 1 WordPress Playground instance to test the software directly in your browser without the need for a separate site or setup. The current target date for the final release of WordPress 6.5 is March 26, 2024. Your help testing this version is key to ensuring everything in the release is stable. Get an overview of the 6.5 release cycle, and check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.5-related posts in the coming weeks for further details. How to help test this release Testing for issues is a critical part of developing any software, and it’s a meaningful way for anyone to contribute—whether or not you have experience. If you encounter an issue, please share it in the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums. If you are comfortable submitting a reproducible bug report, you can do so via WordPress Trac. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs. Curious about testing releases in general and how to get started? Follow along with the testing initiatives in Make Core and join the #core-test channel on Making WordPress Slack. WordPress 6.5 will include many new features previously only available through the Gutenberg plugin. Learn more about Gutenberg updates since WordPress 6.4 in the What’s New in Gutenberg posts for versions 16.8, 16.9, 17.0, 17.1, 17.2, 17.3, 17.4, 17.5, 17.6, and 17.7 (scheduled for release on February 14). WordPress 6.5 Beta 1 contains approximately 681 enhancements and 488 bug fixes for the editor, including about 229 tickets for WordPress 6.5 Core. Vulnerability bounty doubles during Beta 1 The WordPress community sponsors a monetary reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities. This reward doubles during the period between Beta 1 on February 13 and the final Release Candidate (RC) scheduled for March 19. Please follow responsible disclosure practices as detailed in the project’s security practices and policies outlined on the HackerOne page and in the security white paper. Discover what’s on the way in WordPress 6.5 This year’s first major release will add finesse and fine-tuning to how you control your site-building experience, with lots to explore specifically for developers. You’ll find more ways to manage your fonts and styles, notable upgrades to synced patterns, a collection of Site Editor and performance updates to help you get things done, and new ways to leverage design tools in Classic themes. WordPress 6.5 will include breakthrough foundational APIs that will start to transform how you use blocks to build memorable experiences. This release invites you to dig into these early-stage frameworks, discover how you’d like to see them evolve, and have an impact on their future improvements and capabilities. Excited yet? Keep reading for some highlights. Meet the Font Library Initially slated for release in WordPress 6.4, the Font Library is one of those great things worth the wait. It gives you new capabilities for efficiently managing a vital piece of your site’s design—typography—without coding or extra steps. With the Font Library, you can handle fonts across your site regardless of your active theme—much like how you manage assets in the Media Library. You can install local fonts or Google Fonts, and it’s easily extensible, with the ability to add your own custom typography collections. Synced patterns get an upgrade Synced patterns bring efficiency to the design process, letting you make global changes to particular layouts with minimal effort. However, there’s often a need to make contextual changes when it comes to content. WordPress 6.5 introduces new enhancements to synced patterns that let you override the content in each specific instance. You can choose what content can be updated within a synced pattern—while maintaining the design and layout you’ve already created. Use it for templated pieces like recipes, testimonials, or case studies that use recurring elements to frame unique content. This major release will introduce overrides for the Paragraph, Image, Heading, and Button blocks, with support for more blocks to come as work on synced patterns continues. Connecting blocks and custom fields or other dynamic content WordPress 6.5 will finally make it possible to connect core block attributes to custom fields. This capability lets you use the value of a custom field without creating custom blocks. For example, a digital publication could use custom fields with Paragraph and Image blocks. It could pull information from its individual staff writer profiles to dynamically display on its team page, like headshots and names. The Block Bindings API powers this functionality and is designed to be extensible enough for developers to connect blocks to any dynamic content—not just custom fields. If your data is stored elsewhere, you can easily point blocks to that new source with only a few lines of code. This is the first step in a larger project to simplify how custom fields and other dynamic content are managed. The Interactivity API gets baked into Core What started as just a taste in WordPress 6.4 with the lightbox feature for images is officially making its way into Core. The Interactivity API is a new framework that offers developers a standardized method to bring interactive front-end experiences, or interactions, to blocks. It aims to simplify the process, with less dependencies on external tooling, while maintaining optimal performance. Interactions create engaging user experiences, whether showing new comments or fetching search results without reloading a page, allowing visitors to interact with content