Wordpress

Curious about WordPress’s big-picture items for 2024? Phase 3, Data Liberation, new meetups, and more, get the spotlight in this episode. Join Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy for all this, plus a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. Credits Host: Josepha Haden Chomphosy Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Brett McSherry Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Show Notes Real-Time Collaboration Make WordPress Core Data Liberation Make WordPress Plugins WordCamp Events Small List of Big Things Overflow Questions from State of the Word 2023 in Madrid, Spain Annual Meetup Survey – This is the final chance to share your feedback on WordPress meetups for 2024 and how we can improve the program in the future. 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: Hello, my dears, and welcome to 2024. I hope you’ve had a lovely break. At the top of the year, I like to look around and gather the projects that the community is interested in. We can’t always commit to everything, and sometimes even the things we plan to do can’t make it across the finish line. In the next few weeks, I’ll be publishing kind of the big picture goals for the year, but I wanted to share a little bit about what I’ve collected so far. [00:01:05] Josepha: Firstly, we’ve got Phase 3. This has been called a few things over the years: collaborative editing, multiplayer, co-editing. But whatever it’s been called, the biggest changes to writing and design workflows are likely to happen in this phase. A redesigned workflow can be a bit of a shock. But fortunately, we already have a prototype out there. I’ll include a link to some resources in the show notes, or of course, you can always stop by make.WordPress.org/core for some insights. But I would encourage you to, at the very least, get your hands on that prototype to see what it looks like is coming in Phase 3 so that you can be aware and provide your feedback. The next thing on our list is Data Liberation. This is a new-to-us project that was introduced at State of the Word. Fortunately, though, it’s not a new concept overall. Data Liberation is actually one of the earliest ideas that sold me on WordPress. The idea that you could set up a site for a client, or yourself, and that hard work wasn’t lost if something went wrong, was really important to me. It’s been a long time since we put any effort into our importers and exporters, and I think this will be a good focus for the year. [00:02:14] Josepha: The next thing that I’ve picked up, kind of a list of three things, but there are three mid-sized areas that I want us to pay attention to this year: plugins, old tickets, and new meetups. Plugins, because they really have turned a corner on where they ended 2023. A lot of work has been done to make sure that they’ve streamlined some efforts, gotten some better onboarding for folks as they’re going in, and we could really use a hand to keep that momentum going. Old tickets, because it’s something that we hope for year after year when we’re talking to people about what they want in new releases. So often, part of what they say is some way to work through all of these old things that have been around forever, some with patches. And why not, after all? And then new meetups, because I really still think that meetups are the best intro to WordPress. No matter whether you’re wanting to become a developer eventually or, like, the community-building aspect is the thing that hooks you forever. Meetups are the place to encourage those and discover those. [00:03:20] Josepha: The next thing on my list is also two things. It’s two things, but kind of a guess at the moment. There are two summit items that I want us to try to consider this year. So the first one is contributor recognition. Acknowledgment and recognition, I think, are two different things, and there was an entire series of sessions at the summit where we talked about it. And so I think that it’s worth us digging in on that. The other thing from the summit that I would really like us to all kind of dig in on is accessibility, how we do it, how we confirm it, what we think we should do versus what we actually do, and see what we can move on the needle there. And the last thing is sort of a personal wish. I think it’s about time that we take a look at the way that we kind of manage ourselves as a project, the way that we do our meetings and report on our successes, things like that. And I realize that this is a big thing, and it might be a little bit scary. But, I mean, we’ve been doing this for a really long time, and it’s probably as good a time as any, frankly, to look at what we’re doing by habit or tradition and see if it still suits us. So, that’s my back of the napkin set of notes so far. Keep an eye out in the next couple of weeks for the annual Big Picture post so you can get some context, notes, and discussion opportunities. And, of course, anything that has shown up that’s a bit bigger, a bit more final will be in there as well. But first, our small list of big things. [00:04:52] (Music interlude) [00:05:00] Josepha: Firstly, State of the Word had nearly 200 questions submitted, and Matt has been answering the overflow on make.WordPress.org/project. So, I’ll include a link, but head on over there to that post if you would like to catch up on those. And then the second item, and last item, is that you’ve got a few more days left to give us feedback on WordPress meetups in 2023, and give us an idea of what we can do to improve those. I believe those close on January 14th. I really love my local meetup, and I hope that we can get some of that same sort of feeling going in all of yours, too. [00:05:33] 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 again for tuning in for the WordPress Briefing, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. [00:06:02] (Music outro) View the full article

As 2023 came to a close, WordPress bid farewell with the much-anticipated annual State of the Word and the 6.5 roadmap, among other exciting updates. Read on to learn more about the community’s end-of-year celebrations and catch a sneak peek of what’s in store for the year ahead. Highlights from State of the Word On December 11, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg delivered his annual State of the Word keynote in Madrid, Spain, marking the first international edition of the event. Nearly 200 WordPress enthusiasts and tech industry leaders gathered in person to hear what’s next for WordPress—with a large audience joining online or from one of the 47 watch parties held across 18 countries. The keynote highlighted last year’s milestones and showcased compelling demos, providing a glimpse into the upcoming developments for the Site Editor, Collaboration phase, and Admin redesign. Matt also introduced 2024’s focus on Data Liberation, aiming to unlock digital barriers and frictionless migrations into WordPress for a more open web. The event concluded with a Q&A session and this follow-up post. Roadmap to WordPress 6.5 WordPress 6.5 is scheduled for release on March 26, 2024. This major release is set to introduce a new Font Library for easy global font management, support for Appearance Tools in Classic Themes, Data Views for templates and patterns, and more robust revisions across the editing experience, among other highlights. 6.5 will also include new APIs like Interactivity, Custom Fields, and Block Binding that expand block capabilities and underpin features like Synced Pattern Overrides. Learn more about the features planned for WordPress 6.5 in this roadmap post. Don’t wait for the next release to optimize your creative workflows with these powerful Site Editor tools. New in the Gutenberg plugin Two new versions of Gutenberg shipped in December: Gutenberg 17.2 introduced improvements to the site editing experience, including the ability to drag and drop blocks to the top and bottom of documents and sticky table headers. The update also enhanced the Interactivity API docs and addressed numerous bug fixes. Gutenberg 17.3 featured a summary of changes in the global styles revision history, an updated preferences panel, and a new social icon for the Gravatar service, along with the ongoing development of Phase 3 features. https://wordpress.org/news/2023/10/episode-64-patterns-in-wordpress/ Team updates Openverse introduced new features to filter sensitive content, aiming for a more accessible and safer browsing experience. This update marks the beginning of a significant initiative to enhance content safety tools. Matrix contributors announced the decision to pause the Making WordPress Slack migration to Matrix and the factors contributing to it. The redesign of the Developer Resources section went live last month. Are you searching for events in your local community? Explore the recently launched WordPress.org Events page—your new central hub for discovering upcoming events or applying to organize one. In 2023, WordPress significantly improved Core Web Vitals (CWV) across sites. The overall passing rates went up from 28.31% to 36.44% on mobile and from 32.55% to 40.80% on desktop, making both WordPress and the whole web perform better. Volunteers are needed for 2024’s WordPress major releases. If you’re interested, now’s the time to get involved! Check out all the community achievements and contributions that moved the WordPress project closer to its goals in 2023. https://wordpress.org/news/2023/10/episode-64-patterns-in-wordpress/ Requests for feedback & testing Complete the 2023 Annual Meetup Survey before January 14, 2024, and help strengthen WordPress meetups in the future. WordPress events WordCamp Asia has opened registrations for its Contributor Day. The conference will be held in Taipei, Taiwan, on March 7-9, 2024. WordCamp Europe’s call for speakers is open until January 15, 2024. Don’t miss the chance to be part of this event by either submitting your speaking proposals or supporting it as a sponsor. Mark your calendars! WordCamp US 2024 is headed to Portland, Oregon, from September 17 to 20, as revealed during the State of the Word. Check out these WordPress events happening soon: Kolkata CareerCamp, India on January 6, 2024 WordCamp Nepal on January 12-13, 2024 WordCamp Zaragoza, Spain on January 19-20, 2024 WordPress Web Challenge, Indonesia on January 27, 2024 Have a story we should include in the next issue of The Month in WordPress? Fill out this quick form to let us know. Thank you to Bernard Meyer, Nicholas Garofalo, 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

The Site Editor gives you a powerful way to visually create every part of your site and tell your story. It lets you handle everything from big stylistic changes to simple copy updates all in a single place. To help you make the most of this new way to WordPress, here are a few standout tools and features you’ll want to try. Command Palette Think of the Command Palette as the ultimate shortcut tool, letting you do more with less clicks and without needing to remember where each option might be. It’s available across the editing experience, whether you’re switching between templates in the Site Editor or toggling open settings in the Post Editor, with specific contextual options depending on where you are. You can use the keyboard shortcut Cmd+K on Mac or Ctrl+K on Windows to activate it and get started. If you think of a command that doesn’t exist yet that would help with your workflow, open a feature request issue so we can consider adding it. Read more about everything you can do with the Command Palette, including a list of available commands. Style Book The Style Book helps you see all the blocks on your site as you style them. It’s built into the Styles section and can be toggled on/off as you’d like. This is especially useful when you’re aiming for design consistency for a client, trying to see how a change might impact a block that might not be visible, or wanting to get a different look at how a style variation will switch things up. Work is also underway for the next WordPress release to integrate the Style Book into Style revisions to allow for an at-a-glance view of changes made. Learn more about how best to use the Style Book. Styling shortcuts Sometimes you get a design just right—the color contrast, the perfect padding, the exact font size. Instead of needing to manually recreate the design or copy/paste the block to fill in with new content, you have two powerful options built into the editing experience: copy/paste styles and apply styles globally for all instances of the desired block. Copying and pasting styles is perfect for more nuanced and smaller changes, like headings on a landing page that you intentionally want to be distinct. Applying changes globally is best for blocks like buttons and for changes that are likely to work well across layouts, like setting a specific border radius and color. This helps keep the creativity flowing and makes achieving design consistency across your site much easier. Read more about the various styling options available. Distraction free mode Just like an artist might need to take a few steps back to view their in-progress artwork, sometimes we need to get a different view of our site before diving back in. Distraction free offers you that alternate perspective with a pared-down experience that lets you focus purely on creating, like: Hiding the top toolbar until one intentionally hovers over where it typically sits. Removing many of the top toolbar buttons. Automatically closing any open sidebars, like block settings and list view. Hiding the insertion point indicator, reducing visual clutter. Hiding the block toolbar for individual blocks. It’s worth noting that this mode can be used when writing posts and pages too! For an added bonus and more views of your site, you can use the preview options to see how your site might look across different devices. Learn more about making the most out of Distraction free mode. Patterns Patterns are a collection of blocks that make it simple to add complex layouts and designs to any WordPress site without starting from scratch. They save time by reducing duplication and ensuring consistency. You can create your own, use theme-provided patterns, or lean on the Pattern Directory. You can also specify whether to sync your patterns so that one change applies to all parts of your site, or to keep them unsynced so you can customize each instance. For any patterns you create, you can assign categories to make them easy to find and organize. Use the Inserter with easy filtering options to add patterns to your content, and head to the dedicated Patterns section in the Site Editor to create or edit patterns to your liking. Learn more about creating patterns. List View List View is the go-to tool for navigating between layers of your content, selecting exactly what you need, and getting a sense of how everything fits together. Similar to the Style Book and Distraction free mode, you can toggle it on/off as you’d like. It’s currently visible in the Top Toolbar and will remain open as you navigate through your site. Beyond providing a simple view of the layers of your site, there are more recent additions to List View that makes the tool even more powerful: See previews of your images for Image and Gallery blocks reflected in List View to make it easier to find what you need. The Escape key deselects blocks to make it easier to purely preview your content without any blocks selected. Lean on a keyboard shortcut for duplicating blocks quickly: CMD+Shift+D for Mac or Control + Shift + D for Windows. Drag and drop blocks at any level directly within List View. Rename Group blocks and have the custom name reflected in List View for improved organization. Here’s how a few of these improvements come together: Learn more about using List View. As you explore these tools, remember that, except for the Style Book, you can use these features when writing posts and pages too. Expect the Site Editor and other tools to evolve with each release. To get a sneak peek at what’s planned for the next major WordPress release in March, check out the roadmap and stay tuned. Subscribe to WordPress News Join other subscribers and receive WordPress news directly in your inbox. Subscribe Thank you to the contributors who collaborated on this post: Nicholas Garofalo, Lauren Stein, Joen Asmussen. View the full article

