Wordpress

WordPress 6.5.5 is now available! This release features three security fixes. Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately. This minor release also includes 3 bug fixes in Core. You can download WordPress 6.5.5 from WordPress.org, or visit your WordPress Dashboard, click “Updates”, and then click “Update Now”. If you have sites that support automatic background updates, the update process will begin automatically. WordPress 6.5.5 is a short-cycle release. The next major release will be version 6.6 which is scheduled for July 16, 2024. For more information on WordPress 6.5.5, please visit the HelpHub site. Security updates included in this release The security team would like to thank the following people for responsibly reporting vulnerabilities, and allowing them to be fixed in this release: A cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability affecting the HTML API reported by Dennis Snell of the WordPress Core Team, along with Alex Concha and Grzegorz (Greg) Ziółkowski of the WordPress security team. A cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability affecting the Template Part block reported independently by Rafie Muhammad of Patchstack and during a third party security audit. A path traversal issue affecting sites hosted on Windows reported independently by Rafie M & Edouard L of Patchstack, David Fifield, x89, apple502j, and mishre. Thank you to these WordPress contributors This release was led by Aaron Jorbin. WordPress 6.5.5 would not have been possible without the contributions of the following people. Their asynchronous coordination to deliver maintenance and security fixes into a stable release is a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress community. Aaron Jorbin, Alex Concha, Andrew Ozz, bernhard-reiter, Colin Stewart, David Baumwald, Dennis Snell, Grant M. Kinney, Greg Ziółkowski, Jb Audras, Jonathan Desrosiers, Matias Ventura, Miguel Fonseca, Peter Wilson, Rajin Sharwar, Scott Reilly, Tonya Mork How to contribute To get involved in WordPress core development, head over to Trac, pick a ticket, and join the conversation in the #core Slack channel. Need help? Check out the Core Contributor Handbook. Already testing WordPress 6.6? The fourth beta is now available (zip) and it contains these security fixes. For more on 6.6, see the beta 3 announcement post. Learn more about testing WordPress 6.6 here. Props to Paul Kevan, Ehtisham Siddiqui, Alex Concha, Tonya Mork, and Angela Jin for reviewing. View the full article

Big events create big moments, and WordCamp Europe 2024 was no exception. Join host Josepha Haden Chomphosy on this episode of the WordPress Briefing as she shares her top insights and favorite highlights from the event. Discover what the WordPress community focused on during this exciting three-day gathering. Credits Host: Josepha Haden Chomphosy Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Brett McSherry Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Show Notes WordCamp Europe Small List of Big Things WordPress 6.6 RC1 (and upcoming schedule) WordPress Project Contributor Handbook v2 The Sustainability Team’s Handbook for Events is here! Volunteering at WordCamp US 2024 Have a question you’d like answered? Submit them to WPBriefing@WordPress.org. Transcript [00:00:00] Josepha: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go. [00:00:28] (Intro music) [00:00:40] Josepha: My friends, another WordCamp Europe is in the books. We had the second-highest number of tickets sold in the history of our event series, with the first being WordCamp Europe in Berlin. But even with that number of tickets sold, that number of people gathering together to talk about WordPress and related things, there were still a lot of people who didn’t get to join us. [00:01:01] Josepha: For some, that came with experiencing FOMO, but some of you embraced the JOMO of it all. Either way, at this point, there are a good collection of wrap-ups and round-ups going around, so I’m here to tell you a bit about what was buzzing in the hallway track. Firstly, everyone was so excited to see old friends and make new ones. Everywhere I turned, I saw WordPressers in clusters catching up, most included new to the crew faces. So we know that we were using the Pac-Man rule that we love so much. But even while they were catching up on the last two, three, four years, they were also talking to each other about how to get more folks to things like this. Since we all generally agree that your first time meeting other WordPressers can be a truly pivotal moment in your WordPress journey, it was a delight to hear so much brainstorming focused on that. From mentorship to community introduction and the future of our events, the question of how to keep our ecosystem healthy and thriving was a big topic. Does any one of us have all the answers to this? No, but fortunately, we’ve got a global set of thinkers working on this global question. So, together, I’m sure we can come up with some good guesses to try out. [00:02:21] Josepha: Secondly, I saw a ton of talks and discussions about career development, not only about how to learn more but also how to be a champion for open source in your company, how to advocate for contribution as a best business practice. And what other communities can teach us about how they commit to their user’s continuing education, for lack of a friendlier term. And boy, do I love a good conversation about how to make working in open source easier, make it more meaningful, and more impactful. I’m in favor of anything that helps to dignify our profession. The front-facing, easy-to-use experience of WordPress, in particular, has been misunderstood to mean that we are a simple piece of software for simple tasks. And that is the way with our mission really. If we succeed at democratizing publishing or learning or commerce for that matter, we are taking the arcane and making it mundane. But simple to use doesn’t mean simple to create. And I want all of our future employers and clients to see that. [00:03:24] Josepha: And then the final thing that I saw lighting up the hallway track was the idea of bringing life and excitement back to the web. WordPress has been fighting against closed systems for a long time, but as Matt alluded to in his keynote, merely having an open web is still not quite as fun as having an active and dynamic one. And we saw that both in general desire to bring fun back to being online, but also in the fresh variety of demos and workshops that we saw in the fun that was brought to the event. There were new and shocking implementations of Playground, I must say. Which, as far as I can tell, will basically be able to run everything one day. [00:04:03] Josepha: But at WordCamp Europe, it ran; it powered our second massive hybrid translation event, where we translated something like 50,000 strings. We also had an amazing speed-building duel with an accepted future challenge between Jessica Lychik and Matt Mullenweg. And not for nothing; the way we designed; the way the event area was put together included ways to stop and just have fun. There was a little grassy area with yard games and smaller pods of chairs for those quick hallway catch-ups that you just don’t get anywhere else. And for me, it was simply lovely to see everyone embracing the fun that was there, but also hearing about how much they wanted to help the web embrace the fun that could be. [00:04:48] (Music interlude) [00:04:55] Josepha: Thanks for listening to my hallway track recap. Hopefully, it caused JOMO, not FOMO. And now, let’s turn our attention to the small list of big things. [00:05:05] Josepha: First thing on my list is WordPress 6.6 update. So we are reaching the release candidate phase tomorrow. WordPress 6.6 RC1 will be released, so download and join the community helping us to get this release out the door. It is scheduled for July 16th. If you have plugins or themes or any sort of business that uses WordPress, now is the time to get in and test it on a test site. I don’t recommend putting it in production at any point, but come and test it. Help us break it so that we can make sure that it doesn’t break for other people, for the, you know, 43% of the web that uses it when we get it out the door on the 16th. The second thing on the list is that we have a WordPress Project Contributor Handbook V2 out there. It aims to be the quintessential resource for everyone in our community. And it will provide a bird’s eye view of where to find key information and different aspects of our community. How it all kind of connects together. And, just like a release, we really need some feedback from you. There is the repo on GitHub where you can go and kind of make inline comments, join the discussion about it. It can be a go-to resource if we look at it together and make sure that it has as much information as clearly stated as you wished you had when you were learning your way around WordPress for the first time. [00:06:27] Josepha: The third thing on the list is actually another handbook. So, the Sustainability Team has put together a handbook specifically for events. It’s their first version, and over the past few months, members of that team have been sharing their ideas and experiences on how WordPress community events can be held more sustainably. All this input created a first draft, which eventually became this first version. And so we’ll put a link in the show notes, wander over there, take a look at it, see what some best practices for sustainable events are in the WordPress ecosystem. [00:07:02] Josepha: And then the final thing on my list is about WordCamp US. I realize this is a podcast about WordCamp Europe right now. And so it’s odd to think that I’m moving right along into WordCamp US. However, there is a deadline coming up. July 1st is the last day to sign up to be a volunteer at this event. It’s taking place this year in Portland, Oregon, on the west side of the US. And it should be a really fun time. It’s middle of September. Come on out there. Learn about WordPress. Learn about contribution. Maybe get some voodoo donuts. You know, the important things. And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Don’t forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app or subscribe directly on WordPress.org/news. You’ll get a friendly reminder whenever there’s a new episode. If you liked what you heard today, share it with a fellow WordPresser. Or, if you had questions about what you heard, you can share those with me at WPBriefing@WordPress.org. I am your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Thanks for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. [00:08:06] (Music outro) View the full article

WordPress 6.6 Beta 3 is here! Please download and test it. This beta version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites—you risk unexpected results if you do. Instead, test Beta 3 on a local site or a testing environment in any of these four ways: PluginInstall and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. (Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream).Direct DownloadDownload the Beta 3 version (zip) and install it on a WordPress website.Command LineUse this WP-CLI command: wp core update --version=6.6-beta3WordPress PlaygroundUse a 6.6 Beta 3 WordPress Playground instance to test the software directly in your browser. This might be the easiest way ever—no separate sites, no setup. Just click and go! Four ways to test WordPress Beta 3. The target release date for WordPress 6.6 is July 16, 2024. Your help testing Beta and RC versions over the next four weeks is vital to making sure the final release is everything it should be: stable, powerful, and intuitive. If you find an issue If you run into an issue, please share it in the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums. If you are comfortable submitting a reproducible bug report, you can do so via WordPress Trac. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs. The bug bounty doubles in the beta period The WordPress community sponsors a financial reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities. That reward doubles between Beta 1, which landed June 4, and the final Release Candidate (RC), which will happen July 9. Please follow the project’s responsible-disclosure practices detailed on this HackerOne page and in this security white paper. The work continues Catch up with what’s new in 6.6: check out the Beta 1 announcement for the highlights. Beta 3 packs in more than 50 updates to the Editor since the Beta 2 release, including 39 tickets for WordPress core: GitHub commits for 6.6 since June 11 Closed Trac tickets since June 11 The beta cycle is all about fixing the bugs you find in testing. Do you build themes? Feedback from testing has already prompted a change in the way you offer style variations to your users. In Beta 1, if you made preset style variations for your theme, it automatically generated a full set of color-only and type-only options your users could mix and match across the different variations. In Beta 3, your theme no longer generates those options automatically—you do. So you can present a simpler set of choices, curated to guide users’ efforts to more pleasing results. For more insight into the rationale, see this discussion. Thanks again for this all-important contribution to WordPress! Props to @meher, @rmartinezduque, @atachibana, and @mobarak for collaboration and review. A Beta 3 haiku Beta ends at 3 One more week, then comes RC When we freeze the strings! View the full article