in real time, or incorporating effects like countdowns and transitional animations that surprise and delight. Check out this demo site to get a taste of what this framework can do. 6.5 is just the beginning of bringing this developer experience into Core. Find out how you can follow along with the work or lend a hand and test more features. Get more from your revisions Revisions are the markers of progress. For creative projects, they’re also a welcome fallback when you’re working through a new design or concept. This release brings more detail to your style revision history in the Site Editor. Style revisions in 6.5 present a more detailed picture of your work, with design updates like time stamps, quick summaries that outline changes, and the ability to see a full list of revisions made—not just the previous 100. View revisions from the Style Book to see changes that aren’t reflected in the template you’re working on. Style revisions are also newly available for templates and template parts, giving you a broader view of your site’s changes. Expect to see more work happening to expand and improve revisions across the WordPress experience. It’s a foundational part of the collaborative editing and workflows focus of the Gutenberg project’s Phase 3. Classic themes can opt into appearance tools As the design experience in Block themes evolves and improves, many of these upgrades are also available for Classic themes. Theme authors can choose to add support for appearance tools to any Classic theme—even without the use of theme.json. Opting in gives designers and site creators using Classic themes access to a varied set of design options, from spacing and border controls to typography and color options. Switching themes can feel like a big undertaking, and for folks who aren’t ready to jump into the flexibility of Block themes, these pathways to adoption can help ease that tension. Once a Classic theme gets initial support for appearance tools, more design options will be automatically added as they become available. More design tools are on the way Each WordPress release brings more thought and attention to the way you can create with the Site Editor. The latest improvements to the design experience help bring your creative vision to life: Background images for Group blocks get size and repeat support, letting you play with subtle or splashy ways to add visual interest to your layouts. Aspect ratio support for the Cover block gives you more control over your Cover block images’ shape and size. Shadow support added to more blocks to help create layouts with visual depth or add a little personality to your design. Site Editor updates to streamline your workflow Bring ease and simplicity to your site-building process with the latest advancements to the Site Editor’s capabilities, from important interface improvements to upgraded tools. Going beyond Group blocks, you can now rename every block in the List View. You can also rename or duplicate individual patterns to help keep them organized. Other notable UI improvements add access to your block settings with a quick right-click from List View, adjust preferences with consolidated settings in the Editor preferences panel, and the ability to use the block toolbar on hover when you’re in Distraction Free mode. You’ll also notice a cleaner and more unified link-building experience that improves link controls, making it easier to create and manage links in various blocks. This release has a bounty of drag-and-drop enhancements to make your editing experience feel more intuitive. You’ll notice helpful visual adjustments, like displaced items in List View when you drag them around to reorganize. You’ll also find that you can drag and drop anywhere you’d like in the Editor, from the very beginning to the end of you workspace. New Data Views in the Site Editor Every piece of your site comes with a library of information and data. Organizing it, finding what you need, and making informed changes should be as effortless as your site editing experience. WordPress 6.5 includes data views for pages, templates, patterns, and template parts. You can view data in a table or grid view, with a new UI for toggling fields and making bulk changes. It’s a refreshing and feature-rich experience that leads the way for the upcoming Admin Redesign project on the WordPress roadmap. Plugin dependencies improve the plugin experience WordPress 6.5 improves how users manage plugins that require other plugins. Plugin authors can supply a new Requires Plugins header with a comma-separated list of required plugin slugs from the WordPress.org Plugins repository, which will present users with links to install and activate those plugins first. Required plugins must remain active and installed for as long as plugins that require them are active and installed. If any required plugins become inactive or uninstalled, the plugins that require them will be automatically deactivated. Big performance gains across the editing experience and more WordPress 6.5 contains more than 110 performance-related updates, including an impressive increase in speed and efficiency across both the Post Editor and Site Editor. Loading is over two times faster than in 6.4, with input processing speed increasing to nearly four times faster than the previous release. You’ll also find yourself navigating through the Site Editor six times faster than before. The loading time for translated sites gets a boost due to merging Performant Translations into Core. This greatly improves the load time of translated sites across the