In this episode, WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy reflects on the recent 2023 State of the Word, which took place in Madrid, Spain, and some of the highlights of the work across the WordPress open source project. Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@WordPress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Credits Host: Josepha Haden Chomphosy Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Brett McSherry Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Show Notes State of the Word Recap WordPress Contributor Mentorship Program: Pilot Program Proposal WordPress Developer Blog WordPress End of Year Celebrations! Small List of Big Things Introducing Enhanced Content Safety Features on Openverse – Introducing new features for enhanced content safety on Openverse. Alert: WordPress Security Team Impersonation Scams. Join the Plugin Review Team! – The Plugin Review Team is looking for new members; the deadline to apply is on December 31, 2023. 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: We wrapped up State of the Word earlier this month, and while I was sitting there being the only person to clap for the love of cake, I realized just how much we have been able to accomplish this year. And on the one hand, I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, progress is radical over time yet incremental in time. But all told, 2023 has been a big year for WordPress. There’s been some radical progress in a few places. There are the things you know because you’ve heard them all year. You heard them in State of the Word. We turned 20, for instance. We shipped three on-time releases. We had three well-organized flagship events, and we prototyped essential parts of phase 3. But there’s a lot of work that happens outside of flagship events and software releases, and I’d like to highlight a few examples of operational excellence in our community and ecosystem. [00:01:31] Josepha: First highlight goes to the contributors who are building community. Going back to 2021, we’ve been working to bring people back together in person. And in that year, we had 19 events. In 2022, we had 24 events, so a modest increase of just over 30%. But then, in 2023, the WordPress community banded together on a campaign to reignite passion in our Meetup groups and encourage playfulness in our WordCamp planning. And not only did we see a 57% increase in active Meetup groups, But we also saw a 116% increase in WordCamps, 54 WordCamps in all. That’s about a third of the way to our all-time annual high of 142. And to complement these in-person opportunities, Learn also shipped 104 pieces of new content and hosted 258 online workshops because location should never be a barrier to entry for joining WordPress. [00:02:32] Josepha: Second highlight goes to the contributors who are managing our directories. We do have a lot of directories. We have Plugins, Themes, Photos, Block plugins. We got a lot. And I’m sure that everyone saw the consistent and borderline pleading calls to join the Plugin team this year. And for folks who’ve been around a bit, you probably recall a similar set of consistent and pleading calls to join the Theme team a few years back. Concurrent with the work to refill that contribution pipeline, folks over in Meta and across the project generally, were working on automating as many checks as possible, loosening guidelines where it was reasonable, and modernizing as many processes as we could. I’m happy to share that the theme wait time is at a historic low, with their longest wait sometimes just at a week. And as anxious as I am about the plugin wait times, we’re actually seeing a lot of progress there as well. As we follow a process similar to the one that we did on themes, I imagine it’s only gonna get better. So, in 2023, we’ve onboarded six new team members. And since September, the number of plugins awaiting initial review has been cut in half. And then coming up in Q1 of 2024, we’ll have a project focused entirely on automating as many checks as possible. So I still need you, but I also need you to know that your work there matters and is having an impact. [00:03:55] Josepha: The third highlight goes to the contributors who are doing outreach. This year, we launched a mentorship program with an 89% completion rate because we’ve seen time and again that our most prolific contributors had someone at the start that they felt safe asking dumb questions with. We launched and nurtured the developer blog, which was a need identified by the community because there was no place for intermediate and advanced developers to get excited about their cool explorations. And there were 53 posts there this year with thirteen thousand views, which is a 251% increase for the record, which is a ridiculous increase, but it’s a lot. Thirteen thousand views is a lot. We have focused on documentation as we suggested in Porto of 2022. And marketing, I know not always our favorite topic, but marketing, our ability to talk about ourselves to more than just ourselves, has increased dramatically this year. Not only have we started rolling out a modern design across our website, but we also are present and engaged on eight different platforms with 20-plus episodes of this very podcast and also video content that netted us seven and a half million views this year. That’s a lot of numbers, and there’s a post that goes with it. [00:05:10] Josepha: Check out the show notes. But if you’re not gonna check out the show notes because you listen to this on Pocket Casts or Google or something, go to make.WordPress.org/project, and it’ll be over there. But the point is, it’s been a banner year for the software, and I am grateful for every tester, designer, and developer that showed up for it. But I also know that what makes WordPress truly irreplaceable is our ecosystem, and it’s contributions like this and the contributors who do them that make our ecosystem vibrant and responsive and thriving on into the future. So, thank you all for the contributions you make to WordPress. Thank you for the shining example of how to do open source at scale, and thank you for another great year together. [00:06:04] Josepha: Which brings us now to our small list of big things. It is indeed a small this time. First up, I would like to introduce our enhanced content safety features on Openverse. By default, search results now exclude openly licensed media containing sensitive textual content. But this new feature adds additional filtering based on titles, tags, and descriptions of the work as well. [00:06:27] Josepha: The second thing on our small list of big things is that there is just a general alert. There’s a WordPress security team impersonation scam that’s going on out there. The team is aware of multiple ongoing phishing scams impersonating both the WordPress team and the WordPress security team in an attempt to convince administrators to install a plugin on their website which contains malware. I’ll include a link to that post just in case you have anyone that you think might need to be aware of that, but also all of our site administrators know. Like, WordPress is not gonna email you asking for passwords or anything ever. [00:07:02] Josepha: And item number three, I would like you to join the Plugin review team. I know I just said it in the body of the episode. But, the Plugin review team is looking for new members still who believe in our mission of guiding plugin authors in responsibly transforming their innovative ideas into reality and ensuring a great WordPress plugin experience for end users. There is a deadline to apply; it’s December 31st. And so you can get that done over the holidays, over a glass of eggnog if that’s how you choose to celebrate whatever it is that you do. And that’s it for 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. See you again in a couple of weeks. View the full article

On December 11, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg traveled to beautiful Madrid, Spain, to deliver his annual State of the Word keynote. It was the first time this event took place outside the United States. Against the backdrop of Palacio Neptuno—an iconic architectural gem and UNESCO World Heritage site—nearly 200 contributors, developers, extenders, and friends of the Project came together to hear from Matt, with millions more joining online. An introduction from the Executive Director Kicking off the event, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, Executive Director of the WordPress project, spoke about the community’s heart and spirit as what fuels hope for the future, ensuring the freedoms of the open web for all. She invited Matt on stage with a closing statement of confidence that such values and characteristics will move the Project forward into the next 20 as it has for the last 20. Looking back at 2023 Taking the stage, Matt shared his excitement about the event being the first international State of the Word. He honored the Spanish WordPress community for hosting, citing their past WordCamp accomplishments. From there, Matt jumped right into a reflection of this year’s notable moments. He recalled the project’s 20th-anniversary celebrations, how the software has evolved, and how much more the community came together this year—doubling the number of WordCamps to 70, taking place in 33 countries. We’re always aiming to learn and improve. Tell us how to make meetups better. Take the 2023 Meetup Survey Matt continued with callouts to several resources on WordPress.org: the all-new Events page, the redesigned Showcase, a new WordPress Remembers memorial, and the award-winning Openverse. He also demoed WordPress Playground, a tool allowing users to experiment with WordPress directly in their browsers, as well as the versatile Twenty Twenty-Four default theme. Collaborative editing and more Matt recapped the four phases of the Gutenberg project, noting that work has begun on Phase 3: Collaboration before passing the microphone to Matías Ventura, Lead Architect of Gutenberg. After a quick interlude in Spanish, Matías acknowledged how much progress had been made on the software this year. He spoke about the aim of the Site Editor to become both an exemplary writing environment and a superior design tool while noting improvements to the Footnotes Block and the ease of Distraction Free mode. While there was no set timeline for collaboration and workflows, Matías was excited to share a working prototype in the Editor. He showcased some of the most interesting aspects of collaborative editing, including establishing a sync engine that allows real-time edits to be visible across sessions. He invited contributors to test the prototype in the Gutenberg plugin and share their feedback in Github. From there, Matías highlighted other exciting developments, including the emphasis on Patterns and their continued evolution as a powerful tool for workflows, and the ability to connect blocks to custom fields. He was thrilled to speak about performance improvements, noting that work is in progress to make the Editor at least twice as fast. Speaking about front-end performance, he shared what’s to come with a demo of the Interactivity API, showcasing how it can make transitions, search, and other interactions instant—all with standard WordPress blocks and features. Matías concluded with a look at how the Admin redesign will take cues from the Site Editor, eventually allowing users to shape their WordPress Admin experience based on their unique needs. AI and Data Liberation Matt returned to the stage to expand on the future of WordPress, reinforcing his past advice to learn AI deeply. He expressed his excitement about what can be accomplished with the wealth of AI tools available, how contributors are already experimenting with natural language processing and WordPress Playground to create and build. Finally, Matt introduced an additional focus for the project in 2024: Data Liberation, with the goal to make importing from other platforms into WordPress as frictionless as possible. He spoke about the tendency of content management systems to keep users locked in as part of his motivation to unlock digital barriers. The Data Liberation initiative will work on one-click migration and the export format from WordPress. More than just tools, Data Liberation reflects the project’s ethos to allow seamless contributions. With that, Matt invited anyone interested to jump into the action, noting a new Data Liberation GitHub repository and forthcoming Making WordPress Slack channels as places to get started. Questions and answers Following the presentation, Matt fielded questions from the live-stream and in-person audiences during an interactive question-and-answer session hosted by Jose Ramón Padrón (Moncho). Additional questions from the live session will be answered in a follow-up post on make.WordPress.org/project. Subscribe to our blog notifications to be sure you don’t miss it. And don’t forget to mark your calendars for next year’s WordCamp Asia (Taipei, Taiwan), WordCamp Europe (Torino, Italy), and WordCamp US (Portland, Oregon, United States). Thank you to @laurlittle, @eidolonnight, @nilovelez, @fepr, @cbringmann, and the many others who made this event and post possible. View the full article

