Wordpress

On Episode fifty-one of the WordPress Briefing podcast, join WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy as she makes a case for why routine is a good thing– in life and in the WordPress project. Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Credits Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Santana Inniss Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Show Notes Beta 5, Additional Beta Released WordPress 6.2, Release Candidate 1 Join WordPress 20th Anniversary Celebrations Organizing Diverse and Inclusive WordPress Events Events News Widget Modification Proposal Transcript [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00] Hello everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:29] All right, my WordPress wonders; it’s time to join me for one of my gentle rants on basic leadership principles. Today we’re talking about the importance of routine and predictability in everyday life. But don’t worry, I’m gonna tie it all together with WordPress, too. So by now you’re probably aware that I don’t really consider myself one of those “born leaders.” [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:00] Over the years, I’ve put a lot of effort into researching characteristics of good leaders and general leadership methods overall. But one of the things I encountered early on in my leadership learning journey was the concept of routine. As with most leadership practices I hold, routine has more than one purpose. From a very pragmatic standpoint, routines provide predictability and the more predictable something is, the lower the cognitive load becomes, which in turn lets you use your thinking power for something better. For instance, if you know that in every check-in with your team lead, she’s gonna ask you what you were proud to have shipped last week, what you want to ship next week, and what things stand in the way of your plans, then you know that that is what you have to prepare for. The knowledge work, the thinking part. The thinking part stops being, what is my team lead going to ask me and starts being what is the problem that she can help me solve? [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:00] But from a more human standpoint, that kind of predictability helps us to understand when something that happened is out of the ordinary. Whether it’s a notification of a comment left on your blog or syntactical highlighting that lets you know that you’ve written something that’s out of voice or against grammar standards, it just lets you know that something is unusual there and deserves your attention. Now for me, this has a lot of applications across the WordPress project. There are the obvious things like the cadence of our major release cycles or our notification system, which honestly could use a bit of TLC, a little bit of elbow grease. But there are also less obvious things that this idea still applies to simply because of the way our brains work, the information architecture on our sites, for instance. It should make sense visually and semantically because that makes it easy for us to skim and predict where the highest value content is for us. Or the user interface across the back end of our software. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:00] Having familiar tasks or actions across any type of content or area of content makes it easier for a site maintainer to flow from one area of a site to the next, fixing things as they find them without necessarily having to stop and put down their hammer and pick up a screwdriver or whatever metaphor works for you. Or if you’re doing more nuanced work, like put down your timpani mallets and pick up your xylophone mallets. So, yeah, consistency. Consistency is the topic of today’s gentle rant. I get really worked up about it because I feel like consistency ends up being this euphemism for being boring. But I honestly believe that it’s the consistency and the dependability that make it clear what is supposed to be exciting, the things that are different enough that they merit our attention. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:38] Which, fortunately, now brings us to our small list of big things. It’s actually a pretty big list today and also a bunch of pretty big things. So first thing to know, there was an additional beta added to this release cycle. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:00] It was beta five; it came out last week, I think. There was a bit of a regression that we worked our way through. And so RC1, release candidate one, is going to be postponed a little bit because of that. But don’t wait until RC to start testing, obviously RC is tomorrow, so that means you get to test, like, today! The second thing on our small list of big things is that we have the WordPress 20th anniversary coming up. That’s May 27th. And you can join in the celebrations. So at WordPress’s 10th anniversary and 15th anniversary, we had like a big, ongoing global set of parties, like Meetup events got together and made cakes, or did a concert, or did a hackathon for various reasons. Like they all got together on May 27th or thereabouts and did some really fun, like celebration of how far WordPress has gotten them and how far they hope to be able to go with WordPress. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:00] So if you are from the before times WordCamp kind of organizing timeframe, you know that we always consider WordCamps to be like an annual celebration of the excellence of your community and how much you all come together and how different you are as part of this overall big WordPress-y thingy. All right. Third item that we have is that, I know that I mentioned this in the last WP Briefing as well, but we have another session of the diverse and inclusive WordPress events coming up that’s happening on March 16th. So coming up really fast, we’ll put a link to that in the show notes as well. And the final thing, I don’t remember what list number we’re at, but the final thing is that there is a proposal out there right now to modify the events and news widget that we use inside the WordPress dashboard. If you’re not familiar with it, it is a place where all of the local-to-you Meetup events get listed. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:00] It’s where all of the news items from various WordPress media outlets get published. We just have a link to it there. And so, we would like to make some changes to that so that we’re able to include not only specific location types of events but also events that are location agnostic because they’re online but might have a specific, identifying niche that you particularly find interesting. So it might be for Spanish speakers or for women in particular, or whatever it might be. There’s a proposal out for that. We’ll put a link to that in the show notes as well. And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Thanks for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. View the full article

WordPress 6.2’s first release candidate (RC1) is here and ready for testing. Reaching this part of the release cycle is a key milestone. While we consider release candidates ready for final release, additional testing and use by the community can only make it better. The official release of 6.2 is just three short weeks away on March 28. In open source, we say with many eyes, all bugs are shallow, so we ask everyone across the WordPress ecosystem—theme and plugin developers, educators, agencies, and creators—to jump in and help test. This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it is recommended that you test RC1 on a test server and site. You can test WordPress 6.2 RC1 in three ways: Option 1: Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream). Option 2: Direct download the RC1 version (zip). Option 3: Use the following WP-CLI command: wp core update --version=6.2-RC1 First-time tester? Here’s a guide to getting started. What’s in WordPress 6.2 RC1 This release includes over 900 enhancements and fixes and is the first major release of 2023. Gutenberg commits on GitHub Core Trac Tickets WordPress 6.2 comes packed with enhancements to make everything you do smoother, faster and a little more inspired: A refreshed Site Editor for easier template browsing A new sidebar experience in the Navigation block for simpler menu management Reorganized block settings with separate tabs for Settings and Styles New inserter design that lets you add Media—including Openverse and its more than 600-million-item catalog, plus your entire Media Library—and better categories More header and footer patterns for block themes A new Style Book that shows your entire site’s look and feel all in one place New controls to let you copy and paste block styles for faster, simpler design across your whole site Custom CSS you can add for those finishing touches, per block and globally Sticky positioning to keep important blocks fixed when scrolling Distraction Free mode for moments you want to focus on writing New options that let you import certain widgets from classic to block themes The removal of the Site Editor’s beta label—welcome to the next generation of WordPress Want to see some of these featured highlights in action? Check out the WordPress 6.2 Demo recorded March 2, 2023. Do you crave a deep dive into tech specs? These recent posts cover a few of the latest technical updates. This is not an exhaustive list, but it should get you started: Patterns API expanded to include template_types property Introduction of Block Inspector Tabs Shadows in Global Styles Introducing the HTML API Miscellaneous Editor Changes Custom CSS for global styles and per block Google Fonts are included locally in bundled themes Editor Components updates in WordPress 6.2 Enhanced accessibility And much, much more These are also compiled into a comprehensive WordPress 6.2 Field Guide. Let’s go on a bug hunt! Without your testing support, hitting important product milestones would be a much bigger challenge. It’s also a meaningful way to contribute to the project. If it’s your first time, or it’s been a while, this detailed guide is a great resource to lean on. From a global perspective, every time you test a pre-release version, you help secure the future of WordPress. How? By helping the community prove the software is stable, easy to use, and as bug-free as possible. Want to know more about testing releases in general? You can follow along with the testing initiatives that happen in Make Core. You can also join the #core-test channel on the Making WordPress Slack workspace. If you think you have run into an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. If you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, you can file one on WordPress Trac. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs. Interested in the details on the latest Gutenberg features? Find out what’s been included since WordPress 6.1 (the last major release of WordPress). You will find more details in these What’s new in Gutenberg posts for 15.1, 15.0, 14.9, 14.8, 14.7, 14.6, 14.5, 14.4, 14.3, and 14.2. A special thanks to WordPress plugin and theme developers Do you build plugins and themes? Your products play a special role in helping WordPress do more things for more people across the world. In turn, more people in the WordPress Community mean a bigger, more robust open web. Chances are, you have already been testing your latest versions against the WordPress 6.2 betas. With RC1, you will want to finalize your testing and update the “Tested up to” version in your plugin’s readme file to 6.2. If you find compatibility problems, please post detailed information to the support forums. 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 6.2 release cycle. Hungry for even more? Want to know more about what went into the making of WordPress 6.2? Please check out the 6.2 release cycle, the Make WordPress Core blog, or search for all things 6.2 related. Another haiku for 6.2—it’s tradition! Beta has left us The code sings such happy songs Six point two RC Thank you to the following contributors for collaborating on this post: @laurlittle @cbringmann, @audrasjb, @jpantani. Haiku by @nomad-skateboarding-dev. View the full article

