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";s:7:"attribs";a:1:{s:0:"";a:1:{s:7:"version";s:3:"2.0";}}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:1:{s:0:"";a:1:{s:7:"channel";a:1:{i:0;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:61:"
	
	
	
	




















































";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:1:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:16:"WordPress Planet";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"http://planet.wordpress.org/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:8:"language";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:2:"en";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:47:"WordPress Planet - http://planet.wordpress.org/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"item";a:50:{i:0;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:113:"WPTavern: WordPress Contributors Continue Exploring Migration of Public and Private Messages from Slack to Matrix";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=143725";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:124:"https://wptavern.com/wordpress-contributors-continue-exploring-migration-of-public-and-private-messages-from-slack-to-matrix";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4979:"<p>In early 2023, WordPress and Matrix contributors proposed a new Meta team subproject to <a href="https://wptavern.com/wordpress-project-to-evaluate-replacing-slack-with-matrix-open-source-chat">explore replacing Slack communication with Matrix</a>, an open source federated chat system. After the team&#8217;s most recent meeting, Automattic-sponsored contributor Alex Kirk <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/meta/2023/04/06/matrix-chat-summary-april-6-2023/">published</a> an update on the status of recent experiments in migration.</p>



<p>After researching more on migrating public messages, Kirk said the team is now evaluating whether the Apache-2.0 licensed <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://github.com/Awesome-Technologies/slack-matrix-migration" target="_blank">Slack Matrix migration tool</a> could work for this project.</p>



<p>&#8220;It operates on Slack export files and requires a fresh Synapse server,&#8221; Kirk said.</p>



<p>&#8220;We haven’t yet been able to confirm whether it actually can import the messages and hope to be able to share more on the next meeting.&#8221;</p>



<p>On the subject of migrating private messages, Kirk said the team is leaning towards ensuring users have the tools to save their own external archives.</p>



<p>&#8220;For migrating private messages in DMs or private groups we’ve concluded that we won’t want to attempt their migration but will look into providing tools for achieving that,&#8221; Kirk said.</p>



<p>&#8220;Here we’ve found that <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/slack-channel-exporter/" target="_blank">browser</a> <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/robsi-slack-channel-expor/henmphndbgifealbmebncbdfgkilagbe" target="_blank">extensions</a> exist which allow you to download your own Slack direct messages inside your browser as a text file. Possibly it’ll be our recommendation to use those tools to export the messages for yourself.&#8221;</p>



<p>Kirk also addressed some accessibility concerns that WordPress Accessibility Team contributor Alex Stine raised during a <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/meta/2023/03/27/matrix-chat-summary-march-23-2023/">meeting</a> at the end of March: </p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>Slack is well supported and accessible to a very wide audience. Something that is not up for argument, a lot of these open-source/decentralized concepts are not accessible to all or most.</p>



<p>The decentralized media world walks a fine line between a great thing and a lot of hypocrisy. On one hand, claiming to give users a voice, on the other hand, knowingly excluding users of assistive tech.</p>



<p>Years of&nbsp;GitHub&nbsp;issues do not lie. Matrix has not been around all that long but there are plenty of other examples that have been around long enough…The Slack accessibility team is best in its class. They are constantly responsive and very engaged with users.</p>
</blockquote>



<p>Kirk linked to an article published by Mozilla accessibility engineer Marco Zehe titled <a href="https://www.marcozehe.de/how-to-use-element-and-matrix-with-a-screen-reader/">How to use Element and Matrix with a screen reader</a>. Mozilla replaced IRC with Matrix in 2020, identifying Matrix as an &#8220;excellent <em>open community collaboration</em> tool, with robust support for accessibility and community safety.&#8221;</p>



<p>Zehe&#8217;s post is essentially a guide to help those using assistive technology find their way around Element and the Matrix Eco system more easily. It also highlights a few things that do not yet work well, including keyboard navigation for the members list and messages.</p>



<p>&#8220;I hope some of these issues are no longer problems,&#8221; Stine said in response to Kirk sharing the article. &#8220;If they still are, this would be no doubt a far worse experience than Slack was in some of its worst times. The fact that users have to switch their screen reader modes just to have basic functionality support is not cool. Here is the way I see it. If modern apps do not follow a similar pattern for your OS to the point where you have to look up docs to figure out how to use it, it is probably too complicated and/or not accessible by my definition.&#8221;</p>



<p>The question of whether it would be beneficial for the WordPress project to <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/meta/2023/01/25/a-meta-subproject-for-evaluating-matrix/">replace Slack communication with Matrix</a> is still yet unanswered, but the initial response to the idea was overwhelmingly positive. More research into the logistics of migration will be a necessary part of the decision.</p>



<p>The Matrix contributors proposing this new exploration will meet again on Wednesday, April 19, for the regularly scheduled bi-weekly meeting and plan to discuss the research on migrating messages from Slack.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 18 Apr 2023 03:51:32 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:1;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:129:"Gutenberg Times: All Women-release squad for 6.4 , Grid Layout , Pattern for front-page designs and more – Weekend edition #250";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:35:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/?p=23854";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:131:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/all-women-release-squad-for-6-4-grid-layout-pattern-for-front-page-designs-and-more-weekend-edition-250/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:18807:"<p>Howdy, </p>



<p>250 newsletter editions. WOW. It feels like a nice round number and worth a celebration. The weekend edition of the Gutenberg Times officially became a newsletter, sent via Mailchimp, on Feb. 3rd, 2018 with 12 subscribers. It has much evolved since then. </p>



<p>It&#8217;s been a stable of my life to connect with you weekly and report on Gutenberg. After all these years (<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/6XqvRGDs5eLQSCyKUBCBGF?si=e4df7a8278b04efa">cue in Paul Simon</a>&#8216;s Still Crazy),  I am still infinitely curious about what people create with the block editor. Thank you for your great support and trust. It&#8217;s been a great privilege.  </p>



<p><a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/2023/"><strong>WordCamp Europe</strong></a> is around the corner, and if possible, I would meet as may subscribers as possible there. <a href="https://calendly.com/pauli-haack/wordcamp-europe?month=2023-06">My public calendar is open.</a> This method worked very well to meet and I met an incredible mix of people at WordCamp Asia this way.  Making a deliberate effort and scheduling an appointment, adds certainty to an otherwise chance encounter  in the Hallway track. I will be in town before the WordCamp, so the calendar is also open for the 7th of June, if that fits your schedule better, too.</p>



<p>I also hope to see you at the <a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/2023/contributor-day/">Contributor Day</a> on 8th of June.  <a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/2023/contributor-day/#register">Registration is open</a> for those who already have a WordCamp Europe ticket.  The organizer team of WCEU also announced that <a href="https://wptavern.com/wceu-2023-announces-free-childcare-and-workshop-for-kids">there will be free child care are and a Kids track.</a></p>



<p>As a side note, we signed the lease for our Munich flat and my husband and I will have a new permanent address starting May 1, 2023. </p>



<p>I hope you have a fabulous weekend! </p>



<p>Yours, 💕<br /><em>Birgit</em></p>




<div class="wp-block-group has-light-background-background-color has-background is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow"><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container">
<p><strong>Table of Contents</strong></p>



<div class="wp-block-sortabrilliant-guidepost"><ul><li><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#0-word-press-release-information">Developing Gutenberg and WordPress</a></li><li><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#0-p">Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners</a></li><li><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#2-word-press-6-0-1-and-6-1-scheduled">Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks</a></li><li><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#3-building-themes-for-fse-and-word-press">Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor. </a></li></ul></div>
</div></div>




<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="0-word-press-release-information">Developing Gutenberg and WordPress</h2>



<p><strong>Gutenberg 15.5</strong> was released last week, and it was a great pleasure for me to discuss it all with <a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-81-wordpress-6-2-interactivity-api/">Leonardus Nugraha for the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. </a></p>



<div class="wp-block-group has-light-background-background-color has-background is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow"><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container">
<p><strong>🎙️ </strong> New episode:  <a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-81-wordpress-6-2-interactivity-api/">Gutenberg Changelog #81 – WordPress 6.2, Gutenberg 15.4 and 15.5, Phase 3 – Collaboration and a new  Interactivity API</a> with Birgit Pauli-Haack and special guest Leonardus Nugraha</p>
</div></div>



<p><strong>Hector Prieto </strong>proposed the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/14/wordpress-6-3-planning-proposal-call-for-volunteers/"><strong>release schedule for WordPress 6.3 and opened the call for volunteers</strong></a> for the release squad. </p>



<p>It comes on the heals of <strong>Josepha Haden Chomphosy</strong>&#8216;s invitation to the all-women release squad for 6.4. <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/07/preparing-for-the-next-women-nonbinary-release-squad/"><strong>Preparing for the Next Women &amp; Nonbinary Release Squad</strong></a>. Raise your hands in the comments if you want to get involved in the WordPress major release process. </p>



<p><strong>Sarah Gooding</strong> reported on the release for the WP Tavern. Read <a href="https://wptavern.com/gutenberg-15-5-introduces-experimental-grid-layout-support"><strong>Gutenberg 15.5 Introduces Experimental Grid Layout Support</strong></a>.</p>



<p>With all the releases last week,  you might have missed the current call for testing from the FSE Outreach Program by <strong>Anne McCarthy</strong>: <strong><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2023/03/29/fse-program-exploration-build-a-block-theme/">FSE Program Exploration: Build a block theme</a>.</strong> She wrote: &#8220;If you’ve never built a block theme, consider this an invitation to give it a try. Tooling has come a long way and the power of what’s being built is that it allows more folks to dive into the future (and present) of WordPress.<strong>&nbsp;</strong>For this experience, you’ll use the <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/create-block-theme/"><em>Create Block Theme&nbsp;plugin&nbsp;</em></a>to facilitate the creation and export process, so you can keep what you create!&#8221; To leave your feedback and share your observations, use the comment section of the post. </p>



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<p><strong>Justin Tadlock</strong> published the <a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/news/2023/04/whats-new-for-developers-april-2023/"><strong>What&#8217;s new for Developer April 2023</strong></a> round-up post on the WordPress Developer Blog. With byte-sized news, Tadlock invites you to dive deeper into certain topics, or let you know about new features and updated APIs. The post is for plugin and theme developers alike. It might be worth bookmarking each of the post, so you can quickly skim editions, when looking for a specific feature or update. </p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="0-p">Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners</h2>



<p>With this recording on WordPressTV, let <strong>Kathryn Presner</strong> and <strong>Wes Theron</strong> take you on a tour  <a href="https://wordpress.tv/2023/04/12/exploring-some-of-the-new-6-2-wordpress-features/"><strong>exploring some of the new 6.2 WordPress features</strong></a>. The guide for the exploration is the release post of <a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2023/03/dolphy/">WordPress &#8220;Dolphy&#8221; 6.2</a>. </p>



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<p>In another video on WordPressTV, <strong>Wes Theron</strong> shows you <a href="https://wordpress.tv/2023/04/10/adding-a-sticky-header-or-banner/"><strong>how to add a sticky header or banner</strong></a> with the new 6.2 sticky feature. The new sticky option is available when wrapping a header or banner in a Group block. It ensures the block remains within the viewport and is stuck to the top of the page when the content is scrolled.</p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide" />



<p><strong>Sarah Gooding</strong> reported on the new WooCommerce release: <a href="https://wptavern.com/woocommerce-7-6-introduces-single-product-details-block-and-add-to-cart-form-block"><strong>WooCommerce 7.6 Introduces Single Product Details Block and “Add to Cart” Form Block</strong></a>. &#8220;Along with the button, the “Add to Cart” form block will automatically display additional options, depending on if the product has a set available quantity or variations.” she wrote. Together with the Single Product Details block, store owners can now assemble their unique Single product template together with the block themes. </p>



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<p><strong><a href="https://twitter.com/raemoreywrites">Rae Morey</a></strong>, editor of The Repository, wrote in the <a href="https://www.therepository.email/?mailpoet_router&endpoint=view_in_browser&action=view&data=WzE5NCwiM2EzYmU1NDdjYmVhIiw1NTYsIjFqb2g0ZGtiNnZmbzh3NG9vb3dnNG9zODhnazA0czR3Iiw1NjIsMF0">latest edition of the newsletter (#165) </a>: &#8220;The team behind <strong>Multicollab</strong>, a tool that enables <strong>Google Docs-style collaboration in WordPress</strong>, are working on a prototype for real-time collaboration. It&#8217;s still in beta, but the team is inviting folks to preview it in action.&#8221; <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH63x-hYgk4">The video explains how the feature works in the demo</a>. Once you leave your email address, on <a href="https://www.therepository.email/?mailpoet_router&endpoint=track&action=click&data=WyI1NTYiLCIxam9oNGRrYjZ2Zm84dzRvb293ZzRvczg4Z2swNHM0dyIsIjU2MiIsIjllY2U5MWMzMjJiZCIsZmFsc2Vd">the beta sign-up you are invited to the demo</a>. </p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="2-word-press-6-0-1-and-6-1-scheduled">Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks</h2>



<p><strong><a href="https://twitter.com/justintadlock">Justin Tadlock</a></strong> unlocks for you how to use <a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/news/2023/04/using-template-patterns-to-build-multiple-homepage-designs/"><strong>template patterns to build multiple homepage designs</strong></a>. Tadlock <a href="https://twitter.com/justintadlock/status/1646575433331212301">tweeted</a>: &#8220;I&#8217;m a block pattern fanatic. So, when Gutenberg 15.5 released with UI integration of &#8220;template type&#8221; patterns, I couldn&#8217;t wait to dive in.&#8221; This tutorial focuses on creating multiple front-page designs that your users can choose from. Specifically, you will learn to build patterns that are tied to the&nbsp;<strong>Front Page</strong>&nbsp;template in WordPress.&#8221;</p>




<p><strong>&nbsp;<a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/references/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">&#8220;Keeping up with Gutenberg &#8211; Index 2022&#8221;</a>&nbsp;</strong><br />A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test and Meta team from Jan. 2021 on. Updated by yours truly.  <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/references/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index-2020/"><em>The index 2020 is here</em></a></p>




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<p><strong>Brian Gardner</strong> explained <a href="https://wpengine.com/builders/base-wordpress-theme/"><strong>How (and Why) to Build a Base WordPress Theme</strong></a>, in taking you behind-the-scenes of an agency that forked a WordPress theme to create a tailored version that caters to client needs. &#8220;Here’s an example of how building a boilerplate can help an agency thrive.&#8221; Gardner wrote </p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide" />



<p>The WordPress themes team requests your input on the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/themes/2023/04/04/theme-handbook-overhaul-proposal/"><strong>proposal for a revamp of the Themes Handbook</strong></a>. In his post, Justin Tadlock wrote: &#8220;The problem with handbooks for ever-changing software is that they need a large re-tuning from time to time. The Theme Handbook has reached that point in its lifespan.&#8221; There will also be a dedicated meeting on April 18, 2023 at 13:00 UTC via the&nbsp;<a href="https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C02RP4Y3K">#themereview</a>&nbsp;channel on&nbsp;Slack. Everyone is welcome to join and discuss this proposal in detail.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="3-building-themes-for-fse-and-word-press">Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor. </h2>



<p>A reminder: The team who put together the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/03/30/proposal-the-interactivity-api-a-better-developer-experience-in-building-interactive-blocks/"><strong>Proposal for the Interactivity API</strong></a> will hold two <strong>Developer Hours on April 17th</strong>, 2023 one <a href="https://www.meetup.com/learn-wordpress-online-workshops/events/292575913/">at 8 am UTC</a> and one <a href="https://www.meetup.com/learn-wordpress-online-workshops/events/292575942/">at 17:00 UTC</a> to cover as many timezones as possible. </p>



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<p><strong>Ryan Welcher</strong> posted the recording of his Twitch stream session from March 30, 2023: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2SYJhh3PGs"><strong>Reviewing Gutenberg 15.4 Features | Bring Me Your Issues #2</strong></a>. In this session, Ryan took a look at  at some features released in Gutenberg 15.4. He continued working through viewer-submitted issues by continuing with the post-picker block from the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aut0EcsKbxM">first of the &#8220;Bring me Your Issues</a>&#8221; session. </p>



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<p>In his post, <a href="https://humanmade.com/2023/04/06/wordpress-ai-generative-content-and-blocks/"><strong>WordPress AI: Generative Content &amp; Blocks</strong></a>, <strong><a href="https://twitter.com/joe_hoyle">Joe Hoyle</a></strong> shared the initial results from his team&#8217;s the experiments  on integrating generative AI into WordPress. They worked on a &#8220;WordPress CoPilot&#8221; that can &#8220;speak&#8221; Gutenberg/block editor. The video gives you a glimpse into the power of the tools and how they can speed up content creation. &#8220;Going through this project has convinced me that LLMs have much more potential than I was giving them credit for. It feels like there’s still a lot to discover what the models are capable of.&#8221; Hoyle <a href="https://twitter.com/joe_hoyle/status/1643952952690835456">tweeted</a>. Joe Hoyle is co-founder the Chief Technical officer at Human Made</p>



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<p>Inspired by Joy Hoyle&#8217;s post, Sarah Gooding, <a href="https://wptavern.com/wordpress-developers-are-experimenting-with-gutenberg-native-ai-block-and-content-assistants"><strong>WordPress Developers Are Experimenting With Gutenberg-Native AI Block and Content Assistants</strong></a>. She also included Munir Kamal&#8217;s venture into tools powered by AI. </p>



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<p><strong>Fabian Kägy,</strong> lead developer at 10up, was a guest on the <a href="https://syntax.fm/show/598/supper-club-fabian-kaegy-modern-wordpress-blocks-page-builders-headless-custom-fields"><strong>Supper Club episode of the Syntax podcast</strong></a> and co-hosts Wes Bos and Scott Tolinsky discussed with him,  modern WordPress development, local dev experience, changes to the block editor, how version control is handled, and more!</p>



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<p><strong>Munir Kamal</strong> posted a <a href="https://gutenberghub.com/how-to-add-block-styles-in-wordpress-a-step-by-step-guide/"><strong>How to Add Block Styles in WordPress – A Step-by-Step Guide</strong></a>. Why build a new block when you can change the appearance of a core block by adding block styles. With little PHP code and accompanying CSS a new design is applied. No JavaScript required. Kamal also shows you how to find out the name of the block you&#8217;d like to target with the new styles. </p>