In this episode, WordPress Executive Director, Josepha Haden Chomphosy articulates the vision for a collaborative ecosystem where knowledge sharing and contributions to open source tools lead to a more interconnected and empowered web. Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@WordPress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Credits Host: Josepha Haden Chomphosy Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Brett McSherry Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Show Notes State of the Word 2022 PHP Foundation Josepha’s Big Picture Goals 2022 Small List of Big Things Gutenberg 17.1 has been released and is available for download! The latest release includes new enhancements, bug fixes, and continued work on Phase 3 features. Announcing the 2023 Annual Meetup Survey – The Community team proposed a survey for all meetup members and organizers. Please complete the Annual Meetup Survey by January 14, 2024– even if you haven’t participated in a meetup recently! Request for feedback: Lesson Handbook pages – As the Training team progresses towards the 2024 launch of Learning Pathways, they’re developing a set of content creation guidelines to streamline and scale the process. These guidelines will focus on efficient methods for developing, reviewing, and updating content. To gather input, a Google Doc has been created where you can share your ideas. Please provide your feedback and comments on this document by Tuesday, December 19, 2023. WordPress Playground makes WordPress instantly accessible for users, learners, extenders, and contributors. Embracing Matrix for Enhanced Communication 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: If you’re already familiar with the WordPress project, and if you’re listening to this podcast, I feel like it’s a safe assumption that you’re probably also familiar with the fact that we are what’s considered a free and open source software project. We adhere to the four freedoms of open source. We track bugs in the open, and we believe that knowledge sharing can only improve our products. But you might not be aware of the other open source projects that are foundational to ours and otherwise are integral to our commitment to the open web. At last year’s State of the Word, Matt mentioned that one of the coolest things about being a plugin or theme author in WordPress is that you get to run your open source project on the same infrastructure that WordPress runs on. So, no matter whether you have five installs or five thousand, you’re getting the benefits of our bug trackers, messaging, and network of project sites. But beyond those, which are, of course, near and dear to us, we also support projects like PHP and its foundation. Openverse and its founding organization Creative Commons, and of course, the two that we’re hearing a lot about this year and next, Playground and Matrix. [00:01:52] Josepha: That’s a lot of projects and not even a comprehensive list. And honestly, it can seem, I don’t know, a little weird. Like, we’re a FOSS CMS, right? You probably know why we contribute back to PHP. It’s the same reason we ask people to contribute to WordPress. But why are we giving so much time to a media search engine, or a Web Assembly implementation, or even a messaging protocol? At first glance, there are, of course, a lot of quick and easy answers. For instance, like, open source is open source. Any open source contribution is going to be a good contribution. All open source in the world increases good and freedom in the world. Like, open source is open source. Makes sense, right? Another quick and easy answer is, you know, they’re part of us. And that’s true, definitely, for PHP, like, they’re part of us, and so we should be contributing back to them. Because we rely on them so much. And then a third quick and easy answer is that we, as the biggest open source CMS on the planet, basically, we can, spare a lending hand. We can offer a little bit of help to those around us. [00:03:03] Josepha: And those are all true. I don’t think that anyone would disagree with any of that. But the thing that ties it all together for me is something that’s a little harder to see. In the 2022 goals that I posted, I said that my second goal for our year was to support open source alternatives for all site-building necessities. At the time, I was primarily talking about Openverse and the directory of photos that was being created as a CC-first source. But that also applies to all of our directories. It did then, just as it does now. And Trac, and our vast network of WordPress sites. All the tools we use in order to collaborate with, and lead for, and learn from each other. I want us to be able to do everything it takes to build an online presence using open source tools and methods because WordPress is just a glorious little microcosm of the interconnected web. It reminds me of this art installation I had the privilege of experiencing. It’s called Meow Wolf. I went to the one in Denver, but there are a few different installations across the U.S. The one that I went to is this massive art installation, and it is designed to be interactive, but it wasn’t until you started sharing your experience sharing your knowledge with other people that you realized it was also collaborative, a set of buttons you pushed in one room would cause a light show in some other room. [00:04:34] Josepha: So you were enhancing the experience of strangers in some completely disconnected room to yours, and they couldn’t distinguish it from an automation or something they did, or just plain old magic. And that’s what we’re doing by supporting these other open source tools. Yes, every new open source contribution results in more freedom in the world. Yes, we owe support to the components that got us where we are today. And yes, we absolutely can and should pay it forward. But more importantly than all that, we’re creating the opportunity for new interactions, new brilliance, and new defenders of the open web every time that we work on these open source products. [00:05:20] Josepha: And it doesn’t matter if we will ever see any of those people. And it doesn’t matter if they will ever thank us. What matters is that we see that knowledge like this is worth preserving and worth sharing. Because knowledge shared, information shared is like light. The more you share it, the more there is. And I want you to be able to take that sharing and use it to light the world. I want you to be able to go out and tell people how open source has changed your life, how WordPress has opened doors for you, or how much these tools have empowered your clients. I want you to remember why you came to WordPress in the first place, and I need you to hear me when I say that I need you here in WordPress today because every little ripple of good that we create makes the world a little more good. [00:06:12] (Music interlude) [00:06:20] Josepha: (SLBT) And now, my friends, that brings us to our time for the small list of big things. I’ve got a kind of a big list because I always kind of have a big list anymore, but the first thing on my list is Gutenberg 17.1. That has been released and is available for download. It includes several new enhancements, loads of bug fixes, and continues that work on phase three features that we are starting to see come through. If you don’t have it already, go out and grab it, test it, break it, and tell us what you tested and how it broke things. [00:06:52] Josepha: The second thing on my small list of big things is that there is currently an annual meetup survey out. So, we’ve had an increase in our meetup events, and certainly an increase in the active number of meetup groups that we have, but the community team is proposing a unified survey for all meetup members and organizers, and if you haven’t participated in it yet go and fill it out. You don’t have to have actually gone to a meetup event recently in order to take it, but, you know, it might be helpful. Either way, you have until January 14, 2024, to fill that out. [00:07:30] Josepha: The third thing on my small list of big things is a request for feedback. The training team is working toward launching Learning Pathways in 2024. They’re looking to create a new set of content creation guidelines that enables the learning pathways to scale with a straightforward process for developing, reviewing, and updating that content. There’s a Google doc for you where you can contribute your ideas, and that doc will be open for feedback through this week and into next week. I believe it closes on Tuesday, the 19th of December, 2023. [00:08:04] Josepha: And then the final thing on my small list of big things is actually, it’s a dual call-in. I already said with my first one about the Gutenberg plugin: get in there and test it and break it, and then tell us how it broke and what you were doing when you were testing it and broke it. And I encourage you to do that also for Matrix and Playground. So Playground has been a really big deal all year long. It was a big deal at the end of last year. It showed up for us in November 2022 and has been really just growing in surprising ways all the way through 2023. So if you have not yet seen it, you haven’t gotten your hands on it yet, it’s a WordPress installation that is loaded entirely in the browser, totally server-free, and we’re looking at a couple of new implementations that make it easier for users who are trying to, like, kick the tires of WordPress before they decide, and developers who are wanting to test new pull requests and things like that. So keep an eye out if it sounds interesting; it is interesting. And wander over and figure out how that’s working. And the other thing in that last call for collective testing is Matrix. So Matrix is an open source federated messaging protocol, and like so many technology projects out there at the moment, we are trying to make sure that we are preparing ourselves for the future arrival of Web 3 and all of the things that are coming along with current advancements in federated everything and AI and etc., etc. And so, Matrix is an open source messaging protocol. There are a lot of different ways to get connected. I’ll share a link to one of the posts in the show notes over on WordPress.org/news. But if you’re interested in learning a bit about it and you don’t really want to like figure out what sort of client is comfortable for you to use. There’s also on-site chat implementations for, I want to say, like 10 or 12 of our largest or most regularly meeting groups that we have. You can go to parts of the website like make.WordPress.org/core/chat and check those out. If you have a WordPress.org account, then you can have access to that on-site chat, and that is it. That’s the whole low barrier to entryway of figuring that out with us. Come and break stuff with us, everyone, and tell us how to make it better. [00:10:33] 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. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. [00:11:00] (Music outro) View the full article

November is usually a busy month for the WordPress project, and this year is no different. Following the empowering release of WordPress 6.4, the energy continues to build, setting the stage for the anticipated State of the Word and upcoming projects. Read on for all the exciting updates that marked the past month. Get ready for State of the Word Mark your calendars—State of the Word 2023 is approaching fast. In this annual keynote, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg celebrates the progress of the open source project and offers a glimpse into its future. For the first time in WordPress history, the event will be held outside North America, in the vibrant city of Madrid, Spain, on December 11, 2023. If you’re unable to attend the State of the Word in person, you can watch it live on the WordPress YouTube channel or join one of the many community-led watch parties. Find one near you or organize one. Learn more about State of the Word 2023 Meet Twenty Twenty-Four Along with the release of WordPress 6.4 “Shirley,” the new default Twenty Twenty-Four theme was introduced. This theme breaks away from the tradition of previous default themes that focused on a specific topic or style. Instead, Twenty Twenty-Four was created to fit any website and explore different use cases for entrepreneurs, artists, and writers. You’ll find more than 35 beautiful patterns, including full-page patterns for templates like homepage, search, and more. Twenty Twenty-Four boasts the latest site editing capabilities and a sophisticated aesthetic inspired by contemporary design trends. Check out Twenty Twenty-Four now New in the Gutenberg plugin Gutenberg 17.0 was released on November 9, 2023. It introduced improvements to the Command Palette, an alternative implementation of the DropdownMenu component, additional visual cues for LinkControl, and various accessibility and performance iterations. Gutenberg 17.1 shipped on November 22, 2023. In addition to several accessibility and writing flow enhancements, this version brought a new block spacing control in the Quote block. https://wordpress.org/news/2023/10/episode-64-patterns-in-wordpress/ Team updates WordPress is switching to Matrix in replacement of the Making WordPress Slack by the end of this year. The move stems from the project’s commitment to implementing a new chat system aligned with WordPress’s open source values. If you haven’t already, now is the time to explore Matrix and share your questions. With phishing scams on the rise, the WordPress Security team is actively monitoring the current threat and has posted an advisory to help you protect your site. The Plugin Review team is now reopening applications to join their team. They’re looking for three new members who can improve the state of the plugin review queue and help create a diverse and inclusive team. Over the past few months, contributors have been working on redesigning the WordPress.org Developer Resources section. This post outlines proposed dates for major WordPress releases in 2024. The Meta team shared an improved version of the plugin preview feature. This version builds on feedback and allows plugin developers to safely test the preview experience for their plugins in a WordPress Playground environment. Polyglots and Meta contributors introduced a new plugin called Tour, which enables the creation of tours to guide contributors through a Make WordPress blog. Are you looking to broaden your knowledge and improve your WordPress skills? See what’s new on Learn WordPress in November 2023. The latest edition of People of WordPress features back-end web developer Artemy Kaydash from Ukraine. https://wordpress.org/news/2023/10/episode-64-patterns-in-wordpress/ Requests for feedback & testing The Community team announced the 2023 Annual Meetup Survey. Both event attendees and organizers are encouraged to provide feedback in this 5-minute survey to help strengthen WordPress meetups in the future. Version 23.7 of the WordPress mobile app for iOS and Android is ready for testing. WordPress events WordCamp Asia opened the third round of ticket sales and announced that their first speaker is WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg. The conference will be held in Taipei, Taiwan, on March 7-9, 2024. WordCamp Europe opened its call for sponsors and speakers for their conference slated to take place in Torino, Italy, on June 13-15, 2024. Don’t miss these upcoming WordCamps: WordCamp Ahmedabad 2023, India on December 9, 2023 WordCamp Lahore 2023, Pakistan on December 9-10, 2023 Have a story we should include in the next issue of The Month in WordPress? Fill out this quick form to let us know. Thank you to Bernard Meyer 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

WordPress 6.4.2 is now available! This minor release features 7 bug fixes in Core. The fixes include a bug fix for an issue causing stylesheet and theme directories to sometimes return incorrect results. This release also features one security fix. Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately. You can download WordPress 6.4.2 from WordPress.org, or visit your WordPress Dashboard, click “Updates”, and then click “Update Now”. If you have sites that support automatic background updates, the update process will begin automatically. WordPress 6.4.2 is a short-cycle release. The next major release will be version 6.5 released in early 2024. For more information on this release, please visit the HelpHub site. Security updates included in this release The security team addressed the following vulnerability in this release. A Remote Code Execution vulnerability that is not directly exploitable in core, however the security team feels that there is a potential for high severity when combined with some plugins, especially in multisite installs. To help the security team and WordPressers around the world, you are encouraged to responsibly report vulnerabilities. This allows vulnerabilities to be fixed in future releases. Thank you to these WordPress contributors This release was led by Aaron Jorbin. WordPress 6.4.2 would not have been possible without the contributions of the following people. Their asynchronous coordination to deliver maintenance and security fixes into a stable release is a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress community. Aaron Jorbin, Aki Hamano, Akira Tachibana, Alex Concha, Angela Jin, Anton Vlasenko, Barry, bernhard-reiter, Caleb Burks, Corey Worrell, crstauf, Darren Ethier (nerrad), David Baumwald, Dennis Snell, Dion Hulse, Erik, Fabian Todt, Felix Arntz, Héctor Prieto, ironprogrammer, Isabel Brison, Jb Audras, Jeffrey Paul, Jessica Lyschik, Joe McGill, John Blackbourn, Jonathan Desrosiers, Kharis Sulistiyono, Krupal Panchal, Kylen Downs, meta4, Mike Schroder, Mukesh Panchal, partyfrikadelle, Peter Wilson, Pieterjan Deneys, rawrly, rebasaurus, Sergey Biryukov, Tonya Mork, vortfu How to contribute To get involved in WordPress core development, head over to Trac, pick a ticket, and join the conversation in the #core. Need help? Check out the Core Contributor Handbook. As a final reminder, The WordPress Security Team will never email you requesting that you install a plugin or theme on your site, and will never ask for an administrator username and password. Please stay vigilant against phishing attacks. Thanks to @angelasjin and @desrosj for proofreading. View the full article