board by loading multiple locales simultaneously, making switching between them a faster and more enjoyable experience. Accessibility highlights Ensuring that WordPress remains highly accessible is crucial for its success and fulfilling the mission of democratizing publishing. With this in mind, 6.5 will ship more than 65 updates to improve accessibility throughout the platform. These updates include fixes to contrast settings, cursor focus, submenus, positioning of elements, and more. For more information on specific tickets and improvements, please visit WordPress Trac and GitHub for Gutenberg. Please note that features highlighted in this post are subject to change before the final release. Just for you: a Beta 1 haiku Freedom to publish Blocks, fonts, patterns all around Design as you wish Thank you to the following contributors for collaborating on this post: @dansoschin, @rajinsharwar, @webcommsat, @courane01, @hellosatya, @bph, @greenshady, @richtabor, @priethor, @annezazu, @joedolson, @santosguillamot, @cwhitmore, @costdev, @ehtis, @huzaifaalmesbah, @audrasjb, @get_dave. View the full article

The People of WordPress series shares inspiring stories of how people’s lives can change for the better through WordPress and its global community of contributors. In this edition, we feature Sunita Rai, a content marketer originally from a remote village in the hills of Nepal. Sunita’s journey to academic and professional success, with help from the WordPress community, will inspire many. A strong desire to acquire knowledge Schools first opened in Sunita’s village in the late 1970s, but most locals, including her parents, had neither the funds nor opportunities to complete their education. Over the years, they realized that an education could open doors for their children. Sunita’s parents vowed to ensure she received a full education, no matter the costs or hardships. Her father worked as a seasonal laborer in India and ensured Sunita and her siblings could go to school with the proper supplies. Her mother cared for everything at home, both the family and the farm. Money was scarce, but determination was abundant. To finish high school, Sunita moved in with her aunt in a nearby city. After graduation, she worked as a teacher. One of the biggest challenges was speaking and writing in English, a requirement for her first job teaching at a private English-language school. Her own education had used Nepali as the language of instruction. Fortunately, she enjoyed writing in English and became more fluent with practice. She discovered that she would always want a career where she could continue learning. On top of a demanding teaching schedule, Sunita continued her studies at a college affiliated with Tribhuvan University. She knew that doing both would be difficult, but she wanted to be able to support her family while pursuing ambitious life and career goals. Earning a bachelor’s degree was a hugely motivating achievement that inspired her to begin a master’s degree in sociology. Teaching for more than five years had been a full-time commitment, with hours of extra work at home. Preparing lessons, grading assignments, and handling exams made it difficult for her to find the time needed for her own studies. Sunita decided she needed more time for her coursework, so she left her teaching job and sought work that would allow her to focus on her studies while still earning money. From teaching to writing to WordPress After an extensive search, Sunita landed a content writing job at a successful WordPress development firm in Nepal. Her salary as a content writer wasn’t high, but it grew steadily over time. She would later gain some supplementary freelance work after presenting at a WordCamp. She was able to help support her family as she grew in her career, and now she could do more. I’m fortunate to have had the education that gave me the capacity to aspire, get into a WordPress job, meet people from around the world, and tell my story! Sunita Early in her career, especially in her early days with WordPress, Sunita benefited from the support of excellent mentors who played pivotal roles in her career development, nurturing her skills in content writing, SEO, and general confidence. Now, she has mentored other content writers and advocates for mentoring programs. Sunita has engaged in WordCamps, sharing her wealth of knowledge and experiences. Her first WordCamp was WordCamp Nepal 2015, a pivotal moment where she connected with WordPress enthusiasts from various Nepalese and international companies. She experienced a welcoming environment that inspired her to become involved in the WordPress community. At WordCamp Kathmandu in 2016, Sunita delivered a talk on SEO Copywriting for WordPress, marking a significant milestone in her journey. She later joined a panel discussion titled “Girls in WordPress – Story, Experience, Opportunity, and Career” at WordCamp Biratnagar 2018. Most recently, Sunita helped organize speakers at WordCamp Kathmandu 2022 and 2023, and also spoke outside her home country at WordCamp Asia 2023 and WordCamp Sylhet, Bangladesh 2023. These events and her talks, helped her grow stronger connections within the global WordPress community and encourage more women speakers. Translating WordPress and empowering others Reading and writing in your own language is powerful. For Sunita, translation is crucial in bridging gaps and granting access to those with limited platforms to express and share their passions. When she discovered that she could translate WordPress into Nepali, she joined the many