Mid-project Update and Request for Feedback

The Media Corps experimental project already reached its halfway point, so I thought I’d share a mid-project update and start an open discussion to share learnings and feedback.

Goal & current status

As a quick refresher, the Media Corps experimental project aims to enable independent WordPress marketers and media members to produce excellent quality content with less time and effort.

We are currently in Phase 2 (Implementation) and Phase 3 (Monitoring & Measurement) of the roadmap. Since the project began, it has made substantial progress:

Participation

Here are some stats from the Media Corps’ efforts so far:

Observations and challenges

  • Engagement: Around 60% of the media folks who expressed interest in the self-assessment form have shown active participation through briefings, feedback forms, Slack interactions, etc.
  • “WP media” label: While the team has not been classifying self-assessment responses/outlets, I’ve heard concerns that tagging or grouping all folks as media partners or “WP media” can feel unfair, unbalanced, and not entirely accurate for different reasons, including 1) the different levels of engagement, 2) their different focuses and content interests, and 3) the difference in resources (e.g., some corporate outlets may have more resources/funds that other indie outlets don’t).
  • Briefings: As an observation, attendance has declined throughout briefings. Beyond time zone and language challenges, and considering the diverse media folks’ needs and focuses, the overall impact that these sessions are having on supporting their content efforts is still a bit unclear.

Request for feedback

To better understand whether the experimental project is delivering value as is or might need future iterations or changes, here are a few questions I’d love to hear your thoughts on:

  • How helpful have the briefing sessions been in supporting your news or content production efforts so far?
  • Have you found other support resources, such as Slack updates or interactions, shareable assets, or briefing recaps, useful for your work?
  • Has the Media Corps helped improve your ability to stay informed and report news or produce content? If so, how?
  • What do you believe is the most significant impact the Media Corps has had on your work (if any)?
  • What improvements or changes would you suggest for the Media Corps to support or engage the different types of outlets?

Please share your feedback in the comments below by October 5, 2024. Thanks!

Recap of the Briefing on Mid-term Goals for WordPress

On September 10, 2024, WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy joined a Media Corps briefing to discuss the mid-term goals for the WordPress open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. project and answer questions from participants.

The session was recorded and published on the WordPress.org YouTube channel. Below is a summary with relevant links and the full transcript.

Recording

Participants

Bernard Meyer (@bernard0omnisend), Chloé Bringmann (@cbringmann), Javier Casares (@javiercasares), Josepha Haden Chomphosy (@chanthaboune), Nahuai Badiola (@nahuai), Nathan Wrigley (@njwrigley), and Reyes Martínez (@rmartinezduque).

Summary

Make WordPress updates

Reyes Martínez started the briefing by calling out some Make updates, including:

  • The recently published experimental dashboards, which offer a snapshot of Make teams’ metrics and key ongoing projects.
  • The post on Advancing the WordPress Design System emphasized the importance of the design system we move into Phase 3 and the admin redesign. It’s a valuable resource for anyone looking to contribute and extend the platform, including 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 and theme authors.
  • The State of the Word site went live last month. Participants were encouraged to forward anyone interested in attending to the community interest form.

Mid-term goals for WordPress discussion

Josepha Haden Chomphosy introduced the discussion on mid-term goals by referencing Matt’s 11 points shared at WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Europe 2024 and the 2024 big-picture goals, which cover three main focuses—CMS, community, and ecosystem.

The work around the CMS was mentioned as the biggest change earlier in the year, noting less active involvement in Phase 3’s real-time collaboration efforts to prioritize the admin experience, modernize its look, and address pressing items from user feedback. Part of this focus area has included foundational work, major backend elements, and APIs. The design system update was also noted as a positive step towards a consistent design language for WordPress.

“The hope is that we can improve the user experience by having a more consistent look and feel across our admin, and then also having the dashboard and admin areas just be more modern and more in line with what the software actually is capable of doing now.” – Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy.

In community initiatives, Josepha mentioned the shift to bring in new users to events. Current efforts include getting better, standardized feedback from event attendees and making online learning as clear and valuable as in-person meetups and WordCamps.

Upcoming plans involve forgoing the WordPress annual survey. Instead, the WordPress project will leverage Stack Overflow survey results to identify growth opportunities and insights from people outside of the WordPress space. Additionally, ad hoc polls from various platforms are being considered to gather timely feedback on new features and ideas.

The third major goal in the ecosystem space focuses on Data Liberation, powered by WordPress Playground, to simplify migrations between non-WordPress and WordPress sites. A viable concept for easier migrations was explored around WordCamp Europe and work is now gearing up for an adoption phase of both Data Liberation and Playground tools.

Josepha expressed being closer to having a “Try out WordPress” button on the homepage for users to test what their site, theme, and plugins could look like in a Playground instance. Also, a Playground-driven wiki experience for documentation is being prototyped and efforts to revitalize the forums are underway.

Throughout the discussion, Josepha elaborated on how Matt’s points support the direction of the outlined goals. She also underscored the importance of user testing and feedback loops to ensure that the current contributions and software meet users’ needs. “It doesn’t help us to be moving forward with speed,” she said, “if the direction that we’re moving forward in is not something that our users need or want from us.”

A list of completed and upcoming projects related to the 11 points and tactics is expected to be published before WordCamp US to align everyone on the progress.

Questions & Answers

The Q&A covered numerous topics, including thoughts on making WordPress fun, the Feature Notifications project, GatherPress testing efforts, and the importance of aligning demo themes and content with the onboarding experience when installing 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. theme.

On Phase 3 work, Josepha reiterated that while real-time collaboration is open for contribution and active development, the current top priority is improving and modernizing the admin experience.

She further explained that the initial concept for a “Try out WordPress” button would be to provide a generic WordPress installation, allowing users to experience WordPress as close to its out-of-the-box state as possible. Setting up additional plugins with enough example data to showcase different types of sites (like an eCommerce site) has proved challenging, but the Playground team is working on ways to better display sample data and make different setups easily exportable.

In response to specific initiatives that could benefit from increased awareness and amplification from media folks, three major areas were outlined:

  • Data Liberation and Playground for content migrationMigration Moving the code, database and media files for a website site from one server to another. Most typically done when changing hosting companies. and for addressing users’ needs by offering a more interactive and realistic preview of WordPress. Both projects have involved the development of a complex set of tools, but they are nearing readiness. The project hopes for community support in spreading the word about them.
  • WordPress events: Josepha mentioned the need to demystify WordCamps to enhance their appeal, particularly for newcomers. The goal is to improve understanding of event offerings and ensure first-time attendees feel welcomed and informed.
  • New admin prototype: Lastly, she underscored the importance of gathering feedback on the new admin prototype to ensure a smooth transition and avoid disruptions for users. 

Towards the end, the discussion turned to the impact of the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) on open source software. Josepha noted that, after revisions to the carve-out, WordPress currently does not face immediate issues but is closely monitoring the situation. Major open source CMSs are planning to collaborate to assess the impact of other related legislation to ensure that future changes do not negatively affect their communities and software.

Questions with timestamps
  • [00:19:31] Nathan Wrigley (WP Tavern):  How do we keep things fun? Have you got any ideas around what we could do to make it [WordPress] more fun?
  • [00:23:40] Javier Casares (WPpodcast): Is there a roadmap to integrate the feature notification in Phase 3? How is the real-time collaboration doing?
  • [00:27:08] Javier Casares: About that “Test WordPress now” button. Will it be a general WordPress installation or will there be different options like “create an eCommerce,””create a blog,” or “create a company page”?
  • [00:30:50] Javier Casares: Is there a roadmap for migrating from MeetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. to GatherPress?
  • [00:34:58] Nahuai Badiola (Freelandev): I’ve been playing with Playground and importing a theme and demo content, which is great. But as a WordPress theme maker, I can’t offer that nice experience to users who install our block theme. Are there any plans to add an onboarding experience for themes?
  • [00:41:46] Reyes Martínez: Could you share your thoughts on any specific initiatives or audiences that you think could benefit from increased awareness and support from media folks?
  • [00:48:22] Javier Casares: What about the CRA (Cyber Resilience Act) and how WordPress is going to comply with the parts that everybody needs to comply with?
  • [00:52:08] Nathan Wrigley: I’m curious about the Playground on the homepage button. Is there a point person who might be able to give me some intel about that or an interview?

Most of the resources mentioned during the briefing have been added to the summary above, but here are some other relevant links:

Transcript

The following transcript was AI-generated and may contain some errors despite being reviewed.

Full transcript

[00:00:00] Okay, I’m just ensuring that I have all the, yeah, permissions settings. Okay, perfect. Strong amount of silence. I feel like that’s not a, that’s not always a given with us. Usually happens every, every meeting starts the same. Honestly, wind me up. I’ll fill all that silence.

[00:00:29] Yeah, but it’s true. Until we wait for some other folks to join, there’s usually kind of silence, like awkward silence. But yeah, I think we can officially start. So, hello everyone. And, and welcome. I’m very, very excited to have Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy with us today to discuss our midterm goals for WordPress.

[00:00:55] I’m Reyes, and as you all know, I’ll be facilitating today’s session and just before diving into our discussion, I thought I would share. briefly a few updates that just for extra visibility. The first one is about some new experimental make dashboards. Some contributors are working to offer like a snapshot of some make teams key metrics and ongoing projects I think there’s an upcoming announcement soon.

[00:01:27] Probably we can expect that by the end of the week, but I think that’s a pretty exciting update. So, yeah, keep an eye out for that. And next on my list is a post on advancing the WordPress design system. The goal of this initiative is to consolidate all the existing tools into a unified design system reference site, so that anyone looking to contribute, contribute back to WordPress or extend the platform can do it in line with, like, a shared design language and approach.

[00:02:08] I think this effort is especially important as we look into phase 3 of the roadmap and as we look at the admin redesign efforts, so I recommend giving that post a read if you haven’t done so and keeping an eye out for the biweekly design share updates. Let me share, one second, all the links in the chat, so you know what I’m talking about and

[00:02:41] all right. Here you go and, yeah, last but not least just as a reminder the State of the WordState of the Word This is the annual report given by Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress at WordCamp US. It looks at what we’ve done, what we’re doing, and the future of WordPress. https://wordpress.tv/tag/state-of-the-word/. site went live last month, and everyone is welcome to attend this annual event and request a seat. So, if you know of someone who wants or is interested in attending, please direct them to the community interest form.

[00:03:06] I’m going to share the link as well in the chat.

[00:03:15] All right, here we go. And that’s what I got in my list for updates and reminders. I don’t know if you have any questions or thoughts so far. Is the the the advancing the WordPress design system. I read that. And is that, is that intended for anybody touching .Org? So plugin and theme developers as well, or is it, is it specific?

[00:03:41] Well, I, yeah, that’s my question really. Is it just designed for everybody or is it for plugin and theme developers? Specifically. I think it’s for plugin like authors as well. I mean, if they are looking to extend the platform, I think those tools will come handy and useful. Yeah. Okay. But I can make a note and get back to you on that later.

[00:04:01] I mean, and I can also ask we can also ask Joen who I’m sure he might be helpful help. He might be happy to share any other information. Having read it, I couldn’t as who was the intended audience for it, but that would be helpful. Yes, please. Thank you. Yeah, of course, I’ll make a note and I can follow up with you on that after the briefing.

[00:04:24] All right. For if there are no more questions for now, I mean, if you have any thoughts, questions during the session later, just a reminder that you can share them in the chat. I would encourage you to indicate the media outlet and the channel you represent, because that help us first of all, have, to help us to have some context, but also it’s usually helpful for the recap and transcription purposes, but you’re also welcome to raise your hand if that’s easier.

[00:04:54] Okay. So, I think we can get started with our main discussion. Over to you, Josepha. It’s me. I’m Josepha and I’m here with WordPress. Yeah, so I wanted to talk a little bit about our midterm goals. So WordCamp Europe, obviously, Matt showed up with his 11 opinions about, about what WordPress needs to do, what it needs to be.

[00:05:18] And after that, I ended up having quite a few conversations with folks about like, how does this fit with the overall big pictures that we put out there? Big, the big picture post that we, that I put out. And fortunately everything, almost everything that showed up in those 11 points are still absolutely relevant to the big picture post that I put out.

[00:05:40] Now the biggest change obviously this year is on is around the CMS. So we had hoped to get phase 3 kind of prototyped and built out and put out in front of the community. But early on in the year, it became pretty clear that one of the more pressing items for user facing, I don’t know, user satisfaction of WordPress is to maybe make our admin a little bit more modern looking and probably get all of our, you know, five different interfaces kind of looking the same, which I think is actually part of what that design system that Joen published is about.

[00:06:21] And so the work on phase 3, the active, like, everybody focused diligently on phase 3 work sort of paused early in the year. While we took a look at the admin and what we wanted to be in the future, how blocks will work in there. And then ended up doing a bunch of foundational work, which is not user facing a lot of major back end elements and APIs to make sure that we can get that done.

[00:06:44] And so I’ve been really excited to see that design system get out because I think that one, it does kind of pull together some visual elements of what we are aiming for, and then also gives a common design language to WordPress. That is the hope, is that we can improve the user experience by having a more consistent look and feel across our admin, and then also having the dashboard and admin areas

[00:07:09] just be more modern and more in line with what the software actually is capable of doing now. So that is probably the biggest shift from that big picture post, but it happened a long time ago. And so there are, however, four things in those 11 points that Matt brought up at WordCamp. Europe that I think really commit to that and and support that change in direction.

[00:07:38] Obviously, the first one being that simple things should be easy and intuitive and complex things should be possible. The admin area, along with just kind of having a massive influx of notifications, has gotten more and more complex as we have gotten through WordPress as a whole. And so, getting that into a state that’s a little bit easier to kind of fall into and understand is going to be really important.

[00:08:04] And then there were three other things in there as well. One, that WordPress should be more opinionated and quirky that people who are building WordPress should be using WordPress and a bunch of the GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ engineers recently did a ton of user user, what is this called? Sorry for the recording.

[00:08:25] I am sick. And so I can’t get my words sometimes. User testing. That’s it. A bunch of user testing. Not only to check flows for onboarding, which I know have been an ongoing concern for the project or for the software, but then also for like any basic activity that you want to accomplish so that you can feel successful and have the desire to learn those bigger concepts.

[00:08:51] Just trying to make those a lot easier, a lot clearer, and a lot quicker. And so, that goes into that. And then, if we get all of those things kind of back into an easy, comfortable state, then the, the part that Matt shared about blogging and commenting and pingbacks being more fun and allowing websites to be more dynamic again, I think that that shows up over time in it.

[00:09:17] The second element from the second goal from our big picture post was around the community, continuing to support our community as a whole through learning events and mentorship, and that would be for courage and future contributors. Early on this year as well, the community facing teams, the event folks.

[00:09:36] Had a big shift toward less focus on bringing in new contributors, which has been our lifelong focus and more focus on bringing in new users with the belief that everything that we’ve done to enable contribution will still function as, as it always has. So the work that is going in now is to get better feedback from

[00:10:01] people who are attending our workshops and our events and making the online learning as clear and important and valuable as all of the business stuff and networking that you can do at meetups and WordCamps and then also all of our flagship events. We have the dashboards coming, which Reyes mentioned,

[00:10:22] and that’s part of the reason that we’re doing that. Like, we’re working to standardize the questions that we ask new and returning attendees to our events so that our organizers can have some clearer and better information to make decisions that are helpful for them and impactful for them. We also are foregoing the giant annual survey this year.

[00:10:41] We’re gonna take advantage of the giant annual survey that Stack Exchange does. We’re included in it again this year and so we’re going to take advantage of that information because they get more people from outside of the WordPress space to give us some better information, more accurate information about future users of WordPress as opposed to current users of WordPress so that we can kind of get some, some indications of what our opportunities are for future growth, but then also making space for those kind of ad hoc polls that we see popping up on LinkedIn and Twitter and anywhere else where people can just say like, hey, do you use it for this or this?

[00:11:21] If you were doing this activity today, would you choose this or this? And get kind of more timely feedback for the features that we’re trying to experiment and build toward that way. And so the things from Matt’s 11 points that fit in with that are that we should have better feedback loops in general.

[00:11:40] Agreed. Hard agree. It doesn’t help us to be moving forward with speed if the direction that we’re moving forward in is not something that our users need or want from us. And then also one of his callouts was to be a supporter by going to meetups, events and other things that help us stay close to users.

[00:11:58] Because we are the people who are building WordPress. And so, if we are building it, we should be using it. And that includes if we’re building it, we should be talking to the people who are using it. In ways that we expect and ways that we don’t expect. And the best ways to do that is to get to those events, either as organizers or just regular old attendees.

[00:12:16] I’m headed to WordCamp US and I’m going to do my best to be a regular old attendee, sitting in some sessions, seeing what’s happening and not. And that’ll be a change of pace for me as well. So that’s a, that’s a kind of one of those changes that occurred on our second big goal. And then our third one actually has not changed too much.

[00:12:35] The third big goal that we had was around the ecosystem, and especially focusing on the Data Liberation project to make the process of getting from one non WordPress space to a WordPress space easier, and then WordPress to WordPress as required. That has been ongoing all year. We had a few prototypes at the start of the year that we’re kind of okay, but not quite what we were looking for.

[00:13:00] And it was around WordCamp Europe that we had gotten a pretty viable concept of what could work and what will work, I think for easier migrations and the hardest parts of that, the, the parts that require, you know, you to be as brilliant as Adam Zieliński are almost done. We’re ready to start to, to start hooking into it and extending it like we do any other WordPress thing.

[00:13:26] And so for that, actually we’re kind of get gearing up for an adoption phase of it of all of the, like, top 100 plugins that exist in the WordPress repo, I think only 12 of them use blueprints so that when you are testing a plugin inside Playground, it gives you some information, some, some fake data so that it’s clear what it’s trying to do versus what you are hoping it will do.

[00:13:57] And also so that it functions correctly in there. And so that’s going to be our next phase for that is to get the hardest parts built so that, so that every In the WordPress ecosystem can make a blueprint and put it in there. And so their users know, is this solution something that’s going to solve my problem?

[00:14:19] As we have been gearing up for that, we also are really nearing, I believe it, I feel it in my bones nearing the time when we can just put a try out WordPress now button on the homepage that takes you to a playground instance that has a valuable, not valuable. A useful theme, a theme that looks like what we want a good first timer site to look like, and a couple of plugins, so you get a sense for like, what a theme is, how it works, what plugins are, and how they work, and really can, can test drive your site before you get into it.

[00:14:56] We’re really close to that, I’m pretty sure. And so the things that Matt had brought up this summer, if you’re in the northern hemisphere, about that in his 11 points were wikis for documentation. We are actually prototyping a Playground-driven wiki experience for our documentation. And, that looks like it’s going well.

[00:15:18] I don’t understand it, but there is a post out that we can get a link for and share with you all. Getting forums back into kind of a front and center space so that people can have not only conversations but but also like see who else around them is having the same issues or the same excitements, the same extending opportunities that they are having and a lot of work is going into that.

[00:15:44] We have a bug smashing event for it at WordCamp US coming up, which should be pretty fun. And the call to having plugins and themes having mirror infrastructure to the WordPress project is still ongoing. Better theme previews, obviously, Playground is going to drive that. And the work with that Data Liberation is Playground driven at the moment.

[00:16:09] And so as we are building out all of these things for the Data Liberation project powered by Playground I’m pretty sure the rest of these holes that we have in the new user experience when they’re trying to just decide whether WordPress works for them or not, we’ll also get a few bridges over those gaps.

