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Join guest host Rich Tabor and WordPress Playground innovator Adam Zielinski as they discuss the capabilities and promise of WP Playground in episode 56 of the WordPress Briefing. Stay tuned for your small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Credits Host: Josepha Haden Chomphosy Guests: Rich Tabor and Adam Zielinski Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Brett McSherry and Nicholas Garofalo Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Show Notes WordPress Playground and the Playground Github repo WordCamp Gliwice WordCamp Europe 2023, Contributor Day, and WP Connect #meta-playground in the Making WordPress Slack ChatGPT WooCommerce CloudFest and Daniel Bachhuber The Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship for travel to WordCamp US 2023 Find your closest location for a WordPress 20th Anniversary celebration Changes to the WCUS event for 2023 Transcript [Josepha Haden Chomphosy Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00] (Intro music) 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. (Intro continues) [Josepha Haden Chomphosy Haden Chomphosy 00:00:40] Today we’re gonna spend a little time talking about WP Playground. This is a project that debuted at State of the Word in December 2022, but it was demoed for me about a month prior in November. I was, and remain, absolutely floored by the potential future applications, as well as the innovative thinking behind it. So I’ve invited a couple of excellent WordPress futurists to the show today so that we can listen in on their conversation. Welcome guys. [Rich Tabor 00:01:07] Hey everyone, I’m Rich Tabor, and I’m here today with Adam Zielinski to talk about WordPress Playground. So for those of you who don’t know what WordPress Playground is, can you tell us a little bit more about it, Adam? [Adam Zielinski 00:01:18] Absolutely. WordPress Playground is WordPress that works in your browser like there’s no server with PHP or database like there’s just your browser and JavaScript, and you can run it in so many more places that we’ll all get to. For example, I just came back from WordCamp Gliwice, where on a Contributor Day, a couple of developers got set up with WordPress in just a couple of minutes, whereas normally, it can take hours to do that. [Rich Tabor 00:01:44] Yeah, that’s, that’s pretty impressive. Do you think that, particularly for WordCamps and other demo-type areas, this would be something that’s very useful? Or what do you think would be the other problems that could be solved with WordPress Playground? [Adam Zielinski 00:01:55] Playground solves one primary problem, and that is WordPress is pretty difficult to get started with. I’m not even talking about creating your website, but let’s say, someone told you there’s this WordPress thing that you should try. Well, you Google for it, and you find installation instructions, and there’s like three hours of work for you there. So then maybe you’ll find a hosting company, and you have to pay some money. So with WordPress Playground, you can actually try it for free because there’s no cost to run it. It just runs on your device. If you’re a developer, and you want to start learning WordPress, normally you have to go through quite an extensive setup process, and there are some tools to make it easier, but maybe there’s still friction like you have to even own a computer, like a PC device or a Mac. Playground can run on your phone, and it can power interactive tutorials that you can use and just start learning there and there with zero setup. Like if you work on a product team and someone asks you to test a code change, with Playground you can just click a link and test it with no infrastructure behind it. And if you’re a company creating a plugin, you can just show your plugin in a live demo to people. And this isn’t something many plugins are doing because it’s quite hard to get a live demo set up. [Rich Tabor 00:03:12] Ah, that’s pretty impressive. So, you know, amongst like tutorials, code changes for developer environments, the mobile application running, do you think that, since there’s such a wide brevity of ideas that WordPress Playground can kind of plug into, would this be more of a developer tool? Is that right? Or is Playground more of a like a click and play-type application that can run anywhere and demo anything? [Adam Zielinski 00:03:36] I’d say it’s both, but it’s more transparent for the users. So there are a whole lot of things you can do with Playground as a developer, as I just mentioned. But who are you doing these things for? Well, some of them are for the users, as in live demos, or there’s a WordCamp Europe coming, and I know some people are doing workshops there. They are going to use Playground to get everyone set up. So now that’s, well, maybe a workshop that teaches you how to build a theme, for example, right? Now you can just get started without any setup process. So there’s both, it’s very useful for development teams, and it’s very useful for them to build stuff for the final users. [Rich Tabor 00:04:21] That’s great. I know you, and I have probably both been in the same scenario at WordCamps when you’re trying to get dev environments set up, and it takes, you know, the better half of the workshop to get to step one. So this is really gonna be interesting to see it, especially at WordCamp Europe, and to see it getting into action. Are you planning on going to WordCamp Europe this year? [Adam Zielinski 00:04:39] Absolutely, I will have a table at Contributor Day, a WordPress Playground table. So yeah, everyone’s invited to come over. I’ll show you a lot of cool stuff. And then at WP Connect on Saturday at 10:00 AM, there will be a WordPress Playground session where you’ll be able to learn more and see some cool demos. And this will be a conversational format, so we’ll just have a nice chat. [Rich Tabor 00:05:01] Super cool. So how else can people find out a little bit more info about Playground and perhaps even get involved and contribute to the project? [Adam Zielinski 00:05:08] There’s a developer.WordPress.org/playground website. There’s a link in a show notes where you’ll be able, like this is the perfect entry point to the entire rabbit hole of WordPress Playground. There’s a quite a few projects under the WordPress Playground umbrella, and they all live in a single GitHub repository where you can just find any issue that interests if you want to contribute and just start contributing. Also, there’s a Slack channel in WordPress org space called #meta-playground, and I highly encourage everyone interested in coming over to say hi. And probably one of the best places to ask questions and get acquainted with the community. [Rich Tabor 00:05:54] Oh, that’s great; I’m very intrigued about the project overall. I think that there’s an immense amount of potential, for WordPress Playground. Just last question here, like, where do you see the future of this project going? What is the most interesting application that hasn’t been done yet, or the things that are really gonna be the next level in unlocking Playground for everyone? [Adam Zielinski 00:06:12] There’s quite a few. Imagine being able to go to WordPress.org and have a WordPress demo right then and there without having to download anything. Then you customize it, and you have a button to host your website anywhere or just to download it. Imagine having a live preview for all the themes and plugins in the directory and even in WordPress core, but these are sooner than later. Maybe like, let’s talk more grandiose, shall we? So there’s this term, 1 billion new users coming online in the next, like in the nearest future, and plenty of them doesn’t even own a desktop device. Maybe they have a mobile phone, maybe they have a tablet, maybe we’re talking about a young, prospective developer somewhere. And currently, if you don’t own a desktop device, you cannot contribute to the WordPress plugin ecosystem at all. Like, we’re seeing more and more of creating themes with no code, which is really exciting. But you cannot build the plugin, really. Well, with WordPress Playground. Suddenly you can do development on a mobile device. So development tools and code editors and just the entire suite of things we use as the developers on our desktop of devices like this may come online and be available in your browser. And if you’re on a train and you just have a phone with you, but you still want to learn, how to build a plugin, well, you’ll be able to do that. Furthermore, there’s a lot of exciting opportunities with ChatGPT, as in, well, here’s a WordPress running entirely on your device. So maybe if that’s connected to ChatGPT, you’ll be able to say, well, I like fish, or like, I want two columns and a photo of a racing car on top of it. And because ChatGPT can output HTML, we connect the two, and suddenly, you can build a website entirely in your browser using natural language. [Rich Tabor 00:08:20] Man, that’s, that’s really interesting. It really does unlock the next, potentially the next like, wave of innovation in the WordPress experience, especially removing all the complications of getting set up and actually seeing what’s there. I think that it really could, be huge for users every day. [Adam Zielinski 00:08:38] Oh, here’s one more. So, edge computing is big lately, and it’s going to be bigger in the future. WordPress Playground runs on this new technology called Web Assembly, and it just happened so that a bunch of edge computing providers allows you to run web assembly on their gear. So imagine having WordPress running entirely in edge infrastructure with no centralized server. Truly decentralized WordPress. It could be big for a well cost of operating, but also for speed, but also even further down in the future. Imagine downloading the actual, you know, even WordPress around time to your device and having the entire website on your phone. So then you know, you’re on a train, you enter a tunnel, but you can still browse that WooCommerce store and add things to your cart even though there is no range at all. [Rich Tabor 00:09:32] Wow, that’s, that’s pretty crazy. How far out there do you think something like that is? [Adam Zielinski 00:09:37] It’s hard to tell. I mean, technically, it is possible. There are a lot of challenges with regard to privacy, right? And data security for the edge computing case specifically. As for the development tools, there was a Cloud Fest hackathon earlier this year where I was with Daniel Bachhuber, also from Automattic, and we led this exciting project that brought the WordPress development environment into the browser using a couple of editors that are out there, and this is too much of an MVP for actual production use yet, but we got it working, and we build an actual plugin on a phone without internet access. [Rich Tabor 00:10:19] Wow. And that was just a hackathon, just hacking at it to see what you can get. [Adam Zielinski 00:10:23] Yeah, it was two and a half days. [Rich Tabor 00:10:25] Oh, that’s awesome. That’s really cool, man. Well, this has been quite a pleasure. Thanks, Adam, for chatting all about WordPress Playground. Folks, just be sure to check out developer.WordPress.org/playground to explore, experiment, and play with WordPress Playground. This has been awesome, Adam. [Adam Zielinski 00:10:43] Thank you so much for having me, Rich. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:10:45] What a remarkable new way of working with and experiencing WordPress. I would love to be able to find ways across the project and ecosystem to help folks see what they’re getting into before they get into it, but also, who knows what the future holds for that project. Keep an eye on it. (Musical interlude) [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:11:10] That brings us to our small list of big things happening right now in the WordPress project. The first one is that the Kim Parel Memorial Scholarship for WordCamp US 2023 is open, and applications for it are the WordPress Foundation will once again be offering that scholarship for Travel to WordCamp US. It is for specifically for women in technology, women in the WordPress space. I’ll include a link to that in the show notes. The second thing is WordPress’ 20th anniversary is still coming, as we heard in the last podcast. So we have reached over 100 events that are scheduled on or around May 27th, which is WordPress’ launch date. There is still time to find your closest location and attend one of those events. And probably, there’s also time to pull together an event of your own. Head on over to wp20.WordPress.net if you would like to see events in your area. And the third thing is WordCamp US 2023. I realize WordCamp Europe comes before that, but the programming team actually has a really interesting thing that they’re doing this year. They have some changes to the way that they are organizing the event and finding speakers for the event. But as always, they are working very hard to make sure it is an attendee-focused event. I’m gonna include a link or two to some announcements that are really worthwhile there. Head on over to the podcast page to see those. And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Thanks again to my guests, and I’ll see y’all in a couple of weeks. View the full article

WordPress 6.2.2 is now available! The 6.2.2 minor release addresses 1 bug and 1 security issue. Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately. All versions since WordPress 5.9 have also been updated. WordPress 6.2.2 is a rapid response release to address a regression in 6.2.1 and further patch a vulnerability addressed in 6.2.1. The next major release will be version 6.3 planned for August 2023. The update process will begin automatically if you have sites that support automatic background updates. You can download WordPress 6.2.2 from WordPress.org or visit your WordPress Dashboard, click “Updates,” and click “Update Now.” For more information on this release, please visit the HelpHub site. Security updates included in this release The security team would like to thank the following people for responsibly reporting vulnerabilities and allowing them to be fixed in this release. Block themes parsing shortcodes in user-generated data; thanks to Liam Gladdy of WP Engine for reporting this issue. The issue above was originally patched in the 6.2.1 release, but needed further hardening here in 6.2.2. The Core team is thankful for the community in their response to 6.2.1 and collaboration on finding the best path forward for proper resolution in 6.2.2. The folks who worked on 6.2.2 are especially appreciative for everyone’s understanding while they worked asynchronously to get this out the door as quickly as possible. Thank you to these WordPress contributors This release was led by Jonathan Desrosiers. WordPress 6.2.2 would not have been possible without the contributions of the following people. Their asynchronous coordination to deliver security fixes into a stable release is a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress community. Aaron Jorbin, Alex Concha, Anthony Burchell, Chloe Bringmann, chriscct7, Daniel Richards, David Baumwald, Ehtisham S., Greg Ziółkowski, Isabel Brison, Jb Audras, Jeffrey Paul, John Blackbourn, Jonathan Desrosiers, Josepha, Marius L. J., Matias Ventura, Mike Schroder, Peter Wilson, Riad Benguella, Robert Anderson, Ryan McCue, Samuel Wood (Otto), Scott Reilly, and Timothy Jacobs 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 #6-3-release-leads channels. Need help? Check out the Core Contributor Handbook. Thanks to @cbringmann, @davidbaumwald, @chanthaboune, @jeffpaul for proofreading. View the full article

WordPress 6.2.1 is now available! This minor release features 20 bug fixes in Core and 10 bug fixes for the block editor. You can review a summary of the maintenance updates in this release by reading the Release Candidate announcement. This release also features several security fixes. Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately. All versions since WordPress 4.1 have also been updated. WordPress 6.2.1 is a short-cycle release. The next major release will be version 6.3 planned for August 2023. If you have sites that support automatic background updates, the update process will begin automatically. You can download WordPress 6.2.1 from WordPress.org, or visit your WordPress Dashboard, click “Updates”, and then click “Update Now”. For more information on this release, please visit the HelpHub site. 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. Block themes parsing shortcodes in user generated data; thanks to Liam Gladdy of WP Engine for reporting this issue A CSRF issue updating attachment thumbnails; reported by John Blackbourn of the WordPress security team A flaw allowing XSS via open embed auto discovery; reported independently by Jakub Żoczek of Securitum and during a third party security audit Bypassing of KSES sanitization in block attributes for low privileged users; discovered during a third party security audit. A path traversal issue via translation files; reported independently by Ramuel Gall and during a third party security audit. Thank you to these WordPress contributors This release was led by Jb Audras, George Mamadashvili, Sergey Biryukov and Peter Wilson. WordPress 6.2.1 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. Adam Silverstein, Aki Hamano, amin, Andrew Ozz, Andrew Serong, André, Ari Stathopoulos, Birgit Pauli-Haack, Chirag Rathod, Colin Stewart, Daniel Richards, David Baumwald, David Biňovec, Dennis Snell, devshagor, Dhrumil Kumbhani, Dominik Schilling, Ella, George Mamadashvili, Isabel Brison, Jb Audras, Joe Dolson, Joen A., John Blackbourn, Jonathan Desrosiers, JuanMa Garrido, Juliette Reinders Folmer, Kai Hao, Kailey (trepmal), Marc, Marine EVAIN, Matt Wiebe, Mukesh Panchal, nendeb, Nick Diego, nickpap, Nik Tsekouras, Pavan Patil, Peter Wilson, pouicpouic, Riad Benguella, Ryan Welcher, Scott Reilly, Sergey Biryukov, Stephen Bernhardt, tmatsuur, TobiasBg, Tonya Mork, Ugyen Dorji, Weston Ruter, and zieladam. 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 #6-3-release-leads channels. Need help? Check out the Core Contributor Handbook. Thanks to @sergeybiryukov for proofreading. View the full article

