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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the twenty-eighth episode of the WordPress Briefing, Executive Director, Josepha Haden Chomphosy discusses returning to in-person WordPress events. Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Credits Editor: Dustin HartzlerLogo: Beatriz FialhoProduction: Chloé Bringmann & Santana Inniss Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeodSpecial thanks to: Angela Jin References Event Safety ChecklistWordCamp Asia Call for OrganizersOpen Discussion: Returning to In-Person EventsOpen Discussion: Returning to Regional Events 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] I was checking the list of upcoming events recently as part of just my regular work and saw that the call for organizers for WordCamp Asia is open. On the one hand, it made my heart skip a beat with excitement. That event is six years or so in the making. And on the other hand, it reminded me of February 10th, 2020, the day that Matt told me that we had to proactively cancel WordCamp Asia. That week was truly heartbreaking for me as well as I think the entire organizing team. But it also, fortunately, was prescient. As I think back over the two years since then, I’m grateful for our community wranglers and deputies who have consistently hosted important discussions about how to return to in-person events safely. And with two of our major flagship events returning this year, I’m here to summarize, sort of, what the rules and guidelines are. But certainly I hope that you come away from this with an idea of what’s being done to keep everyone safe as we are best able. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:01:44] Firstly, before we dig into specifics, I want to be clear upfront that the guidelines for COVID-aware events are mandatory, unless otherwise stated. For folks who’ve been attending WordPress events, or participating in the community for a long time, this is a change. As a program, we have always done our best to be flexible with guidelines so that we can prioritize local knowledge. But our responsibility is to the long-term success of this community and this program. So moving forward with in-person events that risk the health of our community members poses risks to the program itself. So with that in mind, let’s learn what we’re going to see at events for the rest of the. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:02:28] For any WordPress event that is gathering more than 50 people, the new mandatory guidelines are: Number one, follow local laws and guidelines. If your area has suggested guidelines on top of the mandatory ones, follow those. Second, is if you are in a location where laws or guidelines require or permit venues to limit admission based on a person’s vaccination status and masking, then events can only happen in venues that are willing to provide staff to check for vaccination status at the door. And then also to remind participants to wear masks during the event. And the third thing is if your area or venue legally cannot check vaccination status, your area must pass the in-person checklist, which I will link in the show notes below. But that in-person checklist has to be passed at the time of the application and then again at the time of the event. And in addition to that, the venue must be willing to provide staff who will remind participants to wear masks and check for temperature during the event. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:03:33] Organizers in these areas must be prepared to move online or cancel if the region fails the safety checklist, which again, will be linked in the show notes below. So those are the three things and they are pretty dense, but also I think allow for a fair amount of flexibility. There is also a tidy flow chart linked in the sidebar of make.wordpress.org/community that will help you to decide what sort of event your own area can support right now. So those are the mandatory guidelines for WordPress events in general right now, but you probably also have a few specific questions. So I’ve got the three most common questions ready to go with answers from Angela Jin who helped me to kind of pull together the information for this particular podcast props to Angela. Thank you. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:04:25] So, first question, anything specific to know about WordCamp Europe? WordCamp Europe will be following these guidelines as well. All attendees and participants are expected to wear a mask while they are at the event and catering will be offered outside so people can remove their masks to eat. The second common question is how will these guidelines change as countries and local governments begin deescalating restrictions and safety measures? We should consider these guidelines to be subject to evolution based on what the team is hearing and seeing from the community. But right now we intend to keep these stricter guidelines in place until we see how the loosened rules play out elsewhere. And then a third frequent question is what’s going to happen to all these online events? The community team will continue to support online events right now. So if your community doesn’t feel ready to have an in-person event, but still wants to kind of get everyone together that is still allowed, and still encouraged. And finally the community team will continue to keep a close eye on situations around the world. If it becomes safe to do so, and your community is interested, they of course will be happy to chat with you about a WordCamp. There is an application that I will share the link to in the show notes below as well. In case that is something that your community is wanting to look into. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:05:54] Oh, and I have a little postscript also. I know I was like finally, and now I’m doing a finally, finally. That’s what postscripts are about. P.S. If you have not stopped by the community team’s site or any of their meetings, they’ve been doing a really great job of keeping things moving through two years of unpredictable changes. If you are a community team member, I want to offer you a huge thanks. Thank you so much for helping us to stay aware and able to move forward. If you are an organizer, pat yourself on the back. I want to thank you for pivoting with us, moving through online events, even though they are not at all the same as in-person events and certainly they don’t share the reasons that we get people together sometimes. And finally, if you are an end to end attendee, if you go to WordPress meetups or you go to any sort of WordPress online events or WordCamps, anything like that, thank your local organizer. They have been doing this probably for a while, and I’m sure that they are looking forward to getting back to in-person events themselves, but even, so they have been putting in a lot of volunteer hours to help make sure that we all know how to use WordPress. And so find them, thank them, and I’m sure that they’ll appreciate it. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:07:20] And with that, it is time for our small list of big things. Number one, WordCamp Asia has a call for organizers open! This event will be in 2023. And I think that we all simply cannot wait. So I’ll link the call for organizers in the show notes. And then of course you can follow that whole site to stay up to date on what’s happening there. The second thing is, while we’re on the topic of events, there’s also an open discussion about how we can best support organizers who are getting back to in-person events. We’d like thoughts from both organizers and attendees. So feel free to drop by and leave a note in the comments section. And while you’re over there, the third thing in my small list of big things, there’s also an open discussion about regional events. So go over there, get all your thoughts about WordPress events together. Get them all sorted out in one go. Just leave comments, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. All over the place. And that my friends is your smallest of big things. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host Josepha Haden Chomphosy. And I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:08:54] So my most embarrassing WordCamp story actually has to do with where I was supposed to be versus where people thought I was supposed to be. This was early on in my time with WordPress, with Automattic. And I had convinced someone, I had convinced a colleague and friend of mine to go to my home WordCamp, WordCamp Fayetteville over there in Arkansas. And then I didn’t go. But I knew I wasn’t going, I knew I was going to WordCamp Boston, but he did not know that I was not going to go. And so he arrived at WordCamp Fayetteville, WordCamp Northwest Arkansas. I can’t remember what it was called at the time. And immediately was confused about where I was and why I wasn’t there. And so there was this excellent moment of mass confusion among states where the folks at WordCamp Fayetteville started tweeting about how I had convinced this contributor to go to that event and then didn’t show up. And then the folks at WordCamp Boston, we’re looking at all of those tweets, because if you are a WordCamp organizer, you are always looking at the tweets from all the other WordCamps happening in your weekend. And people got very confused about why I was in Boston while they were thinking that I was in Fayetteville, even though the tweets were talking about how, like, I wasn’t in Fayetteville. They probably didn’t say that it was probably more along the lines of like, “Hey, let’s share a photo with Josepha” to, like, make fun of the fact that I wasn’t there. And so I caused mass confusion in multiple states. That’s probably my most embarrassing WordCamp story. You’re welcome. Bye! View the full article

In this series, we share some of the inspiring stories of how WordPress and its global network of contributors can change people’s lives for the better. This month we feature a website developer and project manager from Argentina, who found in the software a way to live his life in the way he dreamed. WordPress offers something to everyone. For Juan Aldasoro, a developer and project manager for a large distributed company, it provides an opportunity to combine his different interests and skills to live the type of life he wanted. “I like visual, creative and technical things. The joy of WordPress is that you can do all of these things, you don’t have to limit yourself to any one aspect . You can also do this from almost anywhere in the world!” From working in products since 2012, Juan sees WordPress as a major part of his skillset and toolbox. He said: “It gives you an opportunity to be part of building a product which could potentially be used by thousands of people and more on your site. It encourages you to think about different languages and how you can make it accessible. It allows you to work on different platforms. Working in WordPress gives you this broad approach. Working this way on products ended up pushing me into learning about all these different things. Only in open source can you really do this and use your creative side to find solutions.” Learning about being part of a community Born in a mid-sized city in Argentina, Juan was raised in a family in which music, arts and sports were always an essential part of everyday life. “These activities encourage human beings to be creative and participative, and at the same time they are highly formative when it comes to mould people in order to become part of a group, a team, a community.” The youngest of five siblings, Juan became highly motivated, trying to follow the steps of his siblings. Having a computer at home, he started to make connections that laid the foundation for his career as a developer. His interest in computers grew through that access to a machine running MS-DOS – the one with the black screen command line! Mastering this became a challenge to him and something to share with others. Through doing this, he found a way to more social interaction and new friendships. Without being conscious of it, my friends and I were sharing pieces of code. He said: “I started learning some super easy stuff that made me feel like Houdini at that time. I could save a game play, something intangible, on a floppy disk and carry that piece of plastic and magnetic material back home. I was saving the play or game in a square object and then loading that back at home. I now realize, those were my first interactions with computer commands. Without being conscious of it, my friends and I were sharing pieces of code in a unique way.” This interest grew further through computer magazines and experimenting as “there was always something new to learn.” Although sport became a big part of Juan’s life in his teens, he kept up his computer learning. Taking a new direction, he found online tutorials enabling him to learn how to play the guitar. This led to setting up a punk rock band with his friends. “Education has always been important in my family, and thanks to my parent’s efforts, I attended a school where I learned to express myself in another language.” The school had hired a satellite internet connection in the mid-nineties and had HTML on the computer studies program. These facilities were not that common in Argentina or many other countries either at that time. Also, his parents had the foresight to secure a rare internet connection at the house in 1997. Juan recalled: “Browsing around the Internet opened a new universe in my mind. This new universe was extremely fantastic but also extremely expensive. I needed to make the most of every second online.” “It was a whole new world and one thing led to the other. I started learning a bit of everything, editing graphics, scripting and so on. I still remember my first website in the fantastic sunset strip, Geocities.” Trying to go pro After high school, Juan moved to the city along with his brother and began to study IT at University. When he was asked by a friend to work at a software company, he decided to try that whilst continuing his studies. Through his job he had the chance to explore web-related projects, and with a friend from university, they started managing teams and projects across Latin America and Spain. Juan describes this experience as one of the most fulfilling in his life. He was able to travel abroad for work, experience remote working, manage teams, present projects and speak formally in front of senior people. As the company grew at a fast pace, they learned how to set up and run a large organization. Eventually, he decided to drop out of his university program and focus on