other volunteers on the Polyglots team. “Translating WordPress to Nepali means empowering my people to access the freedom that WordPress provides.” Sunita Rai Sunita emphasizes that coding skills are not a prerequisite for contribution: “The potential impact you can have on the WordPress community is enormous, across areas from local meetups and WordCamps to testing and translating.” She highlights her own experience as a potential path for others. “WordPress has had a profound impact on my life… the freedom to work on my own time, to be financially independent, and to overcome my inferiority complex.” Her advice to anyone getting started with WordPress: “Get involved in the WordPress community and contribute as early as possible. By participating, you will better understand the project and its people, so you can advocate WordPress in a better way. It will offer you a sense of satisfaction or meaning as well as success in your career.” Share the stories Help share these open source contributor stories and grow the community. Meet more WordPressers in the People of WordPress series, or continue your own WordPress journey at Learn.WordPress.org Thanks to Sunita Rai for sharing about her adventures in WordPress, and to Abha Thakor, Nalini Thakor, Pooja Derashri, Meher Bala, Nicholas Garofalo, Chloe Bringmann, Maja Loncar and Mary Baum for interviews, editorial, images, and reviews. This People of WordPress feature is inspired by an essay originally published on HeroPress.com, a community initiative created by Topher DeRosia. It highlights people in the WordPress community who have overcome barriers and whose stories might otherwise go unheard. #HeroPress View the full article

January kicked off with big plans for the WordPress project in the year ahead. Work on the WordPress 6.5 release is underway, with Beta 1 scheduled for next week and early testing opportunities. Let’s catch up on all the exciting updates from the past month. Looking at 2024 In a recent episode of WP Briefing, WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy discusses some of the big-picture goals for WordPress this year. The main highlights include Phase 3 of the WordPress roadmap, which involves collaborative editing and significant updates to writing and design workflows. Another major focus is Data Liberation, a new initiative introduced at State of the Word 2023 with the ultimate goal of creating a more open web. Learn more about Data Liberation in 2024. WordPress 6.5 is on its way Preparations for WordPress 6.5, the first major release of 2024, are in full swing. The release squad was announced last month, and the next milestone will be Beta 1, scheduled for February 13. Curious about what version 6.5 will bring? Check out this Hallway Hangout recap to learn about some upcoming features. You can also participate in this early testing opportunity to experience them first-hand and provide feedback. Until 6.5 is released, you can upgrade to WordPress 6.4.3. This version includes numerous security and maintenance updates. New in the Gutenberg plugin Three new versions of Gutenberg shipped in January: Gutenberg 17.4 featured improvements to List View and Style Revisions, more flexibility for background images in Group blocks, and significant advancements to the Data Views experience for the Templates page. Gutenberg 17.5 made good progress in combining the Post Editor and Site Editor by introducing a shared preference panel, among other highlights. Gutenberg 17.6 included the ability to extend allowed blocks within a parent block, along with several improvements to Block Hooks, the Data Views experience, and the Site and Post Editor unification. WordPress 6.5 is slated to include some impactful changes and new features to current revision functionality in the Site Editor. Read more » Team updates The second cohort of the WordPress Contributor Mentorship Program is open for applications. This program aims to connect experienced WordPress contributors with newcomers or those looking to enhance their skills within the community. Both mentees and mentors can apply by February 7, 2024. If you are a part of the LGBTQ+ community and participate in the Mentorship Program, you may be interested in this LGBTQ+Press Empowerment Grant. The Global Community Sponsors for 2024 have been announced. The Community team reflected on the “NextGen Events” pilot project and recommended adopting an expanded scope for WordPress events, encouraging a broad range of innovative event formats. In 2023, the WordPress Core team shipped 2211 commits, and 472 people made their first contribution to WordPress Core. Explore more stats in this report. The Performance team released a roadmap with this year’s focus areas. Are you looking to broaden your knowledge and improve your WordPress skills? Check out what’s new on Learn WordPress. Catch up on all the news in the WordPress development space with the latest edition of What’s new for developers? https://wordpress.org/news/2023/10/episode-64-patterns-in-wordpress/ Requests for feedback and testing Community team members proposed a pilot program to test GatherPress, a community-developed plugin, as a WordPress.org event management tool. New Five for the Future program enhancements were suggested based on insights gathered during the WordPress Community Summit. You can help improve the program by sharing your feedback before February 7. A new proposal recommends the next steps for the Full Site Editing (FSE) Outreach Program. Input is welcome by February 12. Members of the Community team are requesting