The WordPress Security Team is aware of multiple ongoing phishing scams impersonating both the “WordPress team” and the “WordPress Security Team“ in an attempt to convince administrators to install a plugin on their website which contains malware. The WordPress Security Team will never email you requesting that you install a plugin or theme on your site, and will never ask for an administrator username and password. If you receive an unsolicited email claiming to be from WordPress with instructions similar to those described above, please disregard the emails and indicate that the email is a scam to your email provider. These emails link to a phishing site that appears to be the WordPress plugin repository on a domain that is not owned by WordPress or an associated entity. Both Patchstack and Wordfence have written articles that go in to further detail. Official emails from the WordPress project will always: Come from a @wordpress.org or @wordpress.net domain. Should also say “Signed by: wordpress.org” in the email details section. The WordPress Security Team will only communicate with WordPress users in the following locations: the Making WordPress Secure blog at make.wordpress.org/security the main WordPress News site at wordpress.org/news The WordPress Plugin team will never communicate directly with a plugin’s users but may email plugin support staff, owners and contributors. These emails will be sent from plugins@wordpress.org and be signed as indicated above. The official WordPress plugin repository is located at wordpress.org/plugins with internationalized versions on subdomains, such as fr.wordpress.org/plugins, en-au.wordpress.org/plugins, etc. A subdomain may contain a hyphen, however a dot will always appear before wordpress.org. A WordPress site’s administrators can also access the plugin repository via the plugins menu in the WordPress dashboard. As WordPress is the most used CMS, these types of phishing scams will happen occasionally. Please be vigilant for unexpected emails asking you to install a theme, plugin or linking to a login form. The Scamwatch website has some tips for identifying emails and text messages that are likely to be scams. As always, if you believe that you have discovered a security vulnerability in WordPress, please follow the project’s Security policies by privately and responsibly disclosing the issue directly to the WordPress Security team through the project’s official HackerOne page. Thank you Aaron Jorbin, Otto, Dion Hulse, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and Jonathan Desrosiers for their collaboration on and review of this post. 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. Artemy Kaydash discovered that working with WordPress has opened possibilities greater than he imagined. For him, the “active, responsive, and enthusiastic community” makes the software fresh and alive with many ways to experiment and practice adapting it for clients’ needs. Back-end development with WordPress has proven to be a rewarding career choice for Artemy. He believes developers can inspire others to choose the same career path by sharing the opportunities and satisfaction of working with the content management system (CMS). The adventure of learning WordPress Learning new software can be daunting, but Artemy realized that learning with and from inspiring people makes a real difference: “I vividly remember my first WordPress experience. I was confused, had many questions, and was desperately trying to understand how to do the most simple things.” Working initially in a small agency in Ukraine, Artemy had basic HTML/CSS skills and had just started learning PHP development. His senior colleagues helped him take his first steps in web development and were patient with his questions. The agency director later gave him the responsibility of creating a WordPress website for a friend. He recalls being nervous, as he was not yet confident in his PHP skills. Colleagues reassured Artemy as he worked, and he went on to build a career in international web development. Like many others, Artemy found that experimenting with WordPress intrigued him, and he wanted to learn more about it. Looking back, he said: “The first theme I built was awful. It was composed of my own creative solutions and code snippets I found in searches. It had lots of bugs, but as people say, ‘the first pancake is always a bit tricky.'” Artemy is a great believer in reflective learning, going back and reviewing a piece of development. He said: “No matter how bad it was, it was my first experience, and I learned a lot about the basic concepts of WordPress. That’s why I believe that learning by doing is the best way to learn something new.” He added: “My advice to others is don’t be afraid of doing something awful when you create something for the first time. It’s okay. We’ve all been through that initial phase.” “It’s nice to have a mentor when you learn something new. Luckily, you don’t need a person sitting next to you anymore. All of us have got the best mentor possible: the Internet. If you don’t know how to do something, then search for how other people have done the same thing,” Artemy said. “No wonder some say that one of the most required skills of every developer is the willingness to learn and to know how to search for information. This is one of the reasons WordPress is one of the best options for beginners. Now there is so much more information and help available to learn, more than there was when I first began.” Artemy feels that the willingness of others to share their experience and problem-solve together is a big strength of the WordPress community and also the reason for its ongoing success: “When you stumble upon a problem, there’s a high probability that someone already asked the same question on one of the forums or websites. If you’re lucky enough, someone already wrote a post about your problem with a great explanation of how to solve it with examples and code snippets.” WordPress is for beginners and long-term careers WordPress is not a software with strict limits, and it can be adapted and used in many different ways by beginners and advanced developers. I like to learn something that excites me and makes my brain work. With WordPress, I am able to find interesting and creative solutions. There are so many new things to learn that Artemy decided to stay in web development, and he sees it as a perfect channel for his creativity and abstract thinking. It may seem very different from his initial education in literature, sociology, and philosophy. Still, he has found those studies sharpened his skills for understanding, communicating, and working with clients on creative solutions to challenges. Artemy enjoys the client side of his work and interacting with different studios and agencies. His international work allows him to use WordPress and WooCommerce in many different environments, both large and small, which keeps the software exciting. He said: “I believe if you want to learn something you have to practice using it a lot. Open source is a big advantage in this.” Artemy found that the more he experiences various sites and clients, the more flexible and helpful he can be in helping them find the right solution. Inspired to help others use WordPress A willingness to share and grow skills together is what open source environments champion. This collaborative environment inspired Artemy to focus on using WordPress professionally and to share what he learned. “There is a lot of free code and snippets available for anyone to use. I have been grateful to all of the people who have written answers on sites like Stack Overflow, written blog posts, created free plugins, and other helpful materials. It made me want to help others when I was able to.” In August 2021, Artemy began blogging about using WordPress: “I like to think that this way I am repaying my learning debt for all the content I have consumed. It makes me happy to see that people really read my posts, and it helps them solve their WordPress problems. So, today, when I face a problem and can’t find the solution, I think it might be a great idea for a new post!” He also likes to keep up with how other people use WordPress by visiting Stack Overflow, WordPress Facebook groups, and other communities where people ask questions almost daily. He helps where he can in those channels or gains inspiration for new content. He believes Learn.WordPress.org and the Developer Blog are valuable resources for beginners and more advanced developers too. As those resources grow, they will increasingly become a place where others can share their development knowledge and use cases. Every community is a two-way street Artemy encourages everyone to become a part of the WordPress community. “There are a lot of opportunities for everyone,” he said. “You can help with the translation of your favorite plugins or themes. You can create your own plugin or become a contributor to an already existing open source plugin. You can write tutorials. You can write reviews helping other people to choose the best option for them. You can help people on support forums.” Every contribution, big or small, makes WordPress better. It is a great experience to be part of it. Share the stories Help share these open source contributor stories and continue to grow the community. Meet more WordPressers in the People of WordPress series. To discover more about how to use WordPress, and start your own story, visit Learn.WordPress.org. Thanks to Artemy Kaydash for sharing about his adventures in WordPress, and to Abha Thakor, Nalini Thakor, Meher Bala, Mark Smallman, Nicholas Garofalo, Chloe Bringmann, and Mary Baum for interviews, editorial, images, and reviews. This People of WordPress feature is inspired by an essay originally published on HeroPress.com, a community initiative created by Topher DeRosia. It highlights people in the WordPress community who have overcome barriers and whose stories might otherwise go unheard. #HeroPress View the full article

WordPress Executive Director, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, returns to a recent episode of the WordPress Briefing, which discussed two resources for openly licensed media in the WordPress project– Openverse and Photo Directory– and how they differ from one another! Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@WordPress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Credits Host: Josepha Haden Chomphosy Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Brett McSherry Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Show Notes Photo Directory Make Page Submit a Photo to the Photo Directory Openverse Make Page Openverse Call for Contributions: Block Editor Integration (now closed) Small List of Big Things State of the Word – The countdown is on for this year’s State of the Word! If you missed the initial announcement a few weeks ago, you’ll want to mark your calendars for December 11, 2023. State of the Word will include a Q&A session. If you want to participate, you can send your question to ask-matt@wordcamp.org or ask during the event via the Q&A app Slido. A QR code for your submission will be provided during the event live stream. WordCamp Asia has extended their call for sponsors, slated to take place in Taipei, Taiwan, March 7-9, 2024. The new deadline has been extended to November 30, 2023. The Documentation Team created a new GitHub repo for end-user documentation and its translations to all locales. More info about this can be found here. 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’re going to take a listen to last year’s episode about Openverse and the Photo Directory. A lot has changed in that project, well in, in both of those projects since then. For instance, the Photo Directory just passed a 10,000 photo milestone. And Openverse, in the past year, got their own URL and have been hard at work strengthening the reliability of their APIs. [00:01:03] Josepha: But for some folks, it might still be a little unclear just what the difference is between these two projects. So let’s take a listen, and don’t forget to catch the updated small list of big things at the end of the episode. [00:01:13] (Music interlude) [00:01:21] Josepha: About 18 months ago, the Openverse project became part of the WordPress open source project, and at roughly the same time, we also welcomed in the Photo Directory. Since that time, we’ve seen growth of teams supporting both of these initiatives. But if you’re not involved in the day-to-day, it can be hard to know how those two things fit together or if they fit together at all. [00:01:41] Josepha: Today, let’s take a brief tour of those two projects and why they came to be. In my timeline, work on the Photo Directory started before the work on Openverse, so that’s where we’ll start. For as long as I can remember, the WordPress community has raised the need for WordPress-first ways to have and host GPL-compatible photos for use in themes, site builds, and marketing efforts as a whole. As recently as 2016, that was still coming up as a question at various flagship events and among the career photographers that contribute their time to WordPress. [00:02:13] Josepha: So, in 2017 and 2018, as attention started to turn toward rebuilding the CMS using blocks, it dropped down the list of priority items. But it never really went away as a thing that people were hoping we could do for the project as a whole. So in 2019, it was becoming clear that having open source-first tools of all varieties for people whose businesses were built on our software would help broaden the availability of the open source freedoms we believe in. This began the work on the Photo Directory with the intention of providing a GPL-friendly, community-driven repository of images. It has since launched, and we have photos in it now. We have a whole team around it. It’s wonderful. But that is how that all kind of came to be. [00:02:58] Josepha: Openverse, on the other hand, was launched as CC Search in 2019 with the laudable mandate to increase the discoverability and accessibility of open access media. Late in 2020, while work on the Photo Directory was underway, Matt shared with me that the team was looking for a new project home. When I first met with them, they shared an overview of the product, which they shorthanded as an open source search engine that searches openly licensed images. We were working on a repo of openly licensed images, so clearly, this was all written in the stars. And so you might be asking yourself at this point, great, how does it work together? I think for most of us, the timeline there kind of covers the question of what is the difference between these two things. But because I never know which of you will want to strike up a conversation about open source on an elevator, I’ve also got the elevator pitch version as well. [00:03:52] Josepha: Openverse is an open source search engine that searches, indexes, and aggregates copy left media from across the web using sources such as WordPress’s Photo Directory, Flickr’s CC Tagged Media, and Wikimedia, to name just a few. Another key difference between the Photo Directory and Openverse is that in order to contribute to the Photo Directory, now that it’s all built, that’s mostly done by submitting photos or reviewing photos. So, you don’t really need to be a developer to join in. Openverse not only is a developer-centric contribution opportunity, but it also uses a different tech stack than WordPress as a whole. So, it’s a good place for folks to go if they’re looking to broaden their horizons. [00:04:37] Josepha: So that’s your elevator pitch of what is Openverse and how does it use the Photo Directory. You have a couple of ways that you can get involved with these two projects. For the Photo Directory, as I mentioned at the start, you can always contribute photos, and they could always use more photo contributions. I’ll include a link to the submission guidelines in the show notes below, and as I mentioned, it is a no-code way to give back to the WordPress project. So, no code is required, no development environments, no testing skills. The Photo Directory team also could always use more contributors to help with the moderating of photo submissions. And so I’ll link to their making WordPress page in the show notes as well so that you can get started there. [00:05:22] Josepha: And as I mentioned before, Openverse is an aggregator, so it doesn’t host any media itself, but it is always accepting suggestions for new GPL-compatible media providers. I’ll link the area where you can leave suggestions in the show notes as well. And if you are more code-inclined, there’s an open issue for adding Openverse browsing to the block editor right now. So I’ll link that issue in the show notes in case you thought to yourself, gosh, that sounds like my most favorite thing to do. That is where you can go. [00:05:53] (Music interlude) [00:06:01] Josepha: And that brings us now to our November 2023 small list of big things. [00:06:07] Josepha: The first thing that’s on the small list of big things this week is that the countdown is on for this year’s State of the Word. If you missed the initial announcement a few weeks ago, you’ll want to mark your calendars for December 11th, 2023. State of the Word will include a Q&A session, and if you want to participate, you can send your question to ask-matt@wordcamp.org. Or, ask during the event via the Q&A app Slido. A QR code for your submission will be provided during the event live stream, so if you’re choosing that option, don’t worry; there’s not anything to do right this second. [00:06:40] Josepha: The second thing on the list is that WordCamp Asia has extended their call for sponsors for the conference that is slated to take place in Taipei, Taiwan, March 7th through 9th, 2024. The new deadline has been extended to November 30th, 2023, and so if you have been on the fence about whether to sponsor that event or not, for one, please do sponsor it, and for two, you still have a little bit of time to get over there and show your support. [00:07:05] Josepha: And then the last thing on the small list of big things is that the documentation team now has a new GitHub repo created for end-user documentation and its translations into all locales. For more information about this, come check out the show notes. I will have a link right there for you. And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. [00:07:26] Josepha: Don’t forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app or subscribe directly on WordPress.org/news. You’ll get a friendly reminder whenever there’s a new episode. If you liked what you heard today, share it with a fellow WordPresser. Or, if you have questions about what you heard, you can share those with me at wpbriefing@WordPress.org. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Thanks for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. [00:07:51] (Music outro) View the full article

The countdown is on for this year’s State of the Word! If you missed the initial announcement a few weeks ago, you’ll want to mark your calendars for December 11, 2023. State of the Word is the annual keynote in which WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg celebrates the progress of the open source project and offers a glimpse into its future. For the first time, State of the Word ventures beyond North America, bringing the WordPress community to a new and vibrant city that plays a vital role in the WordPress project — Madrid, Spain! The event will be live-streamed to WordPress enthusiasts and newcomers around the globe via the WordPress YouTube channel. Please visit the event website for more event details and live-streaming information. What: State of the Word 2023 When: December 11, 2023, 15:00 UTC (Start of live stream) Where: Palacio Neptuno, Madrid, Spain Streaming: Watch the live stream on the WordPress YouTube channel. Tickets: Request a ticket to attend in person. Please note that the venue’s capacity is limited; therefore, not all ticket requests will be granted. Meetups: The community will sponsor several local watch parties globally, both in person and online. Find one near you or organize one. Have a question for Matt? State of the Word will include a Q&A session. If you want to participate, you can send your question to ask-matt@wordcamp.org or ask during the event via the Q&A app Slido. A QR code for your submission will be provided during the event live stream. Given the volume of questions usually submitted, 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. Is this your first State of the Word? Check out prior events on WordPress.tv for an introduction to the format. See you in person and online on December 11! Thank you to Reyes Martínez and Chloé Bringmann for reviewing this post. View the full article