Join WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy in the 55th episode of the WordPress Briefing as she looks back at the 20 years of WordPress and how the open source community made WordPress what it is today. Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Credits Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Brett McSherry Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Show Notes The benefits of prioritizing and measuring performance in WordPress 6.2 WordPress 6.3 Planning Proposal & Call for Volunteers Preparing for the Next Women & Nonbinary Release Squad WordCamp Europe: Call for volunteers Table Leads Needed for WCEU 2023 Contributor Day Defining the Polyglots contributor ladder Transcript [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00] Hello everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress Open Source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a smallest of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:40] In case you hadn’t heard yet. WordPress is celebrating its 20th anniversary on May 27th. There are a lot of celebrations and parties happening all across the world, hopefully with cake, because we all know that a party without cake is just a meeting and no one wants a year-long meeting about how old you are. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:59] But if you’ve not yet joined the celebrations, there’s still time to share your favorite WordPress merch, your favorite WordCamp memory, host a whole dang party if you want to, or share a video to post on wp20.wordpress.net. I’ve got links to everything you need in the show notes. So if you haven’t done it yet, you can do that while you listen to today’s episode. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:14] I’ve got links to everything you need in the show notes. So if you haven’t done it yet, you can do that while you listen to today’s episode. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:22] Today, WordPress is the leading CMS in the market. And according to W3Tech’s it powers 43% of the web. And that’s like 35% of the top 10,000 sites that are built using this software. And sometimes, that’s as a website, sometimes as a framework, but always as a way for people and businesses to find a space on the web to call their own. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:45] In 2021. The first-ever study on the WordPress ecosystem gave us an idea of just how large our ecosystem is. We already kind of had a sense that millions of people make a living through WordPress because we know that we are supporting small business owners and freelancers all the way out to agencies and content creators. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:06] But according to that study, WordPress at the time was powering 82 million websites and enabled an estimated economy of $597 billion. The success of an economy like this and various other alternative economies hinges on the success of invisible open source software that powers the web, just like WordPress, that has a tonne of growth and a lot of wins since that first Cafe Log fork way back in 2003. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:37] And WordPress could just say pencils down, everybody. Good job, team, and just kind of watch what comes next. But I’ve never met a word processor, emboldened as we are by our belief in open source freedoms, who stepped away from a challenge worth facing the recognition that everyone should have those freedoms whether they know they exist or not. Because I know that no one cares as much about open source freedoms as open source maintainers. But the recognition that everyone has the right to them anyway is built into the foundations of what WordPress is and who WordPress is. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:13] There are big plans for WordPress future, many of which are grounded in the promise of a new block editor within WordPress that aims to lower the barriers to entry for people at any point in their learning curve. So let’s take a look at what this means for WordPress, the software, and follow up about what it means for the WordPress community. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:31] Firstly, the software right at the end of 2018, the Gutenberg editor was merged into WordPress Core. And it’s subverted the way that people had always managed their content. It brought with it this new concept of site building that focused on blocks as the primary mode of creation. It was modular and required very little code knowledge. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:53] Arguably also very little skill with design. Although if you’ve ever seen me tried to design something with blocks, you will know it takes some skill. But still, the ultimate goal was to make those fundamental user interactions of managing the block and apply them in any place you could manage your site using WordPress. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:53] And if you think about the possibility to create media-rich content without having to work with shortcode, without having to know HTML workarounds, it opens the opportunity for many of us in the WordPress community to own our digital presence. In case it wasn’t already clear, this, my friends, is an audacious project, and it’s even more so if you remember that we have this existing and massive ecosystem that is enabled and empowered by our software. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:42] And as we look forward to the third phase of the Gutenberg Project, collaborative editing inside a WordPress installation will soon be a reality, which if you are like me and you never work on a website alone, you’re probably just dying to have. I say all this not to toot the horn have WordPress or belabor our success but rather to emphasize the importance of what I’m going to say next, which is how this CMS got to where it is, namely through the work of the community. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:12] WordPress has survived, and I would dare to say thrived through decades of constant economic, cultural, and technological shifts. And I believe that the thing that keeps us innovating fast enough to stay relevant but slow enough to be ethical, is how the community actively engages with the open source project. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:32] We know that our strength is directly tied to the resilience of our contributors. And we know that the software we ship is shaped by the people who are willing to tell us what they love, what they hate, and what they hope to see. When the WordPress project started, we mainly had code contributions as a way to give back, but over time, the project has grown to include contributions to learning, community building, and translations, among other things, but all of that exists alongside the CMS-focused contributions. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:03] Because WordPress as an organization understands that it is an integral part of an ecosystem of 1000s of global companies and millions of individual people who are building careers, starting businesses, learning new skills, and becoming part of something meaningful. I know that I talk just all the time about the greatness of WordPress as a software and community, which makes sense. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:29] I really do love the work I do with you all. But I am equally in awe of this open-hearted journey of disruption that WordPress represents as an open source project. WordPress and its community is part of a long line of disruptors; blogs made publishing available to everyone, which maybe doesn’t sound like a big deal right now because you’ve been around blogging forever. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:51] You’ve been able to just put your thoughts on the internet with almost no effort for as long as you have known the internet existed, but WordPress, at the time, was and honestly remains the low code open source CMS of choice. It has been for years. And so, let me backtrack you through the 10,000-foot milestones of our journey here. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:14] Gutenberg has been around since 2013. It’s 10 years. I know, don’t get scared, we’re celebrating 20 years. So it’s been around for half of our time as a concept. Open source as a concept was formalized in the 1980s. Though it definitely has been around longer than that as a concept and a way of working. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:34] And this low-code, no-code movement that we hear about from time to time that has been around since the 1970s, and just because we first became aware of it in the 1970s doesn’t mean that that’s when it actually first was discussed or thought about or used. Which means that you are in this moment, decades deep into projects that changed our entire understanding of the web. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:59] So grab a slice of cake, and raise a glass to 20 great years of WordPress, and I am going to raise a glass to 20 more years of continuing our journey together. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:08:17] Which brings us effervescently to the small list of big things. Yeah, I said effervescently. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:08:24] So there are a lot of things happening in the WordPress project over the next couple of weeks. There is a lot of testing going on. There are a lot of releases that are getting underway. There are events and things. So here’s my rundown of stuff you should take a look at. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:08:38] So firstly, there is a post out about performance improvements from 6.2. That is just inviting an open discussion so that we can get more of those improvements in better shape to get into the 6.3 release. And speaking of the 6.3 release that is coming, just last week, we announced the release squad that we have. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:08:58] It is an extra heavy release squad because we also are working toward the 6.4 release just at the same time. So there’s the folks who are running the 6.3 release, and they have committed to working openly and in public channels as much as possible so that the 6.4 folks have a chance to really take a look at what goes into a release, the questions that we ask, the philosophies we believe in, and then that 6.4 release oil pick up probably, my guess is August-ish, mid-August or so. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:09:32] That 6.4 release is specifically going to be made up entirely of diverse genders. People that we historically see are underrepresented in technology, but as always, we accept contributions from everyone for all releases. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:09:48] The third thing is that we have WordCamp Europe coming up, that is June 8 and 10th. So a little bit past the two-week mark. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:09:54] However, there is a final call for volunteers for anyone who wants to be able to help at the event. I personally have always enjoyed doing that kind of volunteer work. It helps you get to know your community even a bit better. And I don’t know; I’m just kind of an extroverted people person. So, of course, I always want to volunteer, but that call is still open. And they’re in the last phases of that. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:10:17] There is also a team or two that needs some help with getting leads for the contributor day that happens leading up to WordCamp. Europe, I know that the testing team needs a lead for the table, and so if you enjoy the process of triaging or testing or helping people get their environment set up, that is a great opportunity. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:10:37] And the final thing on my small, my big small list of big things is that we have a kind of a review of the currently defined contributor ladder for the Polyglots team. There are a number of posts over the years where we talk about the ways that people move through being a contributor. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:10:57] One of the things that we know about almost all contributor ladders is that there’s no time requirement between the steps, but in general, it functions like a ladder. So you do have to have, like, rung one. And then, rung two, if you try to skip from rung one to rung three, you will have a lot of difficulty. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:11:17] Not impossible, but it’s harder than going 1, 2, 3 In the normal sequential order. And so that’s a whole discussion that’s happening over there. There’s a link to all of these things in the show notes. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:11:28] And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. View the full article

Each year, members of the WordPress community (users, site builders, extenders, and contributors) provide valuable feedback through an annual survey. For 2022, the survey received a comprehensive update, the first in six years. The total number of questions was reduced to 29 from nearly 100, socio-economic questions were mostly removed, and the Likert scale was introduced. These updates were intended to increase the completion rate of the survey, enable a more efficient and structured analysis of these data, and position the survey to best gauge the topics that matter most to the WordPress community. My goal is that the input received via the survey helps inform initiatives and focus areas for WordPress in the near term, along with other signals, such as conversations in the community, the Making WordPress blogs, and events. Such data play a key role in shaping the direction and strategy of the project and measuring progress in focus areas. 2022 Highlights The 2022 edition of the survey experienced a 26% increase in completion rate, however, submissions decreased by 56% to roughly 3400, including about 800 contributors. For the 2023 survey, promotion will be increased, hopefully counteracting the declining submissions. Here are some key takeaways: The survey shows an increased usage of blocks and the new site editor (versus the classic editor), which shouldn’t come as a surprise since the default theme is now a block theme. 22% of respondents have only used WordPress for a year or less. Those responding to the survey are also getting a bit older, with fewer responses from those under 40 than in prior years. 1 in 5 respondents learned about WordPress from a coworker, and about the same percentage from using a search engine. In 2022, WordPressers continued to learn about WordPress (68%), taught others about WP (48%), and built sites for others (55%). WordPressers choose the CMS platform because it’s open source (62%), flexible (47%), low risk (45%), cost-effective (45%), and has a positive reputation (41%). 57% of survey participants obtained news and training directly from WordPress.org. While that is the primary source, other sites remain very important: search engines (46%), YouTube (40%), other WordPress communities (35%), and social media (30%) The overwhelming majority of respondents don’t regularly use other CMS platforms, and 21% of respondents use none of the top 20 WordPress plugins. Respondents continue to state that “WordPress is as good as or better than other CMS platforms,” with 68% agreeing. Elements that respondents feel are the best aspects of WordPress include “ease of use,” “flexibility,” and/or “plugin options,” all about 30% each. When asked about the most frustrating elements of WordPress, 1 in 5 said, “nothing,” while approximately 30% referenced difficulties with site editing / Gutenberg. The overall contributor experience remains positive and something I continue to care about deeply. 64% shared they had a positive experience, and 24% viewed their experience as “neutral.” Contributors also feel welcome at the same percentages (64% agree and 24% are neutral). What’s Planned for 2023 In the next iteration of the survey, the plan is to improve the language options for completing the survey and continue investing in refining the questions and how they are asked. It is important to be mindful that completing a survey takes time, so we want to make sure community members are being asked questions that help WordPress the most. The tentative plan is to launch the 2023 edition in August. This will set up an opportunity for the 2023 results and, most importantly, your input to inform planning for 2024’s key initiatives and focus areas. The community’s feedback is vitally important to the success and direction of the project. Moving the survey to earlier in the year can positively affect planning and dialogue. View the 2022 Slide Deck Big thank you to @dansoschin for the analysis and editorial support. Thanks also to @angelasjin, and @cbringmann for their reviews and final edits. View the full article

With preparations for the next major releases already underway, the community is gearing up to celebrate WordPress’ 20th anniversary, which is just around the corner. This month has also seen some major highlights, such as WordPress 6.2’s performance wins and the launch of WP Translation Playground. Read on to find out what’s new. Forthcoming WordPress releases Following the successful release of WordPress 6.2 “Dolphy,” which has garnered over 31 million downloads (and counting), contributors across all teams are already planning future major releases, including versions 6.3 and 6.4. While WordPress 6.3 will focus on refinements to the site editing experience, 6.4 will reprise the underrepresented gender release initiative introduced in WordPress 5.6 “Simone.” If you’re interested in contributing, now is the perfect time to get involved. Check out the WordPress 6.3 proposed schedule and call for volunteers. WP20 is just around the corner Mark your calendars for May 27 and join the community for a day filled with exciting parties and activities! With a refreshed look, the WP20 website offers a list of events to join, swag to show your WordPress pride, and downloadable “selfie props” to add fun to your celebrations. Cake decorated with WordPress anniversary-themed motifs shared at a recent meetup in Japan. The Marketing Team has also launched #WP20 From Blogs to Blocks, a community-focused initiative that encourages you to take a small daily WordPress-focused action for 20 days leading up to the anniversary date. On the other hand, details are being finalized for the 20th anniversary commemorative book, Building Blocks: The Evolution of WordPress 2013-2023. This volume will span the history and most meaningful moments of the last decade of WordPress. What’s your favorite WordPress swag? Do you have a special memory from a WordCamp or meetup? Share them with the community and join the #WP20 fun on social media. WordPress 6.2 performance WordPress 6.2 reiterates the platform’s commitment to optimizing website performance with significant improvements. Load times are 14 to 18% faster for block themes and 2 to 5% for classic themes. Server-side performance is also seeing a big boost, with an increase of 17 to 23% for block themes and 3 to 5% for classic themes. Learn more about the performance wins in 6.2, including a retrospective from the Performance Core Team on the efforts that made it happen. New in the Gutenberg plugin Two new versions of the Gutenberg plugin have shipped in the last month: Gutenberg 15.5 shipped on April 5, 2023, with many user-facing features to improve the creation experience. Enhancements include caption style customization, theme-defined template patterns when adding a new template, and experimental support for grid layouts in the Group block. Gutenberg 15.6 is available for download as of April 19, 2023. This version introduces an experimental Details block to expand and toggle the visibility of hidden content, and more presets for core block spacing and border controls, among other highlights. Follow the “What’s new in Gutenberg” posts to stay on top of the latest enhancements. Team updates: WP Translation Playground, WordPress.org redesign next steps, and more The Polyglots Team launched WP Translation Playground, an innovative tool that combines Local GlotPress with WordPress Playground to translate plugins and themes in context—without having to set up anything. Wondering what’s next in the WordPress.org redesign project? Learn about the latest updates and how to get involved. This Community Team post discusses ways to make WordCamp Contributor Days more effective. Explore what’s new on Learn WordPress in April 2023, including the latest content on the platform and the projects the Training Team has been working on. WordPress Playground was used in a hackathon to prototype different ways to build plugins with minimal setup, right in the browser. See it in action in these tech demos. Members of the Marketing Team suggested improvements to submission guidelines to revitalize the WordPress.org Showcase. Most of the work to refocus the WordPress mobile app on core features is complete. Find out how to help shape its future with contributions opportunities for developers, writers, translators, and more. Keep up with the latest enhancements and development updates you need to build on top of WordPress in last month’s edition of What’s new for developers? The latest issue of the Meetup Organizer Newsletter shares tips and inspiring ideas to help you plan successful community events. Find out how WordPress and its global community of contributors positively impacted Monika Rao’s web career in April’s edition of People of WordPress. Join Josepha Haden Chomphosy in Episode 54 of WP Briefing as she explores the concept of the four freedoms of open source and their likeness to today’s Bill of Rights for the open web. Feedback & testing requests The latest Full Site Editing (FSE) Outreach Program testing opportunity invites feedback on the features included in WordPress 6.2 and those remaining in Gutenberg Phase 2. Share your thoughts by May 8, 2023. This update on the WP Feature Notifications project explains the progress towards a modern WordPress user notification system and how you can get involved. Help test the latest version of the Preferred Languages feature plugin. Version 22.2 of the WordPress mobile app for iOS and Android is ready for testing. This discussion post welcomes ideas and questions about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be integrated into the WordPress experience. WordPress events updates WordCamp Europe 2023 is fast approaching! The organizing team introduced the first confirmed speakers. WordCamp US 2023 announced updates on the programming for the upcoming event, for which tickets are now on sale. Organizers are also calling for sponsors. The 2023 Community Summit will provide a valuable opportunity for in-person discussions across contributor teams. Submit your topics if you haven’t yet. Don’t miss these upcoming WordCamps: WordCamp Barcelona, Spain on May 5-6, 2023 WordCamp Buffalo, NY, USA on May 6, 2023 WordCamp Gliwice, Poland on May 12-14, 2023 WordCamp Sylhet, Bangladesh on May 19-20, 2023 WordCamp Lisboa, Portugal on May 19-20, 2023 WordCamp Apatin, Serbia on May 27-28, 2023 Join #WPDiversity with a free online workshop on Organizing Diverse & Inclusive WordPress Events APAC on May 13, 2023. Have a story we should include in the next issue of The Month in WordPress? Fill out this quick form to let us know. The following folks contributed to this Month in WordPress: @sereedmedia, @ninianepress, @rmartinezduque. View the full article

This month we feature Monika Rao, a Product and Quality Assurance Manager from India. She finds contributing to the WordPress project a way to deepen her technical skills and further her web career. The People of WordPress series shares inspiring stories of how people’s lives can change for the better through WordPress and its global community of contributors. Monika was born in Udaipur, in the state of Rajasthan, India. At that time, she recalls, there was some resistance to girls’ education in certain subjects. Thanks to her parents’ support and encouragement, she graduated in Computer Science Engineering. Following graduation, she went on to work for an international firm. However, she felt she wanted to work in her home area and so returned to work for a firm based in Udaipur itself. Monika started her career journey with WordPress in 2015, and was fascinated as she learnt more of the technology. A few years later, she moved into a role as a WordPress Quality Analyst, enabling her to dive further into the software. “From that moment, I decided to make it an integral part of my ever-learning professional career,” she said. The more Monika researched WordPress, the more she found it was not just a tool to simplify website building but also a platform where you could “meet new people, share your thoughts, learn from them and improve yourself through the process.” When she first started working with WordPress, she found she had many questions, ranging from what are themes and plugins to what is a WordCamp. As her knowledge grew, she knew one day she wanted to be able to contribute to both the code and the community supporting it. Becoming part of WordPress Monika started contributing to WordPress in 2015 with Theme Review. In this area, she was able to work alongside WordPress code experts and, at the same time, learn the concepts of theme development. She saw this as a great opportunity to learn and improve her development skills. She was also very interested in testing from the beginning, so she started contributing to Core. Her first contribution was to the WordPress 4.7 release in 2016. She remembers the day she first saw her name in the WordPress contributor list. This encouraged her to make more contributions including to core and the community team, and each time she felt more like part of the community. Thus inspired, Monika delved into making the software more easily available in her native Hindi language through joining other contributors to the Polyglots team. She went on to become a General Translation Editor for the Hindi language, and has continued to contribute in this area. Monika and other panelists at WordCamp Udaipur 2017 As she became involved with the WordPress community, she looked for ways of sharing it with others in her home city. In 2017 she was part of the organizing team for WordCamp Udaipur 2017 and there shared her contributing journey with others. This was her first WordCamp, and she describes the experience as ‘superb’. It enabled her to connect to both those new to WordPress and those already working with it. “It was a great moment for me speaking in front of hundreds of people and everyone cherished my journey. It inspired me to continue my contribution to other teams too.” Monika Rao She went on to be an organizer for WordCamp Udaipur 2018 and WordCamp India 2021. She also contributes to the Meta and Theme review teams. Contributing to WordPress software releases 2019 was a big year for Monika. She got married and joined a new firm where she could work more on WordPress, learning about marketing and design. In November 2019, the WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden put out a call for an all-women and non-binary release squad. Monika said: “I’ve always felt that not enough women take part in WordPress, so I decided to jump in.” She took on the role of Test Lead. “It was a wonderful journey— worth every second and this was a proud moment for me when I saw my name on the WordPress Noteworthy list. You feel proud when you see your small contributions in use by 40 per cent of the web.” Monika Rao Monika was part of the notable contributors for the WordPress 5.6 release As a Test Lead, her priority was ensuring the release would be stable and, more importantly, ready for production sites. To effectively manage all the testing, test scrubs were run weekly, highlighting the key testing areas to help get the entire team involved. The scrubs also played an important role in picking up tickets needing immediate resolution. Monika also continued her role in the WordPress 5.7 release, and focused more on the core software. She believes being part of the Core and Test teams is a good way to watch and learn, as well as take part in the different elements that make up a release. “Skills you have will eventually fade away unless you work on them and sharpen them. So don’t underestimate the value of any skill. It will eventually help you somehow in your career.” Monika Rao She added: “I owe my skills and knowledge to WordPress and its lovely community. The best part about this platform is that it is free and provides ample opportunities to improve your skills and build a career. The wider WordPress community is highly supportive, and it provides numerous additional resources, such as online forums, tutorials, and meetups, to help people learn and grow. With the help of WordPress, anyone can learn how to create websites, develop plugins, and contribute to the community.” This route for learning has helped Monika in choosing the direction of her career and in keeping her skills up-to-date. In October 2021, she joined a company specializing in producing WordPress plugins and services for online businesses. Everyone can contribute to WordPress Monika pictured during her travels Monika is determined more people, especially other women, have opportunities to contribute to open source in general. “Many people are using WordPress, but they don’t all know about contribution. Therefore, my future goal is to help people, especially women, contribute more to WordPress.” Monika Rao “When I first started contributing to WordPress, I thought that being from a testing background, I may not be able to contribute much. However, I soon realized that there are various different areas where I could easily contribute and develop my skills,” said Monika. “So, I would encourage anyone who is interested in contributing to WordPress to find their own area of interest, regardless of their background, be it marketing, content writing, designing, or any other field. The WordPress community welcomes contributions from people of all backgrounds and skill-sets. So, don’t hesitate to dive in and contribute in a way that suits your interests and skills.” Share the stories Help share these stories of open source contributors and continue to grow the community. Meet more WordPressers in the People of WordPress series. Contributors Thanks to Monika Rao (@monikarao) for sharing her adventures in open source. Thank you to Abha Thakor (@webcommsat) and the late Surendra Thakor (@sthakor) for interviews and writing this feature, and to Meher Bala (@meher), Chloe Bringmann (@cbringmann), Mary Baum (@marybaum) for work on photographs and review. The People of WordPress series thanks Josepha Haden (@chanthaboune) and Topher DeRosia (@topher1kenobe) for their support. This People of WordPress feature is inspired by an essay originally published on HeroPress.com, a community initiative created by Topher DeRosia. It highlights people in the WordPress community who have overcome barriers and whose stories might otherwise go unheard. #HeroPress View the full article