[00:16:28] And at that point can only be made better by our plugin authors and our theme authors really embracing that new tool and making sure that their tools work inside it. And so a little bit, Matt’s 11 points show up almost as like tactical elements that live inside the goals that we have for the WordPress project this year.

[00:16:50] We pulled together a whole list of projects that we either have shipped or are about to ship that specifically relate to all of those 11 tactics that go along with the three goals that we have. And I’m going to try to get it published before WordCamp US so that we all kind of have the same sort of thing that we’re looking at.

[00:17:12] And I, I think maybe Reyes can get you all an early, an early copy of it before, before it gets out there, so that if you have questions around that, we can get those answered. Or if there are anything that doesn’t really make sense to you all, you can let us know about that too. But that’s kind of the, that’s kind of the long and short of how those all fit together.

[00:17:32] And in the post that we pulled together about the work that’s been done just kind of in the last quarter around those tactical elements for our goals. I was tired looking at it. It was like four pages long. And so we’re going to try to make it a little shorter. But it’s just a continuing testament to the work that the community does toward the things that we think are going to make WordPress be able to grow in the future.

[00:17:57] And so I’m really excited to be able to get that post out for you all. Like I said, depending on how fast my brain continues to work while I’m sick, I’ll get that out before WordCamp US. I believe that we can do it. And so yeah, that’s kind of the lightning tour of where we are with that, and I’ll pause for questions on that or anything else, I guess.

[00:18:22] Can I just raise my hand? Is that alright? Yes. Do I need to do it virtually or can I just actually do it like that? Nathan Wrigley from the Tavern, I guess, probably easiest. I’m looking at Matt’s post, the 21. And the points 2 and point 9. He uses the words quirky in point 9 and fun in point 2. And that was what I, I was in the room when that happened.

[00:18:50] And that was what I, that was the impression that I got when I left is that basically the whole thing should just be more fun, it was that word fun. And I’m just wondering if you’ve got any intuitions. As to how we do that, what, what, what could we do to make WordPress more fun? I mean, Matt says here, you know, static websites are better than normal ones.

[00:19:11] And he says. No, he says dynamic wesbites. Dynamic. That’s right. Yeah. Sorry. CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. should be opinionated and quirky, Easter eggs, languages with personality. It’s difficult to translate, jazzy. I I’m all for having fun. I think I, but I’m just wondering what you’re, how do we. I don’t know, because it’s easy to go from fun to just silly, isn’t it?

[00:19:32] How do we, how do we keep things fun? Have you got any ideas around what we could do to make it more fun? I love how this question kind of is like, Josepha, how fun are you? And how much fun can you make WordPress have? No, I’m joking. I’m joking. Yeah. So there are a few things. So for one, there are, as we get the admin into a more modern space, I think one of the things that.

[00:20:00] It’s just kind of a small delight that we see around software at the moment. Places like Discord have this. I think Facebook had it for a while, but like minor animations on your icons, which you can turn on, turn off, depending on, on your motion needs. I think things like that are going to be available to us once we get the admin in a better space.

[00:20:21] There are, there were a number of like core eggs, Easter eggs that were there for a long time that we took out. That existed in comments, it existed in tracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/., it was just like weird nerdy things for people who are digging for weird things, like there was a specific set of words that you could say in trac that caused

[00:20:44] like an eagle to flash up on the screen for some reason. I only did it once and it scared me to death, but I obviously things like that in our own spaces, in our own work are possible and, and welcomed. But I think that one of the things that the community can do is like, excuse me, like when we were doing the next gen events for WordCamps and kind of trying to figure out like what new and interesting versions of getting people together to talk about WordPress, can we still kind of do, I think that’s a lot of the spaces where we have some opportunity.

[00:21:24] So some, some cute and surprising design things. It’s probably not cute and surprising code things like you want that to be pretty predictable, but you know, cute and surprising design elements, some unusual and enriching events, probably is where we can do that. And then, of course, Matt is kind of

[00:21:44] sponsoring art across the entire WordPress ecosystem. And I think that that probably has a bit to do with wanting to bring some fun back into the space as well. Like when we had those cute little spam bots at WordCamp US last year. And and I think that there’s going to be some art around WordCamp US this year as well.

[00:22:08] Thank you. Josepha, we have some questions from Javier in the chat as well. Great. I, I, I can read them. Perfect. Yeah. Go ahead, Javier. So the, I have four. The first the first is is there a roadmap to integrate the feature notification in phase 3? Because that’s a project that has been around and a lot of people is messing with the messages and everything.

[00:22:38] So is there, is there an idea to integrate that now, or is a project that is going to be around until somebody adds it into the core?

[00:22:52] So I think that we should tackle your first and second question together around real time collaboration in phase 3. Because I think that that is going to, is going to impact this. So, on the one hand, at the moment, I don’t, I don’t think that we have a strong sense for notifications specifically being in the, in the phase 3 roadmap.

[00:23:15] But, I do have a roadmap that we’re pulling together for the next couple of releases, so I can take a look and see if, if we can more confidently target it for either one of those. So there’s that. As far as, like, to get it into phase 3, because we as a community have shifted our attention toward the admin and dashboard experience rather than phase 3, real time collaboration is moving forward and and we would like it to continue to move forward.

[00:23:50] I think it’s important, but probably less important than getting the overall software looking a bit more modern. And so real time collaboration still open to contribution, but I’ve asked everybody to focus more on the admin so that the software looks modern. Great workflows are good and important, but like, If we, if we’re trying to get out to a bunch of new users, we also need to absolutely make sure that we don’t look like we’re a software from 2000.

[00:24:17] 2000. That was 24 years ago, quarter of a century ago. I hate it. That notwithstanding 2000 and, and when was, when was Crazy Horse? 2008. So, I think that that’s probably the most important part of what we’re looking at in the, in the near term. And I realize that that’s not like, what’s the plan for phase 3 and how’s real time collaboration going?

[00:24:41] But I do think that that pause that we’ve taken there is really key. Notifications and how to handle them obviously are a real problem and on the minds of a lot of folks in the community. We used to have some pretty clear understandings of like what notifications should be and how they should be managed.

[00:25:03] And I think that at some point we loosened those expectations and those guidelines when we kind of loosened some of the guidelines around a plugin review. I think that that’s primarily when, when that really started to be taken over. And so there is some systemic work to do. There are some, some like

[00:25:23] contributor program types of rehabilitation things that we’ve got to do in there. But then also obviously a mechanism that makes notifications a little bit more corralled and easy to find when users need it. And so I’ll take a look at those roadmaps for the next couple of releases and see what we can fit in there.

[00:25:40] But that’s a great question. Okay. The next one about the, the, test WordPress now, or whatever it will be it’s going to be only clean installation of WordPress, or there is an idea to have like more working with blueprints, like, okay. I want to test something like an ecommerce so we can show an ecommerce and or I want a blog and we can show a blog is it’s going to be that way or a generic WordPress or.

[00:26:14] Yeah, at the moment the plan is just for generic WordPress for a couple of reasons. One, because we want them to see what it looks like as close to out of the box as possible. That. That way they understand, like, this is what the basic interaction looks like, the basic interface looks like, so that they are not surprised when they get a basic installation running.

[00:26:38] And then they’re like, I thought there was a ecommerce site in here. Like, we don’t want it to be too far away from what their initial experience will be. And so that’s part of the reason. The other part of it is that it’s actually very difficult to get additional plugins set up with enough data and a false data coming in.

[00:26:56] Not false. Example, test data coming in that it looks right so that you understand what’s in there. There are a couple of prototypes that we’ve been that that the folks who work on Playground have been working on that are bringing in a bit of sample data so that you can see how something would look.

[00:27:15] But for ecommerce in particular, that is very difficult to do. It’s actually one of the primary hurdles that we’re having also with Data Liberation. Figuring out what is in the front of a site and what is available, like, in an admin area is pretty easy. But having the functional parts that go along with it so it still works is actually kind of hard at the moment.

[00:27:39] So you can see that there’s a shopping cart. You can put like a shopping cart block into the playground instance, but that doesn’t mean that it works or that you know what you would need in order to make that work on the other side of it. And so we’re trying to figure out how to get more complex initial sites

[00:27:57] shown and then also exportable, instantly publishable to your individual host that you’re hoping to work with, that you’re hoping to get hosted on. But we’re just finding that to be a little more complicated than we had hoped. We’re, so the MVPMinimum Viable Product "A minimum viable product (MVP) is a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers, and to provide feedback for future product development." - WikiPedia of it is plain vanilla WordPress, and then we’ll figure out some alternatives for how to get to the other things.

[00:28:20] But I think that we found a similar problem with frontenberg when we first put that on WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ WordPress. org slash Gutenberg is is the back end of a WordPress site basically and when we first put it up there it had just the block editor and that was it. And so that was kind of helpful for folks when they figured out where the, where it lived.

[00:28:43] But when they just went into plain WordPress, they do just get dumped into the dashboard and sometimes couldn’t figure out how to get to where the, the block editor was. And so trying to, to make that experience a bit better this time around is an important part of that. Okay, the last for now in the community, in the community, yeah, no, I think it’s my mind always ask questions.

[00:29:08] Is there a roadmap on migrating from meetup.com to GatherPress?

[00:29:17] I know right now is there are a lot of testing, but basically I’m hosting the testing website now. So I know how it’s going, but I know they are working on, on starting to integrate things with WordPress.org and everything, but I don’t know if there is, there is some idea on when that will be a reality or if, for example, if some new meetup group or some new community wants to start, it will be on, on GatherPress and not in meetup or something like that, or?

[00:29:59] Yeah, there’s not a, there’s not a roadmap for that at the moment. I think that we’re considering this like a testing period for GatherPress, which is fine. And. The reason for that is because we’re having a little bit of difficulty getting people back up and running in their in person events. And so we want to make sure, I want to make sure, that the tools that they can use are tools that feel as comfortable as possible for them.

[00:30:27] So that it’s not this additional lift. Like, I want to put together a WordPress event. I can use Eventbrite or Meetup, or I can use this custom tool. And so I think that the future for getting on gather press still is there. I think it makes sense for us to have something that is more aligned with our open source thoughts and opinions.

[00:30:49] But at the moment, I just want to make sure that there’s not any extra hurdles for folks that are trying to either return to the habit of having in person events happen or join us for the first time. And so great question. And it’s, I think the work that’s being done with GatherPress is good. I think the testing with groups that are getting on there right now is also good.

[00:31:11] It’ll help us figure out like how to get those connections better into profiles and also into the ecosystem of sites as a whole. But right now there’s not a roadmap to get everybody over there. Okay, thank you. Just a quick note that they’re actually seeking feedback from organizers. So, yeah, I’ll share the latest update in the chat.

[00:31:37] Nahuai I think you have another question. Yeah, I will start with the one I didn’t mention in the chat, if I can, it’s not a mention it, but it’s very related with the GatherPress and Meetup. I’m going to host the meetup in, yeah, in one hour or something. And I’ve been having problems with the email

[00:32:00] deliverability or the deliver of the emails in Meetup, which is quite sad because returning from the summer that we did that two months break, it’s less easy to tell the other people that come back in September. We will talk about this and that. Yeah. And I’ve been sending, I usually just send one mail because I’m very mindful of the inbox of the people, but several people told me that they didn’t get it.

[00:32:29] So I sent a second one and some of them got them, but some not. So this is just one thing I will Did they just never arrive? Or did they go into spam? No, never arrived. Never arrived. The spam check in is always the second question. Did you check the spam mailbox? Yeah. In this case, not. So I just wanted to share in case it’s happening to more people.

[00:32:53] And maybe it’s just It’s been years since we had that problem with Meetup, but we can reach out to them, our person over there, and see what’s happening. That would be great because if not, one of the upsides of using meetup is really less an upside because you cannot reach to those people. You can’t get to anybody.

[00:33:12] The question that I wanted to do is more with the extender hat. So I’ve been playing with the blueprints, playground blueprints. I love how you can set up a theme and import demo content and you can really do a one click. Like, look how cool this looks, but I cannot do the same if I’m putting a block theme in the repo because they will activate it and it’s going to be quite sad.

[00:33:44] They will see a nice home homepage, but they will not have any onboarding experience. So specifically for block themes, that’s true. Yeah. Yeah. So my question is, if there is anything thought about that because I think that this diminished quite a lot the experience of the a newcomer that is maybe seen a very cool demo in Playground and then they install, they activate and they say, why is there is this difference between the cool demo I just saw and this thing that I just installed?

[00:34:20] So yeah, the second point is that there are some, I can program something to make that but I cannot put it in the repo and more importantly, I don’t want to reinvent the wheel. I really want to have an extent and a standard to adhere and then use it. So, yeah, my question is, is if there is any idea or anything planned and if there is not, if you would consider it, because I’ve been talking with some Automatticians, just asking, is there anybody working on this?

[00:34:52] My feeling or my sense is that not right now, and I feel that this a bit more important that may looks for user experience. Yeah, I think you’re right. Like, I, I understand that the majority of, of the decisions that we’re trying to make on behalf of users is like, did what they do in one spot. Also look like what they expected it to do when they get on the outside of it.

[00:35:24] And I think that that it counts for this as well. Like we never want to say to someone, this is what you’re getting. And then when they confirm that they want it, they hit publish or hit export or whatever, it doesn’t look like what it looked like on the inside, same problem that we’re having with like putting an ecommerce test me on the homepage, like getting that to look the same as vanilla WordPress will never happen.

[00:35:47] And so I think that that. It’s the same sort of answer to a different kind of question, which is that, yeah, we obviously absolutely need to make sure that the test area is as close to the reality area as we possibly can make it. It is true that no one is currently working on that for block themes inside Automattic, but I don’t think that means that no one could work on it.

[00:36:08] If you’ve got a solution that you would work across the board for block themes and classic themes. Oh, no, I’ll finish the thought. Then I think that you should build a prototype and put it up as a, as a feature proposal and see if we can get other people to work on it. I think that’s a great idea. And then here’s the other thought that I had.

[00:36:31] Okay. I have been wondering if, like, we could at Contributor Days have these, these contributor drives, contribution drives where people take the classic themes and rebuild them as block themes and just republish them in that way because we got so many classic themes that are so great. My favorite theme of all time is 2012 and I know that that means that I just like old design things, but I just write.

[00:37:01] I don’t have a lot of visual stuff on my, on my blog and so like. Of course, I like old, old word based things. But if I had that one in a block way, I probably would try to use it again in a couple of spaces. But yeah, I’ve been wondering if that would be a fun thing to do or a not fun thing to do. But right now, the, the theme tables at Contributor Days are doing, like, everybody show up and we’re going to build a block theme together.

[00:37:23] And then we’ll publish it by the end of the thing. And so like, if we’re going to do that, why not do it with some beloved classic themes that probably could get a new life as a, as a block theme. So yeah, I didn’t ask that question, but no, no, but I think it makes sense. But responding to the previous thing, I don’t have really the time and bandwidth to do a proper, something that I would like to have in core.

[00:37:50] So, the closest thing I’ve been seen is a proposal that Mike McAlister did in some point, I don’t know if you heard about OllieWP, it was a theme that it was an onboarding and it, the onboarding part was stripped out because it was not meeting the the repo guidelines, which makes sense. But I think something like that, I indeed it was built with ReactReact React is a JavaScript library that makes it easy to reason about, construct, and maintain stateless and stateful user interfaces. https://reactjs.org/. and everything, something like that would be really, really nice to have as a foundation.

[00:38:20] And it would be great if someone that could put more time on it or a small group working on that. And I really think, sorry for being a bit like going in the same direction. I really think that themes. are the entry point of a lot of people. And if they are not engaged by the first install and activation, we will lose them.

[00:38:46] So that’s why I think that this part is important. And with that, I close my, my point. I agree with you. I agree with you. We have seen for years that whatever the theme is, is what people assume their WordPress is. And so if they didn’t like the theme, if the theme didn’t work for them, then they didn’t like WordPress and WordPress didn’t work for them.

[00:39:06] So I agree with you on that.

[00:39:12] What else we got?

[00:39:20] I was just saying that in the comments that we should get Jamie Marsland to do a speed build where he gets, where he gets two people to rebuild. two classic themes in 30 minutes. I love it. Yeah, that’d be good. I thought he would do it. Yeah.

[00:39:38] I have one question. Yeah, I was wondering, Josepha, if you could also share any your thoughts on any, like, initiatives, that you think could benefit from increased awareness and, like, support from media folks, any initiatives, yeah, like, specific audiences, I think I know some folks are, you know, like, or are interested in knowing more about, you know, like, priorities, like, for amplification.

[00:40:19] So I think it, if you could share your thoughts on that or any specific initiatives that you think would welcome more, more help and support. Yeah. So there are two that I will, that I have been saying all year, and I’ll say again, cause I mean it then, I mean it now. The first one is, Is around Data Liberation.

[00:40:43] And specifically because it’s powered by Playground. So Data Liberation, obviously, is helping people migrate from one site to another. The more people that we enable to be able to use our tools and our our CMS the better for them, obviously, and for the open web as a whole. But then also for us, because we’re always trying to figure out how to make sure that we can still grow but all of the work, because Data Liberation is such a complex problem

[00:41:12] every bit of work that we do there enables the filling of those gaps that I mentioned before in the user experience. Any time that you have a new user, like, it used to be the case that the first stop on your WordPress learning journey was probably WordPress.org and so you got to the homepage and from there you could get to the showcase.

[00:41:34] You could download. You could learn about the code and and and the people building it. You can learn about the community and the people building it. Those are kind of the four big things that we wanted people to do on the website. And I don’t think that’s the case anymore. I don’t think that people get to WordPress.org as their first experience of WordPress anymore. I think that what they do have is a bunch of content that’s around us saying either, like, these are the things that could be better, or these are the things that I do love and, and, you know. Everybody should look at and so once they get to WordPress, they’re pretty knowledgeable about what they are worried

[00:42:09] the problems are for them and they want to look at something really specific. And so getting some way for them to see the back end as quickly as possible I think matters. Getting them to see themes that look pretty close to what they’re going to get when they unbox it for themselves so that they know whether it’s too complicated, too simple, missing functionality, like the decision making once they get to the pages that we have

[00:42:36] that are really prominent are so different now. And I think that, that what we can enable or hands on experience of it through the work on Playground solves a lot of those problems for us. And so we’ve got to figure out how to get Playground able to do it and then figure out how to get everybody to really adopt it and embrace it.

[00:42:55] And that will help themes and plugins be easier to sell, easier to get into the hands of WordPress users. And then of course, like if someone’s wanting to use your product and your product works with WordPress, then we want to make sure they understand what WordPress looks like too. We don’t want to be a hindrance in anyone’s sales process as it goes with their products.

[00:43:17] And so that’s, that’s a really big thing. It has been, like I said, very hard to work on because it’s a really complex kind of set of tools, but we are really, really close to having it be ready for the community to get in and get their hands on. And so once that happens, I hope that everybody helps us get the word out that it’s available for you to get in and extend and make work with your stuff so that we can teach people how to work with our stuff and your stuff together.

[00:43:46] So that’s a big one. And then the other thing is we have this big shift in our events that is coming. So, like I said, for all the whole year, we have been from an events and community perspective, focusing more on our new users and their experience with us and part of the problem that we often hear from sponsors and organizers, is that like, they’re getting a lot of the same people that come and talk to them.

[00:44:14] And I know that we keep getting stats that are like 40 percent, 50 percent first time attendees at various events that we are hosting, but it’s not translating into, and then they go see sponsors, and then they go see the other things that are available in it. And so, I think that WordCamps have become kind of a black box.