When it comes to designing a website, one size doesn’t fit all. We understand that every WordPress user has unique needs and goals, whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, a passionate photographer, a prolific writer, or a bit of them all. That’s why we are thrilled to introduce Twenty Twenty-Four, the most versatile default theme yet—bundled with WordPress 6.4 and ready to make it uniquely yours. A theme for every style Unlike past default themes, Twenty Twenty-Four breaks away from the tradition of focusing on a specific topic or style. Instead, this theme has been thoughtfully crafted to cater to any type of website, regardless of its focus. The theme explores three different use cases: one designed for entrepreneurs and small businesses, another for photographers and artists, and a third tailored for writers and bloggers. Thanks to its multi-faceted nature and adaptability, Twenty Twenty-Four emerges as the perfect fit for any of your projects. As you dive into its templates and patterns, you will notice how the new Site Editor functionality opens up different pathways for building your site seamlessly. Patterns at every step Whether you’re looking to craft an About page, showcase your work, handle RSVPs, or design captivating landing pages, Twenty Twenty-Four has got you covered. Choose from an extensive collection of over 35 beautiful patterns to customize and suit your needs. For the first time, this theme features full-page patterns for templates like homepage, archive, search, single pages, and posts. Some are exclusively available during the template-switching and creation process, ensuring you have the right options when you need them. Moreover, you can take advantage of a variety of patterns for page sections, such as FAQs, testimonials, or pricing, to meet your site’s most specific requirements. With this diverse pattern library, Twenty Twenty-Four offers a flexible canvas to quickly assemble pages of any kind without having to start from scratch—saving you time and energy in the creation process. Just let your creativity flow and explore the possibilities! Site editing in its finest form Twenty Twenty-Four ushers in a new era of block themes by bringing together the latest WordPress site editing capabilities. Discover newer design tools such as background image support in Group blocks and vertical text, providing an intuitive and efficient way to create compelling, interactive content. Find image placeholders with predefined aspect ratio settings within patterns, allowing you to drop images that perfectly fill the space. To go one step further, make your visuals interactive by enabling lightboxes. Ideal for showcasing galleries or portfolio images, this feature allows your visitors to expand and engage with them in full-screen mode. Activate it globally for all images throughout your site or for specific ones. For a smoother browsing experience on your site, you can disable the “Force page reload” setting in the Query Loop block. This ensures that the necessary content is loaded dynamically when switching between different pages without needing a full-page refresh. Elegance with purpose Twenty Twenty-Four goes beyond versatility with a beautiful aesthetic inspired by contemporary design trends, giving your website a sleek and modern look. Key design elements include: Cardo font for headlines: The Cardo font adds a touch of elegance to your site, creating a sophisticated visual experience. Sans-serif system font for paragraphs: The sans-serif font ensures that your texts are cleaner and easier to read, enhancing overall readability. Eight style variations: Twenty Twenty-Four presents a light color palette for a fresh and inviting appearance out-of-the-box, but you can customize it with seven additional style variations. Each includes fonts and colors carefully curated to work beautifully alongside the patterns and templates. Sans-serif variations: Besides the default styles, the theme offers two additional sans-serif variations, providing more choices for your site’s typography. Along with its design, Twenty Twenty-Four has been meticulously optimized for performance. This ensures that your website not only looks great but also delivers a fast and efficient user experience. Explore Twenty Twenty-Four now More information can be found in the following links: Download Twenty Twenty-Four Twenty Twenty-Four Documentation Twenty Twenty-Four Kick Off The Twenty Twenty-Four theme was designed by Beatriz Fialho and made possible thanks to the passion and tireless work of more than 120 contributors. View the full article

WordPress Executive Director, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, speaks to the strategic approach to integrating open source solutions within your company and offers insight into initiating open source advocacy conversations. Tune in for a session that could redefine your company’s technological approach. Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@WordPress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Credits Host: Josepha Haden Chomphosy Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Brett McSherry Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Show Notes Small List of Big Things WordPress 6.4 “Shirley” – The final major release of 2023 launched on November 7 – WordPress 6.4 “Shirley.” Download and check out this empowering release. The Training Team recently published several new Learn resources for training guides to support Meetup Organizers. From lesson plans to online workshops, there are several ways to help you in your goals as a contributor to WordPress. The Diversity Team recently published a new Diverse Speaker Training page, providing resources for new and experienced contributors to bring more diverse speaker lineups and inclusive, diverse WP events for official WordPress Meetups and WordCamps. If you have a story showing how WordPress has impacted what you are doing or what people you know have done, record something and send it to wpbriefing@WordPress.org. We’d love to hear from you. 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’re talking about something I used to have a lot of experience with in my career before WordPress. I worked at a marketing agency. I wasn’t a developer. I was in data and strategy sorts of things. But part of the work heading into every project was an evaluation of what software was best. There were always a variety being considered, but WordPress was frequently one of them. Now, I don’t know if any of you have had that moment where you’re having to talk open source with a CTO or a CEO, but it can be nerve-wracking, to say the least. And it makes sense, right? Open source has a PR problem, especially when you’re speaking to leadership inside a business. And it doesn’t really matter the size, right? You’re advocating for something that requires a completely different mental model. It doesn’t fit into accepted concepts of what makes a business thrive or what makes a bet a sure thing. There were three, maybe four, concerns that came up every time I had this conversation. So, I’m going to share those concerns with you and a few possible counterpoints to get you started. [00:01:48] Josepha: First and always is the concern around security. I believe that this particular mismatch is rooted in an idea that controlled equals secure, which isn’t always the case. So the talking point is this. Since open source has a transparent development process, it is often more secure than proprietary software, contrary to what you might hear. That transparency allows vulnerabilities to be identified by independent researchers and community members and then patched quickly because you aren’t limited by who or what you know personally. And if you’re not having a conversation where you’re having to defend the security in open source and you just want to bring it up yourself, here is a conversation opener for that. Security is a top concern for all of us. Surprisingly, open source solutions often have stronger security measures due to the collaborative nature of their development. It’s a proactive approach to minimizing risks. [00:02:43] Josepha: A second thing that frequently came up was questions around innovation and future proofing of open source products. I think this mismatch is fully rooted in the Cathedral and the Bazaar methods of advancement. So the talking point for that one is this. Embracing open source fosters innovation. We can tap into the latest technologies and stay ahead of industry trends that way. It is specifically because we have a diverse set of viewpoints that we can make sure to quickly account for future risks, along with taking advantage of future opportunities. And by our organization being more active, we can potentially get exactly the solutions we need for our clients long term. And the conversation opener for this, if you are the one bringing up the topic, is I’ve been thinking about our long-term goals and how to keep our technology stack relevant. Open source not only keeps us current but also positions us as innovators in our field. [00:03:40] Josepha: And finally, the thing that seems to make or break the decision is the concept of independence. Part of any good business decision, especially around software, is determining upfront costs to getting started, long-term effectiveness of the chosen solution, and long-term mobility should circumstances change. Open source can address these from multiple vantage points. So here’s a good talking point for that one. Open source liberates us from vendor lock-in. We’re not tied to a single vendor’s roadmap or pricing changes, providing us with more options that suit our needs our clients’ needs. Also, given how ubiquitous WordPress is in particular, there will always be a disaster recovery option should a senior developer leave. And beyond all of that, clients can own all of the content, audience attention, and clientele that we have all worked so hard to help them earn. And again, if you’re not defending things and instead choosing to bring them up as somebody who is trying to affect change in your own organization, here is a good place to start for that. Considering the dynamic nature of our industry, having the freedom to choose solutions independent of a specific vendor makes sure that we are always in control of our destiny. [00:04:59] Josepha: So, those are the three most frequent things I encountered when I was having conversations about which software to choose and what software was the best choice long term for both our organization and our client’s organizations. If you have been in the midst of this type of conversation and have been longing for some counterpoints, I hope this helps. But if you have been feeling in your heart of hearts that your company or organization would be better off using open source software, and of course, in my context, particularly WordPress as that software, but you’ve been worried about bringing it up, I hope this gives you the courage to get out there and be an agent of change in your organization. You can do it, and I know you can. [00:05:44] (Music interlude) [00:05:51] Josepha: All right, my friends, that brings us now to our small list of big things. [00:05:57] Josepha: First on the list, big, big thing. We launched WordPress 6.4 on November 7th, about a week ago. Be sure to download and check out the latest update on this monumental release. And while you’re doing it. Be sure to check out the new default theme that came out with it. It has a lot of patterns in it. I know I’ve talked about it quite a bit over the course of the year, but it’s really beautiful, and I think that it’s worth a good, strong highlight. So WordPress 6.4, you can get it on WordPress.org/download or inside your own host, probably. [00:06:29] Josepha: The second thing that we have is that the training team recently published several new Learn resources to support meetup organizers. So we’ve got over there some lesson plans, tutorials, online workshops. And there are also new materials that help you figure out how to accomplish your goals as a contributor to the WordPress project. [00:06:49] Josepha: And we also have a recently published new diverse speaker training page. It provides incredible resources for new and experienced contributors to bring more diverse speaker lineups and inclusive, diverse WordPress events for official WordPress meetups and WordCamps. [00:07:06] Josepha: And the fourth thing on our small list of big things today is that I would love to get a few voice recordings from you all, from folks who are listening to the WordPress Briefing, or folks that you know, to learn more about how WordPress has impacted you. One of the things that I miss the most from my days as a WordCamp organizer is that annually, I got to see people who had shown up, once at a meetup, you know, to learn what WordPress was, and then came back year after year to our WordCamp with these new goals and new successes and I got to watch their businesses change over time. And so if you have a story like that where WordPress impacted what you are doing or what people that you know have done, record something and send it to wpbriefing@WordPress.org. So that, my friends, is your small list of big things. [00:08:04] Josepha: Don’t forget to follow us on your favorite podcasting app or subscribe directly on WordPress.org/news. You’ll get a friendly reminder whenever there is 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. [00:08:31] (Music outro) View the full article

September-October 2023 was yet another fun and eventful chapter in WordPress, with more WordCamps hosting exciting discussions, knowledge sharing, and learning. This month also welcomed the release of WordPress 6.4 and the Twenty Twenty-Four theme. Let’s check it out. Meet WordPress 6.4 “Shirley” WordPress 6.4 “Shirley” was released on November 7, 2023, and named after the iconic jazz artist Shirley Horn. With the release of WordPress 6.4 comes the new Twenty Twenty-Four theme, a multi-faceted, highly flexible default theme pre-loaded with more than 35 templates and patterns. This release includes more than 100 performance-related updates for a faster and more efficient experience. There’s also a host of new features and enhancements that help improve the content creation process and streamline site editing. WordPress 6.4 was made possible by more than 600 contributors in at least 56 countries. Learn more about WordPress 6.4 State of the Word 2023 Mark your calendars for State of the Word! The annual keynote address delivered by the WordPress project’s co-founder, Matt Mullenweg, will be held on December 11, 2023. For the first time, the event will take place outside North America—this time with the Spanish community in Madrid, Spain. A live stream will be available for WordPress enthusiasts who will not be able to attend in person. Stay tuned for more information, including how to reserve a ticket, soon! Learn more about this year’s State of the Word New in the Gutenberg plugin Two new versions of Gutenberg shipped in October: Gutenberg 16.8 was released on October 11, 2023. It introduced enhancements to the Cover block and Font Library, and added the option to view the active template when editing pages. Gutenberg 16.9 was released on October 25, 2023. This update lets you rename nearly every block from within the editor, as well as duplicate or rename individual patterns. October’s Core Editor Improvement post dives into all the writing enhancements expected in the latest WordPress 6.4 release. https://wordpress.org/news/2023/10/episode-64-patterns-in-wordpress/ Team updates The journey to update WordPress.org continues with the launch of a new Showcase design. The Performance Team held a Hallway Hangout to discuss WordPress 6.3 performance impact in the field, diving into WordPress 6.4 performance improvements and looking ahead at what can be learned for WordPress 6.5. The Documentation Team created a new GitHub repo for end-user documentation and its translations to all locales. You can find out more about this here. Openverse has been awarded the 2023 Open Education Award for Excellence in the Open Infrastructure category. Congratulations! Learn more about the next chapter for the FSE (Full Site Editing) Outreach Program, which looks to transition into a focused space for solving issues, creating resources, and facilitating conversations around adopting Phase 2 of Gutenberg. The Accessibility team is holding weekly office hours to discuss accessibility principles and best practices for the project. Requests for feedback & testing Version 23.6 of the WordPress mobile app for iOS and Android is ready for testing. https://wordpress.org/news/2023/10/episode-64-patterns-in-wordpress/ WordPress events updates WordCamp Asia has extended their call for sponsors for their conference slated to take place in Taipei, Taiwan, March 7-9 2024. There will be a WordPress #WPDiversity Speaker Workshop for Women Voices in Latin America in San Jose, Costa Rica on November 11, 2023. WordCamp Valencia 2023 will take place on November 10-11, 2203. WordCamp Verona 2023 will take place on November 17-18, 2203. WordCamp Hong Kong 2023 will take place on November 18, 2203. WordCamp Islamabad 2023 will take place on November 25-26, 2203. Have a story we should include in the next issue of The Month in WordPress? Fill out this quick form to let us know. Thank you to Bernard Meyer and Reyes Martínez for their contributions to this edition of The Month in WordPress. Subscribe to WordPress News Join over 2 million other subscribers and receive WordPress news directly in your inbox. Subscribe View the full article