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<p><strong>Brian Coords</strong> and <strong>Aurooba Ahmed</strong> discuss on this episode of the <a href="https://viewsource.fm/">ViewSource </a>podcast: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtmY2Ck_6i0"><strong>Getting started with React inside WordPress</strong></a> You learn what React is  and how it works with WordPress. It&#8217;s the start of a series of episodes to build an accordion block for the WordPress block editor.  </p>




<p><strong><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/need-a-zip-from-master/">Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg&#8217;s master branch?</a></strong><br />Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review. <br />Have you been using it? Hit reply and let me know.</p>



<p><img alt="GitHub all releases" src="https://img.shields.io/github/downloads/bph/gutenberg/total?style=for-the-badge" /></p>




<p class="has-text-align-right has-small-font-size"><em>Questions? Suggestions? Ideas? Don&#8217;t hesitate to send <a href="mailto:pauli@gutenbergtimes.com">them via email</a> or send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph</em>. </p>



<p class="has-text-align-right has-small-font-size">For questions to be answered on the <a href="http://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast">Gutenberg Changelog</a>, send them to <a href="mailto:changelog@gutenbergtimes.com">changelog@gutenbergtimes.com</a></p>



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<p>Featured Image: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/34575850@N05/46876447485">Moveable Type by L. M. Bernhardt </a></p>



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<p class="has-text-align-left"><strong>Don&#8217;t want to miss the next Weekend Edition? </strong></p>



<form class="wp-block-newsletterglue-form ngl-form ngl-portrait" action="https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/" method="post"><div class="ngl-form-container"><div class="ngl-form-field"><label class="ngl-form-label" for="ngl_email"><br />Type in your Email address to subscribe.</label><div class="ngl-form-input"><input type="email" class="ngl-form-input-text" name="ngl_email" id="ngl_email" /></div></div><button type="submit" class="ngl-form-button">Subscribe</button><p class="ngl-form-text">We hate spam, too and won&#8217;t give your email address to anyone except Mailchimp to send out our Weekend Edition</p></div><div class="ngl-message-overlay"><div class="ngl-message-svg-wrap"></div><div class="ngl-message-overlay-text">Thanks for subscribing.</div></div><input type="hidden" name="ngl_list_id" id="ngl_list_id" value="26f81bd8ae" /><input type="hidden" name="ngl_double_optin" id="ngl_double_optin" value="yes" /></form>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-css-opacity is-style-wide" />";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Sat, 15 Apr 2023 05:57:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:18:"Birgit Pauli-Haack";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:2;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:66:"WPTavern: WCEU 2023 Announces Free Childcare and Workshop for Kids";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=143574";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:77:"https://wptavern.com/wceu-2023-announces-free-childcare-and-workshop-for-kids";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:1966:"<p>Preparations for WordCamp Europe (WCEU) 2023 in Athens are moving forward as the team <a href="https://twitter.com/WCEurope/status/1644304356236312577">will soon be contacting speakers</a> selected for the event. Organizers have launched a <a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/2023/speaker-support-program/">Speaker Support Program</a> aimed at encouraging more diversity on stage by connecting speakers with companies that are willing to financially support them.</p>



<p>WCEU has also opened <a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/2023/contributor-day/">registration for Contributor Day</a>, which will take place on June 8, kicking off the event. Those who are unable attend in person can join in the #contributor-day channel on Slack as well as the specific channels for the contributor teams.</p>



<p>Alongside Contributor Day, WCEU has announced it will be hosting an interactive <a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/2023/workshop-for-kids/">Workshop for Kids</a> on June 8, to introduce future generations to WordPress. It will cover the basics of WordPress, how to create a website, choose a theme, and publish content. The workshop is open to kids aged 13-16 and all materials will be provided.</p>



<p>WCEU will also have free childcare available during the Contributor Day and the main conference from June 8-10, to make the WordCamp more accessible for parents and guardians. Children aged 16 and younger are eligible to attend but must <a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/2023/childcare-registration/">register by May 20</a>, as there is limited availability for childcare.</p>



<p>The <a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/2023/call-for-volunteers/">call for volunteers</a> is still open with a variety of roles available. Volunteers will receive one or two collectable volunteer t-shirt(s), a free ticket, and an invite to the Social, as well as the experience of contributing back to the WordPress community at one of its largest events.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 14 Apr 2023 22:25:55 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:3;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:64:"WPTavern: BuddyPress to Host Virtual Contributor Day on April 20";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=143652";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:75:"https://wptavern.com/buddypress-to-host-virtual-contributor-day-on-april-20";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:2644:"<p>Representatives of the BuddyPress core team will be <a href="https://buddypress.org/2023/04/lets-meet-in-paris-during-the-french-community-contributor-day/">hosting a contributor day</a> alongside the French WordPress Community Contributor Day in Paris on April 20, 2023. This in-person event has filled up its registration and <a href="https://wpfr-net.translate.goog/programme-de-la-journee-de-contribution-organisee-a-paris-le-20-04-2023/?_x_tr_sl=fr&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=fr&_x_tr_pto=wapp">posted its schedule</a> already, but BuddyPress core developer Mathieu Viet is inviting people to join online to contribute to BuddyPress.</p>



<p>&#8220;As we’re currently working on a very ambitious 12.0 release with the main goal of migrating from our Legacy URL parser to using the WordPress Rewrite API, there are many areas getting your contributions would really help us and make a huge difference,&#8221; Viet said.</p>



<p><a href="https://wptavern.com/buddypress-12-0-to-focus-on-merging-bp-rewrites-into-core-moving-legacy-widgets-into-bp-classic-plugin">BuddyPress 12.0</a> is expected to be released May 31, 2023, and merging the BP Rewrites feature plugin into the core plugin will be a major change that impacts the entire BuddyPress ecosystem. The effort to migrate BuddyPress’ custom URI parser to use WordPress’ Rewrite API has been in the works for the past decade. Contributors will also be providing backwards compatibility via a new plugin called <a href="https://github.com/buddypress/bp-classic">BP Classic</a> that will contain BuddyPress’ legacy widgets. The virtual contributor day will organize code contributions towards these efforts.</p>



<p>In addition to code, people can also contribute to documentation regarding how developers can prepare their themes and plugins to be ready for BP Rewrites, and documentation for end users on how the change will benefit their BuddyPress experience. Viet also intends to organize some common troubleshooting tips for the inevitable support forum requests that the major change will generate.</p>



<p>The event will run from <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20230420T0815" target="_blank">08:15 UTC</a> to <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20230420T1530" target="_blank">15:30 UTC</a>. Although virtual attendees may miss out on the hot drinks and pastries, they can be equal participants by joining <a href="https://wordpress.slack.com/messages/buddypress">BuddyPress&#8217; Slack channel</a> and jumping in on one of the projects.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 14 Apr 2023 20:09:40 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:4;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:54:"Do The Woo Community: The Evolution of the Friday Show";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=74773";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:42:"https://dothewoo.io/friday-show-evolution/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:307:"<p>It's time to come on our Friday show as a guest co-host.</p>
<p>&gt;&gt; The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://dothewoo.io/friday-show-evolution/">The Evolution of the Friday Show</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://dothewoo.io">Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community</a>	.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 14 Apr 2023 10:14:06 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:5;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:98:"WPTavern: WooCommerce 7.6 Introduces Single Product Details Block and “Add to Cart” Form Block";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=143628";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:103:"https://wptavern.com/woocommerce-7-6-introduces-single-product-details-block-and-add-to-cart-form-block";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:2657:"<p><a href="https://developer.woocommerce.com/2023/04/13/woocommerce-7-6-released/">WooCommerce 7.6</a> was released today with two new blocks merged from the WooCommerce Blocks plugin. The Single Product Details block and the &#8220;Add to Cart&#8221; Form block are now available to store owners who want to use the Site Editor to design their own Single Product Templates. </p>



<p>Along with the button, the &#8220;Add to Cart&#8221; form block will automatically display additional options, depending on if the product has a set available quantity or variations.</p>



<img />image credit: <a href="https://developer.woocommerce.com/2023/04/13/woocommerce-7-6-released/">WooCommerce 7.6 release post</a>



<p>In templates where store owners are displaying multiple products, attributes filtering has been improved for the Products block. Inside the editor, there is now a collapsible menu for selecting attributes and filtering the display. It also shows a live preview of the products that will be included in this view.</p>



<p>For those who are designing pages and templates with patterns, WooCommerce 7.6 makes it much easier to get a consistent design with improved, scalable margins for patterns using the Products block.</p>



<p>This release also improves the Mini Cart block&#8217;s performance, with content preloaded, and an appearance that more closely matches the site&#8217;s active theme.</p>



<p>WooCommerce 7.6 includes several important updates for developers, including the following:</p>



<ul>
<li>Clearer, renamed event names in block-based Checkout</li>



<li>Reintroduced cache for orders (after it was reverted due to causing an infinite loop on activation) when custom tables are enabled </li>



<li>Added an encoding selector to the product importer</li>



<li>Add/Remove order coupon actions are now logged in notes</li>



<li>Products widget can now be sorted by menu_order</li>
</ul>



<p>For a more detailed look at the 673 commits in 7.6, check out the full <a href="https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/blob/release/7.6/plugins/woocommerce/readme.txt">changelog</a>, which references each pull request included in the release. </p>



<p>WooCommerce has also released its <a href="https://developer.woocommerce.com/2023/04/13/woocommerce-contributor-day-guide/">Contributor Day Guide</a> today for the upcoming 24-hour virtual event on April 19, 2023. There are instructions for how to get your development environment set up for contributing and how to join the Woo Community Slack. The guide outlines specific topics and tickets that will be addressed, with dedicated Slack channels for each.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 14 Apr 2023 03:16:17 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:6;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:86:"Do The Woo Community: Building a Better WooCommerce Hosting Ecosystem with Beau Lebens";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=74755";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:49:"https://dothewoo.io/woo-express-with-beau-lebens/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:404:"<p>The new hosting option Woo Express brings a lot to the ecosystem for users, builders and other hosting companies. </p>
<p>&gt;&gt; The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://dothewoo.io/woo-express-with-beau-lebens/">Building a Better WooCommerce Hosting Ecosystem with Beau Lebens</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://dothewoo.io">Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community</a>	.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 13 Apr 2023 08:13:01 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:7;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:63:"Post Status: Launching a WordPress Product in Public: Session 9";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:32:"https://poststatus.com/?p=148930";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:73:"https://poststatus.com/launching-a-wordpress-product-in-public-session-9/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:50741:"<div class="is-layout-flow wp-block-group eplus-wrapper has-theme-palette-2-color has-theme-palette-8-background-color has-text-color has-background"><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container"><div class="wp-block-post-excerpt"><p class="wp-block-post-excerpt__excerpt"><a href="https://twitter.com/coreymaass">Corey Maass</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/corymiller303">Cory Miller</a> continue the development of their new WordPress plugin, <a href="https://crop.express/">Crop.Express</a>. In this conversation, they share their experiences and challenges in creating the plugin, including the importance of user feedback and testing. They also talk about their decision to make the plugin open-source, the potential benefits of doing so, and the importance of community involvement in the process. </p></div>


<div class="wp-block-spacer eplus-wrapper"></div>



<p class="yoast-reading-time__wrapper"><span class="yoast-reading-time__icon"></span><span class="yoast-reading-time__spacer"></span><span class="yoast-reading-time__descriptive-text">Estimated reading time:  </span><span class="yoast-reading-time__reading-time">34</span><span class="yoast-reading-time__time-unit"> minutes</span></p>
</div></div>







<p><a href="https://poststatus.com/planet/feed/#h-transcript">Transcript</a> ↓</p>



<p>In this episode, <a href="https://twitter.com/corymiller303">Cory Miller</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/coreymaass">Corey Maass</a> share their insights and experience about the challenges of finding the right balance between simplicity and complexity and the importance of testing and documentation. They also share their personal stories of how they got started with WordPress and how their experiences have shaped their approach to plugin development. For anyone interested in developing WordPress plugins, especially if you are looking to improve your development process and create more user-friendly plugins, this episode is a must-listen.</p>



<p><strong>Top Takeaways:</strong></p>



<ul>
<li><strong>Building a successful plugin requires a deep understanding of user needs and pain points: </strong>Understanding your users&#8217; needs and pain points to develop a plugin that solves their problems effectively is critical. This requires continuous user testing and feedback to improve functionality and user experience.</li>



<li><strong>Collaboration and communication are crucial for plugin development: </strong>Plugin development is a team effort that requires effective communication, collaboration, and project management. Clear communication channels, regular meetings, and shared project management tools help ensure everyone is on the same page.</li>



<li><strong>Monetization strategies should align with user value: </strong>Considering various monetization strategies for plugins, including premium features, subscriptions, and sponsorships, is helpful. Your chosen strategy should align with the user&#8217;s value proposition and offer a fair exchange of value. Being transparent with users about the plugin&#8217;s monetization strategy and how it impacts their experience is important for successful adoption.</li>
</ul>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">

</div>



<h3 class="eplus-wrapper" id="h-mentioned-in-the-show"><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f517.png" alt="🔗" class="wp-smiley" /> Mentioned in the show:</h3>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://crop.express/">Crop.Express</a></li>



<li><a href="https://wpengine.com/">WPEngine</a></li>



<li><a href="https://pagely.com/">Pagely</a></li>



<li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/">StudioPress</a></li>
</ul>



<h3 class="eplus-wrapper" id="h-you-can-follow-post-status-and-our-guests-on-twitter"><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f426.png" alt="🐦" class="wp-smiley" /> You can follow Post Status and our guests on Twitter:</h3>



<ul class="eplus-wrapper">
<li><a href="http://twitter.com/coreymaass">Corey Maass</a></li>



<li><a href="https://twitter.com/corymiller303">Cory Miller</a> (CEO, <a href="https://twitter.com/post_status">Post Status</a>)</li>



<li><a href="https://twitter.com/lemonadecode">Olivia Bisset</a> (Intern, <a href="https://twitter.com/post_status">Post Status</a>)</li>
</ul>



<p class="eplus-wrapper has-background">The <strong>Post Status Draft</strong> podcast is geared toward WordPress professionals, with interviews, news, and deep analysis. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f4dd.png" alt="📝" class="wp-smiley" /><br /><br /><a href="https://poststatus.com/category/post-status-podcasts/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Browse our archives</a>, and don’t forget to subscribe via <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/post-status-draft-wordpress/id976403008" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">iTunes</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS8ySkU5c2M4UA" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Google Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/PostStatus" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">YouTube</a>, <a href="http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/krogsgard/post-status-draft-wordpress-podcast" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Stitcher</a>, <a href="https://wordpress-post-status-draft-podcast.simplecast.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Simplecast</a>, or <a href="https://feeds.simplecast.com/2JE9sc8P">RSS</a>. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f3a7.png" alt="🎧" class="wp-smiley" /></p>



<h2 class="eplus-wrapper" id="h-transcript">Transcript</h2>



<h2>Session 9 Corey &amp; Cory Launch a WordPress Product Live</h2>



<p><strong>Cory Miller:</strong> [00:00:00] So we&#8217;ll also, um, so re read me as the, the big one?&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Corey Maass:</strong> Yeah. I think that&#8217;s what we cover today.&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Cory Miller:</strong> Okay. So we&#8217;ll also, uh, okay. All right. Could you hear me?&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Corey Maass:</strong> Uh, first I can, yeah. Oh, okay. The echo you mean? Yeah. Yeah. The same thing. Mute it. Yeah. Open up YouTube and then close YouTube. But I, I keep the comments open if anybody&#8217;s weighing in.<br /></p>



<p>Yeah,&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Cory Miller:</strong> exactly.<br /></p>



<p>All right, Corey, this is session nine and we talked last week and we made the decision that we&#8217;re gonna be one this with a couple change. And call it good for now and move on to another [00:01:00] project, um, let it sit and simmer a little bit. Um, so any thoughts that you had based on last week or anything else?<br /></p>



<p><strong>Corey Maass:</strong> Yeah, I, I guess I just, I, I&#8217;m glad that we&#8217;re doing this, like I, and, and if for the, for the, the six people watching, You know, but hi, in historically this will be significant. You know, this is where we, uh, figured out how to make our millions. Right. Um, right. But I, I have had a lot of success not in a, in a project sense in the past of letting things.<br /></p>



<p>Uh, and so I definitely like, cuz we could keep banging away at Crop Express, adding more features. And there&#8217;s still a few things that I wanna add. Like, I definitely wanna put a bow on it. Um, and I definitely think that it&#8217;s something for [00:02:00] us to talk about, promote, you know, we&#8217;ll send copies to, um, blogs.<br /></p>



<p>Like let&#8217;s still have some of those conversations that, um, you talked about. As much because I want to talk to those people. I think it&#8217;d be fun. Um, but I also think that it takes the pressure off of us like, you know, Having this, having this thing and going, okay, what, what&#8217;s happening with it today?<br /></p>



<p>What&#8217;s hap when Sometimes you just honestly need some time to go by. Um, and some people to mess with it and some people do mess with it enough to say, oh man, I wish it did this. And then, and then still ha use it for two more days before they finally do send us an email that&#8217;s like, okay, hey, I&#8217;ve been thinking about this for a couple of days.<br /></p>



<p>Boy, I wish it did this, you know? Just because we&#8217;re thinking a lot about it doesn&#8217;t mean anybody else&#8217;s.&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Cory Miller:</strong> Yeah. And I think there&#8217;s two things when you&#8217;re saying that came to mind is the get something [00:03:00] out, sit on it a bit, let it just kind of cook or just kind of be Yeah. I think it&#8217;s interesting. And then, um, is, is great for this.<br /></p>



<p>And then second is.<br /></p>



<p>I forgot what I was gonna say. Um, but the second is we have the feedback loop, right. Um, within the plugin. So, you know, we, we never know. Um, might be something I think we, we felt like there was something. Better to chase that. We discovered through this, which I look at product as discovery, you know, especially our product, you know, when you got a working product and you&#8217;re just adding things, that&#8217;s way easier.<br /></p>



