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WordPress 6.1.1 is now available This minor release features 29 bug fixes in Core and 21 bug fixes for the block editor. WordPress 6.1.1 is a short-cycle maintenance release. You can review a summary of the key updates in this release by reading the RC1 announcement. The next major release will be version 6.2 planned for 2023. If you have sites that support automatic background updates, the update process will begin automatically. You can download WordPress 6.1.1 from WordPress.org, or visit your WordPress Dashboard, click “Updates”, and then click “Update Now”. For more information, check out the version 6.1.1 HelpHub documentation page. Thank you to these WordPress contributors The WordPress 6.1.1 release was led by @desrosj, @mamaduka, and @jeffpaul. WordPress 6.1.1 would not have been possible without the contributions of more than 105 people. Their asynchronous coordination to deliver several enhancements and fixes into a stable release is a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress community. 10upsimon, Aaron Jorbin, Aaron Robertshaw, Adam Silverstein, Aki Hamano, alexstine, Andrei Draganescu, Andrew Ozz, Andrew Serong, Andre, Andy Fragen, Ari Stathopoulos, azurseisme, Ben Dwyer, Bernie Reiter, Bethany Chobanian Lang, Birgit Pauli-Haack, bjorn2404, Carlos Bravo, Carolina Nymark, Clayton Collie, codesdnc, Colin Stewart, Daniel Richards, David Baumwald, David Smith, David Vongries, Dilip Bheda, Dion Hulse, Dominik Schilling, Ella, Eugene M, Felix Arntz, fpodhorsky, franzaurus, gamecreature, Gary Pendergast, George Mamadashvili, gisgeo, glendaviesnz, Innovext, ironprogrammer, Isabel Brison, James, Jan Thiel, Javier Carazo, Jb Audras, jchambo, jeffpaul, joelmadigan, Joen A., John Blackbourn, John Watkins, Jonathan Desrosiers, Jonny Harris, jsh4, Juliette Reinders Folmer, K. Adam White, kacper3355, Kai Hao, Konstantin Obenland, konyoldeath, larsmqller, Lena Morita, Leo Milo, lozula, Marco Ciampini, Marin Atanasov, Marius L. J., Matt Keys, Michal Czaplinski, Miguel Axcar, Miguel Fonseca, Mukesh Panchal, mw108, Namith Jawahar, Nick Diego, Nik Tsekouras, Nithin SreeRaj, nuvoPoint, oakesjosh, ockham, Oliver Juhas, Pascal Birchler, Paul Biron, Peter Wilson, petitphp, pkolenbr, pypwalters, ramonopoly, Riad Benguella, rjasdfiii, Robert Anderson, rodricus, Ryan Kienstra, Sarah Norris, Sergey Biryukov, stentibbing, Stephen Bernhardt, Subrata Sarkar, Sybre Waaijer, Timi Wahalahti, Timothy Jacobs, Tonya Mork, Torsten Landsiedel, and vtad. How to contribute To get involved in WordPress core development, head over to Trac, pick a ticket, and join the conversation in the #core and #6-1-release-leads channels. Need help? Check out the Core Contributor Handbook. View the full article

In the forty-third episode of the WordPress Briefing, Josepha Haden Chomphosy explores two resources for openly licensed media in the WordPress project– Openverse and Photo Directory– and how they differ from one another! Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Credits Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Santana Inniss Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod References Photo Directory Make Page Submit a Photo to the Photo Directory Openverse Make Page Openverse Call for Contributions: Block Editor Integration Download WordPress 6.1 Docs Team Contributor Day Recap Post Hallway Hangout Block Themes (Video) 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 00:00:00] About 18 months ago, the Openverse project became part of the WordPress open source project, and at roughly the same time, we also welcomed the Photo Directory. Since that time, we’ve seen growth in teams supporting both of these initiatives. But if you’re not involved in the day-to-day, it can be hard to know how those two things fit together or if they fit together at all. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:00] Today, let’s take a brief tour of those two projects and why they came to be. In my timeline, work on the Photo Directory started before the work on Openverse, so that’s where we’ll start. For as long as I can remember, the WordPress community has raised the need for WordPress-first ways to have and host GPL-compatible photos for use in themes, site builds, and marketing efforts as a whole. As recently as 2016, that was still coming up as a question at various flagship events and among the career photographers that contribute their time to WordPress. So in 2017 and 2018, as attention started to turn toward rebuilding the CMS using blocks, it dropped down the list of priority items. But it never really went away as a thing that people were hoping we could do for the project as a whole. So in 2019, it was becoming clear that having open source-first tools of all varieties for people whose businesses were built on our software would help broaden the availability of the open source freedoms we believe in. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:00] This began the work on the Photo Directory with the intention of providing a GPL-friendly, community-driven repository of images. It has since launched, and we have photos in it now. We have a whole team around it. It’s wonderful. But that is how that all kind of came to be. Openverse, on the other hand, was launched as CC Search in 2019 with the laudable mandate to increase the discoverability and accessibility of open access media. Late in 2020, while work on the Photo Directory was underway, Matt shared with me that the team was looking for a new project home. When I first met with them, they shared an overview of the product, which they shorthanded as an open source search engine that searches openly licensed images. We were working on a repo of openly licensed images, so clearly, this was all written in the stars. And so you might be asking yourself at this point, great, how does it work together? I think for most of us, the timeline there kind of covers the question of what is the difference between these two things. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:00] But because I never know which of you will want to strike up a conversation about open source on an elevator, I’ve also got the elevator pitch version. Openverse is an open source search engine that searches, indexes, and aggregates copy left media from across the web using sources such as WordPress’s Photo Directory, Flickr’s CC Tagged Media, and Wikimedia, to name just a few. Another key difference between the Photo Directory and Openverse is that in order to contribute to the Photo Directory, now that it’s all built, that’s mostly done by submitting photos or reviewing photos. So you don’t really need to be a developer to join in. Openverse is not only a developer-centric contribution opportunity, but it also uses a different tech stack than WordPress as a whole. So it’s a good place for folks to go if they’re looking to broaden their horizons. So that’s your elevator pitch of what Openverse is and how it uses the Photo Directory. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:00] You have a couple of ways that you can get involved with these two projects. For the Photo Directory, as I mentioned at the start, you can always contribute photos, and they could always use more photo contributions. I’ll include a link to the submission guidelines in the show notes below, and as I mentioned, it is a no-code way to give back to the WordPress project. So no code, development environments, and testing skills are required. The Photo Directory team also could always use more contributors to help with the moderating of photo submissions. And so I’ll link to their making WordPress page in the show notes as well so that you can get started there. And as I mentioned before, Openverse is an aggregator, so it doesn’t host any media itself, but it is always accepting suggestions for new GPL-compatible media providers. I’ll link the area where you can leave suggestions in the show notes as well. And if you are more code inclined, there’s an open issue for adding Openverse browsing to the block editor right now. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:00] So I’ll link that issue in the show notes in case you thought to yourself, gosh, that sounds like my most favorite thing to do. That is where you can go. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:12] This leads us now to our small list of big things. In case you missed it, WordPress 6.1 is now available. It launched on November 1st. Late, late, late in the day, and so it was easy to miss if you’re used to seeing it at a particular time. We were about six hours later than usual. But if you go to wordpress.org/download, you can get your own copy there. The second thing on our small list of big things is that the Docs team had a contributor day. It was excellent. There’s a recap post up. I will include that in the show notes. And then the final thing is that there was a recent hallway hangout that talked about the site editor and block themes. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:00] The video for that is also published. I will also share that in our show notes. And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. View the full article

This post was written in collaboration with Lauren Stein (@laurlittle) and Anne McCarthy @annezazu). Twenty Twenty-Three is here, alongside WordPress 6.1! The new default theme offers a clean, blank canvas bundled with a collection of style variations. Style variations are predefined design options that give you the opportunity to alter the appearance of your site without having to change your theme. This means that you can keep your template structure but change the visual details of your site with ease. For a truly diverse collection, Twenty Twenty-Three’s featured style variations were submitted by members of the WordPress community, resulting in 38 submissions from 19 people in 8 different countries. From those submissions, a curated collection of ten was chosen and bundled with the new theme. This approach to style variations ushers in the next generation of block themes, able to harness the potential of the platform’s latest design capabilities and tools directly in the Site Editor. Since style variations don’t require any code experience, you’re encouraged to tweak and/or create your own. Thank you to everyone who contributed. Useful links: Download Twenty Twenty-Three Twenty Twenty-Three Documentation Twenty Twenty-Three Project Kick Off Twenty Twenty-Three Selected Style Variations View the full article

Welcome to “Misha” Say hello to WordPress 6.1, “Misha,” inspired by the life and work of Soviet-Norwegian jazz pianist Mikhail “Misha” Alperin. Misha introduced the work of jazz ensembles in the USSR and globally. He is also celebrated as a founding member of the Moscow Art Trio. “Misha” further refines the site-building experience. Inside WordPress 6.1 you’ll interact with enhancements that continue to make site creation more intuitive while pushing your creative boundaries further than ever. Don’t forget to enjoy some of Misha’s jazz piano as you take in all WordPress 6.1 has to offer. The third major release of 2022 is here. Download it now! As of the time of this release, WordPress powers 43% of websites worldwide. Site owners and administrators should upgrade today to take full advantage of the many stability, performance, and usability enhancements. Furthermore, WordPress content creators will enjoy a suite of new features geared toward improving the writing and designing experiences. This release includes features that many in the WordPress Community have been most excited about since the start of this project. Additional enhancements and improvements to the editor give site owners more control and easier customization while offering a more cohesive experience to users. A lot of writing-focused improvements are included in the release, because if you’re giving voices to the voiceless you’ve got to focus on folks writing the copy. Some of my favorite enhancements are the refined ability to select partial paragraphs in a block; settings to keep list view open by default; and the keyboard shortcut to add internal links expanded to all blocks. Josepha Haden Chomphosy, Executive Director Download WordPress 6.1 What’s Inside Twenty Twenty-Three: A fresh default theme with 10 distinct style variations After introducing foundational elements for block themes and style variations in releases 5.9 and 6.0, WordPress site builders welcome a new default theme, Twenty Twenty-Three, that is powered by 10 different styles and tagged as “Accessibility Ready.” These intentionally unique styles ensure users can apply a different look and feel to their site with a single click—all within a single theme. New templates for an improved creator experience New and more refined templates now give site builders more control over the creation of their sites. In this suite of new templates, find a custom template for posts & pages in the Site Editor. Create and edit template parts like headers and footers more quickly with a new search-and-replace tool and easily view your new site. Design tools for more consistency and control Thoughtful upgrades to the controls for design elements and blocks make laying out and building your new site a more consistent, complete, and intuitive experience. Manage menus with ease New fallback options in the navigation block mean you can edit the menu that’s open; no searching needed. Plus, the controls for choosing and working on menus have their own place in the block settings. The mobile menu system also gets an upgrade with new features, including different icon options, to make the menu yours. Cleaner layouts and document settings visualization View and manage post and page settings with a better-organized display improving the use of features like template picker and scheduler. One-click lock setting for all inner blocks When locking blocks, a new toggle lets you apply your lock settings to all the blocks in a containing block like the group, cover, and column blocks. Improved block placeholders Various blocks have improved placeholders that reflect customization options to help you design your site and its content. For example, the Image block placeholder displays custom borders and duotone filters even before selecting an image. Compose richer lists and quotes with inner blocks The List and Quote blocks now support inner blocks, allowing for more flexible and rich compositions like adding headings inside your Quote blocks. More responsive text with fluid typography Fluid typography lets you define font sizes that adapt for easy reading in any screen size. Add starter patterns to any post type In WordPress 6.0, when you created a new page, you would see suggested patterns so you did not have to start with a blank page. In 6.1, you will also see the starter patterns modal when you create a new instance of any post type. Find block themes faster The Themes Directory has a filter for block themes, and a pattern preview gives a better sense of what the theme might look like while exploring different themes and patterns. Keep your Site Editor settings for later Site Editor settings are now persistent for each user. This means your settings will now be consistent across browsers and devices. A streamlined style system The CSS rules for margin, padding, typography, colors, and borders within the styles engine are now all in one place, reducing time spent on layout-specific tasks and helps to generate semantic class names. Updated interface options and features Updates include styling elements like buttons, citations, and links globally; controlling hover, active, and focus states for links using theme.json (not available to control in the interface yet); and customizing outline support for blocks and elements, among other features. Continued evolution of layout options The default content dimensions provided by themes can now be overridden in the Styles Sidebar, giving site builders better control over full-width content. Developers have fine-grained control over these controls. Block Template parts in classic themes Block template parts can now be defined in classic themes by adding the appropriate HTML files `parts` directory at the root of the theme. Expanded support for Query Loop blocks New filters let Query Block variations support custom queries for more powerful variations and advanced hierarchical post types filtering options. Filters for all your styles Leverage filters in the Styles sidebar to control settings at all four levels of your site—core, theme, user, or block, from less to more specific. Spacing presets for faster, consistent design Save time and avoid hard-coding values into a theme with preset margin and padding values for multiple blocks. Content-only editing support for container blocks Thanks to content-only editing settings, layouts can be locked within container blocks. In a content-only block, its children are invisible to the List View and entirely uneditable. So you control the layout while your writers can focus on the content. Combine it with block-locking options for even more advanced control over your blocks. Other notes of interest 6.1 includes a new time-to-read feature showing content authors the approximate time-to-read values for pages, posts, and custom post types. The site tagline is empty by default in new sites but can be modified in General Settings. A new modal design offers a background blur effect, making it easier to focus on the task at hand. Enhancing WordPress 6.1 Accessibility Accessibility is an integral part of the WordPress mission of fostering an inclusive community and supporting users of all types around the world. With this in mind, WordPress 6.1 includes nearly 60 updates specifically focused on enhancing the accessibility of the platform. Read these updates to learn more about the continual initiatives aimed at improving accessibility. Improved Performance in WordPress 6.1 WordPress 6.1 resolves more than 25 tickets dedicated to enhancing performance with improvements for every type of site. A full breakdown can be found in the Performance Field Guide. Learn More About WordPress 6.1 See WordPress 6.1 in action! Watch a brief overview video highlighting some of the major features debuting in WordPress 6.1. Explore learn.wordpress.org for brief how-to videos and lots more on new features in WordPress. Or join a live interactive online workshop on a specific WordPress topic. Developers can explore the WordPress 6.1 Field Guide, complete with detailed developer notes to help you build with and extend WordPress. Read the WordPress 6.1 Release Notes for more information on the included enhancements and issues fixed, installation information, developer notes and resources, release contributors, and the list of file changes in this release. The WordPress 6.1 Release Squad The group listed below tirelessly supported the release, from conception to ship date, and beyond: Release Lead: Matt Mullenweg Release Coordinators: Héctor Prieto and Jonathan Desrosiers Core Tech Co-Leads: Mike Schroder, David Baumwald, and Jeff Paul Editor Tech Co-Leads: Michal Czaplinski, Bernie Reiter, and Carlos Bravo Core Triage Co-Leads: JB Audras and Ahmed Chaion Editor Triage Co-Leads: Nick Diego and Anne McCarthy Documentation Co-Leads: Birgit Pauli-Haack, Milana Cap, and Femy Praseeth Marketing & Communications Co-Leads: Jonathan Pantani and Dan Soschin Test Lead: Brian Alexander Design Lead: Rich Tabor Default Theme Co-Leads: Beatriz Fialho & Sarah Norris Thank you to all the contributors who dedicated time and energy to bring the best WordPress experience to everyone. Josepha Haden Chomphosy 1naveengiri · Aaron D. 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Their asynchronous coordination to deliver hundreds of enhancements and fixes into a stable release is a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress community. Haiku Fun for 6.1 Another release, Mark it down as completed. Breathe, relax, and cheers! View the full article