feedback and ideas to help shape the future of the new WordPress Events page. WordPress events WordCamp Asia 2024 is just around the corner! Organizers announced a tentative schedule and a Diversity Scholarship to fund the attendance of two active project contributors to their first flagship WordCamp. Tickets for WordCamp Europe 2024 are on sale. The organizing team is looking for volunteers to help make the event in Torino, Italy, memorable. WordCamp US 2024 shared details of the event to be held September 17-20 in Portland, Oregon. This WordCamp will have a strong focus on community collaboration with two Contributor Days. Check out these other WordPress events happening soon: WordPress Photo Festival (online) on February 3-10 WordCamp Phoenix, USA, on February 9-10 WordCamp Pune, India, on February 17 WordCamp Kansai, Japan, on February 23-24 Have a story we should include in the next issue of The Month in WordPress? Fill out this quick form to let us know. Thanks to Satyam Vishwakarma (Satya), Jenni McKinnon, and Lauren Stein for contributing to this edition of The Month in WordPress. Subscribe to WordPress News Join other subscribers and receive WordPress news directly in your inbox. Subscribe View the full article

In the latest WordPress Briefing, Josepha Haden Chomphosy explores the reasons for choosing a website supporting your digital presence, covering topics from trust-building to professionalism to owning a unique online domain. Credits Host: Josepha Haden Chomphosy Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Brett McSherry Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Show Notes Getting Started With WordPress: Get Set Up Creating a 4-page business website Download WordPress 6.4.3 Small List of Big Things Early Opportunities to Test WordPress 6.5 Call for Mentees & Mentors: Contributor Mentorship Program Cohort #2 Data Liberation in 2024 WordCamp Asia 2024 Tickets Transcripts [00:00:00] Josepha: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go. [00:00:29] (Intro music) [00:00:39] Josepha: My friends, it is February. For many of us, that means we’ve already fallen off track on our New Year’s resolutions, but not you, intrepid WordPresser, especially you, newly found WordPresser who is still on the fence about needing a website, and I get it. It seems like a lot of work, and even if you shoot for the moon, it’s not clear which star you’ll land on. [00:01:01] Josepha: It feels easier to open a Facebook page or launch a new Instagram account, get a channel going on YouTube, but here’s a secret they won’t tell you. It’s just as much work. And even if you crack the code on today’s algorithm, you don’t own anything you build there, not the content, not the audience. So if you’re gonna make the effort to build anyway, why not build it in your space? It can be scary to take that kind of time. So, if you’re not convinced yet, let me give you a few other reasons why you should choose a website over some social media thing. I’ve got a list here, and they build on one another, really. But the first thing is a website covers the five W’s: who, what, when, where, and why. It’s basic information, I know, but it’s what people need to know when they’re looking at your product or company. The phone book, whether you had the yellow pages or the white pages, those are long gone, but that doesn’t mean that the need for that information is gone. When people are researching the right service or product to solve their problems, they’re getting online to do it. So you should be there, and your information should be easy to find. [00:02:12] Josepha: Which brings us right into item number two. When people know these things about you when, they know who you are, what you’re doing, when to get to you, where you are, why you’re doing it. Having that information increases trust and makes you look more professional, and I’ve seen that be counterintuitive for folks. I mean, it’s a digital asset, after all. But overwhelmingly, we see consumers who are well-researched by the time they get to us. They’ve looked at all of your competitors already and checked to see if you are a human, if you share some of their values, and how you manage waste or, complaints, or praise. You can never know who is looking for you. So, making it all as clear and easy to see as possible makes you more trustworthy. And the more trustworthy and professional you look, then number three, the more chances you have to bring in good leads and contacts, which can turn into sales or, at the very least, a sales opportunity. And it’s important to have good leads and contacts. Right? [00:03:17] Josepha: If you have your information out there on a website, then people can sort of prequalify themselves. If they already have a sense for whether they are a good fit for your product or service, then fingers crossed. You can spend most of your time with people who are making serious inquiries. And coming in at four, you can do this any way you want with words or art, NFTs of your latest work, or video tutorials. It lets you tell your story in ways that other mediums necessarily have to limit. And, importantly, you can still do those things elsewhere. Right? But having essentially a digital home online that is yours, keep your stuff online in a place you own and operate, then draw people to you through those other channels. Make it all work together. [00:04:07] Josepha: I have a fifth thing, mostly because I like lists of either three or five, and the list I had was four, but also because it’s true. Number five is still true. Getting domains is