<p>Um, working product, meaning people are paying money for it in my mind. Um, we already know it&#8217;s functional and works. Um, but yeah, and I think, you know, just to talk about our decision for a second, we saw. More [00:04:00] opportunity on another direction that we discovered something you&#8217;d been working on in parallel.<br /></p>



<p>Um, we&#8217;re not ready to talk about that just yet cause we wanna get some things going, but I think that&#8217;s part of the product trail is, you know, discovery, what&#8217;s over the next mountain. And I don&#8217;t know about you, but I go, I gotta put multiple things in the. To see what actually hits. Oh, yeah. Um, I, I feel like you and I built enough of a case for the other thing that, um, is really interesting.<br /></p>



<p>It seems like there&#8217;s something there. So coming back to the cycle of like, okay, we&#8217;d like this. We think this would be good. Mm-hmm. Other people, you know, would help. Um, anyway, I don&#8217;t wanna get off on that for a second, but I did wanna at least unpack a little bit of our decision. You know, Colin v1 with a couple of these tweaks, um, good.<br /></p>



<p>And all that, and say, it&#8217;s always a safari. Yes. [00:05:00]&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Corey Maass:</strong> Yeah. And I, you know, I, it&#8217;s an ongoing conversation, I think is the other good metaphor. It&#8217;s, it&#8217;s literal for, in our case, but it&#8217;s also a good metaphor that as you talk, you uncover more things. You go, oh, I didn&#8217;t think about this. And it&#8217;s, um, so I guess the analogy too is, Concepts have to simmer.<br /></p>



<p>Ideas have to simmer, you know, the cadence of you and I chatting once a week, you know, occasionally a little bit more, but, uh, gives us a chance to go, okay, so this happened this week where this new other thing came out this week where this new, um, you know, product caught my eye that isn&#8217;t related, but it sparked an idea, dot, dot, dot.<br /></p>



<p>Like it&#8217;s, you know, trying to, trying to get it all done, you know, hackathon. Is a neat exercise, but I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s the, the true arc of, of most products journeys. So, um, but I definitely, [00:06:00] oh, the one thing that I didn&#8217;t tell you about is I did get my first email from crop.express, the website of somebody asking specifically, I have a client website, they need the image to be exactly these pixel proportions.<br /></p>



<p>So not even an aspect ratio. And uh, I was like, oh, okay. You know, so I think that I, I want to think about again, as we&#8217;re talking about sort of putting a bow on v1 uh, accounting for that situation, and then to me that kind of, again, we&#8217;ve, we&#8217;ve completed a. Product. It solves the problem. It solves the problem everywhere that we think that it matters.<br /></p>



<p>Um, it solves the problem for all of the scenarios that we currently know about. And this is where, like you said, we&#8217;re wait, waiting for feedback. We&#8217;re waiting for people to say, oh, hey, you know, aspect ratio [00:07:00] isn&#8217;t really what I need, but I need is image or is pixel size. Uh, which technically can be done in the, I had added bin and max pixel stuff.<br /></p>



<p>Like I, I think, you know, kind of like your feedback last week, like this settings page is the advanced settings, or it feels, you know, um, it feels like a 200 level class or whatever. Um, And so, you know, looking at simplifying that, but then, uh, yeah, letting it, letting it ride. Um, and, and at that point, like I said, I&#8217;m really excited about getting it at actually installing it onto my client&#8217;s websites and going, all right, Guinea pigs dance.<br /></p>



<p>You now have to use my plugin. But I&#8217;ve, even, this week it came up again where, um, one of my clients was like, you know, trying to, trying to get an image. Onto the site correctly. And I had to walk her through some stuff. It&#8217;s like, don&#8217;t mention the plugin yet. Don&#8217;t mention the [00:08:00] plugin yet, but as soon as I introduce it and walk them through it, you know, so I think it&#8217;ll solve problems for them.<br /></p>



<p><strong>Cory Miller:</strong> Yeah, a absolutely. Um, it, this whole conversation, and this relates to crop express now,<br /></p>



<p>uh, made me think of. But also kudos for like a, you, you saw an opportunity there with your client, like, so that&#8217;s like the validation of, you know, is this, is this a valuable thing? Mm-hmm. You&#8217;ve seen this a bunch of times where I wanted to share for anybody that&#8217;s listened later is I always come back to this, so it seems like, like I&#8217;ve majored in the pains.<br /></p>



<p>Um, specifically with utility software in the past. The thing that&#8217;s really always compelling to me is gains. And I know you worked at O Opt Montreal at one point and I go, that was my classic example. We did utility things that [00:09:00] I themes and you know, you look at the gain, you look at like an e-commerce site or something, a marketing software or something like that, and it&#8217;s like that&#8217;s, I haven&#8217;t really camped.<br /></p>



<p>Had a product. I don&#8217;t think that camps out in the gain side. Yeah. Um, but I think we&#8217;ve been doing this work too, is coming back to who is our customer for this. Mm-hmm. Whether it&#8217;s ourselves for sure. And then we&#8217;re developing out the profile for there. Like could this be something that&#8217;s something when we start and talk about the next project publicly, um, so that we can, that&#8217;s something I want to do better is go, okay, let&#8217;s identify.<br /></p>



<p>The person that might have this problem or frustration or issue. This is a whole concept I&#8217;m trying to get to. What&#8217;s the amount of pain? Somebody goes, I&#8217;ll pay for it. What&#8217;s the amount of gain? Somebody goes, I&#8217;ll pay for it. You know? Yep. That&#8217;s [00:10:00] some of my learning as I&#8217;ve gone, is gone. Okay. Like when we created backup buddy.<br /></p>



<p>Um, the de the developer goes, Hey, I think we should, WordPress needs a holistic backup solution. And I was like, I just go, yeah, because a hundred percent theoretical market at that time. Um, so it&#8217;s pretty easy. I think WordPress has got enough things out there. It&#8217;s interesting from a competitive standpoint is where&#8217;s that ideal place?<br /></p>



<p>So, I don&#8217;t know, I wanna throw some of that up to you and see if you had any comments. Cause you always have something really help. Uh, that changes my perspective a little bit, but it&#8217;s like this balance, this is a formula for how products and services, different things get up and then, you know, nailing that customer, they go, oh man, that, that would, you know, when you get that feeling of like, oh, this would help me so much.<br /></p>



<p>That&#8217;s the magic right there. Yeah.&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Corey Maass:</strong> And. [00:11:00] I&#8217;m, I&#8217;m definitely, I&#8217;ve also had some similar thoughts in that it&#8217;s, it is a, I think, a slightly different way of thinking about product. Right. And the looking for pain is a very popular, um, Hundred level, I guess. Apparently I&#8217;m making college analogies today. Um, but like you look at, um, Amy Hoy, Justin Jackson, uh, Rob Walling, like the, the startup thought leaders, um, who put out a lot of great content and have done for decades.<br /></p>



<p>Arguably, um, the, the thinking for a long time has been okay. You are an aspir. Probably solopreneur. You are a entrepreneur, and I don&#8217;t mean that negatively, but the, like you are an aspiring, uh, you, you have an entrepreneurial spirit without [00:12:00] experience, right? So you, you&#8217;re, you want to start your entrepreneur journey.<br /></p>



<p>Um, and, uh, a very popular formula to start with because honestly, I think. I know it&#8217;s generally more reliable as a beginner, um, is pain. And so there&#8217;s all these ideas about like, okay, you get on a forum for fishermen where all the fishermen are talking and you kind of listen to their conversations and, and when they keep talking about like, boy at dawn I wish I had, you know, a certain kind of light.<br /></p>



<p>And that&#8217;s where you go, ah, That&#8217;s a pain. Now I can go try to solve it. Um, which is very different from, oh, I&#8217;m now, I&#8217;m blanking on the name. Um, but there was, um, a product that came out years ago and it just [00:13:00] popped up on my radar again. Oh, Prezi. P r e z I. Mm-hmm. I think, right?&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Cory Miller:</strong> Mm-hmm. Yeah. I remember Prezi,&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Corey Maass:</strong> that was a hundred percent a solution, looking for a.<br /></p>



<p>It was a really neat, in, in, I mean, we still have the slides paradigm, the, you know, uh, PowerPoint, Google presentation paradigm, rectangle, rectangle, rectangle. And Prezi had this really neat software that they built online, which was very impressive at the time, cuz again, it was probably 10 years ago, but where you had a, it was kind of like a, an interactive mind map.<br /></p>



<p>And so you had a point that had something. Concept off of it. And you&#8217;d zoom around, you&#8217;d sort of fly around this, this presentation and it was extremely novel. But I think every person built one presentation in it and was like, this is neat, but it&#8217;s very clear that I&#8217;m using this software cuz it does one thing.<br /></p>



<p>Um, and they did a really good [00:14:00] job, I think, of marketing and finding a use for this and marketing it, but they. Couldn&#8217;t become the presentation standard that they&#8217;d hoped to because they changed. It was too specific, you know? Um, and that&#8217;s always the fear. It&#8217;s definitely more fun sometimes. Um, and I&#8217;ve definitely built a lot of products that were a concept and it was like, oh, I think I have a different way of approaching.<br /></p>



<p>Uh, you know, project management to-do lists, time tracking the standard paradigms, but like, uh, instead of it being a vertical list, you know, it&#8217;s horizontal or whatever the, whatever, it&#8217;s, um, and I think that it&#8217;s you, it&#8217;s then tough because if you&#8217;re, if you&#8217;re on one end of the spectrum, you can, you can only present gain.<br /></p>



<p>Like Prezi, where it&#8217;s a, where it&#8217;s, I hate to use the word gimmick, [00:15:00] but where it&#8217;s, again, a, a prob a solution looking for a problem that&#8217;s dangerous, that&#8217;s very, very difficult to change a paradigm. Like they did not change the way all presentations are. Look, they couldn&#8217;t. Um, and then on the other end of the spectrum, you know, what we&#8217;ve, what we&#8217;ve talking about is, um, a hundred percent solving for a pain.<br /></p>



<p>It&#8217;s. Fishermen need a flashlight at dawn, build the flashlight. You&#8217;re done. And so what we start talking about is somewhere in the middle. Um, and it&#8217;s, and it, again, I think just a different way of, of thinking, uh, it&#8217;s gonna be more challenging for you, marketing it, more challenging for both of us or anybody to talk about it.<br /></p>



<p>Um, if it isn&#8217;t a problem that people are already trying to solve. And I think what we&#8217;re, you know, I do, I do anticipate landing [00:16:00] somewhere in the middle, like crop Express I think is a good example of, it&#8217;s definitely a pain, but people are solving it by going elsewhere. They&#8217;re going to Photoshop, they&#8217;re going to crop.express, and we&#8217;re kind of bringing it to them.<br /></p>



<p>Um, and so I think that I, I hope to still kind of do some of that stuff. Um, but then also, You know, maybe introduce concepts that, that WordPress doesn&#8217;t currently have, paradigms that, that WordPress doesn&#8217;t currently, uh, have its arms around. And so I&#8217;m kinda excited for all that. It&#8217;s also, I think it being more on that spectrum, it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s more creative.<br /></p>



<p>It&#8217;s more fun for us.&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Cory Miller:</strong> Yeah. So yeah, a absolutely. You know, we, it seems like we&#8217;re using that whole thing is build something for yourself. And we&#8217;re using problems we see for ourselves using the new [00:17:00] thing we&#8217;re talking about, using word pr, um, post status and your clients and things. And it makes me think like the game pain conversation on that when we show that we can.<br /></p>



<p>What I wrote down when, when we, just a minute ago was, you know, in the classic consulting bible, I think it&#8217;s Alan Weiss, he talks about the job of a consultant is to improve the client&#8217;s condition. Mm-hmm. In some way. Mm-hmm. And I&#8217;ve been doing a lot of thoughts about consulting cause I&#8217;ve tried it a couple of times and, uh, have failed miserably at it.<br /></p>



<p>But, uh, I&#8217;m still trying. And, but from the. From that consulting thing. If you think about that just for a second, you&#8217;re like, how do I help improve the client&#8217;s condition, or in this case, our potential customer&#8217;s condition? And I think we&#8217;ve done a lot of that work in Crop Express is precisely thinking about the outcome they&#8217;re wanting.[00:18:00]&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p>And, uh, I&#8217;ll save the rest for our, for our next conversation. But, um, so I. Anything you learned, and I know we still need to do the readme, but, um, anything takeaways from what we&#8217;ve done so far? Other takeaways?<br /></p>



<p><strong>Corey Maass:</strong> I, in a, to be honest, I do think that we have, I&#8217;m thinking out loud here, so I, I, I reserve the right to take all of this back. Um, but at least some. The process that we&#8217;re going through, have gone through is the same, uh, falls in the same trap in that I do think that we have, we know there&#8217;s a problem. We, we&#8217;ve had the problem.<br /></p>



<p>We don&#8217;t like how, um, propping and inserting images into WordPress currently [00:19:00] works. Um, we. Got excited and said, okay, there&#8217;s something here. We both felt, you know, felt it in our gut, but then as we got into it, there&#8217;s definitely been, I don&#8217;t, it&#8217;s not like I expect, you know, a million news, a million installs overnight.<br /></p>



<p>Um, but there&#8217;s, there&#8217;s something, I don&#8217;t know what we could have done differently, but they&#8217;re, I haven&#8217;t felt. The spark didn&#8217;t ignite, I guess is what I&#8217;m, kinda what I would say. It&#8217;s like there&#8217;s something here. We&#8217;ve built a nice little utility. I almost, it almost feels like we&#8217;ve kind of, uh, you know, we, we saw a sparkle of something on the ground.<br /></p>



<p>We started digging. There might have been a couple of other glimmers of like, oh, there&#8217;s a, maybe a li a hint of gold. It kept us digging, but I kind of feel like we&#8217;ve reached a point where, You know, we&#8217;ve dug around, we&#8217;ve dug up all the earth around what we thought might have been a vein of gold and said, okay, [00:20:00] yeah, no, I guess there&#8217;s nothing here.<br /></p>



<p>Um, and not that that isn&#8217;t part of the process. Um, I don&#8217;t know what we could have done differently. I, I only question if there was a way to have arrived there sooner. Um, mm-hmm. And again, none of this is to say that I don&#8217;t think that what we&#8217;ve created has value. Um, and we kept sort of going, okay, well let&#8217;s, you know, we keep having really good high level conversations, which again, has led to other ideas.<br /></p>



<p>Um, and so that&#8217;s, that&#8217;s not invaluable. Um, but we were sort of like, take a step forward and see, take a step forward and see. And now that we&#8217;re ready to kind of put a bow on version one, it&#8217;s like, yeah, this might be. You know, which is okay. Um, but it&#8217;s very, it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s a, it&#8217;s definitely a little hard to accept.<br /></p>



<p>Do you know what I mean? Like just [00:21:00] the sunk cost fallacy or whatever it is. Like you Yeah. We&#8217;ve put in time and effort and, and so much thinking that we, we, part of me still really wants it to be something more than what it may. You know, and I know, and this, this conversation may be just as in, um, as premature as, uh, as what I&#8217;m alluding to, right.<br /></p>



<p>Of like, early on we were very optimistic that we would find something bigger down the road anyway. So I have a thought&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Cory Miller:</strong> I, on that thought. I have, I have a thought for when we go to the next conversation. Hmm. Um, how we could maybe approach that even better.&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Corey Maass:</strong> But I guess I like what I do like is the meta, um, the meta of you and I recording all of these conversations.<br /></p>



<p>Right. And I think, like, I remember one, one of the, a a, a mental image, but a [00:22:00] conversation, a memory that, that often pops into my head is when I still worked at we. Um, yes, the one that&#8217;s in the documentary, you can see my bald spot in, in the back of some of the shots, um, where they talk about, you know, the demise of, of WeWork.<br /></p>



<p>Um, so yeah, I&#8217;m, I&#8217;m WeWork famous. Um, but, uh, at the time I sat at the table with, uh, five other entrepreneurs, everybody pursuing different projects and it was great because it was an an instant mastermind and very frequently we. Just say, Hey, could I, you know, buy you lunch and, and pick your brain about such and such?<br /></p>



<p>And I remember a buddy of mine, Joel, coming to a real crossroads in, uh, in product and in business. Um, and again, him saying, Hey, could I just, could we take a walk? I&#8217;m like, you know, vexed about this and [00:23:00] we. Uh, in soho and we walked over to the river and just like standing at the railing and looking at, um, what, what would it have been, um, the Hudson River and looking over to New Jersey and him talking.<br /></p>



<p>And there was this moment of me just feeling very, this is, this is feeling very grown up and very, like, we were having important conversations and, um, You know, and it, it felt great that I hopefully was helping him work through some problems and stuff. But, um, anyway, uh, the value in that experience, that camaraderie and, and then ultimately, like there were other conversations where he helped me just as much as maybe I helped him.<br /></p>



<p>Um, but I&#8217;m hoping that at a high level, even though you and I like session seven, whatever this is, we, we are where we are. It is where it isn&#8217;t, where we expect it to. We are going to continue, but I&#8217;m, I&#8217;m hoping that people watching this are having some of that same, like, [00:24:00] oh, other people have these, these thoughts or go around in these circles or, you know, ramble to themselves just like I do&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Cory Miller:</strong> now.<br /></p>



<p>I, I think so many times, uh, I&#8217;m not just, I don&#8217;t wake up born with a gift of know. What the pro products are. Um, I&#8217;ve gotta figure it out.&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Corey Maass:</strong> Ands am working with you, man. I know. I, I was counting on million dollar idea overnight, the magic.&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Cory Miller:</strong> Um, you know, and uh, so I&#8217;ve done a lot of thinking about products for the last 15 years, obviously, and gone.<br /></p>



<p>Okay. You get, so I think we&#8217;re pulling together some components, comparing experiences too, and. Plowing the new head forward. Um, so yeah, I mean, the camaraderie&#8217;s been amazing. I do it just for that. But second is I think we&#8217;re building some experience about what products work, what, what products don&#8217;t. I, I think there&#8217;s a tendency for me is think [00:25:00] people do have magic and just know it, but there&#8217;s, there&#8217;s, there&#8217;s a lot of things that go into that.<br /></p>



<p>Yeah. And there&#8217;s a lot of. Professionally about this particular topic, but there&#8217;s a reason why comp big companies buy smaller companies because they found the magic and they were pulled in, you know, kind of thing. Um, at least that&#8217;s how I think about it in my humility.&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Corey Maass:</strong> Well, and so I, in the last few years have learned to make things around my house.<br /></p>