On March 2, release squad members Anne McCarthy and Rich Tabor presented a live product demo of all the delights coming in WordPress 6.2, set to release on March 28, 2023. A first-of-its-kind event in the world of WordPress releases, the showcase was moderated by fellow community member Nathan Wrigley and joined by nearly 90 participants. During the demo, Anne and Rich highlighted some of the new features and enhancements that will continue to revolutionize the way you interact with WordPress. They gave a quick tour of the Site Editor’s refreshed interface, which lets you browse and preview templates before editing. They also covered all the new and highly anticipated ways to manage styles, as well as improvements to the Navigation block, new collections of header and footer patterns, the new distraction-free mode for focusing on writing, and plenty more. It was a jam-packed hour that sparked plenty of excitement—and a lively question and answer session that wrapped up the event on a high note. Any questions the presenters couldn’t get to will be collected and answered in a follow-up post on Make.Wordpress.org/Core and subsequently linked to this post. Watch the recording of the live demo in case you missed it, or want to relive the moment (and the funky fresh demo site designed by Rich). You can find a full transcript of the live demo below. Referenced Resources Live demo announcement 6.2 release roadmap Wrapping Phase 2 of the Gutenberg project 6.2 release enters Beta 1 Beta 4 and the latest call for testing Fixed/sticky positioning GitHub issue Learn WordPress FSE theme developers on Twitch: daisyonwp and ryanwelchercodes Intrinsic design, theming, and rethinking how to design with WordPress Anne McCarthy on GitHub Learn WP workshop: How to create a website on mobile Props to @cbringmann and @laurlittle for co-authoring and editing this post, @evarlese, @courtneypk, and @mysweetcate for captioning, and @robinwpdeveloper for uploading the recording files to wordpress.tv. Transcript Nathan Wrigley 0:22 How are we doing? Should we go for it? Anne McCarthy 0:24 I think we can start. Nathan Wrigley 0:26 Why not? The recording has started. So let's get, let's get cracking. Hello, welcome everybody to the WP 6.2 Live Demo outline. I'm Nathan Wrigley. I do a few things around the WordPress community, mainly to do with video and podcasting and things like that. But it's not about me. Today, we've got two fabulous guests. We've got Anne McCarthy and Rich Tabor, and they're going to do a full on Product Demo. It's a little bit unlike things that you may have seen, because in the more recent past, lots of new features have been added. And so Rich, and Anne are going to spend the time on the screen in a moment, and they're going to show you all of the bits and pieces that you may find dropping into a WordPress install near you. Let's hope. There's been a lot that's been happening, so there really will be probably 20 or 30 minutes of live demos, so look forward to that. I've got to get them to introduce themselves in a couple of moments. Just before that, though, a little bit of housekeeping. This is going to be recorded, so if you have to drop out halfway through and go elsewhere, completely fine. It's going to be posted at the Make/Core website, but it will also come fully complete with a transcript as well. So, if that's something that you're looking for, that will all be there. Also to say that if you want to post any questions, we'd love that. In fact, there's a whole portion at the end when Rich and Anne have finished speaking, where we're going to field questions toward them. Now there's really two places to do that. If you're live with us on Zoom, then if you hit the Q&A button at the bottom of the screen and post your questions in there, I guess specifity... specific... Whatever that word is, be specific. Help us out. Tell us exactly what you want to know and we'll get the questions to them. The other way to do that is to go into Slack. And there is a channel in there, #walkthrough. And if you want to post any questions in there as well, that would be great. So yeah, just to recap, Q&A button if you're in Zoom, and use the Slack #walkthrough channel, if you are in the Making WordPress Slack. Okay, right. I think we'll take you guys one at a time if that's alright. First off a little bit of an introduction from both of you. Let's begin with with Anne McCarthy, shall we? Hello, Anne! Anne McCarthy 2:42 Hello, hello. It's so good to be back on literally any sort of live stream with you. I appreciate that you're a part of this Nathan Wrigley 2:48 Yeah, that's really nice. Anne McCarthy 2:49 Well, I'm Anne McCarthy. I'm a product wrangler at Automattic. I live in Seattle. I also run the FSE Outreach Program, which is basically dedicated to testing all the latest and greatest of WordPress, which is part of why I'm so excited to be part of this demo, is because so much neat stuff has come through this that I've had the privilege of going through a little bit early on with the ever growing calls for testing. So that's a little bit about me, I'll pop it over to Rich. Nathan Wrigley 3:17 Yeah. So Rich, if you want to take the baton there. Rich Tabor 3:21 Yeah. Hey, everyone. I'm Rich Tabor. I'm a product manager at Automattic. And I work on WordPress and Gutenberg, in particular. From a little bit south of Atlanta, Georgia, in the US, and been building and tinkering with WordPress for I think, close to 11 years now. So it's, it's been a good run, and I'm super stoked about where things are heading. Nathan Wrigley 3:43 Yeah, and things definitely have been moving in a very much a forward direction, WordPress, 6.1. And WordPress 6.2. There's so much clear blue sky between the two of them. I think probably the best thing at this point is if we can have it, I don't know what whose screen is coming on. I think it might be Rich's, or maybe it's Anne's, I don't know. Rich Tabor 4:00 Yeah. Nathan Wrigley 4:01 If we can get that screen shared, then I will slide my way out of this call and say, Rich and Anne, it's... it's over to you. I'll be back soon as you're finished for any Q&As. Anne McCarthy 4:14 Awesome. Thank you. Rich Tabor 4:17 Alright, everybody can see my screen right now? Anne McCarthy 4:19 Yes. Rich did an excellent job designing this. I do want to call this out that I love, absolutely love this. Rich Tabor 4:26 Thanks, Anne. Yeah, this is actually running Twenty Twenty-Three. So it's kind of showcasing some of the things you can do just with the core theme. And some of the design tooling that we are, that has been built into 6.2. So this view here is the site editor. So I'm going to orient you here. There's one big change here in particular, I want to call out visually, is this idea of the frame here on the right, and this will pull up the local template. So I'm looking at my homepage of the site right now. If I navigate into other templates, I can pull those up here on the right as well. And then you can also navigate template parts. So this part's not very new to 6.2. But the idea of zooming in on different template parts and templates and having them appear here in the frame is. And that's important because of this concept of browse mode. And this is where you could dive into an actual page from the site editor. So here, I just pulled up the about page of the site, and I can click into it and actually start making changes. Now, the changes here within the post content block are going to be relative to this about page. But I can also modify the template which then changes the about, or changes the page on any instance of this particular template. So it's a new concept and how we can browse the site. But it's a very powerful, and really the first iteration of that way of managing a site. Anne McCarthy 5:50 And also lightly introduced content editing in the site editor, as you mentioned. So it's a kind of a neat merging of the two worlds, which I know folks have long been wanting to see that unified. And same with the frame, it kind of adds a nice layer where instead of just being dropped in, like before, you kind of are given a more zoomed out view, which I think helps address a lot of the feedback that we saw around the orientation when you're entering the site editor. Rich Tabor 6:12 Yeah, exactly. And really, if we think a little bit further out than 6.2, this could also house setting to use. So we do have, you know, one view here that that is relative to 6.1, where you can see all of your different templates. But imagine if we had any other different types of settings and controls and different pages loaded within here, doesn't have to be just the front end templates and renders of your site. Alright, so we're gonna dive into this here. So you can go into it just by clicking on the frame. I'll do that one more time just to show, you just click on it. And now you entered right into it. You can edit it right off, so we can make changes, just as if we zoomed into it in the other way in 6.1. And then we have a bunch of styling tools that have been added to 6.2, so I want to kind of hone in on these. Like, this panel itself is not new. We have style variations, you can zoom in here, we've got this new zoomed out view, where you can apply different ones at a time. And then we also have this icon here, which triggers the style book. Now the style book is a very interesting tool here that really lets you customize the theme's style guide, essentially. So I can go through each of these tabs, which are relative to the block categories, and see all of the blocks loaded on this particular site. So right here, I've got like Button blocks and Columns block and whatnot. So if I click on one of these, it'll pull up the Style panel of that particular block. And then when I make changes over here, these are applied globally throughout my entire site. So if I want to change the way this button looks, let's say we do some smaller tags, maybe we'll add a little bit of letter spacing, and maybe make it capitalized. See, it's getting applied everywhere that the button is used. Also do some changes here to padding, perhaps. We'll do something custom here. I think that looks nice. And now... Anne McCarthy 8:13 Real quick while you're doing this, I wanted to note that like this is something that folks have really struggled with previously with the site editor, where if you're editing a block that isn't in the template already, you're not able to see this. So as Rich is showing, you can actually look at any block that's being used in your theme and see how the change that you're making in styles will impact that. Where before, if the block wasn't present in that template that you were editing, it was hard to know exactly what was happening. And so now you have both the style book and this inline preview that you see in the Style section to rely upon, which is pretty neat. Rich Tabor 8:43 Yeah, exactly. And really, you could theoretically go in and design your entire theme with the style book. Now, I know there's some advantage to design in context of pages and whatnot. And I'll go into that in a bit. But the idea is that you really can quickly browse through all of the different blocks and tighten up what you want to within these controls. And it's not limited to the standard variation as well. There's also these style variations of each block that you can now manipulate as well. So we're gonna go in, say, we'll change the radius of this one. So we want it to be sharp like our other button. But we have these new controls. Like, this is a shadow control we've added in 6.2, where you can apply, say, like this shadow here might be nice. This one here, and so some fallback shadows, within core that a theme can provide as well, its own values. But this now will apply for every single variation of the outline on my site here. Anne McCarthy 9:39 And you'll notice that it's not in the style book right now. And that's just part of the future feature development is showing the variations of blocks as well. Rich Tabor 9:47 Exactly, yes, I would imagine that this would this would show up the variations of the button block, yeah. Which is a nice way to really customize these, like it used to be only CSS would be used to manipulate these variations here. And now it kind of abstracts that away and you can do it within the editing experience. That's really nice. It really is. There's also this idea of block CSS, so you can add custom CSS that is scoped to a particular block. So if I add CSS here, it'll be applied for the button block wherever it's used. Now, I wouldn't recommend using additional CSS in most cases. I would, I would suggest using all the different controls that we've built, that are built into 6.2. But the idea of using CSS to add a little pizzazz to this particular button block is fine. But just with that caveat that you wouldn't want to use it exclusively. Like I wouldn't apply a background color via CSS, I would rather use the background elements color here. There's also additional CSS, which emulates what was previously in the customizer. So we do have site wide CSS that can be applied within the site editor and also on the front end of your site. Again, I wouldn't emphasize using this exclusively, as there are a lot of new design tools that I would explore first, from the top level styles here where you can apply colors to the background, text and buttons. But if there was anything extra you wanted to add, you could do so within the stylesheet here. Anne McCarthy 11:21 And I'll note we'd love to hear feedback if there are certain things that you're repeatedly adding custom CSS for. So either commenting on a currently open issue, or if you don't find one, opening an issue would be super helpful, because it's neat to see what folks are using for CSS so we can fill those gaps. Rich Tabor 11:36 Yeah, exactly. So that's the global Style panel here. But there are some quite a few other improvements along with styling. So the first is the idea of pushing styles globally. So if I'm in here, and I'm designing, let's say I want to add a radius, I want to do some different typography as to appearance like this, like bold, italic look. And then we'll also... Anne McCarthy 12:07 That's cool. Rich Tabor 12:07 Thanks. Also, let me make the letter spacing, maybe we'll make it a little bit bigger, actually, and then, I think that'll work. Do these changes here and see I've just styled this one particular block this button up here. And this button down here is still using the global styles that we designed earlier. But now I can go through my settings panel here and hit Apply globally. And I'm going to here so we can see that happen. The styles are now pushed globally to all the other blocks. So this is really helpful for when you're designing in flow. And you don't necessarily want to abstract out into the style book and you want to push your changes that you just did here, because you like the way the button looks and want those applied everywhere, all at once. I think this is really powerful way to to quickly design within the editor. Another tool that is quite useful, I'm going to take this heading here and manipulate this. It's the idea of copying and pasting styling. So we're going to use that same bold italic look, maybe we'll make that a little smaller, we can even manipulate this size to be a little bigger. Now we go here to copy styles. And then I can come all the way down here to this other heading that's very similar, and paste it in. And there we have that style applied just to these two headers. And you would do this when you don't necessarily want every single heading to have this effect. But perhaps there are like elements on this page that you want to push those changes to, specifically. So copying and pasting allows you to be very granular, whereas applying styling globally, lets you be more of a holistic design experience for pushing styles. Another neat... Anne McCarthy 13:57 Oh, real quick, I just wanted to know like I think one of the things that's interesting is, as we've added more design options to blocks like this is part of the experience of scaling things and making it easier to use. So when we think about like intuitive and delightful. Some of these tools coming into 6.2 really take you know, the tons of design tools that we've added over the last couple releases and makes it easy so you can actually tweak things and then reuse. So I think that's one of the things I want to call out is it's kind of this crescendo. Where now the tools that are coming to 6.2 to really ease the experience and allow you to do a lot of neat stuff where rather than having to re-tweak everything through every single heading block. A lot of stuff is used. So... Rich Tabor 14:34 Yeah, exactly. WordPress is moving towards a design tool and less of like, what you see is what you can only have. It's more of an expression of creativity and it really does open up the doors for for designing beautiful pages on the web. I think it's really powerful. Another cool bit that we've added is the idea of sticky positioning. So headers would be nice sometimes if they stick to the top, so for top level group blocks, this is a group block here, there's this new position attribute where you can assign it to sticky. And as you can see, right in the editor, it's already showing me that this is sticky on the front end. And also here as well. It's only available for top level blocks for now, there's still some some odd stuff to figure out on how we communicate when something is not going to stick due to the the parent height of the elements around it. But for top level, it's still fine. So we have it here. But there are some iterations that are already happening for the next release that will kind of bring this into more, bring some more capabilities to this particular feature. Anne McCarthy 15:44 Yeah, and I'm very excited because one of the things I wanted to briefly call out was the how the header, the template part has that purple. So another neat thing coming to this release, that was a big part of feedback for the outreach program was having to look parts and reusable blocks having a different coloring, because there are different kinds of blocks are synced across the site, when you make little changes and impacts everything everywhere. So that's another neat thing that's coming with this release, is that you can kind of see those a bit differently in the List view as well as when you're in the editor. I see Nathan has his hand raised. Is that intentional? Oh, it's removed. Okay. Nathan Wrigley 16:23 It was not intentional. That's my mistake. I'm sorry. Rich Tabor 16:28 Yeah, it helps you see quickly too like, what is the template part, particularly for headers and footers, it makes it easier to browse quickly. So speaking of template parts, and patterns in particular, so headers and footers, are new patterns added within WordPress 6.2. And now that they're loaded, actually from the pattern directory, which is kind of neat. And I'm going to show you how to replace a footer with one of those other patterns. So if you have your footer template parts selected, you can go to replace footer. Now this flow is not new to 6.2, but it's going to call out these other improvements. And then you just click one there, and you have it loaded here, that's the site logo that I'm using up here as well. And you can modify this text without having to do any any funky PHP filters or moving actual templates. And if you want to change it again, you go back to replace say, let's pick this other one, let's try this one. It's kind of nice. And there's this focus view, or you can zoom in to just the footer itself. You can even check the responsiveness of it and see how it, how it reacts on mobile, and make any of your changes here and have those persist over to the actual template whenever you close it out. It's a nice way to really kind of clean up the editing experience. So you're not seeing this entire group of groups and instead kind of focusing on what you're actually wanting to complete. You can do the same for the header as well. Anne McCarthy 18:01 Yeah, and as Rich mentioned, there are some new patterns that are being bundled from the directory, which I think are really extensive. Regardless of what theme you're using, there's going to be some pattern for group patterns that help democratize design where you can use them in anything. Rich Tabor 18:15 Yes, that's right. All right. So navigation. Navigation has gone under a... quite a bit of work in the last a couple of months. And really, this is all about trying to make it easier to manage your site's navigation and also add pages and links and then even styling. So there's this new dedicated list view for the navigation block. So it's essentially emulating a little bit of what's available over here except for you had to kind of get down to it. Now it brings it top of mine and the surface area here. You can drag them around, move them up and down, even add submenu links and remove them as well. And then you can style it like normal. And now apply different styles via the styles tab to the block itself, or even individual page links and whatnot, you can dive into them and manage them all from here, instead of having to only manage them from up here. This really kind of abstracts the complexity from from this particular canvas interface into a more familiar interface here on the sidebar. It's really a great effort. And it's it's taken some time to refine but it's getting there and it's feels a lot nicer. Anne McCarthy 19:30 Yeah, there's been a lot of good feedback about this as well just because it kind of is meant to marry the classic experience with bringing blocks into it. So it is in addition to being edit, editing on canvas, so if you really want to continue to edit as a block you still, you can continue to do that. But it does add a nice interface and the block settings where you're able to do it. And I'll briefly call out here the split settings, which we'll probably talk about later. But you'll see here for more complex blocks, there's some nice split settings making it a little bit easier, more intuitive to go through. Rich Tabor 20:02 Yeah, that's right. And if you take a look at navigation here, this is very similar to this component added here. And, and that's, that's purposeful, we want it to look and feel familiar. Either way you're managing navigation. So you can also add some menu items here, remove them and drag them around and reset them here, as well as browse into the individual pages. So that's what I have for the site editor portion of the demo. And did you have anything else you wanted to add to this, Anne? Anne McCarthy 20:37 Oh, could you resize the Browse mode for me? I just love the resizing. I think it's kind of cool. This is just like a fun, you know, thing to call out. But maybe you won't noticem but you can resize it. So as you're quickly going through your site, if you want to see how it looks in different ways, you can also do that. So that's the final thing I'll shout out. Rich Tabor 20:56 Yeah. So then, yeah, exactly. It's... there's a lot of fine, fine touches like that. Well, we can't obviously can't call them all out today. But it is really getting tightened up overall as an admin experience for the site. Anne McCarthy 21:12 It's such a great foundation in the future, for sure. Rich Tabor 21:15 Exactly, exactly. Alright, so if we press this back button here, it goes right back to the dashboard, I'm gonna go and leave... Anne McCarthy 21:25 That back button was a big piece of feedback people had they would get into the site or not know how to get back out. So I appreciate you calling that out. Rich Tabor 21:32 Yeah, exactly. It's been through a number of iterations. And I think we've settled on something that feels feels nice; it does feel nice. Anne McCarthy 21:41 I agree. Rich Tabor 21:43 So... Anne McCarthy 21:44 Ah yes, the removal of the beta label. Rich Tabor 21:46 You want to talk to this, Anne? Anne McCarthy 21:48 Yeah, I would love to jump in on this actually. So you'll notice that the beta label is removed for this release. And part of why we wanted to show it now is to see how all the features, how the experience has changed, how much more you can do. And all of that has led to the removal of the beta label. And that doesn't mean that feature development is done that it's like, you know, gonna stay this way forever, it just means it's in a place where we invite you all to try to the site editor, it is out of beta. And a lot of development work has gone into testing this. So we've had almost, I think, 20 calls for testing with the outreach program. It's been through multiple major WordPress release cycles, there is still more work to be done. But I'm very excited to see the beta label removed, I think the features that are coming to 6.2. And the foundation that is set with 6.2 really marks a level of maturity. That is pretty exciting. So consider this an invitation to try out modern WordPress, and to check it out. Rich Tabor 22:43 A hundred percent, I couldn't have said it better. Alright, so another neat part that's added recently for 6.2 is this idea of distraction free mode. So it's not turned on by default, but I have it on so we can see the results here. So you can go in and type right here. And then actually, I'm gonna throw in some Lorem here. So you can see it in action. So this feels more like a text editor and less like a Block Editor. Whenever distraction free mode is on even the the multi block selection, it feels really nice. It doesn't there's not this idea of blocks, even it's kind of abstracted from here, there's less noise, there's less distraction. And just think that the idea is that it's just you and your words, it's just writing and publishing. And if you want to publish, you can hover over here, you'll see the toolbar come down, you can hit Publish or draft. And then this is how you would turn it off and back on here. And then you still have control of all the existing tool. And it's just a much simpler, streamlined interface. And you do have access to blocks, you can still add them if you'd like to, but the idea is just being able to write without the distractions is really powerful. And a really nice publishing experience overall. Anne McCarthy 24:08 And this is for everyone. So this is like a lot of stuff we're coming to say it or using a block theme. This is available for anyone who's using the Block Editor. And to be honest, I use this for basically all my writing now. Especially for any post or page, I typically will go into this mode. So I'm very excited about this. And I hope folks feel the same way. Rich Tabor 24:28 Yeah, exactly. I've been using that too for quite a bit. But the thing is, is also not only for post editing, so I have a page here that I've created. And I have distraction free mode turned on, which kind of removes all the extraneous tooling and it really lets me focus in on the actual blocks here so I can manipulate them to an extent. I can even drop in different imagery for these images here and modify the buttons and whatnot and even add more blocks but the idea is it's almost like a simplified editing experience for pages as well, not only for posts. And here, I'll come up here and turn off distraction free mode to see it all in real time. Anne McCarthy 25:13 And this isn't yet available for the site editor, but I have a feeling a number of folks are going to be keen to see that put in there as well. Rich Tabor 25:20 Exactly, yeah, I don't see why it wouldn't work in the site editor as well. I think it'd be very nice. Yeah. So we have some other improvements here that are fun. So this inserter here has gotten a couple of changes here. So blocks looks familiar, it's still the same, but patterns is where we started seeing some changes. Instead of having some featured patterns loaded in a block category selector, we've split them out individually as their categories here, you're gonna load up some of the different header patterns that are loaded in WordPress 6.2. So you can load them here and see them in this tray, and then click to add them to your site. Which is really nice, it's a nice way to kind of go through them quickly and see a bunch of different ones. We also have the media tab up here, which is new, which splits out the images from your Media Library, videos, and audio as well, including the Openverse library. So this is a catalogue of, I believe, over 600 million free, openly licensed stock imagery. And you could search from right here in the inserter. So let's type in birds. And click on one, and it will add an image block with the image already added to it, we have got the caption down here. If you don't want the caption, you just turn it off right here, this little control that was added. And now you can manipulate it right off. So let's say this, drop it into here. Maybe we'll make these about the same size and move it over to something interesting. Anne McCarthy 26:53 And I'll note that there was a GDPR concern around the images being properly uploaded rather than hotlinked. And I wanted to just note that that's been addressed. So the images are uploaded to your Media Library. That's why. So in case anyone has that question. Sorry, continue. Rich Tabor 27:08 Yeah, no, that's a good point. It's very important. A key benefit to have this flow here is that instead of instead of having to add an image block, and then open your Media Library, and then pick an image, and then you have it here, it's really this one flow of searching visually, and searching here, as well. And then having it added as an image block already. So it kind of skipping all the extra steps that you always have to do anyhow, it's really nice. And we have a couple of interface changes. So there's the settings icon up here that used to be a cog, and now it represents the sidebar itself. So when you open it, the sidebar is triggered, if that's closed. And that's changed for a couple of reasons. But one of the bigger reasons is, as I mentioned earlier, this idea of split tabs, so we have the cog for settings. And that's when a block has additional settings that are not per the norm of the styles that are available within WordPress, then you'll have a new settings tab pulled out here. And that's to keep the density nice whenever you're editing and it feels good instead of having everything kind of in your face all at once. Now for other blocks, like the paragraph block, there's not additional settings, so automatically not included. The tabs up top and just be everything top level. But when a third party plugin adds like a different settings panel, or even if you extend one of these core blocks that does not have one, and a detects one should be auto added as well. So it's kind of just like a nice, fluid way to continue improving the experience of editing within WordPress. Anne McCarthy 28:49 Yeah, so plugin authors can also kind of make sure where they want settings and styles to show that it shows up correctly. And there's a dev note about that as well. Rich Tabor 28:58 Yes, that's right, you can you can decide as when you're extending or adding your own inspector controls. That's what these are called here, whether or not they're included within styles or settings as well. Yeah. Then another smaller change that's kind of nice is this idea of pulling the outline from its own toolbar item up here into the list view. It's because they're very relative, you know, a list of all the blocks on your page, also an outline of what's going on. So they're combined now into this one view. We also have time to read word count and character count here, which is nice. And then this is a little guide here that just helps you understand the structure of the importance of the structure of the document and making sure that it is properly structured. All right, was there anything else that we wanted to add you think, Anne? Anne McCarthy 29:51 I'll add one last call out just because I'm trying to think about like little dev tidbits if you want to disable it prefers there is a way to disable Openverse as well I know that's always a concern. We add something it's like, okay, how do we get rid of because I don't want a client getting into it, there is a way to disable that is documented as well. The other thing is the pattern. So there's new categories, the patterns. And so query is now posts, a couple of things were merged, there's no call to action. And there's also some lovely, which I'm gonna brag on Rich, again, some new text based, query patterns. We have a lot of visual patterns for the query loop, and now there's wonderful, more text focused ones, which I think is really exciting. And just another great way where patterns have evolved and patterns is obviously a huge part of the future building with WordPress. So I'm very excited about those and keen to see just more variation with query loop, I think it's really powerful block to make easier to use. So I'm excited to see it. Otherwise, I think that's, I think that covers a lot of what we were trying to go through. Rich Tabor 30:57 Yeah, and there's certainly more. There's a lot of interesting, minute details that are, you know, quality of life improvements around editing and designing. And we can't cover them all today. But it's just, there's a lot of exploratory ideas and cool, interesting pieces that have been the result of lots of feedback and lots of testing, like I mentioned earlier. And, you know, it's really a testament to open source and contributing and really working together as a team to make this thing we call WordPress ours and making it a brilliant publishing experience. So just thank you to everyone who's put in time ideas, effort, code, design, marketing, copy, all of that, and more to making this what it is. It wouldn't be possible without you. Anne McCarthy 31:46 Totally agree. And thank you, Rich, for doing such an excellent job building this site and demoing all this. Nathan Wrigley 31:51 Yeah, indeed. Thank you, Rich. Thank you, Anne. Just to let you know that, in theory, there's possibly up to about 25 minutes left. If anybody wishes to pose a question, we're going to do our best to get the answer directly from Rich and Anne. Whether that means putting the screen back on, I don't really know. But we've got a few that have come in. The place to put those, it would appear that some people have figured out how to do that in Zoom. But if you go to the walkthrough channel, in the making WordPress Slack, you can post some questions in there and all things being equal, we'll get them raised as quickly as we can. So we've got a few. In all honesty, because they've been copied and pasted from various different places, I can't necessarily say who the name of the person is that sent them. But first question I've got over here for either of you. It says when you save globally, under the Advanced tab, does this change the stylesheet? Interesting. Rich Tabor 32:54 So this will change the attributes of the blocks. So if I throw in that example, there, I pushed the attributes of that one block globally. So they're applied to every block. So it does affect some styles, but not writing any style sheet or writing to the core style sheets. Nathan Wrigley 33:11 Can I ask the question? It's not something that's been submitted by anybody else, but it just occurred to me that as you were clicking the global button, I just wondered if there was a "get out" from there. In other words, if you inadvertently click the global button, is there an undo option in there? In other words, can you back away from all of the buttons suddenly changing or all of the H1s? Anne McCarthy 33:32 You do have to hit save after. You can't just hit Apply globally. You have to hit save, and that's where the multi-entity saving pops up. The multi-entity saving is kind of strange in that it's not good at discarding changes. So you basically would just have to like leave. Like it would be like, Whoops, I hit that. You probably also have to hit the undo. Like there's - those are the two kind of options. So, yeah. Rich Tabor 33:54 Yeah. The undo is like a global thing. It works there as well. Yes. Anne McCarthy 33:58 And there's a reason that feature is hidden, like under Advanced and collapsed. That's not necessarily for everyone. But for folks who do like to tinker, it is available. Rich Tabor 34:08 Right. And it's also only available in the site editor as well. So it's the more the global view of editing your site is where you can access that. Nathan Wrigley 34:17 Perfect. Okay, so I have a question from Zoom. Is copying and pasting styles as demonstrated just for core blocks? They go on to say more, which I'll read out. Some blocks collect, some block collections have their own C&P, and I'm curious what might carry over, if anything? And then there's a follow up. Also, if CSS classes are assigned to a block, will applying global styles to a block be to all of the same block, i.e. H2? Or, hopefully, will a custom class allow for a more granular global CSS? There's a lot in that question, but if we start with the: is copying and pasting styles demonstrated just for core blocks? Rich Tabor 34:56 So it works for blocks that have leveraged the block support system within core. So if you have opted your block into using background color, and text color, link color, any of the layout settings, anything that was in the styles tab, then all of those would get pushed to or get copied or pasted or even pushed to the global application of styles as well. Now, if there's, if a block has done its own sort of background color attributes, I don't know that those would persist as well. But if you use what's available in core, it's really one or two lines of JSON will get you the background color support that you need. Nathan Wrigley 35:35 Anything to add to that, Anne? Anne McCarthy 35:37 No, just another reason to rely on what core is building. So it's a another great example of how these features will work together and how adoption helps whenever these new things come out. Nathan Wrigley 35:49 Okay, so we'll go on to the next question then. So this is from Zoom, and apologies, I don't know your name. Can we have this as a feature request? Can we have sticky sidebar block for some groups next release, please? Anne McCarthy 36:05 Probably would do a separate block, I'm guessing. Yeah, do you have anything to add to that? Rich Tabor 36:11 Yeah, I would say we wouldn't need a sticky sidebar block. Right now that group lock in top level-only does support position sticky. And the only reason it was turned off like we did have it on for one of the Gutenberg releases for everything - for every group block - but it was turned off just because there was too much confusion around if you had a sticky element that wasn't didn't have enough space to stick for and enough height to stick. So it wouldn't actually be sticking. You wouldn't see a result of you applying a sticky position to it. So I think we can figure that out with some some UX to really clean that experience up so that you do expect and understand what's going on. When you apply that to a block. That's not the root level of the document. So it'll be there. It just takes a little bit more iteration. Nathan Wrigley 37:00 Okay, another question. This time from Slack. When there are changes made in the site editor, are the templates still marked with the blue dots to indicate that the changes are in the database? Rich Tabor 37:14 Yes, from that Manage Templates view that I shared in the canvas, it will show up just like it did previously, when there are changes to one of the templates provided by the theme. Anne McCarthy 37:25 You can revert the changes, as well, as you're used to doing. Nathan Wrigley 37:30 Okay, thank you. Anne's shared a link related to the question that we just posted. I don't know how Zoom works well enough to whether or not we can share the screen. Anne McCarthy 37:40 I can briefly share my screen. Nathan Wrigley 37:42 Yeah, that'd be great. Show us the GitHub. Anne McCarthy 37:43 Let me try that. I just wanted to mention this in case people want to follow along in the follow up tasks related to this. I love to look at links. I'm a nerd like that. So in case anyone else is, this is a lot of the follow up tasks and a great issue to chime in on or just follow if you're interested in this because there are some improvements to be made. But this is a neat report for now. So it's - oh, I just copied and pasted. So it's issue number 47043 in the GitHub repo. Nathan Wrigley 38:11 So 47043 related to the question that we just had. Okay, so another one from Zoom. This is Robin, who asked the question, can you show? It's just moved on my screen. There we go. Can you show us how to trigger the focus mode to view, say, for example, the footer on its own? So I guess we're back on the screen again. Rich Tabor 38:34 Sure. Everyone can see? Yep. So when you have a template part selected, you just hit the Edit button here and then it's focused into that as well. And then you have, again, the responsive controls here. All the existing controls, it's just localized to this template part. Nathan Wrigley 38:54 Hopefully that answers your question. Thank you, Robin. Just for anybody who's kind of lurking who has a question but hasn't yet posted it, please do. What are the chances that you're going to get Rich and Anne on the on the phone in the next few weeks? Pretty minimal, I'd say, so make use of them while they're here. Ellen has done just that. She's in Slack. Ellen says, is there a plan to allow no title templates in the block editor as they are still included even in header and footer-only templates? Rich Tabor 39:28 No title templates. Like templates without a title? I'm not quite. Anne McCarthy 39:35 You can just remove that block. Rich Tabor 39:36 Yeah, you can you can remove the post title block from a template. I'm not quite sure if that's if that's what the question is asking. Nathan Wrigley 39:46 Ellen, if you're still in Slack and watching this, if you heard Rich and Anne queerying that, then if you can give some more clarity, we'll endeavor to get that answered. Anne McCarthy 39:57 Knowing Ellen she knows exactly how to remove things. So I'm like, I'm curious. I'm definitely - we're misinterpreting something because she's very - Not showing the title in the editor...? Nathan Wrigley 40:07 Yeah. Not showing the title in the editor. She says she's here. Anne McCarthy 40:12 I'm like, "Say more." Nathan Wrigley 40:14 Yeah. Give us more. Give us more Ellen, and we'll get right back to you. Anne McCarthy 40:17 Let's follow back up on that, because Ellen always has some good questions and good feedback. Nathan Wrigley 40:21 All right. We'll do just that. Again, another question from Zoom. This is posed by some anonymous person. Will the list views icon get the same treatment as settings? Rich Tabor 40:33 I don't think it's in the plans. I don't think there are plans to change that. But list view icon, it's always the list view. So when you toggle it on and off, it's relative to what it is. Whereas on the other side, the settings can be block settings, page settings, template settings. Global styles is in that same area. So it's a little bit more context for the list view to stay a list view item. Anne McCarthy 40:58 And I know that the question came up because the settings icon looks like there's that sidebar. And so there are who people have been asking like, will the same thing happened over here? Just for context. That was part of a discussion in a different GitHub issue. Nathan Wrigley 41:12 Okay, thank you very much. I appreciate very much those people who are posing questions. That's really great. Again, just to prod you once more, feel free to add your own questions in no matter how big or small they are. We're here to help. So now we have a question on Zoom from Abdullah. And he coincides beautifully with a question I've written down. Any good resources to learn FSE theme-based development? Can either of you point to a particularly good resource that you know of? Anne McCarthy 41:41 Yeah, Learn WordPress. There's tons of stuff on Learn WordPress that I would recommend. I also, Daisy Olson, who's Developer Relations at Automattic, has a Twitch stream going and some YouTube videos around block theme development. But I would recommend going to Learn WordPress. There's also some contributor-led initiatives. Carolina, who's one of the theme folks has, I think, it's fullsiteediting.com. And that was kind of like the original, go-to resource. And she's done an incredible job working on that and keeping it up to date. So yeah, there's tons of tons of resources. I will spare you from from sharing more, I don't know, Rich, you have more hands-on experience there. What's the most helpful for you? Rich Tabor 42:22 Yeah, there's some really great tutorials and guides on Learn that are relatively new, that are really helpful. And I see that the team there has been really cranking it out on the last year or two, like really putting a lot of effort into this. So I would, I would start there. Nathan Wrigley 42:38 So if you're not familiar with that, I guess it would be apropos to say go to your browser of choice and type in learn.wordpress.org and go and explore. Basically, there's a ton of materials that are getting updated on what feels like a daily basis at the moment. So, once more, learn.wordpress.org. Go and check that out. But also, Anne in the chat that we've got going on here has linked to Daisy Olsen's Twitch channel, which - I'm just going to read it out but hopefully I'll make it into the transcript. twitch.tv/DaisyonWP. And it's all one word. D-A-I-S-Y-O-N-W-P. Daisy on WP. So there's two great places to go. But the learn.wordpress.org is perfect. Anne McCarthy 43:24 I have to add one more thing, which is if you're not fully ready for block themes, one of the big things that I feel like needs to be emphasized more is you can gradually adopt. So all these features are being done. But maybe you want to only give access to a client to edit the header. You can do that. Maybe you want to leverage theme.json in your classic theme, you can do that. If you want to expose the template editor. But use the rest of your themes across them, you can do that. So I want to also encourage folks to look into resources around gradual adoption, because it makes sense that this stuff isn't - From day one, there has been a focus on that. Adopt what you what you want, when you want and it's going to make sense to different people at different times. Matías once said that to me, and I think it rings really true. And so now that we're at this level of maturity, I think we're looking again and revisiting again, like okay, what can I use? What do I want to use? I think it's really important to mention. So if you're not ready to go all in, I encourage you not to just wipe it all away, but to think about how you can gradually adopt and also what would help you gradually adopt. So there is actually a label on GitHub started a couple months ago around - It's called blocks adoption. So if there's something that you see that you're trying to adopt the site editor, and it's preventing you from doing so, like we want to know about that. And you're welcome - I'm going to just put this out here - @annezazu is my GitHub username, feel free to just like @ annezazu, ". This is blocking me from using the site editor." We want to know these things. Open issues. Please share, because that is also part of the phase of this work is making sure people can adopt as they can and that the tools are robust. There's a ton of resources as well. There's a page in the Theme Handbook around gradually adopting to block themes. So I just wanted to call that out. Nathan Wrigley 45:06 And just one more time, what was that? Give us, the give us the username. Anne McCarthy 45:11 A-N-N-E-Z-A-Z-U. So like Zazu from The Lion King. It's an inside joke from middle school. Nathan Wrigley 45:19 Okay, possibly the shortest question. This is from Sandy, I should say, Can Lotties be added to 6.2? Rich Tabor 45:28 I would say that I did a quick search a few minutes ago and there are various blocks built by the community, which do allow you to add or embed LottieFiles to your site. I haven't tested any myself but feel free to dig into those. And if they're open source, they can contribute ideas or feedback on on those GitHub repos. Nathan Wrigley 45:49 Thank you very much. And Eagle has posted a question. When there are changes made in the site editor, are the templates still marked up - Did we have that one? We have, right? We've done that. Anne McCarthy 46:01 We answered that one. Yeah. Nathan Wrigley 46:02 I think we did. Okay, moving on directly then to Ian, what is - oh! Okay, what is the philosophy for mobile in the editor? Are there any plans to have a mobile view? Anne McCarthy 46:16 That's part of the dragging and resizing. And there's a lot of work being done around intrinsic design. And you can see on the developer.wordpress.org? What is the blog? I think it's /news. Do you hear audio? Nathan Wrigley 46:35 I hear only your audio. I don't hear anything I don't wish. Anne McCarthy 46:36 Okay, sorry. Something just started playing in the background out of nowhere and that just scared me. It's like all of a sudden, I was like, woah! Where was I? Nathan Wrigley 46:50 So we were talking about mobile views? Anne McCarthy 46:53 Yes, intrinsic design. There is a developer blog that if you're not following that, you definitely should, that addresses this around, basically showing that the mobile view points have exploded over time. It's now really not sustainable to try and have CSS and all this sort of stuff, mobile queries allowing for each view. So instead, how can we think about intrinsic design? And so that's like the best answer I can give. And for now, there is this nice resizing that you can do to kind of see how things scale. 6.1 introduced fluid typography, which was really exciting and part of this larger, intrinsic design set up. And I think we'll expect to see more of that over time. Sorry, for the brief mental break. Nathan Wrigley 47:36 Just a quick reminder, we probably got 5, 6, 7 minutes or something like that before we start to wrap things up. So if you've got any questions, please, please do post them in here. We have one from Paul who asks, is there any more work planned for pattern management in the future? And then WP Engine has released a plugin allowing easier management of patterns recently, I believe that was yesterday, it would be good to know if we should wait for core or assume that nothing else is coming soon. Rich Tabor 48:07 Yeah, I would say that pattern management is an important part of this new WordPress experience and having a way to create and manage local patterns, but also maybe push them to the pattern directory. And then on top of that, having a functionality built in where - it's kind of like a component based system where you have patterns where the design is the same across patterns, but content can change. All of that kind of falls into the same category of work. And that is something I believe WordPress will eventually do as well. Nathan Wrigley 48:41 Okay, we've got no more questions on the screen. So I'm going to ask a question, if that's all right. You were demonstrating the distraction-free mode there where you could move things up, move things down, and resize pictures and images and so on. I was just wondering what the constraints on that are. So in the case of images, I could see that you could resize things. And with the text, I could see that you could, you know, highlight things and start typing wherever you wish. But I just wondered how the decisions had been made to set those parameters and those only. So yeah, around that, what's available in distraction-free mode? What limitations are there? Rich Tabor 49:17 I would say, generally, it's what's available is what happens when you click on a block. The tooling is there available on the canvas before so resizing was available on the image but not the toolbar. So the resizing is still available when you're in distraction-free, but maybe not adding the caption piece or you know, those other toolings. It's almost like the content locking or content only locking API. It's very similar to that in a sense, but a little bit more tightened up. Where just text and dropping in images - you can't necessarily open the Media Library from there unless you dive out of it. But you can drop another image onto that existing image to replace it. Some things like that. Nathan Wrigley 49:59 It looks like a really excellent interface for people who just, well, want to concentrate on their writing. It sounds like Anne's all in on it. Anne McCarthy 50:05 I use it every single day. It's amazing. Nathan Wrigley 50:09 It almost felt like a Google doc minus all the bits and pieces at the top. Yeah, really, really nice. Okay, so we have some more questions. Weston is asking, what about optimizing the experience of editing using a mobile device on the web? So I guess that's a little bit maybe the question that we had earlier. How can... we how can we do things on a actual mobile device? Anne McCarthy 50:30 That's a great question. There are mobile apps. So there is the mobile team and using the mobile apps. I personally don't use mobile apps and sometimes will edit things from Safari on my iPhone SE 2. I actually was talking to someone - their username is Nomad Skateboarding. And from what I understand, he only builds client sites from his phone. And so one of the things I said to him, I was like, "Give us your feedback. That's really cool. It's really unique. That's fantastic. Like, what pain points you're running into, what can we improve?" Because there is obviously like, we are in a mobile first world. My phone is sitting right next to me. I would love to hear particular pain points folks have when trying to edit in that way. You can obviously use the apps. There are some quirks with the site editor, and that I know is partially being looked into and resolved. But yeah, I think there are probably - what we're building now should always translate back and there are teams trying to sync back and forth. And there was a recent post from the mobile team talking about what's the future of mobile editing. And so I would recommend - it's somewhere on Make/Core. I recommend digging that up and getting involved and honestly sharing your feedback. Because I don't think that is an experience that we talked about enough personally. It's a great question. Nathan Wrigley 51:40 Rich, anything or should we move on? Rich Tabor 51:42 I think that was great. Nathan Wrigley 51:44 Okay, perfect. Um, um, um. Okay, we have an anonymous question. It says as page speed is a big challenge, how are we optimizing the blocks for better LCP score? Anne McCarthy 52:00 There are, some interesting - sorry, Rich, I don't know if you wanted to jump in. I was going to start link dropping. Rich Tabor 52:05 Yeah, you go ahead. Yeah. Anne McCarthy 52:07 Yeah, there's some interesting work from André. Part of it involves actually adding tracking and making sure there's really good front end metrics. So there's kind of a twofer going on. In one fell swoop, we're focusing on better tracking and improving the tracking that we have for performance, particularly the front end. And then at the same time, also work is being done to optimize like style sheets. There's been some really neat stuff in previous releases that I bet I can pull up if you'll give me one moment. Nathan Wrigley 52:36 Yeah, whilst you try to find that, Anne, I think it's probably important to say that, if there are any questions which you wish to have answered which don't somehow get answered in the next few moments, then there will be posts created around this piece. So anything that goes missing, any question that is unanswered, there will be endeavours to get them answered. Right? Okay, show us what you got, Anne. Anne McCarthy 53:00 Yeah. So this was a post I did for 5.9, in conjunction with a whole ton of folks who contributed and actually did this work, I just was kind of gathering it up. But you'll see sections here around block style sheets and CSS loading. And honestly, a lot of the work with the styles engine, which is part of the global styles project, can help give a lot of opportunity to actually improve this, I recommend checking out this post to see some of what's already been done. And then in the future, one of the discussions that we had recently with some folks across the community from Google, from Automattic, 10up, all over the place, including our lovely performance lead, Felix. We talked about some of this stuff and about how to talk about particularly themes and also just blocks in general. And thinking about some performance improvements and developer education and automated testing and all sorts of stuff. So I won't go too far into this. But I think a lot of work can be done. And some of it is being done around measuring more front end metrics and very recently, LCP was added and started to be tracked here, which I think is pretty exciting. Nathan Wrigley 54:05 I think following the performance team and Felix Arntz, in particular, would possibly get you quite a long way towards your answers there. Okay, a couple more. Firstly, there's a few people helping out in the Slack channel. So, appreciate that. We've got Matías answering questions, and so on. So that's really amazing. Thank you. Another anonymous question, any plans to support CSS Grid? Rich Tabor 54:33 I think it's something worth exploring. Probably not the major priority coming up. But definitely some interesting aspects that we've seen other... other building applications do that we can learn from for sure. Nathan Wrigley 54:47 Okay, we're very short on time now. I think we've got to round it off at the top of the hour. So we've got about four minutes left. I've got to wrap it up a little bit. So try to get these last two done if we can. This is from Mary. What are the typography options as of 6.2? we have Google fonts and self-hosted. Any plans for solutions like Adobe Type and Monotype? Anne McCarthy 55:11 There's a Fonts API that got booted from 6.2 and is hopefully planned for 6.3. So I would just follow that effort. So right now, 6.2 is not introducing anything new or different there. Things are as they were. There's a private API that folks can can use with anything JSON. That's as concise as I can be. Nathan Wrigley 55:31 No, that's perfect. I think we're three minutes to go. That's probably the best time to wrap up the Q&A. Apologies if you had a question and it didn't get answered. As I said, there will be a whole load of things created off the back of this. We will make sure that there's a transcript available and - just read something in the comment. Hopefully, any questions that have been asked but unanswered will be answered approaching that. Just very, very quickly, I have to say thank you to Anne and Rich in particular, for taking the time out of their busy schedules and demoing what 6.2 can do. It really looks like a transformational release. But also, thanks to Chloé and Jonathan and Lauren and Mary who are on the call, but, you know, you haven't necessarily seen them right now. So, appreciate them. That's really great. Following up off this, I've got three points to mention. Following the 6.2 release on Make/Core for development updates and calls, there's going to be a post. It's make.wordpress.org/core/6-2. Also, if you've been keeping a close eye on the Beta releases - I say beta, I know it's hysterical. The beta releases, we've got version beta four has just been released. And anybody who wants to test that out would be most welcome. The URL for that is far too long for me to say out loud, but you can Google it, I'm sure, and find out how to test for that. And also, if you are keen to follow WordPress, it's all over the social networks. And you can follow - basically, if you try to just follow @WordPress, then you'll get somewhere. So for example, on Twitter, it's WordPress - @WordPress. On LinkedIn, it's /company/WordPress. Instagram is @WordPress. And guess what? On Facebook, it's - what do you think it would be? It's @WordPress. So it's available all over there. And I think that's it. I think that's everything that we've got to say. We're about one minute away from closing. So particular thanks to Rich and Anne, but thanks to everybody in the background making all of this happen. Thanks for showing up. If people don't show up, the work never gets done and the project never moves forward. So fully appreciate anybody who's given up their time to ask questions today and watch this presentation. Anne McCarthy 57:51 And thank you, Nathan. I want to call you out as being an excellent moderator and creating a safe space for us. Nathan Wrigley 57:57 Very, very welcome. I enjoyed doing it. I would gladly do it again. All right. I don't know how to end this call. So I'm just gonna wave. Bye, everyone. View the full article