[00:44:37] It’s not easy to tell what’s coming in them, it’s not easy to tell whether it’s for you or not, and then once you get there there’s just so much happening, and it looks like there are a bunch of people who already know everything. And so I would, I would love to demystify our events a little bit, and as we are demystifying, help people to understand that, like, if you truly are brand new to this and you feel a little anxious, we also have all of these online things where you can

[00:45:03] learn about the community, learn about contribution, whatever it is just so that you have a sense for what you’re getting into. And so I think that those are the two things, big initiatives that I really, I really would love a lot more chatter about in the space. And then, as soon as we get a

[00:45:23] prototype for our new admin, like we’re going to need a lot of feedback on that to get it right because millions of people are looking at that every day. And if we suddenly break it for millions of people because we couldn’t figure out how to be loud enough about the fact that that was changing, we’re going to.

[00:45:40] We’re going to have a surprise. We’re going to have a Drupal 8 moment where they were like, object oriented programming forever. And then they lost half of everyone and we don’t want that. We have worked really hard all throughout Gutenberg to not lose half of everyone. And so we don’t necessarily want to break it with an admin change, but yeah, it’s going to be, those are the three big things that I think really are going to need a lot of attention and focus.

[00:46:08] I go again something we’ve been talking for some time, but a few months ago, the, the Cyber Resilience Act was approved. It’s not yet on calendar, but I think in 2025, maybe. Yeah. So, how is WordPress going to comply with the CRA? Yeah,

[00:46:36] so the CRA initially had a really bad carve out for open source that made it, as far as I am concerned, impossible for all of our extended community to function because they were going to have to have this incredibly high burden of proof to prove that like, They weren’t, I don’t know. Also the definitions of the digital assets, I think were not very good.

[00:46:58] So we did really get involved with that and and the carve out for open source is substantially different at this point and is much more in line with what we can and need to be able to do. So at the moment, there’s not a lot that WordPress is going to necessarily need to do, but we are keeping an eye on it and just making sure that we understand how it is moving and changing over time.

[00:47:20] All of the major open source CMSs are planning to try to get together to talk through like what the immediate future impacts are of this now that it looks a little bit different. And also, if there are other pieces of legislation, because I think that there are like four additional pieces of legislation that we have general concerns about the impact on on our communities and our software.

[00:47:46] Yeah. Because they, they, they got out the developer involvement with the security part and everything. So that’s, that’s great for everybody, but there are a lot of things like information forcing updates, security updates, and that those kinds of things that everybody is going to comply open source or not.

[00:48:09] So. We need to start thinking because that’s a lot of work for 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. and Meta is not a team that has a lot of time to do a lot of things. So that’s, that’s more, more my concern because I know everything is, is on air, but there are some things that are not going to change. And we need to look on, on that.

[00:48:36] It sounds like you have put a lot of thought into it. So why don’t you send me your list of things you’re concerned about and we will make sure that we have covered all of them. I have a project about that. So, yeah, I’ve been working on that for two years because I knew that that was going to come in and we need to include that on.

[00:48:55] I was in last year at WorldCamp US. I talked with Otto and he told me that there are some tools, internal tools that allow to do some of the things, but those are manual right now, but they need some work to, to open and not be abused for everybody. So I think we have some road made, but there are some things to, to, to do.

[00:49:29] Agreed. Agreed. Yep. I will look forward to your list and project then. Okay.

[00:49:40] May I ask one more thing, please? To, to anybody really. I thank you Chloé. She just gave me the name of Alex Kirk in terms of the Data Liberation project. But I’m curious about the Playground on the homepage button. Is there a point person who, who might be able to give me some, I don’t know, intel about that or an interview?

[00:50:01] That’ll be Adam Zieliński, but also Adam Adam and Alex work together. So that’s great. Thank you. They’re doing a lot of really complicated R and D, but most of the time I understand as long as all you want is like. the surface level information. If you want really complex explanations of what is happening they will be, they will be your people.

[00:50:29] So I just describe it as a voodoo. That’s just, but thank you. Yeah, exactly. Press the button. It’s amazing. Yeah. Thank you. That’s perfect.

[00:50:46] Looks like we have about five minutes left. Yep. I was actually going to share that I want to be mindful of everyone’s time. So I don’t know if there are any other questions

[00:51:07] Good because I can’t answer any questions in five minutes.

[00:51:12] We all know this about me. We’ve learned it over time

[00:51:23] Well, I really appreciate everyone showing up and inviting me along for this. This was great I love talking to you all and answering your question. Yeah, this was yeah, this was really enjoyable Thank you, Josepha, for your time and for sharing your insights. Nathan, I see your hand. I don’t know if that’s a question or, oh, okay.

[00:51:48] Yeah, thank you everyone for contributing to today’s discussion and for sharing your questions as well. And just as a reminder you know, that as, you know, the recap and the recording will be published in the coming days. And if you have any other questions just feel free to reach out on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/..

[00:52:06] All right, bye everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Bye.


Thank you to @cbringmann and @chanthaboune for the peer review.

#media-corps-briefing #summary

Upcoming Media Corps Briefing on Mid-term Goals for WordPress

Join us for the next Media Corps briefing, where we’ll learn about the mid-term goals for WordPress with Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy (@chanthaboune). This topic was a popular choice in the feedback we collected in July and was confirmed as the preferred option for September’s session on Slack.

Session details

  • Date: September 10, 2024
  • Time: 15:00 UTC
  • Location: Zoom (a link will be provided in the Media Corps SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. channel before the session).

What to expect

During this briefing, media folks can gain insights into the mid-term focus areas and priorities for the WordPress open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. project, including initiatives that may benefit from increased visibility and support. @chanthaboune will lead the discussion and address participants’ questions.

As usual, the briefing will be recorded and uploaded to the WordPress YouTube channel in the days following the session. Media partners unable to attend live can submit their questions in advance as comments to this post (by September 8).

A few friendly reminders:

  • Briefings are intended for media partners but are open to the public to avoid restricting information. This means anyone can join as a viewer or listener. We will prioritize questions from media partners as much as possible.
  • Due to time constraints, we may be unable to cover all questions live.

Do you have any questions about the session? Please share them in the comments below or on the Media Corps Slack channel.

Thank you to @jenblogs4u for editing and reviewing.

#media-corps-briefing

Summary of August 2024 Media Corps Briefing

On August 7, 2024, the second Media Corps briefing provided media partners with an update on some of the latest developments in the WordPress project. A key highlight was the relaunch of Learn WordPress, with insights from Training contributors Kathryn Presner (@zoonini), Cynthia Norman (@cnormandigital), and Jonathan Bossenger (@psykro).

The briefing was recorded and published on the WordPress.org YouTube channel. Below is a summary with relevant links and resources and the full transcript.

Recording

Participants

Birgit Pauli-Haack (@bph), Bob WP (@bobdunn-trainer), Cynthia Norman (@cnormandigital), Javier Casares (@javiercasares), Jen Miller (@jenblogs4u), Jonathan Bossenger (@psykro), Kathryn Presner (@zoonini), Patricia BT (@patricia70), Peter Ingersoll (@peteringersoll), Rae Morey (@raewrites), Reyes Martínez (@rmartinezduque).

Summary

WordPress updates

Reyes Martínez began the session by sharing updates on recent WordPress releases, including WordPress 6.6.1 and Gutenberg 18.9. Media partners were reminded of the upcoming Hallway Hangout on August 15 to learn more about the ongoing developments in the GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ 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.

The briefing continued with references to the WordPress 6.7 release cycle, the introduction of offline mode and Progressive Web App support in WordPress Playground, and the current GitHub discussion on CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. 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. extensibility.

Shifting to community programs and events, Reyes mentioned the latest updates from the WordPress Mentorship Program and the WordPress Meetup Trends analysis. She invited participants to encourage people to get tickets for the upcoming WordCamp US in Portland, Oregon, and inform them of the annual State of the Word address scheduled for December 16, 2024, in Tokyo, Japan.

Learn WordPress discussion

The briefing discussed the recent Learn WordPress overhaul, highlighting the importance of Learning Pathways and the vision behind the new experience.

Jonathan Bossenger explained the need for a more structured approach to learning WordPress tailored to different user types and how the new pathways were developed based on research and community feedback that began around late 2022. Reflecting on the first launch of Learn WordPress in 2020, he noted:

There was no specific path if you were brand new to WordPress—where to start, where to go from there. Once you’ve then gotten used to WordPress, what’s the next step? Do you want to build with WordPress? Do you want to develop themes? Do you want to develop plugins? And so we realized that this was something the community wanted.

The new Learn WordPress has launched with four Learning Pathways—two for WordPress users and two for developers—and more on the roadmap, including for designers and contributors. One of the following priorities is the Intermediate Plugin Developer course, now calling for contributors.

On the platform’s redesign, Kathryn Presner illustrated the improvements over the former site and the transition from a text-heavy layout to a visually cohesive look that aligns with other WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ sections. She emphasized how the community collaborated in creating the new thumbnail graphics and the ability to preview courses without a WordPress.org login or account—allowing a broader audience to benefit from the educational resources.

Cynthia Norman shared her experience developing content for the Intermediate Theme Developer course and touched on the importance of allowing learners to assess their comprehension through hands-on activities and quizzes. On that note, the integration of WordPress Playground for practical learning and the overall efforts to make the experience interactive and fun were highlighted as important enhancements.

Learn WordPress Q&A

During the Q&A, participants discussed various topics, including the visibility of completed courses and lessons on WordPress.org profiles, certifications, and Learn multilingual capabilities.

Training contributors shared this GitHub issue and the ongoing conversations with the 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. team about giving more visible recognition of learners’ achievements on WordPress.org profiles. 

Regarding official certifications, Kathryn emphasized the priority of launching the new Learn WordPress site and referred to past discussions on the pros and cons of a certification program. Jonathan added his perspective, stressing the importance of establishing and agreeing on high-quality content the community supports before considering certifications. The work on Learning Pathways is seen as a foundational step in this direction.

The discussion also addressed the localization of Learn content and the need for more translators and a better system. Kathryn mentioned the testing efforts with TranslatePress and expressed hope of implementing a multilingual solution soon.

Lastly, they provided insight into the number of contributors involved in content creation. In July, for example, the team had six content creators (working on videos, scripts, voiceovers, editing, etc.) and three people who created localized content.

Questions submitted in the chat (with timestamps)
  • [00:27:00] Javier Casares (WPpodcast): When you finish a lesson/something, is there any idea of showing that somewhere in “your profile”? Like a new tab (prefer) or in the activity?
  • [00:30:03] Javier Casares: Is there any idea of having an “official” certification from the Community in some way? (Maybe related to the question before in your profile)
  • [00:36:17] Javier Casares: Another big thing around Learn… is multilingual. Something new about it?
  • [00:39:40] Rae (The Repository): How many contributors are working on creating courses/lessons?

Showcase entries

After the Learn WordPress discussion, Reyes provided an update on the latest entries added to the WordPress.org Showcase:

She also reminded participants about the State of Enterprise WordPress Survey 2024, which is currently open for feedback from enterprise organizations using WordPress.

Open floor

During the open floor, a question was raised about the progress of the Media Corps experiment. Reyes noted that the project is still in an early learning phase and aims to evaluate progress by the end of the year. She also provided her perspective on the Media Corps and Anne McCarthy’s (@annezazu) efforts in uniting WordPress YouTubers, explaining the different goals and how they can work together.

As the session concluded, the conversation shifted to recent criticism and discussions of WordPress and Gutenberg in YouTube videos. Reyes mentioned that she had no leadership feedback on the matter but acknowledged the challenge for contributors of tracking and responding to all the feedback shared regularly across different platforms.

Most resources shared during the briefing have been added as inline links to the summary above, but here are some additional links that were referenced:

Transcript

The following transcript was AI-generated. Note that it may contain some errors despite being reviewed.

Full transcript

00:00:12 – Reyes Martínez
All right, I think we are ready. Hello, everyone, and welcome to this Media Corps briefing. Thank you for taking the time to join us today. I’m Reyes and I’ll be facilitating today’s session. Before we dive into today’s agenda, I would like to remind everyone that this session is being recorded. And I also thought I would share what you can expect from the session. So first of all, I’ll start by giving an overview of some of the latest WordPress releases, community updates, and events. And then we’ll move on to discuss the new Learn WordPress experience. We have some training contributors with us today who will share more information about this launch and address any questions you might have. Kathryn, Cynthia and Jonathan, would you like to introduce yourselves?

00:01:15 – Kathryn Presner
Sure, I guess we’ll go in the order you just said. I’m Kathryn Presner and I’m based in Montreal, Canada. And I’ve been working with WordPress since 2008, first as a WordPress designer developer, and then as a happiness engineer with WordPress.comWordPress.com An online implementation of WordPress code that lets you immediately access a new WordPress environment to publish your content. WordPress.com is a private company owned by Automattic that hosts the largest multisite in the world. This is arguably the best place to start blogging if you have never touched WordPress before. https://wordpress.com/. And now I am a sponsored contributor working with the training team. And so I’ve helped with the remake of learn.wordpress.org. And I help do other things in the community, like helping out with a guide program that the training team has to mentor new contributors and a whole bunch of other things involving the training team. So it’s great to be here.

00:01:53 – Reyes Martínez
Thanks, Kathryn. Cynthia, did I pronounce your name correctly?

00:02:01 – Cynthia Norman
Yeah. Perfect. Hi, thanks for having me here. I am a new contributor with the training team. My background is a freelance WordPress developer for the past four years. I’ve been exclusively working with WordPress. And previous to freelancing, I was actually a C-sharp programmer for a SaaS company.

00:02:29 – Reyes Martínez
Nice. Thank you for joining us. Jonathan.

00:02:34 – Jonathan Bossenger
Hey, everybody. I’m Jonathan. I’m from Cape Town, South Africa. It’s nice to see some of you for the first time. I’ve definitely had some communication and conversations with some of you over the past years, but it’s nice to actually see some faces that are folks that I recognize. And I, like Kathryn, I’m a sponsored contributor to the training team. And I work with folks like Cynthia to create all the educational content, the lessons, the online workshops that we have on Learn WordPress.

00:03:05 – Reyes Martínez
Thank you so much, Jonathan, and thank you everyone again for joining us. Okay, after discussing the new learn WordPress updates. If time permits, I will also try to share a quick rundown of the latest showcase entries.

And finally, we will open the floor for other discussion topics and questions about the Media Corps project. We have Jen as well, who has been helping with the Media Corps project, so I’m sure she’ll also be helping addressing any questions or discussion topics we might have. As a reminder, you are welcome to share any questions during the session in the chat. So when first submitting a question, just please remember to indicate indicate the media outlet or channel that you represent, so we can have more context. And I think that’s pretty much all.

00:04:01 – Reyes Martínez
Do you have any questions so far? All good. Okay. Let’s dive right into our first agenda topic then. On WordPress releases and community program updates. One second, let me first share. Okay, some relevant links in the chat that I’ll be, one second, that I’ll be mentioning for reference. There are a bunch of links, so don’t worry. I’ll be just mentioning the different updates. But there you go, so you can have them for reference.

All right. WordPress 6.6.1 released on July 23rd. This maintenance release featured seven bug fixes in core and nine for the block editor. In episode 84 of the WordPress Briefing Podcast, Josepha Haden Chomphosy and Meher Bala, 6.6 release coordinator, discussed WordPress 6.6 and Meher’s journey from contributing to marketing to leading their release. If you haven’t, give that a listen, I highly recommend it. And numerous media partners covered and helped amplify the 6.6 release. So I just wanted to note and express a big thank you for all those contributions.

And we are right now in the WordPress 6.7 release cycle with BetaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. 1 scheduled for October 1. And we should expect an update on the 6.6, sorry, 6.7 release squad very soon. As you might know, Gutenberg 18.9 was released on July 31 and introduced new updates to data views, some consistent design tool support across more blocks and improved usability when editing and applying font size presets in global styles, among other highlights. And if you’re interested in learning more about what’s being worked on in the Gutenberg plugin, I recommend you check out the next hallway hangout, which is scheduled for August 15th.

00:06:33 – Reyes Martínez
Okay, moving on to WordPress Playground. The team recently announced that it supports offline mode and that it can be installed as a progressive web app. These features allow folks to explore and experiment with WordPress without needing an active internet connection. Which makes it easier to develop and test their ideas on the go. So this is a very cool update actually. And lastly, WordPress developers with experience or interest in extending core blocks are encouraged to share their insights in a 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/ discussion on core block extensibility. You can also find that link in the chat.

00:07:14 – Reyes Martínez
Any questions so far? All good? Okay, let’s move on then to… Well, let me check the… Okay, yeah, perfect. Okay, moving on to other community news and upcoming events. The next cohort of the WordPress Mentorship Program is scheduled for October-November of this year. The call for interest, which closed in mid July, attracted 54 mentee applications and 30 from prospective mentors.

The community team also published an analysis of global trends in WordPress meetups and a working group has been formed to analyze regional trends. WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. US 2024 is approaching fast. It’s taking place from September 17th to 20th in Portland, Oregon. The organizing team recently reopened the call for volunteers until tomorrow, August 8, and published the details and location of the social event, just in case you haven’t seen those posts. And the schedule will be published in the coming weeks, if I’m not mistaken. But in the meantime, any help amplifying and encouraging people to get tickets will be highly appreciated. 

And the last item on upcoming events that I have on my list is the State of the WordState of the Word This is the annual report given by Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress at WordCamp US. It looks at what we’ve done, what we’re doing, and the future of WordPress. https://wordpress.tv/tag/state-of-the-word/.. As you might know, State of the Word is the annual keynote addressed by WordPress leadership and will take place this year on December 16th in Tokyo, Japan. The event will highlight this year’s achievements of the open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. project and outline its future direction and vision. And I just wanted to share that we should get some updates out later this month, so stay tuned. But yeah, I’ll keep you all posted on that. Okay, I think that’s all on the first agenda items. Do you have any questions before we move on to discuss the learn WordPress experience?

00:09:34 – Reyes Martínez
Okay, I don’t see any questions in the chat. Feel free also to unmute if you.

00:09:40 – Jen Miller
Did you have a date for the block extensibility meeting? Is that the hallway hangout? Or is that a separate event?

00:09:55 – Reyes Martínez
No, the discussion on GitHub is still open. There are no dates, I believe. There’s a current discussion and that’s still open for developers to share feedback and insights on that.

00:10:06 – Jen Miller
Okay, good. Just wanted to make sure.

00:10:09 – Reyes Martínez
Thank you, Jen.

00:10:13 – Reyes Martínez
All right, I believe there are no further questions so next on our agenda is the announcement of the new Learn WordPress experience, which went live a few days ago. Just as a brief introduction for context, since 2020 Learn WordPress has been a hub for consistent, high-quality educational resources that users can trust to learn WordPress.

And the platform has recently undergone a significant transformation, with a new modern interface and the introduction of learning pathways. This improves the overall user experience with a learner-centric approach. And I know this has been a collaborative project which has involved multiple contributors and teams, including training, meta, work, marketing, sorry, and design folks. Kathryn or Jonathan, would you like to explain a little bit more about the learning pathways, why they matter, and the vision behind the new Learn experience?

00:11:33 – Jonathan Bossenger
Shall I’ll take that one, Kathryn. Sure. So with this sort of official launch of the, you know, the Learn WordPress we knew before the relaunch that happened, the training team did a bit of research with our individual learners survey at around about the end of 2022, beginning of 2023.