This month, as WordPress Accessibility Day approaches, we feature Raghavendra Satish Peri, a blogger turned digital entrepreneur based in India, specializing in web accessibility and digital marketing. The People of WordPress series shares inspiring stories of how people’s lives can change for the better through WordPress and its global network of contributors. Raghavendra speaking at a blogger event, 2015 Expressing myself through WordPress Raghavendra Satish Peri says WordPress is more than a way to succeed online. It’s a community that has always answered his questions and helped him learn, and has enabled his voice to be heard across the world. These are motivating benefits for Raghavendra, who has a vision impairment that introduces challenges to many of the things he wants to do. The WordPress community has helped him make some of his dreams come true. After chatting with others at WordPress events, about his wish to go trekking and running, he found he was later contacted by people in the community went with him to do just that. Raghavendra training for a marathon in 2013 He also found WordPress events a way to raise the importance of accessibility issues, share tips, and connect local communities so they can collaborate on items both within and outside WordPress. Life growing up with an enabling family A key asset for Raghavendra has been the support of his family as he coped with his progressive blindness. His sister took charge of teaching him important social and life skills, so he could navigate his country’s rigorous education system. Those were the early days of technology everywhere, and nobody much was thinking about using it in education and day-to-day life. When Raghavendra got his first computer, in 2004, it was a revelation. His sister taught him to use the internet efficiently, and he taught himself a few basics of programming. Soon he was spending 10 to 12 hours a day exploring the online world and learning about the web. Discovering WordPress and blogging In 2006, he learned basic web design and began to sell website templates. His growing interest in search engines and content led him to WordPress. As the years progressed, his eyesight deteriorated. He had to relearn his skills and acquire new ones to compensate. When he could no longer see the computer screen, he learnt to use screen readers. At that point there was a gap: he had the same business skills, but he couldn’t apply them as effectively until he got comfortable with using screen readers. Raghavendra speaking at an event in Bengalaru, India in 2014 To help achieve that, Raghavendra moved to Bengalaru, where he got a full education in screen-reader technology and took a job as a consultant in digital accessibility. He recalls learning from that time that, in his words: “Some things are important, but one needs to let them go so that more important things can take the new space.” During his stay in Bengaluru, he stumbled on the idea of blogging and audiobooks. On his 23rd birthday, he had two firsts: registering a domain and publishing a blog post. At first he wrote about things happening in his daily life, which initially got low responses. But when he started attending blogging and tech meetups, he received encouragement from fellow bloggers who complimented him on his writing style. Using WordPress to publish his story, Raghavendra found a love for writing and this made him want to learn and understand WordPress much better. “Writing freed my mind and soul from the pain and sorrow; it takes a person into a Zen state where one can understand their soul once they see their own thoughts on paper.” Raghavendra Satish Peri There were still some ongoing challenges arising from his difficulties with seeing. For example, Raghavendra found coding was made more complicated. But he took it slowly, and he improved steadily. He started as many WordPressers do, installing themes and plugins, and making minor changes to the code. Ultimately, he moved all of his sites to WordPress, and as he learned more about WordPress, he could help his friends and family more with their projects. After just a few years, Raghavendra had the skills and the confidence to build just about anything in WordPress, progressing from simple to complex websites. Today Raghavendra is a successful entrepreneur. He sees his life as full of promise. WordPress still helps him grow every day, professionally and personally. “There is always hope for tomorrow! Do not look for the light at the end of the tunnel, embrace the darkness, listen to the quietness, and feel the airflow. You will know that light is ahead even before you see it.” Raghavendra Satish Peri Contribute to accessibility and WordPress Another thing Raghavendra has in common with many WordPressers is his enthusiasm and involvement in the community. As he has learnt more about the software, he felt he needed to be involved with improving accessibility too. He started to help organize local meetups and conferences and encourages others to give time and skills to contribute too. 2016, Raghavendra speaking at WordCamp Mumbai He follows software development closely, especially where WordPress meets accessibility. In 2020, on learning about a global WordPress Accessibility event, he applied and became a speaker. His topic was Gutenberg Accessibility, A Screen Reader User’s Perspective. His interest continued as a result of this event, and he wanted to be part of growing its audience and impact, initially through joining its dedicated channel on Slack. Eventually, he joined the organizing team for future events. Helping run WordPress events brought together all of Raghavendra’s existing skills. It taught him a lot about what it takes to make an event truly inclusive, from captions and sign language to media players and more. As his involvement has grown, Raghavendra has found it has become easier to source and use resources that make events and presentations more accessible. But knows there’s always more that can be learnt in this area, and encourages others to use understanding from events like the Accessibility Days in their conferences. Join the global WordPress Accessibility Day 2022 online on November 2-3, 2022. It’s free to register! Sharing learning on accessibility can be a motivator In 2021, Raghavendra underwent his most challenging event to date, when he had a kidney transplant. To motivate himself, he started a website that focuses on accessibility and inclusive design. This prompted him to start an accessibility community to help fill the gaps in accessibility knowledge. Today, it is one of India’s largest online accessibility communities, educating developers and designers and training people with disabilities to build a career in accessibility testing. Raghavendra after his organ transplant in 2021 Raghavendra is also a keen user of the WordPress Gutenberg editor and builds all his websites using it. Though content creation and editing can still pose him difficulties, he finds the front end of the Gutenberg blocks very accessible. He believes in participating in the software to make it a better experience for all. “I decided to live my life to the fullest and make my mark on the world. This thought keeps me motivated.” Raghavendra Satish Peri After a successful transplant, he lives a disciplined life with a few restrictions. He continues to enjoy working in-depth in disability, accessibility, and inclusion spaces. Rajhavendra hopes others will join with him and the thousands of other people who collaborate to make a difference. 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. Thank you to Raghavendra Satish Peri (@tarkham) for sharing his experiences for this latest edition. Contributors Thanks to Meher Bala (@meher), Abha Thakor (@webcommsat) and Surendra Thakor (@sthakor) for interviews and writing this feature, to Mary Baum (@marybaum), Chloe Bringmann (@cbringmann), and Larissa Murillo (@lmurillom) for reviews. 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-second episode of the WordPress Briefing podcast, Josepha Haden Chomphosy reads a WordPress Halloween story completed by contributor-submitted Mad Libs. 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 Music: Spooky edit by Timothy Volpert Mad Lib Contributors: Juan Lucha, Lauren Stein, robinwpdeveloper, Birgit Pauli-Haack, Madison Swain-Bowden, Ken Gagne, Julia Golomb, kawserz, Sé Reed, Mumtahina Faguni, Clea Mahoney Download Mad Libs: WP-Briefing-Halloween-Mad-LibsDownload References Important Note: WordPress 6.1 is released tomorrow! Multisite registration and activation pages have new HTML and CSS Call for Testing: WordPress for Android 21.0 New design for HelpHub in WordPress.org WordPress.org Redesign Update FSE Program Guiding the Gutenberg Gallery Summary Transcript [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00] Howdy, Halloween nerds! And welcome to the WordPress Briefing, a podcast where I’m normally very serious, but today is Halloween! And gosh, do I love a chance to celebrate. So today, the most serious thing I have is this WordPress themed Halloween Madlib for you. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:43] I was so excited to learn that WordCamp would be on Halloween this year, and now it’s finally here. After a full day of workshops and mingling, I am exhausted. But I’ve got just enough time to return to the hotel and prepare for the after party. It’s a themed costume event organized by the Docs team, and I cannot wait. Walking into my room, I give a big yawn and realize just how tired I am. The bed is looking extra comfortable right now. Surely a little nap wouldn’t hurt, right? As soon as my head hits the pillow, I’m out like a light, but almost immediately, my eyes snap back open, a flash of lightning lights up the room, and I hear rain pouring down outside. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:23] After another flash, the lights in the room start to flicker. That’s strange, I think to myself, but I have an after party to get to. There must have been a power surge because when I look back at the clock, it’s reset and flashing 12:00 am. I check my phone, but it’s dead too. I’m not quite sure how long I’ve been sleeping, so I don’t know if I have enough time to change into my full Ninja Turtles costume. I just put the mask on and head down to the lobby to meet my WordPress friends. When the elevator dings open in the lobby, it’s completely empty. No concierge, no hotel staff, and no WordPress friends. That’s weird. The lights also seem dimmer. And, are those urgent Trac tickets on the lobby lounge chairs? I’m wondering where everybody is, but I keep walking toward the convention hall. A shadow suddenly moves in the corner of my eye, and I spin around but only see my own face reflecting in a hallway mirror. Hmm, that’s odd. I notice that the cute Ninja Turtle mask looks a little less cute somehow. The eyes are angry red, and the teeth are now sharp-looking fangs. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:33] Before I can take off the mask for a closer look, I see another shadow move in the corner of the mirror. When I turn around this time, I see the faint outline of a person. It looks familiar. Could that be Matt Mullenweg? Darn it. They disappear into the convention hall before I can even call out, ‘howdy!’ And so I break into a jog to follow after them. Walking into the hall, I can hear the musical stylings of WordPress Jazzer Duke Ellington playing on a gramophone. I bob my head to the music, super relieved to see the room full of WordPressers dressed up and dancing. I head over to some of the folks from my Make team to chat, but oddly, they won’t stop dancing. They’re smiling and dancing and cheering each other on. Some of them are even doing the electric slide. It’s actually kind of impressive, but it’s still a little strange that no one will stop dancing to talk to me. Actually, now that I think about it, none of the party goers seem to be noticing me at all. Wondering what’s going on, I start backing up toward the door. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:32] I jump a little as it slams behind me with the loud sound of an old door creaking and the heavy click of a lock. That’s when I noticed the shadowy familiar figure again. This time they’re standing by an open door on the other side of the hall. They seem to be watching me. They lift a white gloved hand and motion for me to follow before disappearing through the door again. I run after the mysterious figure weaving between groups of dancing WordCamp goers. Could they be under a spell, I wonder while running past. I exit the convention space and enter a small hallway that seems to twist and turn. It feels a lot longer than I remember. I continue running through it and suddenly find myself back in the Contributor Day conference room. The shadow person is nowhere to be found, and as I walk around the contributor tables, I quickly notice that the exit back to the hotel has also disappeared. Okay, so this is getting really weird. My first thought is to get my Make team involved, but since they won’t stop dancing, I know I need to devise a different plan. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:34] That’s when I noticed the big glass box at the center of the room. I am almost certain it wasn’t there during Contributor Day. I approach the box cautiously. Inside I see a shiny silver goblet of gently fizzing WordPress blue liquid, possibly blueberry flavored if I had to guess. Attached to the goblet stem is a ribbon with a note in EB Garamond that reads: Merge Me. At first, I chuckle at the poor attempt at a GitHub joke until I spot another note scrolled on the glass in black marker. It says, Bubble, bubble, toil, and trouble; Find your escape route on the double; Bring back the community and one thing more; Merge the elixir with your core. As I’m trying to decode the odd poem’s meaning, a flash of lightning lurches across the room, and a clap of thunder follows behind. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:24] I shield my eyes before looking up to find that I am no longer alone. It’s the shadowy figure again, except in the light of this room, I can finally see that it’s not anyone familiar. It is a lumpy-looking being, and it’s wearing a witch costume. The costume-clad figure looks very unsteady on its feet like it might fall over. And just as I’m about to ask if they’re all right, the person suddenly topples over into a heap of robes and broomsticks. I can see spots of yellow fur and a few pairs of fuzzy ears. Aha! There was a wisdom of Wapuus under that witchy costume. They blink cutely at me for a moment and then quickly scurry into a surprisingly organized line. I watch, totally confused, as the line of Wapuus starts moving methodically back toward the convention hall. They take three steps, and then they turn to the side, take another three steps, and then turn to the other side. The last Wapuu in the line turns to look at me and motions with its tiny paw to follow. That’s when the words on the glass box finally click. I have to bring the community back. All the dancing WordPressers need to return to the contributor tables to break the spell. The Wapuus have started a conga line to help lead the way. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:35] So, off I go. Following the tiny conga line through the twisting hallway and into the convention hall. As I’m dancing behind the Wapuus, I’m happy to see all my fellow WordCamp attendees falling into step behind me. My steadily growing conga line is weaving its way through the hall, picking up WordPressers, wearing mouse costumes, and Frankensteins and penguin costumes, and that’s when the Wapuus changed their course, leading us back through the twisting hallway and into the Contributor Day conference room. With the first part of the riddle solved, I’m glad to see that everyone has finally stopped dancing. Some folks are happy to sit down and get off their feet. Others are wondering how they ended up back in the contributor room. My Make team waves at me from across the room. I noticed there’s still no exit, but the glass box has disappeared. With the goblet free, there’s just one thing left for me to do. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:27] I rush toward it, dodging Wapuus and a pile of kicked-off shoes. Except that the closer I think I’m getting to the goblet, the further away it feels. I run faster, weaving through people and tables, and just when I feel close enough to reach out for the goblet, I trip over a live-streaming cable, and I wake up in my hotel room. Sitting up quickly, I realize it was all just a very strange dream. Outside, the sun is setting in a clear sky with no storm in sight. I try to shake it off. I change into my Ninja Turtles costume, ready to do my best Monster Mash at the after party with all of my WordPress friends. As I walk out of the hotel room, I pause for a quick costume check in the mirror. Before heading downstairs, I take a quick glance at the digital clock on the nightstand to see the time. Huh, that’s odd. Next to the digital clock sits a fuzzy plush Wapuu wearing a witch costume. That wasn’t there before, was it? And if I didn’t know any better, I almost think I see it wink. View the full article

Release Candidate 3 (RC3) is now available for testing! The general release is just one week away with WordPress 6.1 scheduled for release on Tuesday, November 1, 2022. This RC3 release is the final opportunity for you to test and help to ensure the resilience of the 6.1 release by performing a final round of reviews and checks. Since the WordPress ecosystem is vast and composed of thousands of plugins and themes the entire project benefits from the time you take to assist. 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 RC3 on a test server and site. You can test WordPress 6.1 RC3 in three ways: Option 1: Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream). Option 2: Direct download the RC3 version (zip). Option 3: Use the WP-CLI command: wp core update --version=6.1-RC3 Additional information on the 6.1 release cycle is available here. Check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.1-related developer notes in the coming weeks detailing all upcoming changes. What’s in WordPress 6.1 RC3? Since Release Candidate 2, approximately 60 items have been addressed. GitHub tickets Trac tickets WordPress 6.1 is the third major release for 2022, following 5.9 and 6.0, released in January and May of this year, respectively. To learn more about the highlights for both end-users and developers, you’re invited to read more about them in the RC1 announcement post and review the WordPress 6.1 Field Guide. Plugin and theme developers All plugin and theme developers should test their respective extensions against WordPress 6.1 RC3 and update the “Tested up to” version in their readme file to 6.1. If you find compatibility problems, please post detailed information to the support forums, so these items can be investigated further prior to the final release date of November 1st. Translate WordPress Do you speak a language other than English? Help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages. Keep WordPress bug-free – help with testing Testing for issues is critical for stabilizing a release throughout its development. Testing is also a great way to contribute. This detailed guide is an excellent start if you have never tested a beta release. Testing helps ensure that this and future releases of WordPress are as stable and issue-free as possible. Anyone can take part in testing – regardless of prior experience. Want to know more about testing releases like this one? Read about the testing initiatives that happen in Make Core. You can also join a core-test channel on the Making WordPress Slack workspace. If you have run into an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. If you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, you can file one on WordPress Trac. This is also where you can find a list of known bugs. To review features in the Gutenberg releases since WordPress 6.0 (the most recent major release of WordPress), access the What’s New In Gutenberg posts for 14.1, 14.0, 13.9, 13.8, 13.7, 13.6, 13.5, 13.4, 13.3, 13.2, and 13.1. RC3, A Penultimate Haiku The time ticks forward Release nears ever closer Download and review Props to the following contributors for collaborating on this post: Dan Soschin, Jonny Harris View the full article

The second release candidate (RC2) for WordPress 6.1 is now available! “Release Candidate” means that this version of WordPress is ready for release and it is a key milestone in the 6.1 release cycle! Before the official release date, the community sets aside time to perform final reviews and help test. Since the WordPress ecosystem includes thousands of plugins and themes, it is important that everyone checks to see if anything has been missed along the way. That means the project would greatly benefit from your assistance. WordPress 6.1 is planned for official release on November 1st, 2022, two weeks from today. 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 RC2 on a test server and site. You can test WordPress 6.1 RC2 in three ways: Option 1: Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream). Option 2: Direct download the RC2 version (zip). Option 3: Use the WP-CLI command: wp core update --version=6.1-RC2 Additional information on the 6.1 release cycle is available here. Check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.1-related developer notes in the coming weeks detailing all upcoming changes. What’s in WordPress 6.1 RC2? Since Release Candidate 1, approximately 65 items have been addressed, bringing the total count to more than 2,000 updates since WordPress 6.0 in May of 2022. GitHub tickets Trac tickets WordPress 6.1 is the third major release for 2022, following 5.9 and 6.0, released in January and May of this year, respectively. To learn more about the highlights for both end-users and developers, you’re invited to read more about them in the RC1 announcement post and review the WordPress 6.1 Field Guide. Plugin and theme developers All plugin and theme developers should test their respective extensions against WordPress 6.1 RC2 and update the “Tested up to” version in their readme file to 6.1. If you find compatibility problems, please post detailed information to the support forums, so these items can be investigated further prior to the final release date of November 1st. Translate WordPress Do you speak a language other than English? Help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages. Keep WordPress bug-free – help with testing Testing for issues is critical for stabilizing a release throughout its development. Testing is also a great way to contribute. This detailed guide is an excellent start if you have never tested a beta release. Testing helps ensure that this and future releases of WordPress are as stable and issue-free as possible. Anyone can take part in testing – regardless of prior experience. Want to know more about testing releases like this one? Read about the testing initiatives that happen in Make Core. You can also join a core-test channel on the Making WordPress Slack workspace. If you have run into an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. If you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, you can file one on WordPress Trac. This is also where you can find a list of known bugs. To review features in the Gutenberg releases since WordPress 6.0 (the most recent major release of WordPress), access the What’s New In Gutenberg posts for 14.3, 14.2, 14.1, 14.0, 13.9, 13.8, 13.7, 13.6, 13.5, 13.4, 13.3, 13.2, and 13.1. Haiku Fun for RC2 Two weeks from the launch Constant improvements we make Great outcomes await View the full article