Join WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy in the 54th episode of the WordPress Briefing as she explores the concept of the four freedoms of open source and likens it to today’s Bill of Rights for the open web. Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Credits Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Chloé Bringmann Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Show Notes Episode 2: WordPress is Free(dom) OpenAI ChatGPT and Github Copilot WordPress 6.3 Planning Proposal & Call for Volunteers Preparing for the Next Underrepresented Gender-Led Release – WordPress 6.4 WP20 — Celebrating 20 years of WordPress Transcript [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00] Hello, everyone! And welcome to the WordPress Briefing: the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go! [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:40] Start of Show Just over 50 episodes ago, I shared some basic thoughts about the four freedoms of open source. I also talked through the most quoted phrase in open source “free as in free speech, not free as in beer.” And honestly, what podcast about the freedoms of open source would be complete without that? If you haven’t listened to that episode, I suggest you do, but if you don’t have time, I’ll start by reminding us all of the definition of free software, which is most commonly referred to as the four freedoms of open source. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:12] So the first thing is the freedom to run the program as you wish for any purpose. The second thing is the freedom to study how the program works and to change it so that it does your computing as you wish. As a side note, access to the source code is a precondition for this. The third freedom is the freedom to redistribute copies so that you can help others. And the fourth freedom is the freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing this, you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes, and of course, also access to the source code is a precondition for this. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:47] The TLDR version of these freedoms is, essentially, that users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve the software. Now, normally when I speak about the freedoms of open source, I’m talking about it either from a practical or a philosophical standpoint, but I also spend a lot of time thinking about it from a leadership and organizational perspective. Every once in a while, you might hear me talk about the effects of “open source at scale,” or you might hear Matt say that the four freedoms are essentially the “Bill of Rghts for the open web.” I almost never really dig into either of those topics because it’s just really complicated. But for starters, anytime you talk about what someone is entitled to or deserves or expects, there is a feeling of political bias. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:40] And while I personally believe that creating software is inherently political or, at a minimum, concerned with the needs of people, that’s not what convinces anyone to participate in open source, and it’s certainly not what convinces people to use WordPress. But here’s the thing, as a leader in a widely used, free, and open source software project, as a leader in WordPress, I also know that every new user to our platform or any other open source platform represents a little more freedom in the world. A little more access to tools and jobs that weren’t available before. A slightly more open door to networks that undergird the success of entrepreneurs across the globe and a little more equity to the world of democratizing publishing. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:28] When I look at the four freedoms of open source, this Bill of Rights for the Web, I see not only the freedoms that we should have but also the things that we should have freedom from. We should have the freedom to know how our tools work, the freedom to know what information they need from us, and also the freedom to have some way to make that software work specifically for us because that’s why we have software because we have humans that need it. But we should also have freedom from having to hide our hacky enhancements or freedom from fear of losing our earned audience, or even the fear of losing access to copious amounts of content that we have created ourselves over the years. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:13] And honestly, the things that we should be free from just include a lot of fear of loss. Loss of opportunity or relevance or livelihood. And I feel like for our project, and maybe for open source as a whole, we’re encountering a lot of that right now, whether we are aware of it or not. We’re seeing advancements like GPT3 or ChatGPT if that sounds more familiar and co-pilot. And while it’s not quite in the same vein, also things like Gutenberg. Advancements that are coming to technology around us, technology we’re familiar with. And it’s hard to see what’s in them sometimes. It’s hard to see what drives them. It’s hard to know how we can make them work for us. So I have to remind us all, as citizens of an open source community, that what protects us from those things we should be free from is directly connected to how active we are in the things we are free to. We hear that in a slightly more routine way from folks around open source communities. Basically, the whole concept of open source software is being built by the folks who show up. You can’t influence the future of anything if you’re not showing up in the spaces where the influence happens. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:35] So be an active participant in these new technologies. Learn how GPT works and how it could work for you, even if it’s just writing better prompts. Learn how Gutenberg can support your needs, not subvert your needs, even if it’s just learning how to arrange a series of blocks into a pattern or patterns into a page. But as with all fast-moving technological advances, I encourage you to leap in feet first, not head first. Get in up to your neck in the “why”s and “how”s of that new technology you’ve been worrying about. Be the first to become best at this arcane new thing because that’s why we open source at all so that you have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve your software. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:33] Small List of Big Things That brings me now to my small list of big things. It’s a very small list, but it is very big, as always. The first thing is that we are gearing up for the remaining major releases of the year, WP 6.3 and 6.4 in an atypical moment for our project. You can volunteer for both simultaneously if you want, and hopefully, you do want. Second thing is that there are many ways to celebrate WordPress’s 20th anniversary on May 27th. But one of the things you can do right now is record a short video or sound clip about a great memory or experience you have had in this community or just generally because of WordPress. Those will be featured on the WP 20 website, and maybe even a lucky few will make it into the second volume of the WordPress history book. And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Thanks for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. View the full article

Named after the multi-instrumentalist Eric Allan Dolphy Jr., WordPress 6.2 “Dolphy”‘s high notes are riffed on by WordPress’s Executive Director, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, in this 53rd episode of the WordPress Briefing. Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Credits Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Chloé Bringmann Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Show Notes WordPress 6.2 “Dolphy” Introducing the WordPress Developer Blog WordPress Contributor Mentorship Program Call for Volunteers: Contributor Working Group Why Jazz Make Slack channels #kidscamp and #sustainability Transcript [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00] Hello everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress Open Source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go. [00:00:28] The latest version of WordPress has shipped. WordPress 6.2, which was named after Eric Dolphy, was released on March 29th. And as is the way with software, there’s already a minor release underway to catch a few errant issues that folks like you have reported to us. It’s a big release that refines a lot of our design tools, but some of the most important changes are actually to the inserter. If you haven’t had a chance to get in there and play with it yet, here are the three things that I think you should know. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:08] First, the pattern browser. We’re all aware of the block inserter by now, and a lot of us probably use the quick options, the keyboard shortcuts, or that kind of inline inserter, that little black box that’s in the middle of your post. If you use the main inserter, that’s a blue square in the top left of the screen. If you use that to add a block, you can still add individual blocks as usual. But there’s a new way to browse patterns, and in my opinion, it is so much better. It now brings out this drawer that has like thumbnails of patterns that will work with your theme. And if you, like me, know what you want your site to look like, but could not in a million years figure out how to build it from scratch out of individual blocks, then this is the area for you. It was like shopping, but you don’t have to go through a checkout process at the end, and you still have what you want. It’s great. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:00] That’s also available when you’re working on templates or template parts, so you can make changes everywhere instead of going page by page. The second thing that I think you should know is about the media browser in that same area where you browse your patterns; you can also now browse for media. It lets you look through the images you’ve already added to your site, but it also lets you search for openly licensed images from Openverse. And if you choose one of those images from Openverse, it inserts the proper attribution for you. You still have to add your own alt text, but that’s the fun part anyway, right? [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:35] And number three, a Style Book. So this thing is available in the template editing area, specifically, as is appropriate, given what it actually does. So if you’re in the template area, toward the top right of the screen is like a half moon day mode, night mode looking icon. If you click on that, you can make changes to things inside your blocks. But if you click on the little eyeball icon that’s just underneath it, it pulls up a style book where you can also see and edit the styles globally. If that didn’t make sense to you, don’t worry. I’ve got you. I’m about to tell you a bunch of things you can do in here. You can edit the way headings and lists and tables, quotes, and code looks all across the site. You can edit the way images, galleries, files, and videos look using custom CSS. Yes. Also, all across the site. And you can edit buttons, separators, and individual blocks. Say it with me — all across the site. That is not a comprehensive list. There is a ton of stuff. You can see the styles that you have applied across the whole site. You can see them in context, and you can make any changes that you need globally, which means all across the site. Yeah. Style Books. What will we think of next? [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:54] So those are my three things I think you should know about WordPress right now. As a former WordPress builder who was never really super great with the code, this stuff makes me feel powerful. I just love these changes, and I hope you do too. [00:04:07] Which brings us now to our small list of big things. First, we just launched the Developer Blog. It’s over at developer.wordpress.org/news. It has a bunch of content on it that not only is geared specifically toward developers that are using WordPress but especially the folks who are extending WordPress. It gives you kind of an in-depth look at various changes and projects, and implementations and what goes into each one of them. So it gives you a bit of like this aspirational overview of stuff that you could do with WordPress and then also gives you an inside look at how you would accomplish it yourself. It’s very cool. I like it a lot. Head on over there, but we’ll have a link to the show notes below. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:00] The second thing is that we have an MVP of our new mentorship program that is underway. It should be debuting for essentially testing any day now, a link to the posts detailing that work, just in case you want to join that important initiative. But it is an important thing for me. I think that mentorship is a key element of many of our successful contributors’ onboarding journeys, a part of their story of coming to us. And so, creating a mentorship program that is a bit sustainable and looks toward the health of the overall project, I think, is an excellent plan. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:38] The third thing on our small list of big things is that Matt put out a nice little post about kind of the history of why jazz has this strong background in the WordPress project. It’s a brief read. I’ll put a link to that in the show notes as well. But suffice it to say that he’s saying that jazz has a little bit of learned processes and rules but that the primary expectation is that you’re able to make of the jazz what you want. Like you get to make your own thing out of it. You get to be extemporaneous. You get to be very measured, whatever it is, that expresses what you are trying to do and what you are trying to say with it. That’s why he feels like jazz is such an important part of the DNA of the WordPress project. Like I said, it’s a short read. I’ll put a link to it in the show notes. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:30] And finally, there are a few working groups that folks can contribute to right now. We don’t always have working groups. We generally just kind of do stuff inside individual teams. But right now, we’ve got like the kids camp group, the sustainability group, and of course, that mentorship working group that I mentioned earlier in our list. So if you’re wanting a little change of pace, I’d drop by their areas in the Making WordPress Slack to see if they have anything that’s up your alley. And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. View the full article

March saw the arrival of the first major release of 2023, WordPress 6.2 “Dolphy.” Planning for the project’s 20th anniversary continues with new celebratory updates and commemorative swag. Read on for the latest happenings in the WordPress space. Meet WordPress 6.2 “Dolphy” WordPress 6.2 “Dolphy” was released on March 29, 2023. Named after the acclaimed jazz multi-instrumentalist and composer Eric Allan Dolphy Jr., the latest version of WordPress further enhances the site editing experience with significant updates. Highlights include a reimagined Site Editor interface, a more intuitive way to manage menus, and a distraction-free writing mode. A new Block Inserter design adds integration with Openverse, allowing you to easily browse and insert free, openly-licensed images and audio files into your content. Whether you’re a content creator, designer, or developer, WordPress 6.2 has something for you. Check out the full announcement post for an overview of what’s new and the Field Guide for detailed developer notes. WordPress 6.2 is one of the last major releases planned for Phase 2 of the project’s development roadmap and was made possible thanks to more than 600 contributors. Download WordPress 6.2 “Dolphy.” WP20 swag is here Show your WordPress excitement with limited edition 20th anniversary merchandise—now available at the official WordPress Mercantile store. If you prefer to create your own swag, you can use these WP20 downloadable assets. The 20th anniversary website lists celebrations as organizers announce and schedule them. Check back regularly to see if there’s an event in your area to join or help organize one to celebrate this milestone with your local community. Enter the Wapuu Coloring Giveaway by April 17, 2023, for a chance to win some commemorative WP20 swag! New in the Gutenberg plugin Two new versions of the Gutenberg plugin have shipped in the last month: Gutenberg 15.3 was released on March 13, 2023. This version polishes the Site Editor experience, includes a new “Time to Read” block for displaying estimated read time to posts, and enhances the Duotone design tool. Gutenberg 15.4 is available for download as of March 22, 2023, and focuses primarily on bug fixes and testing improvements. Other additions include color and layout support for the Cover block, improved descriptions to help you understand the purpose of each template in the Site Editor, and the ability to turn paragraph blocks into columns. Follow the “What’s new in Gutenberg” posts to stay on top of the latest enhancements. Team updates: Phase 3 planning, WordPress Developer Blog launch, and more Gutenberg Lead Architect Matías Ventura outlined the focus areas for Phase 3 of the WordPress development roadmap, known as Collaboration or Collaborative Editing. Last month, the WordPress Developer Blog officially launched (removing the “beta” label). Subscribe to keep up with the latest features, tutorials, and learning resources in the WordPress development space. The Documentation Team seeks volunteers to help with WordPress 6.2 end user documentation. Are you looking to broaden your knowledge and improve your WordPress skills? See what’s new on Learn WordPress in March 2023, including the latest course on Converting a Shortcode to a Block. A new Community Themes initiative aims to bring together a group of contributors to collaborate and build block themes. The Training Team is looking for assistance in creating content to complete this WordPress Development syllabus. The newly formed Contributor Working Group hosted an inaugural chat to kick off work on the WordPress Mentorship Program. The Polyglots Team is testing AI systems to help with translation work. The WordPress.org redesign project has a new dedicated Making WordPress Slack channel to coordinate work: #website-redesign. The March 2023 editions of the Polyglots monthly newsletter and the Meetup Organizer newsletter are available for reading. The Mobile Team announced a new support forum for the WordPress mobile app. Tune in to Episode 52 of WP Briefing to learn more about the visioning behind Phase 3, Collaboration. Feedback & testing requests A new Full Site Editing (FSE) Program exploration looks into the Site Editor as a design tool in light of the recent WordPress 6.2 release. Participants are asked to create a block theme without coding using the current editor tools. Share your experience by April 26, 2023. A group of Core contributors is working on a new Interactivity API proposal to provide a better developer experience for building interactive blocks. Version 22.0 of the WordPress mobile app for iOS and Android is ready for testing. Members of the Core Team are looking for user experience (UX) feedback on the Plugin Dependencies feature plugin. WordPress events updates WordCamp Asia 2024 is calling for organizers. Apply by April 15, 2023. Registration for the WordCamp Europe 2023 Contributor Day is now open. Want to create diverse and inclusive WordPress events? Mark your calendars for the upcoming #WPDiversity workshops. Four WordCamps are taking place this month: WordCamp Torino, Italy, on April 14-15, 2023 Wordcamp Vienna, Austria, on April 15-16, 2023 WordCamp Paris, France, on April 21, 2023 WordCamp Sofia, Bulgaria, on April 22-23, 2023 Join WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy as she discusses the benefits of routine and what role it plays in the WordPress project. Have a story we should include in the next issue of The Month in WordPress? Fill out this quick form to let us know. The following folks contributed to this Month in WordPress: @bsanevans, @cbringmann, @eidolonnight, @rmartinezduque, @sereedmedia. View the full article