2,584 attendees participated in the 12th annual WordPress event in Europe, held at the Lingotto Conference and Exhibition Centre in Torino, Italy. The Mole Antonelliana in Torino, illuminated to celebrate WordCamp Europe 2024 From June 13-15, 2024, WordPress enthusiasts from across the globe gathered in Torino to explore and celebrate the world’s most popular web platform. A dedicated team of 250 volunteers, led by WordCamp veterans Wendie Huis in ‘t Veld, Juan Hernando, and Takis Bouyouris, organized and produced the event. Impact in Action on Contributor Day Contributor Day brought together 726 contributors working across 25 teams to support the WordPress project. Their accomplishments included translating 79,059 “strings” for the WordPress user interface across 29 languages, updating documentation for the forthcoming 6.6 release, onboarding new contributors for the support forums and testing teams, and identifying ways to improve plugin security. Contributors gathering during WCEU 2024 Contributor Day Sustainable open source is the future Keynote presenters, Joost de Valk and Juliette Reinders Folmer Joost de Valk and Juliette Reinders Folmer delivered the event’s opening keynote address on sustaining open source software projects. Their keynote covered funding open source, contributing beyond code, and convincing buyers in commercial enterprises that open source is a viable alternative to proprietary platforms. Two days of engaging sessions Friday and Saturday saw 60 presentations and workshops held across three tracks. Topics included WordPress development, accessibility, design, business, community, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity. Speed Build Session Connect Series A youth workshop gave younger attendees hands-on opportunities to build WordPress websites, explore new tech, and learn about internet safety. Meanwhile, a wellness-themed track included yoga lessons and walking tours of Torino, encouraging attendees to step away from their screens and explore the beauty of this year’s host city. Mid-year project update WordPress Cofounder Matt Mullenweg shared a mid-year project update on WordPress and concluded by fielding questions from the audience on various topics, from Gutenberg Phases to the WordPress Playground, and acknowledging a request to escalate a bug fix. Matt’s presentation highlighted the success of the contributor mentorship program and WCEU Contributor Day, demoed Translate Live, and shared an update on the Data Liberation initiative. Matt also covered the latest innovations with WordPress Playground, highlighted performance gains, and previewed features anticipated in 6.6, like rollbacks and zoomed-out view. WordPress Cofounder Matt Mullenweg Acknowledging an exciting new trend in the WordPress community, Mullenweg discussed “speed build challenges,” where onlookers watch WordPress experts build websites in real-time, showcasing tips, shortcuts, and best practices. One such event took place during a WCEU session, and in the Q&A portion of Matt’s presentation, he was invited to participate in one–an invitation he accepted! Matt reflected on WordPress reaching its 21st anniversary since he and Mike Little launched the first version in 2003. He shared 11 things to ensure that WordPress remains sustainable for decades to come: Simple things should be easy and intuitive, and complex things possible. Blogs and dynamic sites are better. Documentation should be wiki-easy to edit. Forums should be front and center. Plugins and themes with community infrastructure. Great theme previews and diverse aesthetics. We can’t over-index for guidelines and requirements. Feedback loops are so important. Core should be opinionated and quirky. If you make WordPress, use WordPress. Stay close to our end-users Watch Matt’s project update on the WordPress YouTube channel Closing remarks In their closing remarks, the event organizers expressed gratitude for the endorsements of the European Parliament, the city of Torino, and Turismo Torino, the regional tourism board. The volunteer team was celebrated for their hard work in producing the event. Closing out a robust three days of programming, the organizing team announced that WordCamp Europe 2025 would be held in Basel, Switzerland, from June 5 to 7, 2025. The announcement was met with hearty applause and plans to meet in a year’s time. Attendees gather for a photo at WCEU in Torino Stay connected WordPress events enable technologists, open source enthusiasts, and community members around the globe to meet, share ideas, and collaborate to drive WordPress and the open web forward. Mark your calendars for WordCamp US (Portland, Oregon, United States), State of the Word (Tokyo), and next year’s WordCamp Asia in Manila! This post is a collaboration between the contributors who produce content for wordpress.org/news and the WordCamp Europe Communications team. View the full article

WordPress 6.6 Beta 2 is here! Please download and test it. This beta version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites—you risk unexpected results if you do. Instead, test Beta 2 on a local site or a testing environment in any of these four ways: PluginInstall and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. (Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream).Direct DownloadDownload the Beta 2 version (zip) and install it on a WordPress website.Command LineUse this WP-CLI command: wp core update --version=6.6-beta2WordPress PlaygroundUse a 6.6 Beta 2 WordPress Playground instance to test the software directly in your browser. This might be the easiest way ever—no separate sites, no setup. Just click and go! Three ways to test WordPress Beta 2. The target release date for WordPress 6.6 is July 16, 2024. Your help testing Beta and RC versions over the next five weeks is vital to making sure the final release is everything it should be: stable, powerful, and intuitive. If you find an issue If you run into an issue, please share it in the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums. If you are comfortable submitting a reproducible bug report, you can do so via WordPress Trac. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs. The bug bounty doubles in the beta period The WordPress community sponsors a financial reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities. That reward doubles between Beta 1, which landed June 4, and the final Release Candidate (RC) that will happen July 9. Please follow the project’s responsible-disclosure practices detailed on this HackerOne page and in this security white paper. The work continues Catch up with what’s new in 6.6: check out the Beta 1 announcement for the highlights. Beta 2 packs in more than 50 updates to the Editor since the Beta 1 release, including 40+ tickets for WordPress core: GitHub commits for 6.6 since June 4 Closed Trac tickets since June 4 The beta cycle is all about fixing the bugs you find in testing. Thanks again for this vitally important contribution to WordPress! Props to @priethor, @dansoschin, @davidb, @atachibana, @meher, @webcommsat, and @juanmaguitar for collaboration and review. A Beta 2 haiku Testing is vital: It makes everything better. Let’s find all the bugs! View the full article