the opportunity of learning first hand. One of the key early learning from working internationally was that business and web development could be just as fast-moving and successful in Argentina as in other places. “I realized there’s no such thing as a secret sauce for success. Projects are backed by people’s talent and time, and you can find that in any latitude.” By his mid-20s, Juan decided he wanted to try building something from scratch. He created a social network for photo sharing in Latin America, which was used by more than 30,000 people across Latin America and Spain in its time. Through this, he discovered that other people had a blog and he did not want to be left behind. The discovery of WordPress was to change the focus of his life. Hello to WordPress Spending some time traveling around Europe, Juan found himself ‘surrounded by uncertainty’ and worried about what the future could bring. “I had some clues, but under uncertainty, the more you ask the less you answer. I started thinking about embracing the following philosophy: I didn’t want to be part of a large company, I didn’t want to continue studying and I wanted to travel as much as I could.” He did not realize at that time how this vision for his life was to mirror what he would find in WordPress. He started using WordPress for a few sites in 2005. By 2007 he was using it for almost everything. He was struck by the magnitude and range of what the software could do, from a simple tool used to create a blog in the blink of an eye through to complex projects. His first problem-solving project was simple and saved data received through a contact form plugin. “To complete this project I discovered the Codex and I learned how easy and intuitive it is to create a plugin. I had fallen in love with WordPress.” I was truly amazed by how I could learn from others. As he explored the options with the software, Juan was unsure of how intellectual property worked and wanted to be respectful of other people’s work. “I didn’t understand open source yet, and I wasn’t sure if I was stealing from others. That was my first interaction with GPL and open source. I was truly amazed by how I could learn from others and improve things created by others or by myself.” He realized: “WordPress was the way to go if I wanted to pursue a dream of traveling, skipping winter, and working at the same time; what we now call a digital nomad. I already knew how to work remotely, I could work for companies located anywhere, as long as they could communicate in English or Spanish.” Juan started his own web agency, where he provided services to small and medium-sized companies abroad in the USA, UK, and Australia. He built his reputation and developed strong relationships in WordPress. “The experience couldn’t be better. I was learning, having fun, making a living out of it, and at the same time exploring the world.” In mid-2012, he discovered the full power of the WordPress community firsthand. In his spare time he started developing themes and from all he heard, wanted to attend a major event with lots of others in WordPress, a WordCamp. He took the plunge and booked for WordCamp in Edinburgh, in the UK. He said: “I got to meet many super talented people, and the atmosphere of the event was awesome. A place where competitors were also colleagues. Seeing the humility of somebody like Mike Little, the co-founder of WordPress, was amazing.” He added: “While there, unconsciously, I started dreaming of holding something like that in Argentina – the joy of hosting the WordPress community in my home country.” Back home, while browsing the Codex, he happened to see that WordPress was turning 10. A lot of meetups were going to be organized worldwide to celebrate the birthday. But there was nothing organized in Argentina. This was a catalyst for starting a local meetup. Together with a colleague, he organized an Argentinian 10th birthday meetup. More than 20 people showed up. “There was a common denominator. We all loved WordPress, it was part of our day-to-day life. We wanted to share experiences, make new friends and continue growing from what we could learn from others. That day we were a group of people with shared interests. That’s the simplest way to define a community, isn’t it?” This early meetup led to the formation of what is now called WordPress Argentina. In his desire to skip winters and do more traveling, his next adventure was to take him to visit family working in the US and attend one of the biggest WordCamps in the world in San Francisco. His interest kept growing and he traveled across Europe to be part of the first edition of WordCamp Europe in the Netherlands in 2013. He said: “There’s almost nothing I could write to fully express what you experience in such events. They are the main WordPress events worldwide. The best part: I made a lot of good friends from many different places. I’m glad I have more excuses to continue traveling.” Once again in Argentina, our organization started growing thanks to the energy of the whole group, we started hosting formal meetups. In May 2015, we crowned all these efforts with a new WordCamp in Buenos Aires, Argentina. “Organizing such an event in my home country with many of the contributors I had met from the very first meetup was an experience I will always keep with me.” Juan believes one of his biggest contributions to open source was as part of being able to expand the community in Argentina and to share this with other Latin American and Spanish speaking countries. He also contributes as a volunteer translator in the Polyglots Team, to the Make WordPress Support team, and contributes to code blocks and Gutenberg. “I am really excited about seeing the future of Gutenberg as it is the future of WordPress.” Throughout his time contributing, Juan believes in helping to set the foundations and encouraging others to give their time and talents. He is keen to share that contributing does not have to be the same all the time and that you can have breaks and focus on one area in a particular period too. He gives the example of how in his spare time he watches Trac, where tickets about the software are logged, and looks where he might be able to help or think of solutions. He said: “Anytime I find I can contribute to or make improvements in code-related areas, I will do as it is important to keep giving to the community. I enjoy crawling over meta, trac, GitHub and the different places that are requesting help. There is always somewhere you can help. At the moment, my focus is code and translations. I always try to save time to help these two areas. It is like you give and you get, you learn things. You meet amazing people and opportunities arrive.” Finding your path in WordPress “Life is about experiences, it is about the people you surround yourself with and trying to do what you love. What you can find in an open source project like WordPress is an environment full of people who work with a tool they love. An environment that is ready to help and to give advice. Follow what makes you happy, try to be surrounded by people who make you better, try to empower others, try to give back. Try. Make your own path.” 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 to this feature Thank you to Juan Aldasoro (@juanfra) for sharing his story. Interviews and feature by Abha Thakor (@webcommsat) and Surendra Thakor (@sthakor). Reviewed by Mary Baum (@marybaum), Chloe Bringmann (@cbringmann), Meher Bala (@meher), Anjana Vasan (@anjanavasan) and Yvette Sonneveld (@yvettesonneveld). Thanks to Josepha Haden Chomphosy (@chanthaboune) and Topher DeRosia (@topher1kenobe) and others for their support of this initiative. 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