WordPress 6.0.3 is now available! This release features several security fixes. Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately. All versions since WordPress 3.7 have also been updated. WordPress 6.0.3 is a short-cycle release. The next major release will be version 6.1 planned for November 1, 2022. If you have sites that support automatic background updates, the update process will begin automatically. You can download WordPress 6.0.3 from WordPress.org, or visit your WordPress Dashboard, click “Updates”, and then click “Update Now”. For more information on this release, please visit the HelpHub site. Security updates included in this release The security team would like to thank the following people for responsibly reporting vulnerabilities, and allowing them to be fixed in this release. Stored XSS via wp-mail.php (post by email) – Toshitsugu Yoneyama of Mitsui Bussan Secure Directions, Inc. via JPCERT Open redirect in `wp_nonce_ays` – devrayn Sender’s email address is exposed in wp-mail.php – Toshitsugu Yoneyama of Mitsui Bussan Secure Directions, Inc. via JPCERT Media Library – Reflected XSS via SQLi – Ben Bidner from the WordPress security team and Marc Montpas from Automattic independently discovered this issue CSRF in wp-trackback.php – Simon Scannell Stored XSS via the Customizer – Alex Concha from the WordPress security team Revert shared user instances introduced in 50790 – Alex Concha and Ben Bidner from the WordPress security team Stored XSS in WordPress Core via Comment Editing – Third-party security audit and Alex Concha from the WordPress security team Data exposure via the REST Terms/Tags Endpoint – Than Taintor Content from multipart emails leaked – Thomas Kräftner SQL Injection due to improper sanitization in `WP_Date_Query` – Michael Mazzolini RSS Widget: Stored XSS issue – Third-party security audit Stored XSS in the search block – Alex Concha of the WP Security team Feature Image Block: XSS issue – Third-party security audit RSS Block: Stored XSS issue – Third-party security audit Fix widget block XSS – Third-party security audit Thank you to these WordPress contributors This release was led by Alex Concha, Peter Wilson, Jb Audras, and Sergey Biryukov at mission control. Thanks to Jonathan Desrosiers, Jorge Costa, Bernie Reiter and Carlos Bravo for their help on package updates. WordPress 6.0.3 would not have been possible without the contributions of the following people. Their asynchronous coordination to deliver several fixes into a stable release is a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress community. Alex Concha, Colin Stewart, Daniel Richards, David Baumwald, Dion Hulse, ehtis, Garth Mortensen, Jb Audras, John Blackbourn, John James Jacoby, Jonathan Desrosiers, Jorge Costa, Juliette Reinders Folmer, Linkon Miyan, martin.krcho, Matias Ventura, Mukesh Panchal, Paul Kevan, Peter Wilson, Robert AndersonRobin, Sergey Biryukov, Sumit Bagthariya, Teddy Patriarca, Timothy Jacobs, vortfu, and Česlav Przywara. Thanks to @peterwilsoncc for proofreading. View the full article

In the forty-first episode of the WordPress Briefing, peek into the upcoming WordPress 6.1 release with our host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and the release’s Editor Triage Lead, Nick Diego. 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 Guests Nick Diego References Call for Testing for WordPress for Android 20.9 RC2 WordPress 6.1 link forthcoming 18 October Multisite Improvements Block Style Generation Tool Editor Preferences Changes WordPress 6.1 Walkthrough 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] And today I have with me Nick Diego. Welcome, Nick, to the WordPress Briefing. [Nick Diego 00:00:44] Thank you so much for having me. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:46] Yeah. Before we get started, why don’t you tell me a bit about yourself, just kind of your history with WordPress and then what it is that you’ve been doing with the WordPress 6.1 release squad. [Nick Diego 00:00:56] Yeah, so I’m actually kind of new to working with WordPress full-time. Up until about June of last year, I was in the hospitality industry for a career of 10 years. But I always loved doing WordPress on the side. And after the long pandemic, I figured it was time to kind of pursue my passion and work with WordPress full-time. And that ultimately led to my current role as a developer advocate at WPEngine, where I focus primarily on WordPress and contribution to Core itself. And then I guess it was maybe March or April this year when Anne McCarthy, who I’ve worked with a ton, she asked me if I’d be interested in helping out on 6.0 as an Editor Triage Lead which was an awesome experience. And now I’m back for 6.1. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:37] That’s excellent. I always like to hear about people who are coming to do repeat tours of duty. [Nick Diego 00:01:43] Yes, exactly. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:44] I probably shouldn’t refer to working on WordPress releases as a tour of duty. However, I find that releases are so large and complex, and there are so many people in there now that working on them takes an entirely different skill set now than it used to take when WordPress was like 1% of the web. And so I think it’s a really big task, and I think it’s great when people were, like, that was either so good that I would do it again, or I would like a second go because I could do it better. Whichever way brings people to it. So, yeah. [Nick Diego 00:02:18] No, I was just gonna say that’s a great point because the Editor Triage Lead, which is the role that I currently have, was a brand new role for 6.0. The project kind of got so big that it kind of made sense to have a triage lead focused specifically on Gutenberg. Gutenberg’s such a big part of WordPress now. And so that’s where that role kind of came from, and now we’ve carried it over to 6.1. As the project grows, we need more people to come in and help make sure the release is as smooth as it can be. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:42] Yes. Because of that promise of backward compatibility and all the things. [Nick Diego 00:02:47] Exactly. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:48] Cool. So, by the time this releases, if I recall correctly, we will have passed RC2, or RC2 is coming the next day or something like that. We’re right around the Release Candidate two. So you have been doing this for quite some time on this particular release. So far, what is the feature that you’re most excited about that’s going out in the 6.1 release? [Nick Diego 00:03:09] So, this is going to sound really boring, but it’s actually incredibly exciting. So, the most exciting quote-unquote feature that I’m excited about is the improved consistency and standardization of block controls that are coming in 6.1. So things like typography and color and borders and dimensions. These are things and tools that we’ve had in a lot of core blocks, but it hasn’t been consistent throughout. And a ton of work has been done in 6.1 to establish that consistency. We’re not a hundred percent there, but typography, I think we’re at like 85% of all core blocks now support all the typography controls, and with each release as we head to 6.2, we’ll improve on that. But it’s really great for theme builders, theme designers, and users to be able to control the look and feel blocks consistently throughout the editor. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:58] I was gonna immediately answer you earlier with like, there are no boring answers, there are no boring improvements. And as you were explaining why it is that you kind of thought it might be considered boring, I think it’s fair to say that anytime that you’re increasing the consistency and you’re increasing the confidence between what you saw on the back end and what you actually shipped on the front end– anytime you’re doing that, I think that that is exciting in the prove the negative way. If you think about the negative excitement that occurs when you have published something, and it looks one way in the back end, and then it looks totally different on the front end, and the panic you feel when you have to fix. Not having that is a really big step up, I think. And so anything that provides more consistency for people who are using WordPress, people who are building with WordPress, I always find exciting. But also, like, I’m an office person, and so I would find office things exciting, right? [Nick Diego 00:04:53] It creates a more delightful experience. I do a lot of work on the Training team, doing educational things, and we teach people how to change typography and change color. Once they learn how to do it in one block, if they can take that same skill set and apply it to any other block, it’s that light bulb moment. They understand they know how to manipulate and use WordPress to its fullest. So adding that consistency really helps to level up users. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:15] Yeah, I’m gonna take us off track a little bit and just ask a general question here. Like, I remember the first time that I was working with what was a site, I guess, qualified for a site at the time. And I remember the first time that I discovered that I could change the look and feel with HTML and CSS, and I did that. Also was like, well, I accept my fate. Whatever happens, if I kill everything I’ve ever written, that is just how it’ll be. Like the sheer terror of all of that is so different now. Do you recall that first moment where you’re like, Oh, I do have some power over this? I have some control over this, and whether you also found it scary. [Nick Diego 00:05:52] So I came to WordPress kinda as a hobby and website development kind of as a hobby. So I was kind of always in that tinkering phase, or I wasn’t building something for anyone else. I was in a safe place to destroy whatever I was working on with my tinkering. So I never really quite had that fear, but I can definitely see it from the perspective of building something for somebody else. But you’re right, the editor and the controls that we have, and you know, now make it a lot easier to kind of manipulate and exert your creative desires in WordPress than it was before with CSS. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:23] I love the phrase ‘I was safe to destroy things, ’ and if I can figure out a way to make it a tagline for something, I will. [Nick Diego 00:06:30] Exactly. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:31] Alright. So during your second time around here on the release squad with 6.1, what have been the bright spots of that experience, and have there been any unexpected challenges of being on the release squad? [Nick Diego 00:06:44] Again, I come to WordPress from, you know, from a different career. It’s kind of a passion of mine to be working with WordPress. So I kinda have a unique experience than maybe some others. And when I approach WordPress, there’s always that tendency to say, ‘why doesn’t it do this?’ Or ‘why don’t they do this?’ And I’ve always been the person…, well, it’s open source. We, we, we can, we can [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:05] …can do it [Nick Diego 00:07:05] …we can do it. And so that’s kind of how I approach things. Now, of course, you know, I have the privilege of time to do that. Not everybody does, but one of the unexpected bright spots about working in a release squad is understanding how it all works. How does WordPress actually get built? What is the process that it goes through? It was just eye-opening to me, and I really got a shout-out, Anne, for inviting me to be on 6.0. It brought me in. I learned so much about it, and now I’m just excited to keep working on these releases. But a release is hard. You know, it’s a… WordPress is huge. There are a lot of moving parts, there are a lot of things going on. Right now, we’re trying to get everything ready for the first release candidate. So being on the release squad is not an easy job. But it’s exciting, it’s fun, and you really feel like you’re part of that ‘we’ really helping to build WordPress. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:53] One of the things that I hope that people have learned from any time that they spent working with me is that like we understand here in the WordPress open source project, and I believe that all open source projects must understand this, but like every change that you make, if there are things that are dependent on it, which is gonna be true for most of us, we’ll have intended consequences and also unexpected consequences, and unintended, unexpected consequences. And so I’ve always felt like the thing that really makes the biggest difference about how we do open source in WordPress is that, for the most part, we have a concept of where the most likely changes are going to happen across our entire ecosystem. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:08:40] We have a better understanding, at least compared to when I got here, a better understanding of how interconnected it all is. And so you’ve got this change here, and it looks small, but it’s gonna have this positive or negative impact as you kind of work your way out from it. And so I think that that is an interesting thing, and certainly, you get a really clear concept of it in the release squad, I think. [Nick Diego 00:09:02] Oh, absolutely. If you were to build something like the block editor without caring at all about backward compatibility, you’d be done by now, right? I mean, so much of what we do is concerning ourselves with making sure that everybody who’s on a classic theme or hybrid theme or whatever it might be that they continue to use WordPress in a safe and stable way. This is part of being such a large content management system. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:09:24] So you already told us the feature that you’re most excited about, and so now I’m gonna ask you about what feature or what bug fix has the most notable improvements that are coming to 6.1. This is a little different as in, like, there’s the thing you’re excited about, which is an office thing, but like a thing that is maybe not new but has the biggest delta, the biggest change to anyone’s experience of it. [Nick Diego 00:09:51] Yeah, so obviously, in 5.9, we introduced full site editing, and 6.0 was a natural progression from that with more and more features. Now it’s safe to say that there’s only a small fraction of websites that are using the whole full site editing of or block themes, all that kind of stuff. One of the hangups about that was managing templates inside of the site editor. You could add the files to your theme, which would then show up in the site editor. But there wasn’t a direct way to add more complicated templates within the site editor itself. That is changing in 6.1. So now you actually have the functionality to install something like 2023, which is the new core theme, and build out all these very complicated templates within the UI of the site editor that you could not have done before. [Nick Diego 00:10:38] I personally think that the biggest benefit of full site editing is really to empower no-code or low-code users. And the ability to add these templates directly in the UI really levels them up. Because now, you can do all that complicated stuff that you normally would need to be adding to theme files and jumping into the code. You can do that within the site editor now, which I think is fantastic. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:10:59] That’s great. And just a general caveat, anytime that we talk about anything that’s very developer-y or very no code-y, I think it’s always worth mentioning, yes, a lot of what we’re trying to do with the block editor is to just kind of give some power back to folks who cannot find the time to become a developer or don’t have the inclination. They don’t want to do that. But that does not mean that no code is ever involved in WordPress. It’s still a software. You can still do very complicated things with it. And if you are a developer, you should not think to yourself, ‘oh now that it’s being available to low code/no code users, that means you don’t want me.’ Like, that’s not at all what’s happening. You can do very complicated things still. [Nick Diego 00:11:42] A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Absolutely. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:11:45] Alright, so that brings us to our final question here because we like to stay as true to the name as possible here on the WP Briefing. If someone were wanting to get involved with the next release, so WP 6.2, how would they do that? [Nick Diego 00:12:01] So, talk to Anne, and she’ll get you set up. No, I’m just kidding. So at the, after each release, there’s a posting that goes out that lists all the different release teams, and you can just put your name out there and ask to be, you know, for consideration to be part of the team. However, I will say that the best thing you can do right now is help with 6.1. You don’t necessarily need to be a release lead to do that testing, helping with bug fixes. Reach out to me. Reach out to other release leads, and we’ll get you involved and engaged with the release. That will give you a really good framework to start working and become a release lead for 6.2. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:12:37] Yeah. I think we talked maybe two or three episodes ago, or it could be more than that, I’ll never know, about the release squad, like the group that’s doing that. In the event you think to yourself, ‘there’s no way in a million years that I’m gonna just show up tomorrow and be part of the release squad,’ I heard what they said in the first question/answer moment– that’s fine, too. As Nick mentioned, you can always get involved with testing, you can get involved with triage. Those are areas where any feedback at all is valuable because we can get better information about what worked and didn’t, what was expected versus what happened. And that type of information is where all of our co-creators of the WordPress software–really, we rely on what you all are pointing out to us. If you’re not shining spotlights on the most painful parts of your experience, sometimes we don’t necessarily know that that’s a pain point for anyone. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:13:34] And so yeah, that’s a great place to start. If you are more of a writer, technical or prose, there are different spaces you can go to, like keep our docs up to date or make sure that people know that changes are coming at all in WordPress because that’s a thing. If you are a backend developer, we have a million things you can do because that’s just all day, every day, for WordPress. It’s just all the deep backend work. And so yeah. [Nick Diego 00:13:58] I did want to mention that, you know, being on the release team does not necessarily mean that you’re incredibly technical. We have a documentation lead, we have a design lead, you know, a communication lead. So there’s a lot of different roles in the team that, you know, across all disciplines. So don’t think if you’re not a hardcore developer, that precludes you from being on the team. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:14:19] Yeah, and if you’re really good with common sense and working fully remotely, you can be the release coordinator. I can tell you because I did that for 5.0. It was a big job. It was our, it was the first time we had a release squad as opposed to just like the release lead. Because there was just so much that was going into that and so much riding on it. And like you said in some other answer that you gave like if you were to just be like, we’re shutting everything down and rewriting this in six months, and I hope you can come with us on it. Like a lot of open source projects do it that way. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:14:51] And that is a choice, and we made the opposite choice. And so we’re bringing all of our co-conspirators with us, all of our co-creators of WordPress. That’s the hope all the time. Making sure that they have enough information, that they feel safe to destroy things, enough information, and skills about how to get out of it, that they always feel some high confidence in what they’re trying to do versus what they actually did do. So, yeah, excellent. Nick, do you have any final thoughts for our listeners? [Nick Diego 00:15:20] Nope. I just hope everybody goes out and downloads 6.1 and enjoys it as much as I am. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:15:25] Yeah, go check it out. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:15:28] That brings us now to our small list of big things. And actually, it is a pretty big list today, but still pretty big things too. So first up, we have a call for testing that is out, and it is for our Android users. There is a call for testing for WordPress for Android 20.9, and I feel like we don’t get a lot of calls for testing for Android devices. And so if you have been feeling left out or just like we don’t always have that kind of mobile testing available, this is the opportunity for you. The next thing is that tomorrow, we have RC2, release candidate two for WordPress 6.1. That’s coming out on October 18th. There will be a link in the show notes, but that means if you write a plugin or a theme or have anything that kind of extends the core of WordPress, now is the time to start testing anything that might be a bug or represent a breaking change and make sure that you file those bugs so that we can get things as settled and excellent as possible. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:16:40] And speaking of Word points, uh, WordPress 6.1, not Word point, WordPress 6.1. I actually have three changes that I think are going to represent some pretty big changes for folks. I will have links to all of these in the show notes. If you don’t know where the show notes are, it’s on wordpress.org/news/podcast. So the three things that I think are gonna be big, worthwhile things. The first one is multisite improvements, and the second one will be the style engine that’s block styles generation tool, which will ship in Core and I think is really important for y’all to take a look at. And then also there are some changes coming to the block editor preferences. Like I said, links to all of those are going to be in the show notes, and so they should be pretty easy for you to find. But also, if you want to just get a general look at everything that’s coming in 6.1, we did a walkthrough that I will link to in the show notes as well, and you can get a full understanding of what is going to be coming early in November. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:17:45] And that, my friends, is your small list –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