Get ready to dive into the vibrant world of WordCamps with this special episode of the WordPress Briefing, hosted by Josepha Haden Chomphosy! This episode is designed for first-time attendees; we’ll explore what to expect, from Contributor Day activities to mastering the art of socializing and networking. Whether you’re aiming to contribute to the WordPress community or simply looking to make new connections, this episode will help you navigate your first WordCamp with confidence and excitement. Join us for a fun and informative guide to ensure you’re prepared and energized for all the activities these dynamic events have to offer. Credits Host: Josepha Haden Chomphosy Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Brett McSherry Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Show Notes WordCamp Asia WordCamp Europe WordCamp US Upcoming Smaller WordCamps Learn WordPress Small List of Big Things Gender Equality in WordPress Businesses Survey WordCamp Asia 2025: Dates and Venue Revealed Try the Contributor Wizard Questionnaire Five for the Future Program Updates: May 2024 Have a question you’d like answered? Submit them to WPBriefing@WordPress.org. Transcript [00:00:00] Josepha: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go. [00:00:28] (Intro Music) [00:00:40] Josepha: A pivotal moment in my WordPress journey was when someone invited me to a WordCamp. I was sort of aware of WordPress, but certainly not aware of the community or the ways of open source. And when I look back, there were a few things I wish I had known going in. I am, of course, an unapologetic extrovert and therefore unstoppable at events, but if you are headed to your first WordCamp and are feeling a little nervous or confused, then pop in some earbuds because the next 10 minutes are for you. [00:01:11] Josepha: We’re going to first take a look at some basic tactical things about WordCamps, and then I’m going to tell you a few, like, human things about being a human going to events. If you’re a dog going to these events, I think that your prep is different, but also that is not my area of expertise. So the first thing, some tactical stuff about going to WordCamps. All of this happens before you even get in the front door. And so this is stuff that you can do in the comfort of your own home, on your own time, using your own computer. If you’ve got questions, you’ve got a search engine nearby to take some quick searches. Make sure you know what you’re talking about. But first things first, the shape of a WordCamp. All WordCamps have at least one day of talks, one social event, and sponsors to connect to. Some also have extra events that you need to sign up for, like Contributor Days, workshops, things like that. But we’ll start with the main event, right? We’re going to start with the day of talks and things. [00:02:09] Josepha: So when we’re looking at the main event of a WordCamp, what you should do is you should head to the WordCamp’s website and check out the schedule. I suggest that you plan for two, maybe three things that you might want to learn and look around at the schedule to see if there are any presenters or presentations that look like they fit those things that you think you might want to learn. Because if it’s not working for you, if it’s not teaching you something, then you don’t necessarily need to be in that one. Even if you’re not sure about a session a talk that you’re planning to go to, I recommend that you stop by, and then if you find out that it’s not for you, you can leave again. That’s fine. But I do encourage you to go to at least one thing that feels a little bit outside of your comfort zone. Even if you feel lost right now. It at least gives you an idea of what to search for once you do get to that point. I would never have known the things to search for early on in my learning of WordPress without going to at least one or two sessions that were just way over my head. [00:03:14] Josepha: Second thing is don’t forget to check when lunch is available. And if you have dietary restrictions, let them know ahead of time. I realize this sounds silly, and I don’t know about you, but I can’t focus when I’m hungry. But also, it’s really a great, low-stakes networking time, and I think one of the overlooked networking times as well. I mean, everyone’s gotta eat, right? And it’s easier to strike up a conversation over a meal than just out of thin air or, you know, in the middle of a presentation when you’re supposed to be listening to a talk. So yeah, check out when lunch is happening! And yeah, make a friend or two, sit down at a table, and ask somebody what they’re doing with WordPress and how long they’ve been doing it. And the third thing that I would recommend that you do when you’re looking at kind of the main event for a WordCamp is to schedule in time to wander around and meet the event sponsors. They are all experts in some WordPress problem or other, so probably they have a solution to a problem that you have got. But they’re also how we keep our prices super low, so even if you have no problems or you think you have no problems. Still, check them out. They’re also staffed with wonderful people that are building really cool stuff with WordPress and so you might just get some inspiration out there. [00:04:28] Josepha: Now for the side events. So the side events, we’re going to kind of start close to the main event and work our way out. So you’ve got generally three types of side events if you don’t count the networking things, which, in this case, I’m not. But just know that almost every WordCamp has some networking event, either an after-party or, like, a happy hour, a social that happens before the event. You’ll get emails about those if you have signed up for updates on the website. Also, you can look on the website directly. Just check out the schedule. Always go to those. The networking is the best at a WordCamp. But the side events—we’re talking about specific types. Like I said, we’re going to start close and work our way out. [00:05:11] Josepha: So, workshops. These are just what they sound like. They’re classroom-style opportunities to practice the things you’ve learned at meetup events or on learn.WordPress.org, depending on how you found your way to this WordCamp. They mostly happen during the WordCamp itself. in a separate track, and there are like stacks of workshops in that track in that series of sessions. But a lot of them do require preregistration simply so that the trainer has an idea of how many people to expect. Again, if you get in the workshop and it’s way over your head, you feel like you absolutely cannot get it done, you’re always welcome to leave and check out some other area. But, in general, the workshops that we have WordCamps are pretty solid. So a little bit further removed from that are our Youth and Teen Days. So this is more of an event series that is specifically designed for teens or kids who are trying to learn more about WordPress and other related business and entrepreneurial topics. It’s kind of a catch all but also has a lot of WordPress content in it. They have age limits, of course, and require separate registration for safety and planning purposes both. And those, in general, are either half-day during the WordCamp itself or a full-day during that WordCamp. [00:06:32] Josepha: Which brings us then to the big one, the major side event. This is a full-day side event called Contributor Day. If your WordCamp has a Contributor Day, it will happen either the day before or the day after the WordCamp itself. It is an entire day where attendees come together to learn how to contribute to the future of the WordPress open source project. Now, if you are listening to this as part of, like, you’re getting ready to go to a WordCamp, and you don’t know what I meant by open source or open source project or WordPress open source project, that’s fine. [00:07:08] Josepha: You’re going to learn all about it at the Contributor Day if you go, but the TLDR is that this software that you are about to choose to build your website on is built by thousands of people across the planet who are looking for the best solutions to problems that they have in their businesses that probably you will encounter or have encountered before. There’s no new problems under the sun, and open source methodologies kind of use the collective wisdom of everybody who has ever worked with a WordPress project or site and ran into a problem that they had to solve on their own, like this open source project, this community of people just make sure that that wisdom is collected and standardized and made available for all of eternity. That’s all you need to know. Low key. I’ve made Contributor Days sound so calming. However, that is a whole day thing. It happens before or after the WordCamp. It has separate registration so that organizers of your WordCamp can plan for how many folks need to be there to teach new and returning contributors, what to do. If I’m going to be honest, if you’re going to get overwhelmed at any WordPress event, it’s going to be one of these, but they are well worth the effort. [00:08:30] Josepha: Even if you just make a single contribution and never return, which I hope is not the case for you. I hope you do return. Even if you make a single contribution and never return, there’s something really grounding about seeing how much expertise and time, and care goes into this software that is, against all odds, completely free. So that’s all the tactical stuff, or a lot of it anyway. It at least gives you a sense for what you’re getting yourself into for your first-ever wonderful WordPress weekend. But I promised you some human stuff too. So here is my considerably shorter list of stuff to bring as a human being going to a WordCamp. There’s an optional one. I’ll start you off with an optional one. Come with an idea of what you think you want to learn. You don’t have to come with that if you don’t want to. Some of us don’t know what we don’t know yet, and that’s fine too. But if you have a sense for what you think you need to learn, you’ll have an easier time figuring out how to spend your time while you’re here. [00:09:30] Josepha: So, the non-optional things. Bring some way to exchange information. It can be QR codes, business cards, or pen and paper. It doesn’t really matter as long as it’s something that works for you to be sharing information with people that you meet. Because you never know when you’re going to meet your business soulmate, but the odds that you’re going to do it at a WordCamp are pretty dang high. The second thing to bring is bring what you need to be comfortable. Bring your water bottle, a change of shoes if you need it, spare battery for your phone, your glasses. This day is going to be long enough without worrying about small inconveniences. So bring what you need to make yourself comfortable. [00:10:09] Josepha: And finally bring your bravery. You will not know by looking at someone whether they’ve been doing WordPress stuff for two years or two weeks. But you can know that at some point, they were in the first two days of trying to figure this all out. One of the most endearing things about this community is the zeal they bring to solving a problem. So if you get lost or stuck, just ask the person next to you. We all remember what it was like to know nothing, and we are rooting for you to succeed. And that’s it. That’s your whole list. That’s everything you need to know to be the most prepared first-time attendee to a WordCamp ever. If that all sounded more overwhelming than just showing up, don’t worry. You can also just show up. That’s what I did. And even though I knew next to nothing, those WordCampers made me feel welcome and included and kept me coming back to learn more. [00:11:04] Josepha: Ah, WordCamps. Gosh, I love those things. So glad that we’re all getting back together for them. [00:11:10] (Music interlude) [00:11:18] Josepha: That brings us now, my friends, to our small list of big things. If you’re a first-time WordPresser, if you’ve never been to a WordCamp, and you don’t know what any of these things are, don’t worry; you can still go take a look at them, or you can wait until later when you’re less overwhelmed. Either way, but this is our small list of big things for middle of the year 2024. First thing on my list, the gender equality in WordPress businesses survey is still open. It aims to gain critical insight into the gender composition of leadership teams, the experiences of women and gender-diverse leaders and employees, and also take a look at the challenges and barriers to their career success. I care deeply about making sure that we have a way for folks who are traditionally and historically underrepresented in technology have a way to get into our space. Obviously, women and nonbinary folks are an area that I feel particularly called to help build those on-ramps for, but I have a great concern for that across the entire ecosystem and any intersection that we run into as we get more and more users into our space. [00:12:30] Josepha: If you are a woman, if you work with women, if you work in WordPress, if you work in a WordPress business, go take that survey, and let’s see what we find out about what it’s like to work in this space, as somebody that we normally don’t see. The second thing on our list is that WordCamp Asia 2025 dates and venue have been revealed. So WordCamp Asia 2023 and 2024 were both major successes, and we are excited to share that the dates and venue for next year will be February 20th, 21st, 22nd in 2025 in Manila, and you’ll be able to go over to that website, take a look at it, we’ll have a link in the show notes as always and maybe start planning your your next big Asian adventure. [00:13:13] Josepha: The third thing on my list is this new contributor wizard questionnaire. So, there are more than 20 teams to contribute to in the WordPress project. They all show up at those Contributor Days that I talked about. But there are more than 20 of them. They work on different parts of the WordPress project every day. And our passionate community offers contribution opportunities for everyone. I know, we know, that finding the right team is the key to a meaningful contributor experience. So, our interactive questionnaire is here to help you determine where to start. It is sometimes difficult to know whether you can contribute to a software if you are a designer, if you are a writer, if you are in marketing. And it turns out that you can contribute to WordPress with a bunch of skills that you otherwise would not have realized. So, we’ll have a link to the questionnaire in the show notes again. Also, it’s probably going to pop up on WordCamp sites, Contributor Day sites, anything that helps you all understand where you might find a little bit of success as a contributor is a good place for it to be. Take the questionnaire, see where you land, the WordPress sorting hat. [00:14:18] Josepha: And item number four. So we’ve made some updates, not we’ve made some updates, we have some updates from the Five for the Future program. So the Five for the Future program has a long history in the WordPress project. There are a couple of different episodes in this podcast where you can learn more about it. But, to bolster transparency and openness, we have an update on the current state of WordPress contributions as of the end of May 2024. In the past few months, we’ve made a lot of efforts to improve the program and contributor experience in WordPress. We’ve also done a little bit of work to kind of clean up the pledges that are in there for, people or companies or teams that have found that they couldn’t continue their contributions over time. That is fine too. But we’ll have a link to that update in the show notes as well. [00:15:09] Josepha: And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Don’t forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app or subscribe directly on WordPress.org/news. You’ll get a friendly reminder whenever there’s a new episode. If you liked what you heard today, share it with a fellow WordPresser. Or, if you had questions about what you heard, you can share those with me at WPBriefing@WordPress.org. I am your host, Josepha Haden Chomposy. Thanks for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. [00:15:36] (Music outro) View the full article

WordPress 6.5.4 is now available! This minor release features 5 bug fixes in Core. You can review a summary of the maintenance updates in this release by reading the Release Candidate announcement. WordPress 6.5.4 is a short-cycle release. The next major release will be version 6.6 planned for July 2024. If you have sites that support automatic background updates, the update process will begin automatically. You can download WordPress 6.5.4 from WordPress.org, or visit your WordPress Dashboard, click “Updates”, and then click “Update Now”. For more information on this release, please visit the HelpHub site. Thank you to these WordPress contributors This release was led by Tonya Mork, Colin Stewart, and Aaron Jorbin. WordPress 6.5.4 would not have been possible without the contributions of the following people. Their asynchronous coordination to deliver maintenance fixes into a stable release is a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress community. Aaron Jorbin, adrianduffell, Andrew Ozz, Andy Fragen, Beau Lebens, Bernhard Reiter, Brian Alexander, Colin Stewart, Darren Ethier (nerrad), David Baumwald, Enrico Battocchi, Estela Rueda, John James Jacoby, John Blackbourn, Jonathan Desrosiers, Kevin Hoffman, Louis Wolmarans, Md Abul Bashar, Miriam Schwab, Mukesh Panchal, Narendra Sishodiya, Pascal Birchler, Peter Wilson, Pooja N Muchandikar, Sarah Norris, Scott Reilly, Syed Balkhi, Tonya Mork How to contribute To get involved in WordPress core development, head over to Trac, pick a ticket, and join the conversation in the #core and #6-6-release-leads channels. Need help? Check out the Core Contributor Handbook. Props to @afragen, @hellofromtonya , and @angelasjin for proofreading. View the full article