It’s been less than a year since the WordPress Pattern Directory was launched, and we already have more exciting news to share. The Pattern Creator is live! You can now build, edit, and submit your best block patterns to the Pattern Directory—submissions are open to all with a WordPress.org user account! Pattern Directory — List of patterns, and a single pattern detail. The WordPress Pattern Directory includes attractive, handy patterns created by designers that can make your experience building a stunning site much easier. Patterns can save you a significant amount of time and also give you greater freedom when you’re building your site. With patterns, you can make or replicate complex layouts with just a few clicks, and using them is as simple as copy and paste. Create Your Own Bold, Beautiful Patterns Built Entirely with Blocks As the name implies, the Pattern Creator allows anyone, from designers to content creators, to make custom patterns: a collection of blocks arranged in any way, for any purpose intended by the creator. Like most things in WordPress, these are available for public use once it’s submitted to the WordPress Pattern Directory. Have a look at these guidelines to learn more about what makes a pattern suitable for listing in the directory. So what are you waiting for? Check out all the patterns already available or better yet, make your own! Learn more about creating patterns View the full article

Who is WordPress actually made for? Join our host, WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy, as she explores this controversial question and three things that can help find the answer. Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Hosts: Josepha Haden Chomphosy Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Beatriz Fialho Production: Santana Inniss References WordCamp Europe call for volunteersWordPress Photo Directory teamUNICEFMédecins Sans Frontieres International Committee of the Red Cross International Rescue CommitteeUN Refugee Agency World Central KitchenTech For Ukraine#WP4Ukraine Transcript Read more Episode 27 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! Today, we’re talking about who WordPress is built for. I was talking to a group of contributors last week and we encountered some questions around just who WordPress is built for. And it’s a question that you’ll find any time that you’re working on user testing or on triaging tickets, and especially when that comes up when you look at the big picture, roadmap sorts of things. The easiest answer for this question is, of course, everyone because WordPress’ mission is to democratize publishing and that should be available to everyone. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:01:11] However, everyone is a really big target and certainly doesn’t help get your mind around the people that you’re wanting to actually build it for, the people that you actually want to be able to use your product, your software on a day-to-day basis. So let’s take a look at the one question that can help us figure out who it’s built for today and how we get it to being something that’s built forever. Firstly, there’s a basic premise of open source that informs this thought. And that premise is that we are citizens of a community of contributors therefore the decisions are made by the people who show up. In general, I believe that to be true, though, I also believe that some basic qualifications are needed. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:01:50] So with that in mind, the one question that can help us figure out who a software is built for is this: how do your active contributors see themselves? I would bet that most contributors to open source software projects, like WordPress, are developers of some sort, it is sort of written right into the definition of the project. If you work on software, then you need developers. And what I love about WordPress, in particular, is that we do work to include contributors who are not developers. Yet it still remains true that there is a fairly high level of technical knowledge required to actively contribute. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:2:25] Which kind of brings us to the second half of the original question of how can we make sure that WordPress can be something that’s built for everyone? The answer to this one is easy to say, hard to do, and that is to make sure to include them as co-creators in the development process. We’ve talked about co-creators in open source before. It’s this idea that people who use the software every day are likely to know the biggest pain points. So if you want your software to be used by people who don’t know HTML, talk to a bunch of people who don’t know HTML about how it is to use your software. If you want your software to be mostly used by enterprise agencies, talk to enterprise agencies, but also ask them what their clients hate, because everyone has more than one stakeholder. And I know that I said this already, but it bears repeating that, obviously, this is all very easy to say and hard to do. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:3:20] So what is my best guess for the how-to-do part for WordPress? There are three things. The first is testing. This not only helps bring in new contributors and helps train future contributors, which I’ve talked about on the podcast before. But testing also gives us a higher chance of actionable feedback from folks who don’t necessarily spend time directly in the WordPress project. Frequently the feedback that we do get that is just kind of undirected and ad hoc is exactly that– it is undirected and ad hoc and is then hard to follow up on and make sure that we understand what was wrong and how we can help fix it. And so testing is important for that. And testing it turns out is important for a bunch of things. When you’re working in open source. The next thing is support. So checking in with support teams at hosts, as well as the hardworking support teams in the project. And that can really help us to get early indications of what difficulties exist now. They have routinely seen problems and issues that are raised in support forums, and from their everyday users that they are providing support to. That probably could be fixed in WordPress if we had a good understanding of just what was not going right, how many people really needed it to go better, and what our targets were to fix that particular problem. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:4:45] And the third thing is communication. I know that I’ve gone on record in many places as saying that most of our problems at the end of the day are communication problems. And I’m going on record about it again here in this podcast, establishing better communication patterns with users is key. That can be a multi-year project in itself. And even after that, it’s going to be an ongoing journey. But it is one of the many things that WordCamps and other WordPress events have given to us over the years, an opportunity to really hear from and see the struggles that people who are not building with WordPress every day, or literally building WordPress every day are actually having. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:5:34] So now that you’ve heard my small list of way too big things, that brings us to our regular small list of big things. The first thing is that WordCamp Europe is still looking for volunteers. If you’ve never done that before, I think it’s quite fun. You get to meet a lot of people and the team of organizers is super fun, but I’ll leave a link for you in the show notes. We also have a new code-free way to contribute through the photo directory. That team is just getting started and still is working toward building out its programs. So now’s a good time to drop in and just kind of see what they are up to. And finally, a reminder that we do have contributors who are affected by the war in Ukraine right now. I will reshare the list of humanitarian organizations in case you missed them a couple of weeks ago as well. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:6:21] And that my friends is your small list of big things. Thank you for tuning in today for this WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. View the full article

WordPress 5.9.2 is now available! This security and maintenance release features 1 bug fix in addition to 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 5.9.2 is a security and maintenance release. The next major release will be version 6.0. You can download WordPress 5.9.2 from WordPress.org, or visit your Dashboard → Updates and click “Update Now”. If you have sites that support automatic background updates, they’ve already started the update process. For more information, browse the full list of changes on Trac, or check out the version 5.9.2 HelpHub documentation page. Thanks and props! The 5.9.2 release was led by Jb Audras, with the help of Jorge Costa on package updates, Sergey Biryukov on mission control, and David Baumwald on backport commits. In addition to the release squad members mentioned above, thank you to everyone who helped make WordPress 5.9.2 happen: Alan Jacob Mathew, Alex Concha, André, Anton Vlasenko, David Baumwald, ehtis, Jb Audras, Jorge Costa, Peter Wilson, Sergey Biryukov, Tonya Mork, and ironprogrammer. Props @davidbaumwald and @sergeybiryukov for peer review. View the full article

Matt Mullenweg speaks to WordPress contributors worldwide on this special edition of the WP Briefing podcast with Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Join us to hear Matt’s thoughts on Ukraine Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Credits Hosts: Josepha Haden Chomphosy and Matt MullenwegEditor: Dustin HartzlerLogo: Beatriz FialhoProduction: Chloé Bringmann & Santana Inniss How You Can Help UNICEF Mécecins Sans Frontieres International Committee of the Red Cross International Rescue Committee UN Refugee Agency World Central Kitchen Tech For Ukraine #WP4Ukraine Transcript Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00 Hello, everyone, and welcome to a special edition of the WordPress Briefing. I have Matt here with me today because we want to acknowledge that we are once again at the start of a very difficult time. Neither of us would presume to know what it’s like to be at the heart of such massive disruption in our lives. But who would we be if we didn’t stop and check in with you all, the project that we hold so dear? And with that, I’ll hand it right over to you, Matt. Matt Mullenweg 00:27 Hello everyone. First, I want to thank Josepha for inviting me to join the WordPress Briefing to share what’s been on my mind in light of recent global events. Matt Mullenweg 00:37 I’ve been listening and watching events escalate in Ukraine, often in a state of shock. The scale alone is hard to take in. I mean, in the last 7 days, more than 500,000 people have fled their homes, more refugees are expected every day. The downstream humanitarian crises of the invasion are unimaginable. Matt Mullenweg 00:56 And seeing destruction in the world we live in is confusing, disconcerting, and difficult. In my experience, open source and WordPress bring people together; people from other countries and cultures, people that we know as friends and colleagues. Technology connects us, regardless of where we are. Nothing can negate the bad things happening in the world, but when I see how this community of contributors collaborates, regardless of borders, you all remind me of the good in the world every day. Matt Mullenweg 01:30 I firmly believe that the web can be an equalizer and a force for good in the world. To me, the WordPress project is the epitome of goodness—everyone has a voice, a platform, and a community. You have the power to make your corner of the world, and the web, a sanctuary for those who need it—especially now. Matt Mullenweg 01:45 If you or someone you know is affected by this war, I encourage you to be present as the ramifications unfold. While we may all feel fatigued and have a sense of languishing from the past two years of the Covid pandemic, the gift of time and support for one another cannot be overstated. I’m confident that every single person in the WordPress community will approach the situation in Ukraine with sensitivity and understanding. Matt Mullenweg 02:07 I invite you to join me in standing with those in the world working to end conflict and working toward a world of peace, promise, and opportunity. If you’re looking for a way to help support the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, I will offer some suggested NGOs, or Non-Governmental Organizations, that provide assistance to local peacebuilders in the region. Matt Mullenweg 02:26 In closing, please know that my thoughts are with everyone in our community. I know that my words here can’t change anything there, but I hope that we all remember that words of support are never unwelcome. And we can never know when a little human kindness can help someone share the invisible heaviness in their heart. Josepha Haden Chomphosy 02:44 Thanks for that, Matt. My friends, there are links in the show notes to some of the groups that Matt referenced. And that is it for this special edition of the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Be safe, be kind to yourself and others, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. View the full article