And we wanted to find out from learners what was working, what wasn’t working, what would they like to see. And the big item that we saw a lot, a lot of people were saying was a more structured, more defined approach to learning WordPress. So those of you who remember Learn WordPress, when it sort of kicked off in 2020, there were some courses, there were some tutorials, but it was kind of very random, very scattershot. There was no specific path if you were brand new to WordPress, where to start, where to go from there. Once you’ve then gotten used to WordPress, what’s the next step? Do you want to build with WordPress? Do you want to develop themes? Do you want to develop plugins? And so we realized that this was something the community wanted. And so we spent about a year or so kind of defining what that might look like. And that’s how we came up with this idea of structured learning pathways.

So the learning pathways that we’ve currently launched with, we’ve got at the moment we’re on three different user types, focusing specifically on WordPress users, so those that are brand new to WordPress or getting used to WordPress. We also want to create content for designers, for those that are building sites with WordPress, designing with WordPress, and then also developers. A big reason why Cynthia and I are involved is that it’s a big ask from the community for high-quality developer-focused content. So we’ve launched with four learning pathways, two user pathways, two developer pathways. We have a whole bunch more coming that we’re working on. And that’s kind of the history behind all of that and how we got there. Kathryn, I don’t know if you want to chat maybe a little bit about the design and how we ended up there.

00:13:42 – Kathryn Presner
Sure. Actually, I’m going to just share my screen. I want to just show what the site looked like before for those who might not remember. This is what it looked like before. So the focus was on tutorials, which were sort of one-off videos about a specific topic, and lesson plans, which were geared to people teaching WordPress to others. And then as Jonathan said, there were some courses, but no real and then tutorials here. These little graphics did not used to be here. And so this is what it looked like before. And when it was relaunched, this is what it looks like now. So it was the design was overhauled to better match the rest of the .org site, at least the parts of the .org site that have been revamped and refreshed. So it’s a much more coherent look now.

And also before it was very text heavy. You know, apart from these sort of trapezoids or whatever that shape is called, it was really text heavy. So these graphics were created to represent the different user types. So this is for developers. And this is for users. And as Jonathan mentioned, there will be learning pathways for designers coming and also there’ll be learning pathways for contributors coming further down the road. And then, these little thumbnail graphics were created. So the design team created this incredible tool in Figma called the thumbnail generator. And we created a set of instructions and even a video on how to create these thumbnails because we have these hundreds of courses and lessons.

So courses are composed of multiple lessons. So you’ll see here, beginner developer has 59 lessons. Beginner user has 24. And each of these courses and lessons needed a little thumbnail graphic to add visual interest to the site and variety and make it a lot more interesting to look at than it used to be. So the community actually rallied around and created hundreds of thumbnail graphics for all these pieces of content. So you can see now if you go to see all courses, There are all these little graphics. And this is a community that did these. So we had sessions online. We had sessions. I did a little session at WordCamp Canada. We had a meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area.. We had an impromptu contributor hour. So there were all sorts of activities to get people helping to create these graphics and then helping upload them.

So I think that’s a cool example of how the community really pulled together to make the site look great. So yeah, that’s a little bit about the site. And just as Jonathan said, if we go into one of these, learning pathway areas, you can see that for now there are two courses on developing with WordPress, one for beginner developers. And if you click on it, you’ll see that it consists of modules, chunks of lessons. And within each module, there are lessons. And many of these lessons were set to be previewable, which means that without even needing a .org account, without even needing to click take this course, you don’t even have to be logged in, you can actually see the whole lesson. So the only thing you won’t be able to do is take a quiz if there’s a quiz with the course.

So I think this is really cool because it means people can dive in, appreciate the content and think, oh, hey, you know what, I actually want to sign in, take this course. And then create a dot org account and then sort of, you know, get enveloped in the community and hopefully participate further. So, and the other thing I don’t know what Jonathan if you want to talk a little about this practice on a demo site or

00:17:32 – Jonathan Bossenger 
Sure. So this ties back into what Reyes was saying earlier about WordPress Playground and the fact that Playground exists. So there are direct links from the course landing page to be able to spin up a WordPress Playground instance. So as you’re working through the course, you can have the instance in your browser, so you don’t need a local WordPress install. You can just go through and you can can test out the things that you’re learning.

We’re also busy working on being able to, there’s a WordPress playground block that we’re embedding in the lessons themselves. So for specific lessons, you’ll just be able to, in the lesson itself, when you finish the lesson, have a little practical running in WordPress playground that you’ll be able to test your knowledge right then and there. And because it’s running on Playground, you can just export that to your local machine. If you’re doing the developer side of things and you’re writing code, you can see the code making changes live in that Playground block and then download that code locally if it’s a theme or it’s a plugin. So we’re still busy experimenting with the best ways to use all of that. There’s been some accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) issues that we’ve been fixing in the Playground block to get that working.

But we’re really hoping to make Learn at WordPress.org, the place where you come to not only learn WordPress, but also practice WordPress, and practice what you’ve learned without needing to go anywhere else, without needing to install anything else, and really make it this interactive, fun experience. We all know that learning is important, but it’s often very slow and boring and tedious, and so we’re trying to make it as interactive and as fun as possible as we possibly can.

The other thing I want to mention, and it’s difficult to see this because of the resolution on Kathryn’s screen, but one of the biggest bugbears that I had about the old site was that we had this very narrow content area. I think it was set at like 800 pixels or something from, you know, back in 2020. Now it’s a lot wider, so it takes up more of the screen real estate. So if you’re on a bigger screen, you won’t have all these white areas on the side. You can see it’s kind of stretched on Kathryn’s screen. So it just means we can present more content to you. So we’ve really tried to modernize the entire experience and just make it a fun place to be.

00:19:38 – Reyes Martínez
Nice. Looks very, very exciting. The site actually looks great. So I’m really excited about it. And Cynthia, I believe, well first of all, congrats on receiving the Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship. I know you have had a key role in developing the content of the Intermediate Theme Developer course, which is one of the courses that are already out and available. Would you like to tell us briefly about your experience and how do you believe the developer learning pathways will also benefit developers in the community?

00:20:20 – Cynthia Norman
Love to share my experience. So I am an unsponsored contributor, which means that I would wake up in the morning, do my content creation, and then switch over to doing my day job. So it was it was very time consuming, but it was a lot of fun. I fell into the training team quite easily. I do have A background in education as well, and computer training. And so this felt natural for me.

I was fortunate, however, when I jumped in, all that research that Jonathan talked about, that was done for me. So I have experience in developing curriculum, and I know how choosing the topics and creating the outline creating that content is very time consuming. So that was all done for me. I actually based all of my lessons on the theme handbook that’s available in docs. So that made it, you know, that I could quickly get into the creative portion, which was creating the script and the video. So then I edited the video and then I used Camtasia for that. And then I created the lessons that were just shown to you. So I would go in and add my video and the text.

So now we get to focus on the fun stuff that Jonathan is talking about, and that’s making sure that people that are going through can feel that they have an opportunity to assess their comprehension, so they can do some hands-on activities and some quizzes. So, go beyond that visual experience and play around either within Playground or their local development environment. I don’t see myself leaving the training team anytime soon. There’s so much fun work ahead of us.

00:22:53 – Reyes Martínez
Well, that’s great to hear. Jonathan, please go ahead.

00:22:58 – Jonathan Bossenger 
I just wanted to add to what Cynthia said. She reminded me about the fact that the foundation of our lessons are the documentation. So almost every lesson that exists in these courses has a link back to some piece of documentation somewhere. And the great thing about this is that as we’re busy creating this content, if we see documentation that needs a little bit of a tweak, or it needs a bit of an update, then we can go and we can, you know, chat to the Docs team and we can say, hey, we need to fix this, we need to fix that. It got to a point over the course of the last sort of six months to a year that we were working on these learning pathways but the Docs team just basically said to me, just fine, just go and fix it. And I got full admin rights to go and make the changes. But it just means we’re helping to make the documentation better in the process.

We’re seeing as we’re exploring these things, and this is what was great about having Cynthia on board. Cynthia is a much more experienced theme developer than I am. So she was coming up with, okay, how are we going to teach this? How are we going to teach that? Bouncing ideas off me, and then we would discover, oh, maybe this documentation needs to be moved around, needs to be changed slightly to make more sense to somebody learning about theme development.

So the great thing about, you know, there’s that old saying of, the only way you really can understand something is if you have to teach it, because then you really have to understand it. In this process, we’re learning so much about how WordPress works and how you develop with WordPress, and helping to bring that information and that learning back to docs and through other folks in the community. It’s this really cool cycle of improvement, which has been, I think, for Cynthia and myself, really, really rewarding.

00:24:36 – Reyes Martínez 
That’s indeed a great point. And I believe there’s an open call for contributors. Is that correct?

00:24:44 – Jonathan Bossenger
That is correct.

00:24:44 – Reyes Martínez
For the Intermediate Plugin Developer learning pathway.

00:24:48 – Jonathan Bossenger
Yes, so the Intermediate Plugin Developer is essentially the next learning pathway we want to work on. The way we laid out, and if you want, I can talk about development and development courses for the rest of time, so stop me if this gets boring, but with the developer learning pathways, we sort of laid out beginner developer foundational work, and then we thought about, okay, the next sort of logical step once you start developing in WordPress is you kind of make a choice between theme or plugin, depending on your use case or requirements, you know, where your interest lies.

So that’s why we split it off to intermediate theme, intermediate plugin. So theme is now done because we figured that was the most important one to do first. Plugin is next. And plugin is quite few more lessons, because there’s almost quite a lot more that you could do with plugins, a lot more interactions and implementations and things like that. And I worked out that based on an average output rate of 2.5 lessons a week, which is roughly what I can do on my own, if I were to work on this on my own with no other support, it would take the rest of this year. And that’s not cool. So I put out a call for folks to come and join me. I’m hoping to get the plugin community.

We’ve cross-posted to the Plugin Review team. So anybody who has an interest in developing plugins, who has an interest in teaching others about developing plugins, who can help us research and write scripts, who can help us with voice recordings. So sometimes we’ll do a cool thing where somebody will do the research and script writing and somebody else will record the voice and then someone else will take the voice and put the video together. Or someone will just, you know, do the whole thing. So we’ve got all of these different opportunities where folks could come along. Or just reviewing, you know, reviewing our scripts, reviewing our final videos, making sure that the content is valid, correct, and showing the best of what is possible with plugin development.

There is the call for contributors. It’s on the training team site. And then there’s also If you go to our GitHub repository, there is an issue I’ve pinned at the top of the issues list for intermediate plugin developer, and that’s where you can comment and say, yes, I want to get involved and we can start connecting there.

00:26:54 – Reyes Martínez 
Awesome. Thanks for sharing. Glad to hear there are plenty of contributing opportunities there. Javier, I saw you shared a question, would you like to unmute and share it yourself?

00:27:08 – Javier Casares 
Okay. So the first one, I think both have been in some topics in some conversations. The first one, I don’t know if now it’s working, but is it showing when, if I’m not… When you finish a lesson or a tutorial or something, there is like something, somewhere that shows that you did that tutorial. Is that showing anywhere? Because I know you can see that in Learn WordPress, but it’s shown in I don’t know, in your profile or someplace?

00:28:03 – Kathryn Presner 
Yes.

00:28:04 – Javier Casares 
Okay.

00:28:04 – Kathryn Presner 
I actually had this already open, so I’ll just show you. It is shown on your profile in your activity.

00:28:14 – Javier Casares 
Okay, in the activity, but…

00:28:14 – Kathryn Presner 
That’s what it is for now. If somebody feels like there should be more to this, like a badge…

00:28:27 – Javier Casares 
More, like maybe, under the activity tab. For example, there are the photos, the plugins, because the activity disappears when you did some things.

00:28:44 – Jonathan Bossenger 
So if I could interrupt this. That is actually a conversation that we have had with, I think, the Meta team. I can’t remember. I think it was in GitHub somewhere. I can go and find the GitHub issue once we finish chatting about this. But we have had a conversation. I seem to remember even using my inspector, inspector tools, developer tools to like quickly hard code one and sort of show it. And the idea was to have it as its own Learn tab, you know, so where it’s like plugins, and there’s a couple others I can’t remember what they are. But you have one for Learn and then that would list your completed courses or your lessons that you’ve taken, whatever. So that is part of the plan.

I think I think it’s a conversation that, because we don’t have control over the profiles, it’s a conversation we need to have with Meta. So it is definitely something we want to do, but our focus was on getting the new site going and then that sort of part of the next phase. So that is definitely a conversation that has been had. I’ll find that issue of that conversation and see if I can share it while we’re doing this.

00:29:45 – Javier Casares 
Okay. No, the main reason is because the activity disappears. So if you want to see if that person did some tutorials, you need a place to see that. And that’s my second question. Another old question about this. Is there any idea to have an official certification from the community or something?

00:30:17 – Kathryn Presner 
So certifications have been a long conversation, and I’ll even link to a post from 2022. It’s a big topic, and I think there have been a lot of discussions about the pros and cons of having certifications, the difficulty in establishing a certification program.

And like Jonathan said, the focus was on getting the site up and running. And then we can pick up some of these conversations because clearly, some folks really want certifications. And whether that’s something that’ll happen, I’m not sure, because like Jonathan said, that’s also a wider conversation that has to happen. But certainly, it comes up a lot. And I think now that the site is out, we can pick up some of those conversations and see where they go.

00:31:06 – Javier Casares 
Maybe a first step…

00:31:09 – Jonathan Bossenger 
Sorry if I could just. Sorry, I want to quickly add to that because this is something that I am very opinionated of. So this is my opinion as Jonathan Bossenger, not the WordPress community, not the company that I work for. But those of you in this room might remember there was a company a number of years ago, last year or some time, that released their own certification and it was covered on WP Tavern.

And I remember some of the comments on that Tavern post, and one of the comments was, and this is nothing against that company, I’m not bringing this up to say anything against them, but one of the comments by a community member in that Tavern post was, if I fix all the bugs on their website, does that automatically mean I get the certification? And to me, what that points to is that as a community, we need to first agree what is required to get that certification. Now, we have some idea of how to get there. We’re busy creating this content. It’s a community effort. So I think we’re all kind of agreeing that having this content is good. The community is reviewing it. The community is giving us feedback. I recently had a piece of feedback on one of my lessons about something that I showed that could have been done a better way, and I’m busy recording an update for that.

So once we have that foundation, once we have those courses out there that the community agrees on these courses are good, then I think we can have that conversation about certifications, because then the community agrees this content is good. The process of going through this content, learning this content, doing the practical examples, exams, whatever we have together, means that the person who’s completed this content knows what they’re talking about, then we can have certifications, I feel. And so I feel like this work that we’re doing now is laying the foundation of that.

And as Kathryn shared, we’ve had this discussion as a training team many, many, many times. And this project, this process of creating these learning pathways is very much part of it. But as a community, I don’t think we’re ready yet to say this content. I could tell you that this content is right, because I created it. But somebody else might say, no, what you’ve done here is wrong. We need to tweak this. We need to tweak that. So there needs to be a little bit of time for the community. And I would love, and I’m going to make this open call, seeing as I’ve got the media call here, every single WordPress developer out there, come and take the course, come and tell me what I’m doing wrong. So we can make it better. So we can make it right. So that when anybody takes it, we all know, we all agree that this is the best content for these people to learn from. Excuse me. And then we can certify.

00:33:36 – Javier Casares 
Okay.

00:33:39 – Reyes Martínez 
Thanks, Javier, for asking. I think conversations around certifications can go on for a long time. I know, I know. It’s a big topic, yeah. And I know there are some known challenges as well.

00:33:53 – Reyes Martínez 
Jonathan, you raised your hand again or… okay, I don’t know if you wanted to share something else. I just wanted to share or ask you also where people can learn more about Learn WordPress and the Learning Pathways project? Kathryn, maybe you can share…

00:34:13 – Kathryn Presner 
Sure. Well, I think you might have shared it in the chat before, but there is a post if you’re talking about the new site and learning pathways on the new site. I wrote an introductory post here, but is that what you meant or did you mean something else?

00:34:31 – Reyes Martínez 
Yeah, let me share some of those links. And I believe you hosted an online workshop yesterday and you’re hosting another one tomorrow. Is that correct?

00:34:41 – Kathryn Presner 
Yes. Yes, exactly. So we had one yesterday. Jonathan and I hosted a workshop about the new site. We recorded it. It’s up on WordPress.tv, I will grab the link. And then we’re having another one tomorrow. So that’s a tomorrow will be with Wes Theron, who’s another content creator. And yeah, we walk through the new site live. Oh, thank you for grabbing the link. And here’s the recording of yesterday’s. And yeah, it’s a tour of the new site in greater depth than we’ve done here, let’s say. And we also had the certifications question yesterday. So obviously, that’s going to keep coming up. But it’s good. It’s good for us to talk about it and get the conversation going again. So yeah, that would be another place to check out.

00:35:26 – Reyes Martínez 
Definitely. I know Ben also gave a talk at WordCamp Europe for those folks interested in getting a little bit more background about the Learn WordPress platform as well. I’m going to share the link in the chat as well. And there was an episode in the WordPress Briefing podcast as well with Wes, I believe, touching on the learning pathways. So all of those are great resources to get some more context. Okay.

00:36:04 – Reyes Martínez 
And I think, I don’t know folks if you want to share anything else about the new Learn WordPress launch, any other resources?

00:36:14 – Kathryn Presner 
I can take this question from Javier, if you want.

00:36:19 – Reyes Martínez 
Oh, yeah, sure.

00:36:22 – Kathryn Presner 
So very good question about multilingual capability. I will share my screen and show you what we have now. So we have had volunteers translating over time. So not just for the launch, but over time, some of the lessons, some of the courses. And so you can toggle the language to see what’s available. We need more folks to help translate, and also we need a better multilingual solution. So right now, if you click on, you know, Italiano, you’ll see the courses in Italian. These are some community courses. But this isn’t a true multilingual solution, obviously. This is sort of what could be done at the time.

However, going forward, we want a better multilingual solution. And so we are testing a multilingual plugin, which is TranslatePress. Now, the Meta team ran into some technical issues with TranslatePress. There were some issues with that plugin, using it at scale like this. There were some performance issues. The TranslatePress team said they would fix them. And so now, again, now that the site is launched and we’ve got the base up and running, we’re picking that up again, and hopefully we’ll be able to implement that and have a full multilingual solution. Because the way of copying content right now is not ideal. It’s a cumbersome process and it’s not ideal, as anyone who’s ever built a multilingual site knows. You need a good system. And so TranslatePress tested well, it’s just that there are some scalability issues with it. So stay tuned.

00:38:09 – Reyes Martínez 
Thanks, Kathryn, for answering.

00:38:19 – Jonathan Bossenger 
We do have a process in place to start translating the content, even though the plugin is not working. So again, call for contributors. If you speak a different language to English, I speak Afrikaans, which is useless to the rest of the world. So I can’t translate anything. But if you speak another language and you can translate the content, that would be amazing, because I would love to see all of our content translated for everyone. So if you want to translate, you can start. And then once we get the solution in place, then we can implement it.

00:38:44 – Javier Casares
Okay.

00:38:47 – Reyes Martínez 
Thank you. Okay, I was saying that I want to be mindful of people’s time. So, if there are no further questions, I believe we can move on to the next agenda item. I’m also curious, because we are approaching the hour, I’m also curious to know if you folks prefer or want to hear about showcase entries, or do you prefer to jump directly into the open floor?

00:39:23 – Reyes Martínez 
I see, Rae, you are… Did I pronounce it correctly as well? Rae? Okay. Yeah, maybe then I can share… Oh, question. Rae, you can go ahead as well and unmute, yeah.