WordPress 6.4.1 is now available! This minor release features four bug fixes. You can review a summary of the maintenance updates in this release by reading the Release Candidate announcement or view the list of tickets on Trac. WordPress 6.4.1 is a short-cycle release. If you have sites that support automatic background updates, the update process will begin automatically. If your site does not update automatically, you can also update from your Dashboard. You can download WordPress 6.4.1 from WordPress.org, or visit your WordPress Dashboard, click “Updates”, and then click “Update Now”. For more information on this release, please visit the HelpHub site. Thank you to these WordPress contributors This release was led by Aaron Jorbin and Tonya Mork. Thank you to everyone who tested the RC and 6.4.1, and raised reports. WordPress 6.4.1 would not have been possible without the contributions of the following people. Their quick and concerted coordination to deliver maintenance fixes into a stable release is a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress community. @afragen @clorith @desrosj @pbiron @schlessera @azaozz @davidbaumwald @tomsommer @nexflaszlo @howdy_mcgee @baxbridge @earnjam @timothyblynjacobs @johnbillion @flixos90 @joedolson @jeffpaul @zunaid321 @courane01 @audrasjb @tacoverdo @ironprogrammer @webcommsat @otto42 @barry @chanthaboune @rajinsharwar @aaroncampbell @peterwilsoncc @anandau14 @iandunn @matthewjho @coffee2code @boogah @jason_the_adams @joemcgill @johnjamesjacoby @jrf @renehermi @dlh @mukesh27 @sumitbagthariya16 @starbuck 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 @jeffpaul and @webcommsat for proofreading. View the full article

Say hello to WordPress 6.4 “Shirley,” named after the iconic jazz artist Shirley Horn. Her distinctive voice and extraordinary connection to the piano established her as one of the leading jazz musicians of her generation. Horn’s journey from the Washington D.C. jazz scene to the international stage is a testament to her dedication and perseverance. Her influence reached far beyond the confines of traditional jazz, breaking boundaries and inspiring audiences worldwide. Enjoy the easy pace of Shirley Horn’s music as you take in all that 6.4 offers. This latest version of WordPress introduces a new, versatile default theme and a suite of upgrades to empower every step of your creative journey. Craft your content seamlessly with further writing improvements. Explore more ways to bring your vision to life and streamline site editing with enhanced tools. Whether you’re new to WordPress or an experienced creator, “Shirley” has something for you. Discover the unmatched flexibility of building with blocks and let your ideas take flight. Many of the features and enhancements in WordPress 6.4 fall in the “small but mighty” category. Along with the adaptable beauty of the Twenty Twenty-Four theme, these updates help content creators and site developers alike save time and effort while delivering the high value, low hassle WordPress experience the world has grown to expect. Josepha Haden Chomphosy, Executive Director of WordPress Download WordPress 6.4 today What’s inside 6.4 Meet Twenty Twenty-Four Experience site editing at its finest with Twenty Twenty-Four. This new multi-faceted default theme has been thoughtfully crafted with three distinct use cases in mind, from writers and artists to entrepreneurs. Save time and effort with its extensive collection of over 35 templates and patterns—and unlock a world of creative possibilities with a few tweaks. Twenty Twenty-Four’s remarkable flexibility ensures an ideal fit for almost any type of site. Check it out in this demo. Let your writing flow New enhancements ensure your content creation journey is smooth. Find new keyboard shortcuts in List View, smarter list merging, and enhanced control over link settings. A cohesive toolbar experience for the Navigation, List, and Quote blocks lets you work efficiently with the tooling options you need. The Command Palette just got better First introduced in WordPress 6.3, the Command Palette is a powerful tool to quickly find what you need, perform tasks efficiently, and speed up your building workflow. Enjoy a refreshed design and new commands to perform block-specific actions in this release. Categorize and filter patterns Patterns are an excellent way to leverage the potential of blocks and simplify your site-building process. WordPress 6.4 allows you to organize them with custom categories. Plus, new advanced filtering in the Patterns section of the inserter makes finding all your patterns more intuitive. Get creative with more design tools Build beautiful and functional layouts with an expanded set of design tools. Play with background images in Group blocks for unique designs and maintain image dimensions consistent with placeholder aspect ratios. Do you want to add buttons to your Navigation block? Now you can do it conveniently without a line of code. Make your images stand out Enable lightbox functionality to let your site visitors enjoy full-screen, interactive images on click. Apply it globally or to specific images to customize the viewing experience. Rename Group blocks Set custom names for Group blocks to organize and distinguish areas of your content easily. These names will be visible in List View. Preview images in List View New previews for Gallery and Image blocks in List View let you visualize and locate where images on your content are at a glance. Share patterns across sites Need to use your custom patterns on another site? Import and export them as JSON files from the Site Editor’s patterns view. Introducing Block Hooks Block Hooks enables developers to automatically insert dynamic blocks at specific content locations, enriching the extensibility of block themes through plugins. While considered a developer tool, this feature is geared to respect your preferences and gives you complete control to add, dismiss, and customize auto-inserted blocks to your needs. Performance wins This release includes more than 100 performance-related updates for a faster and more efficient experience. Notable enhancements focus on template loading performance for themes (including Twenty Twenty-Four), usage of the script loading strategies “defer” and “async” in core, blocks, and themes, and optimization of autoloaded options. Accessibility highlights Every release is committed to making WordPress accessible to everyone. WordPress 6.4 brings several List View improvements and aria-label support for the Navigation block, among other highlights. The admin user interface includes enhancements to button placements, “Add New” menu items context, and Site Health spoken messages. Learn more about all the updates aimed at improving accessibility. Other notes of interest PHP 8.1 or 8.2 are recommended for use with WordPress 6.4. Find in-depth details on PHP support in this post. WordPress 6.4 disables attachment pages for new installations. Learn more about WordPress 6.4 Check out the new WordPress 6.4 page to learn more about the numerous enhancements and features of this release. Explore Learn WordPress for quick how-to videos, online workshops, and other free resources to level up your WordPress knowledge and skills. If you are looking for detailed technical notes on new changes, the WordPress 6.4 Field Guide is for you. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Developer Blog to stay on top of the latest development updates, tutorials, and more. For more information on installation, fixes, and file changes, visit the 6.4 release notes. The 6.4 release squad ​​The WordPress 6.4 release comes to you from an underrepresented gender release squad to welcome and empower diverse voices in the WordPress open source project. Being part of the 6.4 release coordination team has allowed me to closely observe the intricate release process, where every detail, no matter how minor, is meticulously addressed—taking into account various factors like performance and backward compatibility. There’s still much to learn, but I feel fortunate to have had the chance to contribute to WordPress 6.4. Akshaya Rane, 6.4 release coordinator team member Over several weeks, the 6.4 release squad kept the release on track and moving forward by leading collective work, connecting ideas, and removing roadblocks. Release Lead: Josepha Haden Chomphosy Release Coordinators: Chloé Bringmann, Ebonie Butler, Akshaya Rane, Francesca Marano. Cohort: Dee Teal, Jaimie Olmstead, Jyolsna J E, Mary Baum Core Tech Leads: Mike Schroder, Tonya Mork. Cohort: Stephanie Walters Editor Tech Leads: Sarah Norris, Siobhan Bamber, Tammie Lister. Cohort: Devan Ferguson, Frédérique Battel, Jessica Goddard, Katie Ayres, Marta Torre, Nyasha Green, Pooja Bhimani Core Triage Leads: Nicole Furlan, Olga Gleckler Editor Triage Leads: Anne McCarthy, Birgit Pauli-Haack. Cohort: Emily Leffler Schulman Documentation Leads: Abha Thakor, Femy Praseeth, Mushrit Shabnam. Cohort: D.J. Billings, Jamie VanRaalte, Laura Byrne, Tiffany Bridge, Winstina Hughes Marketing and Communications Leads: Meher Bala, Reyes Martínez, Sé Reed. Cohort: Meagan Hanes, Michelle Frechette Test Lead: Pooja Derashri. Cohort: Anne Bovelett, Birgit Olzem Design Leads: Ellen Bauer, Estela Rueda. Cohort: Allison Tarr, Ana Cirujano, Cathi Bosco, Sonia Gaballa, Ohia Performance Lead: Emily Clarke. Cohort: Linnea Huxford Training Leads: Courtney P.K., Courtney Roberston Default Theme Leads: Jessica Lyschik, Maggie Cabrera 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 working together to strengthen the software. WordPress 6.4 reflects the countless efforts and passion of more than 600 contributors in at least 56 countries. This release also welcomed over 170 first-time contributors! Their collaboration delivered more than 1150 enhancements and fixes, ensuring a stable release for all—a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress open source community. 6adminit · Aaron D. 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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 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. Looking ahead Over the past two decades, WordPress has transformed the digital publishing landscape and empowered anyone to create and share, from handcrafted personal stories to world-changing movements. The present and future of WordPress hold exciting opportunities for everyone, builders and enterprises alike. The foundational work for Phase 3 of the roadmap continues, with efforts focused on fostering real-time collaboration and streamlining publishing flows to improve how creators and teams work together in WordPress. Stay on top of the latest news and contributing opportunities by subscribing to WordPress News and the WP Briefing podcast. A release haiku The smooth feel of jazz The cutting-edge of the web Install 6.4 View the full article

The third release candidate (RC3) for WordPress 6.4 is ready to download! 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. WordPress 6.4 is slated for release on November 7, 2023—less than a week away. If you haven’t tried it, now is the time. You can test WordPress 6.4 RC3 in three ways: Plugin: Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install (select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream). Direct download: Download the RC3 version (zip) and install it on a WordPress site. Command line: Use the following WP-CLI command: wp core update --version=6.4-RC3 Read the RC1 announcement for featured highlights, and check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.4-related posts. If you are looking for detailed technical notes on new features and improvements, the WordPress 6.4 Field Guide is for you. The WordPress 6.4 release is brought to you by an underrepresented gender release squad to welcome the participation and partnership of those who identify as gender-underrepresented in the WordPress open source project. What’s in WordPress 6.4 RC3? Thanks to everyone who has tested the beta and RC releases. Since RC2 was released on October 24, there have been more than 25 issues resolved. You can browse the technical details for all recent updates using these links: GitHub commits for 6.4 Closed Trac tickets since RC2 GitHub commits for Twenty Twenty-Four PHP compatibility update It’s recommended to use PHP 8.1 or 8.2 with the upcoming 6.4 release. Refer to WordPress 6.4’s PHP compatibility post for more details. Contributing to 6.4 WordPress is open source software made possible by a community of people collaborating on and contributing to its development. The resources below outline various ways you can help, regardless of your technical expertise. Get involved in testing Your feedback and help in testing are vital to developing the WordPress software and ensuring its quality. It’s also a meaningful way for anyone to contribute. Check out this guide for instructions on testing WordPress 6.4 features. The core Query block requires more testing and feedback to ensure the latest changes to prevent full page reloads work smoothly. Note that this setting was called “Enhanced pagination,” but it has been recently renamed, and it’s now referred to as “Force page reload” instead. 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 6.4, 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 Do you build themes and plugins? Your products play an integral role in extending the functionality and value of WordPress for users worldwide. Hopefully, you have already tested your themes and plugins with WordPress 6.4 betas. With RC3, you will want to continue your testing and update the “Tested up to” version in your plugin’s readme file to 6.4. Please post detailed information to the support forums if you find compatibility issues. Documentation Help the Docs team put the finishing touches on end-user documentation in time for the 6.4 release. Find out what’s needed and how you can help in this post. Help translate WordPress Do you speak a language other than English? ¿Español? Français? Português? Русский? 日本? Help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages. A RC3 haiku One more week of prep One more week to test the code One more week til launch Thank you to the following contributors for collaborating on this post: @meher, @rmartinezduque, @sereedmedia. View the full article