Say hello to WordPress 6.2 “Dolphy,” named for the woodwind jazz wiz, the multi-instrumentalist—Eric Allan Dolphy Jr. Dolphy is acclaimed for having brought the bass clarinet to prominence in the jazz scene, creating a place for the flute and extending the lexicon of the alto saxophone. In a career that spanned continents, his artistry was at the forefront of pushing improvisational boundaries, ensemble work, and partnerships with well-respected artists like Charles Mingus and John Coltrane. This latest version of WordPress reimagines your site editing experience, introduces more ways to style your site, and offers a new distraction-free way to write. Discover improvements that give you more control and freedom to express your creative vision. There’s something for everyone, whether you’re a content creator, developer, site builder, or designer. Let the music of Eric Dolphy delight you as you take in all that 6.2 has to offer. Download WordPress 6.2 today WordPress 6.2 is the first major release of 2023, covering over 900 enhancements and fixes. It’s also a transition point in the WordPress project’s development roadmap, shifting focus from customization to early exploration of workflows and collaboration. What’s inside Meet the reimagined Site Editor Ready for you to dive in and explore: 6.2 is your invitation to discover what the next generation of WordPress—and block themes—can do. Now out of beta, the Site Editor has an updated interface, giving you a new way to interact with your entire site. Explore full previews of your templates and template parts, then jump in and get to editing your site from wherever you choose. Manage menus in more ways with the Navigation block Add, remove, and reorder menu items faster—with a new sidebar experience that makes editing your site’s navigation easier. Discover a smoother experience for the Block Inserter A refreshed design gives you easier access to the content you need. Use the Media tab to quickly drag and drop content from your existing Media Library. Find patterns faster with a split view that lets you navigate categories and see previews all at once. Find the controls you want when you need them Your block settings sidebar is better organized with tabs for Settings and Styles. So the tools you need are easy to identify and access. Build faster with headers and footers for block themes Discover a new collection of header and footer patterns. Use them with any block theme as a quick, high-quality starting point for your site’s templates. Explore Openverse media right from the Editor Openverse’s library catalogs over 700 million+ free, openly licensed stock images and audio—and now it’s directly integrated into the WordPress experience through the Inserter. Focus on writing with Distraction Free mode For those times you want to be alone with your ideas. You can now hide all your panels and controls, leaving you free to bring your content to life. Meet the new Style Book Get a complete overview of how every block in your site’s library looks. All in one place, all at a glance, directly in the Site Editor. Copy and paste styles Perfect the design on one type of block, then copy and paste those styles to other blocks to get just the look you want. Custom CSS Power up your site any way you wish with design tools and custom CSS for another level of control over your site’s look and feel for maximum creativity and artistry in your designs. Other highlights in 6.2 Sticky positioning: Choose to keep top-level group blocks fixed to the top of a page as visitors scroll. Importing widgets: Options to import your favorite widgets from Classic themes to Block themes. Local fonts in themes: Default WordPress themes offer better privacy with Google Fonts now included. Learn more about WordPress 6.2 Explore Learn WordPress for quick how-to videos, courses, and other resources for the latest features in WordPress. Or join a free live interactive online workshop. Check out the WordPress 6.2 Field Guide for detailed developer notes to help you build with WordPress and get the most out of the latest release. Read the 6.2 release notes for additional technical details about this release, including installation information, updates, fixes, file changes, and more. The 6.2 release squad 6.2 is made possible by the many folks who have enthusiastically helped keep the release on track and moving forward: Release Lead: Matt Mullenweg Release Coordinators: Francesca Marano, Héctor Prieto Core Tech Co-Leads: Tonya Mork, Jb Audras Editor Tech Co-Leads: George Mamadashvili, Nik Tsekouras Core Triage Co-Leads: Colin Stewart, Mukesh Panchal Editor Triage Co-Leads: Anne McCarthy, Nick Diego Design Lead: Rich Tabor Documentation Co-Leads: Birgit Pauli-Haack, Femy Praseet, Milana Cap, Abha Thakor Marketing & Communications Co-Leads: Jonathan Pantani, Lauren Stein, Mary Baum Test Co-Leads: Robin, Adel Tahri Performance Lead: Felix Arntz Thank you, contributors WordPress 6.2 couldn’t be here without the countless effort and passion of more than 600 contributors in at least 50 countries. A special thank you to the 178 new contributors who joined a release for the first time. Their collaboration helped deliver hundreds of enhancements and fixes, ensuring a stable release for all—a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress community. 10upsimon · 254volkan · @mercime · Aaron D. Campbell · Aaron Graham · Aaron Jorbin · Aaron Robertshaw · Abha Thakor · Abid Hasan · abitofmind · ABTOP · ace100 · Adam Bosco · Adam Silverstein · Adam Wiltgen · Adel Tahri · Adhun Anand · adityaarora010196 · aduth · Afshana Diya · Ahmed Chaion · Ajay Maurya · ajayver · Akash Mia · Aki Hamano · Alain Schlesser · Alan Jacob Mathew · albarin · Alberuni Azad. · alecgeatches · Aleks Ganev · Alex Concha · Alex Lende · Alex Stine · alvastar · Alvi Tazwar · amin · amirrezatm · Amit Barai Alit · Amit Paul · Anantajit JG · Andrea Fercia · andreaboe · Andrei Draganescu · Andrew Matthews · Andrew Nacin · Andrew Ozz · Andrew Serong · Andrey "Rarst" Savchenko · André · Andy Fragen · Andy Peatling · Aniket Patel · Ankit K Gupta · Ankit Panchal · Anne McCarthy · Anthony Burchell · Anthony Hortin · Anton Vlasenko · Antony Agrios · Aparna Adhun · AR Rasel · Arafat Jamil · Aravind Ajith · Ari Stathopoulos · arnolp · Artemio Morales · Arthur Chu · ArtZ91 · Arun · Ashar Irfan · Ashraful Sarkar Naiem · Autumn · Ayesh Karunaratne · azurseisme · Barry Ceelen · Bart · Beatriz Fialho · Beda · Ben Dwyer · benish74 · Benjamin Grolleau · Benoit Chantre · Bernhard Kau · Bernie Reiter · Bethany Chobanian Lang · bgin · Bhavik Kalpesh · Birgir Erlendsson (birgire) · Birgit Pauli-Haack · bjorn2404 · BogdanUngureanu · bonjour52 · bookwyrm · Boone Gorges · Brad Jorsch · Brady Vercher · Brandon Kraft · Brennan Goewert · Brian Gardner · bronsonquick · Brooke Kaminski · Brooke. · buutqn · Cameron Jones · Carlos Bravo · Carlos Garcia Prim · Carolina Nymark · Chad Chadbourne · Channing Ritter · Chauncey McAskill · Chintan hingrajiya · Chirag Rathod · Chloe Bringmann · chocofc1 · Chouby · chrisbaltazar · Christoph Daum · Chrystl · ckanderson22 · Clayton Collie · cnspecialcolor · codesdnc · Coding Chicken · Colin Stewart · conner_bw · Copons · corentingautier · Corey Worrell · Cory Birdsong · Craig Francis · craiglpeters · Creative Andrew · Crisoforo Gaspar · Cupid Chakma · D.PERONNE · Daisy Olsen · dali-rajab · Damien Alleyne · Damon Cook · Daniel Bachhuber · Daniel Johnson · Daniel Richards · Daniele Scasciafratte · darerodz · datagutten · David Aguilera · David Baumwald · David Biňovec · David Calhoun · David Gwyer · David Herrera · David Marín Carreño · David Shanske · David Smith · David Vongries · Dean Sas · Dennis Claassen · Dennis Snell · derekblank · devanshijoshi · dhusakovic · Dilip Bheda · Dion Hulse · doctorlai · Dominik Schilling · Donncha · drzraf · DSIGNED · dustinrue · Edwin Cromley · Ella van Durpe · emanuelx · Emmanuel Hesry · Enej Bajgorić · Enrico Battocchi · Eric Andrew Lewis · Erick Danzer · Erik Betshammar · Esrat Sultana Popy · Eugene M · Evan Herman · Fabian Kägy · Faisal Ahmed · Faisal Alvi · fasuto · Felipe Elia · Felipe Lavín · Felix Arntz · Femy Praseeth · Florian TIAR · fpodhorsky · Francesca Marano · Francisco · Frank Bueltge · franzaurus · Fuad Ragib · Gal Baras · gamecreature · Garrett Hyder · Gary Pendergast · Gennady Kovshenin · George Hotelling · George Mamadashvili · Gerardo Pacheco · gisgeo · Glen Davies · Greg Ziółkowski · grl570810 · gvgvgvijayan · H-var · hakre · hanshenrik · Hareesh S · Harit Panchal · Hasan Misbah · Hasanuzzaman · Haz · Helen Hou-Sandi · HelgaTheViking · Helmut Wandl · Hendrik Luehrsen · Hilay Trivedi · hiren sanja · Hitesh Patel · hughie.molloy · hugodevos · hztyfoon · Héctor Prieto · Iain Poulson · Ian Belanger · Ian Dunn · Iazel · Ignat Georgiev · imanish003 · ingeniumed · Innovext · inwerpsel · iqbalrony · ironprogrammer · Isabel Brison · IT Path Solutions · ivanjeronimo · j.hoffmann · Jack Reichert · Jaed Mosharraf · Jakaria Istauk · James · James Koster · James Roberts · Jan Thiel · janusdev · Jarda Snajdr · Jarko Piironen · Javier Arce · Javier Carazo · Javier Casares · jchambo · Jean-Baptiste Audras · Jean-Philippe Green · jeawhanlee · Jeff Matson · Jeff Ong · Jeffrey Paul · Jennifer M. 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J. · Mark Jaquith · Marko Ivanovic · marksabbath · Markus · Markus Kosmal · Martijn van der Klis · Mary Baum · matclayton · Mateus Machado Luna · Mathieu Paapst · Matias Ventura · matiasbenedetto · Matt Keys · Matt Mullenweg · Matthias Reinholz · Mauricio · Max · Max Lyuchin · Maxime J. · MD Jamil Uddin · Md Kawser Ahmed Khan Jami · Md Rakib Hossain · Md. Abir Hasan Dipu · Md. Reduan Masud · mdviralsampat · Mehul Kaklotar · mensmaximus · meyerdev.ch · mgol · Michael Burridge · Michael Kelly · Michal Czaplinski · Michel Many · Miguel Axcar · Miguel Fonseca · Miguel Torres · Mike Schroder · Mike Straw · Milan Dinić · Milana Cap · Minal Diwan · mitchellaustin · miya · Monzur Alam · mreishus · mrwweb · mtias · mujuonly · Mukesh Panchal · Mumtahina Faguni · Musarrat Anjum Chowdhury · Mustaque Ahmed · mw108 · Naeem Haque · Namith Jawahar · Nathan Johnson · Nazmul Hasan · nendeb · Neycho Kalaydzhiev · Nicholas Garofalo · nicholaswilson · Nick Diego · Nick the Geek · nidhidhandhukiya · Niels Lange · Nik Tsekouras · NikhilPatel · Niluthpal Purkayastha · Nitesh Das · Nithin John · Nithin SreeRaj · Nitin Rathod · nitman43 · Noah Allen · nuvoPoint · oakesjosh · Obayed Mamur · ockham · oguzkocer · oh_hello · Okamoto Hidetaka · Olga Gleckler · OllieJones · Omar Alshaker · Paal Joachim Romdahl · PabloHoney · Pascal Birchler · Paul Bearne · Paul Biron · Paul Kevan · Paul Schreiber · pavelevap · pbking · Pedro Mendonça · pepe · Petar Ratković · Peter Wilson · petitphp · Petter Walbø Johnsgård · Phil Webster · Phill · Pial · Pieterjan Deneys · Piotrek Boniu · PJ Brunet · pkolenbr · Pooja N Muchandikar · Pravin Parmar · Presskopp · Ptah Dunbar · pypwalters · raduiason · Rafael Agostini · Rafin · Rajan Panchal · Rajesh Raval · Ramon Ahnert · ramon fincken · Ramon James · Razthee Md. Yakini · Renato Augusto Gama dos Santos · Reza Khan · Riad Benguella · Riccardo Di Curti · Rich Tabor · Rinky Chowdhury · Ritesh Patel · rjasdfiii · Robert Anderson · Robin · Robin Labadie · rodage · rodricus · Rolf Allard van Hagen · Ross Gile · Roy Tanck · Ruchir Goswami · Rupok · Ryan · Ryan Kienstra · Ryan Welcher · Ryo · Sé Reed · Sérgio Gomes · Sören Wrede · Sahil B. · Sajib Talukder · Sakib Mohammed · Sam Fullalove · sam1el · samiamnot · Sampat Viral · samruddhikhandale · Samuel Wood (Otto) · sanjucta · Sanket Chodavadiya · Sanne van der Meulen · sapayth · Sarah Norris · Sarath AR · Saumil Nerpagar · Sazia Faizunnessa Ira · Scott Kingsley Clark · Scott Winterroth · Scout James · Sean Hayes · Sergey Biryukov · seriouslysenpai · Seth Miller · Shahidul Islam · Shamayel · Shamim Mia · Sharif Mohammad Eunus · Shraboni · shubham1gupta · Silicium · Simon Gomes · Simon Lieschke · Siobhan · snicco.io · sruthi90 · SteelWagstaff · Stefano Minoia · stentibbing · Stephen Bernhardt · Stephen Edgar · Stephy Miehle · stephymiehle · Steven Word · Subrata Sarkar · Sumit Singh · sun · sunyatasattva (a11n) · Suvro · syamraj24 · Sybre Waaijer · Syeda Sanjida Afrin · syhc · Synchro · syntaxart · szaqal21 · Tahmid ul Karim · tahminar27 · Takashi Kitajima · Tanaz Masaba · Tanbir Ahmod · Tanner Moushey · Tasnia Rahman Raima · teebee · tekapo · thedaysse · thejaydip · theode · Thomas Griffin · Thomas Patrick Levy · thomask · timbroddin · Timi Wahalahti · Timothée Brosille · Timothy Jacobs · TobiasBg · tobifjellner (Tor-Bjorn Fjellner) · Tom J Nowell · Tomasz Dziuda · Toni Viemerö · Tony G · Tonya Mork · Torsten Landsiedel · Toru Miki · Towhidul I Chowdhury · travisaxton · triumvirate · Tung Du · Umesh Gupta · upadalavipul · Vagelis · Vicente Canales · Viktor Szépe · Virginie Garnier · Vishal Kumar · Vlad T · vtad · vykesmac · WebMan Design | Oliver Juhas · Webrocker · websitegenii · Weston Ruter · whaze · winterpsv · wojsmol · Wojtek Naruniec · Wojtek Szkutnik · Yui · Yuliyan Slavchev · Zeba Afia Shama · Zenaul Islam · zevilz · zieladam · Česlav Przywara By release day, 70 locales had translated 90 percent or more of WordPress 6.2 in their language. Community translators are hard at work ensuring more translations are on their way. Thank you to everyone who helps to make WordPress 6.2 available in 200 languages. A release haiku for 6.2 Six point two, so new Shiny and ready for you Congrats on hard work! * Portrait of Eric Allen Dolphy Jr. discovered via Openverse. Colorization by D. Pountain; Original by F. Wolff. “eric dolphy” by dick_pountain is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. View the full article