00:39:40 – Rae Morey 
Hi, everyone. I was wondering how many people are working on creating, how many contributors are working on creating content for Learn WordPress? If there’s a small team, if there’s lots of people, I mean, because there’s a lot of content to create, you know, with one course having 59 lessons, and that’s very time-consuming. So I’m just interested in the workload as well.

00:40:05 – Jonathan Bossenger 
Hmm, Kathryn, do you feel like answering that one? Should I take it? Cynthia?

00:40:08 – Kathryn Presner 
Yeah, I’m trying to look up the stat for July.

00:40:12 – Jonathan Bossenger 
I can talk, but I don’t want to be the Misha.

00:40:15 – Kathryn Presner 
Well, go ahead and talk. Meantime, I’m looking up the number for July specifically.

00:40:22 – Jonathan Bossenger 
Sure. So what I do know is there are a small number of what we’re calling content creators. So Kathryn, sorry, Cynthia is a content creator. I don’t know why my hand is up. Maybe Sue was picking up my hand, but I didn’t physically do it. Cynthia is a content creator. I’m a content creator. Wes is a content creator. What we mean by that is somebody who takes a lesson idea, a description, with an objective, sometimes not even an objective, maybe some links, and does the whole thing start to finish. So at the moment there’s about four or five of us that are, you know, we create the whole thing start to finish.

Then there are a number of folks who are just creating the video part. So we somebody I remember who met with some folks from I think it’s Hostinger, they’ve got some video editors. They’re not great at the research and script writing part, but they’re great at taking a voice recording and a script and then putting some video together. So we have two team members from Hostinger that are contributing a number of hours per week towards that. We have a big pool of reviewers. So we have a number of reviewers in the team. I would say easily 15 reviewers that review the content quite regularly. And then we also have a number of script writers. So again, it’s a small number. There’s about three or four of those. They just do research and script writing.

And I want to highlight Ronny Shani there. She’s done some amazing work with us. And I’m sure I see other people putting thumbs up. Ronny’s all over the place. She does amazing things. But she’s helped with a lot of research and script writing, especially for the developer-focused things. She’s not comfortable having her voice recorded or doing the video, but she’s very good at doing that. So I would say on the whole, the whole team team, if we include the reviewers, is probably 20 to 25. That excludes anybody translating content, that’s just creating the original English content. But then that’s broken down by different roles and what folks are capable of doing. Obviously, creating content requires you to be comfortable recording your voice as you can hear, I’m very comfortable doing that, comfortable with a video editing tool, putting these things together. And that’s why we’ve tried to sort of open up the sausage factory and make it easy to break these tasks up a little bit so that we can include other contributors. So that’s why in my call for contributors post, I’m saying if you are interested in any of those sort of five areas, please come and join us because the more the merrier.

00:42:47 – Kathryn Presner 
Thanks, Jonathan. And in the meantime, I popped the stat in the chat. But in July, we had six content creators. That’s folks creating videos, scripts, voiceovers, editing, and all that types of work. And then we had three people who created localized content. So that was in two different languages.

That gives you some idea. And I don’t think that was out of the ordinary. It’s not an average, but that’s a sample month.

00:43:21 – Reyes Martínez 
Thank you. Thank you both for answering that. Okay. Any other lingering questions?

00:43:35 – Reyes Martínez 
It feels, it looks like we can move on to the next item. Again, I don’t know… how do you feel about going quickly through some of the latest showcase entries? Is that okay for everyone? Yeah?

Okay, I guess these sessions always take longer than expected. A lot of things to talk about and discuss. Okay, so again, let me share some links for reference in the chat.

00:44:16 – Reyes Martínez
I’ll try to cover these very quickly. One of the first entries I shared is Freethink. Freethink is a digital media company dedicated to sharing stories of people and groundbreaking technologies.

They have a modern website design that draws visitors into a dynamic mix of content including long form written pieces and videos, and they leverage WordPress scalability and design is built on WordPress, WordPress VIP. It’s a really cool site and a large publication. So here’s the link to the showcase.

And the next on the list is Spotify’s official newsroom, For the Record, which leans on WordPress publishing capabilities and the flexibility of custom blocks. They deliver a wide range of content about the company, its technology, and cultural and musical trends. And, oh, the Spotify entry, we don’t know, or at least I don’t have any other information about who designed the site. But if you’re interested, I can try to just learn a little bit more about this entry and try to figure it out or see if we can learn more about the designer who’s behind that site.

00:45:56 – Reyes Martínez 
I was reading some of the chat messages. Perfect. And next on the list, we have Disney General Entertainment Press. This site focuses on Disney’s television brands and is built to communicate updates across its creative properties.

Using WordPress, the DGE press team streamlined the editorial process, content distribution, and updates for 8000 press members. You can learn more about these and other enterprise success stories in the enterprise WordPress showcase shared by the Scale Consortium group. I know this is a brand this group works with. So yeah, I highly recommend checking that Scale Consortium link if you want to read about some other cool success stories.

And other entries include be beau, a French design agency; Digitalists, a digital marketing agency from Austria; and Studio Enabloo, a design and production studio headquartered in Africa. They are all great examples of modern sites that leverage WordPress flexibility to create some unique and branded experiences. So all of these are pretty cool sites and those are links in case you want to check those out. If you want any more any other information about them, feel free to reach out and I can try to learn or yeah learn a little bit more about who are the designers behind them. I know a few folks from those sites, others we don’t know so many information so much information, but yeah.

00:47:53 – Reyes Martínez
And finally, I would just like to remind everyone that the State of Enterprise WordPress 2024 survey is now open and looking for feedback from enterprise organizations. So, if you know any enterprise brands using WordPress, please encourage them to provide their input to help advance the enterprise WordPress space. I think that’s all.

Question, Javier: Is there a way to filterFilter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. by country? In the showcase page, do you mean? I don’t know if there’s actually…

00:48:30 – Javier Casares 
I cannot find… If there is a way, I cannot find that. I see that there is like a place where it says country, whatever, but there is no filter for… Or I cannot find the filter, but…

00:48:48 – Reyes Martínez 
Yeah, that’s interesting. I don’t know right now if there is a…

00:48:52 – Javier Casares 
Maybe we need to open a ticket.

00:48:57 – Reyes Martínez 
I don’t think there’s a current filter by country. But yeah, that would be interesting.

00:49:00 – Javier Casares 
Some time ago, we talked in the Spanish community to have like some directory for meetups or whatever, focused on Spain. It should be interesting to have one place where you can put Spain and see everything there but I cannot find that so. I will try to open a ticket, an issue somewhere. I don’t know where the showcase is now. It’s in some repo in GitHub.

00:49:34 – Reyes Martínez 
Yeah, I believe there’s a repo for the WordPress.org website. I can follow up with you on that if I find the right repo where you can share your suggestion. But I agree that that’s interesting.

00:49:55 – Reyes Martínez 
Okay, if there are no more questions on that, I believe we can move on to a little bit of discussion. I guess there’s not a lot of time. I mean, I’m okay with going for a little bit over an hour, but again, I just want to be mindful of everyone’s time.

00:50:18 – Reyes Martínez 
Let’s open the floor for any other topics about the Media Corps project. I noted some potential conversations that I had in mind, but I would like to first hear if you have any specific questions or topics that you would like to discuss. If so, please feel free to unmute or share them in the chat.

00:50:51 – Reyes Martínez 
It’s quiet here. Okay. Rae. Any updates on the progress of the Media Corps experiment? What do you mean like progress? Or any update on the progress? I would love it if you could elaborate a little bit more on that to ensure I understand it correctly.

00:51:16 – Rae Morey 
Yeah, I just mean, I guess, what’s the general sentiment around how it’s going, I guess, for your team as well and from leadership? And is there a timeline for looking back at the progress and measuring it and deciding on whether it’s been successful or not?

00:51:36 – Reyes Martínez 
Yeah, that’s a great question. So I think I think progress, well, I think we are just starting. I mean, maybe it feels like ages since we announced the first idea, but we are really starting the project. The latest feedback form that we shared, I believe, in general, I mean, I think feedback was positive. Of course, I think there’s room to address or keep improving based on media folks’ feedback. But I feel right now the general sentiment is positive. And there’s a lot of I think we are still learning as we go like there are no like set processes yet. I think we are just learning and the experimental project I know there are a few folks who maybe don’t like to call this experiment but I think it’s actually a kind of… it’s an experiment.

And the timeline we set for or to just see if this could be successful is December. So I think by the end of the year, we’ll be able to maybe look back at the past six months and, you know, like, just evaluate some of the feedback, some of the insights received and to see, you know, how this has been going, what’s the feedback received, and we can recommend or suggest any direction or another one. So, yeah. I don’t know if… does this answer your question?

00:53:22 – Rae Morey
Yeah.

00:53:30 – Reyes Martínez 
Also, in the meantime, I don’t know, in case you are also thinking about any other questions, I also wanted to touch a little bit on the Media Corps and the Uniting WordPress YouTubers efforts. Because I don’t know if folks have all the context and background. But on July 3rd, Anne, Anne McCarthy hosted a call with some WordPress YouTubers to get to know each other and chat about pain points, content planning, and other ways to stay in touch. And if I’m not mistaken, she’ll be hosting another call later this month. So, I feel there has been some confusion, maybe around, like, Media Corps and Anne’s efforts. So I thought I would try to help clarify those initiatives and to help manage expectations and any potential confusion.

For those who are not or haven’t heard about Anne’s efforts, I believe they try to or they aim to provide accurate and like relevant product information. Also leveraging actually the WordPress Media Corps project, but they also aim to help create a feedback 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. where YouTubers creators can share their feedback and insights from the audiences back into the project.

And lastly, I think Anne is also aiming to build a community where these creators can exchange tips, tricks, or any other best practices to support each other. So I think in comparison to the Media Corps, or at least regarding the Media Corps project, what we aim is to cover a broad range of WordPress updates in briefings, so not just limited to product releases or technical development topics.

00:55:33 – Reyes Martínez 
We also expect media partners to regularly attend or watch briefings and share feedback to help shape the upcoming briefings and the project implementation. So I see, or at least from my perspective, I see that Anne’s efforts might be more suitable for YouTubers or content creators who want to maybe share product feedback or stay closely informed about core, Gutenberg, and other related discussions. But again, this is not, by the way, I mean, these efforts are also compatible, it doesn’t mean that you have to be in one or the other one. But it is that I thought, I don’t know, like sharing some of this context would help especially clarify, I don’t know, these efforts. So hopefully, this helps avoid some confusion. But yeah, that’s my perspective.

00:56:44 – Reyes Martínez 
Any other questions, thoughts?

00:56:57 – Reyes Martínez 
Yeah, go ahead, Rae.

00:56:59 – Rae Morey 
Couldn’t find the hand-raising icon, so I’ll just skip. So, it’s interesting that you talk about that because that was actually going to be one of my next questions. Obviously, there’s been some criticism from YouTubers in recent weeks about WordPress, Gutenberg, the release of WordPress 6.6. I guess, how is leadership handling that? Is that something that Anne is taking care of? Is that something that, I guess, what is the feedback from leadership around that kind of criticism that’s happening?

00:57:39 – Reyes Martínez 
I don’t have any feedback from project leadership. I honestly feel that it’s really hard, I mean, to just keep track of everything that is shared out there. I think even I know contributors, like Anne and other core contributorsCore Contributors Core contributors are those who have worked on a release of WordPress, by creating the functions or finding and patching bugs. These contributions are done through Trac. https://core.trac.wordpress.org., I know they try to stay, like, updated on the feedback shared out there, but I think it’s really, really hard to just keep track of all the feedback and thoughts, opinions that are shared out there daily.

I don’t even know if sometimes or some of those videos sometimes are even, I mean, if project leadership knows about those videos or feedback. I know, you know, like there, for example, one of the things that Anne also hopes with this initiative is to actually try to improve the feedback loop because right now, I think it’s kind of hard for everyone to know what’s being shared because there are so many different places to share input or feature requests, suggestions. It’s all kind of distributed across many different places. I think it’s really hard to just keep track of everything that is shared out there. I think that’s also the idea regarding… like improving the feedback loop. But yeah, I can’t share again, I don’t know any thoughts or input from project leadership on that.

00:59:42 – Reyes Martínez 
Okay. I know we… I mean, I do have more topics that I would like to discuss, but I know we are, I see we’re a little over an hour already. So, yeah, I think we can wrap up our discussion for today if there are no other thoughts, questions.

And I think we covered a lot of ground and we can keep conversations going on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/., GitHub, for any questions or topics that we would like to further discuss. And of course, if there’s interest, we can always consider scheduling a discussion call, not just a briefing, but I mean like more of a discussion call.

01:00:37- Reyes Martínez
So yeah. All right. So yeah, I guess we can officially wrap this up. Thank you all for your contributions and for sharing your thoughts. And thank you, Kathryn, Cynthia, and Jonathan for sharing your insights about the new Learn WordPress experience with us.

As a reminder, the recap and recording of this session will be shared on the Media Corps blog. In the following days, and the video will be also uploaded to the WordPress YouTube channel.

If you have any further questions or need any additional information, please feel free to reach out on Slack.

01:01:26 – Reyes Martínez 
Thank you, everyone. And have a great day, afternoon. And yeah, thank you. Thank you all again for your time.

01:01:34 – Jonathan Bossenger 
Thank you. Thank you, guys.


Thank you to @zoonini and @psykro for reviewing this post.

#media-corps-briefing #summary

X-post: Training Team Update – August 2024

X-comment from +make.wordpress.org/updates: Comment on Training Team Update – August 2024

Upcoming Media Corps Briefing Scheduled for August 7

Following last week’s proposal, we will be hosting a multi-topic Media Corps briefing next week. Here are the details:

  • Date: August 7, 2024
  • Time: 12:30 PM UTC
  • Location: To be determined (a link will be provided in the Media Corps SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. channel before the session)

What to expect

This briefing will provide an overview of some of the latest happenings in the WordPress project, including a quick rundown of new entries in the Showcase.

Among other updates, you can expect to hear about the new Learning Pathways and the Learn WordPress redesign from Training contributors Kathryn Presner (@zoonini), Cynthia Norman (@cnormandigital), and Jonathan Bossenger (@psykro), who will help answer any questions about the upcoming launch.

After the briefing, we will open the floor for other questions and discussion topics about the Media Corps. While the briefing (the news/presentation portion) will aim to be shorter this time, note that any subsequent discussions may go a little longer.

The session will be recorded and uploaded to YouTube in the following days.

A few friendly reminders:

  • Briefings are intended for Media Corps partners but are open to the public to avoid restricting information, which means anyone can join as a viewer or listener. We will prioritize questions from media partners as much as possible.
  • Due to time constraints, we may be unable to cover all questions and discussion topics live.

Do you have any questions about the session? Please share them in the comments below or on the Media Corps Slack channel.

Thank you to @javiercasares, @sion99, and @zoonini for reviewing this post.

#media-corps-briefing

First Briefing Retrospective and Next Steps

This post summarizes the feedback received from media partners regarding the first Media Corps briefing and future sessions, along with suggested next steps. Thank you to everyone who completed the feedback form and contributed their thoughts.

Feedback has been synthesized for ease of reading. Full (anonymized) form responses are in this spreadsheet.

Overview

  • Attendance: 14 people attended the first briefing live. The form responses from media partners mixed live attendance and recording views. Due to time zones, finding a time that works for everyone is challenging, so this underscores the importance of recording briefings.
  • Overall briefing effectiveness: The briefing received an average rating of 3.8 out of 5, where 5 is the best effectiveness rating. On average, partners who completed the form found the briefing valuable, but there’s room for improvement.
  • Briefing organization: The average rating is 4.3 out of 5, which suggests that most respondents found the briefing well-organized.

What went well in the first briefing?

  • The demos were well-received and highly appreciated for understanding new features and changes.
  • A number of answers indicated that they found the information, the recap on the Media Corps blog, and the links/resources shared useful. These also helped as supportive resources for non-native English media partners.
  • It was easy to ask questions.
  • Anne’s participation, knowledge, and preparation of the source of truth were highlighted as significant positives.

What would you like to see improved for future briefings?

  • It would have been great to have the chief architect or lead designers available for questions to get firsthand knowledge of vision and ideas.
  • The briefing was very technical. What I’m hearing from subscribers is that they want to know more about what WordPress can do, not how it works. 
  • Briefings shouldn’t go for more than 30 minutes.
  • Focusing on multiple aspects of the project beyond just the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. updates.
  • Having someone other than Anne discuss important changes coming to WP would make more sense since Anne has her own initiatives with content creators and generally publishes her own content.
  • Understanding it was the first iteration, there wasn’t much in terms of the actual “media corps” content or evolving the idea of “media corps.”
  • Perhaps there could be email follow-ups after the event? That could be used to share the recording and transcript.

How often should we host the Media Corps briefings?

The majority of media partners prefer monthly briefings, which indicates a strong preference for regular, consistent updates that are frequent enough to stay informed but not overwhelming.

Topics for upcoming Media Corps briefings

The multi-topic briefing was the most voted choice, suggesting a majority preference among the media partners. Next in interest is a potential session on mid-term goals for WordPress with Josepha.

Additional suggestions from media partners

  • Complement video briefings with written statements and have access to assets (images, video, etc.) that can be referenced or shared by media partners.
  • Have a protocol for how to reach the team if there is something sensitive or questions about something that will be published so it can be resolved before publication.
  • Generally, less technical content and more “this is how WordPress is awesome” content so we can publish stories that showcase what WordPress is capable of.

Proposed next steps

Diverse briefings: For now, rotate the topics and formats for briefings (e.g., dedicated vs. multi-topic sessions) to help address media partners’ different interests and preferences. Keep improving them and iterating based on feedback.

Monthly briefings with SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. updates between sessions: Hosting the Media Corps briefings monthly seems the most preferred approach. We can complement these with updates shared via Slack between sessions to help keep media partners promptly informed of any WP developments that welcome more amplification.

Media kits: When possible, help provide access to shareable assets (videos, images, etc.) and/or statements to support media coverage.

Plans for the next briefing

Based on the feedback from media partners, I suggest that the next briefing be tentatively scheduled for the first week of August, be shorter, and focus on a multi-topic format to cover the latest WordPress news and happenings, including a quick rundown of new entries in the Showcase.

After the briefing, we could open the floor for questions or discussion items about the Media Corps project.

While the briefing (the news portion) can aim to be concise, note that any subsequent Media Corps discussions may naturally go a little longer.

Share your thoughts

What do you think about the above proposed next steps and plans for the next briefing? Do you have questions or comments? Please leave them in the comments below.

Thank you to @bernard0omnisend and @bobdunn-trainer for the peer review and to our media partners for contributing their thoughts on the latest and upcoming briefings.

#retrospective

Media Corps Briefings Feedback Form Now Open for Media Partners

Thank you to all our media partners who attended live or watched the first Media Corps briefing on WordPress 6.6. With the recording and summary now posted, we encourage you to share your thoughts on this briefing to help us learn and inform future sessions.

If you’re a media partner who has completed the self-assessment form, please take a moment to complete this Media Corps Briefings Feedback Form by Friday, July 12, 2024. You can also leave any additional feedback in the comments below.

Note: If you didn’t attend or watch the first Media Corps briefing, you can indicate this in the form and jump to the second part to share your input on future Media Corps briefings.

Thank you again to everyone who participated and supported the first Media Corps briefing. We appreciate you taking the time to help shape the future of the Media Corps sessions.

Thanks to @jenblogs4u and @rmartinezduque for peer review.