February has been an exciting month for the WordPress community, with the celebration of the first-ever WordCamp Asia bringing friends and contributors back together in person. But that’s not all; read on for the latest project updates. Get ready for WordPress 6.2 WordPress 6.2 Beta 4 arrived earlier this week and is ready for download and testing. Work continues on track, with the first release candidate (RC1) due next week and the target for the final release on March 28, 2023—less than four weeks away! WordPress 6.2 is one of the last major releases planned for Phase 2 of Gutenberg, taking the Site Editor out of beta with a more polished user experience and refreshed interface. On March 2, members of the release squad hosted the 6.2 live product demo. The recording and transcript will be available soon. In the meantime, these resources will give you a taste of what’s to come: Roadmap to 6.2 Phase 2, Finale WordPress 6.2 Accessibility Improvements Help test WordPress 6.2. Your feedback is key to ensuring everything in this release is the best it can be. Join WordPress 20th anniversary celebrations WordPress is turning 20, and the community is getting ready to celebrate! As part of the festivities, the project has released a 20th anniversary Wapuu, a set of commemorative logos, and a special playlist with 46 tracks from the jazz artists selected to represent WordPress releases. Official WP20 swag will also be available soon. In addition, the Museum of Block Art (MOBA) is calling all artists to submit block art themed on “20 years of WordPress.” Find out how to organize and participate in the WP20 celebrations. What’s new in Gutenberg Two new versions of Gutenberg have shipped in the last month: Gutenberg 15.1 was released on February 8, 2023, with access to the Openverse library of openly-licensed media from the Editor. Other highlights include the ability to add custom CSS on a per-block basis and support for shadow presets in Global Styles. This is the last version of Gutenberg that will be included in WordPress 6.2. Gutenberg 15.2 is available for download as of February 22, 2023. Besides continued accessibility improvements, this release adds support for revisions when editing templates and template parts, and refines the navigation experience in the Site Editor. Follow the “What’s new in Gutenberg” posts to stay on top of the latest enhancements. Team updates: Global community sponsors for 2023, contributor mentorship program, and more The Community Team announced the global sponsors that will support the WordPress community programs in 2023. A few months ago, Meetup.com removed an accessibility overlay in response to some concerns from the WordPress community. A recent update reports that the company has conducted an assessment and plans to address the issues identified. The Training Team launched a new onboarding program for contributors. In addition, they worked on numerous lesson plans, online workshops, and tutorials last month. Check out what’s new on Learn WordPress. The Documentation Team shared future plans for HelpHub. Openverse moved to a standalone domain, openverse.org, with improvements to the site’s homepage, header, and footer. The Plugin Review Team posted a notice to inform about the latest Twitter API changes and the types of plugins that might be affected. The February edition of the Polyglots monthly newsletter highlights some recent enhancements to GlotPress’ functionality and the translate.wordpress.org platform. The latest Meetup Organizer newsletter shares tips on how to help your meetup group stay connected and engaged between events. Check out What’s new for developers? (February 2023), the first edition of a new monthly series with features and resources developers should know about. The latest edition of People of WordPress features Hauwa Abashiya. Following discussions on improving the contributor journey, a new WordPress contributor mentorship program has been proposed to roll out this year. Feedback & testing requests A new proposal from the Community Team seeks to modify the Events and News dashboard widget to show topic-based meetups worldwide. Members of the Core Team suggested some updates to the WordPress release cycle. Version 21.8 of the WordPress mobile app for iOS and Android is available for testing. Redesign work is well underway on the WordPress Theme Directory. Contributors can follow along on the GitHub repository. WordPress events updates Bangkok, Thailand, hosted a successful inaugural WordCamp Asia on February 17-19. The event welcomed 1,299 attendees, and more than 600 participants joined the Contributor Day. At the event’s closure, organizers announced that WordCamp Asia 2024 will take place in Taipei, Taiwan! The application to attend the 2023 Community Summit is now open to WordPress contributors. Learn more about the ins and outs of this working event in Episode 49 of WP Briefing. WordCamp Europe 2023 is looking for media partners and supporters. Want to create diverse and inclusive WordPress events? Don’t miss this free #WPDiversity workshop happening March 16, 2023. Many WordCamps are coming up in the next weeks: WordCamp Entebbe, Uganda, on March 10-11, 2023 WordCamp Torrelodones, Madrid, Spain, on March 11-12, 2023 WordCamp Phoenix, Arizona, USA, on March 24-25, 2023 WordCamp Kerala, India, on March 25, 2023 WordCamp Bogotá, Colombia, on March 31-April 1, 2023 (Online) WordCamp Switzerland on April 1, 2023 Join WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy as she explores three interesting trends from WordCamp Asia. Have a story we should include in the next issue of The Month in WordPress? Fill out this quick form to let us know. The following folks contributed to this Month in WordPress: @ninianepress, @jpantani, @rmartinezduque. View the full article