fun. You’ve got something to share with the world, and your domain name is title and, story, and first impression. And isn’t it great instead of having to say you can find me at LinkedIn, slash in slash, etc.? You can say something quick and memorable. Josepha.blog or whatever it is you registered. Getting domains is fun. It’s the fifth thing, and I tried to act like it was no big deal. But, also, it’s like one of the first things you have to do, and it’s kind of a big deal. You can have your own domain, and it can say a lot for you. So there you have it, some basic and not-so-basic reasons why you should have a website. If you are convinced or at least intrigued, I’ve got a few tutorials that can help you get started that I’ll link in the show notes. [00:05:03] (Music interlude) [00:05:11] Josepha: Which brings us now to our small list of big things. I have four big things for you today: four-ish. So, first things first, I have some early opportunities for y’all to test our next major release. Our next major release is WordPress 6.5. The target release date is March 26th. But coming up here on February 13th, we have Beta 1 scheduled. That’s an early opportunity for you to provide feedback. A lot of the features that we have coming in this release are big, and they’re moving quite quickly. And so, if you are already a routine WordPress user, pop on over into the core channel or onto make.WordPress.org/core and get your hands on that beta release. We could use a lot of feedback from you on that. The second thing that I have is that the second cohort of the Contributor Mentorship Program has opened up, and we’re calling for participants whether you want to be mentored or mentor somebody. We are accepting applications for both. This is a fantastic opportunity for experienced contributors to help other people learn how to do this. And also, if you are learning to contribute to open source and to WordPress for the first time, I know it can be scary. It took me many, many tries to really get started. And so this is a great opportunity for anyone who is trying to contribute in a new way, in a different way. [00:06:35] Josepha: The third thing that I have is there’s a post up about Data Liberation in 2024. This is one of our big focuses for the year. A web where being locked into a system should be a thing of the past, and migrating your site to WordPress or around the WordPress ecosystem should be doable with essentially 1-click, and, so, there’s a lot of work that we’re doing there. You can find it on WordPress.org/data-liberation. There will be a link to that in our show notes, but also, there is a lot of work that has to be done, not only to get those resources together but also some companion tools to the resources. So head on over there, take a look at what’s out there. And if you have some stuff to contribute, share that too. [00:07:21] Josepha: And my fourth thing, my final thing, is that WordCamp Asia is about a month away. So you still have time to plan your attendance. If that’s something that you want to do, head on over to asia.wordcamp.org to learn more. And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Don’t forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app or subscribe directly on WordPress.org/news. You’ll get a friendly reminder whenever there’s a new episode. If you liked what you heard today, share it with a fellow WordPresser or specifically for this one; if you liked what you heard, share it with a fellow collaborator whether they know WordPress or not. But if you had questions about what you heard, you can share those with me at wpbriefing@WordPress.org. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Thanks for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. [00:08:10] (Music outro) View the full article

This security and maintenance release features 5 bug fixes on Core, 16 bug fixes for the Block Editor, and 2 security fixes. Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately. Backports are also available for other major WordPress releases, 4.1 and later. You can download WordPress 6.4.3 from WordPress.org, or visit your WordPress Dashboard, click “Updates”, and then click “Update Now”. If you have sites that support automatic background updates, the update process will begin automatically. WordPress 6.4.3 is a short-cycle release. The next major release will be version 6.5 planned for 26 March 2024. You can review a summary of the maintenance updates in this release by reading the Release Candidate announcement. For further information on this release, please visit the HelpHub site. Security updates included in this release The security team would like to thank the following people for responsibly reporting vulnerabilities, and allowing them to be fixed in this release: m4tuto for finding a PHP File Upload bypass via Plugin Installer (requiring admin privileges). @_s_n_t of @pentestltd working with Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative for finding an RCE POP Chains vulnerability. Thank you to these WordPress contributors This release was led by Sarah Norris, Joe McGill, and Aaron Jorbin. WordPress 6.4.3 would not have been possible without the contributions of the following people. Their asynchronous coordination to deliver maintenance and security fixes into a stable release is a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress community. Aki Hamano, Alex Concha, Alex Lende, Alex Stine, Andrea Fercia, Andrei Draganescu, Andrew Ozz, Andrew Serong, Andy Fragen, Ari Stathopoulos, Artemio Morales, ben, bobbingwide, Carlos