September was an exciting month with the return of many in-person WordCamps, WordPress Translation Day, and preparations for WordPress 6.1. Contributors across teams continue to work hard to ensure that the last major release of the year is the best it can be for everyone. Let’s catch up on all things WordPress. Countdown to WordPress 6.1: Coming November 1, 2022 WordPress 6.1 is scheduled for release on November 1, 2022—less than three weeks away. Following the beta releases in September, the first release candidate (RC1) is now ready for download and testing. Members of the release squad hosted a casual walk-through of some of the expected WordPress 6.1 features last month. ​​The recording and transcript are available in this post. This next major release focuses on increased control for a more intuitive site and content creation experience, and will be bundled with a new default block theme, Twenty Twenty-Three (TT3). This theme comes with 10 style variations designed by community members that you can easily switch between to customize the look and feel of your site. Other exciting updates include enhanced consistency of design tools across blocks, a refined and expanded template creation experience, improved Quote and List blocks, and support for fluid typography. Selected style variations for the Twenty Twenty-Three theme. Want to know what else is new in WordPress 6.1? Check out these resources for more details: Roadmap to 6.1: Core Companion WordPress 6.1 Field Guide ​​WordPress 6.1 Accessibility Improvements Performance Field Guide for WordPress 6.1 Take part in this release by helping to test key features or translating WordPress 6.1. Gutenberg versions 14.1, 14.2, and 14.3 are out Three new versions of Gutenberg have been released since last month’s edition of The Month in WordPress: Gutenberg 14.1 shipped on September 15, 2022. It adds typography and spacing support for many blocks, continuing efforts to consolidate design tools in blocks. It also includes improvements to the Navigation block and the content-locking experience. This is the last version of Gutenberg that will merge into WordPress 6.1, which will include updates from Gutenberg 13.1 to 14.1. Gutenberg 14.2 comes with writing flow improvements, a more polished Calendar block, and autocompletion for links. It was released on September 28, 2022. Gutenberg 14.3 is available for download as of October 12, 2022. This version makes it easier to navigate text blocks with alt + arrow keyboard combinations, and brings an improved drag-and-drop functionality for images, among other updates. Follow the “What’s new in Gutenberg” posts to stay on top of the latest enhancements. WordPress Translation Day On September 28, 2022, the Polyglots community celebrated WordPress Translation Day (WPTD) with some global events throughout the week, including an overview of the GlotPress feedback tool. In addition, there were 13 local events in 11 different languages and across four continents. The Training Team joined the celebration by hosting a day-long event to help new contributors translate materials on learn.wordpress.org. Check out this recap for more highlights from the event. Team updates: Dropping security updates for WP 3.7 – 4.0, a new developer-focused course, and more The WordPress Security Team will no longer provide security updates for WordPress versions 3.7 through 4.0 as of December 2022. The first developer-focused course, Using the WordPress Data Layer, is live on Learn WordPress. The Global Meetup Reactivation project gathered 39 supporters worldwide so far. As a result of their efforts, 117 meetup groups have reactivated or plan to reactivate in 2022! Learn more about do_action’s charity hackathons and how to host one in the latest edition of the Meetup Organizer Newsletter. Would you like to help create content for the Learn WordPress platform? The Training Team shared a post on how to become an online workshop facilitator or tutorial presenter. The WebP proposal was pulled from the upcoming WordPress 6.1 release in response to this post and subsequent discussions. Users can still get this feature using the Performance Lab plugin. WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg suggested revisiting canonical plugins and adopting a plugin-first approach when developing new features for core. The Plugin Team reminds plugin authors using Heroku’s free services to update their services after the company announced the removal of their free plans. The Openverse Team removed the ‘beta’ status from audio support. Also, the index now includes iNaturalist, making it easy to discover CC-licensed images of flora, fauna, and nature contributed by this community of scientists and naturalists. The Hosting and Documentation Teams are collaborating on the creation of a new WordPress Advanced Administration Handbook. Want to create diverse and inclusive events that make the WordPress community stronger, but not sure where to get started? Join WPDiversity to learn more about upcoming workshops. Feedback & testing requests Last call to complete the Meetup Annual Survey! Help strengthen this global WordPress program by sharing your feedback by October 15, 2022. The Core Team is seeking proposals for Interop 2023. Interop is an effort to improve interoperability across the three major web browser engines (Chromium, WebKit, and Gecko). You can submit yours until October 15, 2022. Don’t miss this call for testing on using block-based template parts in classic themes. The Community Team is gathering feedback on onboarding experiences at Contributor Days. Version 20.9 of WordPress for Android and iOS is available for testing. Tune in to the latest episode of WP Briefing to hear guests Anne McCarthy and Brian Alexander discuss their work on the Testing Team and how you can get involved. Event updates & WordCamps The last batch of WordCamp Asia 2023 tickets will be released on October 19, 2022. The organizing team is also calling for contributors’ stories. WordCamp US (WCUS) 2022 was successfully held last month in San Diego, California. Following two days of presentations, workshops, and a Q&A session with Matt Mullenweg, more than 300 attendees participated in the Contributor Day. National Harbor, Maryland, will host next year’s WordCamp US and a Community Summit on August 23-25, 2023. In addition to WCUS, four in-person WordCamps took place in September in Jinja (Uganda), Kathmandu (Nepal), The Netherlands, and Pontevedra (Spain). And more WordPress events are on the schedule for the rest of October: WordCamp Valencia, Spain on October 21-22, 2022 WordCamp Brno, Czech Republic on October 22, 2022 WordCamp Lyon, France on October 28, 2022 Curious about attending a WordCamp event? Listen to contributor stories from WordCamp US 2022 on why they use WordPress and go to WordCamps. 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: @chaion07, @laurlittle, @rmartinezduque, @robinwpdeveloper, @santanainniss, @webcommsat. View the full article

The first release candidate (RC1) for WordPress 6.1 is now available! This is an important milestone in the 6.1 release cycle. “Release Candidate” means that this version of WordPress is ready for release! Before the official release date, time is set aside for the community to perform final reviews and help test. Since the WordPress ecosystem includes thousands of plugins and themes, it is important that everyone checks to see if anything was missed along the way. That means the project would love your help. WordPress 6.1 is planned for official release on November 1st, 2022, three weeks from today. 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 6.1 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=6.1-RC1 Additional information on the 6.1 release cycle is available here. Check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.1-related developer notes in the coming weeks detailing all upcoming changes. What’s in WordPress 6.1 RC1? Since Beta 3, approximately 100 items have been addressed, bringing the total count to more than 2,000 updates since WordPress 6.0 in May of 2022. GitHub tickets Trac tickets WordPress 6.1 is the third major release for 2022, following 5.9 and 6.0, released in January and May of this year, respectively. WordPress 6.1 highlights for end-users Default theme powered by 10 unique style variations (learn more) More design tools in more blocks (learn more) Expanded and refined template experience and template options More intuitive document settings experience Header and footer patterns for all themes Improved quote and list blocks with inner block support More robust placeholders for various blocks New modal interfaces and preferences improvements Automatic navigation block selection with fallbacks and easier menu management Apply locking settings to all inner blocks in one click Improvements to the block theme discovery experience Accessibility updates, with more than 60 resolved tickets Performance updates, with more than 25 resolved tickets WordPress 6.1 highlights for developers Opt into appearance tools to make any theme more powerful New iteration on the style system Add starter patterns to any post type (learn more) Evolution of layout options including a new constrained option and the ability to disable layout options Content lock patterns for more curation options Expanded support for query loop blocks Allow the use of block-based template parts in classic themes (give feedback) Filter theme.json data (learn more) Fluid typography allows for more responsiveness (give feedback) Ability to style elements inside blocks like buttons, headings, or captions in theme.json Please note that all features listed in this post are subject to change before the final release. Plugin and theme developers All plugin and theme developers should test their respective extensions against WordPress 6.1 RC1 and update the “Tested up to” version in their readme file to 6.1. If you find compatibility problems, please post detailed information to the support forums, so these items can be investigated further prior to the final release date of November 1st. Translate WordPress Do you speak a language other than English? Help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages. This release also marks the hard string freeze point of the 6.1 release cycle. Keep WordPress bug-free – help with testing Testing for issues is critical for stabilizing a release throughout its development. Testing is also a great way to contribute. This detailed guide is an excellent start if you have never tested a beta release. Testing helps ensure that this and future releases of WordPress are as stable and issue-free as possible. Anyone can take part in testing – regardless of prior experience. Want to know more about testing releases like this one? Read about the testing initiatives that happen in Make Core. You can also join a core-test channel on the Making WordPress Slack workspace. If you have run into an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. If you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, you can file one on WordPress Trac. This is also where you can find a list of known bugs. To review features in the Gutenberg releases since WordPress 6.0 (the most recent major release of WordPress), access the What’s New In Gutenberg posts for 14.1, 14.0, 13.9, 13.8, 13.7, 13.6, 13.5, 13.4, 13.3, 13.2, and 13.1. Haiku Fun for RC1 Languages abound Test today, releases soon Freedom to publish Thank you to the following contributors for collaborating on this post: @webcommsat View the full article

WordPress 6.1 Beta 3 is now available for download and testing. This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it is recommended that you test Beta 3 on a test server and site. You can test WordPress 6.1 Beta 3 in three ways: Option 1: Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream). Option 2: Direct download the Beta 3 version (zip). Option 3: Use the following WP-CLI command: wp core update --version=6.1-beta3 The current target for the final release is November 1, 2022, which is about four weeks away. Additional information on the 6.1 release cycle is available. Check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.1-related developer notes in the coming weeks detailing all upcoming changes. Keep WordPress bug-free – help with testing Testing for issues is critical for stabilizing a release throughout its development. Testing is also a great way to contribute. This detailed guide is an excellent start if you have never tested a beta release before. Testing helps ensure that this and future releases of WordPress are as stable and issue-free as possible. Anyone can take part in testing – especially great WordPress community members like you. Want to know more about testing releases like this one? Read about the testing initiatives that happen in Make Core. You can also join a core-test channel on the Making WordPress Slack workspace. If you have run into an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. If you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, you can file one on WordPress Trac. This is also where you can find a list of known bugs. To review features in the Gutenberg releases since WordPress 6.0 (the most recent major release of WordPress), access the What’s New In Gutenberg posts for 14.1, 14.0, 13.9, 13.8, 13.7, 13.6, 13.5, 13.4, 13.3, 13.2, and 13.1. This release contains more than 350 enhancements and 350 bug fixes for the editor, including more than 300 tickets for WordPress 6.1 core. More fixes are on the way in the remainder of the 6.1 release cycle. Some highlights Want to know what’s new in version 6.1? Read the initial Beta 1 announcement for some details, or check out the product walk-through recording. What’s new in Beta 3 Nearly 100 issues have been resolved since Beta 2 was released last week. Github tickets Trac tickets (may include some overlap with Github) A Beta 3 haiku for thee Beta time done soon Gather up your WordPress sites RC then we ship View the full article