Join WordPress enthusiasts from across the globe on May 27, 2023, as they come together to celebrate its 20th anniversary! Regardless of how you use WordPress or where you call home, you are invited to celebrate this great milestone. Plan a larger party that includes your entire meetup, spend the day coworking with a group of friends, or hang out virtually online. Whatever your style, celebrate in your time zone, your way. WordPress has some resources to help you party. The Meetup Organizer handbook has a section dedicated to helping you plan your meetup’s anniversary celebration. You’ll find email and Meetup.com templates that make sending your announcements and creating your events simple, as well as tips for planning a fun, safe, and inclusive event, in-person or online. The 20th anniversary website will list events as they are announced and scheduled by organizers, so check back regularly to see if there’s one in your area you’d like to join or help organize. Meetup organizers, once your meetup’s WP20 Celebration is scheduled, email support@wordpress.org using the subject WP20 Celebration and include a link to your meetup event. Events will be reviewed to ensure they have all the necessary details before inclusion on wp20.wordpress.net. And don’t forget the new swag! Starting in April, meetup organizers can order complimentary kits of official anniversary swag, including limited-edition stickers, buttons, and pencils that can be shipped to your meetup at no cost to you. Additional items, such as pennants, shirts, hoodies, keychains, and more, are also available for purchase at the official WordPress store while supplies last, beginning in early March. So, whether you’re sporting new anniversary swag or your old favorites from your closet, join WordPress enthusiasts on Saturday, May 27, for a globe-spanning WordPress celebration. Use hashtag #WP20 to share your passion for WordPress. Don’t have an active meetup in your area? It’s not too late to start one. View the full article

This month we feature Hauwa Abashiya, a project manager in Nigeria and the UK, whose passion for community support led her to an adventure in open source. The People of WordPress series features inspiring stories of how people’s lives can change for the better through WordPress and its global community of contributors. As we travel through life, sometimes we are drawn to a particular cause, one to which we can get behind and join in. This cause, in whatever field it may be, can help lift us beyond our everyday lives and can help us take stock. This is the journey that depicts Hauwa’s finding a global sense of place and providing a way to re-look at her life and plans. That change agent was discovering and becoming part of open source through WordPress. Learning development and WordPress In 2017, Hauwa was working full time as an experienced and successful project manager, but was becoming increasingly aware that she did not feel the same excitement for projects as she once had. She was starting to feel bored. “I knew I still loved working with and in project management, but I needed to do something different.” she said. Hauwa enrolled in a web development course and studied HTML, CSS and some JavaScript. One of the course options was WordPress, which she elected to take. It was then that a course tutor encouraged her to attend a WordCamp, an event focused on the open source software and its global community. She felt that she needed to have a basic knowledge of the software before she arrived at the event, so started to learn WordPress. The first WordCamp she attended was in the seaside town of Brighton on the south coast of England. There she met people who would be friends and mentors for years to come. She said: “I was inspired by meeting people in the WordPress community. My life and my wish to support communities have been shaped for the better by some of the people I met, and I continue to be grateful for knowing them.” Global WordPress community: from Germany to Nigeria After discovering a WordPress community in the UK, Hauwa wanted to see first hand just what a global connection it had. She had heard that WordCamp Europe was a flagship event and brought thousands from across the world together. She wanted to be part of this, and its organization appealed to her project management training. She applied to be a volunteer at the three day conference, which in 2019 was held in Berlin, Germany. At this event, Hauwa discovered both a global movement and an active local WordPress community in her home country of Nigeria. She was able to connect with all the different parts of this vast community from wherever she was working through an instant messaging tool. Inspired by people she met who were using WordPress to help improve people’s lives in Nigeria and other parts of Africa, Hauwa started to delve further into how this open source software and its global community could provide opportunities and improve understanding across cultures and continents. Rosalind and Hauwa Hauwa’s father, Dr Audu Kwasau Abashiya and her mother Rosalind Zulai Abashiya, were both well known for their philanthropy, especially in giving practical support to people in Kaduna, in the north of Nigeria and Abuja in the center of the country. Hauwa explained: “My mum comes from a family who give and share their skills to give practical help. From friends I had got to know in WordPress, I saw that there were parts of the community that had this same ethos. This could be something I could be part of, and also take back to Nigeria in the future.” Her parents had established a charitable foundation focused on helping widows, orphans and children get access to education skills, from finance to music. It connects those who need help and those who can give support. Hauwa said: “Teaching practical skills people which can be used to raise an income or be re-shared with family and others in the local area is so important. Projects like this can help grow a community and keep it strong. Skills such as sewing and cookery are not just skills to put clothing and food on the table, but also are about gaining independence and pride. They are examples of how micro-economies can grow and inspire others to have dreams that they can see becoming real. In how technology can work in local communities, projects like WordPress can be part of this empowerment through localized translations and software to use to share ideas.” With her project management and IT background, Hauwa is getting more involved with how IT skills can be used for not just instilling a sense of community belonging, but also the practical longer term input into the local infrastructure and introduction of fast changing technology. She said: “I would love to see and help further some of the people who have been helped by the foundation my parents started, so they can share their ideas and what they have been doing to encourage others. One of the routes I had looked into was open source software that is free to access and can work on mobile phones. As a previous volunteer team rep in the WordPress Training Team, I saw first-hand just how important it is that a non-technical end user can use software to share their ideas without having to become a developer. We can all help give people a voice, and if we are working in technology, we have a role where we can push for genuine accessibility of the tools.” On Hauwa’s wish list is to help African countries access software in their local language. “This is part of identity, and respecting and valuing different cultures, and not expecting everything to be translated from the English as it is read. It makes things possible for older people who may not find it as easy to access information all presented in English.” Hauwa learned Hausa (a language spoken across several African countries) and English at the same time at home in Nigeria. She had a multi-location education, like her parents, studying and going on to work in different countries. At 16, she first studied computer science on what she describes as a ‘whim,’ not knowing it would be a significant part of her working life in the future. She intended to go to university to study finance and sociology. When she went to say goodbye to her computer studies teacher, the teacher asked what she was going to study. On hearing it was finance and sociology, the teacher said: “You don’t want to be doing that, you want to be doing something in computing.” This conversation proved to be a turning point for Hauwa. She went on to study Computing and Information Systems at Oxford Brookes University and Object Oriented Information Systems for her Master’s degree at South Bank University in the UK. From her second year of university, she worked doing data entry and related areas as she was determined to learn as much as she could about the moving parts of a project. After she completed her master’s, she chose jobs that enabled her to work on systems, out of hours support, project management, supply chain, and procurement to give her the best structure and experience to work on a variety of projects and really understand what both clients needed and how to help them reach workable and timely solutions. These skills proved to be transferable in later years to give her time to support WordCamps, meetups, and the Training Team. She said: “Contributors to open source have so many different professional and cultural backgrounds. It is a great way to share your skills.” Hauwa continued with her fascination for project management and learning, and gained qualifications in the field, including Prince 2 and PMP. She continues her commitment to learning now as she works with Agile and other methodologies and draws parallels with this and her interest in those . “If you use software, you can advance your skills by joining specialist forums, community learning groups, and online tutorials. In open source, there are also many options for community-based learning. Sometimes you only discover new work areas by learning more about those fields. Skills you learn in tech can be transferred to new environments much more easily than people know.” Hauwa is a regular guest on a well-known IT podcast, where she has shared her passion to keep learning and updating your skills, and helping others do so. Hauwa welcomes attendees at WordCamp London in 2019 Committed to supporting her local community in the UK too, Hauwa joined the London WordPress Meetup and in 2019 became an organizer for WordCamp London. During these events, she had many conversations to encourage others to develop their IT skills and even managed to use some of her project management expertise for the same purpose. This interest in driving up the skills levels of others naturally led her to become further involved in the Contributor Teams. Inspired to share her skills by another contributor to the project, she joined the Training Team with her first introduction at a WordCamp Contributor Day. In this team, Hauwa began to find a need for easier ways for people to keep up with the software, its features, and how to be part of open source in their own local area. At the heart of this, Hauwa felt accessibility should be key, and she gave time to better understand documentation. She felt this was essential to give people genuine access and identify where more work was needed. Her belief in this grew when she joined the accessibility team for release 5.6, and she continued to contribute to the team in the area of documentation and training. Hauwa devoted many hours to supporting the Training Team for a number of years as part of her conviction that the right resources can really help communities globally use open source software. She also stressed the importance of materials being user-friendly and easy to translate as WordPress has such a large international usage. Volunteering in open source can re-energize you Through the combination of volunteering efforts in UK and Nigeria, and supporting contributors globally, Hauwa began to find her passion for projects again. She was able to share her 15 years of project management experience in her volunteering role and encouraged others to consider it as a career. She said: “Through volunteering you work alongside people. Project management is about people. It is about helping people achieve. This can be the same through volunteering, and you can learn much through meeting people from different places. “One of my drivers is using technology to solve problems. As a project manager, it is a privilege to help guide people and organizations to identify and reach goals. It is helping them gain that value. This is one of the reasons I was drawn to finding out tech communities and contributing to them. If this is something that drives people reading about my experience, there are vast opportunities to to share your skills. Find something that fits you for for where you are now.” Hauwa encourages anyone working in technology to further their understanding of managing projects and working with different teams. “Project management skills are so important in whatever kind of project you are in. With long working hours over many years, I felt I had lost the connection with the people element. I was stuck in what seemed to be a repeat cycle. With the people I met in the WordPress community and my professional skills being used, I was reminded of my own values and how as a project manager I can support and be part of someone or an organization reaching new heights or creating something of value and quality that others can benefit from and use.” Hauwa has returned to working full time for both national and international, medium and large scale projects. Though her volunteering time to global community building initiatives has reduced accordingly, she focuses on encouraging skills learning and on the community cultural side. “I will keep my interest in how open source like WordPress, working alongside other solutions, can help not-for-profit ground level and community building. For me, if there are technology-based solutions out there, we can all play some part in helping them grow and making a difference. How we give to wider communities does not have to be the same throughout time. It is important to keep relooking at what is needed and the difference it can make. It is equally important if solutions can be about improving infrastructure to technology that makes access to sewing skills for clothing and micro-businesses. Find your central wish for the communities you are connected with, and there may be technologies that can support them. I am grateful for the friends and mentors I have met in open source, and for re-finding my professional and community focus. ” Share the stories Help share these stories of open source contributors and continue to grow the community. Meet more WordPressers in the People of WordPress series. Contributors Thanks to Hauwa Abashiya (@azhiyadev) for sharing her adventures in WordPress. Thank you to Abha Thakor (@webcommsat) for interviews and writing the feature, and to Meher Bala (@meher), Chloe Bringmann (@cbringmann), Mary Baum (@marybaum), Nalini Thakor (@nalininonstopnewsuk) and Maja Loncar (@mloncar) for work on photographs and review. The People of WordPress series thanks Josepha Haden (@chanthaboune) and Topher DeRosia (@topher1kenobe) for their support. 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

On Episode fifty of the WordPress Briefing podcast, join WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy as she explores the three big trends from the inaugural WordCamp Asia. Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Credits Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Santana Inniss Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Show Notes Create Block Theme Plugin WordPressing Your Way to Digital Literacy PostStatus Networking Opportunities WordPress 6.2 Live Demo will be held 2 March, 2023 at 17:00h UTC Future Plans for the HelpHub How to Own Your Expertise & Start Speaking at WordPress Events WP Diversity Training 1 March 2023 Transcript [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00] Hello everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:40] The inaugural WordCamp Asia happened a couple of weeks ago in Bangkok. There were almost 1300 people in attendance, and I was lucky to be able to talk with a lot of them about their thoughts around the WordPress project and community. So today, let’s talk about three of the most interesting trends that I heard from people: the future of themes, the future of work, and the future of contributions. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:00] So first up, the future of themes. This one was not a surprise to me. Not only has it been on my mind lately, but every WordCamp I’ve ever attended in Asia or Australia has had themes as a central element. There are a lot of theme creators making a living in WordPress in this part of the world. So it’s natural that they want to know what to prepare for. Now, it’s hard to predict the future, but there are a couple of things you can do to kind of get a leg up on it. Firstly, the theme review team, if you know how to make block themes but are still struggling to understand what might make them high value to your users, donating a little bit of time to review them can help. While I was at the contributor day, the team rep who happened to also be there to represent the table told me that reviewing block themes is way faster than reviewing classic themes. So if it’s been a bit since you stopped by, I would encourage you to give it a shot. It’s a lot easier than it used to be for a lot of reasons, and they can always use a little bit of help. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:00] The second thing is this plugin called the Create Block Theme plugin. If you don’t know how to make block themes, you know how to make classic themes. You don’t know how to make block themes. This is a wordpress.org maintained plugin that will make theme creation simpler. It’s a relatively new plugin, though, so if you’re the type of contributor who likes to create good tools for good people, you can also feel free to grab a ticket or two from their repo and help get that moving. The second thing that came up was the future of work. This was also not a surprise to me. There have been a lot of reports of layoffs in the tech industry and worries about the possibility of a recession. Since WordPress is not only a tool that folks use in their jobs but also a tool that empowers people to create jobs for themselves, it’s entirely expected for questions about career prospects to come up during a WordCamp. Here are a couple of thoughts on that. So I mentioned this briefly during the Q&A session on that Sunday, but I’m gonna repeat it here because I believe it with every fiber of my being. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:06] You can learn every 21st century skill that you need while contributing to an open source project. I talked about it in episode 17 of this podcast. I’ve talked about it at WordCamps and major event series outside of WordPress for years. Like I really, really believe this, and it’s not just like a WordPress only thing. Although obviously, that is my primary perspective, that’s true for contributing to almost any open source project. On top of that, if you are contributing to WordPress and you’re doing that in the way that we encourage folks to do, you’ve got public examples of proactive, asynchronous collaboration across cultures and time zones. And I don’t know about y’all, but sometimes it’s hard to explain what my job is. And so having examples of how the whatever it is that you were doing, however, you were collaborating or contributing or working on a project together, having concrete examples to be able to share with someone can never hurt. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:04] I’m gonna give us a necessary side note here. I know that volunteering time is a privilege, and if you find yourself between jobs, the last thing you want to do is give up any more of your time for no money. But if you have contributed to any team in the past, that benefit still exists for you. Your contributions are not taken away just because you’re no longer with your employer. The second thought on that is actually one that Matt mentioned during the Q&A on Sunday. He said in his experience that open source shines in recessionary times. I’ll have to take his word for that one since I discovered WordPress in 2009 or so and so after the last recession that I would have experienced in the US. However, I have heard from a lot of people in the WordPress ecosystem and in tech in general who have shared their stories from the last time that we all experienced a recession. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:00] And certainly, when they suddenly found that they did not have a company to call the place that they were working, a company that they were working for, they were able to, at the very least, freelance until they found the next thing. I know that that’s cold comfort if you’re in the middle of things right now, but it certainly is something that people always have looked back to as like one of those turning points for them in the 2007-2008 era here in the US. Now I know that is sometimes not what anybody wants to hear. And also like, who am I to be speaking about observed experiences from other people? I did want to let you know that the folks over at PostStatus have opened up some networking opportunities for anyone that’s been caught up in the current downsizing around the ecosystem. I’ll link to that in the show notes here on wordpress.org/news, but also, if you’re a part of the PostStatus network, they’ve got it posted over there on their sites and things as well. So easy to find and definitely worthwhile if that’s a situation that you find yourself in right now. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:02] And the third thing that I heard from a lot of folks about is the future of contributions. So 635 people attended the contributor day that happened ahead of WordCamp Asia, And at WordCamp Europe in Porto last June, it was 800 people or something, which was the biggest one on record. And so this is really close to that. There’s a lot of people. And a lot of them were attending for the first time. Over the course of the day, I checked in with quite a few of the table leads and heard some pretty consistent feedback, both about what we’re doing to help onboard contributors now but also about how we can help to onboard contributors in the future. Firstly, we all generally agree that documentation, which is our current problem to solve toward easier contributor onboarding, we all generally agree that that’s going pretty well. We now have a ton of our preferences and processes documented in various team handbooks, but with a ton of documentation comes the potential for overwhelm. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:00] So across the board table leads shared the need for sort of a quick start guide for each of their teams. Secondly, we also generally seem to agree that mentorship plays a big role in the success of many long-term contributors. I’ve talked about it before. I had some mentors as I was getting started, and I would never have made it past organizing meetup events if it hadn’t been for their help. And so a bonus item I heard about is actually Meetup events. Meetup groups are one of our most resilient ways to contribute to WordPress, and they also happen to be one of the hardest working. If you’ve never been to one of these events, you may not know that you can learn a skill that’s new to you or teach a skill that you’ve had for a long time. You can also network to find the jobs that you want or network to hire the people you need. It’s where people learn how to use the CMS or learn how to become an entrepreneur. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:08:00] But it’s also where they discover our community and eventually learn why we think that open source is an idea that will change our generation. So if you took nothing else away from this, I guess the takeaway is that you too can organize a Meetup event that will strengthen your local community and the world! [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:08:27] Which brings us now to our small list of big things. So first up, we have a live product demo for WordPress 6.2 on March 2nd, that’s going to be at 17:00 UTC. There is a post that has gone up about it, which I’ll include in the show notes. This is an opportunity for folks to watch a live walkthrough of the current release with a collection of people from the release squad as well as avid contributors and testers. It’ll give you an idea of upcoming changes, but also we’ll probably expose a bug or two along the way. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:09:00] Come with your questions, and we will see you there. Item number two is documentation. So apparently, that’s just half of what I wanna talk about today. Documentation, so wordpress.org, has docs that are specifically written for users and pulls in not only the documentation that we have but also information from the codex, the documentation space of yesteryear. There’s a bit more to do here, and I realize this project has been going on since 2015. It’s because there’s a lot of stuff we have to do. There’s a lot of documentation, and we have to kind of get it in order. But that is the area that we’re in now. We have launched the new documentation page, the new look and feel is out there. And so the next question is making sure that we have it organized in a way that’s easy to find and easy to learn from as you go. There is a whole working group that meets about it, and I will share a link to that in case you find that to be of interest to you as well. And last but not least, there is another speaker workshop coming up on March 1st. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:10:00] If you have not heard of these yet, it’s a workshop that helps speakers learn the process of presentation brainstorming and creation. It is a great workshop. It was created over the course of many years within the WordPress project by Jill Binder and crew. It is a wonderful opportunity. It’s not a WordPress link that we’re on, but there is an event link that I will make sure that we all have access to here, in case that is something that you have always wanted to try, learning how to speak at WordPress events. And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks! View the full article