WordPress 6.6 Beta 1 is here! Please download and test it. This beta version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites—you risk unexpected results if you do. Instead, install Beta 1 on local sites and testing environments in any of these four ways: PluginInstall and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. (Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream).Direct DownloadDownload the Beta 1 version (zip) and install it on a WordPress website.Command LineUse this WP-CLI command: wp core update --version=6.6-beta1WordPress PlaygroundUse a 6.6 Beta 1 WordPress Playground instance to test the software directly in your browser. This might be the easiest way ever—no separate sites, no setup. Just click and go! The scheduled final release date for WordPress 6.6 is July 16, 2024. Your help testing Beta and RC versions over the next six weeks is vital to making sure the final release is everything it should be: stable, powerful, and intuitive. How important is your testing? Features in this Beta release may be changed or removed between now and the final release. Early attention from testers like you is critical to finding and reporting potential bugs, usability issues, or compatibility problems to make sure developers can address them before the final release. You don’t need any contribution experience, and this is a fantastic way to begin your WordPress contributor story! If you find an issue If you run into an issue, please share it in the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums. If you are comfortable submitting a reproducible bug report, you can do so via WordPress Trac. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs. Want to know more about testing in general, and how to get started? Follow the testing initiatives in Make Core and join the #core-test channel on Making WordPress Slack. Like every version since 5.0 in 2018, WordPress 6.6 will integrate a host of new features from the last several releases of the Gutenberg plugin. Learn more about Gutenberg updates since WordPress 6.5 in the What’s New in Gutenberg posts for versions 17.8, 17.9, 18.0, 18.1, 18.2, 18.3, and 18.4. The final version will also include Gutenberg 18.5; the Beta 2 post will link to that. WordPress 6.6 Beta 1 contains 97 enhancements and 101 fixes for the editor, in a total of about 206 tickets for WordPress 6.6 Core. The vulnerability bounty doubles in the beta period The WordPress community sponsors a monetary reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities. That reward doubles during the period between Beta 1 on June 4 and the final Release Candidate (RC) that will happen June 25. Please follow the project’s responsible-disclosure practices detailed on this HackerOne page and in this security white paper. What’s coming to WordPress 6.6? This year’s second major release is about polish and finesse. Features that landed in the last few releases have new flexibility and smoother flows—and a few new tricks. And of course there are a few brand-new features. Data Views updates Part of the groundwork for phase 3, Data Views get new and improved experience of working with information in the Site Editor. A new layout consolidates patterns and template parts, gets you to general management views in fewer clicks, and packs in a wide range of refinements. Overrides in synced patterns What if you could keep a synced pattern‘s look and feel everywhere it appears—keeping it on brand—but have different content everywhere it appears? For instance, maybe you‘re building a pattern for recipes. Ideally, you want to keep the overall design of the recipe card consistent on every post that will have a recipe. But the recipe itself—the ingredients, the steps, special notes on technique—will be different every time. And perhaps, in the future, other people might need to change the design of the recipe pattern. It would be nice to know they can do that, and that the content in existing recipes will stay right where it is. In version 6.6, you can make all that happen, and overrides in synced patterns are the way you do it. See all the blocks Up to now, when you had a block selected and then opened the block Inserter, you only saw the blocks you were allowed to add to your selected block. Where were all the others? In 6.6, when you have a block selected, you get two lists. First, there’s the list of blocks you can insert at your selected block. Then you get a list with all the other blocks. So you can get an idea of what you can use in your selected block, and what other blocks you could use in another area. In fact, if you select a block from that second list, WordPress 6.6 will add it below your block, to use in whatever you build next. A new publish flow Version 6.6 brings the post and site editors closer together than ever. So whether you’re writing for a post in the post editor or a page in the Site Editor, your experience will be about the same. Style variations If a block theme comes with style variations, 6.6 vastly expands your design options right out of the box, without installing or configuring a single thing. Because in 6.6, your theme pulls the color palettes and typography style sets out of its installed variations to let you mix and match for a whole world of expanded creative expression. Section styles Do you build themes? Now you can define style options for separate sections of multiple blocks, including inner blocks. Then your users can apply those block style variations to entire groups of blocks, effectively creating branded sections they can curate across a site. A note about CSS specificity To make it easier for your variations to override the global styles CSS, those styles now come wrapped in `:root`. That limits their specificity. For details, read the full discussion on GitHub. A native Grid layout Grid is a new variation for the Group block that lets you arrange the blocks inside it as a grid. If you’ve been using a plugin for this, now you can make your grids natively. Better pattern management in Classic themes You heard right: You can do everything with patterns in Classic themes that you can in a block theme. You can see all the patterns available to you in a single view and insert a pattern on the fly. Negative. Margins. They’re here: negative margin values, so you can make objects overlap in your design. As a guardrail, you can only set a negative margin by typing an actual negative number, not by using the slider. That’s to keep people from adding negative values they didn’t intend. Rollback auto-updates Now you can have the convenience of setting all your plugins to auto-update and the inner peace you get from knowing that if anything goes wrong, 6.6 will do a rollback. Automatically. This post reflects the latest changes as of June 4, 2024. Again, the features in this first beta may change, based on what testers like you find. Get an overview of the 6.6 release cycle, and check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.6-related posts in the next few weeks for further details. Just for you: a Beta 1 haiku Negative margins Embellish all the new ways To design and build Thanks very much to @meher, @audrasjb, @fabiankaegy, @colorful-tones, @davidbaumwald, @dansoschin, @desrosj, @atachibana, @ehtis, @adamsilverstein, @joedolson, and @webcommsat for reviewing and collaborating on this post! View the full article

WordCamp Europe 2024 kicks off on June 13, gathering WordPressers from across the globe to Torino, Italy. The highly anticipated conference has a packed schedule starting with Contributor Day and will feature a notable roster of speakers. Other highlights will include engaging workshops covering a variety of disciplines (including one for youth and teens) and WordCamp Connect, a dedicated space for attendees to meet and network with additional community-led sessions. The conference will conclude with an exciting mid-year project update from WordPress Cofounder Matt Mullenweg, including a live Q&A session. You can watch Matt’s presentation on June 15, 2024, streaming live on the WordPress YouTube channel starting at 4:30 p.m. Central European Summer Time (2:30 p.m. UTC). What: WordPress Project Summer Update + Q&A Session with Matt Mullenweg When: June 15, 2024 at 2:30 p.m. UTC (Start of live stream) Where: Lingotto Conference and Exhibition Centre Streaming: Watch the live stream on the WordPress YouTube channel. Have a question for Matt? If you’re unable to attend WordCamp Europe 2024 in person, you’re welcome to email your questions instead. Given the number of questions expected both in-person and online, only some of the submitted questions may be answered live. Whether you’re touching down in Torino or streaming from elsewhere, see you very soon! View the full article