Recap of the Media Corps Briefing on WordPress 6.6

The first Media Corps briefing, held on June 27, 2024, provided media partners with an overview of the source of truth and updates planned in WordPress 6.6—scheduled for release on July 16, 2024. The session featured guest Anne McCarthy (@annezazu), who explained and demoed some of the upcoming features and answered questions from participants. The briefing was recorded and published on the WordPress.org YouTube channel. Besides the recording, you can find a summary, the full transcript, and other relevant links and resources below.

Recording

Participants

Ana Cirujano (@acirujano), Anne McCarthy (@annezazu), Bernard Meyer (@bernard0omnisend), Davinder Singh Kainth (@idavinder), Eric Karkovack (@karks88), Javier Casares (@javiercasares), Josep Morán (@josepmoran), Lauren Stein (@laurlittle), Matt Medeiros (@mattmm), Nilo Vélez (@nilovelez), Patricia BT (@patricia70), Reyes Martínez (@rmartinezduque), Simon Kraft (@krafit), Steve Mosby (@malgra).

Summary

Anne McCarthy began the session by introducing the source of truth, a document that helps consolidate all information about the release in one place. This resource is not meant for copying and pasting but rather as a factual information resource with visuals and demos to better understand the features and updates related to the release.

6.6 callouts

Anne made a special callout for two features coming in WordPress 6.6, primarily due to feedback and the scale of their impact: the unified editing flow and the pattern management in classic themes.

Unified editing flow:

  • The Post and Site editor experiences and interfaces are getting closer and more cohesive through technical and design efforts, including extensibility.
  • Integration of extensions has been made easier for developers, with slots available across editors. Anne noted the work done to help mitigate some unexpected usage of these slots as something to give feedback and call out for 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 authors.
  • The more noticeable piece for users will be seen in the publishing experience, with updates to the sidebarSidebar A sidebar in WordPress is referred to a widget-ready area used by WordPress themes to display information that is not a part of the main content. It is not always a vertical column on the side. It can be a horizontal rectangle below or above the content area, footer, header, or any where in the theme.’s appearance and a more prominent display of key information.

Pattern management for classic themes:

  • Classic themes will have access to the visual, feature-rich pattern management experience the Site Editor offers. This update will be available by default in the upcoming release for those using classic themes with an opt-out hook.
  • Anne highlighted this change’s significance in giving people a taste of a more modern WordPress experience and its impact on those managing patterns at scale—making it more convenient and visual to sort, bulk export, rename, duplicate patterns, etc.
  • Additionally, template parts using blocks are consolidated under the Patterns section in the new pattern management experience.

Other upcoming features

Data Views updates:

  • Anne underscored the importance and ongoing work of Data Views as a part of the broader admin redesign efforts and narrative.
  • Most notably, in this release, management pages for templates, template parts, and pages have been brought forward so they are immediately seen—reducing the steps to access important information. A new side-by-side layout for pages lets users see a list of all pages and a preview while clicking through them.

Typography and color variations:

  • 6.6 will introduce a new ability to create style variations that only target color or typography changes. This feature will allow users to preview and apply more built-in design variations without changing an entire site’s look and feel or switching themes.
  • Anne noted how typography and color variations contribute to the larger design and styling system, which is getting more robust with each release.

Overrides in synced patterns:

  • During the session, Anne demoed the upcoming overrides in synced patterns. This feature will be especially useful for maintaining style control and consistency across synced patterns while allowing content-specific changes within each instance.
  • To make working with overrides more intuitive, a list in the 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. settings sidebar and a purple visual cue will help identify the editable blocks of a synced pattern.
  • The heading, paragraph, button, and image blocks can add overrides in 6.6.

New grid layout variation:

  • This release will introduce the grid layout as a variation for the Group block with two options (auto and manual) and a visual resizer available in auto mode.
  • Of note, any block can use this new grid layout using the supports key in block.jsonJSON JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, is a minimal, readable format for structuring data. It is used primarily to transmit data between a server and web application, as an alternative to XML., making it especially useful for implementing it within custom blocks, especially on the agency side.

Enhancements to 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.:

  • The Block Bindings API, introduced in 6.5, is expected to evolve across releases and have a substantial future impact.
  • A notable change in the upcoming release will be the ability to edit connected sources directly from the block. When saving, there will be a connection that those custom fieldCustom Field Custom Field, also referred to as post meta, is a feature in WordPress. It allows users to add additional information when writing a post, eg contributors’ names, auth. WordPress stores this information as metadata. Users can display this meta data by using template tags in their WordPress themes. values have been edited.
  • Anne called out how this API offers developers a more efficient and low-maintenance way of using custom fields, reducing the need to build and maintain custom block implementations to accomplish the same.

Rollbacks to auto-updates:

  • WordPress 6.6 will include the ability to perform rollbacks when fatal errors occur during attempted plugin auto-updates by default.
  • This feature benefits site owners, highlights the importance of revisionsRevisions The WordPress revisions system stores a record of each saved draft or published update. The revision system allows you to see what changes were made in each revision by dragging a slider (or using the Next/Previous buttons). The display indicates what has changed in each revision. in WordPress, and ensures that users can trust their site’s content will stay safe.

Design tooling upgrades:

Anne demonstrated the new option for theme authors to define style options for sections of blocks, including nested blocks. These can be registered as block style variations and edited via the Styles interface of the Site Editor.

  • She highlighted the benefits of this new feature for those in the agency and enterprise space, especially for branding control. Beyond more granular control over inner blocks and optionality, it will help reduce the need to replicate or duplicate styling.
  • As part of this update, Anne noted that changes to CSS specificity were made to ensure the styling had the right hierarchy.

Other design features mentioned:

  • Negative margins, a long-requested feature, will allow more advanced designs.
  • Site-wide background images can be set in the Site Editor. Theme authors can use relative and absolute paths to their images depending on their use case.
  • With WordPress 6.6, users can create and edit custom shadows and enjoy the new box shadow support in the Featured ImageFeatured image A featured image is the main image used on your blog archive page and is pulled when the post or page is shared on social media. The image can be used to display in widget areas on your site or in a summary list of posts. block, offering more design possibilities.

Additional items and notes

  • Aspect ratio presets will be supported via theme.json, meaning the available aspect ratio presets for the Image, Cover, and Featured Image blocks can be customized.
  • 6.6 will bring added control for default font sizes and spacing in theme.json, which led to a change in the theme.json version. Thanks to this effort, theme authors can turn off default font and spacing sizes, preventing the sizes supplied by coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. from being displayed.
  • Bug fixes in 6.6 worth pointing out:
    • The inserter will show all blocks instead of the blocks allowed
    • Added CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. will remain in place when switching between style variations
  • A new shuffle option will allow swapping between similar patterns in specific scenarios.
  • Patterns can be bulk exported in 6.6, saving time and effort for those who use patterns across multiple sites.
  • Similar to the shuffling option, the upcoming release will allow folks to browse and switch templates and template parts in the Inspector.
  • The List block’s usability has been improved by letting indent list items via the tab key.

Additionally, Anne touched on other items briefly, including performance improvements and the Interactivity API, which is undergoing maintenance with iterations expected in the future. There are routine updates for the Block HooksHooks In WordPress theme and development, hooks are functions that can be applied to an action or a Filter in WordPress. Actions are functions performed when a certain event occurs in WordPress. Filters allow you to modify certain functions. Arguments used to hook both filters and actions look the same. API and HTMLHTML HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a markup language that is used in the development of web pages and websites. API. A new feature, the Token Map, will be introduced in 6.6 and is particularly useful for large organizations. She also noted that this release will drop support for PHPPHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. https://www.php.net/manual/en/preface.php. 7.0 and 7.1 and include preparations for ReactReact React is a JavaScript library that makes it easy to reason about, construct, and maintain stateless and stateful user interfaces. https://reactjs.org/. 19.

Questions & Answers

Anne addressed questions about the new features and considerations for different user groups, including enterprise audiences. She also explained the zoom out view to build with patterns, allowing users to view sections of their site holistically. Despite efforts, the feature wasn’t ready for this upcoming release, but an experiment can be explored by turning it on in the GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ plugin.

She mentioned the effort behind creating the source of truth document and clarified that the Block Bindings API can work with Advanced Custom Fields, as demonstrated by Ryan Welcher. Additionally, Anne shared her thoughts about the potential long-term impact of Data Views and recommended reading the June 2024 update.

Towards the end, the conversation shifted to how classic themes are considered in new feature additions, ensuring a balance between advancing future developments and supporting users. The canonical blocks idea was also discussed, emphasizing that it is under ongoing discussion.

Questions submitted during the session (with timestamps)
  • [00:21:26] Davinder Singh Kainth (TheWPWeekly.com): That side-by-side layout, most of this will possibly trickle into the upcoming WP Dashboard UIUI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing. redesign. Is that correct?
  • [00:43:53] Simon Kraft (KrautPress): A bit of an aside: how much work goes into the Source of Truth post?
  • [00:45:14] Eric Karkovack (The WP Minute): With the block bindings API, does it matter the source of the custom field? For example, does it work with Advanced Custom Fields and similar plugins?
  • [00:46:27] Davinder Singh Kainth: Which one feature are you most excited or looking forward to in this release?
  • [00:48:25] Javier Casares (WPpodcast) and member of the Hosting team: Core has not published a lot of information about the “betaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. compatibility” and “compatible with exceptions”. Is it something that is going to improve? We are preparing a “WordPress 6.6 Server Compatibility” for hosting companies, but in some ways, we are blind.
  • [00:49:57] Simon Kraft: Which change in WP 6.6 do you think will have the most long-term impact for WordPress overall?
  • [00:51:16] Javier Casares: Is there any plan to add the new Data Views or something similar for plugin configuration pages?
  • [00:53:09] Eric Karkovack: How much are classic themes considered when adding features to the block or site editors? It seems like they are catching up to block themes a bit more in each release.
  • [00:59:16] Javier Casares: There is an idea of having “Community Blocks”, not in core itself, but maintained by the community. Is that something we will see soon?

References and shared resources

Other useful links:

Transcript

The following transcript was AI-generated. Note that it may contain some errors despite being reviewed.

Full transcript

00:00:03

Reyes Martinez: All right. So hello, everyone, and welcome to the first WordPress Media Corps briefing. My name is Reyes, as you all know, and I will be assisting in moderating today’s session along with Lauren. Today, I’m super happy to share that we have Anne, Anne McCarthy. Anne is a Product Wrangler at Automattic and test lead for the WordPress 6.6 release. She will be providing an overview of the key updates in this upcoming release and answer any questions you may have.

Reyes Martinez: And just before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that this session is being recorded. This is also our first briefing, so please know that it will serve us as a pilot to test the format, see how that goes, and we would love to get your feedback after the session to keep improving, iterating as needed. I would also like to ask you to submit any questions for Anne through the chat, please, as that would allow us to easily keep track of them. And follow up later if needed. And lastly, please indicate your name and the media outlet or the channel that you represent when sharing your questions, as that would allow us to have more context. So just to summarize, the meeting, as you know, is being recorded. Please submit your questions through the chat and indicate your name and media outlet or channel. Any questions so far? All good? Perfect. That’s it, that said, let’s get started. Anne, over to you.

00:01:53

Anne McCarthy: Thank you so much for kicking us off and for letting this be one of the inaugural things with Media Corps. I’m really excited about what you all are doing.

Anne McCarthy: I’m not going to assume everyone’s familiar with the source of truth. So if you are familiar, awesome. That’s amazing. If you’re not, all good. I just want to give a brief overview before I actually dive into the document itself. So at a high level, the source of truth the intent is not to replace or replicate things like the field guide or dev notes, but it’s meant to pull all everything into one place, tag things based on like main users that are impacted by different features, dig a bit deeper into the top features as well as the additional features.

Anne McCarthy: And part of it is it’s intentionally weighted around the features you’re likely going to see, things like social media postings about, documentation updates, you know, State of the WordState of the Word This is the annual report given by Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress at WordCamp US. It looks at what we’ve done, what we’re doing, and the future of WordPress. https://wordpress.tv/tag/state-of-the-word/. like features. So there’s a lot of stuff in there. I do not recommend copying and pasting anything you find in there, but it’s meant to serve as inspiration and factual information. So you might see some color commentary from me there. I think I have like a special end note of things that I’m calling out. But it’s meant to be not used as like copy paste this, ship it in your next newsletter or news post. It’s meant to be, okay, this is my understanding of the feature. I can look at a demo of it. I can go click on the link that implemented the feature. And I can understand how folks need to go about adopting this. Is it opt in? Is it opt out? How do people do that? So it’s meant to be very factual. It’s not necessarily meant to have a bias or to be overly compelling marketing material.

Anne McCarthy: The reason I bring that up is I’ve had folks ask me to make it more like that and it’s just meant to be more of a information brain dump that all things related to the release. I also want to note that there are visuals and demos in as many places as relevant as possible. So there’s also like a folder you can have access to that you can pull out demo content from. Some of it comes from yours truly. Some of it comes from proper designers. So the quality can be a bit different there, but it’s meant to show you the feature. So you can also ideally rerecord or you can use those demos as well if you’d like. Some of them are funny and feature my friend’s dog. So use it at your own risk.

Anne McCarthy: I’m also happy to demo things live and get into it a bit more if folks have questions about any particular feature. I have a test site spun up, and it’s really easy to just spin up other test sites. Finally, as we go through this, know that I welcome feedback on the format, too. This is something I’m constantly tweaking, so I definitely want to hear questions for the content, but know I welcome feedback there, too. So I’m going to present now. Can you all see my screen? I can’t see you all, so I’m just going to… Okay. It’s so interesting. Google Meet is funny.

00:05:00

Anne McCarthy: So this is the public source of truth. I also have a Google doc link that I actually should add to this in case people want to see it in a Google doc format. Sometimes I find that’s a bit easier to skim through. I have a changelog at the very top of this. So if any major changes happen, so for example, WordPress 6.5 ended up being delayed, that is a prime example of something that will end up in the changelog. So as the release moves forward, this is a great thing to return to in case you’re worried about like, let me double check and make sure X, Y, and Z feature is right or is landing, or I heard that it might be delayed. Let me see what’s changed. I am pretty vigilant about keeping this up to date. So you’ll notice in the Google Doc if you look there, which I recommend just sticking with this public page for now, there is a changelog already because I shared it a bit earlier.

Anne McCarthy: So this is a visual overview of the highlight grid. You might recognize this a bit from WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Europe where Matt did his keynote, but this kind of captures a lot of the high level stuff, as well as smaller features. So one of the things we try to balance with these highlight grids, it’s a combination of like the big heavy hitters, like better pattern management for classic themes, along with smaller, everyday workflow items, like tabbing to indentless items. So this doesn’t always necessarily match up with the absolute heaviest, there are sometimes we like to try and include some of the smaller features intentionally.

Anne McCarthy: Um, let’s skim through this this kind of overview offers very high level my take of what’s going on and what’s shifting? So in this case, I talk a lot about design tools taking center stage and we’ll get into that in a second.

00:06:44

Anne McCarthy: I do want to call out this special Anne note. There are two things that are shifting that we can just jump into now before going back. One is there’s a unified editing flow, and that includes both slotfills, which developers can use to extend the editor, as well as just publishing. So the publishing is going to look different in this experience. And I’m happy to demo this if folks want to see it demoed. I cannot see you all because I’m sharing my screen. So I just want to note that as well. Actually, I wonder if I can pop that out so I can see folks. That’ll change the size of things. Okay. Please unmute if anyone wants to see a demo of this.

Anne McCarthy: I also as part of this have a demo showing the changes between the two. Um, but this is a huge change. So anytime you’re publishing something, you’re going to feel this. Um, I need to do a YouTube video on this. Just haven’t gotten to it this week, but it’s something I am very much expecting feedback on. And the reason for doing it is to start to bring together the post and site editor closer together, both technically and experience wise. Um, and that also has the benefit of, um, now for folks who want to extend the experience, the slotfills, um, now are available across the editors, which also means contributors can build features in a single place and have them available for both but also makes it a lot easier to extend. There’s actually a Developer Hours coming up on this. I think it might have happened actually this morning on this but I expect this to be a huge. This is one of the biggest I would say more technical callouts of this release, and it’s easy to miss. But this is a really big deal in terms of folks who are trying to, you know, create plugins and embrace where things are going in the future. It also touches on some of phase three, admin redesign, like bringing some of that energy into this space.

Anne McCarthy: There was some work done to help mitigate some unexpected usage of these slots. This includes, Jetpack actually had an issue with this. I work for Automattic, so this came up, which was thankfully fixed, but I encourage folks to call this out. Basically, edit post slots will only work on edit post and the post editor and edit site slots only work on edit sites. So while these things are unified, there is some work done to mitigate anything unexpected. And I would love to hear feedback on that too. But that’s something to call out for plugin authors to pay attention to. And then for everyone, I expect this new publishing experience, like the sidebar looks different, the order of information is different. This is going to be a big deal.

00:09:32

Anne McCarthy: The other one I want to call out just right up top as part of my special Anne note, is around a change in pattern management for classic themes. I did do a video about this this week if you want to dig into that. But essentially previously classic themes had access to an appearance patterns page and it showed the old or the current WP list table list view where it’s basically what you see when you open up post or pages.

Anne McCarthy: And that has been replaced by default for classic themes with basically the experience that the site editor has. So rather than seeing, oh, the site editor, you don’t see that, you just see a contained experience of the pattern management. And this is a much more visual, feature-rich experience, especially for patterns at scale, if you have more than, I would say, 20 or 30 patterns like this will be incredibly useful. You can sort by all sorts of things, bulk export, import them. Yeah, basically change them quickly, duplicate them easily. A lot of workflow improvements with this new experience and also just frankly a better visual experience and an easier one at that.

Anne McCarthy: So this was done to give folks a taste of what’s to come and this is based on feedback that we’ve gotten both around pattern management and the styles experience and the site editor has also been folks have wanted to see that moved into the ability for classic themes to use that that has not happened yet. But this is kind of, you can think of it as part of phase two, gradual adoption stuff. So rather than building all this new stuff entirely separate, we’re now trying to safely bring some of the new stuff to the current experience of folks with classic themes. Because classic themes are so in use, this, I expect it to be a big change. There is a way to opt out. So as mentioned, you’ll always see like this adoption approach. I need to fix the spacing on this. It’s available automatically, no opting in required. And to opt out, I have a link to this hook that you can see. I might want to embed that there, actually. You can see I give myself feedback.

Anne McCarthy: But yeah, this is a big deal. And the same thing is true if you had template parts that were using blocks, this will now be consolidated under patterns. So some hybrid themes expose template parts with blocks, but template parts and patterns have merged in this latest release under the same, not technically, but under the same section in the site editor and in this pattern management experience. Those are the two right off the bat that I want to call out. I think they’re probably the most impactful changes in terms of like sheer number of people impacted, I would say.

00:12:16

Anne McCarthy: Separately from that, and diving into more of the high level items, I want to talk about data views. So the reason this is a top level item in this document, and perhaps not emphasized in the same way as you see in this highlight grid, is because it’s touching on broader work and broader narrative across many releases. And the reason I bring this up to you all is I know the narratives around how the releases connect and what the vision is really matters. So in this case, when you look at this highlight grid, the feature that we’re calling out is quick previews for pages related to this data views, but the work there is actually much broader.

Anne McCarthy: And this is part of, phase three, specifically the admin redesign efforts. And so this UI that’s being created with data views is just a huge foundational piece. It’s part of what this data view system and advancing the system there is part of what’s being exposed when we modernize patterns for classic themes. Mainly for this release, essentially the work that was done was to surface the management pages of template parts, templates, pages faster. So rather than seeing like a preview of a template or having to have a few extra clicks, we basically removed that and brought those forward. So they’re immediately seen and just reducing the number of steps, just quickly became clear that there were just too many steps in between accessing each. 