On Episode fifty-two of the WordPress Briefing podcast, join WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy and special guest Héctor Prieto as they discuss phase three and why it’s more than just collaborative editing! Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Credits Editor: Dustin Hartzler Logo: Javier Arce Production: Santana Inniss Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording. Show Notes Write as Blocks in an Encrypted Collaborative Environment by Riad Benguella Riad Benguella’s collaborative editing GitHub repository Riad Benguella’s WordPress.org Profile Block Collab: New package, a framework for collaborative editing GitHub PR Phase 3: Collaboration Matías Ventura Quick Search GH Issue Matías Ventura WordPress.org Profile WordPress 6.2 Release Day Process Introducing the WordPress Developer Blog WordCamp Europe Contributor Day Registration WP20 Wapuu Coloring Giveaway Transcript [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00] Hello everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:40] I have with me today Hécto Prieto. You all may know him from the WordPress Slack. He recently was, I believe, a release coordinator, maybe for the last release. Was that for 6.1? [Héctor Prieto 00:00:51] Yes. It was for 6.1 and also 6.0, in fact. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:54] All right. Well, welcome to the WordPress Briefing today. How are you doing? [Héctor Prieto 00:00:59] Well, I’m excited to be here. I’m a longtime listener of the podcast since the first episode. So I’m super excited to be here with you today. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:06] Yes. Longtime listener. First-time caller. All right, well, we’re gonna have a topic that just dumps you right in the soup, as they say in the United States. So we are actually here to talk about phase three of Gutenberg. It’s been a long time coming, and there are a lot of questions that folks have about what’s going into it and what’s not going into it. And as someone who works really closely with our Gutenberg technical architect, Matías Ventura, I figured you would be exactly the right person to come and talk about your favorite things. From your perspective, what is going to be the biggest enhancement that we start to approach in phase three? Like which thing, which API is gonna take the most work, do you think? [Héctor Prieto 00:01:53] Well, the most work, that’s a very hard question to answer because we are still we are going to start an exploration phase to determine how far we want to go with each of these APIs. So, in general, all these APIs and these products are standalone projects. And some of them are shorter, and some of them are longer. I would say, in general, the real-time collaboration sounds the most technically challenging because of what it represents and all the changes needed to how we interact with WordPress from async to sync, basically. That would be the hardest part. I think there are also already a few prototypes working, but we need to see how that scales, for example. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:32] Yeah. So speaking of a few prototypes, I know that there are two or three different prototypes specifically for collaborative editing, but do we have people or groups, working groups in the community that have built any other prototypes? Or is it just kind of first passes at collaborative editing that we’ve seen? [Héctor Prieto 00:02:52] Well, apart from Riad Benguella’s exploration, there’s a public repository with that exploration, there are a few plugins trying the same, trying real-time collaboration. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:03] Yeah, I can think of co-blocks and as blocks, and then I feel like there was a third one. [Héctor Prieto 00:03:09] Yeah. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:09] We’ll find the links to all these [Héctor Prieto 00:03:12] Yeah. Let’s add them to the show notes. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:14] Excellent. So that’s going to be the biggest one. Is there, of the list of APIs, and this is based on the post that Matías sent out last week. If you all haven’t seen that, we’ll put that in the show notes as well. But from the APIs that Matías sort of helped us to identify last week, is there any one that you are particularly excited about for fixing things in WordPress or just generally like an interesting topic of development for you? [Héctor Prieto 00:03:42] Well, I would say all of them and how they all play together. But, if I need to pick one of them… [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:48] Everything’s the best! [Héctor Prieto 00:03:50] I’ll cheat anyway, and I will going to pick two out of them because they solve issues at different levels. I’m very excited about visual revisions. I think it helps a lot of users, and it affects even non-technical users. So it’s one of the projects that lower how hard or complex WordPress can be to use sometimes. It’s going to be a huge improvement. It’s going to, I mean, bringing blocks to the revision system. I mean, it’s just a dream come true for me. I’m also going to highlight the search everywhere or quick search feature Matías already opened an issue in the GitHub repository right now. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:28] Mm-hmm. [Héctor Prieto 00:04:28] So the idea for this product is to have a power user shortcut that opens searching, an Alfred-like or Spotlight-like interface for those familiar with MacOS operating systems. When you can type anything, any place you want to go, or you want to search for any specific text in a document. And it’s supposed to be your power user command tool. So that you can do most things there. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:53] Oh, and I mean not only power user command tool, but also there are some applications there for folks who have mobility issues, people who are using primarily keyboard as opposed to keyboard and mouse, all that kind of stuff, right? [Héctor Prieto 00:05:07] Exactly. And just thinking long term with the rise of AI, it could be possible even to add some natural language processing to this interface so that users could just write in, in plain text, in natural language, what they want to do, and WordPress would provide the action for them. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:23] Very nice. My two favorites, since you gave two favorites and I can’t just give one at that point, my two favorite projects, which are also probably really, really hard projects, are those explorations around fixing notifications. That is a really big project. And one that I think that, in general, the WordPress project is going to be really excited to have some input on. And so that’s one that I really will have an eye on. And the other one that I’m going to definitely have my eye on is the media gallery redesign. I realize that this shows, between you and I, that shows our two specific focuses. Because, of course, you work directly with guiding all of our developers. And I am very much like our user advocate. And WordPress “everyman.” I don’t know if that’s a term that makes sense outside the US. But I do a lot of advocacy for folks who are using WordPress from the user side as opposed to from the developer side because, of course, we have a lot of excellent developers. So y’all don’t need my help with your advocacy. But yeah, that really shows that you and I have different focuses, which I think is good too. [Héctor Prieto 00:06:32] Yes. Also, it’s worth noting that at the end of the day, any improvement we make for developers is so that developers can build better things for users. So, at the end of the day, everything is in the best interest of the users. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:45] That’s right. That’s definitely a good point. Yeah. So, a final question about this particular thing because we’re trying to keep it a little brief and also because we’ll have a few other podcasts that are specifically about phase three as our explorations get going. Final question here: If you felt like there was one API or one project in particular that could benefit from a lot of community involvement which would you guess that was? [Héctor Prieto 00:07:20] I don’t think I can single out any of them. I think getting user feedback is going to be a vital part of this phase, as always. So I would encourage our listeners to just participate in discussions and provide feedback as we start releasing the first prototypes in the Gutenberg plugin. I don’t think I can pick one of them for you, completely honest. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:43] Yeah. My guess for that is going to be the rework of the dashboard, the admin, WP admin. I think that a lot of people are gonna have a lot to say about what they use it for, what they would like to be able to use it for, how to make it look more modern, how to make it feel more modern. I think that that probably is going to benefit from a lot of early testing and possibly some specific user testing around the concepts of design in there. And so that’s one that that I think probably is going to take a lot of feedback from the community. And community, in this case, I think, is not only our developers and designers and copy folks who are working to build the CMS, but probably also all of our folks who are extending WordPress, everybody who is working in agencies, things like that. [Héctor Prieto 00:08:35] Hmm, well, if I need to pick one, I would say the publishing flows could use also lots of feedback and testing because we are going to implement editorial requirements and customized user flows. And, of course, there are many, many different workflows out there that we might not be able to think of ourselves. So just imagine the sheer amount of different use cases. There’s going to be, or there currently is with customizations of third-party plugins. So, yeah. I would like to listen to how people would like the publishing flows to be. What are the specific use cases? [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:09:09] So really, just everything, we need a lot of user feedback on everything. [Héctor Prieto 00:09:13] Yes. That’s the summary. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:09:15] I don’t think that’s a bad summary. I know that we talk a bit about how WordPress is made better by the activity of our co-creators, the people who are using the software and testing the software, and telling us how it could be better. Those are the groups of people that make sure that we are the best version or headed in the best direction on any of our things with the software. And so I guess it’s probably not super unusual for everyone to hear like we need your feedback on everything because that’s probably what we do half the time. [Héctor Prieto 00:09:44] Yeah, absolutely. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:09:47] So the publishing workflows, that reminds me that there has been a little bit of a conversation lately around the naming of this phase, basically. And I know that the phases don’t necessarily need names. Like that’s why they’re numbered, and that’s a great idea. Like numbers are wonderful ways to reference things, but it also is just easier to reference it in kind of general conversation. So the first phase was easier editing, and it really focused on the editing experience itself. The second one was customization, and now the third phase has been called collaboration for quite a bit of time. But as we got closer and closer to this phase and we had more and more conversations that were coming out of phases one and two, it became really clear that really what we’re looking at here is more around workflows. And I love that that is an option for how to refer to this. Probably that’s how I will refer to it for most of the time that I talk about it as we are looking at phase three. Because I remember that when we were first building the prototypes of Gutenberg, one of the big flags that I had was that breaking changes are not just about what we can see or any sort of visual regressions or what causes the white screen of death. Also, some of the things that are breaking changes should be considered in those workflows when we change where things are or how you accomplish a task. And our users weren’t ready for it. That is something that is breaking for them, right? [Héctor Prieto 00:11:25] Yes. As you mentioned, this phase was referenced as collaboration, real-time collaboration, for a long time, but if we think of how this collaboration looks, it’s much more than just editing at the same time. A very big part of collaboration is also asynchronous collaboration by adding in-line comments and improving these notifications when you have a comment in your draft. I think the power of this phase is how everything comes together. These individual pieces come together. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 0:11:51] Yes, and I don’t know where that first flag that sparked the discussion around, like, okay, but collaborative editing is not quite big enough and also means a bunch of different things for a bunch of different people. It depends on the size of your organization or the type of content you’re writing. Like, I don’t know where that conversation started. My guess is, you know, some WordCamp somewhere, and an attendee was like, did you, did anybody ever think about these problems? And then they kind of worked their way around the Make Core site or otherwise made their way around to Matias’s ears. But yeah, I think that was a really smart choice. And you’re exactly right, collaborative editing; that can refer to the synchronous kind or the asynchronous kind, and both of those types of collaboration are equally valuable and probably equally used. [Héctor Prieto 00:12:40] Yes. And one important point to note here is that this editorial flows, and this collaboration is crucial to implement multilingualism going into phase four. We need to think that as soon as we have posts and pages in different languages, there are going to be requirements in terms of how to translate these pieces of content. So this will need collaboration, all forms of collaboration. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:13:02] Yeah, absolutely. This maybe was before your time with the project, but I was team multilingual-first for a long time. Or at least thinking that we could do the multilingual part of this work alongside the collaborative editing part of the work. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand what we think is going in phase three versus what probably we need to be able to do as far as having native multilingual support in the project. And I have softened my very hard position on that. You know, we’re big fans of strong positions loosely held, strong opinions loosely held. And this was one of those moments where I had that really strong opinion that we could just do them concurrently. We can do them at the same time. And I think it was a conversation that you and I were having when you were pointing out the complexities of translating WordPress at all, let alone being able to translate all your content as well. And it makes a lot of sense, and you’re right. I think that there are a lot of interactions, a lot of workflows that we’re gonna have to kind of refresh or redesign or rebuild before it really makes sense for us to help make that a nice streamlined option for multilingual offerings. [Héctor Prieto 00:14:17] Yes, absolutely. As a Spanish-speaking person, I’m super excited about having multilingual in Core, but I also understand that we need some tooling ready before implementing multilingual in Core. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:14:29] There are no, there really are no easy problems left in WordPress, right? Like, we all agree on this now? [Héctor Prieto 00:14:36] That’s correct. And we’re creating something incrementally. If we look at the phases, they are ordered sequentially. But that doesn’t mean that when we start phase three, we are, finishing phase two completely in the same way. We have not finished phase one. That will be like saying, when is WordPress finished, when is the development finished? So it’s an incremental project, and it’s always going to be to need refining. So it’s of course, multilingual needs to come after collaboration because we need those tools. But that doesn’t mean we need to finish the collaboration phase or have it very advanced phase three before we can start phase four. That will be determined in the next month as we start explorations. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:15:17] So if you all, which I know you are, are interested in better workflows, more streamlined ways of working inside WordPress, and or interested in how we are gonna get multilingual settled in the future, this is a great time to get involved in this project and in the community. Like I said, we’ve got that post up that Matías shipped last week, which, again, if you have not read it, go read it because it’s got excellent, excellent information in there for you. Héctor, before we head out, is there anything that you wanna make sure that you let the listeners know, either about phase three or just about WordPress in general? [Héctor Prieto 00:15:57] Well, tomorrow is WordPress 6.2 release day. So happy 6.2, everybody! [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:16:04] Happy 6.2. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Which means today is the dry run; probably in three hours, we’re doing the dry run. [Héctor Prieto 00:16:14] Depends on when we’re listening to this, but yes. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:16:18] Oh, that’s a good point. Right? Not everybody listens to this the second it becomes available. Time zones. That’s right. Oh, man. Look at us being a global project and just pretending like everybody listens to this particular thing the moment that it’s available. I apologize to everybody who’s listening to it after the release or in the middle of the release party or whatever you’re doing. Regardless, tomorrow, if you’re listening to it today, is the WordPress 6.2 release, and it’s gonna be great. Well, Héctor, thank you so much for joining me today. I really enjoyed having you on, and thanks for letting me interview you. [Héctor Prieto 00:16:59] Thank you for having me. It was my pleasure to be here. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:17:10] So that brings us now to our small list of big things, and as is frequently the case, it’s actually kind of a big list of big things. So we’re gonna hop right in here. As Héctor and I mentioned in the episode, the release WordPress 6.2 is coming out tomorrow, depending on when you’re listening to this. If you listen to it on the 27th, it comes out on the 28th of March. If you have a chance to drop by the release party. I would encourage you to; they’re pretty interesting just to get an idea of everything that it takes to build WordPress. It is, of course, the last few hours before a release, and so you don’t get a full scope. But it’s always nice to see the way that everybody in the community works together, especially there in that last moment when we’re trying to package something and test it in a bunch of environments all across the world. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:18:00] I love attending those. And so I encourage it. The next episode of the WordPress Briefing is going to have the release rundown. I’ll go through the key features and highlights that finally made it into 6.2. The reason we don’t do those beforehand is just in case we have to remove anything at the last minute from a release. It doesn’t happen too often, but it does happen sometimes. And so, next episode of WP Briefing, that’s what we’ll be talking about. The next thing on my list is a new developer blog. So there is a brand new developer blog. It was launched last Wednesday. It’s a great resource for WordPress developers to stay up to date and hear the latest in the WordPress development world. And also, we had been hearing some feedback from our developers in recent years that if you are like exploring how to extend WordPress, if you’re in that group of extenders, people who are building themes or building plugins, you’ve kind of feel like you’ve lost a place where you can have those exploratory conversations. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:19:00] This is gonna be one of those places. We’ll put a link in the show notes. So far, the content that’s planned, I think, is really interesting. Next thing on our small list, big list, of big things is WordCamp Europe’s Contributor Day. So registration for Contributor Day is now open, and it does require a separate registration than regular attendance at WordCamp Europe. So if you are registered for WordCamp Europe, you already have your ticket for that, but you are not registered for Contributor Day, click the link in the show notes and come on down to spend a little time giving back to the WordPress Project. And the last thing on our list today is that we have a WP20 Wapuu coloring giveaway. So put on your little party hats, and grab your crayons. The 20th anniversary Wapuu coloring giveaway is here. There is an opportunity to color in your own community-driven Wapuu and tweet it to us using #WapuuWP20 for your chance to win a sweet haul of WP20 swag items. [Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:20:00] You can check out the full rules at the link in our show notes. And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Thanks for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. View the full article

With much activity happening in the WordPress development space every day, keeping up-to-date with the latest updates can be challenging. The new WordPress Developer Blog is a developer-focused resource to help you stay on top of the latest software features, tutorials, and learning materials relevant to the open source project. This blog is the culmination of a community effort that began last year. Formed by experienced WordPress community members and developers, the editorial group has since worked on a wide range of content already available—from theme and block development tutorials to tips and tricks for leveraging WordPress in the site editing era. A new home for developers As a complementary resource to the WordPress documentation, the Developer Blog aims to provide a shared space to stay informed of development-related updates, keep up with ongoing discussions and ideas, and explore cutting-edge use cases. In other words, consider it as a central hub for developers and extenders of different backgrounds and skill levels to learn with quality content from reliable sources, share knowledge, and drive WordPress development forward. True to the open source way, the blog will likely evolve. As its editors and readers learn and create more content, it will adapt in response to the needs of community members like you. Everyone is welcome to chime in on-topic discussions, share ideas or contribute. Learn more about how to get involved. What about the content? Content on the WordPress Developer Blog covers many topics, including tutorials on theme development, plugins, and block development. You can also expect posts on WordPress APIs, best practices for working with WordPress, updates on upcoming releases, and learning resources for beginners and seasoned developers. These articles offer a good hint at what’s already in store for you: Demystifying home and posts templates in WordPress theme development Creating themes from a pattern-first mindset Static vs. dynamic blocks: What’s the difference? Creating custom block styles in WordPress themes What’s new for developers? (March 2023) Sounds interesting? Subscribe to the Developer Blog to keep up with the latest content in the WordPress development space. Props for content and peer review @chanthaboune @rmartinezduque @mburridge @marybaum @bph @greenshady @webcommsat. View the full article

It’s the final countdown: the third (and last) scheduled release candidate (RC3) for WordPress 6.2 is ready! The WordPress 6.2 release is scheduled for March 28, 2023—just one week away! Now is your last opportunity to test it before the general release. Just tuning in now? Catch up on the featured highlights, and dig into more 6.2 details in the WordPress 6.2 RC1 release announcement. Thanks to all the Beta and RC testers who have assisted in this release. Since RC2 was released on March 14, there have been about 21 issues resolved in Trac and GitHub. Your feedback and help in filing bug reports keep the WordPress experience stable, smooth, and delightful. It’s critical work and a great way to contribute to the project. How to install RC3 for testing This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it is recommended that you test RC3 on a test server and site. You can test WordPress 6.2 RC3 in three ways: Option 1: Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream). Option 2: Direct download the RC3 version (zip). Option 3: Use the following WP-CLI command: wp core update --version=6.2-RC3 A shout out to plugin and theme developers Your products are the reason WordPress does so many things for more people across the world. As you test your latest versions against RC3, make sure you update the “Tested up to” version in your plugin’s readme file to 6.2. If you find compatibility problems, please post detailed information to the support forums. Check out the WordPress 6.2 Field Guide for more details about the major changes in this release. Help translate WordPress Do you speak a language other than English? Help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages. Keep WordPress bug-free—help with testing Without your testing support, hitting important product milestones would be a much bigger challenge. It’s also a meaningful way to contribute to the project. If you’re new to testing, or it’s been a while, this detailed guide can help you get started. If you think you have run into an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. If you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, you can file one on WordPress Trac. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs. Release the haiku Wow, we’re oh so close Test, test. Get it out the door. Please no RC 4. Thank you to the following contributors for collaborating on this post: @laurlittle @marybaum @audrasjb @cbringmann @webcommsat View the full article

Here it is: the second release candidate (RC2) for WordPress 6.2 is ready! WordPress 6.2 is scheduled for release on March 28, 2023—which is only two weeks away. Now is your perfect opportunity if you haven’t tried it out yet. Your feedback and help filing bug reports are what keep the WordPress experience stable, smooth, and delightful. It’s important work and a great way to contribute to the project. Thanks to everyone who tested the Beta and RC releases so far. Since RC1 was released on March 9, there have been about 36 issues resolved in Trac and GitHub. Catch up on the featured highlights, and dig into more 6.2 details, in the WordPress 6.2 RC1 release announcement. How to install RC2 for testing This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it is recommended that you test RC2 on a test server and site. You can test WordPress 6.2 RC2 in three ways: Option 1: Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream). Option 2: Direct download the RC2 version (zip). Option 3: Use the following WP-CLI command: wp core update --version=6.2-RC2 A shoutout to plugin and theme developers Your products are the reason WordPress does so many more things for more people across the world. As you test your latest versions against RC2, make sure you update the “Tested up to” version in your plugin’s readme file to 6.2. If you find compatibility problems, please post detailed information to the support forums. Check out the WordPress 6.2 Field Guide for more details about the major changes in this release. Help translate WordPress Do you speak a language other than English? Help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages. Join the bug hunt—test, test, test Without your testing support, hitting important product milestones would be a much bigger challenge. It’s also a meaningful way to contribute to the project. If you’re new to testing, or it’s been a while, this detailed guide can help you get started. If you think you have run into an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. If you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, you can file one on WordPress Trac. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs. Release the haiku Listen, we are close One step to final RC Breathe, and keep going Thank you to the following contributors for collaborating on this post: @laurlittle @marybaum @audrasjb @cbringmann Haiku by @sereedmedia View the full article

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

WordPress 6.2’s first release candidate (RC1) is here and ready for testing. Reaching this part of the release cycle is a key milestone. While we consider release candidates ready for final release, additional testing and use by the community can only make it better. The official release of 6.2 is just three short weeks away on March 28. In open source, we say with many eyes, all bugs are shallow, so we ask everyone across the WordPress ecosystem—theme and plugin developers, educators, agencies, and creators—to jump in and help test. This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it is recommended that you test RC1 on a test server and site. You can test WordPress 6.2 RC1 in three ways: Option 1: Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream). Option 2: Direct download the RC1 version (zip). Option 3: Use the following WP-CLI command: wp core update --version=6.2-RC1 First-time tester? Here’s a guide to getting started. What’s in WordPress 6.2 RC1 This release includes over 900 enhancements and fixes and is the first major release of 2023. Gutenberg commits on GitHub Core Trac Tickets WordPress 6.2 comes packed with enhancements to make everything you do smoother, faster and a little more inspired: A refreshed Site Editor for easier template browsing A new sidebar experience in the Navigation block for simpler menu management Reorganized block settings with separate tabs for Settings and Styles New inserter design that lets you add Media—including Openverse and its more than 600-million-item catalog, plus your entire Media Library—and better categories More header and footer patterns for block themes A new Style Book that shows your entire site’s look and feel all in one place New controls to let you copy and paste block styles for faster, simpler design across your whole site Custom CSS you can add for those finishing touches, per block and globally Sticky positioning to keep important blocks fixed when scrolling Distraction Free mode for moments you want to focus on writing New options that let you import certain widgets from classic to block themes The removal of the Site Editor’s beta label—welcome to the next generation of WordPress Want to see some of these featured highlights in action? Check out the WordPress 6.2 Demo recorded March 2, 2023. Do you crave a deep dive into tech specs? These recent posts cover a few of the latest technical updates. This is not an exhaustive list, but it should get you started: Patterns API expanded to include template_types property Introduction of Block Inspector Tabs Shadows in Global Styles Introducing the HTML API Miscellaneous Editor Changes Custom CSS for global styles and per block Google Fonts are included locally in bundled themes Editor Components updates in WordPress 6.2 Enhanced accessibility And much, much more These are also compiled into a comprehensive WordPress 6.2 Field Guide. Let’s go on a bug hunt! Without your testing support, hitting important product milestones would be a much bigger challenge. It’s also a meaningful way to contribute to the project. If it’s your first time, or it’s been a while, this detailed guide is a great resource to lean on. From a global perspective, every time you test a pre-release version, you help secure the future of WordPress. How? By helping the community prove the software is stable, easy to use, and as bug-free as possible. Want to know more about testing releases in general? You can follow along with the testing initiatives that happen in Make Core. You can also join the #core-test channel on the Making WordPress Slack workspace. If you think you have run into an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. If you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, you can file one on WordPress Trac. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs. Interested in the details on the latest Gutenberg features? Find out what’s been included since WordPress 6.1 (the last major release of WordPress). You will find more details in these What’s new in Gutenberg posts for 15.1, 15.0, 14.9, 14.8, 14.7, 14.6, 14.5, 14.4, 14.3, and 14.2. A special thanks to WordPress plugin and theme developers Do you build plugins and themes? Your products play a special role in helping WordPress do more things for more people across the world. In turn, more people in the WordPress Community mean a bigger, more robust open web. Chances are, you have already been testing your latest versions against the WordPress 6.2 betas. With RC1, you will want to finalize your testing and update the “Tested up to” version in your plugin’s readme file to 6.2. If you find compatibility problems, please post detailed information to the support forums. Help translate WordPress Do you speak a language other than English? ¿Español? Français? Português? Русский? 日本? Help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages. This release also marks the hard string freeze point of the 6.2 release cycle. Hungry for even more? Want to know more about what went into the making of WordPress 6.2? Please check out the 6.2 release cycle, the Make WordPress Core blog, or search for all things 6.2 related. Another haiku for 6.2—it’s tradition! Beta has left us The code sings such happy songs Six point two RC Thank you to the following contributors for collaborating on this post: @laurlittle @cbringmann, @audrasjb, @jpantani. Haiku by @nomad-skateboarding-dev. View the full article