There’s a lot going on in the world right now, and safety is top of mind for everyone in the WordPress community. If you don’t know where to begin, or how to support your peers, Executive Director Josepha Chomphosy’s advice to the global community is to start small. Overall, February has been a busy month for WordPress. To begin with, it was thrilling to see the enthusiasm for the release of WordPress 5.9 Joséphine from January continue last month, and that’s not all. We have many exciting updates to share, so keep reading to learn about the latest achievements from the WordPress community. WordPress 6.0: May 24, 2022 is the proposed release date The proposed release schedule for WordPress 6.0, the second major release of 2022, has been published.While we’re waiting for 6.0, check out the WordPress 5.9.1 maintenance release which was released on February 22, 2022. Are you interested in contributing to WordPress core? Join the #core channel in Slack. Also, don’t miss the Core Team’s weekly developer chat on Wednesdays at 8 PM UTC. Gutenberg releases: Versions 12.5, 12.6, and 12.7 were released The Core Team launched three new versions of Gutenberg last month. All come with new features, code quality improvements, and bug fixes. Gutenberg 12.7 is available to download. This version improves the Patterns experience, allows you to add border styles to column blocks, and includes other new features.Gutenberg 12.6 was launched on February 16, 2022. This release includes a new color panel, updated color controls, a new Post Author Biography block, Read More block, and plenty of other exciting updates!Gutenberg 12.5 was released on February 2, 2022. This version allows switching theme styles variations, custom taxonomies filtering, and more. Want to get involved in developing Gutenberg? Contribute to Gutenberg on GitHub, and join the #core-editor channel in the Make WordPress Slack. Follow the #gutenberg-new tag for details on the latest updates. WordPress News gets a new look The redesign of WordPress News, which was first announced by Matt Mullenweg, Co-Founder of WordPress, in State of the Word 2021, went live on February 16, 2022. Read the redesign announcement to learn more about the inspiration behind the new look. Team updates: #WP Diversity, a new blog for developers, and more The #WPDiversity working group, which is part of the Community Team, hosted an open Zoom meeting with volunteers on February 23, 2022. If you’re interested in contributing, read the recap of the meeting to view available roles. The Core Team shared a proposal to start a blog on developer.wordpress.org to share news and updates relevant to developers. The first Gutenberg Developer Hours session hosted on February 8th by the Core Team was successful. Head over to this page to learn more about the participants’ feedback.The Core Team published “Feature Project: Plugin Dependencies,” where they identified the problems with plugin dependencies and suggested potential solutions to improve the plugin experience.The WordPress Photo Directory has a new Make team. There is currently an open call for team reps and collaboration is happening at the new #photos channel of the Make WordPress Slack.The Polyglots Team shared a proposal for a milestone template for the Polyglots Locale Teams.The Community Team published a proposal for refurbishing camera kits.The Global Community Sponsors for 2022 have been announced.The February 2022 edition of the monthly Meetup Organizer Newsletter has been published.The latest edition of People of WordPress highlighting Tonya Mork was published on February 28, 2022. Read Tonya’s story to learn more about how WordPress helped her find herself again after a health crisis. The February 2022 edition of the Polyglots Monthly Newsletter has been published. The Community Team published a discussion on diversity in WordPress events. If you’re comfortable sharing your experience, you can still comment on the post. Feedback/Testing requests: WordPress iOS 19.3 and Android 19.3 WordPress for iOS 19.3 beta is available for testing, along with WordPress for Android 19.3 Test and share your feedback on the GlotPress feedback feature. WordCamp Europe 2022 announces steps to ensure a diverse, inclusive, and welcoming event WordCamp Europe 2022 announced a plan to ensure more diversity and inclusion in events moving forward.The WordPress Foundation published a post on how open source software is good for business.In a recent episode of WP Briefing titled “Five Cents on Five for the Future,” Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy talks about future-proofing the WordPress project with the Five for the Future pledge.The Training Team is hosting several WordPress Social Learning Meetups in March 2022.Don’t miss the following upcoming WordCamps: WordCamp Genève, Switzerland on April 9, 2022 (in person) WordCamp Athens, Greece between April 9 and 10, 2022 (in person) WordCamp Vienna, Austria from April 23 to 24, 2022 (in person) WordCamp Europe in Porto, Portugal from June 2 to 4, 2022 (in person) WordCamp Montclair in New Jersey, USA June 25 (in person) WordCamp US in San Diego, California from September 9 to 11, 2022 (in person) It’s not too late to be a volunteer at WordCamp Europe 2022. If you’re interested, head over to this page to apply. Have a story that we could include in the next ‘Month in WordPress’ post? Let us know by filling out this form. The following folks contributed to December 2021’s Month in WordPress: @anjanavasan @harishanker @rmartinezduque @mysweetcate View the full article

In this series, we share some of the inspiring stories of how WordPress and its global network of contributors can change people’s lives for the better. This month we feature a website developer and engineer from the US, who found the software and its community provide the impetus to keep her going forward. WordPress gave Tonya Mork a new lease of energy after a health crisis from which she nearly died. She had spent two decades as an electrical and software engineer in high tech automated manufacturing. But when she discovered the WordPress software, teaching it to others became her new purpose. Through this discovery, she has gone on to help thousands of developers understand and build code in great depth. As part of her WordPress journey, she has shared her skills in the roles of Release Coordinator and the Core Tech Editor for the most recent major WordPress release, 5.9 Joséphine. Life takes an unexpected turn For the first 22 years of Tonya’s life, she rose through the ranks from enlisted personnel in the US Navy to a highly sought after chief engineer with a multi million-dollar industrial automation engineering firm. However, while she was working in engineering, her life was to change dramatically. In 2007, Tonya started to face health challenges that had an impact on all that she had known. “My career defined me. It was my canvas and my art. When it was gone, I did not recognize myself. Tonya Mork One day, she woke up at home ready to visit a client’s facility where her firm was building a robotic system. She said: “As I headed for the door, I fell to my knees, as this wave of pain crushed down on my chest.” Doctors diagnosed her with a very rare heart disease that caused her blood vessels to spasm, cutting off blood to whatever was downstream of the blockage. A few months later, she was diagnosed with a second rare and more serious condition, related to the migraines from which she had been suffering. Combined with her heart condition, this made every migraine attack life-threatening. For nearly seven years, the unexpected changes to her health left her mostly homebound and constantly monitored. This meant she had to close her engineering firm and say goodbye to staff and clients. “My career defined me. It was my canvas and my art. When it was gone, I was lost. I didn’t recognize myself.” But in her darkest hour, she found her strength. Tonya made a choice to move forward, and make the most of her life. “When you are at rock bottom, you have to make a decision or else it will consume you. My decision was that I chose to be happy,” said Tonya. One of Tonya’s first steps was to start writing a blog using WordPress. In this she shared insights on how to find peace and joy in any situation. She wrote about kindness and helping one another. The