In the fortieth episode of the WordPress Briefing, Josepha Haden Chomphosy sits down with special guests Anne McCarthy and Brian Alexander to discuss the Testing Team and how to get started with testing 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 Guests Anne McCarthy Brian Alexander References WordPress 6.1 Testing Testing Reports w/ Template Week in Test Series Reporting Bugs Handbook Page Fullsite Editing Outreach Program FSE Outreach Experiment Slack Channel make.wordpress.org/test WordPress.org/news Learn.wordpress.org #WPDiversity Speaker Workshop for Women Voices in Latin America Transcript [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00] Hello everyone. And welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of some of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project and the community around it, as well as get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:42] So I have with us today on the WordPress Briefing a couple of special guests. I have Brian Alexander, as well as Anne McCarthy. I’m gonna ask you both to tell us a little bit about yourselves, if you can tell us what you do with the WordPress project, maybe how long you’ve been with WordPress, and if there are any particular teams that you contribute to, that would be great. Brian, why don’t you get us started? [Brian Alexander 00:01:02] Hi, I’m Brian. I work on the WordPress project as a full-time contributor, sponsored by Automattic. And I am one of the Test Team reps, so I help promote testing across the project. And that’s not just in Core, but it could be for Themes, Performance, feature plugins, what have you. So try to make that stuff move forward and wrangle as many people as we can to get on board and help. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:32] Excellent. All right, and Anne, what about you? [Anne McCarthy 00:01:36] I spearhead the Full Site Editing outreach program. I am a sponsor contributor for Automattic as well, and so I contribute across a couple of different teams depending upon what the outreach program needs as well as various release squads I have been a part of. So for 6.1 coming up, I’m one of the co-Core Editor triage leads. Brian is also on the squad as the co-Test lead, which is very exciting. So it’s been fun to work with him and be on the podcast. And I’ve been around the WordPress project since about 2011. But this is, the last couple of years, the first time I’ve been able to be sponsored by Automattic and be a part of giving back to the community that’s given me so much. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:13] Amazing. All right. For folks who’ve been listening to the WP Briefing for a while, you know that I’ve been saying for like a full year that I think that testing is one of the best onboarding opportunities we have. And then also I really like to bring in our co-creators of WordPress through that testing program. Because we don’t know whether we’re right or not unless people tell us that we’re right or not. And we would like to hear so much from the users who, you know, use it and don’t necessarily have an opportunity, that privilege to kind of build on it or build the CMS itself. So I just have a few questions since I’ve got a couple of our strong testing wranglers here. The first thing I have is what are you doing? Or, do you have any advice for getting people outside of our active contributor base and the community to participate in testing? [Anne McCarthy 00:03:03] I can kick this off. Just thinking about the Full Site Editing outreach program model. So just for context, there are various calls for testing in different formats. So everything from really procedural where you’re following exact steps to follow, to very open-ended calls for testing, as well as we recently did usability testing. And one of the things that come to mind immediately just for getting different contributors is to have very specific, fun, engaging, relevant tests that can draw people in. So if you have a call for testing that really speaks to someone, they might be more willing to participate. As well as just different formats. So someone may not want to, you know, follow 30 steps, but they might want to follow something more open-ended. They might want to answer a survey rather than opening a GitHub link. And so I think a lot of facilitation with the outreach program has served us really well to bring in different folks as well as explicitly reaching out. So I’ve done a number of talks in different WordPress related spaces and non-WordPress spaces to try to tell people about what we’re up to and really go meet them where they are. Because I think that’s ultimately, especially with Covid and the pandemic, there was a really unique opportunity to do that and to join the random online meetup that was happening and talk about the program and talk about ways that people could get involved and feel heard. [Anne McCarthy 00:04:12] And the last thing I’ll mention is translations. The program that’s culture testing that I write is written in English, but I’m very fortunate to have people who translate those. And so that’s a huge way that I cannot contribute but that other people have. And so I really want to highlight that and call that out because it’s been hugely impactful to have these calls for testing in a way that people can more readily access. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:32] Yeah, absolutely. [Brian Alexander 00:04:35] Yeah, I was going to add in, in addition to the calls for testing that are, as Anne said, structured such to isolate so that someone can just kind of go through a list of steps to do rather than just being exposed to Trac or GitHub and have kind of snow blindness with, with everything that’s happening. We also have a Week in Test series of posts that goes out about every week. And what we try to do with that series is to curate a list of posts that might be a good starting point. So we try to find one that, in each type of testing example, is something that would, a more novice contributor might be able to start with. Things for more intermediate and then also advanced ones that, for testers who may need to have a development environment and the ability to make some pretty deep or type of customizations to their WordPress project in order to test a patch or reproduce a particular issue that might be happening. So that’s a good springboard for someone to come in where there’s just a small thing that they can kind of look at and then dive into the larger process. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:46] Absolutely. That’s very smart. It’s hard to figure out how to get started in WordPress at all, let alone as a contributing by testing things sort of area. That feels new to WordPress even though the team has been around for a long time. And so I think that’s excellent. Brian, you mentioned in your note about who you are and what you’re doing that you’re helping with testing not only in the test section in the Test Team but then also across the project. So, I have a follow-up question for you. What can developers do to create better tests for their software? [Brian Alexander 00:06:18] There are sections within the Core handbook that kind of go into detail about the types of tests that should accompany individual contributions. A lot of those require kind of an extra step, and some developers maybe don’t have as much experience there. So hopefully, the Core handbook can provide a little bit of that guidance. We also have a lot of contributors who are interested in things such as unit testing, E2E testing, which is end-to-end testing, and testing in JavaScript or in PHP. So there’s a wide variety of the types of tests that you can actually contribute to. And I would say maybe about 50% of the tickets that I’ve triaged, personally, the contributor who brought in the patch was unable to or was not familiar with providing unit tests. So that is a very good opportunity for someone to come in who maybe is not as well versed in the depth of what the patch was involved with. But by contributing a user test, they get an opportunity to look very focused at a particular piece of code, what was modified, and then create unit tests based on that. [Brian Alexander 00:07:40] And then once that unit test has been submitted and starting to be reviewed, other reviewers, Core contributors, or Core committers, I would say, they’ll start looking at that and if there are additional details that should be there, expanding the tests or little modifications. Then that also is feedback to that test contributor so that the next time they come in, they’re more prepared for it. They’re learning more about Core, and eventually, maybe they’ll also become a Core contributor. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:08:07] Excellent. We will include links to these handbook pages and documentation in the show notes if you’re listening to the podcast on your favorite podcasting platform, Pocketcasts, or it’s somewhere else. I don’t know where people listen to podcasts, but if you’re listening to it somewhere that’s not on the website, you can come to get that on wordpress.org/news. Okay, the next question that I have, and I think this is for both of you, Brian, it sounds like you partially answered it, but I bet there are more answers from Anne as well. What advice do you have for those submitting bug reports? [Anne McCarthy 00:08:38] I’ll chime in to start, and then Brian, I’d love to hear your unique take because I also think you do an excellent job whenever I’ve engaged with you in various places of providing really good replication steps. And so I love that, and I wanna offer things specific to WordPress itself and something that I’ve noticed that’s more cultural rather than necessarily like steps to follow. And one of the things I’ve noticed that I think has started to come up partially with Covid is people, you know, you start talking at WordCamps or at a meetup, and a bug comes up, and you find someone who knows where to put it, and that kind of connection is has been frayed in the last couple years. And so one of the things I feel like I’ve been saying to a lot of different people at this unique point in time is that it doesn’t need to be perfect. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. And so if it means you just need to drop it in a Slack channel and you just are like, I don’t know where to put this, that’s huge. We need to hear from people across the project. And I just really encourage anyone, even if you don’t have the complete information or you’re not a hundred percent sure you’re afraid it’s been reported 10 times before, like, please still report it because we need those reports and also if 10 people reported it and it’s still not fixed, that also means we need to iterate. [Anne McCarthy 00:09:40] And so that’s one of the things, especially with the Full Site Editing outreach program, I feel people will message me saying, hey, I’m sure you’ve heard this a bunch, but… And sometimes I’ve never heard it at all. And I shudder to think of all the people who have not reached out or have not posted in GitHub or Trac or wherever. So yeah, share, and write blog posts. I think that another great way that people can give feedback is if you don’t know how to get into the depths of WordPress, writing a post and talking about it and sharing it on social media is also a great way to get attention. I read a lot of those. But as much as possible, getting to, if you can, if you’re comfortable, getting to the source where we’re able to see it in Github or Trac goes a really long way. And share as much as you can. And don’t worry if you can’t spend hours writing the perfect bug report, we still wanna hear from you. [Brian Alexander 00:10:21] Yeah. Building off of what Anne said, just the fact that you’re speaking out and raising an issue is a huge step for many, many people. And once, once you’ve actually done that, as Anne said, it doesn’t need to be perfect. There are a lot of other people who are going to be looking at these bugs, trying to figure out the replication steps used. So even if you can’t provide all this detail up front, someone will help. On the back end, they’ll help kind of fill in those gaps. If you do have the time to actually get deep into providing a very detailed bug report, then there are some key aspects of the bug report that make it very helpful for contributors, not only testers, who should be able to reproduce the issue to validate and make sure that this isn’t something that’s unique, unique to a plugin, to a custom theme or snippet that you dropped into your functions PHP. But, also for the actual Core contributors, who then need to be able to understand what is happening so that they can fix the right thing. And some of those items are the information about your testing environment. [Brian Alexander 00:11:34] So that could be your browser, your server, the type, whether it’s Apache, Nginx, et cetera, the operating system you’re running, what version of PHP you’re running, the version of WordPress, very critical, and… [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:11:49] Super important. [Brian Alexander 00:11:51] Any themes and plugins that you’re using. And that kind of information helps set the stage, and then other people will be able to set up their environment similarly if they’re going to try to test it. After you have provided the environmental information, the steps required to reproduce the issue should be as detailed as possible. You may not have realized that clicking this caused such and such to happen, so just try to remember, or maybe even walk through if it’s something you can repeat multiple times, walk through a couple of times and write down everything that you’re doing. [Brian Alexander 00:12:30] So that you’re sure, hey, this is the way that I can reproduce this bug. And then those steps will be very helpful for other contributors when they’re reviewing it. And then it’s also very helpful if you have video, screenshots, debug logs, any of those other kinds of resources that you could refer to because not all bugs are easy to explain. And we tend to… Trac and GitHub issues for the Gutenberg project, everybody’s writing in English. And maybe your main language is not English, and it might be a little bit challenging to do that. So providing a video, it’s worth a thousand words in any language. So, if you can provide those types of assets, that’s also very important. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:13:22] Yeah, and I’ll share a little bit of a you’re-not-alone-in-it sort of anecdotes from the first few bugs that I ever filed for WordPress. I sort of had this feeling that if I were to file a bug, everyone would know that I wasn’t a developer. And like everyone knows, I’m not a developer, but a little bit I was like, they’ll know now. And so if that’s where you are also, Anne said it, and Brian said it as well, like, we can’t fix things that we don’t realize are broken. And just because you’ve run into it 15 times, which obviously should never happen, you should run into it once, and then we know, but it happens. If you run into it 15 times, probably other people have as well. And if it’s still not fixed, it might be because no one has thought to themselves I should tell someone that’s broken. And so if that’s your primary hurdle, folks out there in our listening space, I was once there too. And honestly, knowing that it’s a problem is as valuable as knowing the solution to it most of the time. [Brian Alexander 00:14:23] Yeah, and those are, I wanted to add, there is a lot to that to remember. That’s a lot to remember in terms of what you should be submitting, what, or I should say, what would be ideal in what you’re submitting. But luckily, in the test handbook, there’s a test report section, and it includes a description, it goes everything from, it starts with why we do bug reports to examples of the types of testing, whether it be for bugs or enhancements, which also need testing, and it has templates in there that you can copy and paste directly into Trac. And that’s very helpful. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:15:03] Yeah,, we will have links to those in the show notes as well. Since we’re right there at that moment, what do you think we could do as WordPress to make reporting problems easier? [Brian Alexander 00:15:15] I know that this has been something that’s come up during our weekly meetings, discussions on the Core test channel, as well as in contributor day test table discussions. And the test documentation that’s on the website is a little bit fragmented. I believe that the current test handbook was originally written for a type of flow analysis and feedback testing that is not the norm today. So it’s a little bit confusing. The terminology is a little dated, and the most recent updates that have been provided on there relate solely to Gutenberg, which is very important that that also be represented, but, in order to find information about testing and Trac or PHP unit tests, you have to go over to the core handbook. So we could definitely make things improved by consolidating, bringing everything into one area so that if you are interested in testing, you’ll have everything in one place and not be split between that and not have outdated methodologies that are asking you to submit videos that nobody’s going to really look at because we’re not doing the flow tests anymore. So I think that that would be a benefit to future testers. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:16:41] Anne, any thoughts? [Anne McCarthy 00:16:43] Yeah. I’ll also add that I think there are like two things we can do. One is, there’s so much happening in the WordPress project in such a cool way that I think the more we can write targeted tests and talk to people about, like, hey, here’s this new thing coming. This is a high-impact area to test. It’s under active iteration. You’re gonna get a lot of engagement. People are really thinking about this and pulling people into that where you kind of get the momentum of getting the feedback in right when someone needs it. I think we could do that a bit more to make reporting problems easier because it’s kind of like you’re in the thick of it with a lot of people rather than maybe exploring an area where someone hasn’t looked at it in a minute. So that’s the thing that comes to mind is just the more we can take the time. I think this release cycle has been really good with that, where there’s been a call for testing for fluid typography. There’s also been one for using block template parts and classic themes. And there’s a ton of stuff that’s been happening where we can kind of make these both developer and more end user testing experiences easier and better. And Brian has done a great job continuing the tradition of, you know, helping test this latest release cycle. And he’s taken those posts and done an amazing job of helping, having specific testing as well. Tied to this, I think just this has always been a thing but better, easier testing environments for developers and for quickly setting up more WordPress sites to test things for end users. [Brian Alexander 00:17:56] Yeah. Another thing that we have been discussing in Slack in the Core and Core Test channels is the possibility of pre-populating the Trac tickets. With a template based on what it is that you’re reporting. So similar to copying a template for a test report out of the handbook. Instead, you would hit a button to say the type of bug you are submitting, and then it would pre-populate that, and then you could fill in the gaps for that. This already happens over in Gutenberg. There, there are templates, and I find that that is very helpful. And so being able to do that in Trac would be useful. And then for reporting problems on the user side, I thought that it would be interesting to have like you have for any other modern app, a button that says Report Bug in WordPress that could capture some intelligence data for your installation, the page that you’re on and have a simple text box where you could provide a little description and then submit that. [Brian Alexander 00:19:08] Now, these wouldn’t be the types of things that would just go straight into Trac, most likely. However, it would be an opportunity to allow end users to just send something in, and start having it looked at, rather than looking and saying, okay, I found a bug in WordPress. Now, what do I do? And then not reporting. So that would be the worst case is that the bug just doesn’t get reported. So that would be information that is already harvested if you go to your site health screen and your WordPress installation. A lot of that information that would be useful is there. In this type of bug report, we would want to anonymize and strip a lot of that information out. There’s a lot of private stuff you don’t wanna share, but there is that data there that’s available that could potentially help in doing a bug report. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:19:57] Brilliant. All right. Question for everyone in the room: what opportunities are there currently to help with testing? Anne, I know, and you already mentioned a few, we can just bombard everybody with links to the tests if we want. But yeah, what opportunities are currently out there? [Anne McCarthy 00:20:13] Yeah, I’ll mention the Full Site Editing outreach program. I’m very biased, but we’re always looking for new folks. We just crossed, I think, 600 people, which was unbelievable. So even if you’re not necessarily always able to help join the calls for testing, you can always pop into the FSE outreach experiment channel, which we’ll also add a link to. And that’s just a great way when you have time to join because I flag stuff all the time, whether it’s about the outreach program or just in general across the project. Brian does really good weekly round-up testing posts as well. So make.wordpress.org/test is also a great place to get started. And then right now, I think when this comes out, will be a great time to be helping test WordPress 6.1. So check out that post. I kind of wanna just shove everyone in that direction currently cause I think that’s the most high-impact thing to get involved with and one of the great ways to give back to the next version of WordPress to make it really delightful and easy to use. Yeah, I’m just gonna leave it there, even though there are so many ways you can help. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:21:11] WordPress 6.1 coming out on November 1st if you haven’t yet heard about it. Brian, what else have you got out there? [Brian Alexander 00:21:16] In terms of the online stuff, Anne covered that pretty well. I would say if you have a local WordCamp, sign up for their contributor day or if there are any local WordPress meetups. When Covid ended up hitting and lockdowns were rolled out, a lot of this stuff started to really slow down. So I think now is a good time to maybe introduce the idea for, hey, let’s have a local meetup, and for a couple of hours, we’ll just do some testing, and look at some stuff in WordPress. So it might be a good way of getting people re-engaged. It’s a little bit lighter weight if you’re doing testing versus trying to actually provide a patch to fix an issue. So, might be a good way of bringing in some new faces and re-engaging people who we lost over the lockdown. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:22:09] Yeah, and if you all have never done a testing party for WordPress before, and it sounds like it’s maybe a really boring thing, it’s actually not, she said with strong authority and opinions. But also, I have never had a more successful learning experience with the WordPress CMS than when I was trying to figure it out with other people. They see things that you don’t see, they know things you don’t know, and it really covers a lot of the bases for unknown unknowns when you’re trying to learn something. And then also you have all these people that like, we’re really in it with you, and everyone’s really pulling for each other, and it’s actually a bit more fun than it sounds like when you’re just like, a testing party. It turns into just like jointly solving a puzzle together, which I think sounds like a lot of fun. It’s like a party, but for technology, I would feel this way. I am a mad extrovert, and we all know it, but. Now you two know it as well. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:23:08] I have a final, just like a fun question for you both, and if you have an answer, great. And if you don’t have an answer, I would be surprised. So here we go. Last question of the day. If five more volunteers suddenly appeared to help on the Test Team, what would they do? Just, I waved a magic wand. I guess that’s what made it fun. I don’t know why. I was like, fun question and then I’m, like, assigned tasks that, Yeah, I waved a magic wand. That’s what made it fun. [Brian Alexander 00:23:38] Yeah, I would say I would probably point them to FSE outreach program posts because… [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:23:45] Woot woot. [Brian Alexander 00:23:47] …the outreach program does a great job of outlining steps. You’re isolating testing in one particular area. It’s got a lot of tests. There’s examples of the types of feedback that you’re looking for, et cetera. That’s a really good introduction to it, and most FSE testing does not require a local dev environment. Which is probably the biggest hurdle for a new tester coming in. If you do have developers with more experience, then they could start–and they wanted to look into Trac tickets or GitHub issues– then it does take a little bit of setup and you may spend the next few hours configuring your development environment. So instead, I would recommend that you start with something like FSE outreach program posts. [Anne McCarthy 00:24:37] I did not pay Brian to say that. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:24:42] We’re just all partial to it here. That’s all. [Anne McCarthy 00:24:45] No, we really are. Yeah, no, this is, I love this question, and I actually find it really fun cause I think about it a lot. And we’ve talked about some of this stuff too, and it’s something that when I think about five more people suddenly appearing, makes me giddy. Because we have folks, who have helped with like, I think I’ve mentioned like translations and group testing and even responding to questions that come from the channel and like, I just wish if we had five folks full time dedicated to that, I could see way more hallway hangouts where we casually talk about stuff and actually go on a call and talk live. I could see folks, someone dedicated to helping translations and translating even more places. We have an Italian contributor who does it regularly, and a couple of Japanese contributors every once in awhile we get Spanish translation. But I’d love to see more translations to bring more people in, more facilitating group testing, more types of testing, helping me be more creative because sometimes I get a creative wall. But more than anything, if I really think long term about the project and thinking about this outreach program model, which I don’t think I fully appreciated how new it was, Josepha, when you introduced the idea, I think it would be so neat to bring in more folks to actually create new outreach programs. [Anne McCarthy 00:25:52] So maybe there’s an outreach program for theme authors or block theme authors, or maybe there’s an outreach program around collaborative editing. Like what does this look like, and how can we expand this to bring more people in? And I think a lot of that will prove the resiliency and lessons we’ve learned from Covid in the WordPress community. We can’t necessarily always rely on the meetup groups, so how can we meet people where they are? And I think there’s something really interesting and almost serendipitous that the outreach program started literally, I think it was like May 2020, like a couple of months into the pandemic. And I, like, I want to see it in a position of strength where we both have the in-person community alongside this outreach program model that can intertwine work. And I’d love to see the model expand to different types. And right now, maybe part of that is we use the outreach program model, the full site editing outreach program group itself, to experiment more and to keep that level of experimentation. That’s something I feel really strongly about is continuing to find what works and what doesn’t. And so if we had five more people, I could just, I’d probably go wild and have all sorts of cool, cool things and spinoffs, but I’m more introverted than Josepha, so there’s limitations to this. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:26:56] Well, you heard it here first. If you’re one of my 6,000 listeners. I only need five of one of you. Five of the ones of you to come and make Anne’s whole life an exciting joy for the next 12 months. So, I only need five of you and I know that you’re out there. There are 2000 or something, 6,000. I have no idea. I’ve got more than 1000 of you listening, and I know that you wanna come and help Anne cuz she’s a delight. I know you wanna come help Brian cuz he’s a delight. Both of you. This was such a fun conversation. Thank you for joining me today. [Brian Alexander 00:27:29] Thank you, Josepha. Thank you, Anne. [Anne McCarthy 00:27:31] Yeah. Thank you. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:27:33] And there it is a bit of a deep dive on the Test Team and how to get started on it. Like I mentioned, we’ll have a ton of links in the show notes over on wordpress.org/news. And I wanna remind folks that if you have questions or thoughts that you’d like to hear from me about, you can always email us at WPbriefing@wordpress.org. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:27:58] That brings us now to our small list of big things. First and foremost, we are counting down the days to the WordPress 6.1 release. We are within a month of the target release date. So if you have not tested the latest version with your plugins or themes, now is the time. Secondly, we are seeing translated tutorials being submitted on learn.wordpress.org. I’m delighted to see that happening, and I encourage any polyglots out there who feel called to consider translating one into your language and help other people feel empowered to use WordPress. And then the third thing is that the WordPress Speaker Workshop for Women Voices in India just concluded, so to celebrate, we’ve opened registrations for the WordPress Speaker Workshop for Women Voices in Latin America. Unlike the last one, this event takes place in person on October 29th. And so I’ll include a link to registrations for 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 Chomphosey, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. View the full article