Bravo, Carolina Nymark, Česlav Przywara, Colin Stewart, Daniel Käfer, Daniel Richards, Dominik Schilling, Ella, Erik, George Mamadashvili, Greg Ziółkowski, Isabel Brison, Joen A., John Blackbourn, Jonathan Desrosiers, joppuyo, Lax Mariappan, luisherranz, Markus, Michal Czaplinski, Mukesh Panchal, Nik Tsekouras, Niluthpal Purkayastha, Noah Allen, Pascal Birchler, Peter Wilson, ramonopoly, Riad Benguella, Sergey Biryukov, Stephen Bernhardt, Teddy Patriarca, Tonya Mork How to contribute To get involved in WordPress core development, head over to Trac, pick a ticket, and join the conversation in the #core and #6-5-release-leads channels. Need help? Check out the Core Contributor Handbook. As a final reminder, The WordPress Security Team will never email you requesting that you install a plugin or theme on your site, and will never ask for an administrator username and password. Please stay vigilant against phishing attacks. Thanks to Angela Jin, Ehtisham S., Jb Audras, and Marius L. J. for proofreading. View the full article

In the latest WordPress Briefing, Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy revisits our roots in blogging and breaks down the essentials of starting your first WordPress blog. Tune in to Episode 71 for practical tips and inspiration to kickstart your blogging journey. Credits Host: Josepha Haden Chomphosy Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Brett McSherry Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Show Notes WordPress 6.4.2 Download Getting Started with WordPress: Get Setup How to Make a WordPress Blog Social Learning Space Event WordPress Plugins WordPress Themes Small List of Big Things A Year in Review With Themes Team WordPress End-of-Year Celebrations! Leap into 2024 with these Site Editor Tools WordPress Developer Blog 2024 Team Reps – Watch for updates as we move into 2024. Each team in the WordPress project goes through a process to review and elect new team reps. Those elections are happening now. Big Pictures Goals 2024 Transcripts [00:00:00] Josepha: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go. [00:00:28] (Intro music) [00:00:40] Josepha: Today, we’ve got a throwback episode about blogging. If you’re like me, you sometimes miss the early days of blogs, where the words were a little more pensive, and the images were a little less professional. If you’re on a slow hobby journey like so many of us are right now, give this one a listen. [00:00:58] (music interlude) [00:01:05] Josepha: 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 own 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 20 years into our journey, blogging is still a key part of what WordPress enables you to do. That’s because, even after those 20 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. [00:02:06] Josepha: And just by the way, if you heard the word blog right now and thought, Oh, Jospeha, 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. 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, but also 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’t 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 kind of the words you want in your domain, then you can be a bit flexible about what is there. [00:03:30] Josepha: 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 mention 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 and provide daily backups, and have customer support if something goes really wrong. [00:04:23] Josepha: So it ranges all the way from full service like that, all the way down to essentially zero service, just kind of hands off. 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 that. 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 services with the existing host that you chose or moving to a different host; however, that works out for you. [00:05:09] Josepha: 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. The other option that on the like zero, zero service side, that’s not quite fair, but you know, on 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 you know how to work in this thing called cPanel, etc. 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. [00:06:17] Josepha: In the show notes, you’ll find a link to one of the LearnWP courses for getting started with WordPress. There’s a section on choosing a host, as well as various other early steps of this process. 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 really a very good guide. All right. So 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. [00:07:03] Josepha: 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 CMSs in general, you can simply remove that and start fresh. 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 be moderated, and stuff. And so, the most fun task for everyone is choosing a theme. But 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 that. [00:08:24] Josepha: 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 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 WordPress instance ships with a theme, and it is fully functional 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. [00:09:20] Josepha: 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 to it. 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 themes. 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. [00:10:05] Josepha: 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 as well, 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 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. 