Welcome to another episode of the WordPress Briefing! In this episode, your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, delves into the incredible resources available to help you broaden your WordPress expertise. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to deepen your skillset, these tools and tutorials offer something for everyone. Join us as we explore how Learn WordPress can be your guide on the journey to mastering WordPress, providing invaluable support and community connections along the way. Credits Host: Josepha Haden Chomphosy Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Brett McSherry Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Show Notes WordPress Events Learn WordPress Online Workshops Tutorials Lesson Plans Small List of Big Things WordCamp Europe Youth & Teen Workshop Registration is Open Roadmap to WordPress 6.6 WordCamp US 2024 Showcase Day Share Feedback with Meetup.com Have a question you’d like answered? Submit them to WPBriefing@WordPress.org. Transcript [00:00:10] Josepha: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go! [00:00:28] (Intro Music) [00:00:40] Josepha: My friends, I don’t know about where you live, but where I live, it’s graduation season. Students all across the region are either gearing down for a little bit of a brain break or gearing up for the next big adventure in their lives. And as I watch these students discover the next phases in their lives, whether it looks good or bad, whether it feels fearful or faithful, I can’t help but think back to my last big change. [00:01:07] Josepha: The one that brought me here to WordPress. I was working in insurance at the time and investing in a side hustle. And as is often the case with side hustles, discovered that knowing something about marketing myself was going to be key. Now, this next bit, I know that a lot of you will understand immediately. After that realization, I entered a period in my life where I was learning how to invest in my hoped-for side hustle so that I could realize my hoped-for dreams while also having to succeed at the job that I was using to pay my bills. By some singular coincidence, I wound up being introduced to the WordPress project, where I found not only the tools it turned out I needed but also people who were willing to help me learn them. For me, during that time, the cost to get access to both the tool and that support was basically zero. Like the whole cost to me was get those WordPress people together in a room to talk about WordPress for an hour. [00:02:04] Josepha: And that’s something that I always want to do anyway. I always want to get people together. And if what we’re talking about is WordPress, and that is what I need to learn about, then so be it. I realize that there is a little bit of privilege in that story and a whole lot of persistence. It’s not like I discovered it, and overnight, everything worked out well, and perfectly, and correctly. However, all of the struggles to get what I got accomplished done aside. One of the things that I love the most about how the WordPress project has evolved over time is that we took that already low-cost, low-barrier concept and did everything in our power to take that low-cost, low-barrier and make it available to as many people as possible in as many points in their journey as possible. So, if you’re at the start of your career or thinking about a bit of a career change, I have some resources for you. Like, stick around. But before we get to the resources, I want to make sure that you hear this. Learning WordPress things, whether that’s the software itself, or how to run a business supported by WordPress, or how to support other businesses by building them WordPress stuff, learning these skills now is an investment in who you want to be. [00:03:20] Josepha: It’s placing a bet that’s grounded in what you think you can bring to the world before anyone else might have figured out it’s what they need in their lives. And when you do that, in WordPress, you’re accessing and hopefully one day contributing to an equitable framework that doesn’t require you to understand it in order for you to benefit from it. You can do hard things, and hopefully, these resources make those hard things a little easier. I’m going to take us through a whirlwind wayfinding list. I’ll generally be focused on time required and then kind of like necessary actions or context that would be useful for you to know. But remember that your mileage may vary. [00:04:01] Josepha: If something sounds close but not perfect, I encourage you to give it a try anyway. The worst that happens is you try something different next time. Or, in the best-case scenario, you create something that other folks also have been missing. There was something that was close for them but not perfect either, and maybe you found the thing that’s perfect for them. So, here is my whirlwind wayfinding list. Let’s go. Only have one hour a week and prefer a little company in your learning? Check out a meetup event near you. You can find those listed in your dashboard or on events.WordPress.org, but frequently, they happen during the week, after work hours, sometimes they happen on the weekend, they happen like in libraries or coffee shops. So, there are a lot of different ways that these events come together, and surely, there will be something that is the sort of low-key event that you want. But if not, you can always reach out to your local chapter and see how you can get involved with that, how you can help them create a new meetup event. [00:05:02] Josepha: The next option, if you only have an hour a week, but you actually don’t want company but still use some external support, I would check out one of our online workshops. There are cohorts for each workshop, and they’re run by facilitators so that you can learn and socialize from the comfort and safety of your own space, or if you really are super strapped for time, that can help with like not having to commute anywhere. Next up on our list, feel like you could average an hour a week, but honestly, would prefer it to be in one big chunk? Check out a WordCamp near you. Those are a little bit like the meetups but quite a bit bigger and a lot more content, a lot more learning available, and gets you into a different kind of group of people in your local area. Those happen about once a year per city or region, but if there’s not one within a comfortable traveling distance for you, it might be a good chance for you to do a mini business trip, or if you’re doing it as current career development, see if your boss, or your boss self, if you are your own boss, has a continuing education budget available for you. [00:06:08] Josepha: Have 30 minutes or so a week and don’t need any external motivation? On the one hand, I am a little jealous. I sometimes need my own external motivation. But, if that’s not you, if you can just self-drive forever, then courses over on learn.WordPress.org are just about your speed. We even have a series of learning pathways in development that curate all the courses you need to achieve particular milestones. You can also help to create those. If you have been all the way through your learning journey and you’re, like, the most WordPressy WordPresser we’ve ever seen, and you just want to make sure that other people have the same opportunities you’ve had, that’s an excellent opportunity to show up and make sure that the knowledge is still available, still free, still can be accessed. And finally, if you have unpredictable time and also still comfortable being completely self-driven, We have in the WordPress ecosystem countless videos, blogs, tutorials, and a ton of content creators that are behind them that specialize in teaching WordPress basics but also leveling up existing knowledge. And if your type of existing knowledge is in the, like, gathering the network to succeed, sort of area. We even have podcasts and blogs that are dedicated to the more businessy side of WordPress, how to make this function in the WordPress ecosystem. [00:07:32] Josepha: As always, I’ll have links for everything in the show notes—just myriad links because this isn’t even all that we need to share with you today. And I’m going to say this last thing one more time because I really, really mean it like a whole, whole lot. I know it’s hard, bordering on impossible sometimes, to carve out time to learn new things. But when you’re ready to invest in yourself, I’m pretty sure that these resources will be here to support your hoped-for dreams. [00:07:58] (Music interlude) [00:08:05] Josepha: And that brings us now to our small list of big things. First up is speaking of learning, speaking of investing in your future. WordCamp Europe has a youth and teen workshop going on. The registration for that is still open. It is open for students aged 10 to 16. It’s gonna be a hands-on workshop. They’ll get to build their own website with WordPress and then explore some cutting-edge technology from VR to AI and learn essential internet safety skills. We’re going to be running that on June 13th. It will be in both English and Italian. I will leave a link to the registration in the show notes. And the next thing on our list is pretty much related. It’s kind of related. At WordCamp US this year, we have a Showcase Day. Now, this is new to WordCamp US, and it’s all about pushing the boundaries of what WordPress can do. It will feature presentations, demos, and technical workshops for all kinds of projects, from high-profile, large-scale builds with innovative integrations to more niche creative implementations that still have a big impact. Submissions are now open for it. If you are working on something that is really cool and uses WordPress and want to show it off to the WordPress community, wander over there, submit your project; let’s take a look at it and see if we can get it into that showcase lineup, but if you are looking for inspiration about what WordPress can do, if you’re still figuring out how this can work the best for you, that’s going to be a great opportunity to look at some unusual implementations so that you can get an idea for how big this thing can get. [00:09:43] Josepha: And just some tactical things. The next two things on my small of big things are two tactical items. One is that WordPress 6.6 is on the move; as always, we have Beta 1 scheduled pretty soon here. So, dig into our priority features. I will leave a link to the roadmap for WordPress 6.6. We’re targeting, if I recall correctly, middle of July for that release. And so it’s coming up faster than you think. And we would absolutely love for you to come in, test the Beta, tell us what’s broken so that we can fix it before it gets out. We can’t fix the things if you don’t tell us they’re broken. [00:10:17] Josepha: And then the final thing on our small list of big things is that speaking of not being able to fix things that we don’t know are broken. So, we use meetup.com to manage all of our meetup series. Well, most of our meetup series anyway, but they are planning to invest in some product improvements, and they have asked for feedback from the WordPress community. Historically, we are one of the largest, most active communities on their platform. And so, if you could fill out the feedback form, if you’ve been to a meetup, or if you tried to find a meetup using meetup.com and did not succeed, that’s probably also relevant information. I’ll have a link to that here as well. It will go directly to their product team. And hopefully we’ll see some product improvements for the WordPress community in the future. [00:11:01] Josepha: And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Don’t forget to follow us, follow me on your favorite podcast app, or subscribe directly on WordPress.org/news. You’ll get a friendly reminder whenever there’s a new episode, and if you liked what you heard today, share it with a fellow WordPresser. Or, if you had questions about what you heard, you can share those with me at WPBriefing@WordPress.org. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Thanks again, and I’ll see you in a couple of weeks. [00:11:29] (Music outro) View the full article

There’s a new initiative in the WordPress community: the WordPress Media Corps. In today’s episode of the WordPress Briefing, you’ll find out how it came to be, first as a nugget of an idea during the pandemic and now as an active experiment. Learn how this shift in focus values the ongoing impact, and often invisible effort, of independent WordPress media—and seeks to help them more easily deliver engaging, high-quality WordPress content to their audiences. Credits Host: Josepha Haden Chomphosy Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Brett McSherry Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Show Notes Making a WordPress Media Corps WordPress Media Corps Next Steps WordPress Media Corps Initial Roadmap #media-corps Slack channel Small List of Big Things WordPress 6.6 call for volunteers update WordPress 6.5.3 maintenance release Openverse Introduces Collection views for Tags, Creators, and Sources WordCamp Europe 2024 Schedule Released Have a question you’d like answered? Submit them to WPBriefing@WordPress.org. Transcript [00:00:00] Josepha: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go! [00:00:28] (Intro Music) [00:00:39] Josepha: If you’ve been keeping an eye on the WordPress marketing space for the past few months, today’s topic will be no surprise to you. Today, we’re talking about the WordPress Media Corps. It’s a bit of a controversial topic; there’s no point denying that, so today, I want to take a little journey through its history. The WordPress Media Corps is an idea that goes back probably four, maybe five years ago. I don’t know what year it is—four years, five, four, or five years ago. It was the height of our COVID isolation. So I was spending a lot of time with our WordPress media folks, people who hosted podcasts, who gathered weekly roundups, and who were writing these nuanced and thoughtful newsletters. [00:01:19] Josepha: And during the prep phases for these, I was witnessing all the work that goes into them, researching questions and topics, marketing both before and after any appearance, and consistently engaging with the audiences they had grown over time. Over the course of the year, I wound up in two or three different conversations with these hosts about how this does or doesn’t fit in the WordPress project as a way to contribute. Now, invisible contributions are a persistent concern for any open source project and is one of the problems I am often most desperate to solve. As with so many long-standing problems, if the solution were easy, it wouldn’t still be a problem. And that’s the case here as well. I’ve got a quick side note on why this is a hard problem to solve at the end of the episode. It’s relevant to the overall discussion, but not if you’re only here to learn about how we arrived at the Media Corps. So, choose your own adventure! [00:02:16] Josepha: So, during one of those discussions, Allie Nimmons reminded me that we have always relied on third-party supporters to share information about WordPress. It was a smaller group than we have now, much less variety in the format, but they didn’t have contribution acknowledgments either, right? And she was right. They were included in something called the WP Planet. And I remember that I said to her what I wouldn’t give to be able to acknowledge the value that WordPress media folks bring to our ecosystem. These folks who have more flexibility than us can be a little more, more nimble who are canonical power users of WordPress, sharing not only what they are excited about now and in the near future but also the things that they had to learn in order to get the most out of the features and the software. [00:03:07] Josepha: Like that’s practically a gold standard of the people that we want to have talking about us. And, for folks who’ve worked with Allie, you probably can predict what’s next. You know she’s not afraid to call it like she sees it, and she called me on my excessive dreaming. She asked me what actually was stopping me from getting that done. I don’t recall if I had an answer for her at the time. I, I probably didn’t, but ultimately, I think the answer was, most likely, that I was afraid to try. So you might be asking yourself, what has changed my mind since then? What has changed since 2020, when I was maybe too scared to get this done? Why does now feel like the right time compared to when I was first thinking through it? Well, for starters, when we look at then, we look at the context of then; it was my second year leading us. It was 2020, the year of COVID. And I was desperately trying to roll out a disaster recovery plan, incomplete though it was. [00:04:06] Josepha: I wasn’t sure how much more disruption we as a community could stand, so I didn’t want to take any more risks than I had to. Which brings us to today. One of my big obstacles to tackle this year is our plateauing growth. I said it right there in my big-picture post for 2024. Re-engaging those gold standard users who are talking about us while making it clear that their contributions add to the success of the project seems like a high-impact opportunity to me. We’ve kicked off our initial experiment for the Media Corps. As with many high-impact projects, there’s also a high potential for risk, so I’m trying to get a clear indication of success as early as possible. Because of that, the experiment is time-limited and has pretty strict guidelines up front. It’s also being paired with a pause on the current work with the marketing team, just so that we can focus as much attention to get that signal sooner rather than later. [00:05:01] Josepha: Not everyone agrees with this plan, which is to be expected. There are so many seasoned marketing professionals in WordPress, myself included, and I mean, our software is a primary tool in so many marketing tool belts. It probably would be odd if we didn’t have any marketers around. So there you have it, a brief explanation of how we got to today’s Media Corps experiment. Quick side note on why it’s a hard problem is that a good first step to acknowledging invisible work is removing the need for human recognition of the work. I’ve worked with teams, guided them since I got here to define contributions as granularly as possible so that we can find ways to attach automated triggers to them so that you don’t have to do a ton of invisible things for someone to notice them and give you props for them. Obviously, the more automation, the more dehumanization, and of course, the work of breaking things into tiny chunks feels like micromanagement; it feels like value assessment. [00:06:01] Josepha: It also often felt like kind of a toxic tallying of who was doing what where. None of that is what any of us wanted when I started that work, and it’s certainly not what I want now. But because it is so often misread as a way to, like, separate out good contributions from bad, not all teams have embarked on that journey with me. And for those who have done that with me, not all of them have actually implemented, kind of that definition of the individual types of contributions you can make so that we can do that kind of automated acknowledgment of the work. [00:06:40] (Music interlude) [00:06:47] Josepha: Which brings us now to our small list of big things. First on our list is WordPress 6.6. It’s our next major release. There are still a few volunteer roles that are available. I think documentation lead is one. So, if you are the sort of folk who just loves to write the docs, it’s been a while since you have done that for the WordPress project, with the WordPress project. That’s a great opportunity for you to kind of dip your toe in and see what’s going on in the world of WordPress. [00:07:15] Josepha: The second thing on our list is a minor release that actually came out last week. It’s a maintenance release, but it’s one of those where it’s really important to get upgraded and make sure that you have the latest security and maintenance releases on all of your sites that are in production. The third thing on our list is about Openverse. Openverse is now offering a new way to explore our collection. We’ve got over 800 million images and audio files in there. And so, the collection search makes it easier to view works that are belonging to an individual tag, creator, or source. It just kind of helps you filter it out a little bit more so that there are more decisions than there are options available in there. And the fourth thing on my list is that the WordCamp Europe 2024 schedule has been released. We’ll be talking a bit more about this event as we get closer and closer to it. We are racing our way. It’s like a month away as we go. So take a look, plan your activities, and come and check out our community. [00:08:16] Josepha: And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Don’t forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app or subscribe directly on WordPress.org/news. You’ll get a friendly reminder whenever there’s a new episode. If you liked what you heard today, share it with a fellow WordPresser. Or, if you had questions about what you heard, you can share those with me at WPBriefing@WordPress.org. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Thanks for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. [00:08:44] (Music outro) View the full article