<p>I. My carpentry skills are getting better. I&#8217;m not good. But, uh, I have now, you know, built a big roof over my patio. I&#8217;ve built shelves, I&#8217;ve, you know, um, helped my father-in-law fix his roof, stuff like that. Um, and I&#8217;m, I&#8217;ve definitely had the experience where I&#8217;m, I&#8217;m working generally with people who know what they&#8217;re.<br /></p>



<p>But not always. [00:26:00] Uh, I have, I can always jump on YouTube and, and Google things. Um, but I definitely felt the, so a little, a little insight to me like. Years and years ago, I was an artistic genius. Um, in my own mind, absolutely. Like I was, uh, a musician. I still am. I was starting to build product. I still do, but at the time I was convi, utterly convinced that I&#8217;m very smart and I will, I can, I can figure out magic, um, and, uh, an aspect.<br /></p>



<p>Turning middle-aged or whatever it is, is like, I&#8217;m just another human. And yes, I might do some amazing things. Um, but most humans in one sense or another, do some amazing things. Um, but everybody also, everybody has to start from somewhere. And a lot of the times it&#8217;s a group of people. And so, uh, going back to like learning how to repair or I, I got to be, [00:27:00] I was, uh, helped a bunch of people literally build a house in a.<br /></p>



<p>And it was one of the most amazing experiences of my life. And the, the, the, in the crew, it was a dad and some son, his sons all work construction, all build houses, so they know how to knock together, literally knock together a house in a day. And I had no idea how to knock together a house in a day. Um, And so they are amazing at what they do now from experience, and they are smart people.<br /></p>



<p>Um, and then that gets shared with the rest of us. There&#8217;s this trickle down, and I&#8217;m not saying I could go build a house in a day, but at least I have some sense of how it is done. And so this summer when I build a shed, I might be able to build a shed with a couple of other people in a couple of days.<br /></p>



<p>You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. Um, and so there&#8217;s, there&#8217;s definitely. You know, we, we always talk about the Steve [00:28:00] Jobs or the whoever, um, you know, the artistic geniuses. The, the people who can snap their fingers and, and creativity comes out, and then the rest of us have to work at it, you know? And, and that&#8217;s okay.<br /></p>



<p>And it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s a little bit of luck and it&#8217;s a little bit of timing and it&#8217;s a little bit of the people around you, and it&#8217;s a little bit of the industry you&#8217;re in. And then it&#8217;s the practice that you&#8217;ve done. And you and I have both been thinking about product for, you know, 15 years or whatever it is.<br /></p>



<p>And so I&#8217;m walking around, I&#8217;m in San Francisco this week, so I&#8217;m walking around in San Francisco thinking, The amount of, you know, tech and, and whatnot that&#8217;s here. Um, but what it really comes down to is like, I was driving on the highway last night. Judging harshly, all of the ridiculous billboards, because I&#8217;m like, who is Twilio think they&#8217;re advertising to?<br /></p>



<p>Or who is, um, who else did we see monday.com? And I&#8217;m not necessarily picking on their billboards. They&#8217;re fine. But it&#8217;s like, [00:29:00] okay, th this is, these, these is, this isn&#8217;t, that&#8217;s most of these products I don&#8217;t think. Attributable to one person&#8217;s genius. These are products that were built by teams and companies that were built up over time.<br /></p>



<p>And then there&#8217;s a marketing team, and now I&#8217;m questioning some of the marketing decisions, but I&#8217;m like, who are they marketing to? You know? And how does that differ from like the online billboards ads and such that I&#8217;m seeing when I&#8217;m in New Hampshire versus in. You know, I&#8217;m, I&#8217;m essentially in Silicon Valley, you know, so it&#8217;s, uh, humbling, right?<br /></p>



<p>I mean, they&#8217;re exp spending tens of thousands on billboards that I think are not very good. Um, but at the same time, they&#8217;ve arrived there over time, you know? And did it start with conversations like this? Did it, you know, who was the team involved? Who were the people involved? What were their experience?<br /></p>



<p>I think that&#8217;s all fascinating. I wish most [00:30:00] companies. There was just a, a thread on Hacker News. Um, was it Hack News or Reddit? Like what are your favorite postmortems? Um, and it&#8217;s, I, I like the people on that thread were wishing that they were more write-ups of, um, You know, there&#8217;s probably a little bit of morbid curiosity, um, but also like, you know, what are the lessons we can learn, but also a, a lot of it&#8217;s just the stories are fascinating.<br /></p>



<p>There&#8217;s a reason why there&#8217;s 101 podcasts interviewing founders, many of whom haven&#8217;t reached the success that most of us would, would want, themselves included. Um, but the stories are fascinating, you know.&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Cory Miller:</strong> Yeah, it, it, I&#8217;ve, I read the founders at workbook and it was really cool, but, and a lot of it is serendipity.<br /></p>



<p>Yeah. And it&#8217;s like, I was gonna use a band analogy cuz of your music background [00:31:00] and just go like, you know, how does. Um, I know some mu musicians and I&#8217;m like, one pretty dang popular in the nineties, eighties and nineties. Mm-hmm. And, uh, spent some time with him. Really great guy, but I was like, I always wanna go.<br /></p>



<p>How did the, like he&#8217;s played with that, his band for, you know, A long time and they&#8217;ve had success together and it&#8217;s like, how do you, how does that come together? Is always the magic for me. And then how do they make this great music that a lot of the best bands I&#8217;ve heard, you know, they need, like Dave Matthews was the continuum.<br /></p>



<p>You&#8217;re like, man, great voice. But I&#8217;ve also heard like he wouldn&#8217;t be Dave Matthews and Dave Matthews band without all the incredible musicians around him. He happens to get the names stands,<br /></p>



<p><strong>Corey Maass:</strong> the connections he had and stuff like that.&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Cory Miller:</strong> Yeah, that was very much, iThemes , by the way, I got way more credit and I can&#8217;t sing so[00:32:00]&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Corey Maass:</strong> well. But um, yeah, and I think that, thank you. I think you&#8217;ve sort of. In some ways summarized what, what I, my rambling was trying to get at is the, it&#8217;s everything is the sum of its parts, right? And so it&#8217;s like, there was a point where I thought that I would snap my fingers, um, and not that I didn&#8217;t work really, really hard, um, but I now understand that it&#8217;s so much more as the building blocks, the sum of the building blocks, um, and the culmination of things.<br /></p>



<p>And like a lot of bands, you know, I love, in fact, I&#8217;m, I&#8217;m rereading Elton John&#8217;s book. Um, great read by the way. I&#8217;m not a fan of Elton John. I, when I read it the first time, I went back and literally tried to listen to some of his music and I couldn&#8217;t get through most of it. It&#8217;s just so not to my taste.<br /></p>



<p>Um, I&#8217;m wrong. Don&#8217;t, there? There is no question that I am, I am wrong. Literally, [00:33:00] billions of people love his music and I don&#8217;t, so I am wrong here. But the book is really fun. Um, well written self effacing. Self self deprecating. Um, and, and I&#8217;m a music history nerd. Um, but it&#8217;s the, you know how things came.<br /></p>



<p>Um, you know, and he definitely is magical, musically. Um, but he, he watch the past tense of grind grounded. He, he worked really, really hard for a really long time and with a lot of people, and people came and went and stuff like that, you know, so at some point you and I are. Reach a a point where you&#8217;re gonna fire me and hire somebody better and keep going with the band.<br /></p>



<p>Um, and I will be the pee best. Um, you know, the long lost drummer, original drummer of the Beatles, um, who will die in obscurity. [00:34:00] And I accept,&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Cory Miller:</strong> I don&#8217;t think so, cuz you, you, you forget. I don&#8217;t know how to sing and it&#8217;s not gonna be as fun at all without the drums and guitar solo and everything you&#8217;ve done so.<br /></p>



<p><strong>Corey Maass:</strong> But anyway, why don&#8217;t, why don&#8217;t you share your screen if you have the, the read me. I think, I feel like the brainstorming we did last time worked well. Like you were typing, typing, typing, um, while we were both chatting, if that works. Yep. So we&#8217;re here.<br /></p>



<p>Nice. Oh, so there&#8217;s an edit option. That&#8217;s cool. Uh, bottom left, there&#8217;s a button that&#8217;s an edit. Can we make our changes right in it? Cool.<br /></p>



<p><strong>Cory Miller:</strong> You know what, we&#8217;ll wanna go back when we do the, the new brand that we talked about, we&#8217;ll wanna come back and put the links here.&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Corey Maass:</strong> Oh, for sure. [00:35:00] Okay,<br /></p>



<p>so I go to, we&#8217;re press. Slash plugins<br /></p>



<p>and I search for crop<br /></p>



<p>and I&#8217;m seeing what else comes up. And like there&#8217;s a, yeah, image aspect ratio. Custom fields for, um, a ACF crop and image as keywords. Um, I also heard from, I did a, um, a call with um, Matt Cromwell and, um, I hate to say it, but Leslie Pizza, um, cuz I can never remember her last name and I think she actually, like a lot of people call her Leslie Pizza.<br /></p>



<p>Um, But, uh, they were helping me [00:36:00] review one of my other plugins and said that we can actually have up to 12 keywords. Uh, just the first, I think, five show up. So, uh, I was actually misinformed that, or I, under, I had the wrong knowledge that, uh, I thought we could only have a few keywords. So, um, I think on that, on that first screen, Plug in maybe.<br /></p>



<p>Yeah, I saw tags. So, um,<br /></p>



<p>like I&#8217;m, I&#8217;m wondering if, I mean this is, and this is all always speculation, but is, is it better to have image crop or is it better to just have crop? To me, you don&#8217;t crop, you don&#8217;t crop anything that isn&#8217;t an image. So I, it might ju we might, image, crop might be. Cropping is good though.[00:37:00]&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Cory Miller:</strong> So I had crop and cropping. Since we can add more tags, that&#8217;s good knowledge,&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Corey Maass:</strong> right?<br /></p>



<p>In WordPress, uh, featured images are often called thumbnails.<br /></p>



<p>Um, oh, media library. Now that we have that, it&#8217;s probably, you know, if people are looking for ways that they are manipulating images in the media library, maybe they search for media library.<br /></p>



<p>Um, I can&#8217;t imagine that people are looking for the term aspect. Um,<br /></p>



<p>More likely they&#8217;re looking for, oh, image size, right? Like we had the, the guy message me and say, I need, you know, I need [00:38:00] all images, need to ultimately be 700 by 500 or whatever it was, like image size. Um, so anyway, I feel like that flushes it out a lot more. Okay.&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Cory Miller:</strong> Yeah, that&#8217;s awesome. I mean, that&#8217;s really good base level things.<br /></p>



<p>We gotta just check the box for. Uh, do I push saver update code? I&#8217;m always the Control s. Control s. Command desk. Command desk, right.&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Corey Maass:</strong> Um, I probably save, I I imagine that Save actually does both. I just remember that Save took a long time. Okay.&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Cory Miller:</strong> Um. Okay. I put cropping here and I put precise. I took out feature damages, but is there anything else you see that we should probably like a list of features maybe[00:39:00]&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Corey Maass:</strong> I. So up to 150 characters, um, I&#8217;m still looking at the description first. Um, it seems like, uh, do you have a, something that&#8217;ll tell us how many characters we&#8217;re using there? Go stick it in a fake tweet or something though. So I guess they just give you. A counter,<br /></p>



<p>I think like, so I do, I [00:40:00] think we could just say crop images in WordPress Z or is that a sentence? It&#8217;s awesome. I think that&#8217;s really good. WordPress easily, but I, I guess my point is I, we&#8217;re not using 150 characters. Let&#8217;s, let&#8217;s add more words. Um, and WordPress easier. Dash featured image media library.<br /></p>



<p>You know, it&#8217;s a little bit of, um, keyword.<br /></p>



<p>I mean, we had the block too. Mm-hmm. Prop images and WordPress.[00:41:00]&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p>Uh,<br /></p>



<p>say Guttenberg block,<br /></p>



<p>like, um, image crop or guttenberg block. I just always feel like we need, I, I&#8217;m not convinced that people. Only at like truly think of it, it&#8217;s just the block editor. Do you know what I mean? Yeah.<br /></p>



<p>[00:42:00] Yeah, that&#8217;s.<br /></p>



<p><strong>Cory Miller:</strong> Probably have all these memorized, but I was gonna go back into the plugin. So we have mm-hmm. Go ahead.&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Corey Maass:</strong> Um, just the, that we can, um, keyword stuff, the title too. So going back to the plugin tab, crop express,<br /></p>



<p>crop express, four featured images or, um,<br /></p>



<p>I&#8217;m just trying to think of what the key, what the keywords might be like. Hmm. [00:43:00] I don&#8217;t think we need WordPress.<br /></p>



<p><strong>Cory Miller:</strong> Yeah, I was trying to say something like car is a,<br /></p>



<p>it keeps it native, I guess. Like you don&#8217;t have to go outside of WordPress. There&#8217;s a better term for that, I&#8217;m sure.&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Corey Maass:</strong> Right, but I guess this, this is more like, this is more search rankings. I literally think repeating Crop Express for featured images for media library for Gutenberg block. Um,<br /></p>



<p>yeah, I think, I think that that&#8217;s, to me, that&#8217;s what, what the purpose would be. It&#8217;s, it doesn&#8217;t hurt, like those are human readable words, but I do think it helps the seo.<br /></p>



<p>Okay. [00:44:00] And I put block, I don&#8217;t know how long this can be, right? Uh, I mean, short pixels is pretty long. Say what?<br /></p>



<p>I am, I&#8217;m comparing other ones in the repo and like short, short pixel image optimizer Dash Optimize Image is Convert WebP and a V I f. Like they&#8217;re, they&#8217;re, the title of theirs is 66 characters, so I feel like we&#8217;re, we&#8217;ve got room to play with.[00:45:00]&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p>Uh, the sentence above, you can take out featured images, so crop express speeds up your content workflow. Uh, giving you uniform images for your blog post. I think you can take out featured because we now have expanded, but I still love this intro. Um, so even the title at the top, make cropping featured images you can take out featured.<br /></p>



<p>So making<br /></p>



<p>that what you meant right here. Yeah, and, and again, that I think that could be similar to the short description. So rather than make cropping images, we could just say crop images easier.<br /></p>



<p>Yep. I think it&#8217;s bad English, [00:46:00] but I think it.<br /></p>



<p>But I think, yeah, we define the problem, we define the high level solution well, and then talk about features, which is the formula you&#8217;re kind of supposed to follow. Mm-hmm.<br /></p>



<p>Nice.<br /></p>



<p>And I would even add another one, uh, below that first one you just said. Say, um, something like, uh, round avatar images or something like that. Like shapes is shapes and down the road we can add [00:47:00] stars and rainbows and unicorns if we want. But you know, I still think that it&#8217;s pretty amazing that you can crop a circle.<br /></p>



<p>Uh, yeah, there you go.<br /></p>



<p><strong>Cory Miller:</strong> Love it<br /></p>



<p>and the set sizing defaults give. I don&#8217;t know if guardrails communicate cross cultures, but um, to me it&#8217;s like put those Boeing bumpers on your client, right? From like doing crappy stuff. So giving some, you&#8217;re kind of making it easier on your client by giving them some base. You&#8217;re, you&#8217;re actually taking out the [00:48:00] possibility of error on the client you deliver work for by giving them some.<br /></p>



<p>So keep them for,&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Corey Maass:</strong> um, Prevent uploading the wrong,<br /></p>



<p>wrong image, like it&#8217;s really wrong size and shape image, but that&#8217;s really wordy.<br /></p>



<p>Huge images that slow down your site. There you go. Nice.<br /></p>



<p>Yep.<br /></p>



<p>Um, you could also, uh, another, you another new under the, the second item is, um, media library.[00:49:00]&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Cory Miller:</strong> Just throw things out just to get us going.&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Corey Maass:</strong> Absolutely.<br /></p>



<p>Yeah, we&#8217;ve got, at this point we&#8217;ve got the three integration points, featured images, media library, and Gutenberg block. Um, and then we&#8217;ve got settings.<br /></p>



<p>[00:50:00] Settings.&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Cory Miller:</strong> Got the block you said, I&#8217;m sorry. Feature damage image and then the standalone block? Mm-hmm. Okay.<br /></p>



<p>I&#8217;m just testing that. I don&#8217;t know if it works. [00:51:00] I almost feel like putting this above here and then, you know, new, like the first one is the block. Yep. That&#8217;s cool. It&#8217;s in post copy images by sizes set. Image<br /></p>



<p>three, need it. Let&#8217;s see. I almost feel like this needs to be, I don&#8217;t know. I don&#8217;t want to nitpick it too much. Image sizing.<br /></p>



<p>Okay. Anything I missed?&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Corey Maass:</strong> No, I think this is a great next version. Okay.&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Cory Miller:</strong> Save it. Mm-hmm.[00:52:00]&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p>Can you do custom ratios? Mm-hmm.<br /></p>



<p>Where already said that. See, so it&#8217;s really a square circle or&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Corey Maass:</strong> you&#8217;re accustom, right? I I feel like, I mean, it&#8217;s circle, circle or anything else. So, um, pick the most pocket aspect ratios or create your own. Crop a circle if you want to kind of thing. Yeah, I mean they&#8217;re, cuz they&#8217;re all,[00:53:00]&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p>yeah, I think that&#8217;s great. You&#8217;re done. Okay.<br /></p>



<p>Now do you just need this? Yeah, so if you&#8217;ve hit update code and it updated, uh, cuz I&#8217;m not seeing our new tags in there, so I don&#8217;t think we&#8217;ve updated. Oh. Update code. There we go. There we go. Yeah. So send that to me and I&#8217;ll, I&#8217;ll drop it in. Cool.<br /></p>



<p>Done. Great. Um, so I actually need to bounce. Okay. Um, But yeah, you send that to me. Uh, we&#8217;ll plug that in. I&#8217;ll upload it later today. And then, um, again, I I, there&#8217;s a little bit of a long tail, there&#8217;s a couple more the settings that we wanted to add and [00:54:00] stuff like that, but, um, you know, let&#8217;s, again, I&#8217;m, I&#8217;m excited to kind of let it, let it simmer for a while.<br /></p>