joy of making solutions through WordPress became a way for Tonya to accept her new life and not feel as limited by her health. She wanted purpose, and in WordPress, she found just that. Tonya felt she could do something worthwhile in the virtual world. A ray of hope for Tonya In 2013, Tonya’s health deteriorated further. She was admitted into intensive care and was diagnosed with a third rare disease, this time related to her autoimmunity. She was not expected to survive this time. Following what she describes as a ‘miraculous recovery,’ she became stronger and was able to stop relying on a wheelchair. She used the energy from working on websites to keep going. “WordPress kept my mind alive,” said Tonya. She had first used WordPress for her engineering firm’s intranet. But when she discovered the software’s full potential and the collaborative opportunities of open source, it opened a new world. “Finding WordPress helped me to find myself again” Tonya Mork During the years which followed, she donated her time to build some WordPress websites and plugins. She said: “Through giving my time, I was able to do something other than sit in isolation.” Tonya was amazed by the sharing in open source in general and in WordPress in particular. She said: “I was amazed to see people sharing so much information freely with one another. In my former engineering world, information was proprietary. Throughout my career, I had worked to break down those silos and help anyone to understand complex systems. I was drawn to this open community.” She also became aware that WordPress developers were hungry to learn more about development. She wanted to be part of the solution with her passion for teaching and the knowledge she had gained in industry. She said: “Finding WordPress helped me to find myself again. Here in this community, I was able to feel like a person again, not a sick one, but a professional with something to give.” As her interest in the software grew, Tonya decided to start a non-profit where she turned to WordPress to build the websites. This re-sparked her interest in programming. She said: “I wanted to really know the code and understand what made it tick.” The realization led Tonya to start the WP Developers’ Club, which in turn spawned Know the Code, to help educate individual developers, and is still used today. From helping WordPress companies to working on WordPress Core Tonya went on to work with big and medium size WordPress companies helping their developers and supporting them in raising their firms’ leverage with WordPress. By late 2020, she knew she wanted to do even more with WordPress. In February 2021, Tonya joined an international firm in the ecosystem and began working closely on WordPress Core. At that time, WordPress Core was pulling together a new Triage team. Tonya started volunteering on that team to find collaborative solutions, and help others do so. In 2020 for WordPress 5.6 Simone, she became the release’s Triage lead, and again for WordPress 5.7 Esperanza. In 2021, she became a Test Team Rep and helped to expand the team and is an advocate for the value of testing and feedback in the release development process. A new, successful chapter with WordPress 5.9 Tonya’s passion for the software and getting people involved in its growth continued. For the WordPress 5.9 release in 2021, she took on the role of both the Core Tech Lead and the Release Coordinator. As this was a big release and included the first major implementation of Full Site Editing, it had many moving parts and hundreds of contributors. She was able to share the skills she had learned in communication and project management from her days streamlining and documenting engineering software and processes. In the first 24 hours of WordPress 5.9 landing, it had more than 10 million downloads—and 17 formally reported bugs. Giving back to open source Now in what Tonya describes as her third chapter. She said: “I’m a very different person from the engineer I used to know. What really matters in this world is when you reach out and make a difference in someone’s life.” She feels she has found her purpose in this life. “I’m on a mission to give back and make a difference. Teaching is how I will do it. And in WordPress I have found my professional home, and I have all this software knowledge that I just want to share.” 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. #ContributorStory. Contributors to this feature Thank you to Tonya Mork (@hellofromtonya) for sharing her story. Interviews and feature by Abha Thakor (@webcommsat) and Mary Baum (@marybaum). Reviewed by Chloe Bringmann (@cbringmann), Nalini Thakor (@nalininonstopnewsuk), Meher Bala (@meher), and Anjana Vasan (@anjanavasan). Photo editing Reyez Martínez (@rmartinezduque) and Jean Baptiste Audras (@audrasjb). Thanks to Josepha Haden Chomphosy (@chanthaboune) and Topher DeRosia (@topher1kenobe) and others for their support of this initiative. 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 5.9.1 is now available! This maintenance release features 82 bug fixes in both Core and the block editor. WordPress 5.9.1 is a short-cycle maintenance release. The next major release will be version 6.0. You can download WordPress 5.9.1 from WordPress.org, or visit your Dashboard → Updates and click “Update Now”. If you have sites that support automatic background updates, they’ve already started the update process. For more information, browse the full list of both Trac and GitHub changes in the release candidate post, or check out the version 5.9.1 HelpHub documentation page. Thanks and props! The 5.9.1 release was led by Jb Audras and George Mamadashvili. Special props to @sergeybiryukov for running mission control. Thank you to everyone who helped make WordPress 5.9.1 happen: Albert Juhé Lluveras, Alex Lende, alexstine, André, Anton Vlasenko, Ari Stathopoulos, ArteMa, Ben Dwyer, BlogAid, Carolina Nymark, Channing Ritter, Chris Van Patten, Colin Stewart, Daniel Richards, David Biňovec, David Smith, Dion Hulse, Dominik Schilling, Eddy, Ella van Durpe, Erik, Fabian Kägy, Flinim Asso, gadhiyaravi, George Hotelling, George Mamadashvili, glendaviesnz, Greg Ziółkowski, ianatkins, Ian Belanger, ironprogrammer, itsamoreh, Jb Audras, Jeff Ong, Jeremy Herve, Joe Dolson, Joen A., John Blackbourn, Jonathan Desrosiers, Jorge Costa, Juliette Reinders Folmer, KafleG, Kapil Paul, Kjell Reigstad, linux4me2, Lukman Nakib, manfcarlo, Marius L. J., mgol, nidhidhandhukiya, Nik Tsekouras, Omar Alshaker, Paolo L. Scala, Pascal Birchler, Paul Bearne, Pavlo, Petar Ratković, Peter Wilson, Petter Walbø Johnsgård, Phil Johnston, Piotrek Boniu, ravipatel, Riad Benguella, Robert Anderson, Rolf Siebers, Sergey Biryukov, stacimc, Stephen Bernhardt, Sven Wagener, Team Staatic, Tim Nolte, Tonya Mork, webcommsat AbhaNonStopNewsUK, WebMan Design | Oliver Juhas, wpcharged, wpsoul, Yunus Ertuğrul, and Rafi Ahmed. Thanks to @estelaris, @pbiron, @ironprogrammer, @bph, @abhanonstopnewsuk and @threadi for their help to test the release package. View the full article