Anne McCarthy: Also the details page which was a black sidebar that you could see with like yeah details about whatever you were looking at has been removed, that interstitial stuff is now gone. And instead, the inspector has been updated to basically like consolidate all the information into that. And the biggest thing that’s more visual and exciting, at least, is around for pages, there’s a new side by side layout. And again, this is where I just want to start demoing stuff. And I might just need to do that. So please flag if folks want to see demos of this. This has been reduced so you can see a list of the pages as well as a preview while you’re clicking through the different pages, making it really easy to just quickly edit or quickly see what’s going on.

Anne McCarthy: I think it’s a really interesting design approach, especially for these different layouts because you can imagine in the future with this work because extensibility is so in line for phase three and thinking about how plugins might adopt this. It’s a layout that I think could be really valuable in the future, thinking six months to a year down the road. There’s also a ton of just smaller changes that we don’t need to go through.

00:15:02

Anne McCarthy: Another option that has come up.

Reyes Martinez: Anne

Anne McCarthy: So, oh, yes, please. 

Reyes Martinez: No, sorry. I just wanted to share that I’m sharing some links in the chat about some of the resources that you have been sharing, just so folks know, okay? You have been mentioning some resources. And also, maybe we can also, if folks want to see any of those demos later, I mean, I think if we have time, I think that would be really great.

Anne McCarthy: Yeah, I mean, I have no problem.

Reyes Martinez: Sorry, I didn’t want to interrupt.

Anne McCarthy: No, that’s super helpful. Yeah, please. I mean, I’m almost tempted to demo as we’re talking. Just because I think it might be a bit more compelling. How do folks feel about that? Would folks be cool with me jumping into demo things a bit more? Yeah? Okay. I’m going to stop sharing in that case. And hold on, we’re going to share my… Yeah, I’m such a visual person. I like gotta see it.

Reyes Martinez: Yeah, I think as far as we are mindful about the time and keep things moving forward. Yeah, I mean that would be really nice.

Anne McCarthy: Okay, I’m gonna share my entire screen in that case. So we’re gonna go through. Okay. So right now, we’re talking about individual typography and color variations. And this, you all probably know and love style variations, right? That changes layout, typography options, color, everything. They can be pretty big changes. So in this release, to offer more narrow changes while still opening up more design options, you now have the ability to basically create style variations that only target color or typography. And so rather than changing the entire look and feel of your site, you’re able to do more targeted changes and provide users with options for more targeted changes. And this is just a part of the narrative around the larger design system and styling system that is just really getting more and more robust with each release. And I’m going to show you an example of that.

Anne McCarthy: So instead of browse styles, where you will see these different style variations, in this case, you’ll actually find them in individual sections, either typography or colors, and you’ll see it in these palettes right here. And what’s neat is you can basically get a quick preview of what’s going to change and even change them above. But as I clicked through this, pay special attention to this section, because we’ll go through this in a second. But you can see it only changes the colors of my site. So perhaps I like a style variation, but I’m like, ooh, I want a different color. A block theme author could create these so that you could have this initial style variation, but then switch through the different color options until you find something that works well for your system or your vibe. But it just offers a bit more narrow changes rather than switching everything up, which I think is really powerful. It’s just another way to offer more options to users built in without needing to switch themes or anything like that.

Anne McCarthy: And while I’m here, I just wanted to briefly show, this is the new side-by-side layout that I was trying to explain. And you can see as I click through this, a nice preview of things. There’s also these different filters so that I can quickly get to publish, quickly get to schedule. There’s nothing scheduled, drafts, all that sort of stuff. And I can change things from here. And all of what I’m showing is all part of this broader data views work. Okay.

00:18:40

Anne McCarthy: So overrides in synced patterns. This is a really interesting feature, probably more on the agency side, people who want more control potentially. I do think some average end users could use it. It’s still early days. So overrides in synced patterns basically allows you to have a synced pattern that connects all across your site. But then let’s say you have a heading within that synced pattern. And you want to be able to have it be customized across. I can actually, while I’m talking about this. So you have this project overview and you want, you know, this project description to have overrides. You can see I’ve already set this up to have overrides. So let me disable this real quick. And I can enable overrides right here. All I have to do is just add a name and click enable. And now anywhere this pattern is used, I can then basically have it so that I can customize this right here. So let me show an example. We’ll go back, new project. Yeah.

Anne McCarthy: So as I click on this, you’ll notice that the things that I can edit, flash purple, and this is not meant to be solely be the way to tune into it. It also helps that this over here has this content only. So you can see in a couple of different ways what’s actually editable. You’ll also notice this icon is purple to show that it’s connected. So then I can say, this is my last project, and I can have customized text. So then I can hit save draft, and I can also edit original, or I can reset it to the original as well. But if I go back and edit original, and let’s say I want this background to be, I don’t know, that’s obnoxious. This like light purple. All right, that looks good. I’m gonna save that. I’m gonna go back to the page. You’ll see that the styling is now updated and the content is still customized.

Anne McCarthy: And it’s pretty powerful. You can also go back and let’s say you actually want to reset this entirely. I can then say, okay, disable overrides. I actually don’t want this to be overridable anymore. I want one thing. Um, and say like click save, go back and you’ll see it automatically updates. And also when I click on this, I now can no longer edit this. So there’s, it’s a more advanced feature and that’s part of why there’s the more advanced, um, options here to actually change things. It also only works with a certain number of blocks. So in this case, heading, paragraph, button, and image. I’m going to keep moving along.

00:21:26

Reyes Martinez: We have one question. Yeah, we have one question from Davinder. Maybe you want to expand about it, Davinder, or would you prefer me to read it? 

Anne McCarthy: Oh, I understand the question. I’m happy to dive in. That’s a great question. So the question is “That side by side layout, most of this will possibly trickle into the upcoming WP dashboard UI redesign. Is that correct?”

Anne McCarthy: I recommend reading through that June 2024 update, but the gist of it is explorations are underway to bring this new experience, this database experience into future like post pages. So there’s actually like, let’s see, I just tested this yesterday. Right now it’s very experimental. There is an experiment in the Gutenberg plugin that actually implements this on the posts list, but it’s very early days. Yeah, that’s so funny. I actually got an error. So yeah, this is actively underway, but yes, it’s looking at this and seeing, does this work? If it works, how does it work? Does anything need to change? Does anything need to evolve? This is being done both in posts and the media library. But it’s very early days. It’s not slated necessarily for the release. It’ll depend on how things actually progress. Does that answer your question? Hopefully.

Davinder Singh Kainth: Yes, yes.

Anne McCarthy: Okay, cool. Awesome. So next up, improvements to grid layout. Grid layout is a long requested feature, especially from block themers and designers. This is something that has just been hammered on for a while. So building on the previous grid layout that was in the release, this one surfaces it as a variation of the group block. So similar to row and stack and group, you now have grid. So you can add the grid block as is. And there’s two different options. Auto generates the grid in row and columns like automatically, and it’s also responsive, so it has built in responsiveness. Or manual allows you to specify the exact number of columns. And there’s also a really neat visual resizer that you can use whenever you’re in auto mode to just visually resize it. I’ll note, and I think this is like easy to miss, any block can use this new grid layout using the supports key on block.json. So if you’re writing something more developer forward, I might mention that. I think that is like a very neat way to implement this within your own custom block, especially on like the agency side. This is definitely like a builder designer. I actually didn’t put a tag of who this impacts, because I think it impacts everyone. And I also have a quick video that goes into that feature. All right, we covered that.

00:24:15

Anne McCarthy: Yes, so another really high-level, important developer update. So the Block Bindings API launched in as 6.5, you probably noticed, this is another one of those things that kind of exists across releases, and I would expect this work to continue across releases. This is another through-line across a set of releases that I think we’ll see. So the Block Bindings API partially was done to help power overrides in synced patterns, and there was a huge refactor of the existing implementation as part of also landing overrides in synced patterns. And there’s a better visual experience if you have actually bound and connected blocks to understand that those blocks are connected. Work is still needed there to kind of further things, but that purple, like, let me go back.

Anne McCarthy: For example, this purple icon here and surfacing this here, like this is a good example of trying to show connected blocks using the block bindings API. And one of the biggest changes that I think is very exciting is you can edit connected sources directly from the block. And when you save, there’ll be a connection that you’ve edited those custom field values. And this was on the bubble for the release. So I’m actually really excited to see this land. So for folks, again, more technical, this is a huge way to continue to use custom fields. And a lot of times with these custom fields, and the block bindings API, you can get rid of a lot of custom block implementations that folks would previously have to build and maintain. And this is just a much easier, much less maintenance way of accomplishing the same thing. And I see this continuing to march forward in a big way. So that is a good one to call out.

Anne McCarthy: Now we’re getting into kind of the additional items. So I’m going to be a bit shorter with these, but I’m happy to demo whatever folks want to see. So rollbacks, auto-updates, this is really exciting. I know Matt was super excited about this, and it’s part of the narrative of WordPress really valuing revisions, really valuing that you can trust your content will stay safe on the site. So for 6.6, when you set an auto-update for a plugin, if it fails, it will automatically roll back and catch it for you, which I think is really exciting. Very useful for folks who are maintaining sites. Were just honestly like, I added a bunch of auto-updates to one of my side project sites. So all around good for the average end user and good for folks on the higher end as well.

Anne McCarthy: There’s a slew of design tooling upgrades. So this is supposed to be the heading for these additional things that we see. This top-level run went back and forth around being a top-level item, so I think it’s good to emphasize. I also have been seeing some confusion around it, so I just want to note that. If you’re digging into it and your brain starts to spin, you’re not alone there. I definitely recommend spending some time with it, because I think it’s a really big game-changing option, and I’ll actually demo this, because I think it’s important to see.

Anne McCarthy: So 6.6 allows you to define styling options for multiple blocks, including inner blocks. So what does that mean? Why would you use this? Imagine you are an agency, you have very specific branding that you need to implement for a client, both colors and the look and feel of it. You can basically provide these shortcuts to styling options using what’s being built in 6.6 and registering it as a block style variation. And it shows up in the same place that you see block variations. So it’s in a similar UI and it changes the styling of that section, including the inner blocks. So there’s multiple ways to register this. I will not get into the details of it. But I do just want to call that out that there’s multiple ways of doing it and you can actually, once you’ve registered these, you can actually edit them via the styles interface in the site editor, which is really exciting. So…

00:28:22

Anne McCarthy: Let’s go back to… Where did I put this? Yeah, OK. So in this case, I have this section. You can imagine I’m trying to keep branding consistent and I can change, and I can name this whatever I want, default, section one, what have you. I basically have this here. Blow this up a little bit. I actually can’t make that bigger, which is annoying. But this is just the title here, so I could call this Light. I’ll refresh this.

Anne McCarthy: It allows you to have, especially for container blocks, which a group block is, so now you can see Light here, so you can customize all this stuff. It allows you at default to have this, but imagine you want some options. You could have like four or five options in the same way you have block variations to switch between. And it automatically adds styling to your site. So in this case, maybe we call that the light experience. And then what’s neat is if you do this correctly as a block themer, and you rely on global styles rather than having local block styles here, you can then go in and using the same feature I showed earlier, choose between different palettes, and you’ll see it’ll automatically update based on the palette you’re choosing, because basically what this section does is it’s using color variables.

Anne McCarthy: So you can see I pulled variables from the theme. So it automatically responds to the different colors of the theme. So it keeps the contrast mostly good. This was a quick demo that I pulled together last night and last minute using some of the stuff actually from Rich Tabor, my coworker and fellow contributor. But it’s a pretty exciting and powerful feature when you combine it because it allows you to have this customization set up by default, but then it corresponds with how you update your site further in the future. And you can actually go into styles and make changes to this thing that you created in a separate JSON file. So it basically allows a lot of control and a lot of optionality and also reduces the need to constantly replicate. So if you’re trying to replicate a bunch of sections, you now can just click through. It’s kind of like a… you can imagine a bunch of parts of the site and you’re trying to have them look similar. You can imagine having like the default, the light, a dark, and like a modern and you could switch between them and ensure that they all work well together colorwise.

Anne McCarthy: And to me the really powerful thing is how much you can control the inner blocks. This has been a long requested feature on the enterprise side and just to have more granular control, because you can imagine having these options here, but then turning off a bunch of options below. So it has some presets basically built in to style sections of your site and reduce the need to duplicate styling all the way through.

Anne McCarthy: As part of this, there were changes to CSS specificity. So this is another good thing to call out. I will not go super depth in here, but to basically get the styling to have the right hierarchy, some changes had to be made in the specificity. So there’s a detailed dev note about it as well.

Anne McCarthy: Negative margins. For negative margins, the neat thing, I’m just gonna pick that one. You cannot reach negative margins using the drag handles. You have to manually insert it. So you cannot, this is intentional to prevent people from doing, you know, basically dragging and accidentally not being able to hit zero, because oftentimes people might want to zero out the margins. So this was done intentionally. It’s also honestly meant for more advanced designs. So it’s a feature that has also been long requested. This is, it’s amazing how many people really wanted this. And so I’m really, this is a big feature for the design side of things as well.

00:32:28

Anne McCarthy: Site-wide background images are now available in the site editor. So this is also related to having site-wide images in the customizerCustomizer Tool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings. and some compatibility between the two. For theme authors, you can use both relative and absolute paths to your images depending upon your use case, which is a huge deal. So you don’t necessarily need to bundle it, which is pretty exciting. So I have two different examples here of absolute paths, where the file needs to be hosted and maintained, as well as a relative path, where you can just have it in the theme assets. So I’m going to call that out.

Anne McCarthy: Box shadow has been added to the featured image block. More design options. You can use your featured image in the media and text block. So this builds on some previous functionality of using the featured images in more places, like the cover block. You can create and edit shadows and styles, which is pretty darn cool. So you’ll see this new shadow section here. You can create like a custom shadow and do all sorts of funky stuff. I had a way too much fun doing this the other day. Yeah, that’s pretty cool. And you can also obviously edit the current ones as well.

Anne McCarthy: There’s a couple more additional supports. I won’t mention those. Aspect ratio support for theme.json. This is pretty neat. Justin Tadlock is really excited about this, which makes sense. But you can basically change the available presets for aspect ratio for image, cover, and featured image. So you can add your own and there’s an example here. So maybe you want like an extra wide aspect ratio. It’s a way to just have more optionality built into the theme.

Anne McCarthy: Similar to this, there’s now added control for default font sizes and spacing in theme.json and this led to a change in theme.json version. So this is an important thing to call out. We’re now on theme.json version 3. But basically thanks to this effort, you can turn off default font sizes and disable them from showing the sizes supplied from core. This has been also a requested feature for folks who want more control of the editor and not just exposing everything. And the same is true of the default spacing sizes. So this is another layer of control added to theme.json and also solving some requested features. But as a result, it’s had to update to v3. And this, I won’t get into the details of this, but there is some work done to preserve some backwards compatibility.

00:35:00

Anne McCarthy: These two are some fun bug fixes, basically, almost, that I think are worth calling out. So the inserter previously, when you would open up, let’s say… What should I do? I’m going to go list block. When you previously had the inserter open and you had an item like list, it would only show list item. All of this… Wouldn’t be visible. And now you can see that you can click, you know, I can add a list, and that’s great. But I can also hit heading, and I’ll add the heading below. So it doesn’t obviously, for the blocks that are allowed to be added, it still prioritizes adding those and surfaces them at a high level at the top. But then you can still see the controls and options you have, but before this wasn’t visible. So it’s a pretty poor experience. And this has now been resolved in a way that I’m really excited to see that this landed. And it’s a good thing to call out just on the base user experience of using all this new stuff. 

Anne McCarthy: Similar to this, if you had custom CSS in a style variation and then switch style variations, you would lose it. And now it copies the CSS between the variations, which I think is pretty neat.

Anne McCarthy: There’s also a new shuffling patterns in specific scenarios. So if there is a pattern that you add to your site and it has a pattern in the, there’s more patterns in that same categoryCategory The 'category' taxonomy lets you group posts / content together that share a common bond. Categories are pre-defined and broad ranging., you’ll see a shuffle option at the top. I’m actually gonna cheat and just watch my own video just to show you all. It’s 15 seconds, so it’s just easier than spitting something up, but you’ll see this nice little shuffle option and it’ll shuffle things through. This is another way of surfacing different discoverability of patterns and different styling and design options. I’m curious to see how this evolves and how it overlaps with some other things that are being worked on.

Anne McCarthy: You can bulk export your patterns. This was a requested thing amongst folks with multiple sites. A lot of times, different builders and stuff oftentimes have patterns across different sites they want to use. And before, you’d have to manually export each one. And now, you can export them all. 

Anne McCarthy: That’s another smaller thing.

Anne McCarthy: Similar to this shuffling option, you can also browse and switch templates and template parts in the inspector. I’m also going to cheat on this. And this is a good way for me to demo some of the assets I have to see the feature. But you’ll see this transform into, and you can swap between different templates. So this is showing different templates. And it surfaces similar functionality that already exists, but I think it’s worth calling out as we’re trying to have some intuitive parts of the interface show things that folks might want to use. So this is swapping out the footer. And again, options will only show up if they’re available. So if you’re using a theme and they don’t show up, that’s why it’s because there’s not something available. 

00:38:07

Anne McCarthy: This is one of the smaller things, but powerful indent list block items via the tab key.

Anne McCarthy:  Um, there are a number of performance improvements, uh, but it’s not necessarily as robust as 6.5. Um, I recommend digging into these specifically, but 6.5 definitely was like a big performance release and there are still some awesome things here. But it’s just not as heavy hitting. 

Anne McCarthy: Same with Interactivity API. This is more of like a maintenance, um, cycle for them, but I expect that to the Interactivity API to continue to be iterated on in the future.

Anne McCarthy: Same with Block Hooks API. Same with the HTML API. There’s a lot of just like routine API updates this release that you’re welcome to dig into.

Anne McCarthy: The token map is new. I am not going to dig super deep into this, partially because it’s hyper technical. And I think more niche isn’t the right word, but yeah, the average everyday WordPress user probably won’t be impacted as much by this, but if this perks your ears, definitely dig into this. Dennis Snell has done a ton of work and this is a great example for like, if you have a large organization, it’s really helpful at scale.

Anne McCarthy: Dropping support for PHP 7.0 and is 7.1, always important to call out, as well as this, some changes to prepare for React 19. So these are just kind of base software things to keep in mind and to mention for folks. I need to fix that. I’ll fix that later.

Anne McCarthy: I think the rest of these, I want to be mindful of time and leave room for questions. I also can stay over time. But the rest of these are more smaller in features that I think you can dig into later. Again, mainly refinements. This is a good call out for enterprise, adding support for custom ports for multisites. Same with this.

00:40:05

Anne McCarthy: Yeah, let’s dive into that’s basically the end of it. And then I get into some items that got punted from this release, mainly because folks ask about them. And so it’s a way to get ahead of like, why didn’t this make it in? And it’s like, here’s a reason why you’ll see like a brief explanation. Actually, let me jump back over and see. Yeah.

Reyes Martinez: I was actually, I mean, once you were done, that was also one of my questions, if you could also clarify, like the current status of the zoomed out view, because I know there were some questions about that, and it has been punted, right? I mean, it won’t be coming in this release. So if you could maybe provide some context to just help clarify any questions about that, that would be great.