WordPress 6.5.3 is now available! This minor release features 12 bug fixes in Core and 9 bug fixes for the block editor. You can review a summary of the maintenance updates in this release by reading the Release Candidate announcement. WordPress 6.5.3 is a short-cycle release. The next major release will be version 6.6 planned for July 2024. If you have sites that support automatic background updates, the update process will begin automatically. You can download WordPress 6.5.3 from WordPress.org, or visit your WordPress Dashboard, click “Updates”, and then click “Update Now”. For more information on this release, please visit the HelpHub site. Thank you to these WordPress contributors This release was led by Aaron Jorbin and Grant M. Kinney. WordPress 6.5.3 would not have been possible without the contributions of the following people. Their asynchronous coordination to deliver maintenance fixes into a stable release is a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress community. Aaron Jorbin, Adam Silverstein, adrianduffell, Aki Hamano, Alan Fuller, Anders Norén, André, Andrea Fercia, Andrew Ozz, Andrew Serong, Andy Fragen, annezazu, Arun Sharma, Aslam Doctor, Ben Keith, Ben Ritner – Kadence WP, bernhard-reiter, Brian Alexander, Carolina Nymark, Colin Stewart, CookiesForDevo, Damon Cook, Daniel Richards, darerodz, Dave Page, David Baumwald, David Levine, Drew Jaynes, Ella, Erik, evanltd, Felix Arntz, George Mamadashvili, Grant M. Kinney, Greg Ziółkowski, Isabel Brison, James Huff, Jason Adams, Jb Audras, Jeffrey Paul, Jeremy Herve, Jessica Lyschik, Joe Dolson, Joe McGill, jordesign, Jorge Costa, Joshua Goode, Kai Hao, Kevin Hoffman, Khokan Sardar, luisherranz, Matias Benedetto, Matt Cromwell, Md Sahadat Husain, Mukesh Panchal, Narendra Sishodiya, Nik Tsekouras, Pascal Birchler, Peter Wilson, ramonopoly, Roy Tanck, Sal Ferrarello, Sarah Norris, Sergey Biryukov, Stephen Bernhardt, Steve Jones, Tom Cafferkey, WilliamG, Yannis Guyon How to contribute To get involved in WordPress core development, head over to Trac, pick a ticket, and join the conversation in the #core and #6-6-release-leads channels. Need help? Check out the Core Contributor Handbook. Thanks to @grantmkin, @angelasjin, and @jeffpaul for proofreading. View the full article