In this twenty-fifth episode of the WordPress Briefing, Executive Director, Josepha Haden Chomphosy discusses future-proofing the WordPress project with the Five for the Future pledge. Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Credits Editor: Dustin HartzlerLogo: Beatriz FialhoProduction: Chloé Bringmann & Santana InnissSong: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod References Five for the Future, on ma.tt circa 2014Governing the Commons, Elinor OstromFive for the Future White Paper6.0 Planning RoundupPart I: Full Site Editing CoursePart II: Full Site Editing CoursePart III: Full Site Eiditing Course Transcript Episode 25 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 [00:00:42] I have a non-mailbag mailbag question that I would like to answer for y’all today. Non-mailbag because no one actually emailed me about it and mailbag because Twitter is basically like a giant mailbag. And I do get a lot of DMS about this particular topic. If you want to send something to my actual WP Briefing mailbag, you can send it to wpbriefing@worpress.org. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:01:06] But the question that I frequently get asked in my DMS on Twitter is: what is Five for the Future? It’s not always that tidy the question, but that still is the question we’re answering today. So if you take a casual survey of active contributors to the WordPress project, the high-level answer that you’re likely to get to that question is “a way to remind people to give back to the project.” Or, if you run in more business-y circles, you might hear that it is an initiative that encourages companies to give back 5% of their resources. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:01:40] And both of those answers are true. So a quick mini-history lesson; the original concept of Five for the Future came from Matt Mullenweg in 2014. There’s a lovely blog post on it that I will link in the notes below, but it was essentially a call to any companies experiencing success with WordPress to contribute back to the project and make sure that the project was a success. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:02:07] The initial program then included outreach recognition, et cetera, proposed in 2017 by Tracy Levesque and Ian Dunn. Then that was defined and formalized with the help of the WordPress community in 2018. And then, in 2019, we had our first trial run with entire dedicated teams sponsored by companies inside the WordPress ecosystem. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:02:36] So that’s the mini-history lesson chronology of this program. The intentions that informed the work of building the program in 2017 have become a bit lost to the ages. So I’m here to share it with you. The basic heart and soul of the Five for the Future program is to make sure that there is a way to refresh the commons of the WordPress community and ecosystem. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:03:00] And as a result, ensure that the common resources of WordPress are available long after we have stopped being available to care for them. If you are familiar with the concept of the tragedy of the commons, Five for the Future was created to help avoid that tragedy. There were two original goals for formalizing the program. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:03:22] The first one was to acknowledge companies that participated in Five for the Future by sponsoring contributors to work on the WordPress project. And the second was to motivate more companies to sponsor more volunteers. Either by hiring them and paying them to contribute or by assigning their existing employees to contribute to the WordPress project. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:03:46] Of course, it’s hard to quantify participation and hard to qualify what should be seen as an impactful contribution, which is why when the program was originally created, it was in partnership with team reps and community members who were active at the time. There are many posts around that discuss the next steps for this program. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:04:07] And as I’m looking through them, the next steps revolve around some of the hardest and most important questions that we have to answer as a project and as stewards of open source. Those questions are things like: How do we remain true to these gloriously subversive values of WordPress and open source while also finding a way to thoughtfully secure our organization’s future?Does contributing without the expectation of reciprocity hold up when we are looking at how to acknowledge contributors who sustain us? Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:04:40] And if you’re familiar with Elinor Ostrom’s award-winning work, Governing the Commons, you may also be wondering how this particular program aligns with her eight principles designed to sustain organizations like ours. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:04:57] As an aside to that last question, this particular program does not have all eight principles accounted for, but among WordPress’s many programs, we do account for most of them. Although imperfectly, as is the way with human beings, that’s probably a whole episode unto itself, I did want to quickly answer that particular question. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:05:16] So to get back to my non-mailbag, mailbag question, if I had to tell you in the span of an elevator ride what Five for the Future was, this would be my answer. It is a v1 program with a dual goal of boldly declaring the need to refresh the shared resources of WordPress and offering the ways and means for communities and individuals alike to participate in refreshing those resources. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:05:45] If you want to learn more about the Five for the Future initiative, you can check out wordpress.org/5. Like literally just the number five. Or, if you want to learn more about the program that has grown from the Five for the Future initiative, you can check out the white paper that’s linked in the notes below. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:06:11] And that brings us now to our small list of big things. Number one on my small list, the planning post for WordPress 6.0 is out. I’ve included a link in my massive list of links below. But it includes our best guess at timing, features that we intend to include, and a call for volunteers as well. So if you are looking for ways to give back, that is a clear and immediate option. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:06:38] The second thing on the list is if you are a team rep, don’t forget that we have daylight saving time ending and starting depending on your hemisphere within the month. If you move meetings, if you’re in a team that moves your meetings, discuss it now so that folks have time to adjust their calendars. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:06:55] And the third thing on my small list of big things is that there’s a suite of Full Site Editing courses that are now available on learn.wordpress.org. I will add that to my giant list of links below, but I encourage you to wander on over and see what all the fuss is about. I think the courses are excellent. They’re great for folks who don’t quite know what Full Site Editing is yet, but then also they give you a few intermediate tips and tricks as you’re getting your legs underneath you. Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:07:27] So, 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. I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. View the full article