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, hear some things that could make you feel a little nervous about doing this for the first time. [00:11:10] Josepha: Things like the five-second installation, which WordPress has been famous for 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. I can say with confidence that once you learn it, it’s easy. We are the easiest of the hard options for CMSs 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. [00:12:01] Josepha: 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? [00:12:18] (Music interlude) [00:12:25] Josepha: And now, our small list of big things. Today we’ve got some look-back items and some look-forward items. So let’s hop right in. First thing is we have a year in review with the themes team. So much amazing work has been done by the themes team over the past year, both for reviewing themes and creating them. So I’ll leave a link to those in the show notes. We also have a post out that just has some general celebrations from teams around the community. I’ll leave a link to that. It probably has been linked in quite a few places, but you know, we don’t always embrace those moments of celebration. We don’t always embrace our wins. And so it’s always good to share those early and often. There are probably more than just those two. So if you posted one or you saw a really interesting one that you think that we should know about, don’t forget to share it. [00:13:16] Josepha: Next, we have a leap into 2024 with Site Editor tools. So, on the new Developer Blog, if you haven’t seen it yet, there is a lot of excellent content there for whether you are like an advanced developer in WordPress or you’re kind of intermediate and ready to move into your advanced developer era. The Site Editor will give you a powerful way to visually create every part of your site and tell your story. And this post will help you to kind of see how to handle everything from big style changes to simple copy updates, all in a single place. We want to make sure that you get the most out of your WordPress this year. And that post will give you a few standout tools and features that you’ll want to try. You’ll also want to keep an eye out for updates as we move into 2024 around team reps. So each team in the WordPress project goes through a process to review and elect team reps, and elections are happening now. [00:14:12] Josepha: Along with things that are happening now that you should keep an eye on, the annual goals, our big picture post has gone out as well. It went out at the end of the week last week. There’ll be a link to all of these in the show notes. And yeah, keep an eye out for, hopefully, a fantastic 2024 in WordPress. And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Don’t forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app or subscribe directly on WordPress.org/news. You’ll get a friendly reminder whenever there’s a new episode. And if you like what you heard today, share it with a fellow WordPresser, or if you have questions about what you heard, you can share those with me at WPbriefing@WordPress.org. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Thanks for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. [00:14:57] (Music outro) View the full article

Imagine a more open web where people can switch between any platform of their choosing. A web where being locked into a system is a thing of the past. This is the web I’ve always wanted to see. That’s why I announced a new initiative called Data Liberation for 2024. Migrating your site to WordPress, or exporting all your content from WordPress, should be possible in one click. I want WordPress’ export format to become the lingua franca of CMSes, whether coming to WordPress or moving within WordPress. I often hear about folks across the WordPress community duplicating efforts when creating scripts and workflows to move users to WordPress. Imagine if we shared those resources instead and built community-owned plugins that anyone could use! But it should be more than plugins; workflows, tutorials, and helper scripts should be shared, too. I want this resource to have space to include moving from social networks, moving from a page builder to core blocks, switching from classic to blocks, and improving WordPress current canonical plugins for importing. You can help! Of course, the heart of any open source project is the community that shows up to build it. My hope is that this marks the start of a new contribution pathway, separate from core teams, that allows folks to contribute what they’ve learned and what they’ve created to help others move to WordPress. I expect this emphasis on migration will also influence future development, both in core and with recommended community or canonical plugins. There are a few things that I think will be key to making this project a success: A dedicated landing page on WordPress.org following a WordPress.org/and/[platform-name] format. A forum used for non-review user feedback and general discussion. A dedicated Slack channel. Moderation within hours rather than days. Listed on WordPress GitHub with syncing for individual commits to SVN for history in both places. By complementing the community’s existing efforts—the Five for the Future program, the Learn WordPress initiative, a focus on internationalization, etc.—my hope is that this will help even more people see themselves in the WordPress project, providing fresh momentum for WordCamps and meetups. It’s never been more crucial to champion openness on the web. Bringing focused attention to improved portability will untether users and increase their freedom like never before. View the full article