Explore the transformative world of the WordPress Contributor Mentorship Program with guest host Angela Jin and special guest and sponsored contributor Hari Shanker. Whether you’re a long-time WordPress enthusiast or new to the scene, this episode is packed with insights, stories, and tips to help you engage more deeply with one of the most passionate open source communities. Credits Guest host: Angela Jin Guest speaker: Hari Shanker Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Brett McSherry and Nicholas Garofalo Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Show Notes Five for the Future About the Contributor Mentorship Program Details of Mentorship Program Cohorts Mentorship Program Cohort 2 Graduation Post – Express interest in the next cohort by leaving comment or sending a message to @harishanker in the Making WordPress Slack Small List of Big Things Brainstorming a Support Team Contributor Ladder Observations on WordPress Contributor Team Structure Apply for the Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship for WordCamp US 2024 Upcoming WordPress events: WordCamp Europe 2024 Tickets Find upcoming events in your area on events.WordPress.org Have a question you’d like answered? Submit them to WPBriefing@WordPress.org. Transcript [00:00:00] Angela: 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 insights into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I am your guest host, Angela Jin. Let’s go! [00:00:30] (Intro Music) [00:00:40] Angela: I am delighted to be guest hosting this episode of the WordPress Briefing and to talk about the Contributor Mentorship Program, a community-driven initiative in the WordPress space that is proving to really support contributor journeys. And joining me today is special guest, Hari Shanker, Five for the Future Program Manager. Welcome, Hari! [00:01:02] Hari: Thank you, Angela. Excited to be here. [00:01:04] Angela: Now, before we dive into the Contributor Mentorship Program, can you first tell me a bit about yourself? I’d love to know a bit more about your role as Five for the Future Program Manager. [00:01:16] Hari: Sure. So, my name is Hari Shanker. I live in India in a city called Kochi. And I’d like to share some context to explain what I do. I am a sponsored contributor working full-time on WordPress, and I have been contributing primarily to the WordPress Community Team full-time since April 2020, where I am a Community Program Manager, formerly known as a Super Deputy. Since September 2022, I have been working exclusively on projects that bolster the WordPress contributor experience. A key part of this work is my role as the Program Manager for the Five for the Future program, where my day-to-day work involves supporting and empowering companies and individuals that have pledged a part of their time to contribute to WordPress. [00:02:00] Hari: In parallel, I also lead the Contributor Working Group of the WordPress Community Team, which has the goal of making the contributor experience in WordPress the best it can be. Our recent focus has been on running an experimental contributor mentorship program as well. [00:02:16] Angela: Excellent. Thank you. So, I was recently at Open Source Summit, and figuring out funding and commitments to projects was a very hot topic. And people were really interested in Five for the Future. And so, Hari, would you mind giving us a quick overview of what Five for the Future is, and how it aims to support the WordPress open source project? [00:02:44] Hari: Absolutely. The Cofounder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, launched Five for the Future in 2014 as a call to action for organizations and individuals who have benefited from WordPress, either the CMS or the community, to contribute up to 5 percent of their resources to the continued success of the WordPress project. [00:03:03] Hari: In 2019, this idea was formalized as a program with a pledging page that lives in the URL WordPress.org/five. Right now, this program attempts to foster generous collaboration towards the long-term health and stability of our project for the future. So, like any large and successful open source project, WordPress has a lot of big goals and tasks, not all of which can be accomplished by volunteers in that available time. Here’s where sponsored contributors come in. Sponsored contributors have more time, availability, and bandwidth to make an impact on a lot of these tasks. They also work on some routine but important administrative and housekeeping tasks that are essential to keep the project running smoothly. At this time, the program has 868 contributors from 183 companies, who have pledged 7,722 hours of contribution time per week for the program. I can also share that roughly 70% of contribution activity in WordPress is coming from these sponsored contributors. That is the Five for the Future program in brief. [00:04:15] Angela: Thanks, Hari. That’s incredible that so much of our contribution comes through sponsored time and clearly is very necessary to keep the WordPress open source project running. Wonderful. All right, well, I would love to dig into the Contributor Mentorship Program. Can you tell us a bit more about how this came to be? What is the Contributor Mentorship Program? [00:04:41] Hari: Oh, absolutely. It is one of my favorite programs and one of the best things that I’ve worked on personally. So, the Contributor Mentorship Program aims to onboard new contributors to WordPress by providing them one-on-one and cohort-based mentorship for a period of typically four to six weeks. The mentorship program typically coincides a major WordPress release. [00:05:04] Hari: And the idea behind the program is to help new contributors kickstart their WordPress contributor journey by providing them an in-depth overview of the WordPress project as well. To talk a bit about how this started, it all began in 2022-2023 when I started researching on the WordPress contributor experience. I discovered that there were gaps in the onboarding experience for new contributors. And I did some research on how we can solve this issue. Now, while those gaps can be fixed by improving the overall WordPress contributor onboarding experience through technical changes or changes in the program. Mentorship really stood out as an excellent solution to solve the problem. Based on my discovery from this research, I worked on revitalizing the WordPress Contributor Working Group of the Community Team. And together, our group we started working on building a mentorship program. We did a few months of collaborative discussions and brainstorming. And as a result, the group put together the idea for a pilot cohort-based mentorship program, which paired up 13 new contributors as mentees with one mentor each. The cohort worked together for four weeks, and 11 of these mentees graduated after making impactful contributions to the project, with over half of the cohort staying on to make long-term contributions. In fact, we just wrapped up the second cohort of the program in February 2024, which had 52 participants, of which 44 graduated from the program. [00:06:34] Angela: Amazing. Congratulations. And I speaking just for myself, I know how important mentorship was to, to a lot of my journeys, both within WordPress and outside of, and so I think it’s wonderful that we’re able to bring mentorship to this space. What sort of benefits are there to participating in this program, either as a new WordPress contributor or as a mentor? [00:07:04] Hari: There’s a bunch of benefits for both new contributors and mentors in this program, starting with new contributors. First and foremost, new participants in this program they get to kick off their WordPress contributor journey by making initial contributions. So, in my mind, the biggest benefit that they get is they get a chance to actually make their first contributions in the area of their choice with help from a mentor. The other main benefit that I see is that these mentees or new contributors. They get to learn a lot about the WordPress project and how it works. They get to learn about the WordPress release process broadly. And in short, participants in this program also get a chance to network with and learn from experienced WordPress contributors. And finally, this program is a great opportunity for mentees or new contributors to pick up a lot of valuable skills that they can use in the real world. For mentors, they also get a lot of benefits from this program. In fact, to share another anecdote, some of our mentors they contributed for the first time to WordPress core in the last cohort. [00:08:14] Hari: So, that is also something that they also get to learn, which means mentors also get to learn new skills when they be a part of this program. So, for mentors, even they get to enhance their skills, they get to expand the network within the WordPress community, but in my mind, the biggest benefit that they gain is they gain fulfillment from guiding new contributors. And personally, as a mentor myself, it’s one of the most valuable thing that you can gain from such a program. That feeling of belonging, that feeling of, you know, fostering sustainability and innovation in the project. I also feel that mentoring new contributors is a great way to bolster your leadership and communication skills, which is extremely valuable in any professional context. [00:08:54] Angela: Absolutely. I definitely see that being able to share your experience and mentor others is a really valuable way to help the next generation of WordPressers be successful in our space. Now, you’ve talked a bit about what results you’re seeing from this program, and it’s really exciting to see that so many mentees are successfully graduating from this program. I’d love to hear more about the impact and results that you’re seeing from the mentorship program. Could you give us more details there? [00:09:32] Hari: Absolutely. So, I shared some numbers earlier. We had 11 mentees out of 13 graduating from the 2023 cohort and 44 outta 52 mentees from the 2024 Q1 cohort graduating. From the first cohort we have six of these mentees continuing to make impactful contributions to the project, but we have more encouraging results from the second cohort, in fact. So, ten of our mentees in the second cohort got props for contributing to WordPress 6.5, and one of our mentees was a noteworthy contributor. That’s about 22% of all the mentees. Fourteen mentees from the latest cohort, which is 31%, they have committed to join the WordPress 6.6 release squad. And the program actually gave eight new core contributors to the project, which includes mentors, as I mentioned earlier. [00:10:21] Hari: We did pre and post-cohort surveys, and the results are very interesting. I can definitely share some numbers here. So, we had a question on contributor familiarity. The familiarity of contribution for new contributors went up from 53% to 80%, that’s around 26% increase. The contribution confidence went from 57% to 82%, which is around 28%-29%. We asked if the mentees how many of these mentees were satisfied by the program. We heard that 88% of all the mentees were satisfied. 80% of mentees achieved their personal goals as part of the program. A key part of the program experience was that we asked mentees to create contribution plans to make future contributions. [00:11:06] Hari: 62% of our mentees actually made a future contribution plan. So which means, which is a 30, 60, 90-day plan. So, these mentees they’re gonna follow a plan to contribute to WordPress for the next three months. Finally, we also created a ton of learning materials for these mentees, and we are in the process of releasing them. So these are, most of these are videos, so we plan to release them in WordPress or TV and in the Learn WordPress platform. So, in my mind, seeing these mentees out in the world making impactful contributions that is the biggest impact that I’m seeing. So, having them in the project as long-term contributors. That is, in my mind, one of the biggest impacts that we’ve had from this program. [00:11:46] Angela: Yeah, that’s really incredible to see that new contributors to WordPress, upon joining this program, able to better navigate this vast ecosystem and make important contributions to our space. And that they’ve made these connections, so they are sticking around and staying with us and continuing to help us build WordPress. That’s incredible. [00:12:14] Angela: Now, I understand that between the first cohort and the second cohort, the Contributor Working Group made some important updates and iterated on the cohort itself. And one of the big changes, I understand, was to design cohorts around contributor projects. I’m curious now that we’ve talked about how fantastic this program is. Are there plans for future cohorts, and what might those cohorts look like? [00:12:44] Hari: Absolutely. So, we have received a lot of interest in future cohorts. So, our working group just did a chat last week, and there was overwhelming positive interest and from all our working group members and other participants saying that we would love to be in a future cohort. So, short answer, yes, we will have a ton of these cohorts going forward. And we are, in fact, hosting a new cohort alongside WordPress 6.7. In October-November, 2024. And we will most likely continue to host at least one mentorship cohort every year. Ideally two, but I’m just saying one to make sure that we are sustainable. It is hard to predict how future cohorts will look like, but based on all the discussions our working group has had, I can definitely tell you how the next cohort is going to look like. [00:13:35] Hari: So, as per current plans, we will have around 20 to 30 mentees supported by mentors. And the cohort will most likely start early on in the 6.7 release process. The idea is that we would like our mentees to be more deeply involved in the 6.7 release as early as possible. We also plan to have a lot more learn-up sessions in the next cohort. One feedback that we heard was our mentees really enjoyed some of the learn-up sessions, and they would like these sessions to be scheduled in advance as much as possible so that they can attend as many of them as possible. So, more learn-up sessions. [00:14:14] Hari: And finally, you mentioned projects when you spoke of the latest cohort. We are going to double down on projects in the next cohort. So the hope is to have a host of projects for folks to work on and, ideally, have all mentees work on some project or the other. So, we had projects as an experiment for the earlier cohort. Some mentees did work on projects, while some they were broadly contributing. So, ideally, for the next cohort, every mentee in the program will be a part of some project or the other. It could be a small one. It could be a big one, but there will be some project of some sort for every mentee in the program, ideally. And finally, some contributors in our cohort, they received a scholarship to participate in the last cohort. We hope to expand that. We hope to provide more opportunities for scholarship for contributors. [00:15:05] Hari: I’m not sure how viable it is, but we did see that the folks who received scholarship, they got a chance to contribute more. So we would ideally like to provide more opportunities for scholarship, especially for folks from underrepresented backgrounds, so that they can contribute to WordPress and, you know, upskill as part of this program. [00:15:23] Angela: Fantastic. Well, hopefully, we have convinced our listeners today to get involved in the Contributor Mentorship Program. And so, if somebody wanted to get involved, either as a mentee or a mentor, how should they go about doing so? [00:15:42] Hari: That’s a great question. We have not opened up signups for mentors and mentees for the next cohort yet. As I mentioned, it’s going to happen later this year. However, those interested in the next cohort of the program can comment on the post. I think we can share the link in the show notes. We just published a post announcing the graduation of our mentees, and we had asked folks who are interested in joining the next cohort comment there. [00:16:07] Hari: So if you’re interested in joining the next cohort, either as a mentor or a mentee. You can comment on that post. Alternatively, you can also DM me. If you’re not comfortable commenting in a public space, my name is Hari Shanker. I am Hari Shanker, which is H-A-R-I-S-H-A-N-K-E-R. That’s my username in the Make WordPress Slack. You can DM me there expressing your interest, and I will make sure that we send you the call for interest form when it’s published. Additionally, and this is especially to all the mentor applicants, we have a Contributor Working Group, which meets every third Thursday of the month in the Community Team channel on a text chat. It’s called a mentorship chat. It happens every month, and you can find a link to it in the Make WordPress meetings, P2 blog. So, if you’re interested in being a mentor, or if you’re interested in building the Contributor Mentorship Program, or contributing to the Contributor Mentorship Program, I would invite you to join our chat. So, the next chat is being held in May. Please join our next chat. That’s also a great way to contribute to this program, especially if you are interested in being a mentor. [00:17:10] Angela: Wonderful. Thank you so much for joining me today, Hari. It’s been a pleasure. [00:17:16] Hari: Thank you. It’s been an honor, and thank you for inviting me to be a part of this program. [00:17:19] (Music interlude) [00:17:27] Angela: And now it is time for our small list of big things. We’ve got three things for you this week. The first is a proposal to explore the Support Team contributor ladder. If you are not familiar with the concept of the contributor ladder, it is based on the five stages of volunteering, which examines how a volunteer gets onboarded and steps into progressive roles. By thinking through the contributor ladder, Make WordPress teams are able to improve onboarding, engagement, and connection with contributors and generally improve the health of their team. If this is of interest to you, we have a great overview post about the contributor ladder, and you can see the discussion in action over on the Support Team. [00:18:14] Angela: Second, is that the WordPress Foundation has just announced the Kim Parcell Memorial Scholarship for 2024. This scholarship is in honor of Kim Parcell, an incredible long-time contributor, and is awarded to a current WordPress contributor who is a woman, has not previously attended WordCamp US, and requires financial assistance to attend this year’s event. The scholarship will provide travel assistance for the recipient to attend WordCamp US this year in Portland, Oregon, and covers travel from your home city, hotel, and your ticket to the event. The application is open through May 30th, and you can apply on the WordPress Foundation page. Third is a reminder of our next big WordPress event, WordCamp Europe, which will be in beautiful Torino, Italy, June 13th through the 15th. You can still get tickets on their website. If you can’t make it to Italy, never fear. This time of year sees a good number of WordPress events around the world, and they are a great way to connect with WordPress friends and hear all about the latest and greatest in WordPress. You can go find upcoming events on events.WordPress.org to see what events are happening in your area. If there isn’t a WordPress event near you, you can become an organizer and start hosting events locally. [00:19:42] Angela: And that, friends, is your small list of big things. Don’t forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app. Or subscribe directly on WordPress.org/news. You’ll get a friendly reminder whenever there’s a new episode. If you liked what you heard today, share it with a fellow WordPresser, or if you had questions about what you heard, you can share those by emailing WPBriefing@WordPress.org. I am your guest host, Angela Jin. Thanks so much for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. In a couple of weeks, Josepha will be back as your regular host for the next episode. [00:20:21] (Music outro) View the full article

