Hallway Hangout Let’s explore WordPress 6.5 Recap

This is a summary of a Hallway Hangout dedicated to exploring WordPress 6.5 and first announced in late November 2023. Thank you to @saxonafletcher and @isabel_brison for helping with the demos! This hallway hangout doesn’t cover everything in the Roadmap to 6.5 post but goes through many of the features that are ready for and needing feedback. Please help test!

Video Recording:

Thank you to the 18 or so folks who joined at various points. 

Demos:

The following items were demoed in various ways, sometimes on live sites, sometimes as prototypes in figma, and sometimes in a draft PR state. 

• Style revision improvements.
• Pattern overrides.
• Data Views for templates, patterns, and pages. 
• Font Library.
• Block connections.
• Ensuring local content is not added to global scope and vice versa for both template editing and pattern overrides. 
• Section styling, Colorways, and Typesets.
• List View displacement when dragging and dropping.
• Allow drag & drop to create rows and galleries.

Discussion:

Desire for a separate metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. capability for pattern overrides 

Question from Jorbin: “Do pattern overrides include capability checks so that it is possible for someone to be able to use the pattern and the overrides without editing the pattern as a whole? What I am thinking is having a meta capability for managing the pattern and then a separate meta cap for doing overrides.”

This was underscored by folks on the call and a follow up GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ issue will be opened to pursue this further. 

When is something ready to ship for a release?

A discussion broke out both in the chat and on the call itself around when we deem something ready to ship, particularly as it related to pattern overrides. Right now, pattern overrides currently only work with paragraph blocks and need the ability added on a blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. by block basis due to a limitation with the block bindings APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways.. There are plans to expand to buttons, heading, and images. This is a great chance to give feedback, share use cases, and dig in to find limitations. Generally, it’s common to ship an initial state of something and iterate in future releases but we need to ensure that initial state is still properly valuable for users. 

Where can I learn more about block connections?

• This is the best issue for 6.5 related items with a recent update. 
• This is the overview issue for the broader set of work.

On the potential of block connections

Towards the end of the call, we had a discussion about the UXUX User experience of block connections (what will and won’t matter to a user), how useful the feature will be, what to show when there’s no value, and whether a connection can be defined by a theme. For example, you could have a theme that supports a pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party’s post meta and then the theme already makes these connections to provide a seamless experience for the user to then edit as they’d like. This is definitely in line with where this work is headed. 

“Thinking about a price for example. We want to store it in meta so that we can display it both in a query loopLoop The Loop is PHP code used by WordPress to display posts. Using The Loop, WordPress processes each post to be displayed on the current page, and formats it according to how it matches specified criteria within The Loop tags. Any HTML or PHP code in the Loop will be processed on each post. https://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop. and on the single post in different locations. But to a user it shouldn’t matter at all. For them editing it inline on the page template should feel as if it all just is in content.” – Fabian in the chat. 

Next steps:

@annezazu will do the following:

• Open an issue around capabilities for overrides and having a separate meta capability for that. 
• Update testing post to include some of the items discussed and demoed here that need more feedback.
• Recap feedback about block connections with contributors.

#6-5, #hallway-hangout