Episode forty-nine of the WordPress Briefing explores the What, Why, and Who behind the upcoming Community Summit in National Harbor, DC, USA, August 22-23, 2023. Join Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy to learn the importance of the gathering to the WordPress project. Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Credits Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Santana Inniss Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Show Notes Observations on WordPress Contributor Team Structure Apply to attend the 2023 Community Summit Topic Submissions for the 2023 Community Summit Tuckman’s Theory: Stages of Group Development Chatham House Rules Proposal for a project-wide mentorship program Openverse.org 6.2 Beta 1 is open for testing Transcript [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00] Hello everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:40] A couple of episodes ago, I mentioned the Community Summit in the small list of big things. That’s coming up on August 22nd and 23rd, right before WordCamp US. And for some of you, that made complete sense, and the only thought in your mind was, wow, our last one was in 2017, how could so many years have passed since then? And since so many years have passed, today we’re gonna talk a bit about the Community Summit, what it is, where it came from, and why it’s so important for the WordPress project. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:09] First things first, let’s talk about what exactly the Community Summit is. The Community Summit is a small event where folks from around the WordPress project and community come together to work through some of the most difficult topics the project currently faces, many of which are easier or at least less fraught when we can be face-to-face. The Community Summit is usually done in an “unconference” style, and when we were smaller, we left topic gathering and voting to the day of. That’s evolved a bit as our group of fearless contributors has grown over the years, and this year, we have been asking for topics ahead of time so that we can make sure we have the right folks in the room and are making the best use of everyone’s limited time. It’s easy to take a look at this event and think it’s like some fun exclusive thing with a who’s who of WordPress. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:00] But I assure you it’s a working event. Decisions are not finalized during the event, but since we try very hard to account for many, many viewpoints, it ends up being two days of hard discussions, contentious viewpoints, and problem definition at a level of complexity you don’t really see every day. Hearing how hard this event is, you may be wondering why we put in that effort. There are a lot of reasons, but there are three that come to my mind immediately. So for starters, working across cultures is hard. Apart from the cultural differences, we tend to be aware of things like where we’re located or our lived experiences, things like that– working remotely or distributedly is a whole different set of skills than working in person. This helps remind everyone that we’re humans, that there are humans behind those comments and behind those messages in Slack. The second thing is that I’m a big supporter of Tuckman’s theory of group development. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:00] If you don’t know what that is, you can look for it, we’ll put a link in the show notes, but it’s that forming, storming, norming, performing kind of concept of how groups come together. Because there are so many of us and our community has such a large footprint, there are little storms a-brewin all the time. Some get really big, some stay small. But at some point, most of them have to be addressed. And this is a space that is specifically designed to help us do that. Which brings us to the third reason that we do it. This event uses something called the Chatham House Rule, which creates a kind of temporal psychological safety. Right. Psychological safety, if you’re a leader, you know that that’s something that is built over time and requires a lot of trust and a lot of conversations with people that you’re working with, and we can’t quite do that. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:00] And so Chatham House Rule builds an environment that helps create that suddenly in the moment and requires, you know, some, some faith in one another. But basically, no one can be quoted about what they said in those conversations. No one’s examples can be attributed to them. But the conversations can be summarized and published, which we do on the Community Summit website. And then, we publish those for our collective knowledge over time. This lets folks who are attending advocate for themselves and others fully without worrying over whether they’re gonna be taken out of context later. And finally, one of the biggest questions we get ahead of any Community Summit is why it is by invitation only. The most commonly cited reasons for keeping this small and invite only have everything to do with logistics and leadership. You want it to be large enough to have good representation but small enough to have high-quality interactions. It’s just a really narrow Goldilocks moment, if you will. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:00] But that reason doesn’t necessarily address the need for invitations rather than letting it be first come, first served. The reason for that is more of a philosophical one and requires you to go on a mini historical journey with me. This also has changed a bit over the years. The first ever Community Summit, way back in 2012, was before my time, but if I recall my history correctly, it was truly by invitation only. The summit after that included a closed nomination process. The next included a team nomination process, and then the last two, 2017 and 2023, have included open nominations. Now, even in the nomination era of Community Summit organizing, there is still a selection process. The organizers review the list of suggested attendees and check for the same types of things we expect major WordCamp organizers to look for in their speaker selection. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:00] Things like which teams they contribute to, what communities they advocate for, and how long they’ve been a member of the community. And then they adjust for balance. In addition to those things, there are also four types of voices that we always want represented at our Community Summit. So first is leading voices, people who are already in the community and kind of are helping us to make decisions. I am considered one of those leading voices; I have put in my application to be included in the Community Summit. Really hope we select me. The second one is future leading voices. Specifically, those are people who are active in the community already and are showing a lot of promise, either because they really understand the values that the WordPress open source project is putting forward or understand the basic processes of communicating and guiding people in such a complex ecosystem as the WordPress project represents. Or because they have said quite plainly they are interested in helping us to make sure that the WordPress project is able to move and continue to create and continue to support democratizing publishing. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:00] So it’s a little bit potentially folks who are self-selecting for that. People who already are showing that they are doing that either in WordPress or in their local communities. That’s one of the types of voices we want to include. A third one that we want to include all the time is voices we need, so voices that we need to hear. People that specifically we are building WordPress for, people that have indicated to us that the CMS is not necessarily perfect for some of the use cases that they run into regularly. So the people and users and community organizers that can and are able to advocate for the types of user interactions, the types of community interactions that we absolutely want to be able to see. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:08:00] And so that’s a third group of voices that we want to make sure we have represented. And then the fourth and final group that we always want to have represented is a group that I call voices we miss. And so those are the people that we want to be able to hear more from in our project that we don’t necessarily either have a good group of representative voices for, so it’s hard to hear them, or that we know are probably users of the CMS or they are attending events, they are somehow involved in the WordPress project. But we don’t necessarily have any way to have accounted for them while we were building solutions way back in 2012 or 2006 when things were being built for us. And so those are the four groups of people, the four types of voices that I absolutely want to have represented at our Community Summit. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:09:00] And I ask organizers to go through this incredibly complicated selection process because we want not simply a microcosm of the WordPress community as we see it today and hope to see it in the future but also an equitably voiced forum during that critical problem definition phase. So TLDL. For, listen?! T L D Real Listen. Although if you didn’t make it through that, you definitely are not getting to this point. So a TLDR for folks who skimmed the transcript and got here, I guess we keep this invitation structure because we want to account for voices we don’t hear every day in the WordPress project. Not because we don’t value them but because we already hear them. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:09:44] And now that brings us to our small list of big things. This week it’s actually kind of a big list of big things, but you know, there it is. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:10:00] First things first. The applications for the Community Summit are now open. Those are the applications to attend. It’s pretty short. I filled mine out this morning and it’s three questions about who you are and your username on wordpress.org, and then three questions about the topics you are most interested in and the experience that you have in those conversations so far. Yeah. It took me, like, I think, 90 seconds. Like, a full minute and a half. So head on over there. We have a link in the show notes, but also, you’ll be able to find it in newsletters across the entire WordPress media ecosystem. I am pretty sure about that. The second thing is that there is a proposal out for a project-wide mentorship program. This is a huge potential win for us. It is aiming to fix some of our broken ladders. If you’re not familiar with my Broken Ladder Theory of the WordPress project, I’ll try to remember to find a link to that post and put that in the show notes. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:11:00] Number three is that Openverse moved. I shared this last week that happened last week. They didn’t move very far, though. They have a new URL, you can find them at openverse.org. It’s the same team. It’s the same product. It’s the same group of excellent openly-licensed images and media that you have come to expect. It just has its own standalone URL now. Huge kudos to the contributors who got that done. Another thing that happened last week is that WordPress 6.2 has moved into its beta phase, and so now is the time to get out there and test. There also was an excellent, excellent write-up about how to test any given release. And I think it also includes how to file a good bug. And so we’ll send all of those things into the show notes. They’ll be easy to find. Get out there and do your testing. And number five, longest, small list of big things in recent history. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:12:00] I got some interest on [a] women, and non-binary led release for 2023, and so since there was some interest shown for that, it is hereby verbally confirmed. Keep an eye out on make.wordpress.org for more information about what that process is gonna look like and how to volunteer your time for that if that is something that calls to you. Woo. And that, my friends, is your small list of big things, your big list of big things. Thanks for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. View the full article

WordPress 6.2 Beta 1 is ready for download and testing! This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, you should test Beta 1 on a test server and site. You can test WordPress 6.2 Beta 1 in three ways: Option 1: Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream). Option 2: Direct download the Beta 1 version (zip). Option 3: Use the following WP-CLI command: wp core update --version=6.2-beta1 The current target for the final release is March 28, 2023, which is seven weeks away. Your help testing this version is vital to ensuring everything in this release is the best it can be. Get an overview of the 6.2 release cycle, and check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.2-related posts in the coming weeks for further details. How you can help: testing! Testing for issues is a critical part of developing any software, and it’s a meaningful way for anyone to contribute—whether you have experience or not. This detailed guide is a great place to start if you’ve never tested a beta release. If you build products for WordPress, you probably realize that the sooner you can test this release with your themes, plugins, and patterns, the easier it will be for you to offer a seamless experience to your users. Want to know more about testing releases in general? You can follow along with the testing initiatives that happen in Make Core. You can also join the #core-test channel on the Making WordPress Slack workspace. If you think you may have run into an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. If you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, you can file one on WordPress Trac. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs. Interested in Gutenberg features? Find out what’s been included since WordPress 6.1 (the last major release of WordPress). You will find more details in the currently available What’s new in Gutenberg posts for 15.0, 14.9, 14.8, 14.7, 14.6, 14.5, 14.4, 14.3, and 14.2. This release contains more than 292 enhancements and 354 bug fixes for the editor, including more than 195 tickets for the WordPress 6.2 core. A major release for a major project milestone WordPress 6.2 is one of the last planned major releases of Phase 2 on the Gutenberg project’s roadmap. The platform has come a long way in the past few years. The 6.2 release both celebrates that progress and looks toward a future of publishing that puts ever more powerful tools in your hands. Next stop: collaboration tools and more, in Phase 3! Notable highlights Want to know what’s new in WordPress version 6.2? Read on for a taste of what’s coming. Beta label is gone—signaling that the Site Editor is stable and ready for anyone to explore, create, and experiment! Distraction-free mode for a clear, focused writing experience. A new Site Editor interface shows you previews of your templates and Template Parts first, so you can choose exactly where you want to start editing. Scaled block settings with split controls organize your Styles and Settings options to easily find what you need—and clearly see everything a block can do. Color-coded labels help you find your Template Parts and Reusable Blocks fast, everywhere you look: in the List View, the Block toolbar, even on the Canvas. An improved Navigation experience makes menus simple to create and manage—right from the block settings sidebar. Patterns are easier to find and insert—with even more categories to choose from like headers and footers! A new Style Book offers one place to see all your Styles across every block, for a complete overview of your site’s design details. Custom CSS support for specific blocks, or your whole site, for another level of control over how you want things to look. Openverse integration lets you pull free, openly-licensed media directly into your content as you work—along with a quicker way to insert media from your existing library. Widgets become Template Parts when you switch from a Classic to a Block Theme—making the transition that much smoother. Please note that the features in this list may change before the final release. A haiku for 6.2 Last of Phase 2 now Let’s get the party started WordPress turns 20 Thank you to the following contributors for collaborating on this post: @marybaum @laurlittle @cbringmann, @webcommsat, @audrasjb, @annezazu, @bhp View the full article

Welcome to the first 2023 edition of The Month in WordPress! January kicked off with an overview of WordPress’ big goals for 2023 and new projects beginning to take shape. Moreover, work on the next major release, WordPress 6.2, continues with Beta 1 scheduled for next week. Read on for the latest news. WordPress 6.2 Beta 1 is on its way The first beta release of WordPress 6.2 is scheduled for next Tuesday, February 7, 2023. As you may have heard, this version will wrap up work on Gutenberg Phase 2 (Customization), but what does this mean in the larger context of the WordPress project? Tune in to Episode 48 of WP Briefing to hear Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy discuss what it means to conclude a Gutenberg phase. What’s new in Gutenberg Gutenberg 15.0 was released on January 18, 2023. Some highlights include a new “paste styles” feature to easily create multiple blocks with identical styling, and a “sticky” option to keep a block at the top of the page while the rest of the content scrolls. In addition, block settings have been split into two tabs in the sidebar: Styles and Settings. This makes blocks with more controls, such as the Group block, easier to customize, and allows the interface to scale with the growing number of design tools. The latest “Core Editor Improvement” post highlights the newest style features enhancements. Learn how they can help give your site a unique and cohesive look and feel. Team updates: Matrix exploration, WordPress.org redesign news, and more WordPress and Matrix contributors published a proposal to explore the open source chat system Matrix as a possible replacement for the WordPress community’s Slack. Several sections of WordPress.org have been redesigned lately, including Documentation (HelpHub), Enterprise, and Mercantile (the official WordPress swag store). Learn more about the latest redesign updates. The implementation of the block editor in the WordPress.org forums is progressing well and the feedback so far has been very positive. This comprehensive post clarifies how WordPress Community Support (also known as WordCamp Central) and WordPress Foundation entities are set up and addresses some misconceptions about them. The bug scrub schedule for WordPress 6.2 is now published. The goal of bug scrubs is to ensure tickets move towards a resolution—anyone can join these sessions to learn, help, or even lead one. The Plugin Review Team is looking for your (intentionally) wrong plugins. The latest edition of People of WordPress features Daniel Kossmann, a software engineer from South America. As part of the discussion on improving the contributor journey, Josepha wrote some thoughts on the Eternal September phenomenon in open source and invites you to share yours. Feedback & testing requests The Community Team is gathering feedback on a proposed move to GitHub for standardizing the project’s management tools. To mark WordPress’ 20th anniversary milestone, Core Team contributors are organizing several bug scrub sessions to tackle long-standing Trac tickets. Version 21.6 of the WordPress mobile app for iOS is available for testing. The Training Team calls all WordPress users to complete this short Individual Learner Survey by February 15, 2023. Your feedback will help identify the most high-impact resources for Learn WordPress. WordPress events updates Would you like to be a speaker at WordCamp Europe 2023? Submit your application by February 5, 2023. The organizing team released the first batch of tickets and is also calling for volunteers and photographers. The first WordCamp to be held in Africa in 2023, WordCamp Entebbe, is well underway and set to take place on March 10-11. Don’t miss these other upcoming WordCamps: WordCamp Birmingham, Alabama, USA on February 4-5, 2023 WordCamp Cebu, Philippines on February 11, 2023 WordCamp Chiclana, Spain, on March 3-4, 2023 WordCamp Asia 2023 in Bangkok, Thailand, is only two weeks away! Check out the livestream schedule if you are attending virtually. Have a story we should include in the next issue of The Month in WordPress? Fill out this quick form to let us know. The following folks contributed to this edition of The Month in WordPress: @webcommsat, @rmartinezduque. View the full article

This month we feature Daniel Kossmann, a software engineer from South America who shares his enthusiasm for WordPress at every opportunity. The People of WordPress series features inspiring stories of how people’s lives can change for the better through WordPress and its global community of contributors. Daniel’s adventure into WordPress began in 2009 when he needed a way to publish and share articles on films. From that small spark, he now enjoys an interesting and varied career in Brazil and beyond, and an ever-expanding community network. Following WordPress and its new features fascinates Daniel and he is always looking for ways to share what it has to offer with others. His initial focus on WordPress for content publishing soon became a wider appreciation of the platform’s capacity for building communities and careers. Daniel has served as a community organizer for seven years in Curitiba, Brazil and co-organized four annual WordPress Translation Day events in the city. Community building initiatives, like these, bring in new volunteers and help spur on local user groups. Now working as a software engineer manager, Daniel maintains his interest in supporting the WordPress community through a newsletter in Brazilian Portuguese. Finding WordPress to publish content can be life-changing Daniel’s developer skills were initially self-taught, and built on his interest in technology and from his earlier interest in video games. He developed systems in ASP and PHP, and created online resources to teach others how to create websites. When the time came to choose his academic path, he had no doubt that it would be something related to computers and picked Computer Science at the Federal University of Paraná. “In order to focus more on content rather than coding, I ended up getting to know WordPress. It was love at first sight!” In 2009, he launched a public blog about films that became a hub for cultural content related to cinema, literature, and comics. The blog had collaborators from several cities in the country. He found WordPress an easy tool for publishing articles. It allowed him to spend more time on writing content rather than having to use his software engineering skills to write code. Discovering what the software was capable of, he soon wanted to build themes and features in WordPress to customize websites. As he searched for learning resources, he came across an event focused on WordPress actually happening in his own city. WordCamp Curitiba 2010 had a deep impact on Daniel. “Other tech events I attended charged more than double this WordCamp, but hadn’t offered half of the things it did.” Daniel was inspired not only by the talks but also the kindness shown by others at the event. His inherent shyness meant he had to step out of his comfort zone to socialize. However, the friendliness of attendees and the welcome he received made this less foreboding. He was hooked by the community he met, and he pledged to volunteer at the next WordCamp and even apply as a speaker. Daniel Kossmann giving a talk at WordCamp São Paulo 2018 about Gutenberg Less than two years later, Daniel helped to organize WordCamp in Curitiba 2012, and this was where he gave his first public talk. It was an important moment in his journey. He is determined to keep improving his public speaking skills each time he presents, and help others to do so too. From WordPress user to entrepreneur Daniel had dreamed of starting his own company since childhood. Following his university graduation in 2011, he decided to fulfil that dream. He started a web development company, envisioning it as a creative project lab. Initially, he worked with a variety of systems and programming languages. Soon, he realized that maintaining multiple solutions took considerable time and effort. So he opted to use a single platform, WordPress. It offered ease of use for his clients and the possibility of offering various types of websites. “This decision allowed me to dive even deeper into the system, making better and faster-to-deliver solutions for my clients,” said Daniel. As the company grew, he expanded the services it offered to include support, maintenance, courses, consulting, and optimized hosting for WordPress. This gave Daniel access to a wider range of clients and greater specialization in the WordPress platform. Even as a small company, Daniel wanted to give back to the WordPress community. Through using this open source software, the business had not faced the costs of using commercial platforms. He felt he should invest back into the software and its community it as much as he could, from sponsorship of events to collaborating in the Contributor Teams. His community contributions include speaking at meetups and WordCamps to share what what he has learned in his day-to-day work. “It was always and still is a big pleasure to be able to make these contributions,” he affirmed. In 2019, he decided to close his company after eight years and start a new chapter in Development Coordination. His focus and support for WordPress continues to this day. Supporting local: re-energising the Curitiba’s WordPress community Daniel Kossmann Speaking at a meetup in Curitiba in 2016 After WordCamp in Curitiba in 2012, the community there took a break from organizing events. Three years later, Daniel was eager to help restart meetups in Curitiba. He connected with others in the Brazilian community to find a way forward to support both end users of WordPress and firms using the platform. Through instant messaging tool Slack, a rebooted meetup was organized in August 2015. All the planning was done virtually and they only met for the first time in person on the day of the event. Although they did not have much initial experience in event planning, the meetup organizers were determined attendees should have fun and enjoy a relaxed atmosphere. They wanted people to feel comfortable socializing and to chat before and after the talks. The tips that attendees shared at every meeting were one of the most successful elements of these user-focused meetups. For Daniel, getting up in front of people to introduce the meetup was still not easy. However, he knew continuing to practice and improve his self-confidence was the only way to overcome his shyness. This determination and sense of achievement inspires him to encourage others to present talks and share the tips he uses when presenting. The Curitiba meetup continues to flourish. Though Daniel has moved to supporting the community in new ways, he has a lasting fondness for it. It has made him an advocate for local groups at the heart of the WordPress community. He believes the shared interest and enthusiasm for learning at meetups helps to increase attendees’ interest in both the software and its community, and their willingness to participate . Sharing the benefit of WordPress across Brazil Daniel speaking at a meetup in Curitiba in 2019 In June 2019, Daniel created a newsletter to spread content about WordPress in Brazilian Portuguese and inspire others to create content in the language. Translating, Daniel believes is a powerful way to make WordPress more accessible to people who do not speak English, which is the case for a lot of people in Brazil. In 2021, Daniel started writing regularly about WordPress on his blog too. He continues to publish weekly news, tutorials, tips, and share events. Advice to future WordPress contributors Daniel believes that the WordPress community is a key strength of the platform. It attracts people with a range of technical skills and backgrounds, and strives to have a diverse and open space for exchange. There are so many ways to contribute to WordPress without working with the code. He said: “I’m a big evangelizer of learning in public. A great way to collaborate is to create your blog in WordPress itself and share your journey of using it, and to write about tips and useful resources. This will eventually lead you to the official WordPress documentation and, the more you use it, the more opportunities for improvements you will see. Then you can start contributing to improving it. Besides this, you can pick a plugin or theme that you use and help with its translation.” He added: “My biggest advice for those who are starting to contribute to WordPress is to start with a small step, maybe solving an easy bug or fixing a typo, and create a routine to consistently work on it, like an hour every weekend.” Daniel has made several lasting friendships, received professional referrals through his participation in community events, and enjoys a career that continues to have variety and new things to learn. His final message is to join WordPress meetups locally or online in other cities, and be inspired like he has been for 14 years and still counting. Share the stories Help share these stories of open source contributors and continue to grow the community. Meet more WordPressers in the People of WordPress series. Contributors Thank you to @kossmann for sharing his adventures in WordPress. Thank you to Abha Thakor (@webcommsat), Larissa Murillo (@lmurillom), Meher Bala (@meher), Chloe Bringmann (@cbringmann) for research, interviews, and contributing to this feature article. The People of WordPress series thanks Josepha Haden (@chanthaboune) and Topher DeRosia (@topher1kenobe) for their support. 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