On March 2, release squad members Anne McCarthy and Rich Tabor presented a live product demo of all the delights coming in WordPress 6.2, set to release on March 28, 2023. A first-of-its-kind event in the world of WordPress releases, the showcase was moderated by fellow community member Nathan Wrigley and joined by nearly 90 participants. During the demo, Anne and Rich highlighted some of the new features and enhancements that will continue to revolutionize the way you interact with WordPress. They gave a quick tour of the Site Editor’s refreshed interface, which lets you browse and preview templates before editing. They also covered all the new and highly anticipated ways to manage styles, as well as improvements to the Navigation block, new collections of header and footer patterns, the new distraction-free mode for focusing on writing, and plenty more. It was a jam-packed hour that sparked plenty of excitement—and a lively question and answer session that wrapped up the event on a high note. Any questions the presenters couldn’t get to will be collected and answered in a follow-up post on Make.Wordpress.org/Core and subsequently linked to this post. Watch the recording of the live demo in case you missed it, or want to relive the moment (and the funky fresh demo site designed by Rich). You can find a full transcript of the live demo below. Referenced Resources Live demo announcement 6.2 release roadmap Wrapping Phase 2 of the Gutenberg project 6.2 release enters Beta 1 Beta 4 and the latest call for testing Fixed/sticky positioning GitHub issue Learn WordPress FSE theme developers on Twitch: daisyonwp and ryanwelchercodes Intrinsic design, theming, and rethinking how to design with WordPress Anne McCarthy on GitHub Learn WP workshop: How to create a website on mobile Props to @cbringmann and @laurlittle for co-authoring and editing this post, @evarlese, @courtneypk, and @mysweetcate for captioning, and @robinwpdeveloper for uploading the recording files to wordpress.tv. Transcript Nathan Wrigley 0:22 How are we doing? Should we go for it? Anne McCarthy 0:24 I think we can start. Nathan Wrigley 0:26 Why not? The recording has started. So let's get, let's get cracking. Hello, welcome everybody to the WP 6.2 Live Demo outline. I'm Nathan Wrigley. I do a few things around the WordPress community, mainly to do with video and podcasting and things like that. But it's not about me. Today, we've got two fabulous guests. We've got Anne McCarthy and Rich Tabor, and they're going to do a full on Product Demo. It's a little bit unlike things that you may have seen, because in the more recent past, lots of new features have been added. And so Rich, and Anne are going to spend the time on the screen in a moment, and they're going to show you all of the bits and pieces that you may find dropping into a WordPress install near you. Let's hope. There's been a lot that's been happening, so there really will be probably 20 or 30 minutes of live demos, so look forward to that. I've got to get them to introduce themselves in a couple of moments. Just before that, though, a little bit of housekeeping. This is going to be recorded, so if you have to drop out halfway through and go elsewhere, completely fine. It's going to be posted at the Make/Core website, but it will also come fully complete with a transcript as well. So, if that's something that you're looking for, that will all be there. Also to say that if you want to post any questions, we'd love that. In fact, there's a whole portion at the end when Rich and Anne have finished speaking, where we're going to field questions toward them. Now there's really two places to do that. If you're live with us on Zoom, then if you hit the Q&A button at the bottom of the screen and post your questions in there, I guess specifity... specific... Whatever that word is, be specific. Help us out. Tell us exactly what you want to know and we'll get the questions to them. The other way to do that is to go into Slack. And there is a channel in there, #walkthrough. And if you want to post any questions in there as well, that would be great. So yeah, just to recap, Q&A button if you're in Zoom, and use the Slack #walkthrough channel, if you are in the Making WordPress Slack. Okay, right. I think we'll take you guys one at a time if that's alright. First off a little bit of an introduction from both of you. Let's begin with with Anne McCarthy, shall we? Hello, Anne! Anne McCarthy 2:42 Hello, hello. It's so good to be back on literally any sort of live stream with you. I appreciate that you're a part of this Nathan Wrigley 2:48 Yeah, that's really nice. Anne McCarthy 2:49 Well, I'm Anne McCarthy. I'm a product wrangler at Automattic. I live in Seattle. I also run the FSE Outreach Program, which is basically dedicated to testing all the latest and greatest of WordPress, which is part of why I'm so excited to be part of this demo, is because so much neat stuff has come through this that I've had the privilege of going through a little bit early on with the ever growing calls for testing. So that's a little bit about me, I'll pop it over to Rich. Nathan Wrigley 3:17 Yeah. So Rich, if you want to take the baton there. Rich Tabor 3:21 Yeah. Hey, everyone. I'm Rich Tabor. I'm a product manager at Automattic. And I work on WordPress and Gutenberg, in particular. From a little bit south of Atlanta, Georgia, in the US, and been building and tinkering with WordPress for I think, close to 11 years now. So it's, it's been a good run, and I'm super stoked about where things are heading. Nathan Wrigley 3:43 Yeah, and things definitely have been moving in a very much a forward direction, WordPress, 6.1. And WordPress 6.2. There's so much clear blue sky between the two of them. I think probably the best thing at this point is if we can have it, I don't know what whose screen is coming on. I think it might be Rich's, or maybe it's Anne's, I don't know. Rich Tabor 4:00 Yeah. Nathan Wrigley 4:01 If we can get that screen shared, then I will slide my way out of this call and say, Rich and Anne, it's... it's over to you. I'll be back soon as you're finished for any Q&As. Anne McCarthy 4:14 Awesome. Thank you. Rich Tabor 4:17 Alright, everybody can see my screen right now? Anne McCarthy 4:19 Yes. Rich did an excellent job designing this. I do want to call this out that I love, absolutely love this. Rich Tabor 4:26 Thanks, Anne. Yeah, this is actually running Twenty Twenty-Three. So it's kind of showcasing some of the things you can do just with the core theme. And some of the design tooling that we are, that has been built into 6.2. So this view here is the site editor. So I'm going to orient you here. There's one big change here in particular, I want to call out visually, is this idea of the frame here on the right, and this will pull up the local template. So I'm looking at my homepage of the site right now. If I navigate into other templates, I can pull those up here on the right as well. And then you can also navigate template parts. So this part's not very new to 6.2. But the idea of zooming in on different template parts and templates and having them appear here in the frame is. And that's important because of this concept of browse mode. And this is where you could dive into an actual page from the site editor. So here, I just pulled up the about page of the site, and I can click into it and actually start making changes. Now, the changes here within the post content block are going to be relative to this about page. But I can also modify the template which then changes the about, or changes the page on any instance of this particular template. So it's a new concept and how we can browse the site. But it's a very powerful, and really the first iteration of that way of managing a site. Anne McCarthy 5:50 And also lightly introduced content editing in the site editor, as you mentioned. So it's a kind of a neat merging of the two worlds, which I know folks have long been wanting to see that unified. And same with the frame, it kind of adds a nice layer where instead of just being dropped in, like before, you kind of are given a more zoomed out view, which I think helps address a lot of the feedback that we saw around the orientation when you're entering the site editor. Rich Tabor 6:12 Yeah, exactly. And really, if we think a little bit further out than 6.2, this could also house setting to use. So we do have, you know, one view here that that is relative to 6.1, where you can see all of your different templates. But imagine if we had any other different types of settings and controls and different pages loaded within here, doesn't have to be just the front end templates and renders of your site. Alright, so we're gonna dive into this here. So you can go into it just by clicking on the frame. I'll do that one more time just to show, you just click on it. And now you entered right into it. You can edit it right off, so we can make changes, just as if we zoomed into it in the other way in 6.1. And then we have a bunch of styling tools that have been added to 6.2, so I want to kind of hone in on these. Like, this panel itself is not new. We have style variations, you can zoom in here, we've got this new zoomed out view, where you can apply different ones at a time. And then we also have this icon here, which triggers the style book. Now the style book is a very interesting tool here that really lets you customize the theme's style guide, essentially. So I can go through each of these tabs, which are relative to the block categories, and see all of the blocks loaded on this particular site. So right here, I've got like Button blocks and Columns block and whatnot. So if I click on one of these, it'll pull up the Style panel of that particular block. And then when I make changes over here, these are applied globally throughout my entire site. So if I want to change the way this button looks, let's say we do some smaller tags, maybe we'll add a little bit of letter spacing, and maybe make it capitalized. See, it's getting applied everywhere that the button is used. Also do some changes here to padding, perhaps. We'll do something custom here. I think that looks nice. And now... Anne McCarthy 8:13 Real quick while you're doing this, I wanted to note that like this is something that folks have really struggled with previously with the site editor, where if you're editing a block that isn't in the template already, you're not able to see this. So as Rich is showing, you can actually look at any block that's being used in your theme and see how the change that you're making in styles will impact that. Where before, if the block wasn't present in that template that you were editing, it was hard to know exactly what was happening. And so now you have both the style book and this inline preview that you see in the Style section to rely upon, which is pretty neat. Rich Tabor 8:43 Yeah, exactly. And really, you could theoretically go in and design your entire theme with the style book. Now, I know there's some advantage to design in context of pages and whatnot. And I'll go into that in a bit. But the idea is that you really can quickly browse through all of the different blocks and tighten up what you want to within these controls. And it's not limited to the standard variation as well. There's also these style variations of each block that you can now manipulate as well. So we're gonna go in, say, we'll change the radius of this one. So we want it to be sharp like our other button. But we have these new controls. Like, this is a shadow control we've added in 6.2, where you can apply, say, like this shadow here might be nice. This one here, and so some fallback shadows, within core that a theme can provide as well, its own values. But this now will apply for every single variation of the outline on my site here. Anne McCarthy 9:39 And you'll notice that it's not in the style book right now. And that's just part of the future feature development is showing the variations of blocks as well. Rich Tabor 9:47 Exactly, yes, I would imagine that this would this would show up the variations of the button block, yeah. Which is a nice way to really customize these, like it used to be only CSS would be used to manipulate these variations here. And now it kind of abstracts that away and you can do it within the editing experience. That's really nice. It really is. There's also this idea of block CSS, so you can add custom CSS that is scoped to a particular block. So if I add CSS here, it'll be applied for the button block wherever it's used. Now, I wouldn't recommend using additional CSS in most cases. I would, I would suggest using all the different controls that we've built, that are built into 6.2. But the idea of using CSS to add a little pizzazz to this particular button block is fine. But just with that caveat that you wouldn't want to use it exclusively. Like I wouldn't apply a background color via CSS, I would rather use the background elements color here. There's also additional CSS, which emulates what was previously in the customizer. So we do have site wide CSS that can be applied within the site editor and also on the front end of your site. Again, I wouldn't emphasize using this exclusively, as there are a lot of new design tools that I would explore first, from the top level styles here where you can apply colors to the background, text and buttons. But if there was anything extra you wanted to add, you could do so within the stylesheet here. Anne McCarthy 11:21 And I'll note we'd love to hear feedback if there are certain things that you're repeatedly adding custom CSS for. So either commenting on a currently open issue, or if you don't find one, opening an issue would be super helpful, because it's neat to see what folks are using for CSS so we can fill those gaps. Rich Tabor 11:36 Yeah, exactly. So that's the global Style panel here. But there are some quite a few other improvements along with styling. So the first is the idea of pushing styles globally. So if I'm in here, and I'm designing, let's say I want to add a radius, I want to do some different typography as to appearance like this, like bold, italic look. And then we'll also... Anne McCarthy 12:07 That's cool. Rich Tabor 12:07 Thanks. Also, let me make the letter spacing, maybe we'll make it a little bit bigger, actually, and then, I think that'll work. Do these changes here and see I've just styled this one particular block this button up here. And this button down here is still using the global styles that we designed earlier. But now I can go through my settings panel here and hit Apply globally. And I'm going to here so we can see that happen. The styles are now pushed globally to all the other blocks. So this is really helpful for when you're designing in flow. And you don't necessarily want to abstract out into the style book and you want to push your changes that you just did here, because you like the way the button looks and want those applied everywhere, all at once. I think this is really powerful way to to quickly design within the editor. Another tool that is quite useful, I'm going to take this heading here and manipulate this. It's the idea of copying and pasting styling. So we're going to use that same bold italic look, maybe we'll make that a little smaller, we can even manipulate this size to be a little bigger. Now we go here to copy styles. And then I can come all the way down here to this other heading that's very similar, and paste it in. And there we have that style applied just to these two headers. And you would do this when you don't necessarily want every single heading to have this effect. But perhaps there are like elements on this page that you want to push those changes to, specifically. So copying and pasting allows you to be very granular, whereas applying styling globally, lets you be more of a holistic design experience for pushing styles. Another neat... Anne McCarthy 13:57 Oh, real quick, I just wanted to know like I think one of the things that's interesting is, as we've added more design options to blocks like this is part of the experience of scaling things and making it easier to use. So when we think about like intuitive and delightful. Some of these tools coming into 6.2 really take you know, the tons of design tools that we've added over the last couple releases and makes it easy so you can actually tweak things and then reuse. So I think that's one of the things I want to call out is it's kind of this crescendo. Where now the tools that are coming to 6.2 to really ease the experience and allow you to do a lot of neat stuff where rather than having to re-tweak everything through every single heading block. A lot of stuff is used. So... Rich Tabor 14:34 Yeah, exactly. WordPress is moving towards a design tool and less of like, what you see is what you can only have. It's more of an expression of creativity and it really does open up the doors for for designing beautiful pages on the web. I think it's really powerful. Another cool bit that we've added is the idea of sticky positioning. So headers would be nice sometimes if they stick to the top, so for top level group blocks, this is a group block here, there's this new position attribute where you can assign it to sticky. And as you can see, right in the editor, it's already showing me that this is sticky on the front end. And also here as well. It's only available for top level blocks for now, there's still some some odd stuff to figure out on how we communicate when something is not going to stick due to the the parent height of the elements around it. But for top level, it's still fine. So we have it here. But there are some iterations that are already happening for the next release that will kind of bring this into more, bring some more capabilities to this particular feature. Anne McCarthy 15:44 Yeah, and I'm very excited because one of the things I wanted to briefly call out was the how the header, the template part has that purple. So another neat thing coming to this release, that was a big part of feedback for the outreach program was having to look parts and reusable blocks having a different coloring, because there are different kinds of blocks are synced across the site, when you make little changes and impacts everything everywhere. So that's another neat thing that's coming with this release, is that you can kind of see those a bit differently in the List view as well as when you're in the editor. I see Nathan has his hand raised. Is that intentional? Oh, it's removed. Okay. Nathan Wrigley 16:23 It was not intentional. That's my mistake. I'm sorry. Rich Tabor 16:28 Yeah, it helps you see quickly too like, what is the template part, particularly for headers and footers, it makes it easier to browse quickly. So speaking of template parts, and patterns in particular, so headers and footers, are new patterns added within WordPress 6.2. And now that they're loaded, actually from the pattern directory, which is kind of neat. And I'm going to show you how to replace a footer with one of those other patterns. So if you have your footer template parts selected, you can go to replace footer. Now this flow is not new to 6.2, but it's going to call out these other improvements. And then you just click one there, and you have it loaded here, that's the site logo that I'm using up here as well. And you can modify this text without having to do any any funky PHP filters or moving actual templates. And if you want to change it again, you go back to replace say, let's pick this other one, let's try this one. It's kind of nice. And there's this focus view, or you can zoom in to just the footer itself. You can even check the responsiveness of it and see how it, how it reacts on mobile, and make any of your changes here and have those persist over to the actual template whenever you close it out. It's a nice way to really kind of clean up the editing experience. So you're not seeing this entire group of groups and instead kind of focusing on what you're actually wanting to complete. You can do the same for the header as well. Anne McCarthy 18:01 Yeah, and as Rich mentioned, there are some new patterns that are being bundled from the directory, which I think are really extensive. Regardless of what theme you're using, there's going to be some pattern for group patterns that help democratize design where you can use them in anything. Rich Tabor 18:15 Yes, that's right. All right. So navigation. Navigation has gone under a... quite a bit of work in the last a couple of months. And really, this is all about trying to make it easier to manage your site's navigation and also add pages and links and then even styling. So there's this new dedicated list view for the navigation block. So it's essentially emulating a little bit of what's available over here except for you had to kind of get down to it. Now it brings it top of mine and the surface area here. You can drag them around, move them up and down, even add submenu links and remove them as well. And then you can style it like normal. And now apply different styles via the styles tab to the block itself, or even individual page links and whatnot, you can dive into them and manage them all from here, instead of having to only manage them from up here. This really kind of abstracts the complexity from from this particular canvas interface into a more familiar interface here on the sidebar. It's really a great effort. And it's it's taken some time to refine but it's getting there and it's feels a lot nicer. Anne McCarthy 19:30 Yeah, there's been a lot of good feedback about this as well just because it kind of is meant to marry the classic experience with bringing blocks into it. So it is in addition to being edit, editing on canvas, so if you really want to continue to edit as a block you still, you can continue to do that. But it does add a nice interface and the block settings where you're able to do it. And I'll briefly call out here the split settings, which we'll probably talk about later. But you'll see here for more complex blocks, there's some nice split settings making it a little bit easier, more intuitive to go through. Rich Tabor 20:02 Yeah, that's right. And if you take a look at navigation here, this is very similar to this component added here. And, and that's, that's purposeful, we want it to look and feel familiar. Either way you're managing navigation. So