<p>Yeah.&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Cory Miller:</strong> Okay. Sounds good to me. I&#8217;m gonna put some notes about the next topic. In chat, um, just so that We&#8217;ll, they&#8217;ll be there and I won&#8217;t lose them.&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Corey Maass:</strong> Yeah, yeah. I&#8217;m sorry. I&#8217;ve, I&#8217;m, yeah, no problem. I&#8217;m getting lost, but, um, yeah, we could also, let&#8217;s, you know, let&#8217;s schedule a call, uh, tomorrow, Friday, too. Okay.<br /></p>



<p>Sounds&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Cory Miller:</strong> good, man. Enjoy San Francisco.&nbsp;<br /></p>



<p><strong>Corey Maass:</strong> Thank you. Thanks man.</p>



<h2><br /></h2>
<p>This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 13 Apr 2023 02:13:35 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:11:"Cory Miller";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:8;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:64:"WPTavern: Yoast SEO 20.5 Drops Support for PHP 5.6, 7.0, and 7.1";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=143580";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:73:"https://wptavern.com/yoast-seo-20-5-drops-support-for-php-5-6-7-0-and-7-1";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:2178:"<p><a href="https://yoast.com/yoast-seo-april-11-2023">Yoast SEO 20.5</a> was released this week with several security fixes and an improved Google SERP preview. The preview shows mobile and desktop snippets with Google&#8217;s current styling so users can see exactly how their snippets will look and tweak how they optimize them for Google Search results.</p>



<img />



<p>Another highlight of this release is that Yoast SEO has dropped compatibility with PHP 5.6, 7.0 and 7.1. The plugin now requires PHP 7.2.5 or higher (along with WP 6.0). While this may seem extreme at first glance, approximately 89.9% of WordPress sites are running on PHP 7.2+. WordPress doesn&#8217;t cross-reference these stats with WP version numbers, but it&#8217;s possible sites running on much older versions of WordPress are also on unsupported versions of PHP.</p>



<img />WordPress <a href="https://wordpress.org/about/stats/">PHP Version Stats</a> &#8211; 4/11/2023



<p>Getting WordPress sites to update to the latest versions of PHP is a slow-moving process, but historically Yoast SEO has been a force for change in pushing users to upgrade their PHP versions. In version 4.5, released in 2017, <a href="https://wptavern.com/yoast-seo-4-5-urges-users-to-upgrade-to-php-7">Yoast SEO threw the weight of its estimated 6.5 million user base behind the movement to push hosts to upgrade their customers to PHP 7</a>. That version of the plugin introduced a large, non-dismissible notice urging site administrators to upgrade to PHP 7.</p>



<p>“To move the web forward, we need to take a stand against old, slow, and unsafe software,&#8221; Yoast founder Joost de Valk said at that time. “Because web hosts are not upgrading PHP, we have decided to start pushing this from within plugins.&#8221; He contended that the WordPress ecosystem was losing good developers because the project was moving too slowly and also made the case for security and speed.</p>



<p>Although the latest version 20.5 will be incompatible with approximately 10% of WordPress sites running unsupported versions of PHP, this move forward is necessary for maintaining a healthy and secure ecosystem. </p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 13 Apr 2023 00:54:23 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:9;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:70:"WPTavern: WordPress Gears Up for 2nd Women and Nonbinary Release Squad";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=143582";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:81:"https://wptavern.com/wordpress-gears-up-for-2nd-women-and-nonbinary-release-squad";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:3046:"<p>WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy is <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/07/preparing-for-the-next-women-nonbinary-release-squad/">coordinating a second women and nonbinary release squad</a> for the 6.4 release, which is anticipated to land in <a href="https://wordpress.org/about/roadmap/">November 2023</a>. In 2020, <a href="https://wptavern.com/wordpress-5-6-simone-includes-new-twenty-twenty-one-theme-and-improved-editor">WordPress 5.6 &#8220;Simone&#8221;</a> was led by an all-women and non-binary identifying release squad, a first in WordPress&#8217; history, and Haden Chomphosy is proposing the project go for it again.</p>



<p>&#8220;Having a release squad comprised of folx we don’t typically see in technology also has a goal of increasing the number of underrepresented people who have experience maintaining, managing, and shipping software in an open source project,&#8221; Haden Chomphosy said. &#8220;All contributions to the release and release process are welcome.&#8221;</p>



<p>WordPress 6.3, which is targeted for a mid-July release, will give prospective 6.4 squad members the opportunity to shadow more experienced contributors and gain new skills by working with mentors and assisting with the release. She is calling for mentors to join in preparing this new round of leaders. The process is a several-months long commitment that gives contributors a head start on understanding their roles in the squad, though it is not required for participation in the 6.4 release.</p>



<p>Haden Chomphosy emphasized that anyone will be able to contribute to the release but the leaders in the 6.4 squad will be limited to this specific group.</p>



<p>&#8220;I short-hand the release to &#8216;women and nonbinary&#8217; for easy referencing in our day-to-day collaboration, but the release squad will be open to anyone who identifies as a woman, nonbinary, or gender-expansive,&#8221; she said. &#8220;All contributions are welcome as always, regardless of how you identify or what groups you feel part of.&#8221;</p>



<p>WordPress has gained valuable new contributors and leaders from this initiative in the past, including 6.2 Core Tech Co-Leads Tonya Mork.</p>



<p>&#8220;Before joining the 5.6 Release Squad, I had <em>not</em> contributed to the project,&#8221; Mork said. &#8220;I had no idea how the release cycle worked or where to start. Yup, I was a contributing noob. But with mentoring, I was <em>well supported</em> in my onboarding. <em>And you will be too! The experience was and still is incredible!</em>&#8220;</p>



<p>Based on the response to Haden Chomphosy&#8217;s proposal, there should be no shortage of contributors and volunteers available to help with the women and nonbinary 6.4 release squad. She is requesting anyone who wants to be part of the squad or help as a mentor leading up to the release to leave a comment on the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/07/preparing-for-the-next-women-nonbinary-release-squad/">post</a>.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 12 Apr 2023 21:02:54 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:10;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:101:"Post Status: Women &amp; Nonbinary Release • WP-CLI 2.8.0 • Redesign Update • Build Block Theme";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:32:"https://poststatus.com/?p=148909";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:94:"https://poststatus.com/women-nonbinary-release-wp-cli-2-8-0-redesign-update-build-block-theme/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:16746:"<h2 id="h-this-week-at-wordpress-org-april-3-2023">This Week at WordPress.org (April 3, 2023)</h2>


<div class="has-background has-theme-palette-8-background-color wp-block-post-excerpt"><p class="wp-block-post-excerpt__excerpt">Sign up soon to mentor and be a part of the upcoming women and nonbinary release squad. Join the Test team in building a block theme. WP-CLI 2.8.0 is coming soon with PHP 8.2 compatibility. Get the latest updates on the WordPress.org redesign.  </p></div>


<div class="wp-block-spacer"></div>



<div class="wp-block-kadence-infobox kt-info-box_94d1bd-77"><div class="kt-blocks-info-box-link-wrap kt-blocks-info-box-media-align-left kt-info-halign-left"><div class="kt-blocks-info-box-media-container"><div class="kt-blocks-info-box-media kt-info-media-animate-none"><div class="kadence-info-box-icon-container kt-info-icon-animate-none"><div class="kadence-info-box-icon-inner-container"><span class="kb-svg-icon-wrap kb-svg-icon-fas_paint-brush kt-info-svg-icon"></span></div></div></div></div><div class="kt-infobox-textcontent"><h2 class="kt-blocks-info-box-title">Women and Nonbinary Release Squad, WP-CLI 2.8.0 Release, Redesign Update</h2><p class="kt-blocks-info-box-text"><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f9b8-1f3fb-200d-2640-fe0f.png" alt="🦸🏻‍♀️" class="wp-smiley" /> <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/07/preparing-for-the-next-women-nonbinary-release-squad/">Preparing for the Next Women &amp; Nonbinary Release Squad</a><br /><br /><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f477-1f3fe.png" alt="👷🏾" class="wp-smiley" /> <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2023/03/29/fse-program-exploration-build-a-block-theme/">FSE Program Exploration: Build a block theme</a><br /><br /><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f7e6.png" alt="🟦" class="wp-smiley" /> <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/03/30/proposal-the-interactivity-api-a-better-developer-experience-in-building-interactive-blocks/">Proposal: The Interactivity API – A better developer experience in building interactive blocks</a><br /><br /><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f469-1f3fb-200d-1f4bb.png" alt="👩🏻‍💻" class="wp-smiley" /> <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/cli/2023/04/05/wp-cli-v2-8-0-release-date/">WP-CLI v2.8.0 release date</a><br /><br /><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f58c.png" alt="🖌" class="wp-smiley" /> <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/meta/2023/04/10/wordpress-org-redesign-update-2/">WordPress.org Redesign Update</a></p></div></div></div>



<div class="wp-block-kadence-spacer aligncenter kt-block-spacer-_b57166-6e"><div class="kt-block-spacer kt-block-spacer-halign-center"><hr class="kt-divider" /></div></div>



<h2 id="h-news"><a href="https://wordpress.org/news">News</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2023/04/episode-53-a-look-at-wordpress-6-2-dolphy/">WP Briefing: Episode 53: A Look at WordPress 6.2 “Dolphy”</a></li>
</ul>



<div class="wp-block-kadence-spacer aligncenter kt-block-spacer-_8f6276-eb"><div class="kt-block-spacer kt-block-spacer-halign-center"><hr class="kt-divider" /></div></div>



<div class="is-layout-flex wp-container-5 wp-block-columns">
<div class="is-layout-flow wp-block-column">
<h2 id="h-community"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community">Community</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community/2023/04/07/its-time-to-plan-your-wp20-anniversary-celebration/">It’s Time to Plan Your WP20 Anniversary Celebration!!</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community/2023/04/06/personalised-coupon-codes-for-wordcamps/">Personalised Coupon Codes for WordCamps</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-core"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core">Core</a> </h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/10/a-week-in-core-april-10-2023/">A Week in Core – April 10, 2023</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/07/preparing-for-the-next-women-nonbinary-release-squad/">Preparing for the Next Women &amp; Nonbinary Release Squad</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/03/preferred-languages-help-test-the-latest-version/">Preferred Languages: Help test the latest version</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/03/30/proposal-the-interactivity-api-a-better-developer-experience-in-building-interactive-blocks/">Proposal: The Interactivity API – A better developer experience in building interactive blocks</a></li>
</ul>



<h3 id="h-developer-blog"><a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/news/">Developer Blog</a></h3>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/news/2023/04/whats-new-for-developers-april-2023/">What’s new for developers? (April 2023)</a></li>
</ul>



<h3 id="h-meetings">Meetings</h3>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/12/editor-chat-summary-wednesday-12th-april-2023/">Editor chat summary: Wednesday, 12th April 2023</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/11/dev-chat-agenda-april-12-2023/">Dev Chat agenda, April 12, 2023</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-design"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/design">Design</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/design/2023/03/30/why-jazz/">Why Jazz?</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-docs"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/docs">Docs</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/docs/2023/04/11/summary-for-docs-team-meeting-april-4-2023/">Summary for Docs Team meeting, April 4, 2023</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2023/04/10/documentation-team-update-april-10-2023/">Documentation Team Update – April 10, 2023</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-hosting"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/hosting">Hosting</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/hosting/2023/04/11/hosting-team-meeting-agenda-2023-04-12/">Hosting Team meeting agenda 2023-04-12</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-marketing"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/marketing">Marketing</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/marketing/2023/04/11/notes-global-marketing-team-meeting-4-april-2023/">Notes: Global Marketing Team meeting, 4 April 2023</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-meta"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/meta">Meta</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/meta/2023/04/10/wordpress-org-redesign-update-2/">WordPress.org Redesign Update</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-mobile"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/mobile">Mobile</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/mobile/2023/04/11/contribute-to-the-future-of-the-wordpress-app/">Contribute to the Future of the WordPress App</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2023/04/07/mobile-team-update-april-6th-2/">Mobile Team Update – April 6th</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-openverse"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/openverse">Openverse</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/openverse/2023/04/11/new-repository-for-storing-sensitive-terms/">New repository for storing sensitive terms</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/openverse/2023/04/11/community-meeting-recap-2023-04-11/">Community Meeting Recap (2023-04-11)</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/openverse/2023/04/10/last-week-openverse-2023-04-03-2023-04-10/">A week in Openverse: 2023-04-03 – 2023-04-10</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-performance"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/performance/">Performance</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/11/performance-chat-summary-11-april-2023/">Performance Chat Summary: 11 April 2023</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-plugins"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/plugins">Plugins</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/plugins/2023/03/21/use-of-code-generators-must-remain-gpl-compatible/">Use of Code Generators Must Remain GPL Compatible</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/plugins/2023/03/10/advance-notice-of-retirement/">Advance Notice of Retirement</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2023/04/11/plugin-team-status-april-10-2023/">Plugin Team Status: April 10, 2023</a></li>
</ul>
</div>



<div class="is-layout-flow wp-block-column">
<h2 id="h-polyglots"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots">Polyglots</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/2023/04/12/agenda-weekly-polyglots-chat-april-12-2023-1300-utc/">Agenda: Weekly Polyglots Chat – April 12, 2023 (13:00 UTC)</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/2023/04/11/polyglots-outreach-effort-retrospective/">Polyglots outreach effort retrospective</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-project">Project</h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/project/2023/02/06/proposal-creating-a-wordpress-contributor-mentorship-program/">Proposal: Creating a WordPress Contributor Mentorship Program</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/project/2023/01/27/discussion-ending-the-eternal-september/">Discussion: Ending the Eternal September</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-support"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/support">Support</a></h2>



<ul>
<li> <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/support/2023/03/support-ticket-triage-session-april-5th-2023-at-1600-utc/">Support ticket triage session – April 5th 2023 at 16:00 UTC&nbsp;</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-test"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test">Test</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2023/04/11/test-chat-summary-11-april-2023/">Test Chat Summary: 11 April 2023</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2023/04/04/hallway-hangout-lets-chat-about-moving-to-the-site-editor/">Hallway Hangout: Let’s chat about Moving to the Site Editor</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2023/03/29/fse-program-exploration-build-a-block-theme/">FSE Program Exploration: Build a block theme</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2023/04/10/test-team-update-10-april-2023/">Test Team Update: 10 April 2023</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-theme">Theme</h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/themes/2023/04/12/themes-team-meeting-notes-april-11-2023/">Themes Team Meeting Notes – April 11, 2023</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/themes/2023/04/04/theme-handbook-overhaul-proposal/">Theme Handbook Overhaul Proposal</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2023/04/11/themes-team-update-april-11-2023/">Themes team update April 11, 2023</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-training"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/training">Training</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/training/2023/04/11/training-team-meeting-recap-for-april-4-2023/">Training Team Meeting Recap for April 4, 2023</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/training/2023/04/05/proposal-creating-learning-pathways-for-learn-wordpress/">Proposal: Creating Learning Pathways for Learn WordPress</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/training/2023/03/29/introduction-to-wordpress-development-syllabus/">Introduction to WordPress Development syllabus</a></li>
</ul>



<h3 id="h-lesson-plans"><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/lesson-plans">Lesson Plans</a></h3>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/lesson-plan/ta-pages-vs-posts/">பக்கங்கள் Vs. இடுகைகள்</a></li>
</ul>



<h3 id="h-tutorials"><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/tutorials">Tutorials</a></h3>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/tutorial/adding-a-sticky-header-or-banner/">Adding a sticky header or banner</a></li>



<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/tutorial/extending-wordpress-common-security-vulnerabilities/">Extending WordPress: common security vulnerabilities</a></li>
</ul>



<h3 id="h-online-workshops">Online Workshops</h3>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/?meeting=a-beginners-guide-to-setting-up-a-basic-website-website-design">A Beginner’s Guide to Setting Up a Basic Website: Website Design</a></li>



<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/?meeting=a-beginners-guide-to-setting-up-a-basic-website-content-planning">A Beginner’s Guide to Setting Up a Basic Website: Content Planning</a></li>



<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/?meeting=becoming-a-better-developer">Becoming a Better Developer</a></li>



<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/?meeting=building-a-page-with-only-patterns">Building a page with only patterns</a></li>



<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/?meeting=lets-code-creating-a-wordpress-multisite-network">Let’s code: creating a WordPress multisite network</a></li>



<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/?meeting=community-sharing-favorite-themes">Community Sharing: Favorite Themes</a></li>
</ul>



<h3 id="h-courses"><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/courses">Courses</a></h3>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/course/converting-a-shortcode-to-a-block/">Converting a Shortcode to a Block</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-wp-cli">WP-CLI</h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/cli/2023/04/05/wp-cli-v2-8-0-release-date/">WP-CLI v2.8.0 release date</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-wptv">WPTV</h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.tv/category/year/2022/">Latest WordPress TV videos</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity" />



<h2 id="h-related-news">Related News:</h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.php.net/archive/2023.php#2023-02-14-2">PHP 8.2.4 Released!</a></li>



<li><a href="https://www.php.net/archive/2023.php#2023-03-16-1">PHP 8.1.17 Released!</a></li>



<li><a href="https://262.ecma-international.org/13.0/">TC39</a></li>



<li><a href="https://github.com/composer/composer/releases/tag/2.5.5">Composer 2.5.5</a></li>
</ul>



<p class="has-theme-palette-7-background-color has-background">Thanks for reading our WP dot .org roundup! Each week we are highlighting the news and discussions coming from the good folks making WordPress possible. If you or your company create products or services that use WordPress, you need to be engaged with them and their work. Be sure to share this resource with your product and project managers. <br /><br /><strong>Are you interested in giving back and contributing your time and skills to WordPress.org?</strong> <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f64f.png" alt="🙏" class="wp-smiley" /> <a href="https://wordpress.org/support/article/contributing-to-wordpress/">Start Here ›</a><br /><br /><strong>Get our weekly WordPress community news digest</strong> — Post Status&#8217; <a href="https://poststatus.com/news/week-in-review/">Week in Review</a> — covering the WP/Woo news plus significant writing and podcasts. It&#8217;s also available in <a href="https://poststatus.com/newsletter">our newsletter</a>. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f48c.png" alt="💌" class="wp-smiley" /></p>