On episode forty-eight of the WordPress Briefing podcast, Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy reflects on the closing of Gutenberg phase two, and what that means in the larger context of the project. Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Credits Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Santana Inniss Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Show Notes Removing Block Editor Beta Label GitHub Issue Reporting Bugs make.wordpress.org/design Contribution Conversations: Improving the Contributor Journey Contribution Conversations: Ending the Eternal September Contribution Conversations: WordCamp Mentorship WordCamp Asia Livestream Info Transcript [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00] Hello everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Jospeha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:40] We’ve barely gotten moving here in 2023, but even so, WordPress is already working toward its next major release– coming to us at the end of March. You’ve probably heard by now that with this release comes the “end of Phase 2.” But for a lot of folks, that’s raising some questions about what to expect. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:00] So I’m gonna spend a little time today sharing what I currently know. Let’s start with what that phrase does mean. Firstly, all of the projects, with the exception of two, I believe, in the Phase 2 scoping ticket, will be shipped in the Gutenberg plugin before WordPress 6.2 release comes out. Barring any major breaking issues, those will then land in that major release in WordPress 6.2. So, like, 99% of the features we considered in scope for Phase 2 will be in core by April. It also means the block editor may finally shed its beta label. We’ve been discussing that possibility with the input of the community over the course of the last few major releases, and we’ll do the same as we get ready for the 6.2 release as well. That discussion is tracked over in GitHub, and I can share a link to that in the show notes. For anyone who is a little super nerd, like me, the ticket number is 39293. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:00] So not only if you’re going to memorize it and be one of those cool WordPressers who can call tickets to mind based on the numbers. This is a good one because not only is it an important topic, to be able to recall, but also it’s a palindrome, so you get to be fancy and know that forever. But anyway, I’ll put a link to it in the show notes for all the rest of us. Fingers crossed that we get to remove that label this time around, but also, the acceptance criteria on it are pretty clear. So it’s really a matter of yes or no on all of the columns all the way down. So what does that phase not mean? Firstly, it does not mean that we will stop accepting user feedback or bug reports on any features up to this point. It is always encouraged to file a ticket on track or GitHub detailing any bugs that you’ve encountered. If you’ve never reported a bug before, don’t worry. We have all been there. I’ll gather a link or two with some information for first-timers. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:00] If you ever run into me at a WordCamp, feel free to ask me about my first bug-reporting experience. And after you’ve heard that, you will immediately go and file that bug that has been sitting screenshotted on your desk for six months because it honestly cannot get any worse than my first one. Secondly, it definitely does not mean that we will stop shipping refinements to the user experience. As much as I’d like to say this isn’t true, I think all open source contributors know that no matter how much you test a solution, you can’t actually account for all possible use cases when you work on a project this size. So as we find things that we didn’t realize were a little rough to use, we will, of course, make the effort to smooth those workflows as quickly as possible. So that’s my little reassuring tl;dr for what that phrase means. If you are listening to this and haven’t spent much time in the block editor as it exists today, I encourage you to do so. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:00] It has really changed substantially since it was first merged in 2018, and it represents thousands of hours of research and problem-solving and creation, and outreach. If you know someone who has contributed to the project or whose content helped you make sense of some inscrutable part of it, also maybe, drop them a line and let them know you appreciate their hard work. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:26] That brings us now to our small list of big things. Firstly, we are thinking a lot right now about the paths to contribution. Both at the start of your contribution journey and as you grow into a long-term, seasoned contributor. There are a couple of different discussions related to that right now. So there are actually two project-wide discussions that are on make.wordpress.org/project. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:00] And then there’s one that is specific to WordCamp membership, and that is on make.wordpress.org/community. You can head over to any of those and share your experiences, thoughts, and any wild ideas that you have. The second thing on my small list is that there are a lot of pages across wordpress.org that are getting shiny new designs. If you want to get involved in those discussions, or you just wanna catch early previews of what’s coming to the site, you can hop over to make.wordpress.org/design or join the design team meetings in Slack. And the last thing is that WordCamp Asia is coming quickly, my friends. This event is near and dear to my heart. I hope to see a lot of you in person, but if you won’t be able to make it in person, we still have you covered. There will be a live stream, and the schedule for that is already on the site. It shows the times for each session in your local time zone so you can easily decide which presentations you absolutely must see right in the moment. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:00] And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Thanks for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. View the full article

Last month at State of the Word, WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy shared some opening thoughts on “Why WordPress” and the Four Freedoms of open source. In this recent letter, she expands on her vision for the WordPress open source project as it prepares for the third phase of Gutenberg: “We are now, as we ever were, securing the opportunity for those who come after us, because of the opportunity secured by those who came before us.” Josepha Haden Chomphosy December brought with it a time for reflection—a time to look back, celebrate, and start planning new projects. Read on to find out what 2023 holds for WordPress so far. WordPress is turning 20! 2023 marks the 20th anniversary of WordPress’ launch. The project has come a long way since the first release as it continues to advance its mission to democratize publishing. From its beginnings as a blogging platform to a world-leading open source CMS powering over 40% of websites. Join the WordPress community in celebrating this important milestone. As the anniversary date approaches, there will be events, commemorative swag, and more. Stay tuned for updates. WordPress 6.2 is scheduled for March 28, 2023 Work on WordPress 6.2, the first major release of 2023, is already underway. It is expected to launch on March 28, 2023, and will include up to Gutenberg 15.1 for a total of 10 Gutenberg releases. The proposed schedule includes four Beta releases to accommodate the first WordCamp Asia and avoid having major release milestones very close to this event. Read more about the 6.2 schedule and release team. What’s new in Gutenberg Two new versions of Gutenberg have shipped in the last month: Gutenberg 14.8 was released on December 21, 2022. This version features a reorganized Site Editor interface with a Browse Mode that facilitates navigation through templates and template parts. In addition, it includes the ability to add custom CSS via the Style panel and a Style Book that provides an overview of all block styles in a centralized location. Gutenberg 14.9 became available for download on January 4, 2023. It introduces a new “Push changes to Global Styles” button in the Site Editor, which allows users to apply individual block style changes to all blocks of that type across their site. Other features include typography support for the Page List block, and the ability to import sidebar widgets into a template part when transitioning from a classic theme. Learn how Gutenberg’s latest releases are advancing the Site Editor experience to be more intuitive and scalable. Team updates: WordPress big picture goals, new Incident Response Team, and more Josepha shared WordPress’ big picture goals for 2023, which support the vision set out in State of the Word 2022 and her recent letter to WordPress. Let’s welcome the newly formed WordPress Incident Response Team (​​IRT)—a group of contributors who will help as a community resource when behavior or actions do not align with the code of conduct. A number of Make teams have announced their team representatives for 2023, including Community, Core, Marketing, Polyglots, Themes, and Training. As part of the WordPress.org redesign project, the Theme Directory will soon get a refreshed look and feel. The return of in-person events and the Meetup Reactivation project are some of the highlights that marked a challenging but successful year for the Community Team. Learn more about what they achieved in 2022. #WPDiversity also celebrated its accomplishments in this report. Last year, the training group held 15 events attended by more than 200 participants. A Year in Core – 2022 provides a data overview of contributions made to the WordPress core codebase in the past year. Are you into WordPress development? Don’t miss this post on 2022’s most notable milestones and learning resources for block developers. The January 2023 editions of the Polyglots monthly newsletter and the Meetup Organizer newsletter are now available for reading. Check out the 2022 State of the Word Q&A post, which answers submitted questions that Matt could not address at the live event. Feedback & testing requests Join the latest FSE Program testing call to help strengthen the upcoming WordPress site editing experience. Leave your feedback by February 1, 2023. The WordPress Developer Blog is gathering ideas for content topics. Version 21.4 of the WordPress mobile app for Android and iOS is available for testing. Have thoughts for improving the Five for the Future contributor experience? This post calls for ideas on how this initiative can better support the project and the people behind it. WordPress events updates Get ready for WordCamp Asia 2023! The first flagship WordCamp in Asia is happening on February 17-19, 2023, in Bangkok, Thailand. Check out the schedule to learn more about the sessions and speakers. The WordPress Community Summit and WordCamp US 2023 will take place in Maryland, USA, in August 2023. You can now apply to join the organizing team and help bring the next WCUS to life. Join #WPDiversity with a free online workshop on How to Own Your Expertise & Start Speaking at WordPress Events APAC. The event will take place on January 28, 2023. Don’t miss these other upcoming WordCamps: WordCamp Zaragoza, Spain on January 20-21, 2023 WordCamp Birmingham, Alabama, USA on February 4-5, 2023 WordCamp Cebu, Philippines on February 11, 2023 Would you like to be a speaker at WordCamp Europe 2023? Submit your application by the first week of February. Have a story we should include in the next issue of The Month in WordPress? Fill out this quick form to let us know. The following folks contributed to this edition of The Month in WordPress: @cbringmann, @laurlittle, @rmartinezduque. View the full article

On episode forty-seven of the WordPress Briefing podcast, Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy shares her vision and current thinking for the WordPress open source project in 2023. Rather read it? The full letter is also available. Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Credits Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Santana Inniss Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Show Notes make.WordPress.org/core Join the 6.2 Release! Submit Topics for the Community Summit! Transcript [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00] Hello everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:40] Last month at State of the Word, I shared some opening thoughts about why WordPress. For me, this is an easy question, and the hardest part is always knowing which lens to answer through. Though I always focus on the philosophical parts of the answer, I know that I often speak as an advocate for many types of WordPressers. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:00] So as we prepare ourselves for the start of a new year, I have a few additional thoughts that I’d like to share with you, my WordPress community, to take into the year with you. Firstly, the Four Freedoms. If you have already listened to State of the Word, you have heard my take on the philosophical side of open source and the freedoms it provides. But if you didn’t, then the TL;DR on that is that open source provides protections and freedoms to creators on the web that I really think should just be a given. But there are a couple of other things about the Four Freedoms, and especially the way that WordPress does this kind of open source-y thing that I think are worth noting as well. One of those things is that WordPress entrepreneurs, those who are providing services or designing sites, building applications, they have proven that open source provides an ethical framework for conducting business. No one ever said that you aren’t allowed to build a business using free and open source software, and I am regularly heartened by the way that successful companies and freelancers make the effort to pay forward what they can. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:02] Not always for the sole benefit of WordPress, of course, but often for the general benefit of folks who are also learning how to be entrepreneurs or how to kind of navigate our ecosystem. And the other thing that I love about the Four Freedoms and the way that WordPress does it is that leaders in the WordPress community, no matter where they are leading from, have shown that open source ideals can be applied to the way we work with one another and show up for one another. As a community, we tend to approach solution gathering as an us-versus-the-problem exercise, which not only makes our solutions better, it also makes our community stronger. As I have witnessed all of these things work together over the years, one thing that is clear to me is this: not only is open source an idea that can change our generation by being an antidote to proprietary systems and the data economy, but open source methodologies represent a process that can change the way we approach our work and our businesses. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:01] The second big thing that I want to make sure you all take into the year with you is that we are preparing for the third phase of the Gutenberg project. We are putting our backend developer hats on and working on the APIs that power our workflows. That workflows phase will be complex. A little bit because APIs are dark magic that binds us together, but also because we’re going to get deep into the core of WordPress with that phase. If you want to have impactful work for future users of WordPress, though, this is the phase to get invested in. This phase will focus on the main elements of collaborative user workflows. If that doesn’t really make sense to you, I totally get it. Think of it this way, this phase will work on built-in real-time collaboration, commenting options in drafts, easier browsing of post revisions, and things like programmable editorial, pre-launch checklists. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:00] So phases one and two of the Gutenberg project had a very ‘blocks everywhere’ sort of vision. And phase three and, arguably, phase four will have more of a ‘works with the way you work’ vision. And my final thought for you all as we head into the year is this, there are a couple of different moments that folks point to as the beginning of the Gutenberg project. Some say it was State of the Word 2013, where Matt dreamed on stage of a true WYSIWYG editor for WordPress. Some say it was State of the Word 2016, where we were all encouraged to learn JavaScript deeply. For a lot of us though, it was at WordCamp Europe in 2018 when the Gutenberg feature plugin first made its way to the repo. No matter when you first became aware of Gutenberg, I can confirm that it feels like it’s been a long time because it has been a long time. But I can also confirm that it takes many pushes to knock over a refrigerator. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:00] For early adopters, both to the creation of Gutenberg as well as its use, hyperfocus on daily tasks makes it really hard to get a concept of scale. And so I encourage everyone this year to look out toward the horizon a bit more and up toward our guiding stars a bit more as well. Because we are now, as we ever were, securing opportunity for those who come after us because of the opportunity that was secured for us by those who came before us. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:33] That brings us now to our small list of big things. It’s a very small list, but two pretty big things. The first thing on the list is that the WordPress 6.2 release is on its way. If you would like to get started contributing there, you can wander over to make.WordPress.org/core. You can volunteer to be part of the release squad. You can volunteer your time just as a regular contributor, someone who can test things — any of that. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:00] We’ll put a link in the show notes. And the second thing that I wanted to remind you of is that today is the deadline to submit topics for the Community Summit that’s coming up in August. That comes up in the middle of August, like the 22nd and 23rd or something like that. We’ll put a link to that in the show notes as well. If you already have chatted with a team rep about some things that you really want to make sure get discussed at the community summit, I think that we can all assume that your team rep has put that in. But if not, it never hurts to give it a second vote by putting a new submission into the form. And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. View the full article

Last month at State of the Word, I shared some opening thoughts about “Why WordPress.” For me, this is an easy question, and the hardest part is knowing which lens to answer through. The reasons that a solopreneur will choose WordPress are different than the reasons a corporation would. And while artists and activists may have a similar vision for the world, their motivations change their reasons, too. That’s why I always focus on the philosophical parts of the answer because I know that I am speaking as an advocate for many types of WordPressers. I have a few other reasons, too, which you may not be aware of as you use our software every day. Why WordPress? Most importantly, the Four Freedoms of Open Source. If you have already listened to State of the Word, you have heard my thoughts on the philosophical side of open source and the freedoms it provides. If you didn’t, then the tl;dr on that is that open source provides protections and freedoms to creators on the web that should be a given. There’s an extent to which the idea of owning your content and data online is a radical idea. So radical, even, that it is hard for folks to grasp what we mean when we say “free as in speech, not free as in beer.” Securing an open web for the future is, I believe, a net win for the world especially when contrasted to the walled gardens and proprietary systems that pit us all against one another with the purpose of gaining more data to sell. A second reason is that WordPress entrepreneurs (those providing services, designing sites, and building applications) have proven that open source offers an ethical framework for conducting business. No one ever said that you cannot build a business using free and open source software. And I am regularly heartened by the way successful companies and freelancers make an effort to pay forward what they can. Not always for the sole benefit of WordPress, but often for the general benefit of folks learning how to be an entrepreneur in our ecosystem. Because despite our competitive streaks, at the end of the day, we know that ultimately we are the temporary caretakers of an ecosystem that has unlocked wealth and opportunity for people we may never meet but whose lives are made infinitely better because of us. And the final reason is that leaders in the WordPress community (team reps, component maintainers, and community builders) have shown that open source ideals can be applied to how we work with one another. As a community, we tend to approach solution gathering as an “us vs. the problem” exercise, which not only makes our solutions better and our community stronger. And our leaders—working as they are in a cross-cultural, globally-distributed project that guides or supports tens of thousands of people a year—have unparalleled generosity of spirit. Whether they are welcoming newcomers or putting out calls for last-minute volunteers, seeing the way that they collaborate every day gives me hope for our future. As I have witnessed these three things work together over the years, one thing is clear to me: not only is open source an idea that can change our generation by being an antidote to proprietary systems and the data economy, open source methodologies represent a process that can change the way we approach our work and our businesses. WordPress in 2023 As we prepare for the third phase of the Gutenberg project, we are putting on our backend developer hats and working on the APIs that power our workflows. Releases during Phase 3 will focus on the main elements of collaborative user workflows. If that doesn’t make sense, think of built-in real-time collaboration, commenting options in drafts, easier browsing of post revisions, and programmatic editorial and pre-launch checklists. If Phases 1 and 2 had a “blocks everywhere” vision, think of Phase 3 with more of a “works with the way you work” vision. In addition to this halfway milestone of starting work on Phase 3, WordPress also hits the milestone of turning 20 years old. I keep thinking back to various milestones we’ve had (which you can read about in the second version of the Milestones book) and realized that almost my entire experience of full-time contributions to WordPress has been in the Gutenberg era. I hear some of you already thinking incredulous thoughts so, come with me briefly. There are a couple of different moments that folks point to as the beginning of the Gutenberg project. Some say it was at State of the Word 2013 when Matt dreamed of “a true WYSIWYG” editor for WordPress. Some say it was at State of the Word 2016 where we were encouraged to “learn Javascript deeply.” For many of us, it was at WordCamp Europe in 2017 when the Gutenberg demo first made its way on stage. No matter when you first became aware of Gutenberg, I can confirm that it feels like a long time because it has been a long time. I can also confirm that it takes many pushes to knock over a refrigerator. For early adopters (both to the creation of Gutenberg and its use), hyper-focus on daily tasks makes it hard to get a concept of scale. So I encourage you this year to look out toward the horizon and up toward our guiding stars. We are now, as we ever were, securing the opportunity for those who come after us, because of the opportunity secured by those who came before us. Rather listen? The abbreviated spoken letter is also available. View the full article