you can also add some menu items here, remove them and drag them around and reset them here, as well as browse into the individual pages. So that's what I have for the site editor portion of the demo. And did you have anything else you wanted to add to this, Anne? Anne McCarthy 20:37 Oh, could you resize the Browse mode for me? I just love the resizing. I think it's kind of cool. This is just like a fun, you know, thing to call out. But maybe you won't noticem but you can resize it. So as you're quickly going through your site, if you want to see how it looks in different ways, you can also do that. So that's the final thing I'll shout out. Rich Tabor 20:56 Yeah. So then, yeah, exactly. It's... there's a lot of fine, fine touches like that. Well, we can't obviously can't call them all out today. But it is really getting tightened up overall as an admin experience for the site. Anne McCarthy 21:12 It's such a great foundation in the future, for sure. Rich Tabor 21:15 Exactly, exactly. Alright, so if we press this back button here, it goes right back to the dashboard, I'm gonna go and leave... Anne McCarthy 21:25 That back button was a big piece of feedback people had they would get into the site or not know how to get back out. So I appreciate you calling that out. Rich Tabor 21:32 Yeah, exactly. It's been through a number of iterations. And I think we've settled on something that feels feels nice; it does feel nice. Anne McCarthy 21:41 I agree. Rich Tabor 21:43 So... Anne McCarthy 21:44 Ah yes, the removal of the beta label. Rich Tabor 21:46 You want to talk to this, Anne? Anne McCarthy 21:48 Yeah, I would love to jump in on this actually. So you'll notice that the beta label is removed for this release. And part of why we wanted to show it now is to see how all the features, how the experience has changed, how much more you can do. And all of that has led to the removal of the beta label. And that doesn't mean that feature development is done that it's like, you know, gonna stay this way forever, it just means it's in a place where we invite you all to try to the site editor, it is out of beta. And a lot of development work has gone into testing this. So we've had almost, I think, 20 calls for testing with the outreach program. It's been through multiple major WordPress release cycles, there is still more work to be done. But I'm very excited to see the beta label removed, I think the features that are coming to 6.2. And the foundation that is set with 6.2 really marks a level of maturity. That is pretty exciting. So consider this an invitation to try out modern WordPress, and to check it out. Rich Tabor 22:43 A hundred percent, I couldn't have said it better. Alright, so another neat part that's added recently for 6.2 is this idea of distraction free mode. So it's not turned on by default, but I have it on so we can see the results here. So you can go in and type right here. And then actually, I'm gonna throw in some Lorem here. So you can see it in action. So this feels more like a text editor and less like a Block Editor. Whenever distraction free mode is on even the the multi block selection, it feels really nice. It doesn't there's not this idea of blocks, even it's kind of abstracted from here, there's less noise, there's less distraction. And just think that the idea is that it's just you and your words, it's just writing and publishing. And if you want to publish, you can hover over here, you'll see the toolbar come down, you can hit Publish or draft. And then this is how you would turn it off and back on here. And then you still have control of all the existing tool. And it's just a much simpler, streamlined interface. And you do have access to blocks, you can still add them if you'd like to, but the idea is just being able to write without the distractions is really powerful. And a really nice publishing experience overall. Anne McCarthy 24:08 And this is for everyone. So this is like a lot of stuff we're coming to say it or using a block theme. This is available for anyone who's using the Block Editor. And to be honest, I use this for basically all my writing now. Especially for any post or page, I typically will go into this mode. So I'm very excited about this. And I hope folks feel the same way. Rich Tabor 24:28 Yeah, exactly. I've been using that too for quite a bit. But the thing is, is also not only for post editing, so I have a page here that I've created. And I have distraction free mode turned on, which kind of removes all the extraneous tooling and it really lets me focus in on the actual blocks here so I can manipulate them to an extent. I can even drop in different imagery for these images here and modify the buttons and whatnot and even add more blocks but the idea is it's almost like a simplified editing experience for pages as well, not only for posts. And here, I'll come up here and turn off distraction free mode to see it all in real time. Anne McCarthy 25:13 And this isn't yet available for the site editor, but I have a feeling a number of folks are going to be keen to see that put in there as well. Rich Tabor 25:20 Exactly, yeah, I don't see why it wouldn't work in the site editor as well. I think it'd be very nice. Yeah. So we have some other improvements here that are fun. So this inserter here has gotten a couple of changes here. So blocks looks familiar, it's still the same, but patterns is where we started seeing some changes. Instead of having some featured patterns loaded in a block category selector, we've split them out individually as their categories here, you're gonna load up some of the different header patterns that are loaded in WordPress 6.2. So you can load them here and see them in this tray, and then click to add them to your site. Which is really nice, it's a nice way to kind of go through them quickly and see a bunch of different ones. We also have the media tab up here, which is new, which splits out the images from your Media Library, videos, and audio as well, including the Openverse library. So this is a catalogue of, I believe, over 600 million free, openly licensed stock imagery. And you could search from right here in the inserter. So let's type in birds. And click on one, and it will add an image block with the image already added to it, we have got the caption down here. If you don't want the caption, you just turn it off right here, this little control that was added. And now you can manipulate it right off. So let's say this, drop it into here. Maybe we'll make these about the same size and move it over to something interesting. Anne McCarthy 26:53 And I'll note that there was a GDPR concern around the images being properly uploaded rather than hotlinked. And I wanted to just note that that's been addressed. So the images are uploaded to your Media Library. That's why. So in case anyone has that question. Sorry, continue. Rich Tabor 27:08 Yeah, no, that's a good point. It's very important. A key benefit to have this flow here is that instead of instead of having to add an image block, and then open your Media Library, and then pick an image, and then you have it here, it's really this one flow of searching visually, and searching here, as well. And then having it added as an image block already. So it kind of skipping all the extra steps that you always have to do anyhow, it's really nice. And we have a couple of interface changes. So there's the settings icon up here that used to be a cog, and now it represents the sidebar itself. So when you open it, the sidebar is triggered, if that's closed. And that's changed for a couple of reasons. But one of the bigger reasons is, as I mentioned earlier, this idea of split tabs, so we have the cog for settings. And that's when a block has additional settings that are not per the norm of the styles that are available within WordPress, then you'll have a new settings tab pulled out here. And that's to keep the density nice whenever you're editing and it feels good instead of having everything kind of in your face all at once. Now for other blocks, like the paragraph block, there's not additional settings, so automatically not included. The tabs up top and just be everything top level. But when a third party plugin adds like a different settings panel, or even if you extend one of these core blocks that does not have one, and a detects one should be auto added as well. So it's kind of just like a nice, fluid way to continue improving the experience of editing within WordPress. Anne McCarthy 28:49 Yeah, so plugin authors can also kind of make sure where they want settings and styles to show that it shows up correctly. And there's a dev note about that as well. Rich Tabor 28:58 Yes, that's right, you can you can decide as when you're extending or adding your own inspector controls. That's what these are called here, whether or not they're included within styles or settings as well. Yeah. Then another smaller change that's kind of nice is this idea of pulling the outline from its own toolbar item up here into the list view. It's because they're very relative, you know, a list of all the blocks on your page, also an outline of what's going on. So they're combined now into this one view. We also have time to read word count and character count here, which is nice. And then this is a little guide here that just helps you understand the structure of the importance of the structure of the document and making sure that it is properly structured. All right, was there anything else that we wanted to add you think, Anne? Anne McCarthy 29:51 I'll add one last call out just because I'm trying to think about like little dev tidbits if you want to disable it prefers there is a way to disable Openverse as well I know that's always a concern. We add something it's like, okay, how do we get rid of because I don't want a client getting into it, there is a way to disable that is documented as well. The other thing is the pattern. So there's new categories, the patterns. And so query is now posts, a couple of things were merged, there's no call to action. And there's also some lovely, which I'm gonna brag on Rich, again, some new text based, query patterns. We have a lot of visual patterns for the query loop, and now there's wonderful, more text focused ones, which I think is really exciting. And just another great way where patterns have evolved and patterns is obviously a huge part of the future building with WordPress. So I'm very excited about those and keen to see just more variation with query loop, I think it's really powerful block to make easier to use. So I'm excited to see it. Otherwise, I think that's, I think that covers a lot of what we were trying to go through. Rich Tabor 30:57 Yeah, and there's certainly more. There's a lot of interesting, minute details that are, you know, quality of life improvements around editing and designing. And we can't cover them all today. But it's just, there's a lot of exploratory ideas and cool, interesting pieces that have been the result of lots of feedback and lots of testing, like I mentioned earlier. And, you know, it's really a testament to open source and contributing and really working together as a team to make this thing we call WordPress ours and making it a brilliant publishing experience. So just thank you to everyone who's put in time ideas, effort, code, design, marketing, copy, all of that, and more to making this what it is. It wouldn't be possible without you. Anne McCarthy 31:46 Totally agree. And thank you, Rich, for doing such an excellent job building this site and demoing all this. Nathan Wrigley 31:51 Yeah, indeed. Thank you, Rich. Thank you, Anne. Just to let you know that, in theory, there's possibly up to about 25 minutes left. If anybody wishes to pose a question, we're going to do our best to get the answer directly from Rich and Anne. Whether that means putting the screen back on, I don't really know. But we've got a few that have come in. The place to put those, it would appear that some people have figured out how to do that in Zoom. But if you go to the walkthrough channel, in the making WordPress Slack, you can post some questions in there and all things being equal, we'll get them raised as quickly as we can. So we've got a few. In all honesty, because they've been copied and pasted from various different places, I can't necessarily say who the name of the person is that sent them. But first question I've got over here for either of you. It says when you save globally, under the Advanced tab, does this change the stylesheet? Interesting. Rich Tabor 32:54 So this will change the attributes of the blocks. So if I throw in that example, there, I pushed the attributes of that one block globally. So they're applied to every block. So it does affect some styles, but not writing any style sheet or writing to the core style sheets. Nathan Wrigley 33:11 Can I ask the question? It's not something that's been submitted by anybody else, but it just occurred to me that as you were clicking the global button, I just wondered if there was a "get out" from there. In other words, if you inadvertently click the global button, is there an undo option in there? In other words, can you back away from all of the buttons suddenly changing or all of the H1s? Anne McCarthy 33:32 You do have to hit save after. You can't just hit Apply globally. You have to hit save, and that's where the multi-entity saving pops up. The multi-entity saving is kind of strange in that it's not good at discarding changes. So you basically would just have to like leave. Like it would be like, Whoops, I hit that. You probably also have to hit the undo. Like there's - those are the two kind of options. So, yeah. Rich Tabor 33:54 Yeah. The undo is like a global thing. It works there as well. Yes. Anne McCarthy 33:58 And there's a reason that feature is hidden, like under Advanced and collapsed. That's not necessarily for everyone. But for folks who do like to tinker, it is available. Rich Tabor 34:08 Right. And it's also only available in the site editor as well. So it's the more the global view of editing your site is where you can access that. Nathan Wrigley 34:17 Perfect. Okay, so I have a question from Zoom. Is copying and pasting styles as demonstrated just for core blocks? They go on to say more, which I'll read out. Some blocks collect, some block collections have their own C&P, and I'm curious what might carry over, if anything? And then there's a follow up. Also, if CSS classes are assigned to a block, will applying global styles to a block be to all of the same block, i.e. H2? Or, hopefully, will a custom class allow for a more granular global CSS? There's a lot in that question, but if we start with the: is copying and pasting styles demonstrated just for core blocks? Rich Tabor 34:56 So it works for blocks that have leveraged the block support system within core. So if you have opted your block into using background color, and text color, link color, any of the layout settings, anything that was in the styles tab, then all of those would get pushed to or get copied or pasted or even pushed to the global application of styles as well. Now, if there's, if a block has done its own sort of background color attributes, I don't know that those would persist as well. But if you use what's available in core, it's really one or two lines of JSON will get you the background color support that you need. Nathan Wrigley 35:35 Anything to add to that, Anne? Anne McCarthy 35:37 No, just another reason to rely on what core is building. So it's a another great example of how these features will work together and how adoption helps whenever these new things come out. Nathan Wrigley 35:49 Okay, so we'll go on to the next question then. So this is from Zoom, and apologies, I don't know your name. Can we have this as a feature request? Can we have sticky sidebar block for some groups next release, please? Anne McCarthy 36:05 Probably would do a separate block, I'm guessing. Yeah, do you have anything to add to that? Rich Tabor 36:11 Yeah, I would say we wouldn't need a sticky sidebar block. Right now that group lock in top level-only does support position sticky. And the only reason it was turned off like we did have it on for one of the Gutenberg releases for everything - for every group block - but it was turned off just because there was too much confusion around if you had a sticky element that wasn't didn't have enough space to stick for and enough height to stick. So it wouldn't actually be sticking. You wouldn't see a result of you applying a sticky position to it. So I think we can figure that out with some some UX to really clean that experience up so that you do expect and understand what's going on. When you apply that to a block. That's not the root level of the document. So it'll be there. It just takes a little bit more iteration. Nathan Wrigley 37:00 Okay, another question. This time from Slack. When there are changes made in the site editor, are the templates still marked with the blue dots to indicate that the changes are in the database? Rich Tabor 37:14 Yes, from that Manage Templates view that I shared in the canvas, it will show up just like it did previously, when there are changes to one of the templates provided by the theme. Anne McCarthy 37:25 You can revert the changes, as well, as you're used to doing. Nathan Wrigley 37:30 Okay, thank you. Anne's shared a link related to the question that we just posted. I don't know how Zoom works well enough to whether or not we can share the screen. Anne McCarthy 37:40 I can briefly share my screen. Nathan Wrigley 37:42 Yeah, that'd be great. Show us the GitHub. Anne McCarthy 37:43 Let me try that. I just wanted to mention this in case people want to follow along in the follow up tasks related to this. I love to look at links. I'm a nerd like that. So in case anyone else is, this is a lot of the follow up tasks and a great issue to chime in on or just follow if you're interested in this because there are some improvements to be made. But this is a neat report for now. So it's - oh, I just copied and pasted. So it's issue number 47043 in the GitHub repo. Nathan Wrigley 38:11 So 47043 related to the question that we just had. Okay, so another one from Zoom. This is Robin, who asked the question, can you show? It's just moved on my screen. There we go. Can you show us how to trigger the focus mode to view, say, for example, the footer on its own? So I guess we're back on the screen again. Rich Tabor 38:34 Sure. Everyone can see? Yep. So when you have a template part selected, you just hit the Edit button here and then it's focused into that as well. And then you have, again, the responsive controls here. All the existing controls, it's just localized to this template part. Nathan Wrigley 38:54 Hopefully that answers your question. Thank you, Robin. Just for anybody who's kind of lurking who has a question but hasn't yet posted it, please do. What are the chances that you're going to get Rich and Anne on the on the phone in the next few weeks? Pretty minimal, I'd say, so make use of them while they're here. Ellen has done just that. She's in Slack. Ellen says, is there a plan to allow no title templates in the block editor as they are still included even in header and footer-only templates? Rich Tabor 39:28 No title templates. Like templates without a title? I'm not quite. Anne McCarthy 39:35 You can just remove that block. Rich Tabor 39:36 Yeah, you can you can remove the post title block from a template. I'm not quite sure if that's if that's what the question is asking. Nathan Wrigley 39:46 Ellen, if you're still in Slack and watching this, if you heard Rich and Anne queerying that, then if you can give some more clarity, we'll endeavor to get that answered. Anne McCarthy 39:57 Knowing Ellen she knows exactly how to remove things. So I'm like, I'm curious. I'm definitely - we're misinterpreting something because she's very - Not showing the title in the editor...? Nathan Wrigley 40:07 Yeah. Not showing the title in the editor. She says she's here. Anne McCarthy 40:12 I'm like, "Say more." Nathan Wrigley 40:14 Yeah. Give us more. Give us more Ellen, and we'll get right back to you. Anne McCarthy 40:17 Let's follow back up on that, because Ellen always has some good questions and good feedback. Nathan Wrigley 40:21 All right. We'll do just that. Again, another question from Zoom. This is posed by some anonymous person. Will the list views icon get the same treatment as settings? Rich Tabor 40:33 I don't think it's in the plans. I don't think there are plans to change that. But list view icon, it's always the list view. So when you toggle it on and off, it's relative to what it is. Whereas on the other side, the settings can be block settings, page settings, template settings. Global styles is in that same area. So it's a little bit more context for the list view to stay a list view item. Anne McCarthy 40:58 And I know that the question came up because the settings icon looks like there's that sidebar. And so there are who people have been asking like, will the same thing happened over here? Just for context. That was part of a discussion in a different GitHub issue. Nathan Wrigley 41:12 Okay, thank you very much. I appreciate very much those people who are posing questions. That's really great. Again, just to prod you once more, feel free to add your own questions in no matter how big or small they are. We're here to help. So now we have a question on Zoom from Abdullah. And he coincides beautifully with a question I've written down. Any good resources to learn FSE theme-based development? Can either of you point to a particularly good resource that you know of? Anne McCarthy 41:41 Yeah, Learn WordPress. There's tons of stuff on Learn WordPress that I would recommend. I also, Daisy Olson, who's Developer Relations at Automattic, has a Twitch stream going and some YouTube videos around block theme development. But I would recommend going to Learn WordPress. There's also some contributor-led initiatives. Carolina, who's one of the theme folks has, I think, it's fullsiteediting.com. And that was kind of like the original, go-to resource. And she's done an incredible job working on that and keeping it up to date. So yeah, there's tons of tons of resources. I will spare you from from sharing more, I don't know, Rich, you have more hands-on experience there. What's the most helpful for you? Rich