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<p>This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 12 Apr 2023 19:17:43 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:18:"Courtney Robertson";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:11;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:86:"WPTavern: #71 – Nathan Ingram on How To Manage Contracts With Your WordPress Clients";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:48:"https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=143522";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:100:"https://wptavern.com/podcast/71-nathan-ingram-on-how-to-manage-contracts-with-your-wordpress-clients";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:50678:"Transcription<div>
<p>[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley. Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case how to manage your website client contracts.</p>



<p>If you&#8217;d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.</p>



<p>If you have a topic that you&#8217;d like us to feature on the show, I&#8217;m very keen to hear from you and hopefully get you or your idea on the podcast as soon as possible. Head over to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the form there.</p>



<p>So on the podcast today, we have Nathan Ingram. Nathan is the host at iThemes Training, where he teaches WordPress and business development topics via live webinar. Based in Birmingham, Alabama, he has been working with clients to build websites since 1995.</p>



<p>He&#8217;s also the creator of MonsterContracts, which helps WordPress professionals create contracts for their client work.</p>



<p>If you&#8217;ve worked directly with clients, then you&#8217;ll know that things don&#8217;t always go according to plan. Assets might not be delivered on time. The client does not respond to your emails. The expectations of the client begins to creep away from the original proposal.</p>



<p>Whilst there&#8217;s unlikely to be a perfect system to ensure that all projects run according to the plan, you can protect yourself from some of the worst aspects. And for this, you may need a contract.</p>



<p>Nathan is on the podcast today to talk about why he thinks contracts are an essential part of any client facing WordPress work.</p>



<p>We begin by talking about how the contract is designed as a tool to bring clarity to both parties. You, the website builder, can set out the constraints within which you work and the client can understand what they can, and cannot, expect from you. Nathan thinks that setting these expectations before the project begins leads to fewer problems later on.</p>



<p>We talk about the fact that contracts don&#8217;t need to contain overly complex legal language, but they do need to be checked by a qualified legal professional before they&#8217;re deployed.</p>



<p>Nathan also explains how he&#8217;s refined his contract over the years, tweaking the wording and the structure, depending upon the project at hand.</p>



<p>We then get into what you can realistically do should your client breach the contract. Are you able to turn off their website, or withhold work that you&#8217;ve completed? Nathan&#8217;s not really in favour of sending in the lawyers as soon as something goes wrong. Rather trying to resolve any conflict through better communication.</p>



<p>It&#8217;s an interesting conversation, which makes contracts seem less adversarial and more about ensuring that your WordPress website projects run as smoothly as possible.</p>



<p>If you&#8217;re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading over to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast, where you&#8217;ll find all the other episodes as well.</p>



<p>And so without further delay, I bring you Nathan Ingram.</p>



<p>I am joined on the podcast by Nathan Ingram. Hello, Nathan.</p>



<p>[00:04:07] Nathan Ingram: Hey Nathan, how are you?</p>



<p>[00:04:08] Nathan Wrigley: That&#8217;s strange. I&#8217;ve not had that before. Two Nathan&#8217;s on the podcast today. Very different levels of experience in the subject that we&#8217;re going to be talking about. Nathan Ingram is here today and he&#8217;s going to be talking to us about the legal aspects of hiring clients.</p>



<p>You might describe it in one word as contracts, I guess. And there&#8217;s a whole treasure trove of things that we&#8217;re going to unpack there. But before we do that, Nathan, if anybody hasn&#8217;t heard of you before and hasn&#8217;t seen the things that you are doing online, would you just spend a few minutes introducing yourself? You can go back as far as you like but, give us yourself in the WordPress context.</p>



<p>[00:04:44] Nathan Ingram: Yeah, sure. So I&#8217;ve been working with WordPress exclusively since right around 2010. I run a small agency down in Birmingham, Alabama. I&#8217;ve been working with clients since 1995. So I&#8217;ve been around the webspace for quite a while. I also am the host at iThemes Training. So we do live training webinars three days a week through iThemes. And then I also do some business coaching, and I have a product called MonsterContracts.</p>



<p>[00:05:08] Nathan Wrigley: Tell us about the iThemes thing for a minute, because I know you do trainings over there. How did that all come about? Was it like a happy coincidence that you ended up doing that? Were you making content, training content, elsewhere that got you into that position?</p>



<p>[00:05:22] Nathan Ingram: No goodness. So it&#8217;s really an interesting story and we could take a whole , a whole episode on how do people find their way in the WordPress community? So for me, iThemes was actually iThemes training at that time. Early on it was called webdesign.com. They had leased that really awesome domain name.</p>



<p>And it was where I learned WordPress. At that point I was sort of in a, the Macromedia ecosystem, and I had resisted WordPress for quite a while. Decided this is coming and I&#8217;ve got to go with the flow and move into WordPress, because a lot of my clients were looking for WordPress sites. Or sites they could log in and edit themselves. I found iThemes as a theme company, and the training went hand in hand, and that&#8217;s where I learned WordPress. And gradually over time, I started presenting one or two webinars and then gradually rolled into the presenter role.</p>



<p>[00:06:08] Nathan Wrigley: That&#8217;s nice. And so you do that regularly, three times a week. You go live and give trainings about a whole range of different subjects, right?</p>



<p>[00:06:15] Nathan Ingram: Yeah, like just yesterday we did our monthly news roundup on iThemes training. So look at the news in the WordPress world. Particularly from the perspective of people who build and manage websites. That&#8217;s really our audience on iThemes training. What news is important for people who do what I do.</p>



<p>[00:06:29] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so that&#8217;s really excellent. Unfortunately, it&#8217;s not the topic that we&#8217;re going to be talking about today. We&#8217;re talking about one of the areas, I think in web design that really can cause the blue touch paper to be lit, and the firework to go off. This is the whole thing of relationships with clients and the boundaries that you set, and whether you should have contracts, and whether you should be getting involved with lawyers and things like that.</p>



<p>And there are very few parts of the business that I used to run, which would cause me to become upset, irritable, and in some cases quite angry. But relationships with clients could do that. It&#8217;s quite unique, isn&#8217;t it?.</p>



<p>[00:07:15] Nathan Ingram: Oh, it really is, and I&#8217;ll tell you, it is certainly one of the common challenges that people who do WordPress things run into. You go to WordCamps, back when we used to have those things, so we actually just had our WordCamp Birmingham two weeks ago, and it was wonderful to see people in person. But when you get a group of people who work with clients around, you know, a table eating lunch at an event like a WordCamp, inevitably the conversation turns to bad clients and everybody has a story.</p>



<p>[00:07:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it&#8217;s just one of those things. I&#8217;ve got a whole litany of stories. On the whole I think I was able to manage this scenario fairly well, but there was a lot of things probably that I shouldn&#8217;t have done. So I gave way in many cases because I believed that the things that the client was asking for didn&#8217;t really push the boundaries too far, although they certainly stepped over the expectations that I had.</p>



<p>But your premise really, the reason why you&#8217;ve been getting into this and talking about this is because you want to prepare people and educate people to give them a kind of legal framework. And you describe it in terms of boxing in a client if you like. That&#8217;s probably too harsh a word.</p>



<p>You go about it in much more conciliatory language than that. But the point is, you are educating people to get themselves into a position where they&#8217;ve got some piece of paperwork, some contract. Something written down somewhere where you can all go back and say, okay, these are the boundaries, these are the constraints. If we step outside of these, one of us is at fault. So tell us a little bit more about your approach there.</p>



<p>[00:08:47] Nathan Ingram: That&#8217;s a great question. So years ago I put talk together about dealing with problem clients. And the title of the talk was &#8220;dealing with problem clients, building fences around friendly monsters&#8221;. And it&#8217;s a book, actually now I turned that into a book on Amazon. But, it&#8217;s really positioning the client, every client as what I would call a friendly monster.</p>



<p>Meaning they&#8217;re friendly, but they still have teeth. The idea is we need to build fences around the clients that we work with, because we never know what kind of person we&#8217;re dealing with. And the fences that I talk about are the systems and processes in our business.</p>



<p>Four in particular. We need to establish clarity. We need to have good commitments between us and our clients. We need to have communication and documentation. And those four fences can show up in a lot of different ways depending on your particular business and how you work. And there may be additional fences you&#8217;d want to build, but those four at least have to be in place in order to have good ongoing client relationships.</p>



<p>And a lot of those things show up in a contract. But they start as just part of your regular business system, the way you work, the way you deal with clients. Clarity, commitments, communication, documentation. And that&#8217;s where it all has to start. Like you&#8217;ve got to get your house in order before you can really bring in a good document, like a contract to, make your rules clear.</p>



<p>[00:10:10] Nathan Wrigley: I think the clarity piece coming first is really intriguing. Because that was always the misstep that I felt I&#8217;d made. In that I was very often in a position where I felt that I had explained myself clearly, and assuming the clients were being honest when they were explaining their frustration with the way things were going.</p>



<p>I clearly hadn&#8217;t done that. I maybe expressed it in a way which I understood, maybe that was too technical. And later down the road it became obvious that there was a complete disconnect between what I was trying to achieve, and what they, in their head, had got designed. And so yeah, the clarity piece, I think is perfect at the beginning, but also quite difficult to achieve. How do you, how do you advise that? What are some of the strategies that you&#8217;ve got in place around that?</p>



<p>[00:10:57] Nathan Ingram: Yeah, it really is difficult, and one of the first things I think you have to realize is that agreement on the surface does not equal clarity. So, if there&#8217;s no meeting of the minds, like maybe we use technical jargon, or maybe the client doesn&#8217;t tell you everything at the beginning.</p>



<p>I can&#8217;t tell you how many projects I&#8217;ve gotten into where the client, we&#8217;ll get three quarters of the way through the project, and they&#8217;re like, oh, well where do my clients log in? Well, wait, we haven&#8217;t talked about this at all. And in those sorts of situations you ask yourself, well, whose fault is that?</p>



<p>And I would say it&#8217;s probably 50 50. And so one of the great skills that we can develop in in way, but specifically in our way of working with people on the web, is learning the skill of asking great questions. If you learn the skill of asking great questions, and continuing to ask until you reach that point of clarity. That skill can really set you apart from other people that are doing client work.</p>



<p>Asking a question, asking why, and following up with additional questions until you really get down to the root of what the client expects. If you don&#8217;t do that, then oftentimes you can be saying one thing, the client can be saying another, and you&#8217;re both shaking your head up and down, but nobody is really clear on what we&#8217;re saying. Assumptions are made.</p>



<p>[00:12:08] Nathan Wrigley: In the work that you do, do you typically do all of that client exploration work prior to beginning the build? And then in a sense, that process is closed off, and you go away and you take six weeks, whatever it takes to complete your initial first offering and then go back to the client? Or do you, do you encourage a more agile approach where you iterate with the client? I mean, I know that they&#8217;re completely different ways of doing things. Curious as to know what your process is.</p>



<p>[00:12:36] Nathan Ingram: So it really depends on the complexity of the build. We try to get some understanding of that at the very beginning, when we&#8217;re trying to create the scope of work. If it&#8217;s a project we&#8217;ve done before, if it&#8217;s a simple, just a basic identity piece, a brochure site, that&#8217;s fairly simple.</p>



<p>When you get into something that is a lot more complicated, maybe there&#8217;s lots of different content types, or you&#8217;ve got to do some really interesting thing with data. A lot of times what we&#8217;ll end up doing, and I picked this up from my friend Beth Livingston, a change budget. So adding a change budget into the original pricing, that as we go forward and the client gets more ideas where things are uncovered, that we didn&#8217;t realize, there&#8217;s some pre-approved money sitting there, that the client can say, okay, we&#8217;ll allocate some of that change budget to build this thing that we hadn&#8217;t talked about yet.</p>



<p>[00:13:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we&#8217;re in such a curious industry as well, in that there&#8217;s not many things that I purchase that morph over time. You know, if I go into a shop and I buy some clothes, I&#8217;m just getting what I&#8217;m getting. I can see it right off the bat, and there it is, and I can hold it in my hands, and it&#8217;s either what I want or it&#8217;s not what I want.</p>



<p>I&#8217;m not going to purchase that pair of trousers and then turned around a week later and said, actually, you know what? These pockets. I&#8217;ve been wearing these trousers for a couple of weeks now, and the pockets are not deep enough. Can we have an amendment to the pockets please? This curious idea of scope creep that creeps into more or less every project that I was ever involved in.</p>



<p>Are you getting your clients, after your initial discussions then, are you getting them to a point where you draw up some contract which in effect puts the four fences around the friendly monster that you were describing?</p>



<p>[00:14:12] Nathan Ingram: In our world we would call that the scope of work, which is part of the proposal. That comes from the original conversation. Or if it&#8217;s a complicated project, maybe there&#8217;s a discovery phase that happens first to really flesh out, what is the scope of work? What are we trying to accomplish in this project.</p>



<p>And then depending on the complexity of the project, the longer, or the more complex a project is, the greater chance of scope creep. Or honestly, the longer a project takes, because the client delays on content or something else. The longer a project takes also, you tend to have scope creep.</p>



<p>When you talk about scope creep, people&#8217;s eyes roll. They hate scope creep. But I&#8217;ll tell you what, I love scope creep as long as there&#8217;s corresponding price creep, right? If you want more things, that&#8217;s great. It&#8217;s just we can&#8217;t do more for the same price. In your analogy about, we don&#8217;t use the word trousers.</p>



<p>[00:15:00] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah, you use pants don&#8217;t you? I apologize.</p>



<p>[00:15:02] Nathan Ingram: Yeah. When you&#8217;re talking about something like that, it&#8217;s a little bit different because, well some people sell websites more as a product rather than a custom service. We&#8217;re more on the custom build side. Everything we do is bespoke. But you know, if you&#8217;re selling websites as a service, that is a good analogy because you&#8217;re in package three and this is what it comes with and this is your pair of pants.</p>



<p>But for us it would be more like, I&#8217;m hiring a contractor to come in and do a remodel on a kitchen .And this is kind of what we talk about at the beginning, but as we go, maybe we had a problem we didn&#8217;t anticipate. Or maybe my wife sees something on television that she wants to add. And so we want to add to it and we change it along the way. That&#8217;s really a closer analogy, I would think, to a custom website.</p>



<p>[00:15:44] Nathan Wrigley: It&#8217;s pretty clear that the audience for this podcast is pretty broad and deep. In other words, there are all sorts of people listening to this doing all sorts of work around the WordPress space. Some of them very new to WordPress and website building at all. Some of them just doing it for their own hobbies. Other people just getting into building websites for the first time.</p>



<p>So let&#8217;s speak to that crowd first. The crowd who really are just embarking on a career. They&#8217;re scoping out whether they wish to build websites for other people and charge for that, and make a business out of that. Let&#8217;s speak to the importance of a contract, because it may be that when you&#8217;re starting out, you&#8217;re just doing this with friends and we know that that can turn south quite quickly.</p>



<p>So, and also, you know, you may be encouraging businesses in your local area to come on board and they&#8217;re going to be expecting something like a contract. Is this an essential component of the makeup of a web designer? Do you truly need a contract? Or is there any realistic situation where it&#8217;s okay to begin work on a website, charging a fee without some legal protection?</p>



<p>[00:16:50] Nathan Ingram: Wow, what a great question. For years I worked without a contract. I just had a proposal with a scope of work and a price, and you pay me, I build the thing and there it goes. Then I started running into problems. Expectations that were never really talked about anywhere. For example, oh wait, this would&#8217;ve been like many years ago.</p>



<p>But at that point it was maybe Internet Explorer 6 was the browser of choice for everyone. And the person would say, wait this is not working on my Internet Explorer 4. Well, we don&#8217;t design for older browsers, we design for newer browsers. And there was great difference in rendering between those two.</p>



<p>These are the sorts of things that you don&#8217;t think about until you have a problem with a client. What I like to say is you don&#8217;t need a contract for good clients. You need a contract for bad clients. But my goodness, it&#8217;s hard to tell them apart at the beginning. So every client gets a contract. And my contract is mostly plain English, and virtually every paragraph in that contract, aside from the necessary legal constructions, everything in that contract is there because I had a problem one time with a client. That now gets added to the contract for the next time.</p>



<p>[00:17:59] Nathan Wrigley: I was very much like you in that I began way back, and it was long before IE6 in fact. I remember writing that into my contracts at one point. We are not supporting IE6. It was exactly the problem you described. I had happily breezed through multiple websites. No problem at all, everything was fine. I had a client who simply was able to push harder than anybody I&#8217;d come across before. In other words everything that I delivered, they would either reject or request it to be entirely different.</p>



<p>So this whole notion to me of scope creep and the client who refused to accept that anything was finished, came along. And it really was at that point that I started to look around and try to protect myself. So, I would imagine that your advice is really, it doesn&#8217;t matter on what level you&#8217;re doing this. You need some kind of legal protection, right?</p>



<p>[00:18:51] Nathan Ingram: So I would even take a step backwards. You need a consistent process that you use for every client, every project, every time. And that process needs to be documented somewhere in something that you and the client agree to. Call it whatever you want. Call it a contract. Call it, as we do, a master services agreement. You could put it in your proposal, but just have some place where everybody&#8217;s agreeing to the process. That&#8217;s that piece of clarity at the beginning where we are clear on how this is going to proceed.</p>



<p>Where we get into trouble is where we, we think, well we just sort of do every project differently and there&#8217;s not really a consistent process. And so the client is able at that point to dictate how the project goes. Will have at some point, you know, some level of control over your world, as long as you&#8217;re building that website. Instead of realizing, okay, this is the best way to build. We&#8217;re going to document this process out, and have the client agree to it in a contract.</p>



<p>[00:19:47] Nathan Wrigley: I guess whenever I&#8217;ve read legal contracts before, whether they&#8217;re for my car insurance or what have you. I&#8217;m always confounded by the language used, within moments of beginning the reading of it. I&#8217;m coming across, not only words which I haven&#8217;t encountered before, but the sentence construction is entirely bizarre.</p>