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

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

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

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

Say hello to WordPress 6.5 “Regina,” inspired by the dynamic versatility of renowned jazz violinist Regina Carter. An award-winning artist and storied jazz educator known for transcending genre, Regina’s technical foundations in classical music and deep understanding of jazz have earned her the reputation of boldly going beyond what’s possible with the violin. Let the stunning twists and subtle turns of Regina’s genre-bending sound surprise you as you explore everything 6.5 offers. This latest version of WordPress puts more power into the details. It offers new and improved ways to fine-tune and enhance your site-building experience, letting you take control in ways that make it your own. You’ll find new ways to manage your site’s typography, more comprehensive revisions available in more places, and a collection of Site Editor updates paired with impressive performance gains to help you get things done smoother and faster. “Regina” also marks the introduction of some breakthrough developer tools that will start transforming how you use and extend blocks to craft engaging experiences. The Interactivity API opens up a world of creative front-end possibilities, while the Block Bindings API makes dynamic connections between blocks and data seamless. These, among other developer-focused improvements and updates, are ready to help you evolve how you build with WordPress. Download WordPress 6.5 “Regina” What’s inside 6.5 Add and manage fonts across your site The new Font Library puts you in control of an essential piece of your site’s design—typography—without coding or extra steps. Effortlessly install, remove, and activate local and Google Fonts across your site for any Block theme. The ability to include custom typography collections gives site creators and publishers more options when it comes to styling content. Get more from your revisions—including revisions for templates and template parts Work through creative projects with a more comprehensive picture of what’s been done—and what you can fall back on. Get details like time stamps, quick summaries, and a paginated list of all revisions. View revisions from the Style Book to see how changes impact every block. Revisions are also now available for templates and template parts. Play with enhanced background and shadow tools Control the size, repeat, and focal point options for background images in Group blocks so you can explore subtle or splashy ways to add visual interest to layouts. Set aspect ratios for Cover block images and easily add color overlays that automatically source color from your chosen image. Add box shadow support to more block types and create layouts with visual depth, or throw a little personality into your design. Discover new Data Views Every piece of your site comes with a library of information and data—now, you can find what you need quickly and organize it however you like. Data views for pages, templates, patterns, and template parts let you see data in a table or grid view, with the option to toggle fields and make bulk changes. Smoother drag-and-drop Feel the difference when you move things around, with helpful visual cues like displaced items in List View or frictionless dragging to anywhere in your workspace—from beginning to end. Improved link controls Create and manage links easily with a more intuitive link-building experience, like a streamlined UI and a shortcut for copying links. What’s fresh for developers in 6.5 Bring interactions to blocks with the Interactivity API The Interactivity API offers developers a standardized method for building interactive front-end experiences with blocks. It simplifies the process, with fewer dependencies on external tooling, while maintaining optimal performance. Use it to create memorable user experiences, like fetching search results instantly or letting visitors interact with content in real time. Connect blocks to custom fields or other dynamic content Link core block attributes to custom fields and use the value of custom fields without creating custom blocks. Powered by the Block Bindings API, developers can extend this capability further to connect blocks to any dynamic content—even beyond custom fields. If there’s data stored elsewhere, easily point blocks to that new source with only a few lines of code. Add appearance tools to Classic themes Give designers and creators using Classic themes access to an upgraded design experience. Opt in to support for spacing, border, typography, and color options, even without using theme.json. Once support is enabled, more tools will be automatically added as they become available. Explore improvements to the plugin experience There’s now an easier way to manage plugin dependencies. Plugin authors can supply a new Requires Plugins header with a comma-separated list of required plugin slugs, presenting users with links to install and activate those plugins first. From fast to faster: Performance updates This release includes 110+ performance updates, resulting in an impressive increase in speed and efficiency across the Post Editor and Site Editor. Loading is over two times faster than in 6.4, with input processing speed up to five times faster than the previous release. Translated sites see up to 25% improvement in load time for this release courtesy of Performant Translations. Additional performance highlights include AVIF image support and improvements for registering block variations with callbacks. A tradition of inclusion This release includes more than 65 accessibility improvements across the platform, making it more accessible than ever. It contains an important fix that unblocks access to the admin submenus for screen reader users and others who navigate by keyboard. This release also adds fixes to color contrast in admin focus states, positioning of elements, and cursor focus, among many others, that help improve the WordPress experience for everyone. Learn more about WordPress 6.5 Check out the new WordPress 6.5 page to learn more about the numerous enhancements and features of this release—including short demos of some of the highlighted features. Explore Learn WordPress for quick how-to videos, online workshops, and other free resources to level up your WordPress knowledge and skills. Check out the WordPress 6.5 Field Guide for detailed technical information and developer notes to help you build with WordPress and get the most out of this release. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Developer Blog for developer updates, feature tutorials, and other helpful WordPress content from a developer perspective. For more information about installation, file changes, fixes, and other updates, read the 6.5 release notes. The 6.5 release squad Every release has many moving parts with its own triumphs and challenges. It takes a dedicated team of enthusiastic contributors to help keep things on track and moving smoothly. 6.5 is made possible by a cross-functional group of contributors, always ready to champion ideas, remove blockers, and resolve issues. Release Lead: Matt Mullenweg Release Coordinators: Akshaya Rane, Héctor Prieto, Mary Baum Core Tech Leads: David Baumwald, Pascal Birchler Editor Tech Leads: David Smith, Riad Benguella Core Triage Leads: Ahmed Kabir Chaion, Jb Audras, Rajin Sharwar Editor Triage Leads: Anne McCarthy, Fabian Kägy Design Leads: Benjamin Zekavica, Rich Tabor Marketing and Communication Leads: Dan Soschin, Lauren Stein Documentation Leads: Estela Rueda, Leonardus Nugraha, Steven Lin Performance Leads: Joe McGill, Mukesh Panchal Test Leads: Olga Gleckler, Patrick Lumumba, Vipul Ghori Default Themes Leads: Carolina Nymark Thank you, contributors WordPress believes in democratizing publishing and the freedoms that come with open source. Supporting this idea is a global and diverse community of people collaborating to strengthen the software. WordPress 6.5 reflects the countless efforts and passion of around 700 contributors in at least 57 countries. This release also welcomed over 150 first-time contributors! Their collaboration delivered more than 2,500 enhancements and fixes, ensuring a stable release for all—a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress open source community. !Benni · _ck_ · Aaron Jorbin · Aaron Robertshaw · Abdullah Mamun · Abha Thakor · Abhishek Deshpande · abletec · acosmin · Adam Pickering · Adam Silverstein · Adarsh Akshat · admcfajn · adrianduffell · Ahmed Chaion · Ahmed Saeed · Ajith R N · Akash Muchandikar · Aki Hamano · Akira Tachibana · akmelias · Akramul Hasan · Akshaya Rane · Alain Schlesser · Alan Fuller · Alex · Alex Concha · Alex King · Alex Kirk · Alex Lende · Alex Mills · Alex Stine · Alexandre Buffet · AlexKole · Amber Hinds · Amy Hendrix (sabreuse) · Amy Kamala · Anand Upadhyay · Anders Norén · Andrea Fercia · Andrei Draganescu · Andrei Lupu · Andrew Hayward · Andrew Hutchings · Andrew Nacin · Andrew Norcross · Andrew Ozz · Andrew Serong · andrewleap · Andrii Balashov · André Maneiro · Andy Fragen · Andy Peatling · Aneesh Devasthale · Ankit K Gupta · Ankit Panchal · Anne McCarthy · Anthony Burchell · Antoine · Anton Lukin · Anton Timmermans · Anton Vlasenko · Antonella · Antonio D. · Antonis Lilis · arena94 · Ari Stathopoulos · Arslan Kalwar · Artemio Morales · Arthur Chu · Arun Chaitanya Jami · Arun Sharma · Arunas Liuiza · Asad Polash · Ashish Kumar (Ashfame) · Asish Chandra Mohon · Aslam Doctor · audunmb · Aurooba Ahmed · Austin Matzko · axwax · Ayesh Karunaratne · Béryl de La Grandière · bahia0019 · Balu B · bangank36 · Barry · Barry · Bart Kalisz · bartkleinreesink · Beatriz Fialho · Beau Lebens · Beda · ben · Ben Dwyer · Ben Hansen · Ben Huson · Ben Keith · Ben Lobaugh (blobaugh) · Ben Ritner - Kadence WP · Ben Word · Benjamin Gosset · Benjamin Zekavica · benjaminknox · Benoit Chantre · benoitfouc · Bernhard Reiter · bernhard-reiter · billseymour · Biplav · Birgit Pauli-Haack · bobbingwide · Boone Gorges · born2webdesign · Brad Jorsch · Brad Parbs · Brad Williams · Brandon Kraft · Brandon Lavigne · Brian Alexander · Brian Coords · Brian Fischer · Brian Gardner · Brian Haas · Brian Henry · Brooke · burnuser · Caleb Burks · camya · Carlo Cannas · Carlos Bravo · Carlos G. 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Community translators are working hard to ensure more translations are on their way. Thank you to everyone who helps make WordPress available in 200 languages. Last but not least, thanks to the volunteers who contribute to the support forums by answering questions from WordPress users worldwide. Get involved and contribute Participation in WordPress is not limited to coding. If contributing appeals to you, learning more and getting involved is easy. Discover the teams that come together to Make WordPress, and use this interactive tool to help you decide which is right for you. One more haiku 6.5 is here! Play, interact, build better, Stronger and faster. View the full article

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

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

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

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

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

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

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