WordPress 6.1 Beta 2 is now available for download and testing. This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it is recommended that you test Beta 2 on a test server and site. You can test WordPress 6.1 Beta 2 in three ways: Option 1: Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream). Option 2: Direct download the Beta 2 version (zip). Option 3: Use the following WP-CLI command: wp core update --version=6.1-beta2 The current target for the final release is November 1, 2022, which is about five weeks away. Additional information on the 6.1 release cycle is available. Check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.1-related developer notes in the coming weeks detailing all upcoming changes. Keep WordPress bug-free – help with testing Testing for issues is critical for stabilizing a release throughout its development. Testing is also a great way to contribute. This detailed guide is an excellent start if you have never tested a beta release before. Testing helps ensure that this and future releases of WordPress are as stable and issue-free as possible. Anyone can take part in testing – especially great WordPress community members like you. Want to know more about testing releases like this one? Read about the testing initiatives that happen in Make Core. You can also join a core-test channel on the Making WordPress Slack workspace. If you have run into an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. If you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, you can file one on WordPress Trac. This is also where you can find a list of known bugs. To review features in the Gutenberg releases since WordPress 6.0 (the most recent major release of WordPress), access the What’s New In Gutenberg posts for 14.1, 14.0, 13.9, 13.8, 13.7, 13.6, 13.5, 13.4, 13.3, 13.2, and 13.1. This release contains more than 350 enhancements and 350 bug fixes for the editor, including more than 250 tickets for the WordPress 6.1 core. More fixes are on the way. Some highlights Want to know what’s new in version 6.1? Read the initial Beta 1 announcement for some details, or check out the product walk-through recording. What’s new in Beta 2 Here are some updates since last week’s Beta 1 release: 24 issues addressed in Github A haiku for beta 2 WordPress six-point-one Global collaboration Gutenberg phase two Thank you to the following contributors for collaborating on this post: @dansoschin, @robinwpdeveloper, and @webcommsat View the full article

WordPress 6.1 Beta 1 is now available for download and testing. This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it is recommended that you test Beta 1 on a test server and site. You can test WordPress 6.1 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=6.1-beta1 The current target for the final release is November 1, 2022, which is about six weeks away. Additional information on the 6.1 release cycle is available. Check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.1-related developer notes in the coming weeks detailing all upcoming changes. Keep WordPress bug-free – help with testing Testing for issues is critical for stabilizing a release throughout its development. Testing is also a great way to contribute. If you have never tested a beta release before, this detailed guide is a great start. Testing helps make sure that this and future releases of WordPress are as stable and issue-free as possible. Anyone can do it – especially great WordPress community members like you. Want to know more about testing releases like this one? Read about the testing initiatives that happen in Make Core. You can also join a publicly-accessible channel on the Making WordPress Slack workspace. If you think you have run into an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. If you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, you can file one on WordPress Trac. This is also where you can find a list of known bugs. To review features in the Gutenberg releases since WordPress 6.0 (the most recent major release of WordPress), access the What’s New In Gutenberg posts for 14.1, 14.0, 13.9, 13.8, 13.7, 13.6, 13.5, 13.4, 13.3, 13.2, and 13.1. This release contains more than 350 enhancements and 350 bug fixes for the editor, including more than 250 tickets for the WordPress 6.1 core. Some highlights Want to know what’s new in WordPress version 6.1? Read on for some highlights. Features for end-users Default theme powered by 10 unique style variations (learn more) More design tools in more blocks (learn more) Expanded and refined template experience and template options More intuitive document settings experience Header and footer patterns for all themes Improved quote and list blocks with inner block support More robust placeholders for various blocks New modal interfaces and preferences improvements Automatic navigation block selection with fallbacks and easier menu management Apply locking settings to all inner blocks in one click Improvements to the block theme discovery experience Accessibility updates, with more than 60 resolved tickets Performance updates, with more than 25 resolved tickets For developers Opt into appearance tools to make any theme more powerful New iteration on the style system Add starter patterns to any post type (learn more) Evolution of layout options including a new constrained option and the ability to disable layout options Content lock patterns for more curation options Expanded support for query loop blocks Allow the use of block-based template parts in classic themes (give feedback) Filter theme.json data (learn more) Fluid typography allows for more responsiveness (give feedback) Ability to style elements inside blocks like buttons, headings, or captions in theme.json Please note that all features listed in this post are subject to change before the final release. A Haiku for you Twenty Twenty-Three 10 style variations The new default theme Thank you to the following contributors for collaborating on this post: @dansoschin, @annezazu, @cbringmann, @davidbaumwald, @priethor, and @jeffpaul. View the full article

In the thirty-ninth episode of the WordPress Briefing, hear contributors at WordCamp US share stories about their why for using WordPress and attending WordCamps. 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 and Chloé Bringmann Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Guests Topher DeRosia Jen Miller Courtney Robertson Kathy Drewien Alex Stine Courtney Patubo Kranzke Dustin Hartzler Ricardas Kudirka References WordPress Translation Day September 28, 2022 WooSesh October 11-13, 2022 All Things Open October 30-November 2, 2022 Transcript [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00] Hello, everyone! And welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of some of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project and the community around it, as well as get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go! [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:41] For folks who are new to WordPress in the past couple of years, you may have heard people talk about WordPress events with a sort of passion that really is hard to describe. For me, I know our events are the dark matter of what makes this global, fully distributed, multifaceted project come together so well in the end. But I also know that WordPressers have so many different reasons for coming together. So we took a little wander through WordCamp US to get their take on why they use WordPress and also why they go to WordCamps. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:13] So WordCamp US is back in person for the first time since 2019. What are you most excited about? [Topher 00:01:19] I am Topher. Seeing everyone, the interpersonal relationships, the communication, the expressions on people’s faces that you don’t get via email or Slack or whatever. Just being near people again and enjoying each other’s company. [Jen Miller 00:01:35] My name is Jen Miller. I was most excited to see my friends. It’s been a long time to try to maintain connections via social media and, you know, texting and phone calls. But being here and being a part of the WordPress community has made everything great. [Courtney Robertson 00:01:54] Courtney Robertson. Contributor day, of course, that’s how I got really connected to the WordPress community. And I am hoping we have a great turnout. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:02] How long have you been a contributor to WordPress? [Kathy Drewien 00:02:05] Hi, I’m Kathy Drewien. I started in 2008 by attending my first WordCamp. Two years later, I was part of the organizing team for WordCamp Atlanta. I have been on that team for one role or another. Well, I can’t tell you how many years now. From then, until now. [Alex Stine 00:02:24] My name is Alex Stine. About six years now. [Topher 00:02:28] About 12 years. I started going to WordCamp, then working in the support forums, and just grew from there. [Courtney Robertson 00:02:24] I started checking guests in, at my first WordCamp in 2009, which I see as one avenue of contributing. I joined a team officially in 2014. [Courtney Patubo Kranzke 00:02:47] My name is Courtney Patubo Kranzke. I have been an on-and-off contributor to WordPress since like the mid-2000s, but I’ve been a sponsored contributor since 2016. [Dustin Hartzler 00:03:02] My name is Dustin Hartzler. I started a WordPress podcast in 2010. And I did like 500 episodes in a row without a break and without a week worth of rest. So I consider that my contribution to WordPress. I have a couple of core contributions, like I, I fixed a little bug here, a little bug there in a couple of releases, I think back in the four eras, 4.1 or 4.2 or something. 2010 is when I really got started in giving back, and, like, sharing my knowledge with the WordPress community. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:28] Why is it important for you to attend WordCamps or contribute to the WordPress project? [Ricardas Kudirka 00:03:33] My name is Ricardas Kudirka. Basically, for everyone who’s using WordPress, it’s really important to understand how big the community is that we have here. So the community is an important and crucial part of WordPress. And for it to grow, you need to attend the WordCamps, you need to share knowledge, and you need to meet people. So networking here and while meeting the exciting people who are developing WordPress or who are contributing to it, who are providing the services, who enable people to use WordPress. That’s a crucial point for everyone to attend. [Kathy Drewien 00:04:05] It’s important to attend them because it’s very hard to describe them. We are not like any other thing you have ever done in your life. You have to be here to get it. And then once you get it, you wanna do more of it. It’s magical. It’s magical. There’s no way to get that experience without being here. In terms of contributing, it’s a responsible thing to do. You want to give back instead of get, get, get. In the beginning, we’re all about the get, get, get. And then you go, oh my gosh. I didn’t know. I didn’t know I could do this. I didn’t know I had to write code. I can actually just stand around and talk to people and contribute to the project. [Jen Miller 00:04:50] Well, it’s a community effort, and so if we want it to progress and grow, we need to put our own individual effort into the community. Plus, we make friends, we make connections, and we find people who we can help and who can help us. [Alex Stine 00:05:07] I feel it is important to support the community that got me my start in technology and make sure that people understand that accessibility is very much a requirement. You know, we need to make sure we keep the community inclusive for all. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:21] What is your favorite way to WordPress? [Courtney Patubo Kranzke 00:05:24] I started with WordPress as a personal blogger. So it continues to be my favorite way to use WordPress. But, my use has evolved to using it for work as well as a place to share my photography and food blogging. [Courtney Robertson 00:05:42] My favorite way to WordPress is through the Training team. Most of the things that I write these days are on make.wordpress.org/training and or learn.wordpress.org. I love teaching people about WordPress, helping people at all skill levels advance, and that’s where you’ll find me around the WordPress Training team. [Dustin Hartzler 00:05:59] My favorite way to WordPress is just building cool things. Like I have a website, my wife has a couple of websites, and me just trying to learn things and trying to do them myself. Yesterday, there was a session, a 15-minute long session, and I learned how to customize the options available for different core WordPress blocks. I didn’t realize that you could just make a button and like make a default like here’s the style for the default button. So every button’s exactly the same on the site. Like how cool is that? I like the side of customizing WordPress to make it easier for people who are non-techy like me to use my site, like my wife, and whatnot. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:30] How do you use WordPress in your day-to-day life? [Topher 00:06:32] It’s sort of a universal tool for me. I blog, and I do podcasts. I enjoy drinking whiskey, so I built a rating system for it. And I use it as a notepad, a scratch pad. I use it as my photography backup system. Just kind of as a universal tool for everything [Alex Stine 00:06:53] So I currently am one of the Accessibility team reps. I’m a core contributor, Guttenberg contributor, the occasional meta contributor, and the occasional training team contributor. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:05] Well, if that doesn’t convince you to go to a WordCamp or start your own meetup group, I just don’t know what will. Big thanks to everyone who sat down with us there in San Diego. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:23] And now it’s time for our small list of big things. First thing, WordPress Global Translation Day is coming up next week on September 28th. This is a great opportunity to learn more about the hard work that goes into translating all of this software for folks all around the world. If you want to learn more about how you could contribute to translations, I’ll have a link in the show notes for you. The second thing is that WooSesh is coming up on October 11th through 13th, 2022. This one is not an in-person event. It’s a WPSessions event, but it specifically talks about how to get some eCommerce going on your WordPress site. So if you’ve been thinking about how to get a shop on your site, or just making your current shop a bit more complicated, then this is the event for you. And the third thing on our list today is All Things Open. They are hosting a hybrid event this year from October 31st through November 2nd. This event isn’t specific to WordPress, but it is specific to open source and one of the best resources for learning some OSS basics. So if you’ve been interested in learning more about how this whole open source thing is an idea that will change our generation, then set your sights on that event. I will have a link in the show notes there as well. 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. 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As of December 1, 2022 the WordPress Security Team will no longer provide security updates for WordPress versions 3.7 through 4.0. These versions of WordPress were first released eight or more years ago so the vast majority of WordPress installations run a more recent version of WordPress. The chances this will affect your site, or sites, is very small. If you are unsure if you are running an up-to-date version of WordPress, please log in to your site’s dashboard. Out of date versions of WordPress will display a notice that looks like this: In WordPress versions 3.8 – 4.0, the version you are running is displayed in the bottom of the “At a Glance” section of the dashboard. In WordPress 3.7 this section is titled “Right Now”. The Make WordPress Security blog has further details about the process to end support. View the full article

August has been a busy month, with the redesign of WordPress.org, new localized content on Learn WordPress, and the WordPress 6.0.2 security and maintenance release. But that’s not all! Read on to catch up on the latest WordPress news. WordPress 6.1 walk-through scheduled for September 13, 2022 Save the date! A live interactive walk-through of WordPress 6.1 is coming up on September 13, 2022, at 16:00 UTC. The event will take place via Zoom and include a discussion of new major features, resolved tickets, and potential blockers. Attendance is open to anyone who wants to know more about what’s coming in the next major release. If you are unable to attend, the event will be recorded for on-demand viewing. Learn more about the WordPress 6.1 product walk-through. The WordPress.org Homepage and Download page got a new jazz-inspired look The redesign of the WordPress.org homepage and download page went live on August 15, 2022. The new pages highlight the benefits of using WordPress while making it easy to access resources for getting started. The look and feel build on the jazzy aesthetic that WordPress is known for. In addition, the admin bar and global navigation menu have been updated to simplify and better organize the content across the WordPress.org network. Expect more design updates and iterations as efforts to refresh the website continue. Check out the new WordPress.org homepage and download page. Gutenberg versions 13.9 and 14.0 are here Two new versions of Gutenberg were released last month: Gutenberg 13.9 became available for download on August 17, 2022. This release continues to iterate and polish the user interface (UI), interaction, and engine work for site editing. Gutenberg 14.0 brings a lot of enhancements, including extra block supports in the UI, a revamped List block, and more. It shipped on August 31, 2022. This new post in the “Core Editor Improvement” series focuses on the template creation enhancements coming in WordPress 6.1. You can explore them now with the Gutengerg plugin. New localized content on Learn WordPress Learn WordPress is currently expanding the non-English resources available on the platform! Last month, some members of the Training Team hosted the first free online workshops in Japanese. Following its success, two more sessions will be held on September 7 and 17, 2022. Get the details in the online workshop calendar. In addition, learners have access to: Portuguese tutorials Greek lesson plans Curious about what else is new on Learn WordPress? Check out the learning materials released in August 2022. Enter the educational world of the Training Team and its Learn initiative in the latest episode of WP Briefing. Team updates: WordPress 6.0.2 maintenance release, Twenty Twenty-Three kickoff, and more WordPress 6.0.2 is now available. This security and maintenance release features 12 bug fixes on Core, 5 bug fixes for the Block Editor, and 3 security fixes. The new Twenty-Twenty-Three (TT3) theme, which will ship with the WordPress 6.1 release, is now in development. The theme will bundle a collection of style variations designed by community members. The final curated set is expected to be chosen by September 7, 2022. The August edition of the Meetup Organizer Newsletter shares tips on how to join and support the Meetup Reactivation project. The feedback tool for translate.wordpress.org is now available for all WordPress.org users that have opted into notifications. Learn more in the latest edition of the Polyglots Monthly Newsletter. Code references in DevHub (WordPress Developer Docs) are now easier to use, understand and navigate. Members of the Documentation Team kicked off discussions around the WordPress 6.1 release docs. The bug scrub schedule for WordPress 6.1 was published last month. Anyone can join these sessions to learn, help, or even lead one. To celebrate World Photography Day (August 19), the Photos Team set up a fun photo challenge to contribute to the WordPress Photo Directory. The initiative may be over, but photo contributions are always open! Nominations for the Performance Team Reps are open until September 9, 2022. Why is Gutenberg being developed on GitHub? Is Gutenberg part of core? Get answers to these and other common questions about WordPress core and Gutenberg. Members of the Full Site Editing Outreach program joined a Hallway Hangout session to talk about block themes, from workflow changes to tools they are using and more. The latest edition of People of WordPress features Bud Kraus and his inspiring WordPress journey. The Testing Team is looking for facilitators to expand testing efforts across the project. Feedback & testing requests Are you a meetup organizer or member? Complete the 2021-2022 Annual Meetup Survey (available in 14 languages) to help strengthen this global WordPress program. Members of the Core Team are looking for feedback on a new system for updating HTML attributes. The call is open until September 9, 2022. There’s a new proposal to harmonize the process of merging new APIs from the Gutenberg plugin to the WordPress core. Share your thoughts by September 7, 2022. Version 20.6 of WordPress for Android and iOS is available for testing. Gutenberg 13.8 introduced the first version of fluid typography, a new feature that allows theme authors to define text size that can scale and adapt to changes in screen size. Help shape its future by joining this testing call. Event updates & WordCamps Get ready for WordCamp US! The event is happening on September 9 through 11, 2022, in San Diego, California. Check out the schedule and tune into the WCUS livestream if you are attending virtually. Openverse announced that they will be participating in the WordCamp US Contributor Day remotely. Learn how you can get involved. WordCamp Asia organizers sold out the first batch of standard and micro sponsor tickets in one day. The second batch will be released soon. Planning for WordCamp Europe 2023 is in full swing! You can still apply to be an organizer. Join #WPDiversity with a free, online speaker workshop for Indian women in the WordPress community. The event will take place on September 24-25, 2022. Don’t miss these other upcoming WordCamps: WordCamp Netherlands, The Netherlands on September 15-16, 2022 WordCamp Pontevedra, Spain on September 24-25, 2022 The Call for Speakers for WordCamp Asia is closing soon! Submit your application by September 30, 2022, and help reach WCAsia’s speaker diversity goals. 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: @laurlittle, @mysweetcate, @chaion07, @bsanevans, @priethor, @rmartinezduque, @webcommsat. View the full article