<p>In other words, it can be read by a lawyer. Sometimes I&#8217;m confused as to whether or not it&#8217;s written deliberately to be hard read or whether or not it&#8217;s the most expedient way of hammering something down perfectly. I can never parse that. Either way, I&#8217;m left confounded.</p>



<p>So given that lawyers very often end up with this language, which is impenetrable. And you mentioned that your contracts are in plain English. Is it possible to nail things down, absolutely watertight with plain English? And do you feel yourself equipped to do that? Or is this really the domain of a lawyer? Do we need to get a lawyer to go through your contract and inspect it to make sure that in every scenario it&#8217;s having your back?</p>



<p>[00:20:59] Nathan Ingram: So, just first of all, I&#8217;ll answer this from my perspective as a person who&#8217;s been working with clients, doing web things for over 25 years. I&#8217;m not an attorney. This is not legal advice or anything like that. But my experience has been sort of a blend of both.</p>



<p>It&#8217;s important to have good, practical experience working with clients and knowing what the problems are. But you also do need the legal language. Because if the worst thing happens and you end up in court with a client, there&#8217;s a reason that attorneys write things the way they do. You know, this is language that has been proven out and so forth.</p>



<p>And so if you take a contract that is exclusively plain English, you can get tied up with defining what the meanings of this word and that word and so forth are, and it turns into a mess. So, if you went out today and you did a search for a web design contract on the web, you would find two types of contracts in general.</p>



<p>You would find some that are just absolutely plain English with no legal constructions whatsoever. And those are okay. They do establish clarity, or give you kind of a template to establish some clarity. But they don&#8217;t have the legal protections. On the other side, it&#8217;s like the total opposite end of the spectrum. Contracts that are a hundred percent legalese, and I don&#8217;t understand what some of these things mean. And this is what you were talking about a bit earlier. And I&#8217;m not sure if that really gives clarity to the client, because nobody really knows what any of this means unless you&#8217;re an attorney.</p>



<p>And so what I found to be the best approach, and this is what I&#8217;ve done, is I began years ago explaining our process. Explaining what we do, what we don&#8217;t do. Explaining some of the issues like browser compatibility, and what happens if you hire a digital marketing person that comes in and they break your website. Are we responsible for that because we&#8217;re managing your website.</p>



<p>All of the bad experiences I&#8217;ve had with clients, I started putting those things down in a document and then I gave that to an attorney and said, okay, make this legal. And so they added all the necessary legal constructions, and patched the holes. Over time this has become my agency contract, and that&#8217;s what I ultimately turned into MonsterContracts.</p>



<p>[00:23:02] Nathan Wrigley: With your contracts, did you find that the nature of the project at hand, in other words, the one that you&#8217;re working on right now. Given that each client website is slightly different and it may have different constraints. It may need, I don&#8217;t know, let&#8217;s imagine, a WooCommerce store or something like that. We really are getting into a completely different variety of website. Or it may be a simple brochure site. Or it may be that there&#8217;s a bespoke plugin, for example, has to be written for that website.</p>



<p>Do you advise taking those contracts that you&#8217;ve had written, or rather inspected by lawyers, do you take them back and get them to look, more of a scan through each time and append to it, the bits and pieces that are needed? Or have you settled on a contract which you think is broadly good enough to fit any situation?</p>



<p>[00:23:50] Nathan Ingram: It&#8217;s a great question. So this exact situation is why I recommend a two document approach. So we have a proposal of services that deals with the scope of work and the price for every individual project. And those are going to be different every time. But then we have a master services agreement, or a contract, that has the rules of the road for every project. These don&#8217;t change. And so we present those documents together.</p>



<p>So the contract that the master services agreement covers the process. All these things that we do and timeframes, and what happens if you don&#8217;t pay and, here&#8217;s how the website management works, and we don&#8217;t guarantee results for SEO.</p>



<p>All these things that need to be in a contract that don&#8217;t change from project to project, are there in the contract. But then the scope of work of we&#8217;re going to build this plugin, or we&#8217;re going to add a store, we&#8217;re going to do whatever. Those are in the proposal, which is the scope of work and the price for that individual project.</p>



<p>[00:24:43] Nathan Wrigley: Right, okay, that&#8217;s an intriguing separation. Yeah, so two different documents. One which is more bespoke and one which is more generic and you can reuse over and over again.</p>



<p>[00:24:53] Nathan Ingram: Exactly.</p>



<p>[00:24:54] Nathan Wrigley: So, given that we&#8217;ve got a contract. Given that it&#8217;s been written by a lawyer, and there may be aspects in there that are impenetrable to us. I guess there&#8217;s always going to be a need to go back to the lawyers. I can imagine the fees of this starting to tick up quite quickly actually. Because if a client comes back to you and you believe they&#8217;re in breach of the contract in some way, but the contract is difficult to read, it&#8217;s in that legal language. That&#8217;s an important thing to do, isn&#8217;t it? You really do have to understand the ins and outs of your contract.</p>



<p>So given any scenario of inverted commas, wrongdoing by the client, you are able to say to them with confidence, look, this is what you signed. This is what this clause in the contract meant. In other words, you have to know what it says in plain English in your head. Otherwise you can&#8217;t really enforce it, because you wouldn&#8217;t be sure what you were able to enforce.</p>



<p>[00:25:47] Nathan Ingram: Right, and this is why if you were to open my agency contract, or if you were to look at MonsterContracts. You would see things like payment terms, and they&#8217;re all in plain English. Again, this is why I said earlier, I want to have my system documented ahead of time.</p>



<p>Like I want to know, internally, this is how we deal with late payments. This is what happens if the client disappears during a project, all these things. We have our policies internally for this. Those are then put into the contract in very plain wording that can be easily pointed to. There have to be legal constructions, but these are, they&#8217;re really at the end of the document and they don&#8217;t pertain, nearly as much to these practical issues that come up with the client.</p>



<p>[00:26:28] Nathan Wrigley: Do you ever, so this is a question more directed at you personally, given that you&#8217;ve got all these contracts and you&#8217;ve thought all of this through. Do you ever let things slip, in other words, you&#8217;re having a conflict internally. Part of you saying, I know that this client is now in breach of what the, not only the spirit, but the letter of the contract said. But I&#8217;ve got a bit of a spidey sense that I can let this one go. It feels like it&#8217;s going to be all right. Because there be monsters down there.</p>



<p>And it&#8217;s so easy. I did that and probably continue to do that quite a bit, because sometimes I feel that if I push the legal button, I really have transformed everything. I&#8217;ve suddenly gone from it being a fairly friendly relationship, albeit fraught at times. To a really adversarial relationship where the lawyers are getting involved and so on. So I&#8217;m just wondering whether or you permit yourself to ignore your contracts in some scenarios.</p>



<p>[00:27:24] Nathan Ingram: Oh, what a great question. So the answer to that question, it revolves around emotional intelligence, right? you have to make a judgment call on, is this a situation that is worth really enforcing the contract or not. And honestly, many times, let&#8217;s just say, here&#8217;s the situation. The client, we&#8217;ve been waiting for three months for the client to supply assets that are needed to build the website, and that happens all the time, right? Clients delay, delay, delay for content, and photography and everything.</p>



<p>So, in the contract, it says if we haven&#8217;t heard from you in 30 days, then your project is suspended. And there&#8217;s some things that happen as a result of that. Now, can we choose to change that? Sure, but oftentimes what will solve that problem is a simple email to the client. Hey, we haven&#8217;t heard from you in the last 30 days. At this point your project is about to go into suspended status. And this is what that means.</p>



<p>We explain in the contract. And just having a clarifying email like that can oftentimes shake up the client and get them refocused on the project. If it doesn&#8217;t, then you have to make a judgment call on, is this a salvageable project or not?</p>



<p>[00:28:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I feel like I&#8217;ve encountered many different interpretations of this. On the one hand, there&#8217;s a lot of people out there in the wild who really are proponents of, look, the minute it goes wrong, start lawyering. Just protect yourself. Get the lawyers involved. You cease communication with the client and start to go through the lawyers.</p>



<p>It&#8217;s this idea of, it&#8217;s not working out. I need you to do what you&#8217;ve agreed right now, otherwise it doesn&#8217;t work. We also hear constantly about firing clients and the joy that that can bring.</p>



<p>But on the other hand, I feel that, like you said, you have to judge off your own instincts sometimes whether there is a legitimate reason behind there. And that has happened to me. You know, I&#8217;ve had clients that have not delivered things, and then it turns out there&#8217;s not only a plausible reason, but a reason, which if it were me in their shoes, I would desperately want the web designer to understand my crisis.</p>



<p>Something personal has happened, some event in their life has meant that they literally have been away from the computer for weeks on end. And so it&#8217;s not really their fault. I guess the answer is use your judgment. Invoke the spidey sense, and figure out which is the best way to proceed.</p>



<p>[00:29:42] Nathan Ingram: For sure. I mean, we&#8217;re dealing with people here, right? And so my default dealing with people is generally grace. I&#8217;m very gracious with people. Understanding about issues that come up. On the other hand, it&#8217;s important to have a document that protects you. If you get to the point where you have to fire the client.</p>



<p>That&#8217;s a great conversation. And, and you hear a lot, especially on social media and Facebook groups and places like that. Oh, we got to fire the client. This whole discussion, right? But that&#8217;s complicated. If you want to fire the client, can you even do that? Do you have a contract that specifies what happens if you want to terminate the relationship?</p>



<p>That&#8217;s where having a good document that protects you is critical, because you know at some point, oh, the client didn&#8217;t pay me, so I&#8217;m going to turn their website off. Well, guess what? If you just turn their website off for non payment, and they haven&#8217;t agreed to that stipulation, then you can get sued for that.</p>



<p>Well you didn&#8217;t give me due process and whatever. And you can find yourself in a lot of trouble if you don&#8217;t have a good document that protects you. So my advice is always have a great contract that is weighted towards you as the service provider, and then you can choose to be gracious when you want.</p>



<p>[00:30:44] Nathan Wrigley: So let&#8217;s get into that bit. You were mentioning about switching the website off. So it&#8217;s almost like the sanctions piece. What do you have in your arsenal as a web designer, which you can bring to bear should you need to apply a little bit of pressure to make sure that things are moving? So I&#8217;m describing a scenario now where things have clearly gone south.</p>



<p>We&#8217;re definitely in the territory of miscommunication has been heaped upon miscommunication. We&#8217;re at the point of almost falling out. Communication is breaking down, and so we now need to bring out the big guns, if you like. What have we got? You mentioned turning off the website, that&#8217;s obviously one thing that we could do, given that that was in a contract.</p>



<p>I&#8217;m thinking we could refuse to do any additional work. There&#8217;s obviously the refusal to communicate unless you go through lawyers at this point. What are the kind of things that you would put in your contracts that you would allow yourself to have as an option?</p>



<p>[00:31:40] Nathan Ingram: So it would obviously depend on where we are in the process of the project. But if you&#8217;re in the middle of building the site, the client is texting you at 2:00 AM, or whatever. This is clearly not going to work, and we&#8217;ve tried to communicate and tried to request the client to change their behaviour, and they just simply won&#8217;t do it for whatever reason, and you need to pull the plug on the project. Then, you know at that point, at least my contract says, we as an agency get to evaluate the work that&#8217;s been done and say, okay, 78% has been completed and so you owe this much more.</p>



<p>Or if we&#8217;ve already received full payment, we&#8217;ll refund that much or whatever. You need some process by which you can mitigate or decide who gets what at the end of this. So if you&#8217;re in the middle of the project, and you want to pull the plug, somebody has to figure that out.</p>



<p>If it&#8217;s a client that&#8217;s maybe in a management phase and they&#8217;re just not paying their bill or they&#8217;re asking for too much or whatever, it&#8217;s always a conversation. What&#8217;s going on here? And is there something we don&#8217;t understand about this? But, at some point you have to have an agreement that if you don&#8217;t pay your bill within certain time, then we do suspend the website from view.</p>



<p>[00:32:46] Nathan Wrigley: I guess there is also a point where you have to cease communication through anything other than the lawyers. Because at some point any stream of email going left, right, and center has to be mediated by a professional who&#8217;s removed from all of this.</p>



<p>[00:33:03] Nathan Ingram: Yeah, you really do. And you know, we first tried to do arbitration, just to try to keep things out of court. That&#8217;s just a personal preference. But at some point you have to do that. Now, thankfully I&#8217;ve never even gotten close to anything like that, and I&#8217;ve heard horror stories of where it&#8217;s gotten to that point.</p>



<p>You know, a lot of this is, as you work with clients and you have good client experiences and bad client experiences. You start to develop, like you said earlier, this spidey sense. This radar of early on, like before you even sign a proposal with a client, getting better at filtering out the bad clients at the beginning.</p>



<p>Hopefully over time that becomes part of this, where you don&#8217;t have nearly the issues. Early on I had bad clients. They would take advantage of me. they didn&#8217;t want to pay. They wanted to pay a just a little bit, not really what the work was worth.</p>



<p>They would constantly second guess and question my professional decisions. It was just terrible. I began to realize there are better clients out there and, not let those difficult clients in our world to begin with.</p>



<p>[00:34:02] Nathan Wrigley: It&#8217;s interesting as this podcast has gone on, we&#8217;ve concentrated on the negative aspect of contracts, in the, you know, we&#8217;re protecting ourselves. This horrible thing could happen, so make sure you&#8217;ve got some protection. Oh, and this horrible thing could happen. But really, it&#8217;s the opposite, isn&#8217;t it? The contract is there to give you peace of mind. It&#8217;s to create a sort of positive scenario.</p>



<p>And so hopefully you won&#8217;t find yourself in these positions. If the contract is robust enough, everybody signed it, read it, understood it, then those boundaries are in place so that these disasters don&#8217;t occur. So there&#8217;s a bit of silver lining on this cloud.</p>



<p>[00:34:38] Nathan Ingram: Oh, it absolutely is. There&#8217;s this old story about this mother who&#8217;d warned her children about playing next to the road because they lived next to this busy highway. And oh, don&#8217;t get close to the road because, you know, you could get hit by a car or whatever. And so the kids would not go just a few feet from the house because they were terrified of this road.</p>



<p>And then they realized, well, our kids aren&#8217;t even playing in our yard. So they put up a fence between the yard and the road. And the kids then could play within the boundaries of the fence and weren&#8217;t afraid of the road anymore. And that&#8217;s just a little example of put up a fence, a contract, and it really frees you to work better with clients.</p>



<p>And in my experience, it&#8217;s if a client out of the gate, if the client pushes back against some of the things in our contract, it&#8217;s a huge red flag that we probably don&#8217;t want to work with this client, just right away. Because everything that is in our contract is there for a reason.</p>



<p>I tell the clients that. It&#8217;s a rather long document, but everything is there for a purpose. And if you have questions about it, I&#8217;m happy to answer those, you know, happy to talk through why we do this. But it&#8217;s there for a reason and it really establishes the boundaries of our relationship.</p>



<p>And the remarkable thing about all of this is, people look at a contract, well, I&#8217;m afraid to get my clients to sign this, it&#8217;s really long or whatever. The good clients have no problem signing contracts like this. They welcome it. It&#8217;s a mark of your professionalism that you&#8217;ve thought through your business well enough to have a well crafted document that governs this whole process of us working together.</p>



<p>[00:36:03] Nathan Wrigley: You&#8217;ve obviously given this a great deal of thought in the past. You live in the United States and you mentioned Alabama. Obviously America&#8217;s a tapestry of different states with laws and, honestly I don&#8217;t understand that a little bit. But in the UK we have UK law and then there&#8217;s EU law, and then obviously there&#8217;s law in other jurisdictions.</p>



<p>This, I suppose is something which we might mention right now, towards the end of our recording. You&#8217;ve got to have that in mind as well. It really does matter where you are and where the clients are because I guess you&#8217;ve got to think about the law. Should it go wrong, are you protected correctly given where the client is and where you are?</p>



<p>[00:36:40] Nathan Ingram: Yeah, for sure. There&#8217;s a lot of local laws that govern things that you wouldn&#8217;t think about. And that&#8217;s why it&#8217;s critical to have a local attorney that understands technology and things like intellectual property and these sorts of things, to take a look at whatever document you have.</p>



<p>One of the biggest challenges with MonsterContracts was, okay, I&#8217;ve got this document that I have a hundred percent faith in for my work here, and really even state to state. There are very few things that would have to change from state to state, using in the United States.</p>



<p>But then we started getting some people buying the product internationally. And I began to wonder, wow, how is this going to work? I did have some experience. I had a coaching client, somebody that I was working with in business development who lived there in the UK. I provided her a copy of the contract and she had it vetted through a local attorney there.</p>



<p>There were just very few changes. So, the way that at least my contract works is most of it, and I would just, pulling a number out of the air, say 80% of the document is just plain language about processes and things like that. And the legal language is at the end. So the attorney in the area, whether it&#8217;s internationally or locally in a different state or whatever, they could just substitute the little bits of standard legal language at the end and make it work wherever you are. And we now have people who&#8217;ve bought MonsterContracts all over the world and they&#8217;re having that experience where the attorney can review it with maybe one or two hours of time. It works great for their location.</p>



<p>[00:38:05] Nathan Wrigley: So just give us the quick elevator pitch of MonsterContracts. It sounds like that it&#8217;s a service that you can essentially log in, pay your subs, and then you can extract from it contracts, which hopefully you can then use.</p>



<p>[00:38:19] Nathan Ingram: That&#8217;s basically it. And so again, this is, it&#8217;s based on my contract that over 25 years of working with clients, I&#8217;ve gradually made better until it&#8217;s virtually bulletproof, I think, in my opinion. The MonsterContracts is simply a Word document. You log in, you purchase the document. You take this. You tweak anything that&#8217;s there to match your processes or the, you know, if you don&#8217;t do things in the same order that the contract specifies, change that around. Plain simple wording. And then the recommendation is always take that to your local attorney to allow them to, you know, run through it and make any changes.</p>



<p>And universally the response has been, one or two hours of time and it&#8217;s done. So, for most people they&#8217;re going to have one of the two types. So if they&#8217;re using a contract, they have the type that&#8217;s just plain English and full of holes, or it&#8217;s just a bunch of legalese that no one understands.</p>



<p>MonsterContracts it addresses the specific situations that we encounter as web professionals, and it provides the cover that you need to grow your business. It addresses all the things that we deal with in client work.</p>