2023 marks the 20th year of WordPress. Where would we all be without WordPress? Just think of that! While many technologies, software stacks, and fashion trends have come and gone throughout the past two decades, WordPress has thrived. This is due to the fantastic work and contributions of the WordPress community, comprised of thousands of contributors; and millions of users who have embraced the four freedoms of WordPress and the mission to democratize publishing. Let’s celebrate! Throughout the beginning of 2023, leading up to the official anniversary date of WordPress’s launch (May 27, 2003), a number of different events will celebrate this important milestone, reflect on the journey, and look toward the future. Please join in! Over the next few months, be sure to check WordPress’s official social media accounts along with the official anniversary website for updates on how you can be involved in this exciting celebration by contributing content, collecting cool anniversary swag, and much more. Use the hashtag #WP20 on social media so the community can follow along. If you have something planned to celebrate that you would like to be considered for inclusion on the official website, please use this form to share the details. View the full article

This episode of the WP Briefing features all the Josepha bloopers our little elves have stored away over the year. Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Credits Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Santana Inniss Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Transcript [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00] Hello everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can normally catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project with the hope that deeper understanding creates deeper appreciation. But on today’s bonus episode, instead of catching quick explanations, you’ll catch some quick bloopers. The end of the year is a time when many people and many cultures gather together, and whether you observe traditions of light or faith, compassion, or celebration from everyone here at the WordPress Briefing Podcast, we’re wishing you a happy, festive season and a very happy New Year. Sit back, relax, and enjoy some of the laughs and outtakes from recording the WP Briefing over the year. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:00] Hello everyone, and welcome to the WordPress. This is the thing I’ve done 25 times, and I know how to do it for reals. Welcome to WordPress Briefing, episode 20. Oh no, 7? 27? 26? Episode 27. I know how many things I’ve done. Ooh, neat. This is Josepha recording episode 46 of the WP Bonus Briefings. Not because we’ve had 46 bonus Briefings, but because this is the 46th one and it is a bonus, it will also have a fancy name. But right now, I’m just calling it the bonus. It’s gonna be quick. Here I go. Group them into two big buckets, themes, uh, themes and tools. Mmm, I’m gonna have to redo the whole thing! No! I thought I could save it, and I didn’t save it. I had a typo in my script, and then I messed it up. I, it said into you big buckets instead of into two big buckets. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:00] I’m gonna start over from the target release date because I kind of smeared it all together, um, despite what I intended to do. And gives everyone, no. What is this ringing of phones? Oh, I was doing so well. Where was I? Let’s see if I can just pick it up. All righty, live from my closet. It’s episode 20, the WordPress Briefing, WP Briefing. So I have a title for this, and when I started writing it, I really had every intention of writing it to the title. And then what I wrote doesn’t fit the title at all, but does really hang together well. And so we’re gonna have to come up with a new title, but at the moment, it’s called So Many Ways to WordPress. Here in a minute, you will see why it doesn’t fit. Also, at the end, I feel like I get very, like, angry nerd leader. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:00] And so I may, I may at the end, give that a second go and see if there’s a way that I can soften it a little bit, but, I, I don’t know that I can soften it. I feel very strongly about it. So, maybe I am just an angry nerd leader. Oh, okay. I’ll get us started now that I apparently have filled the room with apologies, not the room, the closet. We’ll figure out something very catchy as a title or as an alternative. Very descriptive, and people will click on it because they must know, but we’ll figure out the title later. @wordpress.org. However, I don’t know why I decided to do an invitation to email me in the middle of that. I’m gonna start from the top of that paragraph. I just got too excited by the opportunity to get mail. I gotta slow it down. I’m like the fastest talker, had too much coffee. Okay, slowing it down now. Huh? What am I saying? No, no, that’s what I’m saying. It’s fine. I, I can do this. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:00] Hold on. Oww. Sorry. I was adjusting my microphone, and then it fell down. I happened to be holding it at the time, so it didn’t, like, slam down, I think, and hurt your ears and so I apologize. Good thing I stopped so it didn’t just, like, slam down in the middle of a recording. That’s all right. I’m gonna give myself that win, even though it’s a hollow one. All right. Trying again. Starting right there, at now since. This year, it starts on October 18th, 2001. That’s the year? No, 2021. That’s the year. Oh man. I’m doing such a great job of this. Um, I’m recording this slightly before, um, you’re hearing it? What, how am I gonna start this? Hold on. I don’t know how to start this. All right. I’m, I can do it. Oh, I’m so glad I remembered. We had guests that could have been so embarrassing. Now for me, the trade-offs work well. How many times can I say now? [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:00] Do I just start every sentence with now now? Is this just how I do things? Uh, now, now, now, now. I’m gonna start all over again because I’m in my head about the words in my mouth now. So. In some near timeframe, some near timeframe. This is not a thing that people say, Dustin, I’m sorry. That’s not a thing people say. I’m just gonna retry that one sentence to sound like I speak with other human beings sometimes. Today is the start of… I can do these things. This was a terrible ending. I need to just finish that last part. I’m gonna redo the part where I started with my name and not the name of the podcast. Um, and we’ll do that. And if you’re supporting or building anything to hand off to clients, you know that timely, easy to ship changes on a site are considered a vital part of any overarching brand and marketing strategy. Wow. It’s like, I don’t know what words are right there. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:00] I tripped over my own tongue a lot. I’m gonna sit, I’m gonna do that paragraph again because I didn’t do a very good job of it. I’ll do a better job. I literally digress, and now I don’t know. I am in my thing. What was I saying? Oh, there we go. Topher DeRosia, who founded Word not WordPress. Holy moly. That was a, I knew I was gonna say that, and I was like, don’t say that when you actually get around to saying this, but here I am, and I did it. Even though I knew I was gonna do it and I told myself not to. Doing it again. Right from there. Not which audiench segment. Oh man. Audiench is not a word, folks. I was on a roll. I’m gonna start right from the primary thing. I don’t even remember how I started this podcast. What is the last thing I said? I said, here we go. All right. Kind of covered some interesting ground, and so, oh no, this is not where I’m gonna start it. I know exactly where I’m gonna start it. Okay. I’m really ready now. Here we go. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:00] I suddenly, I’m gonna pause right here because I suddenly got really worried that I didn’t actually hit record. Oh my gosh. I did. Woo. I’m all over the place. Okay. We’ll now continue. Wait, did I? Oh my goodness. I did, super sorry. Of the WordPress Briefing. I’m gonna do some singing in the middle of some talking, but I keep trying to talk myself out of the singing, so I’m gonna go ahead and do the singing, and then I’ll do the talking before I talk myself out of the singing. Here I go, probably. I added a word. That was so good. I’m gonna start again. I’m gonna get some water, and then I’m gonna start again. Not again. Again. Just from the ‘and finally.’ I don’t know how I finish my show. Y’all, I do this literally every week. I never know how to finish my show. Here we go. I don’t know why I shouted at you from the other side of the tiny closet. I apologize. I’m gonna start again from ‘and finally.’ Tada we did it. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:08:00] Ha. I hate it. I hate the whole podcast. It’s gonna be fine. Done. Nailed it. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00] With that, I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Merry Christmas from me. Happy holidays to you, and we’ll see you again in the new year. Done. View the full article

In the forty-fifth episode of the WordPress Briefing, WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy discusses highlights from this year’s State of the Word address. Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Credits Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Santana Inniss Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod References LearnWP WordPress Playground ICYMI: State of the Word Recap Take the 2020 WordPress Survey! Exploring WordPress Certifications Community Summit WordCamp Site Submit Topics for the 2023 Community Summit 20th Anniversary– Stay Tuned for Updates Check Out Style Variations and the 2023 Theme Transcript [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:39] Last week, WordPress hosted its annual State of the Word. As usual, this was delivered by our project co-founder Matt Mullenweg and represented a year-long labor of love from the WordPress community as a whole. There are many things I love about State of the Word, but consistently the thing I love the most is being able to shine spotlights on the great work of our global network of contributors. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:02] Since that presentation goes by at the speed of light, I wanted to highlight a few things as well. First things first, I wanted to highlight that we had nearly 1,400 contributors, and by nearly, I mean just one too few. We had 1,399 contributors. So that is a big deal in general, but it’s an especially big deal to me because that’s before we start looking at any contributions that aren’t specifically tied to a release. You may be wondering what those non-release contributions are. An incomplete list of those contributions would include organizing WordPress events, training others how to use WordPress, the myriad podcasts, articles, and newsletters that make up the WordPress media community, and any participant in a call for testing. Not to mention the unglamorous ways to contribute, like reviewing themes or reviewing plugins. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:58] Things like patching security vulnerabilities and the bazillion things that Meta does to make sure that our community has all the tools that it needs to function. So I want to echo, once again, the huge, huge thanks that Matt already shared in State of the Word, and thank all of you for showing up for our project and for each other this way. The next thing I wanted to be sure to highlight was LearnWP. It was briefly noted that 12,000 learners had found their way to courses on learn.wordpress.org, and then during the Q&A, there was a related question about certifications in WordPress. The need for certifications has been a regular topic in our project, and I mentioned that there are two different ongoing discussions at the moment. One of those discussions is happening directly on the make.wordpress.org/training site, so I’ll share a link in the show notes for that. But I’ve also been personally chatting on and off with Training team reps and other members of the community about what makes that so hard. In case you have not heard my whole spiel about what makes it difficult, it’s the logistics and our speed of iteration, and public perception. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:05] So not exactly a small set of hurdles. I’ll be doing a more complete post on this in the New Year so that we can get some solid documentation of the state of things and not let it be lost forever in this podcast. But I do know that it is something that we are very interested in as a community and something that, historically, I have really been resistant to. Not because I think it’s a bad idea, but because as someone who’s looking out for our operations side of things and our logistics side of things, it is not clear how we’re gonna get that done. Like I said, in the New Year, keep an eye out for a big, big post that takes a look at the benefits versus the costs and everything that we can do to help make those match each other a bit better. And then the last thing I wanted to highlight was the WordPress Playground. Okay, so this was the last thing that Matt mentioned, and I want to be sure that it’s clear what’s going on with this project because when I first heard about it, I very nearly lept from my chair! [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:03] It was such a remarkably big deal. Okay, so the WordPress Playground uses technological magic called ‘web assembly.’ I don’t know what it is, but it’s magic. And when I say magic, I mean that this tool makes it possible to run WordPress, an instance of WordPress, including a theme and a handful of plug-ins entirely inside your browser as a logged-in admin. You don’t need a server. You don’t need to select a host. You don’t need to download anything at all. You don’t need to know what your domain’s going to be. You simply select the theme you want to test. Add some dummy content and see how all of the posts and pages function as though we’re a real live WordPress site running on your favorite top-tier host. Then when you close the tab, it’s gone forever. Poof. Just like that. Now, this is a brand new project. It’s brand new to us and has a long way to go. So if working on that sounds cool, stop by the Meta Playground channel in the Making WordPress Slack. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:09] But this, in my mind, changes the way that we stage sites. It could change the way we determine whether a theme or plugin is right for us. And arguably, it can become a stress-free way to introduce new or undecided users to WordPress’s admin area so that they can tell what they’re getting into. So when I say that this is a mind-blowing thing, and when I say that it is powered by magic, like it is astounding, it is astounding. And the applications for our users as a whole, I think, are untapped yet, and potentially even the applications for our learners and future learners of WordPress– equally untapped. I’m very excited to see what we can do with this project in the future. So stop by the Meta channel. Stop by Meta Playground. See what’s going on over there. We would love to have you. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:00] So those are my highlights of the day for State of the Word. Like I said, there are a few things I want to do more of a deep dive on in the text, so keep an eye out on make.wordpress.org/projects for most of those. But right now, let’s make some time for the small list of big things. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:17] Today I actually have kind of like a big list of big things. But I pretended it was small, so you didn’t turn off the podcast. So the first thing that I have is that in case you missed State of the Word, if you didn’t have a Watch Party to go to, or you didn’t know it was happening and so you didn’t really tune in at the time, I’m going to drop in a link of the recording. It’s gonna probably start right when everything gets going. And so you shouldn’t have to scrub through anything. If you end up on one of the recordings that includes like the whole live stream, there is jazz for the first 30 minutes, and just, you know, skip through that. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:00] The second thing on my big list of big things is our annual community survey. So Matt mentioned this in State of the Word, and he pointed out that one of the things that makes WordPress and open source in general so effective is that we have a way to communicate with people who are using our software and we make every effort to be responsive to it. So the annual survey that we send out, it used to be quite big, and we’ve cut it down to 20 questions. If you want, you can think of it as like a census, so have your type of work and how long you’ve been working in WordPress, and what you wish to do with WordPress– have all those things be counted so we have a good idea of the type of person who’s currently using WordPress, and we can account for your needs and wants. But also, if you want to think of it more as an opportunity to share the things that were especially useful for you in the project this year or especially valuable for you as a contributor, this is also an excellent place to do that. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:08:01] There’s a QR code running around on the internet somewhere, but I’ll also put a link in the show notes. If you do not know where the show notes are, by the way, they are at wordpress.org/news/podcast, and you’ll be able to get to the survey. The third thing on my big list of big things is that next year we’re hosting a community summit. So if you’ve never been to a community summit, Matt mentioned that it is an opportunity for the best and most prolific contributors that we have to show up and discuss the things that are the biggest problems for the WordPress project right now. But we also want to make sure that we are making space for the voices that we know that we are missing from the community as well as contributors who look like they are probably excellent future stewards of this open source project that we are taking care of together. And so there is a whole website for that. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:08:55] I believe it’s communitysummit.wordcamp.org. Right now, there is a form up asking for topics that you want to be able to discuss while we are there, but it’s taking place, if I recall correctly, on August 22nd and 23rd of 2023. Number four on my big list of big things is that next year is WordPress’s 20th anniversary. So on May 27th of next year, WordPress will officially be 20 years old. So on our 10th birthday, anniversary rather, and our 15th anniversary, we pulled together some parties all across the world. We had some images, some logos, and things that were specific to the celebration that we printed into stickers and that folks put on, like, mugs and backpacks and cakes and stuff. So if you want to learn more about that, keep an eye out in the community channel in making WordPress Slack. They will keep you posted on how to one, find any of those logos and designs so that your local community can join in the celebrations. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:10:03] But they will also help you learn how to have any sort of WordPress celebration party that we’re doing there in May of 2023. And then the final thing on my big list of big things, it was mentioned that on the 2023 theme that was shipped with a bunch of style variations and there was this really, I think, excellent illustrative video that Rich Tabor put together for us that shows that you can switch through style variations on a single theme and have a site that looks totally different. Now, that feels like that’s just a thing that should always have been in WordPress, but it is new this year. And so, if you have not yet had a chance to look at the 2023 theme, it is the default theme that shipped with 6.1. And so, if you have it on your website and just haven’t had a look at it yet, I encourage you to do that. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:11:00] It’s a really interesting implementation that makes a single theme potentially look like an infinite number of other themes, and those style variations can be specific to the theme or can just kind of be around and about in the patterns that are also available in Core. Give that a look. I think it’s super worthwhile. And that, my friends, is your big list of big things. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and I’ll see you again in the New Year. View the full article

WordPress enthusiasts tuned in last week for the State of the Word address to celebrate the project’s yearly accomplishments and explore what 2023 holds. But that’s not the only exciting update from the past month. New proposals and ideas are already emerging with an eye on the year ahead—let’s dive into them! Highlights from State of the Word 2022 WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg delivered the annual State of the Word address on December 15, 2022, before a live audience in New York City. Most attendees joined the event via livestream or one of the 33 watch parties held across 11 countries. Josepha Haden Chomphosy, Executive Director of WordPress, kicked off this year’s event with an introduction to the Four Freedoms of open source and the importance of WordPress in ensuring “a free, open and interconnected web for the future.” Similar to past State of the Word events, Matt reflected on the project’s achievements over the past year, including Gutenberg’s adoption beyond WordPress, the steady progress in advancing the site editing experience, and the return to in-person events. In addition, he took the opportunity to remind everyone of the 2023 Community Summit and the 20th anniversary of WordPress coming up next year. Ahead of 2023, Matt announced new taxonomies in the WordPress.org theme and plugin directories to help users identify the extensions that best fit their needs and plans for Phase 3 of Gutenberg—Collaboration—among other notable updates. People who watched the State of the Word enjoyed a demo of WordPress Playground, an experimental project to explore, experiment, and build apps with a WordPress instance that runs entirely in the browser. Missed the event? Read the recap or watch the State of the Word recording and Q&A session on WordPress.tv. The 2022 WordPress Survey is open The annual WordPress survey helps project leadership and those who build WordPress understand more about the contributor experience, how the software is used, and by whom. This year’s survey will remain open through the end of 2022 and is available in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. Take the 2022 WordPress Survey to help make an impact on the project. What’s new in Gutenberg Two new versions of Gutenberg have shipped in the last month: Gutenberg 14.6, released on November 23, 2022, came with many refinements to core blocks. Notable highlights include a variation picker that allows users to choose a desired layout when a Group block is inserted on a page, a new list view for editing the Navigation block, and a keyboard shortcut to transform paragraph blocks into headings. Gutenberg 14.7, released on December 7, 2022, introduced an experimental tabbed sidebar, colors to help identify some block types in list view, and improvements to the Page List block to make it easier to manage page links in the content. Follow the “What’s new in Gutenberg” posts to stay on top of the latest enhancements. Team updates: Introducing the block editor in the support forums, a revamped Showcase page, and more The Support and Meta Teams are bringing the block editor experience into the WordPress.org support forums. WordPress.org’s redesign continues with a refreshed Showcase page. A proposal for the 2023 Global Community Sponsorship Program has been published. WordPress is accessible to more people thanks to 19,357 contributors who translated more than eight million strings this year. Learn more about the Polyglots Team’s achievements in 2022. Speaking of accomplishments, supporters of the Global Meetup Reactivation project helped reactivated 126 meetup groups in 2022! There are also some discussions on how these efforts can support the Polyglots Outreach Effort project, and vice versa. The Community Team met with members of the Meetup.com team to help report some feedback and issues with an accessibility overlay that they ultimately agreed to remove. The Training Team highlighted the latest updates that have been made to Learn WordPress. In addition, part 1 and part 2 of the Developers Guide to Block Themes are now available on the platform. The Themes and Polyglots Teams announced their team representatives for 2023. The final releases for WordPress 3.7-4.0 were made available on November 30, 2022, with a notice that they are no longer receiving security updates. WordPress 4.1 and later will continue to receive such updates. Fresh off the press, the December 2022 edition of the Polyglots monthly newsletter is available for reading. The latest edition of People of WordPress features Huanyi Chuang, a front end developer from Taiwan. Curious about why WordPress has so many releases? Tune in to Episode 44 of WP Briefing to learn about the role of major and minor releases in the project. Feedback & testing requests Help efforts to wrap up Gutenberg Phase 2 by testing the Site Editor’s latest updates. Leave your feedback by January 6, 2023. The Performance Team shared a new proposal for enhancing the Scripts API with a loading strategy. The Full Site Editing (FSE) Outreach Program is looking for volunteers to use Replay.io for capturing bugs. Express your interest by December 28, 2022. Version 21.4 of the WordPress mobile app for Android and iOS is available for testing. The Community Team is calling on WordPress contributor teams to suggest topics for the 2023 Community Summit by January 16, 2023. WordPress events updates The #WPDiversity working group organized several workshops during the past few months. Among other highlights, attendees of the Speaker Workshop for Women Voices in Latin America reported a 52% increase in self-confidence to speak in public. Stay tuned for the next events. The WordCamp Europe 2023 organizing team shared their content vision for next year’s flagship event in Athens, Greece. WordCamp Asia 2023 is just a few months away, scheduled for February 17-19, 2023, in Bangkok, Thailand. Organizers have announced the first recipient of the WordCamp Asia Diversity Scholarship, Awais Arfan. Three more WordCamps are happening in the next few months: WordCamp Zaragoza, Spain on January 20-21, 2023 WordCamp Birmingham, Alabama, USA on February 4-5, 2023 WordCamp Cebu, Philippines on February 11, 2023 WordCamp Europe 2023 is calling for sponsors and speakers. Have a story we should include in the next issue of The Month in WordPress? Fill out this quick form to let us know. The following folks contributed to this edition of The Month in WordPress: @cbringmann, @webcommsat, @sereedmedia, and @rmartinezduque. View the full article