Anne McCarthy: Yeah, so zoom out mode is complex, right? But it has the potential to be powerful. So zoom out mode in general is allowing you to, rather than dealing with editing something on a block by block basis, it zooms you out to look at the sections of your site, mainly using patterns as the paradigm that you’re interacting with. And that’s where that shuffling patterns feature could be really interesting, right? You’re zoomed out and you’re shuffling through patterns as you’re creating a page. It could replace kind of starter patterns. Potentially. There’s some like expressions there. But the long and short of it is a lot of work went into zoom out mode for this release and similar to pattern overrides in the last release and being able to add that feature. Not enough work was able to be done to get to an experience that was compelling enough.

Anne McCarthy: And part of the question is, is zoom out mode a mode that you can click on and toggle on, like a distracting free mode? Is it something that is automatically initiated when you enter a certain part of the interface? How do you get out of it? How do you get, you know, if you’re in zoom out mode, how do you go back to editing granular box? Like these are parts of the design questions that just were not able to be explored far enough to implement, but I expect it to be something that we, see in the future. There is an experiment you can turn on in the Gutenberg plugin if you want to tease that or anything like that. But yeah, it just didn’t get it just didn’t get far enough. And I expect what we’ll end up seeing is that it will be it. It’s already initiated right now. I’ll actually show you all just because I think that’s a good thing to view.

Anne McCarthy: When you are in Styles, this is part of the zoom out, the initial zoom out. So you can see it contextually, right? Like, it makes sense that when you’re in this, like, I’m changing the entire style of my site, maybe I want a more zoomed out look, right? And so you can imagine that being applied to different situations. So one of the main ways it’s being looked at is with patterns. When you open up patterns, you can imagine that same zooming out effect happening. And I basically imagine that that’s what we’ll see happen is something more contained. Another flow will be added that will include this like zooming out feature that will be advantageous in that space. We’re just not quite there yet. Does that help? Ok. I’m like, I can get real deep into that, but I’m trying to stay high level.

00:43:25

Reyes Martinez: Thanks Anne. I think we can maybe open the floor to any other questions. Maybe if any of you folks want to see any other demo, just let us know. And if there are no questions, I mean, I have a few more. So, but yeah, I would love to see if any, if folks have any other questions.

Reyes Martinez: Okay, Simon. Simon asked: “A bit of an aside: how much work goes into the source of truth post?” That’s a great question.

Anne McCarthy: So much. It’s an immense amount of work. It’s gotten a lot easier. But yeah, I basically have to go through like every Gutenberg release post, pull things out, and then, you know, things change. It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of, like, vigilance and persistence. But I get really close to the details. I get really close to the feedback. As test lead, it’s really useful for me to have that kind of clarity of vision. But yeah, it’s a lot of work. I would say… It’s hard. Like, each week I probably spend, during beta and RCRelease Candidate A beta version of software with the potential to be a final product, which is ready to release unless significant bugs emerge. at least, two hours on it each. And then the lead up of actually getting it written is just like a caffeine filled nightmare. But it’s fun. I like, love this stuff. I love getting into like how many details can I pull in? How can I make it compelling? How can I make sure it’s like clear that people can look at it and anyone can get value from it? So I really welcome feedback. I have not changed the format too much since the early days. And I’ve been doing this for I think like eight releases or something like that. It started as like a ad hoc thing I sent to folks and has since grown.

Anne McCarthy: Eric asks, “With the block bindings API, does it matter the source of the custom field? For example, does it work with advanced custom fields and similar plugins?”

Anne McCarthy: It does not currently, as far as I know. There’s actually, hold on. Ryan Welcher does some streams. And I think he actually did a stream recently connecting. Yeah, he connected ACF to blocks using block binding. So let me correct myself. There is a very long stream two weeks ago. This is how much of a nerd I am. Um where you can connect these two things, um using a change that will shift and work by was 6.6 about to say as I was about to talk I was like, I think I actually saw that this is possible. So yes, that is very much possible. Not only that Ryan did like a deep dive like almost two hour live stream about it, which he is so good about going into depth about that stuff. I would literally link off to it. I also wouldn’t be surprised if we see a developer news article about it at some point. If you all have not dig into that site, you definitely should.

00:46:26

Anne McCarthy: Next question. Am I pronouncing this right? Davinder? Is that the correct? Just want to make sure. “Which one feature are you most excited or looking forward to in this release?”

Anne McCarthy: Let me look. I’m like, you’d think that’d be an easy answer question, but here we are. I mean, for me personally, I think being able to override specific items in synced patterns is really powerful. There’s a couple of sites I run on the side that I am going to be implementing this, like ASAP. I think that’s just like a really neat, really neat feature to maintain stylistic control. And in the future, there’s work around like maybe even allowing, you know, more stylistic options locally too. So I’m really excited to see the future of that. I’m just kind of seeing it as like a supercharged, um, it’s a supercharged pattern. Like it’s just amazing how much you can do now and how much it saves time. Um, and then I can just like have a bunch of these synced patterns and then in an instant, if I want to update the background color or change the style, it’ll all update. Like, I just think that that’s like pure magic.

Anne McCarthy: From my like product brain side, I would say the bringing, uh, the new experience of pattern management to classic themes. I’m all about how do we reach more people with what’s new? And I just think that that is like a huge, a huge deal. I am very excited about it. I think it will give folks a taste of like a more modern WordPress experience. Not everyone’s going to love it. We always need a filterFilter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. to, or a hook to get rid of it. But I think it is just like the scale of feedback, the excitement. I keep hammering on that even though I know it’s not like, the coolest new thing. I think it is one of the most impactful things about this release. And a Japanese contributor, Aki, really pushed it forward. And so big, big props go to him. I want to call him out for that.

Anne McCarthy:.Javier asks, “Core has not published a lot of information about the “beta compatibility” and “compatible with exceptions”. Is something is going to improve? We are preparing a “WordPress 6.6 Server Compatibility” for hosting companies, but in some ways, we are in the blind.”

Anne McCarthy: Okay, let me look at this. This is really about PHP. Yep. Okay. Yes, it’s a great question. I was involved in this previously. I think I worked on like a news article on this. And I don’t, we don’t have anything in the works right now, but this is it’s actually funny you mentioned this, there’s I have a to-do item next week around following up on this. I will, I will put this down in my personal list to follow up on to see if something is needed.

Anne McCarthy: I think it needs to improve. What you’re basically asking is, is this going to improve? Are we going to see something more around this? And we need that. And Javier, I think we worked on this previously, if I’m not mistaken. All of a sudden, your name, I’m like, I know who you are. I’m going to follow up on this, because I think that that’s a good thing to 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. back on, because we do need to communicate that a bit better. And I know that that’s a very tricky area, and people have a lot of strong feelings around it. Cool. Okay.

00:49:58

Anne McCarthy: Simon asks, “Which change in WordPress 6.6 do you think will have the most long-term impact for WordPress overall?”

Anne McCarthy: Not yet, but I do want to underscore data views and the work that is happening there. Along with that connects, I had a really hard time figuring out how to structure these two things, but the unifying the editor, so you have this like technical foundation that’s unified, and then you have this new like offshoot being built with data views in the site editor. Like those two things combined are creating a technical and visual foundation for the future. It’s very early, the APIs are private intentionally, but the plugins can start playing with it. There are some designs you can copy and paste from the WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ design Figma library. I just think that that is a huge part of the larger narrative. We’re not seeing a huge, like, heavy-hitting, like, here’s this huge thing. I do think this new, like, side-by-side layout is really cool and powerful. But a lot of it is more foundation building, and it cannot be overlooked. Like, that is gonna be a huge, long-term thing. I think people need to I’m trying to get people as much as possible to pay attention to that and that’s part of why we did like a June update is to bring attention there

Anne McCarthy: “Is there any plan to add the new data views or something similar for plugin configuration pages?”

Anne McCarthy: Yes! I’m guessing you’re thinking about like settings and forms. Let me find this issue real quick. There’s this one. But yeah, that’s part of the work. So part of the work that needs to be done is like, yeah, what do these settings pages look like? And there’s got to be, oh, there you go. OK. Let me make sure. I’m missing one of the… Yep, here we go. This is part of the extensibility side of things, which I’m going to also link to. But yes, the long and the short of it is that is something that needs to be figured out. It’s like, what do forms look like, what do settings pages look like, and some plugins are, I’m getting feedback are starting to experiment with that. And that’s part of what would be huge to get feedback on. But yes, that is part of what’s being worked on is around forms, settings, pages. Yeah, because some things you don’t need a preview of, right? Like if you’re filling out a settings page for a plugin, you don’t need to see a preview of it. So that like side-by-side layout doesn’t make as much sense. So what does it look like to apply it elsewhere? What components are needed? Like all of this should be reusable and there should be a common design language so you’re not installing five different plugins and getting five different, drastically different experiences. We want them to have a shared visual language that folks can use. So that’s probably when I’m like hammer home, a lot of day of use stuff, start paying attention there. It’s not ready to be used yet, but you can start exploring and we need feedback from folks for sure.

00:53:09

Anne McCarthy: Eric, “How much are classic themes considered when adding features to the block or site editors? It seems like they are catching up to block themes a bit more in each release.”

Anne McCarthy: I would say it’s a big part of consideration with each release, just about there is like something being brought over to the classic theme side to bridge the divide. I think one of the last ones that I can remember that I was really excited about was bringing appearance tools to classic themes. So classic things could opt into a lot of appearance tools that were in place if you’re using a block theme, but that classic themes didn’t necessarily have access to. So you should continue to see things like chip away there. Where classic things are getting access to the new stuff. And this is feedback that I’ve seen mentioned a lot with each release is like, okay, well, what’s actually impacting the most users of WordPress? And how do we communicate that? And part of it is we need to have a compelling vision of what’s next to help folks adapt and adopt and future-proof themselves. But then there’s also the reality of a lot of folks. Both in the enterprise space and everyday space who are still in classic themes and like how are reaching them? So yeah, I would say it’s very much considered as much but balanced with driving the future forward. So there’s a compelling future to grab on to. So there’s a dance there for sure. These are great questions.

Reyes Martinez: Anne, just as a reminder that we are nearing the end of the session. Of course, I think if that’s okay, we can be a little bit flexible, but just a reminder that… I don’t know if you have, maybe we have time for one more question, something like that, but otherwise…

Anne McCarthy:  Oh, you can, yeah, I’m chilling. I mean, I have like 6.6 stuff, but yeah, I have probably at least another 15 minutes if folks have more questions. I know I went a bit long.

Reyes Martinez: Yeah, I just want to be mindful with folks’ time, but of course, I’m happy to be flexible. Also, and maybe this gives folks some more time. In case they want to share any questions. But I know you talked about some of the big updates coming in 6.6. You also mentioned some of those additional items. But sometimes there’s so much going on in each release that, you know, like there are features that can go a little bit unnoticed. We know that some of those smaller details are also important sometimes, so I was just wondering if you think are there any of those smaller details or updates that are worth highlighting for this release, or that it would be also helpful for folks to help amplify. Maybe some of those updates that usually go unnoticed, but it would be nice if folks know about them as well.

00:56:11

Anne McCarthy: I would definitely say the narrative around design tooling continue to expand whether it’s like adding box shadow to a feature image block or being able to set background images or negative margins. Like that all of these like design and styling and making it visual and easy and like kind of touching on Matt’s “simple things should be easy, complex things should be possible” or something I’m paraphrasing that, but I think that’s like a really interesting challenge with this right. Like we’re adding these toolings, but then how do they work well together and kind of touching on those? Smaller like, you know with each WordPress release we get access to more and more options and more and more things are possible. And if you want to build an interface, here are some of the newer tools that maybe you might miss. But if you want to go, you know, really out there go use the Interactivity API. Go create something interactive and more advanced, go use the custom fields.

Anne McCarthy: Like there’s a lot, there’s a story to tell there around like uh, these releases right now, where we’re both doing like very technical stuff and then we’re also like improving the experience of, um, the block inserter. To me, the block inserter change, I think is a important one. I think it’s just like a good quality of life as well as, um, you know, I think the indenting list block via the tab key, like that will be an everyday improvement to be able to use that. Those are the two that probably come to mind first.

Anne McCarthy: A smaller one that I think is worth mentioning for like extensibility. So like they’re kind of hot topics with each release. I’m not sure if you all feel this, but it’s like performance is a big one. Everyone wants to hear about performance stuff. AccessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) is a big one. What are we doing to improve accessibility? Extensibility, how can I extend better? And then governance or control? How can I control what you are building more? So those are every release, my brain is thinking about those things. It’s just like a constant thing in my mind. And I think of the last one, control, as also being related to exposing things to classic themes. And there is a new filter to extend the list of post content blocks. This is more like edge case. But if you have a custom block, your block that reads the rights data to like the actual post, you couldn’t actually edit your block directly if the template was locked. And so this is kind of an interesting use case where when you’re editing a template, you can only edit what’s in the post content block. And if you had a custom block that maybe added, I don’t know, some other functionality like a calendar or something like that. You couldn’t edit it within the template, and now you can add that. If it writes to the post object, you can actually add that as one of the allowed post content blocks, so it’s editable. And that’s a smaller quality of life control agency side of things, but I think it’s another one of those smaller improvements that I glanced over at the end, but actually is, again, really powerful and touches on that last piece of control. I don’t know if it’s helpful to name those different things, but that definitely is what comes to mind.

Anne McCarthy: Oh, Javier, great question. “There’s an idea of having community blocks, not in core itself, but maintained by the community. Is that something we will see soon?”

Anne McCarthy: The update on that, and this is as of this last week, this was actually brought up in the core dev meeting, and the term that’s being used is canonical blocks. I can be particular about words. So canonical blocks is basically the idea of exactly what you’re describing. It’s not shipped directly in core when you install a new update, but there are blocks that are in the block library that are maintained by core, have the name WordPress.org team, you know, like have that like branding weight behind them and the maintenance behind them, and the quality behind them. And so this has been a huge discussion. Right now there was like a little bit of a side quest where folks were looking at whether you could sideload these block plugins sponsored by core into themes as a possibility. And so that’s kind of been under discussion right now.

01:00:19

Anne McCarthy: There’s an initial PR right now for the time to read block to have this be one of the first ones that might take this canonical approach, but frankly the details have not been fully flushed out. And so you should expect to see a make core proposal discussing this further. It’s still under a lot of debate because it gets into like, what qualifies as a canonical block. You know, we try to build for 80% of users. Should we be building these for the 20%? I don’t want this thumbs up. Sorry. Like… How do you distinguish what’s a canonical block what’s versus a core block? Who maintains it? Do we have folks who can maintain it? What happens if you want to graduate a canonical block to core? Should we move some core blocks to canonical blocks? There’s all these larger questions. And then what’s the base user experience? What’s the benefit to users?

Anne McCarthy: And I also think a big part of this to touch on is block themers. What is the benefit to block themers? Because those are the folks you might be more likely to bundle these into a theme they create and that’s where like the site loading block plugins, single block plugins, came up for themes this past week, because ultimately one of the major use cases for this would be for block themers to include it by default. Because the average user is probably not going to go out and install a bunch of canonical blocks. Yeah, I don’t think we’ll see it necessarily soon. I think we’ll see experimentation around it very soon. I think we will see a lively discussion and probably someone trying something. But I’m not that… I have a 50% confidence threshold and… if it’ll all happen in six months… I’m not putting bets down for that. I think it’s a big thing to figure out. I think that will change depending on who you talk to you. That’s a great question though. And let me drop a link to that as well. So this is the early PR for time to read. That’s very much a draft. It’s just someone messing around. And then this proposal from Matias, who’s the project architect. And then you’ll just see a huge discussion.

Anne McCarthy: I think it’s an interesting idea. I would love to see it. I would love to see like an increasing number, because we’re being… the weight of having the branding of WordPress behind these blocks would go really far, and there’s a lot of things that you still cannot do that blocks would make sense for that. That would just really allow a lot of design optionality in the base WordPress experience that you can add in, not by default, but that you could add in that I think would be really cool.

01:03:25

Anne McCarthy: What other questions? I’m like today… if I talk too fast at any point I’m always happy to go back and reiterate something. The source of truth should also like… there’s links as much as possible to anything visual. So that should help as well if you are ever like, what is this person writing like… the video and the images are there for a reason because I do think this stuff can be really much easier to understand when you’re actually looking at it. Especially like a before and after.

Reyes Martinez: I had another question, Anne. It was about… what are some of the features in 6.6 that benefit larger or enterprise websites. But I saw you also mentioned this in… I mean, you also add this kind of tag to the source of truth, so I feel… it also feels clear or gives a pretty good picture of those features that might impact that audience, yeah.

Anne McCarthy: Yeah, I would… Other than the features that are tagged with that because some of them are not tagged because they’re meant for everyone. I do just want to repeat and underscore exposing the new patterns experience for classic themes and the unified published flow. They’re good. That’s gonna be huge. I’ve done some phase three research that I’ve published about on make core with a number of newsrooms, large, small newsrooms, medium size, and it’s like who moved my cheese. Any change impacts the documentation, impacts the training, impacts the base editor experience of folks who are trying to quickly get a breaking news story out or who are live blogging. So I am especially keen on those two things. Mainly the published flow if I had to to pick one. I think a lot of folks have control already of the patterns experience, but that’s also still just a good drawing change if you don’t.

Anne McCarthy: But the publish flow like… there was…  initially revisions were going to be more hidden than they were, and that was one that we pulled in enterprise feedback for around like the new publish flow just to remain it surfaced at a higher level. Because that is just a base thing that I feel like I saw constantly when talking to folks about their workflows with writing. So yeah, that is the main one that I underscored. Otherwise there’s… Yeah, I do have it intentionally listed now. That’s actually a new thing with the last couple of sources of truth that is trying to call out enterprise stuff, especially as we get deeper into the phase three. And then there’s some stuff kind of like I described with the new filter to extend what counts as a post content block. There’s also the ability to preview a template in the post editor for not administrators. So before, if you were an administrator, you coudn’t actually preview the template. So that’s like another I think good one for enterprise. Fabian worked on that.

01:06:30

Anne McCarthy: The custom ports for multisites feels very enterprise to me, but because I previously worked on multisiteMultisite Multisite is a WordPress feature which allows users to create a network of sites on a single WordPress installation. Available since WordPress version 3.0, Multisite is a continuation of WPMU or WordPress Multiuser project. WordPress MultiUser project was discontinued and its features were included into WordPress core.https://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network.. Yeah, I’m trying to think… I do think that the styling sections of blocks could be really interesting. But so few enterprise level folks that I have talked to at least have adopted block themes. So you have to be using a block theme to take advantage of that feature. And so that could be really neat in terms of branding and control and accessibility and all sort of stuff, but we’re not… quite there yet on the enterprise side. I would maybe emphasize it as in the future when you’re embrace this is something of the cool stuff you can do, but not… use this now because most folks not… they’re using classic names.

Reyes Martinez: Yeah, I’m also excited about the pattern management for classic themes. I think that that will be pretty important to bridge the gap with block themes.

Anne McCarthy: Yeah, I agree. Just the management side… I mean it’s just so much more visual, duplicating patterns, renaming patterns, all that stuff. It’s just so much easier with this new experience.

Reyes Martinez: All right. I think there are no more questions.So I think it’s safe to conclude the session. So yeah… Thank you everyone for your participation and for the great questions. And Anne, thank you so much also for sharing your insights and taking the time to address all those questions.

Anne McCarthy: Thanks for organizing.

Reyes Martinez: Thank you. And have a great day or have a great rest of your day and see you all on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/.. Thank you.

Anne McCarthy: Yeah, awesome. Bye all.


Thank you to @annezazu and @jenblogs4u for reviewing this post.

#media-corps-briefing #summary