Join WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy as she looks at a recent WordPress success story, the clean energy solution Little Sun, and learns about their WordPress story. Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Credits Host: Josepha Haden Chomphosy Special Guest: Romane Guégan Special Guest: Ashley Mrozek Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Brett McSherry Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Show Notes Website: Little Sun Small List of Big Things State of the Word – This year’s annual keynote, State of the Word, will be on December 11. Save the date to hear the WordPress project’s co-founder, Matt Mullenweg, share reflections on the project’s progress and aspirations for the future of open source. Celebrating 10,000 Photos in the WordPress Photo Directory – On October 11, the 10,000th photo was approved! The Photo Team is one of the newest ways to contribute to the WordPress open source project. Community Team Training #11: Using the Translate Live tool – Uncover the potential of the “Translate Live” tool, which is ideal for presenting at local meetups to engage and onboard new translators for your native language. If you’re organizing a WordCamp, consider introducing this tool during your Contributor Day. A New WordPress Showcase – The journey to update WordPress.org continues with the launch of a new Showcase design. The Showcase is a natural starting point for visitors arriving on WordPress.org, and it both inspires creativity and demonstrates what’s possible with WordPress. 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’ve got a special guest with me. I have here a couple of folks from Little Sun, a nonprofit organization that recently moved its entire online presence to WordPress. And we’re talking everything from their mission statement and donations all the way to their blog and shop. Welcome both to the WordPress Briefing. [00:00:59] Ashley: Thank you. [00:01:00] Romane: Thank you. [00:01:01] Josepha: We have with us Little Sun today. Can you start by introducing yourselves and your organization? Just tell us a little bit about what you all do. [00:01:08] Romane: Hi, my name is Romane Guégan. I’m a Senior Press and Communications Manager at Little Sun. [00:01:14] Ashley: And I am Ashley Mrozek. I’m the Senior Digital Manager. [00:01:17] Josepha: So what does Little Sun do for the folks who are listening and maybe don’t know about it yet? [00:01:22] Romane: Little Sun brings full power and light to communities that live off the grid, with the focus on sub-Saharan Africa because most of the people who lack access to electricity and need them. And we also inspire people to take climate action globally. [00:01:39] Ashley: So access to solar energy helps kids who don’t have electricity and study at night. They can complete their homework at night. If their schools are in a more rural area, they will have a light to kind of guide them back home. We also work on a lot of electric vocation projects and hospitals. So we’re, we’re kind of supporting labors that are, are taking place in the evening, after the sun goes down, among other things. [00:02:07] Josepha: Yeah. It’s, I, I think that that is one of the things that folks, probably most of my listeners, probably take for granted, like the easy access to light. And as we all know, the sun is around a lot. And so that is one of our most readily available resources other than potentially wind power. But I think that that is a great mission. And I really think that that’s wonderful work that y’all are doing. So, is there a particular reason that you focus on sub-Saharan Africa? Is that where you find a majority of people who don’t have access to that kind of resource are? [00:02:43] Romane: Yeah. 70% of those people actually need in sub-Saharan Africa, where solar is actually a viable source of energy. Actually, it’s only 1% of solar, of the solar capital of the generation when we actually deliver solar energy there because there is so much potential. [00:03:04] Josepha: That’s amazing. So you said that you all were funded in 2012. I imagine that your business has evolved over time. So, obviously, you all are WordPress users. That’s why we have you here with us today. But before we get into the questions about WordPress itself. Why don’t you tell us a bit about how your business needs evolved over time and how you wound up needing a solution that did use WordPress? [00:03:31] Ashley: So I would say our focus and kind of the different initiatives that we’ve taken on since 2012 have shifted a lot based on various reasons, where our donors are, where we’ve kind of found the most need, and where we can be the most impactful. And I think as we go into those new geographies, our online presence has become more and more important. [00:03:55] Josepha: So, before you all switched to WordPress, I understand that you had several sites that you had to merge into one. And so I assume that as you evolved the business and your focus has changed, you realized you needed something a bit more streamlined. So, how was that transition, that migration from a lot of different sites to one big site? [00:04:17] Romane: Yeah, because we started as a global project. And then, with the time, we evolved, actually also getting new donations. And in the past, we used to have one website where we have our webshop and our mission, our vision, all of our project descriptions. But then we had another website only for the foundation. And then you had another foundation in the U.S. So it was the question, okay, how do we put everything together? So we actually switched from littlesun.com to littlesun.org with WordPress, and it was amazing to see how we managed with the team to create an ecosystem approach, including impact, but also sales, and fundraising. [00:05:02] Josepha: That was a big footprint that you all had, and you kind of consolidated it into one. And for all of our folks listening on the podcast, I’m going to include some links, not only to their site but then also to a few other things that we’ve mentioned in here today. So, since you made that change, how has it, how has that impacted the way that you all work with your site or with your online presence? [00:05:27] Ashley: Yeah, I think using WordPress and having access to WordPress has been hugely valuable for us. We’re a small team, we’re a nonprofit, so it is pretty scrappy. Everyone is kind of doing a lot of different things. We don’t have a dedicated development team. And so being able to easily customize our pages and create new landing pages or make adjustments on the site without that development help has been valuable. [00:05:55] Josepha: Yeah, so you don’t have a developer team now. Did you have a developer team when you had all the sites? [00:06:01] Romane: We just still work with freelancers. [00:06:03] Josepha: Okay, yeah. I am also not a developer, for what it’s worth, and have been working with nonprofits for a while. And I understand that problem where you have all these things you need to do and want to do, but there are also things you absolutely have to focus on in order to make your mission possible and your vision come true. [00:06:23] Ashley: Yeah, and I think, I think WordPress has given us a lot more, like a lot more flexibility to kind of produce new content quickly. And because of that, it’s just been a lot more efficient, too, for us, you know. [00:06:38] Josepha: And you all are using Blocks? Are you, like, the best Block builders? [00:06:42] Romane: Yeah, I love Blocks. [00:06:43] Josepha: Blocks are a fairly new innovation for the history of WordPress. WordPress has been around for 20 years, so we’re a nice, mature project. And we’ve really only had blocks as a functional part of the CMS for probably the last five or so. We’ve been working on the project a little bit longer. And it has been fascinating to me, like, in my own work that I have done with WordPress, kind of outside of my work with the project, to see, like, how much autonomy you get to have back as somebody who is not a developer, maybe isn’t a designer, but you do know exactly what you need to have on your site today, right? And having to stop and find a freelancer or stop and find some set of developers who can make those changes. For me, when I was specifically working on nonprofit stuff. That was always kind of a moment where I was like, well, I guess I’ll just go to Facebook and put that on there or something because I was faster than trying to find someone to come help you. And so, I’m so glad you love the block. [00:07:48] Ashley: We’ve created many a landing page. [00:07:50] Josepha: Also, your site is adorable, and your brand is adorable, in case no one’s mentioned that lately. Super cute. Super cute. [00:07:58] Josepha: So, we’ve talked about how you kind of took a bunch of stuff and made it into one big thing and how that’s been easier for you all to manage it. But from the standpoint of just, like, somebody who’s running a nonprofit, someone who’s running an organization, how has that transition been for your team? I know you said you don’t have a huge team, but was the move toward WordPress a net benefit over time, or was it immediately beneficial? Like, how has that been for your team? [00:08:27] Romane: So what’s interesting actually is that we have a team that is spread also all over the world. And so we have teams in Berlin and in U.S., and New York. In Zambia, too. What was really interesting was how people identify to the new website because now we have to really think, okay, what is the content we want people to see, but also we want our critics to see. And so it kind of unified all of our content at Little Sun. And it was much more like much easier to understand afterwards. [00:09:03] Josepha: Yeah. [00:09:04] Romane: And it was because we also work at the intersection of creative communications, impacts, fundraising, technology, and to be able to put everything and have it on the front. And then have the stories to tell the stories from sub-Saharan Africa, from universities who got either a Little Sun lamps or solar systems, and then we have the donation page, so basically everything could be integrated in a super easy way, and it could target different audiences easily, either it’s someone who wants to partner with us, or a donor, or just someone who wants to be part of our solar training. [00:09:46] Josepha: Yeah, and I mean, I think that no one will be surprised to hear that if you have multiple things that you have to get everybody to, it really increases the amount of marketing that you have to accomplish, rather than having one place for everyone to go too, and they can see everything that they might want once they arrive. So, that’s wonderful. [00:10:06] Ashley: I think I was just going to say, or kind of echo what Romane said about the fact that we have so many different audiences, we have partners, we have donors, we have people who are just coming to learn about solar energy, or who are interested in purchasing a lamp. I think prior to this, it was a little bit confusing for those different audiences to kind of navigate to where they were intended to go to on the site, and now it’s much more cohesive. And we often hear that from people where it’s like, it’s quite easy to, to kind to find what they need to find on the site. [00:10:39] Josepha: I define the WordPress community as anyone who is using WordPress, regardless of whether they know it or not. And so you all, in my mind, are part of the WordPress Community. And I just wondered if being part of that community has changed your approach to the way that you manage your content online or the way that you have chosen work with your business as like an online entity that also does on-the-ground, in-person thing? [00:11:06] Ashley: I think definitely. I think we’re kind of going back to what I said before. I think we’re much more efficient now. I think in the past, it’s the idea of, like, well, getting this web page live or publishing this is going to be, you know, we have to think about a huge timeline, that’s, is going to require a lot of resourcing, a lot of different types of expertise and people, and everything now feels like something that we can, we can launch pretty immediately, which is really wonderful too. I would also say just like being a part of the WordPress community too. It’s the sort of support that we’ve gotten from your team. It’s always really tailored. And I think as a nonprofit working with a, like, a much bigger business, you can be apprehensive sometimes, feeling like you won’t really get that personalized support. And I think that’s something that’s been so nice with WordPress. Is really feeling like the people we’re working with are understanding our business and taking the time to understand our needs. And I think that makes us think differently about our online presence as well because then we feel like we have that additional support, which is great. [00:12:12] Josepha: I’m always a fan of hearing that people who are passionate about WordPress are also passionate about helping others with WordPress. That’s one of my favorite things about us. That’s not true. I have like 25 favorite things about us. And so I need to stop saying that I have one favorite, but I never will. Okay, well, do you all have any last thoughts that you just want to share with me or podcast listeners that we have? [00:12:36] Ashley: Yeah, I think the, the plugins and integrations have been really useful for us. I think it can be really intimidating to bring on, like, a new tech solution or tool and feel like everything that you are already working with or have is going to become outdated or obsolete in some way. And I think it’s just been really nice to work with WordPress and have all of those transitions be really seamless for everything to connect really well. Yeah, I think that’s been. That’s hugely helpful too. [00:13:07] Josepha: So, was that part of the decision-making process? Like, do I know that this software will be around in the future so that you’re making an investment in the site now and know that it’s going to hang around now you can find people help? Like, was that part of the decision-making process? [00:13:21] Ashley: I think so. I mean, I guess I wasn’t completely around during the time, but I would say, like, that’s definitely something that we’re considering in any kind of tech that we’re thinking about is it can require so much work to, to kind of bring something on with such a small team. So we want to ensure that, yeah, it’s going to last, it has longevity, and it’s going to work with the tools that we already have. So I think all of that is really important for sure. [00:13:48] Josepha: Well, thank you both so much for joining me. Like I said, we’ll have a link to littlesun.org in the notes so that you all can learn more about their project and see their beautiful site with their beautiful little solar sunflowers. Thank you both for being with me today. [00:14:04] Romane: Thank you so much. [00:14:05] Ashley: Thank you so much for having us. [00:14:07] (Music interlude) [00:14:11] Josepha: What a wonderful organization. I’m so glad that they found WordPress and that it works for them. Let’s continue our tour today with the small list of big things. Item number one, it’s time to save the date: December 11th, 2023, for this year’s State of the Word. State of the Word is the annual keynote address delivered by the WordPress Project co-founder Matt Mullenweg. Every year, the event shares reflections on the project’s progress and aspirations for the future of open source. And so, if that is something that you like to tune into, December 11th is your day. Second thing on our list is that we are celebrating our 10,000th photo submission. So, on October 11th, the 10,000th photo was approved. The Photo Team is one of the newest ways to contribute to the WordPress open source project, and it feeds all of those photos into Openverse as well. The third thing on our list today is that I want to tell you about a community team training module that just came out. It’s specifically about the Translate Live tool, and it is ideal for presenting at your local meetups to engage and onboard new translators for your native language. If you’re organizing a WordCamp, consider introducing this tool during your Contributor Day. I will leave a link for this in the show notes so that it is easy to find. And item number four, the journey to update WordPress.org, continues with the launch of a new Showcase design. The Showcase is a natural starting point for a lot of visitors who are on WordPress.org. It inspires creativity and also demonstrates what’s possible with WordPress. So, stop on by there, it’s WordPress.org/showcase, and give it a bit of a look. [00:15:58] Josepha: And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. And 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 a new episode drops. And if you like what you heard today, share it with a fellow WordPresser. Or, if you had questions about what you heard today, you can share those with me at wprebriefing@WordPress.org. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. [00:16:24] (Music outro) View the full article