WordPress belongs to all of us, but really we’re taking care of it for the next generation.” Matt Mullenweg A small audience of WordPress contributors, developers, and extenders gathered on December 15 for the annual State of the Word keynote from WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg. Those who could not join in person joined via livestream or one of 33 watch parties held across 11 countries, with more than 500 RSVPs. Executive Director, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, introduced the event with a reminder of why so many of those gathered choose WordPress—the Four Freedoms of open source. As Haden Chomphosy noted, open source is an idea that can change our generation, and WordPress is one of the most consistent and impactful stewards of those freedoms. As with past State of the Word events, Matt reflected on the year’s accomplishments, learnings, and aspirations as the project moves into 2023. From Gutenberg concluding its second phase of site editing in preparation for phase three—Collaborative Workflows, to the reactivation of meetups and global WordCamps, to the introduction of a new theme and plugin taxonomy to musings on the potential of machine learning, WordPress enters its 20th year continuing to define bleeding edge technology in thanks to the ecosystem’s vibrant community. The one-hour multimedia presentation was followed by an interactive question and answer session where Matt fielded questions from the livestream and studio audience. All questions will be responded to in a follow-up post on Make.WordPress.org/project. Discover everything that was covered by watching the official event recording and join the ongoing #StateOfTheWord conversation on Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter. For another way to get involved, consider sharing your experience with WordPress in the 2022 WordPress Community Survey. Referenced Resources WordPress on Tumblr Engineawesome.com using Gutenberg WordPress Community Summit 2023 WP20.wordpress.net learn.WordPress.org Openverse Create Block Theme plugin Make.WordPress.org WordPress Playground Matt on Tumblr Distributed.blog Special thanks to @laurlittle and @eidolonnight for review and collaboration. View the full article

Each year, members of the WordPress community (users, site builders, extenders, and contributors) provide valuable feedback through an annual survey. Key takeaways and trends that emerge from this survey often find their way into the annual State of the Word address, are shared in the public project blogs, and can influence the direction and strategy for the WordPress project. Simply put: this survey helps those who build WordPress understand more about how the software is used, and by whom. The survey also helps leaders in the WordPress open source project learn more about our contributors’ experiences. To ensure that your WordPress experience is represented in the 2022 survey results, take the 2022 annual survey now. Take the 2022 Survey (English) You may also take the survey in French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, or Spanish, thanks to the efforts of WordPress polyglot contributors. These are the most frequently installed languages based on the number of WordPress downloads. The survey will be open through the end of 2022, and then WordPress plans to publish the results sometime in 2023. This year, the survey questions have been refreshed for more effortless survey flow, completion, and analysis. Some questions have been removed, while a few new ones are now present, reflecting the present and future of WordPress. If you’re looking for the analysis of the 2021 survey results, those will also be shared in early 2023. Spread the word Help spread the word about the survey by sharing it with your network, through Slack, or within your social media accounts. The more people who complete the survey and share their experience with WordPress, the more the project as a whole will benefit in the future. Security and privacy Data security and privacy are paramount to the WordPress project and community. With this in mind, all data will be anonymized: no email addresses nor IP addresses will be associated with published results. To learn more about WordPress.org’s privacy practices, view the privacy policy. Thank you Thank you to the following WordPress contributors for assisting with the annual survey project, including question creation, strategy, survey build-out, and translation: dansoschin, _dorsvenabili, angelasjin, arkangel, audrasjb, atachibana, bjmcsherry, chanthaboune, eidolonnight, fernandot, fierevere, fxbenard, jdy68, jpantani, laurlittle, nao, nielslange, peiraisotta, piermario, rmartinezduque, santanainniss. View the full article

This month we feature Huanyi (Eric) Chuang, a front end developer from Taiwan, who helps connect local groups to WordPress and the worldwide open source community. He is part of the team helping to make the first WordCamp Asia a success in 2023. The People of WordPress series shares some of the inspiring stories of how people’s lives can change for the better through WordPress and its global network of contributors. Discovering WordPress and the benefit of child themes Huanyi’s first footsteps in WordPress began in 2017 when he worked for a firm that built blogs and developed ad content for clients. After building a few sites using the platform, he discovered child themes and through them opened up a world of possibilities for his clients. To this day, he uses child themes to deliver truly custom designs and functionality for clients. Later in his career, Huanyi moved into digital marketing, integrating sites with massive ad platforms like Google and Facebook. This led him to learn to work with tracking code and JavaScript. He also began his learning journey in HTML, CSS, and PHP, to be able to improve his development skills and customize child themes. Meetups bring together software users to learn together Huanyi pictured in Australia during one of his travels meeting a koala bear. When Huanyi had a problem with a client’s site, he looked to WordPress meetups near where he lived in Taipei to help find the solutions. “When I encountered an issue with the custom archive pages, a local meetup announcement showed up on my WordPress dashboard.” Huanyi Chuang At the meetup, he met more experienced WordPress users and developers there, who answered his questions and helped him learn. “When I encountered an issue with the custom archive pages, a local meetup announcement showed up on my WordPress dashboard. That was my original connection with the local community,” Huanyi said. The WordPress community gave Huanyi a chance to connect with people, feed his curiosity about the software, and join a circle of people he could share this interest. At first, he thought meetups were an opportunity to source new clients, and he took his business cards to every event. However, he soon found that these events offered him the opportunity to make friends and share knowledge. From then on, Huanyi started focusing more on what he could give to these events and networks, making new friends, and listening to people. This led him to share as a meetup speaker his own commercial website management experience. The road to WordCamp It was going to his first meetup and then getting involved with WordCamps that changed Huanyi’s whole relationship with WordPress. In 2018, he took the step to help as an organizer, having joined the Taoyuan Meetup in Taiwan. He played several parts across the organizing team, and the welcoming feeling he got in every situation encouraged him to get more involved. He recalls meeting new friends from different fields and other countries, which gave him a great sense of achievement and strengthened his passion for participating in the community. When the team started this meetup, numbers were much lower than in the group in the city of Taipei, but they were not disheartened and gradually grew the local WordPress community. They created a pattern of ‘multiple organizers,’ which spread the workload and grew friendships. “Being connected to and from meetups is the most valuable part of the community. Having these friends makes me gather more information. We share information and benefit from others’ information, and thus we gain more trust in each other. With such credibility, we share more deeply and build deeper relations.” Huanyi Chuang Before the pandemic, the meetup met every month and grew to become the second largest meetup in Taiwan. Huanyi also contributed to the WordPress community as an organizer of WordCamp Taipei 2018 in the speaker team and lead organizer of WordCamp Taiwan 2021. So why should you join the community? According to Huanyi, you will always have something to take home with you. It might be new information or experiences. It might be plugins or theme ideas. But most of all, it is the chance to meet fascinating people and make new friends. Huanyi’s message to other contributors: “Keep participating, and you will find more you can achieve than you expect.” He added that long-term participation will ‘let you feel the humanity behind the project’. Localize: the road ahead for WordPress Huanyi believes WordPress has the power to break down the barriers between designers, project managers, developers, marketers, writers, and publishers. In Taiwan, he said WordPress is ‘a common protocol’ that lets people from all of these disciplines work and communicate together more easily than they ever have before. That is why he works on and encourages others to localize plugins today. He believes localization of the software is the foundation for the extension of the WordPress community as it enables people to ‘Flex their Freedom’ in a language they speak! He has helped to organize online events around previous WordPress Translation Day events. Huanyi said: “I think it’s important to localize WordPress because its very concept of ‘open source’ means that people can access it freely. In another way, free from the monopoly of knowledge and speech. To achieve it, it’s important that people can access it with their own language. “Localization is the foundation of the extension of WordPress community because it helps people using different languages to access the project and lowers the hurdle to understand how things work.” Share the stories Help share these stories of open source contributors and continue to grow the community. Meet more WordPressers in the People of WordPress series. Contributors Thank you to @no249a002 for sharing his adventures in WordPress. Thank you to Abha Thakor (@webcommsat), Mary Baum (@marybaum), Meher Bala (@meher), Chloe Bringmann (@cbringmann), Surendra Thakor (@sthakor), Adeeb Malik (@adeebmalik) for research, interviews, and contributing to this feature article. The People of WordPress series thanks Josepha Haden (@chanthaboune) and Topher DeRosia (@topher1kenobe) for their support. This People of WordPress feature is inspired by an essay originally published on HeroPress.com, a community initiative created by Topher DeRosia. It highlights people in the WordPress community who have overcome barriers and whose stories might otherwise go unheard. #HeroPress View the full article

In the forty-fourth episode of the WordPress Briefing, our host Josepha Haden Chomphosy highlights the role of major and minor releases in the WordPress open source project. Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Credits Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Santana Inniss Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod References Twelfth Man State of the Word Transcript [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00] Hello everyone! And welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:27] At the top of November, a new major release for WordPress shipped. That was WordPress 6.1. I know I talked about it basically nonstop. Then two weeks later, there was a new minor release for WordPress. It was WordPress 6.1.1, which I did not talk about at all. Way back in episode four of this podcast, I dug into the overall release cycle and what someone could expect from a high-level logistics aspect. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:05] And today we’re gonna take a quick look at minor releases in particular. Just as a general heads up, I always want to lean into sports metaphors when I’m talking about releases, and I think it’s because of the words major and minor. And so, I’ve done my level best to not include that in any of my explanations today. But I do have one, I do have one that’s a sports thing. So just if you don’t like sports, know that it’s just one little bit and we’ll try to be carefully quick around it together. All right, so minor releases. You may have noticed that I don’t mention minor releases nearly as often as I mention major releases. And yet, most of the time, when we have a major release of WordPress, there’s a minor release that gets started almost immediately after. So first major versus minor. Major releases in WordPress happen roughly three times a year, give or take a release. Inside a major release, you will find that we include features, so– brand new abilities, enhancements, which you can generally call improvements to existing abilities, and also any bug fix that we can find, big or small, we’ll take ’em all. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:16] So minor releases in WordPress happen about four or five times a year on average. Minor releases include patches for issues introduced in the major release and any bug fix that doesn’t add or change functionality. If you’re with me so far, you probably have noted that there’s basically always at least one minor release per major release. And you might have also noted that I said minors include patches for issues we introduced in a major. Now, if I were hearing this with fresh ears, the first thing I would wonder is, okay, so if you start working on the minor right after you release the major to deal with issues you know you introduced in the major– why just not ship the major while there are bugs in it? Great question. I’m glad you asked. So there are a few things worth knowing here. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:09] Firstly, there is this concept of “ship and iterate,” which is present in both agile and open source. The idea is that we ship software as soon as we have confidence that what is in the release is non-breaking and represents our best guests at a better experience for our users. Once that is out there, we use feedback on the initial release to quickly iterate and ship another release. That way, we don’t hold back any good features. And since we already planned the immediate minor, any major issues that show up can be fixed in as little as two weeks. Secondly, there is the concept that with many eyes, all bugs are shallow, which is primarily present in open source. The idea here is that with enough people looking at a problem, that problem doesn’t stand a chance. So when a release is shipped in a workable state but with interactions that could use some refinement, the fastest way to find those refinements is to take it to the community of WordPress users and developers and invite them to co-create this CMS with us. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:10] Which touches on my final thought. The concept of the user as co-creator. If we think about the development and evolution of our software as a team effort, then we can think of the people who use our software as what’s called the “Twelfth Man” That’s in quotes, and I will, I’ll leave a link to that in the show notes as well. In sports, this refers to the fans. And if you’ve ever been to a live sporting event or played in any, you will know that the cheering and jeering from fans turns into this distinct motivating entity all its own. As a whole team or individual member, you know what you have to do. You know what you need to do in a game, but there’s something about that chaotic, loud roar of feedback that just brings life to what you’re doing, and that’s how I see our community of users. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:02] So at the end of the day, the answer to the question of ‘why so many releases’ and the follow-up question of ‘why tolerate stable imperfection’ is largely the same. To get features into the hands of our users quickly so that we can always be breathing life into this CMS we care so much about. I hope that answers your questions about our release cadence, and if you didn’t come into this podcast having any questions about release cadences at all, I hope this new information brings a little extra light to the complexity of working in open source. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:32] That brings us now to our small list of big things. Big thing number one is that the State of the Word has been announced and is scheduled for December 15th. It’s a little earlier in the day than in past iterations, so I hope we get a new crew of listeners tuning in at the same time. I’ll leave a link to that in the show notes, or you can pop over to wordpress.org/news to see the announcement for yourself. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:00] Big thing number two is that team rep nominations are open on most teams right now. So if organization and people wrangling are high on your list of ways you can give back to WordPress, head on over to the team you contribute to and see how you raise your hand for that. Then big thing number three is that big-picture goals, hopes, and timelines are being gathered, and I will ship those shortly after the start of the new year. It will give us all an idea of where we want to focus our attention to ensure that WordPress continues to grow toward the future. You can keep an eye out for that on make.wordpress.org/project. And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Thanks for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. View the full article

With the end of the year fast approaching, the WordPress project has not slowed down. Read on to learn more about the latest major release, WordPress 6.1, and the State of the Word 2022 live event, among other exciting news. It’s time to catch up on all things WordPress! Say hello to WordPress 6.1 “Misha” The third and last major release of 2022, WordPress 6.1 “Misha,” shipped on November 1, 2022. Named after jazz pianist Mikhail “Misha” Alperin, this release comes packed with many improvements that refine the site-building experience introduced earlier this year in WordPress 5.9 and 6.0, as well as accessibility and performance upgrades. WordPress 6.1 is also bundled with a new default block theme, Twenty Twenty-Three (TT3), that features 10 style variations designed by WordPress community members. These intentionally unique designs ensure that you can change the visual details of your site with ease—and within a single theme. Learn more about what’s in 6.1: WordPress 6.1 “Misha” Announcement WordPress 6.1 Field Guide Following WordPress 6.1 “Misha”, a 6.1.1 maintenance release landed on November 15, 2022. This minor release includes about 50 bug fixes. Download WordPress 6.1.1 State of the Word 2022 is coming on December 15 State of the Word 2022, the annual keynote address delivered by the WordPress project’s co-founder, Matt Mullenweg, will be held on December 15, 2022. The event will take place in person in New York City and live-streamed via various WordPress.org social media platforms. You can also host or join a State of the Word watch party to enjoy the event with your WordPress friends. Learn more about State of the Word 2022 What’s new in Gutenberg Two new versions of Gutenberg have shipped in the last month: Gutenberg 14.4 was released on October 26, 2022, with support for a distraction-free mode that allows a more focused writing experience. Other notable highlights include a redesigned pattern inserter, content locking to the Navigation block, and improvements to fluid typography. Gutenberg 14.5 sets the groundwork for future releases with code quality improvements and bug fixes. This version introduces a new “Document Overview” panel for easier access to the list view and document information, expands margin and padding support, and improves spacing visualizers. It was released on November 9, 2022. Explore some of the latest enhancements to the writing experience in this Core Editor Improvement post. Team updates: Documentation Contributor Day, WordPress.org redesign updates, and more After a lively discussion around the site editing terminology, WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy announced that the term “Site Editor” will be used going forward in reference to the suite of site editing tools. Last month, the Docs Team successfully held its first online Contributor Day to collaborate in real-time, help onboard new contributors, and work on backlog tasks. Progress and next steps for the WordPress.org website redesign were shared in this post. The following pages that will get a refreshed look and feel soon include Showcase and Documentation (HelpHub). The WordPress.org Theme Directory introduced a new feature that allows visitors to preview style variations in block themes. Inspired by the Community Team’s efforts to reactivate meetup groups, the Polyglots Team is looking to start a Polyglots outreach project and welcomes help. The Training Team shared an overview of some of the new Learn WordPress courses they have been recently working on. Openverse’s catalog now includes more than one million audio records! The WordPress Photo Directory also reached a significant milestone by surpassing 5,000 photos! Check out this celebratory retrospective from the Photos team. Speaking of Openverse and the Photo Directory, don’t miss the latest episode of the WP Briefing podcast—it covers the differences between these two resources, and how they work to further openly-licensed media. The latest edition of People of WordPress features Raghavendra Satish Peri. Enjoy a spooky Halloween Mad Libs story completed by community contributors in Episode 42 of WP Briefing. Feedback & testing requests The Plugin Dependencies feature plugin is available for testing. Provide your feedback by December 1, 2022. What does a genuinely sustainable WordPress community look like to you? Share your vision and thoughts in this discussion post. The new WordPress developer blog is in public beta and ready for feedback. The Core Team requests assistance with testing a new Rollback Feature in WordPress core. Version 21.2 of the WordPress mobile app for Android and iOS is available for testing. Were you involved in WordPress 6.1? Share your thoughts on the release process by December 15, 2022. Event updates & WordCamps The WordCamp Asia organizing team is collaborating with WordCamp Central to bring the WordCamp Asia Diversity Scholarship. In addition, the team recently announced the first round of speakers. Preparations for WordCamp Europe 2023 are underway. Don’t miss these upcoming WordCamps: WordCamp São Paulo, Brazil on November 26, 2022 WordCamp Kolkata, West Bengal, India on December 17-18, 2022 Boost your speaking confidence in WordPress events. Register for the How to Own Your Expertise & Start Speaking at WordPress Events online workshop happening December 7, 2022. Have a story that we should include in the next issue of The Month in WordPress? Fill out this quick form to let us know. The following folks contributed to this edition of The Month in WordPress: @rmartinezduque, @webcommsat, @santanainniss, @dansoschin, @eidolonnight. View the full article

Hello, WordPress! Mark your calendars; it’s almost time for State of the Word 2022! 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 the future of open source. Expect this and more in this year’s edition. This year’s event will take place in person in New York City and live-streamed via various WordPress.org social media platforms. Join Matt as he provides a retrospective of 2022, the latest WordPress releases, Site Editor advancements, and a return to in-person events around the globe, among other topics. What: State of the Word 2022 When: December 15, 2022, 1–2:30 P.M. EST (18–19:30 UTC) How: If you’re watching from the comfort of your home or local watch party, the live stream will be embedded in this post and available through the WordPress YouTube channel. Would you like to join the in-person audience? Request a seat by completing this survey. Have a question for Matt? State of the Word will include a Q&A session. If you want to participate, you can either send your question ahead of time to ask-matt@wordcamp.org or ask during the event in the live stream chat on YouTube. Given the volume of questions that are usually submitted, please note that it may not be possible to answer all of them in the live Q&A. A follow-up post will be published after the State of the Word to answer those not covered at the event. First time attending State of the Word? Check out previous years’ recordings on WordPress.tv to get a sense of the event. See you in person or online on December 15! Join a State of the Word Watch Party near You Can’t make it to New York? No problem, organize or join a watch party in your community in person or online. Like last year, the Community team has resources available to help! Check out this handbook page, which includes event templates, information on requesting a Zoom account, and how to get some swag. Gather together to look back on how WordPress has grown in 2022 and what is ahead for 2023. Stay up-to-date as a group on the latest happenings in the WordPress world and collaborate together on any questions you might have for Matt! We will be compiling a list of State of the Word watch parties in this post, which will be updated regularly as the event approaches. If you don’t see a watch party in your region listed here in the next few weeks, check this page on Meetup.com to see if your local WordPress group is organizing one. If you are planning a watch party for State of the Word and have questions, please email support@wordcamp.org. A member of the WordPress community team will assist you in the best way possible. View the full article