In the thirty-eighth episode of the WordPress Briefing, join Josepha Haden Chomphosy and special guest Hauwa Abashiya for a discussion on the WordPress Training team and LearnWP initiative. 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 Guests Hauwa Abashiya References Hauwa Abashiya HeroPress Essay make.wordpress.org/training make.wordpress.org WordPress 6.0.2 Security and Maintenance Release WordCamp Asia call for speakers (deadline extended to September 30, 2022) WordCamp US Livestream information Transcript [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00] Hello, everyone! And welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of some of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project and the community around it, as well as get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go! [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:42] Helping people who are new to WordPress learn how to make the most out of their CMS used to be one of the most clearly impactful things I ever did as a contributor. Whether it was making sure a brand new installation simply worked, or if the original setup needed to grow along with a solopreneur’s growing business needs, I found great joy in seeing how my local community was learning new tools together. You’ve probably heard me talk about the Learn WP initiative or the training team on this podcast before, but you might still be a little shy to get started with the team. So I have invited one of their team reps today to talk through what the team does. All right. I have with us today Hauwa Abashiya. She is one of the team reps for the training team and also works on the learn.wordpress.org site. Thank you for joining me today, Hauwa. [Hauwa Abashiya 00:01:33] And thank you for having me, Josepha, quite exciting to be on your podcast. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:37] Oh, I, you know, when we were talking about doing this topic, I was like, you know, who would be an excellent person is Hauwa. Like you were such an interesting person to work with when we were working on the 5.6 release. And then also, you just have such a lovely way of explaining the complicated things that we have going on in WordPress and especially on the training side of things. And so you were the first person that came to mind for me. [Hauwa Abashiya 00:02:02] Thank you. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:03] Speaking of all the learn.wordpress.org things, you’ve been contributing to the WordPress project as a team rep for the training team for a bit. But that’s not really where you started. Can you tell me a bit about how you found your way to this team? [Hauwa Abashiya 00:02:15] Well, I started by attending a WordCamp, and that was WordCamp Brighton. And if anyone’s read my article on HeroPress, then they will know that I learned WordPress in one week. Went through beginner sessions of it. And then, I was like, yeah, let me just go turn up and see what it’s like. So turned up, and I met some wonderful people there. One of them being Jenny Wong, who introduced me to the London meetup team. So, I then went there. They were looking for volunteers because they were planning WordCamp London for 2019. And me being me, I was like, yeah, sure. Why not? And got thrown into the deep end, but no, an amazing team. I got to meet some really amazing people. And yeah, just went from there then, you know, because I was doing stuff with WordCamp London, ended up going to WordCamp Europe. And I think there’s probably quite a lot of people who say they fully got into contributing in WordCamp Europe. So I was doing little bits and pieces then on like, marketing team and then met Jesse [Owens] at the training team cause Abha Thakor introduced me to him and just went from there. And then in terms of team rep, I mean, Courtney Robertson sent out SOS, because Learn had just launched, and there were a couple of things that we needed. So that was during the soft launch. And I was like, yeah, sure. I’ll help you. I’m not doing much. And that’s how I ended up doing team rep. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:46] I love that so many initial stories in the WordPress community start with like, well, I went to a WordCamp cause I was like, what in the world is this? And then people were like, we need some help. And I thought to myself, what else am I doing? Like, so many stories start that way. And I just love it. [Hauwa Abashiya 00:04:03] Yeah. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:03] So you mentioned learn.wordpress.org. That is a part of the training team in the WordPress project. Correct? Yeah. So can you give us an idea of the difference between the two? Cause like normally, with a project as big as Learn, you would expect to see like a whole separate team. But these are two intertwined teams using two intertwined concepts. And so can you give us an idea of the difference between them? [Hauwa Abashiya 00:04:29] So I like to see learners, that’s the content. So it’s the content that we have on the platform, and the training team wrangles all the content on Learn. So that would be like your videos, your lesson plans, and online workshops. Yeah, so we wrangle the content that’s on there. We try to bring a lot of different teams together, and that’s one of the things the beauty, I think, of Learn is that there is a lot of cross-team collaboration, which started from the beginning and I think just will continue and get better and better. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:59] Yeah. And the workshops, those are once a week, right? [Hauwa Abashiya 00:05:04] Yeah. So you have online workshops, which used to be called social learning spaces, which used to be called discussion groups. So those run once a week. There’s a number running, and there are some that are launching in Japan. And I think Ben Evans has been quite key in getting quite a lot of those going, and I think Destiny Kanno as well. So, that’s the beauty is you get to see a lot more languages coming up. Those run once a week. And then we obviously have lesson plans, which traditionally that’s what the training team used to always make for Meetup organizers. So if you didn’t have a speaker, you could go and get a lesson plan and run through something, or anybody could pick one up. So they are used mainly by like our Meetup users and then people who are running any boot camps or sessions, or you wanna just take somebody through WordPress and teach them, you can pick one up and run through it. And now we’ve got courses on Learn, which is quite exciting. Got a couple of courses. And I know there’s about three or four courses in development. There is a bit more WordPress development based rather than user based. There’s a fourth piece of content, and that is just the general workshop. So tutorials, I think no tutorials is what we’re calling them now. So there’s like all our online videos. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:17] I tell you terminology in any project, the age and size of WordPress is hard to keep everything straight, but especially when you’ve just changed it you’re like, what do we call it though? [Hauwa Abashiya 00:06:27] Yeah. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:30] So if I understand correctly, because as you mentioned, like you have this post up on HeroPress, you don’t actually come from a training background. Like you aren’t a teacher or corporate trainer or anything, but you have really committed to contributing to the training team and to learn.wordpress.org. So, from your perspective, from like the, I’m not a trainer perspective, what’s the most exciting thing for learn.wordpress.org in the near future? [Hauwa Abashiya 00:06:58] I think it’s the collaboration. It’s the potential that Learn has. So I don’t have a training background, but interestingly enough, I come from Kaduna, Nigeria. And Kaduna cause all the states in Nigeria have a tagline, and, Kaduna is actually the center of learning. So there must be some link there, so yeah. So, I think the beauty of that is you don’t have to have a training background. You can come in and impart your knowledge, and there are people available in the team that can help you impart that knowledge. So if it’s like a lesson plan that you wanna draw up, we’ve got people that can help and assist in that. Or you wanna run an online workshop. There are people that can assist you. And I think that’s also the beauty of WordPress is that we’re all there to help each other. So just seeing that and seeing how, as time has gone on how the team has actually just been growing cause more and more people are coming. And then with that, you’ve got more of like the different languages coming in, and I know we might touch on that later, but it’s, I think to me, that is the beauty that anyone can actually now come in and learn. And Learn as this platform that is accessible to everybody. So it’s not necessarily behind a, like a paywall or anything, which is, there’s nothing wrong with that, but there are people that it’s like, well, okay, you can access something by the community for the community. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:08:32] I think like your last thought there, something that’s by the community for the community. That’s one of the things that I noticed early on about the WordPress community. So I’ve been in the WordPress community for a long time, but when I started doing the administrative back office, things that are invisible and no one wants to know about, because it’s boring. When I started doing that work, one of the things I noticed and that I really treasure the most about the WordPress community is that they want to do things together. They want to look at the problem together. They want to find a solution together. And a lot of times they just want to learn together as well. We see that there is a real, I don’t know, not, it’s not a safety and numbers question. I think it is a long-standing feeling that we can all kind of get further together and that we are better together. And so I like your thought there. You mentioned, though, translations, and I know that this came up at WordCamp Europe. We don’t actually have a lot of translated content on learn.wordpress.org. There’s some technical issues that exist there, but are there a few languages that we already are sort of seeing translated courses for? Translated lessons for? [Hauwa Abashiya 00:09:47] Yeah. So we have a couple in Hindi, I believe. And I know we’ve got some Greek translations that have been coming up, so I know, I think it was last year WordCamp India, during contributor day, we had quite a lot of people translating stuff then, and I suppose the online WordCamps that we’ve been able to rank. Cause I think our first like face to face is this year, so they didn’t do that much translation there, but we’ve seen an increase in people wanting to translate. And I think those are the ones that come to mind. And I know Japanese, I think that was just recently, in the last two weeks, somebody’s translated one or two of the tutorials have been translated. But we’re getting more and more requests coming through. And I know we kind of touched on this in our earlier discussion, but it’s like, how do you manage that? Cause you’re right, we don’t have a way to easily manage polyglots on Learn at the moment or WordPress in general. But I think seeing that, and I keep saying to people, I don’t wanna lose that engagement cause if you’ve got the people engaged, let them just do it. And I don’t normally say this, but let them do it, and we’ll figure out how to sort out the whole pile when it comes in later. Because you kind of don’t want to lose them because I feel like if we say, no, we’ll wait until that comes in, we’ll lose a lot of the engagement. And come that time, people will be like, oh no, I’m not that interested. Or it might be an even more effort to try and bring more people on board. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:11:18] That’s always a struggle, like wanting to be able to get something good out without insisting that it be perfect. Like that whole perfect is the enemy of the good sort of concept. [Hauwa Abashiya 00:11:30] Yeah. Mm-hmm [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:11:30] When we were talking about this way back in June, I was like, I obviously would love to get a perfect solution out immediately, but like, you’re right. In the meantime, do we just be if you don’t speak English, you cannot learn here? Like that’s not fair. [Hauwa Abashiya 00:11:45] No. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:11:46] We want everyone to be able to learn here in their own languages, and yeah. That’s just a living, breathing issue with a global project, I think. [Hauwa Abashiya 00:11:56] Yeah. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:11:57] Now that we left us on like a really juicy topic, just the lightest thing we could find. Is there anything else that you wanna be sure to share with the WordPress Briefing listeners before we head out? [Hauwa Abashiya 00:12:10] Come and join the training team. Like I said, you don’t have to be a trainer. You can come in, and help us take notes. You can come in and edit, and review. If you are a subject matter expert, we also have the faculty program, which was launched. Was it a month ago now? Sorry. Days, months, weeks merge for me these days. But yeah, so that’s like a dedicated volunteer team. And in there, we’ve got content creators, editors, subject matter experts, and just admin stuff. If you wanna help us with the admin stuff. If you’re a GitHub guru, get in touch cause we are trying to automate some of our processes, and we could use the help, but yeah, just come join us. Join one of our meetings, which run on Tuesdays at 7 AM UTC and 4:00 PM UTC. Yes, that’s right. I get my time right. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:13:03] If it’s not right, we’ll put it. We’ll correct it in the show notes. Also, if you are not necessarily familiar with the WordPress project and how to get started with contributions, you can find the training team and a lot of information about them and all the other teams on make.wordpress.org. I will share that in the show notes as well. make.wordpress.org/training is where you can find Hauwa’s team. Hauwa, thank you again for joining me today. [Hauwa Abashiya 00:13:30] No, thank you for having me. It’s just a wonderful treat. I get to listen to you, and now I get to be on it. So, yeah, it’s good. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:13:37] I hope that some of you feel inspired to stop by and see what the team is up to learn something new about WordPress or contribute a little something yourself. And with that, I’ll bring us home with the small list of big things. First thing, there was a freshly pressed minor release last week. You probably didn’t notice it. It probably went quite smoothly in the background and never interrupted you at all. However, if you want to read what was in it, you can head to wordpress.org/news now, or click on the link in the show notes. Second thing, is that coming up at the end of this week, September 9th, 2022, WordCamp US is back and ready to help broaden your WordPress knowledge. If you will be there, I hope it is a wonderful time, but if you won’t be there in person, I’ll include a link to register for the live stream, or you can watch all of those sessions afterward on wp.tv or the WordPress YouTube channel. Third thing on our list of small list of big things is that WordPress Translation Day is coming up. That’s normally at the end of September, it coincides with a global day of appreciation for translators just generally across the world. And so that is coming, it’s normally around the 28th or so. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:14:55] So put that in your calendars. As soon as I have any information, as soon as I have a link to share with you all, I will have that for you as well. And the final thing on my list today is that if you are hoping to speak at WordCamp Asia, 2023, you have 10 more days, September 15th, 2022**, to apply for that. We need topics of all sorts, from security hardening and backend development to entrepreneurial best practices, WordPress out of the box all the way back around to the importance of securing open source freedom. Even when people don’t know they need them. If you’ve got something you’re a bit passionate about, something that you are a passionate expert about especially, we want to see your application. 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. ** Special note: the deadline to apply as a speaker to WordCamp Asia was extended to September 30th, 2022, after the recording of this episode. View the full article

This month, as we approach WordCamp US, we feature Bud Kraus, a WordPress trainer who has made a career in helping others learn about software. He also shares how he has developed an approach to using technology in order to overcome longstanding difficulties with his eyesight. In this People of WordPress series, we share some of the inspiring stories of how WordPress and its global network of contributors can change people’s lives for the better. Bud Kraus with his guitar Teaching WordPress strengthens your understanding Bud has taught web design since 1998, with students from more than 80 countries online or in person. He was determined not to let his sight difficulties stop him from his wish to help others learn website building and maintenance skills. As WordPress evolves and new features release, Bud decided to extend his training services around helping new and existing users improve and practice their skills. He supports others in open source through volunteering to speak at WordPress events, and encourages others to do so too. He also gives time to help produce material for the free-to-access resource Learn WordPress, which is part of the WordPress.org project. As a contributor to the Test and Training teams, Bud is keen for others to try contributing to these areas and help support the project’s future development. One of his current training priorities is to help people with using the block editor and Full Site Editing. He is an advocate for the usability of WordPress today, saying: “I can design all aspects of a website now with a block.” Using WordPress as a traditional developer Bud’s WordPress journey began with a lunch at Grand Central Station in New York in 2009. A friend and former client was promoting the idea of using WordPress, which Bud initially resisted. “I’m a code guy…,” he told his friend at the time. “I will never use anything like that.” However, the friend persisted. Eventually, Bud gave it a try and found a new approach with things called themes and plugins. His first encounter was with WordPress 2.6. Bud signed up with a hosting company and found a theme where he could learn to edit and understand child themes. He said: “Once I saw that you could edit anything and make it yours, I was hooked. The endorphins were freely coursing through my veins.” Bud was hooked. Teaching WordPress strengthens your own understanding of the software There’s an old saying that the best way to learn something new is to turn around and teach someone else. Bud was already an instructor at the Fashion Institute of Technology when he thought, “I could teach WordPress!” And so he did, packing classrooms all through those first years of WordPress as it swept through the design world and further. But Bud had more to discover. He said: “Two big things were about to happen that were really going to change my life. They would show me the way to the WordPress community – not that I even knew what that was.” Sharing lessons learnt with the WordPress community In 2014, one of his students suggested he start going to the New York WordPress Meetup. As he started going to WordCamps in New York City, he realized that WordPress was getting very large. What’s more, it had a community of people with whom he felt at home and could learn alongside. Bud gave a talk for the first time in 2016 at the only WordCamp to this day that has been held at the United Nations. He shared his knowledge of “Lessons Learned: Considerations For Teaching Your Clients WordPress.” Bud Kraus speaks at WordCamps to help people use the software even more effectively From there, Bud went on to speak at other WordCamps in the US. He also volunteered as a speaker wrangler for his home camp in New York City in 2018 and 2019. From speaking to writing about WordPress At some point before the Covid-19 lockdown, Bud found another outlet, this time in writing. Bud heard a magazine was advertising for submissions related to WordPress. His first attempted article did not make the cut. So in his second submission, Bud took the risk of writing about something deeply personal – a topic he really didn’t want to write about at all. He gathered his courage and revealed to the entire web design world that he was legally blind. The article appeared as “Using Low Vision As My Tool To Help Me Teach WordPress”. Since the age of 37, Bud has had macular degeneration in both eyes, which affects his central vision. It is a leading cause of legal blindness in the United States and many other countries. He relies on his peripheral vision and finding ways to compensate. He also tends to see things in a flat dimension and has a difficulty discerning contrast – he is glad there are starting to be improvements in color contrasts in web design! He uses tools like Speech to Text, larger sized cursors and bigger font sizes, and heavily uses zooming back in and out when working with WordPress. He is able to recognize patterns but has to rely on detailed preparation and memorizing materials. In his first magazine article acknowledging this situation, he shared the added difficulties that technology creates for people with visual conditions, and tips that he had found to try and find alternative routes around them. He uses the technique of finding alternatives in his training work to help people learn and understand, realizing that all people have different ways of reading and understanding. His words and subsequent stories have inspired others and enabled more people to highlight accessibility. He describes himself as a ‘stakeholder in ensuring that the WordPress admin is accessible.’ A year after its first publication, the piece became a WordCamp talk, ‘My Way with WordPress.’ The talk was a hit and started many conversations about accessibility and the importance of raising awareness. A few months later, he gave a Gutenberg talk at the first WordCamp Montclair. There was no way he could have done it from a laptop, so instead, he did it from his 27” desktop computer. Bud said: “It was a presentation on Gutenberg plugins. Since I couldn’t do this from a notebook screen (the screen is too small and the keyboard is hard for me to manipulate), it was decided that I would bring in my 27″ desktop machine to a WordCamp. I’m probably the first person to ever have done this. It was good thing I only lived a few miles away.” He added: “I sat behind my computer, did my thing, and every once in a while peered out to make sure people were still there.” Different ways of contributing to WordPress One of the main ways Bud supported the community around the software was through talks at WordCamps and helping others to speak. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he was keen to continue contributing when WordCamps were no longer meeting in person. He turned greater attention to supporting the Learn WordPress resource, a free to use learning platform made by and for the community itself. More training materials on the block editor can be found on Learn WordPress and his WordCamp talks are available on WordPress.tv. Global reach and meaning through WordPress Bud Kraus with Josepha Haden Chomphosy at WordCamp Montclair, NJ 2022 Bud’s training materials and willingness to talk about accessibility have helped so many people find their way with WordPress. He in turn is an advocate for the community around open source. He said: “The software is really good, and the people are even better.” He added: “I get a sense of accomplishment whenever I launch a new or redesigned site. It’s also given me a great feeling to know that many people have learned WordPress around the world from my talks and presentations. This might just be the most gratifying thing of all.” Share the stories Help share these stories of open source contributors and continue to grow the community. Meet more WordPressers in the People of WordPress series. Contributors Thanks to Abha Thakor (@webcommsat), Mary Baum (@marybaum) , Surendra Thakor (@sthakor), @Meher Bala (@meher), @Larissa Murillo (@lmurillom), and Chloe Bringmann (@cbringmann), for work on this feature. Thank you too to Bud Kraus (@trynet) for sharing his experiences. Thank you to Josepha Haden (@chantaboune) and Topher DeRosia (@topher1kenobe) for their support of the People of WordPress series. This People of WordPress feature is inspired by an essay originally published on HeroPress.com, a community initiative created by Topher DeRosia. It highlights people in the WordPress community who have overcome barriers and whose stories might otherwise go unheard. #HeroPress View the full article