Tabor 42:22 Yeah, there's some really great tutorials and guides on Learn that are relatively new, that are really helpful. And I see that the team there has been really cranking it out on the last year or two, like really putting a lot of effort into this. So I would, I would start there. Nathan Wrigley 42:38 So if you're not familiar with that, I guess it would be apropos to say go to your browser of choice and type in learn.wordpress.org and go and explore. Basically, there's a ton of materials that are getting updated on what feels like a daily basis at the moment. So, once more, learn.wordpress.org. Go and check that out. But also, Anne in the chat that we've got going on here has linked to Daisy Olsen's Twitch channel, which - I'm just going to read it out but hopefully I'll make it into the transcript. twitch.tv/DaisyonWP. And it's all one word. D-A-I-S-Y-O-N-W-P. Daisy on WP. So there's two great places to go. But the learn.wordpress.org is perfect. Anne McCarthy 43:24 I have to add one more thing, which is if you're not fully ready for block themes, one of the big things that I feel like needs to be emphasized more is you can gradually adopt. So all these features are being done. But maybe you want to only give access to a client to edit the header. You can do that. Maybe you want to leverage theme.json in your classic theme, you can do that. If you want to expose the template editor. But use the rest of your themes across them, you can do that. So I want to also encourage folks to look into resources around gradual adoption, because it makes sense that this stuff isn't - From day one, there has been a focus on that. Adopt what you what you want, when you want and it's going to make sense to different people at different times. Matías once said that to me, and I think it rings really true. And so now that we're at this level of maturity, I think we're looking again and revisiting again, like okay, what can I use? What do I want to use? I think it's really important to mention. So if you're not ready to go all in, I encourage you not to just wipe it all away, but to think about how you can gradually adopt and also what would help you gradually adopt. So there is actually a label on GitHub started a couple months ago around - It's called blocks adoption. So if there's something that you see that you're trying to adopt the site editor, and it's preventing you from doing so, like we want to know about that. And you're welcome - I'm going to just put this out here - @annezazu is my GitHub username, feel free to just like @ annezazu, ". This is blocking me from using the site editor." We want to know these things. Open issues. Please share, because that is also part of the phase of this work is making sure people can adopt as they can and that the tools are robust. There's a ton of resources as well. There's a page in the Theme Handbook around gradually adopting to block themes. So I just wanted to call that out. Nathan Wrigley 45:06 And just one more time, what was that? Give us, the give us the username. Anne McCarthy 45:11 A-N-N-E-Z-A-Z-U. So like Zazu from The Lion King. It's an inside joke from middle school. Nathan Wrigley 45:19 Okay, possibly the shortest question. This is from Sandy, I should say, Can Lotties be added to 6.2? Rich Tabor 45:28 I would say that I did a quick search a few minutes ago and there are various blocks built by the community, which do allow you to add or embed LottieFiles to your site. I haven't tested any myself but feel free to dig into those. And if they're open source, they can contribute ideas or feedback on on those GitHub repos. Nathan Wrigley 45:49 Thank you very much. And Eagle has posted a question. When there are changes made in the site editor, are the templates still marked up - Did we have that one? We have, right? We've done that. Anne McCarthy 46:01 We answered that one. Yeah. Nathan Wrigley 46:02 I think we did. Okay, moving on directly then to Ian, what is - oh! Okay, what is the philosophy for mobile in the editor? Are there any plans to have a mobile view? Anne McCarthy 46:16 That's part of the dragging and resizing. And there's a lot of work being done around intrinsic design. And you can see on the developer.wordpress.org? What is the blog? I think it's /news. Do you hear audio? Nathan Wrigley 46:35 I hear only your audio. I don't hear anything I don't wish. Anne McCarthy 46:36 Okay, sorry. Something just started playing in the background out of nowhere and that just scared me. It's like all of a sudden, I was like, woah! Where was I? Nathan Wrigley 46:50 So we were talking about mobile views? Anne McCarthy 46:53 Yes, intrinsic design. There is a developer blog that if you're not following that, you definitely should, that addresses this around, basically showing that the mobile view points have exploded over time. It's now really not sustainable to try and have CSS and all this sort of stuff, mobile queries allowing for each view. So instead, how can we think about intrinsic design? And so that's like the best answer I can give. And for now, there is this nice resizing that you can do to kind of see how things scale. 6.1 introduced fluid typography, which was really exciting and part of this larger, intrinsic design set up. And I think we'll expect to see more of that over time. Sorry, for the brief mental break. Nathan Wrigley 47:36 Just a quick reminder, we probably got 5, 6, 7 minutes or something like that before we start to wrap things up. So if you've got any questions, please, please do post them in here. We have one from Paul who asks, is there any more work planned for pattern management in the future? And then WP Engine has released a plugin allowing easier management of patterns recently, I believe that was yesterday, it would be good to know if we should wait for core or assume that nothing else is coming soon. Rich Tabor 48:07 Yeah, I would say that pattern management is an important part of this new WordPress experience and having a way to create and manage local patterns, but also maybe push them to the pattern directory. And then on top of that, having a functionality built in where - it's kind of like a component based system where you have patterns where the design is the same across patterns, but content can change. All of that kind of falls into the same category of work. And that is something I believe WordPress will eventually do as well. Nathan Wrigley 48:41 Okay, we've got no more questions on the screen. So I'm going to ask a question, if that's all right. You were demonstrating the distraction-free mode there where you could move things up, move things down, and resize pictures and images and so on. I was just wondering what the constraints on that are. So in the case of images, I could see that you could resize things. And with the text, I could see that you could, you know, highlight things and start typing wherever you wish. But I just wondered how the decisions had been made to set those parameters and those only. So yeah, around that, what's available in distraction-free mode? What limitations are there? Rich Tabor 49:17 I would say, generally, it's what's available is what happens when you click on a block. The tooling is there available on the canvas before so resizing was available on the image but not the toolbar. So the resizing is still available when you're in distraction-free, but maybe not adding the caption piece or you know, those other toolings. It's almost like the content locking or content only locking API. It's very similar to that in a sense, but a little bit more tightened up. Where just text and dropping in images - you can't necessarily open the Media Library from there unless you dive out of it. But you can drop another image onto that existing image to replace it. Some things like that. Nathan Wrigley 49:59 It looks like a really excellent interface for people who just, well, want to concentrate on their writing. It sounds like Anne's all in on it. Anne McCarthy 50:05 I use it every single day. It's amazing. Nathan Wrigley 50:09 It almost felt like a Google doc minus all the bits and pieces at the top. Yeah, really, really nice. Okay, so we have some more questions. Weston is asking, what about optimizing the experience of editing using a mobile device on the web? So I guess that's a little bit maybe the question that we had earlier. How can... we how can we do things on a actual mobile device? Anne McCarthy 50:30 That's a great question. There are mobile apps. So there is the mobile team and using the mobile apps. I personally don't use mobile apps and sometimes will edit things from Safari on my iPhone SE 2. I actually was talking to someone - their username is Nomad Skateboarding. And from what I understand, he only builds client sites from his phone. And so one of the things I said to him, I was like, "Give us your feedback. That's really cool. It's really unique. That's fantastic. Like, what pain points you're running into, what can we improve?" Because there is obviously like, we are in a mobile first world. My phone is sitting right next to me. I would love to hear particular pain points folks have when trying to edit in that way. You can obviously use the apps. There are some quirks with the site editor, and that I know is partially being looked into and resolved. But yeah, I think there are probably - what we're building now should always translate back and there are teams trying to sync back and forth. And there was a recent post from the mobile team talking about what's the future of mobile editing. And so I would recommend - it's somewhere on Make/Core. I recommend digging that up and getting involved and honestly sharing your feedback. Because I don't think that is an experience that we talked about enough personally. It's a great question. Nathan Wrigley 51:40 Rich, anything or should we move on? Rich Tabor 51:42 I think that was great. Nathan Wrigley 51:44 Okay, perfect. Um, um, um. Okay, we have an anonymous question. It says as page speed is a big challenge, how are we optimizing the blocks for better LCP score? Anne McCarthy 52:00 There are, some interesting - sorry, Rich, I don't know if you wanted to jump in. I was going to start link dropping. Rich Tabor 52:05 Yeah, you go ahead. Yeah. Anne McCarthy 52:07 Yeah, there's some interesting work from André. Part of it involves actually adding tracking and making sure there's really good front end metrics. So there's kind of a twofer going on. In one fell swoop, we're focusing on better tracking and improving the tracking that we have for performance, particularly the front end. And then at the same time, also work is being done to optimize like style sheets. There's been some really neat stuff in previous releases that I bet I can pull up if you'll give me one moment. Nathan Wrigley 52:36 Yeah, whilst you try to find that, Anne, I think it's probably important to say that, if there are any questions which you wish to have answered which don't somehow get answered in the next few moments, then there will be posts created around this piece. So anything that goes missing, any question that is unanswered, there will be endeavours to get them answered. Right? Okay, show us what you got, Anne. Anne McCarthy 53:00 Yeah. So this was a post I did for 5.9, in conjunction with a whole ton of folks who contributed and actually did this work, I just was kind of gathering it up. But you'll see sections here around block style sheets and CSS loading. And honestly, a lot of the work with the styles engine, which is part of the global styles project, can help give a lot of opportunity to actually improve this, I recommend checking out this post to see some of what's already been done. And then in the future, one of the discussions that we had recently with some folks across the community from Google, from Automattic, 10up, all over the place, including our lovely performance lead, Felix. We talked about some of this stuff and about how to talk about particularly themes and also just blocks in general. And thinking about some performance improvements and developer education and automated testing and all sorts of stuff. So I won't go too far into this. But I think a lot of work can be done. And some of it is being done around measuring more front end metrics and very recently, LCP was added and started to be tracked here, which I think is pretty exciting. Nathan Wrigley 54:05 I think following the performance team and Felix Arntz, in particular, would possibly get you quite a long way towards your answers there. Okay, a couple more. Firstly, there's a few people helping out in the Slack channel. So, appreciate that. We've got Matías answering questions, and so on. So that's really amazing. Thank you. Another anonymous question, any plans to support CSS Grid? Rich Tabor 54:33 I think it's something worth exploring. Probably not the major priority coming up. But definitely some interesting aspects that we've seen other... other building applications do that we can learn from for sure. Nathan Wrigley 54:47 Okay, we're very short on time now. I think we've got to round it off at the top of the hour. So we've got about four minutes left. I've got to wrap it up a little bit. So try to get these last two done if we can. This is from Mary. What are the typography options as of 6.2? we have Google fonts and self-hosted. Any plans for solutions like Adobe Type and Monotype? Anne McCarthy 55:11 There's a Fonts API that got booted from 6.2 and is hopefully planned for 6.3. So I would just follow that effort. So right now, 6.2 is not introducing anything new or different there. Things are as they were. There's a private API that folks can can use with anything JSON. That's as concise as I can be. Nathan Wrigley 55:31 No, that's perfect. I think we're three minutes to go. That's probably the best time to wrap up the Q&A. Apologies if you had a question and it didn't get answered. As I said, there will be a whole load of things created off the back of this. We will make sure that there's a transcript available and - just read something in the comment. Hopefully, any questions that have been asked but unanswered will be answered approaching that. Just very, very quickly, I have to say thank you to Anne and Rich in particular, for taking the time out of their busy schedules and demoing what 6.2 can do. It really looks like a transformational release. But also, thanks to Chloé and Jonathan and Lauren and Mary who are on the call, but, you know, you haven't necessarily seen them right now. So, appreciate them. That's really great. Following up off this, I've got three points to mention. Following the 6.2 release on Make/Core for development updates and calls, there's going to be a post. It's make.wordpress.org/core/6-2. Also, if you've been keeping a close eye on the Beta releases - I say beta, I know it's hysterical. The beta releases, we've got version beta four has just been released. And anybody who wants to test that out would be most welcome. The URL for that is far too long for me to say out loud, but you can Google it, I'm sure, and find out how to test for that. And also, if you are keen to follow WordPress, it's all over the social networks. And you can follow - basically, if you try to just follow @WordPress, then you'll get somewhere. So for example, on Twitter, it's WordPress - @WordPress. On LinkedIn, it's /company/WordPress. Instagram is @WordPress. And guess what? On Facebook, it's - what do you think it would be? It's @WordPress. So it's available all over there. And I think that's it. I think that's everything that we've got to say. We're about one minute away from closing. So particular thanks to Rich and Anne, but thanks to everybody in the background making all of this happen. Thanks for showing up. If people don't show up, the work never gets done and the project never moves forward. So fully appreciate anybody who's given up their time to ask questions today and watch this presentation. Anne McCarthy 57:51 And thank you, Nathan. I want to call you out as being an excellent moderator and creating a safe space for us. Nathan Wrigley 57:57 Very, very welcome. I enjoyed doing it. I would gladly do it again. All right. I don't know how to end this call. So I'm just gonna wave. Bye, everyone. 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February has been an exciting month for the WordPress community, with the celebration of the first-ever WordCamp Asia bringing friends and contributors back together in person. But that’s not all; read on for the latest project updates. Get ready for WordPress 6.2 WordPress 6.2 Beta 4 arrived earlier this week and is ready for download and testing. Work continues on track, with the first release candidate (RC1) due next week and the target for the final release on March 28, 2023—less than four weeks away! WordPress 6.2 is one of the last major releases planned for Phase 2 of Gutenberg, taking the Site Editor out of beta with a more polished user experience and refreshed interface. On March 2, members of the release squad hosted the 6.2 live product demo. The recording and transcript will be available soon. In the meantime, these resources will give you a taste of what’s to come: Roadmap to 6.2 Phase 2, Finale WordPress 6.2 Accessibility Improvements Help test WordPress 6.2. Your feedback is key to ensuring everything in this release is the best it can be. Join WordPress 20th anniversary celebrations WordPress is turning 20, and the community is getting ready to celebrate! As part of the festivities, the project has released a 20th anniversary Wapuu, a set of commemorative logos, and a special playlist with 46 tracks from the jazz artists selected to represent WordPress releases. Official WP20 swag will also be available soon. In addition, the Museum of Block Art (MOBA) is calling all artists to submit block art themed on “20 years of WordPress.” Find out how to organize and participate in the WP20 celebrations. What’s new in Gutenberg Two new versions of Gutenberg have shipped in the last month: Gutenberg 15.1 was released on February 8, 2023, with access to the Openverse library of openly-licensed media from the Editor. Other highlights include the ability to add custom CSS on a per-block basis and support for shadow presets in Global Styles. This is the last version of Gutenberg that will be included in WordPress 6.2. Gutenberg 15.2 is available for download as of February 22, 2023. Besides continued accessibility improvements, this release adds support for revisions when editing templates and template parts, and refines the navigation experience in the Site Editor. Follow the “What’s new in Gutenberg” posts to stay on top of the latest enhancements. Team updates: Global community sponsors for 2023, contributor mentorship program, and more The Community Team announced the global sponsors that will support the WordPress community programs in 2023. A few months ago, Meetup.com removed an accessibility overlay in response to some concerns from the WordPress community. A recent update reports that the company has conducted an assessment and plans to address the issues identified. The Training Team launched a new onboarding program for contributors. In addition, they worked on numerous lesson plans, online workshops, and tutorials last month. Check out what’s new on Learn WordPress. The Documentation Team shared future plans for HelpHub. Openverse moved to a standalone domain, openverse.org, with improvements to the site’s homepage, header, and footer. The Plugin Review Team posted a notice to inform about the latest Twitter API changes and the types of plugins that might be affected. The February edition of the Polyglots monthly newsletter highlights some recent enhancements to GlotPress’ functionality and the translate.wordpress.org platform. The latest Meetup Organizer newsletter shares tips on how to help your meetup group stay connected and engaged between events. Check out What’s new for developers? (February 2023), the first edition of a new monthly series with features and resources developers should know about. The latest edition of People of WordPress features Hauwa Abashiya. Following discussions on improving the contributor journey, a new WordPress contributor mentorship program has been proposed to roll out this year. Feedback & testing requests A new proposal from the Community Team seeks to modify the Events and News dashboard widget to show topic-based meetups worldwide. Members of the Core Team suggested some updates to the WordPress release cycle. Version 21.8 of the WordPress mobile app for iOS and Android is available for testing. Redesign work is well underway on the WordPress Theme Directory. Contributors can follow along on the GitHub repository. WordPress events updates Bangkok, Thailand, hosted a successful inaugural WordCamp Asia on February 17-19. The event welcomed 1,299 attendees, and more than 600 participants joined the Contributor Day. At the event’s closure, organizers announced that WordCamp Asia 2024 will take place in Taipei, Taiwan! The application to attend the 2023 Community Summit is now open to WordPress contributors. Learn more about the ins and outs of this working event in Episode 49 of WP Briefing. WordCamp Europe 2023 is looking for media partners and supporters. Want to create diverse and inclusive WordPress events? Don’t miss this free #WPDiversity workshop happening March 16, 2023. Many WordCamps are coming up in the next weeks: WordCamp Entebbe, Uganda, on March 10-11, 2023 WordCamp Torrelodones, Madrid, Spain, on March 11-12, 2023 WordCamp Phoenix, Arizona, USA, on March 24-25, 2023 WordCamp Kerala, India, on March 25, 2023 WordCamp Bogotá, Colombia, on March 31-April 1, 2023 (Online) WordCamp Switzerland on April 1, 2023 Join WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy as she explores three interesting trends from WordCamp Asia. Have a story we should include in the next issue of The Month in WordPress? Fill out this quick form to let us know. The following folks contributed to this Month in WordPress: @ninianepress, @jpantani, @rmartinezduque. View the full article

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

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

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

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

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

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