In an effort to keep the WordPress community up to date, this post provides an update on the PHP compatibility of the upcoming WordPress 6.4 release scheduled for November 7, 2023. Recommended PHP version for WordPress 6.4 It’s recommended to use PHP 8.1 or 8.2 with this upcoming release. Please refer to the Hosting page for more detailed information, including a few known issues. Reach out to your hosting company to explore PHP upgrade options. Why does compatibility matter? PHP is a programming language on which the WordPress code is based. This language runs on the server, and it is critical to keep it updated for security and functionality. Various teams within the WordPress open source project work to both test and fix any issues with new PHP versions so you can update with confidence that the WordPress core software is compatible. Happy WordPress-ing! Thank you to @annezazu @barry @ironprogrammer @hellofromtonya @chanthaboune @jrf @costdev @javiercasares for reviewing and contributing to the effort of this post. View the full article

The second release candidate (RC2) for WordPress 6.4 is now available! 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. WordPress 6.4 is slated for release on November 7, 2023—two weeks from today. If you haven’t tried it, now is the time. You can test WordPress 6.4 RC2 in three ways: Plugin: Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install (select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream). Direct download: Download the RC2 version (zip) and install it on a WordPress site. Command line: Use the following WP-CLI command: wp core update --version=6.4-RC2 Read the RC1 announcement for featured highlights, and check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.4-related posts. If you are looking for detailed technical notes on new features and improvements, the WordPress 6.4 Field Guide is for you. The WordPress 6.4 release is brought to you by an underrepresented gender release squad to welcome the participation and partnership of those who identify as gender-underrepresented in the WordPress open source project. What’s in WordPress 6.4 RC2? Thanks to everyone who has tested the beta and RC releases. Since RC1 was released on October 17, there have been more than 25 issues resolved. You can browse the technical details for all recent updates using these links: GitHub commits for 6.4 Closed Trac tickets since RC1 GitHub commits for Twenty Twenty-Four Contributing to 6.4 WordPress is open source software made possible by a community of people collaborating on and contributing to its development. The resources below outline various ways you can help, regardless of your technical expertise. Get involved in testing Your feedback and help in testing are vital to developing the WordPress software and ensuring its quality. It’s also a meaningful way for anyone to contribute. Check out this guide for instructions on testing WordPress 6.4 features. 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 6.4, 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 Do you build themes and plugins? Your products play an integral role in extending the functionality and value of WordPress for users worldwide. Hopefully, you have already tested your themes and plugins with WordPress 6.4 betas. With RC2, you will want to continue your testing and update the “Tested up to” version in your plugin’s readme file to 6.4. Please post detailed information to the support forums if you find compatibility issues. Help translate WordPress Do you speak a language other than English? ¿Español? Français? Português? Русский? 日本? Help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages. A RC2 haiku You have been waiting Download and give it a test RC2 is here Thank you to the following contributors for collaborating on this post: @meher, @rmartinezduque, @michelleames, @cbringmann View the full article

It’s time to save the date, December 11, 2023, for this year’s State of the Word! State of the Word is the annual keynote address delivered by the WordPress project’s co-founder, Matt Mullenweg. Every year, the event shares reflections on the project’s progress and aspirations for the future of open source. For the first time, State of the Word will take place outside North America–this time with the Spanish community in Madrid, Spain. The event will be live-streamed to WordPress enthusiasts around the globe via WordPress.org social media platforms. Join Matt as he provides a retrospective of 2023, demos the latest in WordPress tech, and comments on the future of the WordPress open source project. Details including how to reserve a ticket for the in-person event, the link to watch the live stream, and information on how to submit questions for the Q&A portion will be provided in November and shared on WordPress.org and affiliated social media accounts. Thanks to Reyes Martínez and Chloé Bringmann for reviewing this post. View the full article

The journey to update WordPress.org continues with the launch of a new Showcase design. The Showcase is a natural starting point for visitors arriving on WordPress.org, and it both inspires creativity and demonstrates what’s possible with WordPress. From unique personal blogs and portfolios to enterprises and celebrity fan sites, the Showcase celebrates WordPress’s flexibility, popularity, and the freedom to own one’s content. This new design provides much-needed improvements to the aesthetics and user experience. It emphasizes bold visuals and a more dynamic browsing experience through tags and categories. Individual site pages now include desktop and mobile screenshots, while the site introduces an improved layout on mobile devices. This redesign also brings new block-based functionality and several components that will be used elsewhere on WordPress.org. All of this was made possible through collaboration between Design, Marketing, and Meta teams. Thank you to everyone. @adamwood @alexstine @annezazu @bengreeley @cbringmann @chanthaboune @dufresnesteven @eidolonnight @fcoveram @joen @jonoaldersonwp @jpantani @laurlittle @matt @markoserb @ndiego @pablohoneyhoney @pkevan @renyot @ryelle @sereedmedia @_dorsvenabili If you would like to propose a change or report an issue, please do so in the wporg-showcase-2022 GitHub repository. Also, make sure to join the #website-redesign Slack channel if you are interested in additional updates coming to WordPress.org and want to contribute. View the full article

The first release candidate (RC1) for WordPress 6.4 is now available! 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 vital to ensure that everything in WordPress 6.4 is the best it can be. You can test WordPress 6.4 RC1 in three ways: Plugin: Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install (select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream). Direct download: Download the RC1 version (zip) and install it on a WordPress site. Command line: Use the following WP-CLI command: wp core update --version=6.4-RC1 The current target for the WordPress 6.4 release is November 7, 2023. Get an overview of the 6.4 release cycle, and check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.4-related posts. The WordPress 6.4 release is brought to you by an underrepresented gender release squad to welcome the participation and partnership of those who identify as gender-underrepresented in the WordPress open source project. What’s in WordPress 6.4 RC1 This release contains 420 enhancements and 445 bug fixes for the editor, including more than 260 tickets for WordPress 6.4 core. Browse the technical details for all issues recently addressed using these links: GitHub commits for 6.4 Closed Trac tickets since Beta 4 GitHub commits for Twenty Twenty-Four Highlights WordPress 6.4 is the third and last major release of 2023. It introduces a multi-purpose default theme, new features, and a keen focus on details to enhance every aspect of your creation journey—from site editing and design to writing flows. A new flexible default theme brings together the latest and greatest of WordPress. Discover its vast collection of templates and patterns to tweak and match your brand. Built for versatility, Twenty Twenty-Four is an ideal fit for nearly any type of website. Enable lightbox functionality in images for immersive viewing experiences. Organize your patterns with your own custom categories. Find them all more intuitively with advanced filtering in the Patterns section of the inserter. Enjoy more writing improvements, including new keyboard shortcuts, smoother list merging, and enhanced control over your link settings. A revamped toolbar experience for Navigation, List, and Quote blocks ensures cohesive and organized access to the tooling options you work with. A redesigned Command Palette with new commands helps you find what you need, perform tasks efficiently, and speed up your workflow. Rename Group blocks to organize and distinguish areas of your content easily. See and locate your content’s media assets at a glance with new gallery and image previews in List View. Build beautiful yet functional layouts with an expanded set of design tools. Play with background images in Group blocks for unique creative designs, keep image dimensions consistent with placeholder aspect ratios, and effortlessly add buttons to your Navigation block without custom CSS—among other new capabilities. Block Hooks enable developers to automatically insert blocks at their chosen content locations, enriching the extensibility of block themes through plugins. While developer-centric, this new feature improves your building experience with blocks and gives you complete control to customize Block Hooks to your needs. Over 60 accessibility updates, including significant List View enhancements, aria-label support for the Navigation block, and upgrades to the admin user interface. More than 100 performance updates, focusing on template loading performance for classic and block themes, usage of the script loading strategies “defer” and “async,” and optimization of autoloaded options. Are you looking for a deeper dive into details and technical notes? These recent posts cover a few of the latest updates: Changes to attachment pages for improved SEO Miscellaneous Editor changes in WordPress 6.4 Introducing Block Hooks for dynamic blocks Script loading changes in WordPress 6.4 Improvements to template loading in WordPress 6.4 Introducing admin notice functions in WordPress 6.4 Updates to user-interface components in WordPress 6.4 New `registerInserterMediaCategory` API Ways to contribute WordPress is open source software made possible by a community of people collaborating on and contributing to its development. The resources below outline various ways you can help, regardless of your technical expertise. Get involved in testing Testing for issues is critical to developing the software and ensuring its quality. It’s also a meaningful way for anyone to contribute—whether you have experience or not. Check out this guide for detailed instructions on testing key features in WordPress 6.4. 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 6.4, 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 Do you build themes and plugins? Your products play an integral role in extending the functionality and value of WordPress for users worldwide. You most likely have already been testing your latest themes and plugins with the WordPress 6.4 betas. With RC1, you will want to complete your testing and update the “Tested up to” version in your plugin’s readme file to 6.4. Please post detailed information to the support forums if you find compatibility issues. Help translate WordPress Do you speak a language other than English? ¿Español? Français? Português? Русский? 日本? Help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages. This release also marks the hard string freeze point of the 6.4 release cycle. A haiku for RC1 RC1 in hand WordPress evolves and takes shape Testing, a sneak peek, in place Thank you to the following contributors for collaborating on this post: @meher, @rmartinezduque, @webcommsat, @annezazu, @cbringmann, @priethor. View the full article

Join WordPress Executive Director, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, as she goes back to the basics and offers some insight into block patterns for WordPress. Don’t miss this exciting insider’s look! Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Credits Host: Josepha Haden Chomphosy Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Brett McSherry Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Show Notes Using Block Patterns Pattern Library Taking Advantage of Query Loops Small List of Big Things The WP Annual Survey is available! Each year, the WordPress community (users, site builders, extenders, and contributors) provides valuable feedback through an annual survey. WordCamp Asia is searching for volunteers for the upcoming WordCamp on March 7–9, 2024. They are looking for Contributor Stories, Event Volunteers, Emcee support, A/V Team Crew, and even designers to help create the official Wapuu for the event. Local WordCamp Meetups! Use this opportunity to find upcoming local events or volunteer to help at the next one. They are an excellent opportunity to meet with others in the community. 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: Today’s briefing topic is going to take a bit of a back-to-basics look at block patterns. Block patterns are one of my favorite enhancements that came through the Gutenberg project, and they’re pretty much exactly what they sound like. Groups of blocks that are arranged together. These patterns can be as simple as a block that holds a series of social sharing icons, but they can also be as complex as an entire landing page, complete with a call to action and interactive gallery. They can be used as a starting point where you activate an entire pattern and then modify the pieces that don’t quite work for you or as a sort of inspirational catalog of design elements for you to build your own patterns from. So, where do these block patterns come from? Who created them? As with most things in WordPress, the answer is lots of places. Some patterns are included with WordPress by default, and there are also sometimes specialized block patterns that are bundled with a particular theme or plugin. There’s also a pattern library that includes both curated block patterns and all the patterns that are created and shared by the WordPress community itself. So from the CMS, from themes, from plugins, from designers, from hobbyists, from people who just like love creating things and putting it out in the world, that’s, that’s where those patterns come from. But you can also create and curate your own block patterns, either to share back to the community as some folks do or because you are a site administrator and everyone needs to be able to add, I don’t know, an author block or something. But you don’t always want to be the one that has to put the photo on the page. There are a few blocks that have their patterns built into settings, most notably the Query Loop Block. I’ll share a tutorial about how to work with that in the show notes, but ultimately, what’s important to remember here is that block patterns are a really powerful tool with a lot of ways to implement them. You can start as simple as you want or as complex as you want, but either way, getting familiar with this concept in the software will give you a leg up on your next project. [00:02:53] (Music interlude) [00:03:00] Josepha: That brings us now to our small list of big things. First up, the annual survey is available. Each year, the WordPress community, so users, site builders, extenders, contributors, artists, you all provide valuable feedback through an annual survey. And every year, I look into the results to get a sense for what areas need the most attention in the project. So click the link in the show notes to take the 2023 survey and help co-create WordPress. The next thing on our small list of big things is WordCamp Asia is currently searching for volunteers for the upcoming event on March 7th through 9th, 2024. They’re looking for Contributor Stories, Event Volunteers, Emcee support, A/V Team Crew, and even designers to help create the official Wapuu for the event. I’ll include a link to applications for that in the show notes as well. And finally, I think it’s important to mention that if you don’t really know what a WordCamp is, so you don’t really understand why you should volunteer to help this one, or why you would want to, then head over to your local meetup. If you look in your WordPress dashboard, there’s a widget in there that tells you when the next local event will be. And I know that they will all be delighted to have you there. And who knows, maybe your city will be the next to host a WordCamp. I’ll also include in the show notes just a list of all of the meetup groups that we have in the world. And so if you don’t trust your dashboard or you don’t share your location there for some reason, you can just find it on your own. And that, my friends, is your small of big things. [00:04:32] Josepha: Thanks for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. 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 a new episode drops. 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 directly with me at wpbriefing@WordPress.org. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Thanks again for listening, and I’ll see you in a couple of weeks. [00:05:00] (Music outro) View the full article