WordPress 6.0.2 is now available! This security and maintenance release features 12 bug fixes on Core, 5 bug fixes for the Block Editor, and 3 security fixes. Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately. All versions since WordPress 3.7 have also been updated. WordPress 6.0.2 is a short-cycle release. You can review a summary of the main updates in this release by reading the RC1 announcement. The next major release will be version 6.1 planned for November 1, 2022. If you have sites that support automatic background updates, the update process will begin automatically. You can download WordPress 6.0.2 from WordPress.org, or visit your WordPress Dashboard, click “Updates”, and then click “Update Now”. Security updates included in this release The security team would like to thank the following people for responsibly reporting vulnerabilities, and allowing them to be fixed in this release: FVD for finding a possible SQL injection within the Link API.Khalilov Moe for finding an XSS vulnerability on the Plugins screen.John Blackbourn of the WordPress security team, for finding an output escaping issue within the_meta(). Thank you to these WordPress contributors The WordPress 6.0.2 release was led by @sergeybiryukov and @gziolo. WordPress 6.0.2 would not have been possible without the contributions of more than 50 people. Their asynchronous coordination to deliver several enhancements and fixes into a stable release is a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress community. Alex Concha, Andrei Draganescu, annezazu, Anton Vlasenko, Ari Stathopoulos, Ben Dwyer, Carolina Nymark, Colin Stewart, Darren Coutts, Dilip Bheda, Dion Hulse, eMKey, Fabian Kägy, George Mamadashvili, Greg Ziółkowski, huubl, ironprogrammer, Jb Audras, John Blackbourn, Jonathan Desrosiers, jonmackintosh, Jonny Harris, Kelly Choyce-Dwan, Lena Morita, Linkon Miyan, Lovro Hrust, marybaum, Nick Diego, Nik Tsekouras, Olga Gleckler, Pascal Birchler, paulkevan, Peter Wilson, Sergey Biryukov, Stephen Bernhardt, Teddy Patriarca, Timothy Jacobs, tommusrhodus, Tomoki Shimomura, Tonya Mork, webcommsat AbhaNonStopNewsUK, and zieladam. View the full article

The WordPress experience has significantly evolved in the past few years. In order to highlight the power of WordPress on WordPress.org, the last few weeks have seen a homepage and download page redesign kickoff and shared mockups. Today, these new designs are going live! Like the News pages before them, these refreshed pages are inspired by the jazzy look & feel WordPress is known for. The new homepage brings more attention to the benefits and experience of using WordPress, while also highlighting the community and resources to get started. The new download page greets visitors with a new layout that makes getting started with WordPress even easier by presenting both the download and hosting options right at the top. This redesign was made possible through great collaboration between Design, Marketing, and Meta teams. Thank you to everyone involved throughout this update: @abuzon @adamwood @adeebmalik @alexandreb3 @alipawp @angelasjin @aniash_29 @annezazu @beafialho @bjmcsherry @chanthaboune @colinchadwick @crevilaro @critterverse @dansoschin @dd32 @dufresnesteven @eboxnet @eidolonnight @elmastudio @fernandot @geoffgraham @iandunn @javiarce @joedolson @jpantani @kellychoffman @laurlittle @marybaum @matt @maurodf @melchoyce @mikachan @nikhilgandal @pablohoneyhoney @peakzebra @poliuk @priethor @psmits1567 @renyot @rmartinezduque @ryelle @santanainniss @sereedmedia @sippis @tellyworth @tobifjellner @webdados @willmot Your comments, including some feedback from the 2016 redesign, were taken into consideration with this work. Expect more updates to come as efforts to jazz up WordPress.org continue. View the full article

July 2022 brought a lot of exciting announcements and proposals for the WordPress project, from an updated timeline for the WordPress 6.1 release, to design updates on WordPress.org. Read on to learn more about the latest news from the community. WordPress 6.1 development cycle is now published Mark your calendars! The WordPress 6.1 development cycle has been published along with its release team. The expected release date has been updated to November 1, 2022, to incorporate feedback received on the first proposed schedule. In the meantime, you can upgrade WordPress to version 6.0.1. This maintenance release became available for download on July 12, 2022, and includes several updates since WordPress 6.0 in May 2022. Want to get more involved with WordPress? Join Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy, as she guides you through the five stages of contribution in a recent episode of WP Briefing. A new look for the WordPress Homepage and Download page Following the revamp of WordPress.org/News and the Gutenberg page, further design updates are coming to WordPress.org to create a fresh and modern user experience that reflects the future of WordPress. The WordPress.org home and download pages will be the next pieces to get a refreshed look and feel. The redesign project kicked off on July 8, 2022, and the development work is already underway. Take a look at the design mockups and join the conversation. Gutenberg versions 13.6, 13.7, and 13.8 are here Three new versions of Gutenberg have been released since last month’s edition of The Month in WordPress: Gutenberg 13.6 shipped on July 6, 2022. It includes 26 bug fixes and accessibility enhancements. This release also builds on previous work to expand theme.json and to allow you to create a cohesive design across blocks.Gutenberg 13.7 brings an updated modal design, the ability to apply block locking to inner blocks, and new template types, to name a few highlights. It was released on July 20, 2022.The latest Gutenberg release, version 13.8, went live on August 3, 2022. It comes with ​​fluid typography support among other enhancements, a new feature that will allow you to define text size that can scale and adapt to changes in screen size. Follow the “What’s new in Gutenberg” posts to stay on top of the latest updates. Team updates: WordPress mobile app changes, pattern previews, Five for the Future improvements The Mobile Team announced last week that it will be refocusing the WordPress mobile app on core features. To better serve the needs of all app users and reduce confusion, the Jetpack and WordPress.com features will be moved to a separate app in a gradual process targeted for completion later this year.The Community Team is looking for supporters to help reactivate WordPress meetups around the world.As part of the ongoing efforts to improve the Five for the Future (5ftF) initiative, the Meta Team added automated recognition for a number of non-code contributions. Check out this post to learn more about other proposed improvements to the program.The WordPress.org Theme Directory introduced a new feature that allows visitors to preview patterns bundled in a theme without requiring installation.The Design Team proposed to release a curated set of style variations designed by the community (instead of a new default theme) for WordPress 6.1.Josepha Haden Chomphosy reflected on progress towards the 2022 goals of the WordPress project in this mid-year review.Over the past few months, the Training Team published six tutorials along with a variety of lesson plans and online workshops. See what’s new in this summary post.Curious about how the WordPress 6.0 release process went? Read this WordPress 6.0 retrospective recap for insights.The Themes Team shared a follow-up post to address questions about the use of locally-hosted Google fonts in themes.There is an open call for a new Accessibility Team Representative.The Performance Team has a new dedicated Make blog. Follow updates on their work and proposals at make.wordpress.org/performance.The July 2022 edition of the Polyglots Monthly Newsletter is live.The latest edition of People of WordPress highlights Carla Doria, a customer support specialist from South America.July’s Meetup Organizer Newsletter features several tips and tools for engaging and growing your community. WP Briefing celebrated World Wide Web Day 2022 with a special episode! Tune in to hear contributors from the community reflect on how WordPress impacts their world. Feedback & testing requests Josepha Haden Chomphosy suggested giving Full Site Editing (FSE) a more user-friendly name. Share your thoughts in this post.The WordPress Notifications Feature project is ready to begin collecting feedback. Efforts to help test the feature plugin and comments are welcome.The Training Team kicked off a discussion to gather feedback on how WordPress certifications should be approached.The Performance Team shared a few proposals to integrate new features targeting the WordPress 6.1 release. You can help by testing, reporting bugs, or contributing fixes and ideas:Proposal: Persistent Object Cache and Full Page Cache Site Health ChecksProposal: Add a dominant color background to imagesVersion 20.4 of WordPress for Android and iOS is available for testing. The Community Team is calling on all meetup members and organizers to complete the 2021-2022 Annual Meetup Survey. Your feedback will help strengthen the WordPress meetup program for years to come. Please respond and help spread the word. WordCamp updates WordCamp US is only five weeks away! The organizing team announced the Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship recipients for this year. Congratulations to Margherita Pelonara, Simona Simionato, and Pooja Derashri!20 organizations have stepped forward to support underrepresented speakers from all over the world to get to WordCamp US 2022. Visit the Underrepresented Speaker Support page to donate to the fund or ask for support if you are part of an underrepresented group.WordCamp Asia 2023 opened a new Call for Speakers and Media Partners. The deadline for speaker applications is September 15, 2022. The organizing team also shared more details on the ticket release timeline.Don’t miss these upcoming WordCamps: WordCamp Jinja, Uganda on September 2-3, 2022 WordCamp Kathmandu, Nepal on September 3-4, 2022 WordCamp US in San Diego, California on September 9-11, 2022 WordCamp Netherlands, The Netherlands on September 15-16, 2022 WordCamp Pontevedra, Spain on September 24-25, 2022 Join #WPDiversity with a free, online speaker workshop for Indian women in the WordPress community. The event will take place on September 24-25, 2022. Sign up now! Have a story that we should include in the next issue of The Month in WordPress? Let us know by filling out this form. The following folks contributed to this edition of The Month in WordPress: @chaion07, @laurlittle, @mysweetcate, @sereedmedia, @dansoschin, @rmartinezduque. View the full article

In this series, we share some of the inspiring stories of how WordPress and its global network of contributors can change people’s lives for the better. This month we feature Carla Doria, from South America, a customer support specialist on how WordPress opened up a new world for her, and her desire to help her local community discover and enjoy it too. Carla Doria For Carla, working with WordPress is a vital part of her life. It gave her a career and a community, in which she she would organize the first WordCamp in her city, Cochabamba, and the first in Bolivia. Carla studied industrial engineering and has a master’s degree in environmental studies. Her first experience with WordPress was when she decided to start a small business designing and selling cushions and bedclothes. While Carla sat in the small store she had rented, hoping that people stopping at the shop windows would step in to buy something, she decided she needed to create a website. First Steps with WordPress Carla had no budget to hire somebody, but she felt confident she could learn things on her own. “Learning to use WordPress requires no code skills or a technical background. It needs an adventurous and playful spirit.” Carla Doria She had always been studious, and decided she would figure out how to build a website herself. Carla ended up building a simple blog with WordPress. At the time, she didn’t even have a budget to buy a custom domain, so she used a free subdomain. “Learning to use WordPress is easy. It requires no code skills or a technical background at all. It only needs an adventurous and playful spirit,” said Carla There were no profits, and any income mainly went to pay the store’s rent. At the time, her previous company contacted her for a job opening that matched her profile. Carla needed that income and decided to closed the store and forget about being an entrepreneur. Back in employee mode, Carla started her new job as a technical writer for a software development company. Since Carla had completed her master’s degree in the UK, she was proficient in English. Her close affinity for computers and technology made it easy for her to translate complex software jargon into simple tutorial steps. As Carla got more interested in technical writing and started to improve her writing skills. This reconnected her with her previous enthusiasm for writing, and she decided to channel that interest into a blog. Diving deep Creating her blog helped her become more familiar with WordPress and building websites. In 2015, Carla blogged about writing, her thoughts, book reviews, and everything that came to mind. Through looking for answers to specific issues using her WordPress blog, Carla found the support forums a useful place to go. Soon she realized that she could also help answer other people’s questions. Carla began checking the forums as a hobby. She liked that she was able to help people and learn more while doing so. Instead of surfing social media during her work breaks, Carla focused on checking the WordPress forums. Through this she learnt about a support job in one of the global firms. She felt the job was made for her and was excited to support people in building their websites with WordPress. The role offered the possibility to work remotely and travel while still working. After three years as a technical writer, her career felt stuck. She was certain she did not want to return to any job related to industrial engineering. Carla did not get through the selection process the first time. But after nearly 18 months between three applications and learning HTML and CSS, Carla finally secured a support job in 2016. With this job, WordPress became her main source of income. Leading a local WordPress community On the job, Carla learned about the WordPress communities around the world and WordCamps. But when somebody asked about the WordPress community where Carla lived, she didn’t know what to say. Was there a community? She discovered no local group existed, so she researched what was needed to setup a meetup. Carla discussed the idea with others, but hesitated as she thought it would require an expert WordPress developer to organize. But after trying to gauge interest, Carla realized that the only way to find community members was to start a community. In 2017, the WordPress community in Cochabamba was born. The group has had ups and downs, probably similar to any other community. Although Cochabamba is not a big city, they had issues finding a location that was free and available to anyone who wanted to join. People came with different levels of knowledge, from people with vast experience with WordPress to people with no experience but who wanted to learn. The community grew during the pandemic, as meetups went online and people from other cities in Bolivia were able to attend. After restrictions were lifted, there was a lot of excitement amongst members to meet each other in person. Giving back through speaking Carla reading a book under a tree The community also helped Carla to develop a new skill in public speaking. She applied to be a speaker at WordCamp Mexico 2019 and 2020, WordCamp Guayaquil 2019, and WordCamp Colombia in 2020. Her confidence grew while she enjoyed connecting with other communities and meeting people who were on similar pathways. Not all of them were developers, as she had presumed. Many, like her, started out as bloggers. Finally, after three years, Carla applied to organize her first WordCamp in 2021 in Cochabamba. She had never imagined organizing any WordCamp – talking to sponsors, contacting companies, leading a group of people with different talents and backgrounds. Carla felt she had learned so much from the experience. Thanks to WordPress, Carla found a job she enjoyed, was able to work remotely, and help build something in her community to help people learn skills and find career opportunities. Carla feels grateful for all she has been able to do thanks to WordPress. She said: “WordPress has led me to find good jobs. It also has allowed me to contribute to a community of friends that love learning about WordPress.” 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 Alison Rothwell (@wpfiddlybits), Abha Thakor (@webcommsat), Larissa Murillo (@lmurillom), Meher Bala (@meher), Chloe Bringmann (@cbringmann), and Surendra Thakor (@sthakor) for work on this feature, and to all the contributors who helped with the series recently. Thank you too to Carla Doria (@carlisdm) for sharing her experiences. Thank you to Josepha Haden (@chantaboune) and Topher DeRosia (@topher1kenobe) for their support of the People of WordPress series. This People of WordPress feature is inspired by an essay originally published on HeroPress.com, a community initiative created by Topher DeRosia. It highlights people in the WordPress community who have overcome barriers and whose stories might otherwise go unheard. #HeroPress View the full article