<p>[00:39:16] Nathan Wrigley: I think you&#8217;ve got a system whereby you can submit amendments that you&#8217;ve had made. So let&#8217;s say for example, in my case, the UK. I could make amendments and then submit them back to MonsterContracts so that other people can benefit from that as well.</p>



<p>[00:39:32] Nathan Ingram: Yeah, exactly. So we have the ability to do that. That&#8217;s an area of MonsterContracts that I&#8217;m really working on growing this year. We haven&#8217;t had as many members do that as I had hoped originally. And so that&#8217;s one of our goals this year is to expand those revisions. MonsterContracts is a subscription, just to keep access because we do have the contract vetted by an attorney annually.</p>



<p>And, there are usually at least a few changes to the contract every year to just keep up to date with things that are happening in client work. The subscription gives you access to those changes as well as any revisions that people upload. And if you upload a revision that&#8217;s accepted we credit you for that year&#8217;s cost.</p>



<p>[00:40:06] Nathan Wrigley: So a scary subject hopefully somewhat tamed by having contracts. Nathan, thanks for chatting to us today and putting our minds at rest and giving us some advice. If the listeners to this would like to get in touch or figure out where you are or begin a chat with you, what are the best, some of the best places to find you online?</p>



<p>[00:40:26] Nathan Ingram: Yeah, sure. So, monstercontracts.com is, the place to find the MonsterContracts product. There&#8217;s a great contact form there if you want to reach out to me about any contract related questions. My coaching website is nathaningram.com. That is available out there for coaching work or questions around that subject. And I&#8217;m online three days a week with iThemes training, at training.ithemes.com.</p>



<p>[00:40:48] Nathan Wrigley: Nathan Ingram, thank you so much for chatting to us on the podcast today. I really appreciate it.</p>



<p>[00:40:52] Nathan Ingram: Thanks, Nathan. I enjoyed it.</p>
</div>



<p>On the podcast today, we have <a href="https://nathaningram.com/">Nathan Ingram</a>.</p>



<p>Nathan is the host at iThemes Training where he teaches WordPress and business development topics via live webinar. Based in Birmingham, Alabama, he has been working with clients to build websites since 1995.</p>



<p>He’s also the creator of MonsterContracts, which helps WordPress professionals create contracts for their client work.</p>



<p>If you’ve worked directly with clients, then you’ll know that things don’t always go according to plan. Assets might not be delivered on time. The client does not respond to your emails. The expectations of the client begins to creep away from the original proposal.</p>



<p>Whilst there’s unlikely to be a perfect system to ensure that all projects run according to the plan, you can protect yourself from some of the worst aspects, and for this, you may need a contract.</p>



<p>Nathan is on the podcast today to talk about why he thinks contracts are an essential part of any client facing WordPress work.</p>



<p>We begin by talking about how the contract is designed as a tool to bring clarity to both parties. You, the website builder, can set out the constraints within which you work, and the client can understand what they can, and cannot, expect from you. Nathan thinks that setting these expectations before the project begins leads to fewer problems later on.</p>



<p>We talk about the fact that contracts don’t need to contain overly complex legal language, but they do need to be checked by a qualified legal professional before they’re deployed.</p>



<p>Nathan also explains how he’s refined his contracts over the years, tweaking the wording and the structure, depending upon the project at hand.</p>



<p>We then get into what you can realistically do should your client breach the contract. Are you able to turn off their website or withhold work that you’ve completed? Nathan’s not really in favour of sending in the lawyers as soon as something goes wrong, rather trying to resolve any conflict through better communication.</p>



<p>It’s an interesting conversation which makes contracts seem less adversarial and more about ensuring that your WordPress website projects run as smoothly as possible.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Useful links.</h2>



<p><a href="https://training.ithemes.com/">iThemes Training</a></p>



<p><a href="https://monstercontracts.com/">MonsterContracts</a></p>



<p><a href="https://birmingham.wordcamp.org/2023/">WordCamp Birmingham</a></p>



<p>Nathan&#8217;s &#8220;Dealing with problem clients, building fences around friendly monsters&#8221; <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrSH7Mq8ZZs">webinar</a>.</p>



<p><a href="http://nathaningram.com">Nathan&#8217;s website</a></p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 12 Apr 2023 14:00:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"Nathan Wrigley";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:12;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:87:"Do The Woo Community: When WooCommerce Developers Need to Find an Accessibility Partner";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=74744";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:59:"https://dothewoo.io/woocommerce-accessibility-partnerships/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:421:"<p>With the need to make sure more sites start with being accessible, learn when you should consider bringing in a partner.</p>
<p>&gt;&gt; The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://dothewoo.io/woocommerce-accessibility-partnerships/">When WooCommerce Developers Need to Find an Accessibility Partner</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://dothewoo.io">Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community</a>	.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 12 Apr 2023 06:03:03 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:13;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:93:"WPTavern: Limit Login Attempts Plugin Patches Severe Unauthenticated Stored XSS Vulnerability";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=143554";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:104:"https://wptavern.com/limit-login-attempts-plugin-patches-severe-unauthenticated-stored-xss-vulnerability";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:1622:"<p>Wordfence has <a href="https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2023/04/update-now-severe-vulnerability-impacting-600000-sites-patched-in-limit-login-attempts/">published</a> a security advisory about <a href="https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2023-1912">a severe unauthenticated stored Cross-Site Scripting vulnerability</a> in the <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/limit-login-attempts">Limit Login Attempts</a> plugin, which is active on more than 600,000 WordPress sites. </p>



<p>The security issue was discovered by Wordfence security researcher Marco Wotschka in January 2023. It was submitted to the WordPress Plugin Security Team, which acknowledged receipt of the report nearly two months later on March 24, 2023.</p>



<p>&#8220;This can be leveraged by unauthenticated attackers to facilitate a site takeover by injecting malicious JavaScript into the database of an affected site that may execute when a site administrator accesses the logging page,&#8221; Wotschka said.</p>



<p><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/limit-login-attempts/">Version 1.7.2</a> of the plugin patches the vulnerability. It was released on April 4 with a note in the changelog that simply says &#8220;Security fixes.&#8221; Version 1.7.1 and previous versions remain vulnerable. </p>



<p>In August 2021, the plugin had more than 900,000 active users, and more than 2 million in 2018, but seems to be dying a slow death and is no longer maintained, as it hasn&#8217;t been updated in years.</p>



<p>Wordfence has more details in the advisory on how the plugin might be exploited and advises users update immediately.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 12 Apr 2023 03:19:21 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:14;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:122:"WPTavern: TeamWP Launches Team Experience Index To Measure Employee Engagement and Satisfaction in the WordPress Ecosystem";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=143527";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:133:"https://wptavern.com/teamwp-launches-team-experience-index-to-measure-employee-engagement-and-satisfaction-in-the-wordpress-ecosystem";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:1868:"<p>In February 2023, James Giroux <a href="https://teamwp.co/blog/the-benefits-of-investing-in-employee-engagement/">founded TeamWP</a>, a project that aims to advocate for open, people-first workplaces in the WordPress ecosystem. His first initiative was to launch the <a href="https://teamexperienceindex.com/">Team Experience Index</a>, a benchmark employee engagement survey designed specifically for people working in the world of WordPress.</p>



<p>“The distributed nature of WordPress companies means they often lack the resources and knowledge to create truly open, people-first workplaces,” Giroux said. “The Team Experience Index fills this gap by providing insights and benchmarks that help companies identify strengths and areas for improvement, fostering a more open, collaborative, and innovative work culture.”</p>



<p>The comprehensive survey will be aggregated and anonymized. It takes approximately 4-7 minutes to complete and includes questions about employee experience, company culture, leadership, management and teamwork, career progression opportunities, professional development, compensation and recognition, and employees&#8217; individual experiences. </p>



<p>While responses are recorded anonymously, it&#8217;s important to note that the company name is required, along with the employee&#8217;s role and the number of employees. Respondents should be aware that they are collectively giving away a lot of private information and should only share if they believe the insights will have a positive impact on the wider ecosystem.</p>



<p>Giroux plans to share the initial results of the Team Experience Index at WordCamp Europe in Athens in June 2023. Anyone working at a WordPress product or service company, agency, or hosting company is invited to <a href="https://teamexperienceindex.com/">complete the survey</a>.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 11 Apr 2023 20:55:59 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:15;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:79:"Do The Woo Community: Using WooCommerce Subscriptions at Scale with Devin Price";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=74726";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:55:"https://dothewoo.io/woocommerce-subscriptions-at-scale/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:436:"<p>When a site generates 10k orders each hour, and you have 8 million products going out, most of them on subscription, you need to know how to scale.</p>
<p>&gt;&gt; The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://dothewoo.io/woocommerce-subscriptions-at-scale/">Using WooCommerce Subscriptions at Scale with Devin Price</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://dothewoo.io">Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community</a>	.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 11 Apr 2023 08:10:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:16;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:102:"WPTavern: WordPress Developers Are Experimenting With Gutenberg-Native AI Block and Content Assistants";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=143492";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:113:"https://wptavern.com/wordpress-developers-are-experimenting-with-gutenberg-native-ai-block-and-content-assistants";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5213:"<p>As more WordPress <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/search/chatgpt/">plugins for AI-generated content and images</a>, chatbots, and assistants, are landing in the official directory, developers are beginning to explore even deeper integration with the block editor. Moving beyond the prototypical content generators that are cobbled together into a plugin, the tools developers are experimenting with today will provide a more deeply integrated experience that works seamlessly with the block editor as a natural extension of its capabilities.</p>



<p>Last week Human Made CTO Joe Hoyle <a href="https://humanmade.com/2023/04/06/wordpress-ai-generative-content-and-blocks/">published</a> an early preview of generative AI natively integrated into the block editor with a video demonstrating prompts working across various blocks.</p>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">I’ve been working on a WordPress Gutenberg-native AI copilot. The results were pretty astounding to me once I got GPT to “speak Gutenberg” <a href="https://t.co/adEfkPRHcb">pic.twitter.com/adEfkPRHcb</a></p>&mdash; Joe Hoyle (@joe_hoyle) <a href="https://twitter.com/joe_hoyle/status/1643952243605925889?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 6, 2023</a></blockquote>
</div>



<p>&#8220;Taking a native-first approach to integrating generative AI into WordPress, we’ve been experimenting with approaches to a &#8216;WordPress Copilot&#8217; that can &#8216;speak&#8217; Gutenberg / block-editor,&#8221; Hoyle said.</p>



<p>&#8220;Copy-pasting paragraphs between ChatGPT and WordPress only goes so far, while having the tools directly embedded in the editor for block layout generation, auto-linking, formatting, translation summarization and more open up a world of possibilities and productivity wins for content creators.&#8221;</p>



<p>Munir Kamal, WordPress developer and founder of Gutenberg Hub, has created a native AI writer with a similar UI to the tool Hoyle previewed, as they both were inspired by the <a href="https://www.notion.so/">Notion app</a>. His preview video demonstrates far more capabilities than the earlier AI content generators for WordPress have implemented.</p>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">I've been working on a native AI writer inspired by Notion, designed to seamlessly integrate into <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Gutenberg?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Gutenberg</a>. Unlike clunky admin approached <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/AI?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#AI</a> plugins this will be your hidden Ai content assistant. Keep an eye out for it at the <a href="https://twitter.com/GutenbergHub?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@GutenbergHub</a> shop.<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WordPress?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#WordPress</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/chatgpt?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#chatgpt</a> <a href="https://t.co/WmCkJCpF0l">pic.twitter.com/WmCkJCpF0l</a></p>&mdash; Munir Kamal (@m_munirkamal) <a href="https://twitter.com/m_munirkamal/status/1644406162966683661?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 7, 2023</a></blockquote>
</div>



<p>Kamal has tapped into the GPT API to add more options to the AI writer, including the ability to rewrite, improve the generated text, fix grammar, simplify language, make it shorter, make it longer, and translate. He plans to release it as a commercial plugin in his <a href="https://shop.gutenberghub.com/">Gutenberg Hub shop</a> when it&#8217;s ready.</p>



<img />



<p>&#8220;With the increasing advancements in AI technology, thanks to OpenAI for taking the leap, I believe it will become an even more integral part of blogging,&#8221; Kamal <a href="https://twitter.com/m_munirkamal/status/1644724907694227456">said</a> when asked about AI and the future of blogging. &#8220;It can assist in generating ideas, improving grammar and structure, and even help with SEO optimization.</p>



<p>Hoyle is equally optimistic on the future of AI integrated into WordPress tools. It will be exciting to see if his Gutenberg-native AI copilot can be extended to blocks inside the Site Editor, to offer a text prompt-guided design experience without having to click through the tools.</p>



<p>&#8220;Going through this project has convinced me that LLMs [Large Language Model] have much more potential than I was giving them credit for,&#8221; Hoyle said. &#8220;It feels like there’s still a lot to discover what the models are capable of.</p>



<p>&#8220;As the availability to GPT-4 (and with it larger token limits) increases, we see a clear path of improvement to what we’ve shown today. The data and information that is stored and available to the Content Management System is ideal for model-training and building a corpus of data specific to the user. Generating, improving and suggesting content of all types that is specific to the data set will be another lead forward in the utility of these tools. We see a future where AI will support and enhance the work we all do, and see the necessity to integrate the technology deeply into the tools and solutions we create.&#8221;</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 11 Apr 2023 02:11:41 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:17;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:81:"WordPress.org blog: WP Briefing: Episode 53: A Look at WordPress 6.2 “Dolphy”";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:53:"https://wordpress.org/news/?post_type=podcast&p=14818";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:77:"https://wordpress.org/news/2023/04/episode-53-a-look-at-wordpress-6-2-dolphy/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:9229:"<p>Named after the multi-instrumentalist Eric Allan Dolphy Jr., WordPress 6.2 &#8220;Dolphy&#8221;&#8216;s high notes are riffed on by WordPress&#8217;s Executive Director, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, in this 53rd episode of the WordPress Briefing.</p>



<p><em><strong>Have a question you&#8217;d like answered? You can submit them to <a href="mailto:wpbriefing@wordpress.org">wpbriefing@wordpress.org</a>, either written or as a voice recording.</strong></em></p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Credits</h2>



<p>Editor:&nbsp;<a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/dustinhartzler/">Dustin Hartzler</a><br />Logo:&nbsp;<a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/javiarce/">Javier Arce</a><br />Production:&nbsp;<a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/cbringmann/">Chloé Bringmann</a><br />Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod </p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Show Notes</h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2023/03/dolphy/">WordPress 6.2 &#8220;Dolphy&#8221;</a></li>



<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2023/03/introducing-the-wordpress-developer-blog/">Introducing the WordPress Developer Blog</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/project/?p=251">WordPress Contributor Mentorship Program</a></li>



<li><a href="https://wp.me/p2U65r-9Nl">Call for Volunteers: Contributor Working Group</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/design/?p=11037">Why Jazz</a></li>



<li>Make Slack channels <a href="https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C04QZCREJ9W">#kidscamp</a> and <a href="https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C03JNV77Y57">#sustainability</a> </li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Transcript</h2>



<span id="more-14818"></span>



<p>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00] </p>



<p>Hello everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress Open Source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks.</p>



<p>I&#8217;m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go.</p>



<p>[00:00:28]</p>



<p>The latest version of WordPress has shipped. WordPress 6.2, which was named after Eric Dolphy, was released on March 29th. And as is the way with software, there&#8217;s already a minor release underway to catch a few errant issues that folks like you have reported to us.</p>



<p>It&#8217;s a big release that refines a lot of our design tools, but some of the most important changes are actually to the inserter. If you haven&#8217;t had a chance to get in there and play with it yet, here are the three things that I think you should know. </p>



<p>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:08] </p>



<p>First, the pattern browser. We&#8217;re all aware of the block inserter by now, and a lot of us probably use the quick options, the keyboard shortcuts, or that kind of inline inserter, that little black box that&#8217;s in the middle of your post.</p>



<p>If you use the main inserter, that&#8217;s a blue square in the top left of the screen. If you use that to add a block, you can still add individual blocks as usual. But there&#8217;s a new way to browse patterns, and in my opinion, it is so much better. It now brings out this drawer that has like thumbnails of patterns that will work with your theme.</p>



<p>And if you, like me, know what you want your site to look like, but could not in a million years figure out how to build it from scratch out of individual blocks, then this is the area for you. It was like shopping, but you don&#8217;t have to go through a checkout process at the end, and you still have what you want. It&#8217;s great.&nbsp;</p>



<p>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:00]&nbsp;</p>



<p>That&#8217;s also available when you&#8217;re working on templates or template parts, so you can make changes everywhere instead of going page by page. The second thing that I think you should know is about the media browser in that same area where you browse your patterns; you can also now browse for media.</p>



<p>It lets you look through the images you&#8217;ve already added to your site, but it also lets you search for openly licensed images from Openverse. And if you choose one of those images from Openverse, it inserts the proper attribution for you. You still have to add your own alt text, but that&#8217;s the fun part anyway, right?</p>



<p>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:35]&nbsp;</p>



<p>And number three, a Style Book. So this thing is available in the template editing area, specifically, as is appropriate, given what it actually does. So if you&#8217;re in the template area, toward the top right of the screen is like a half moon day mode, night mode looking icon. If you click on that, you can make changes to things inside your blocks.</p>



<p>But if you click on the little eyeball icon that&#8217;s just underneath it, it pulls up a style book where you can also see and edit the styles globally. If that didn&#8217;t make sense to you, don&#8217;t worry. I&#8217;ve got you. I&#8217;m about to tell you a bunch of things you can do in here. You can edit the way headings and lists and tables, quotes, and code looks all across the site. You can edit the way images, galleries, files, and videos look using custom CSS.</p>



<p>Yes. Also, all across the site. And you can edit buttons, separators, and individual blocks. Say it with me &#8212; all across the site. That is not a comprehensive list. There is a ton of stuff. You can see the styles that you have applied across the whole site. You can see them in context, and you can make any changes that you need globally, which means all across the site.</p>



<p>Yeah. Style Books. What will we think of next? </p>



<p>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:54]&nbsp;</p>



<p>So those are my three things I think you should know about WordPress right now. As a former WordPress builder who was never really super great with the code, this stuff makes me feel powerful. I just love these changes, and I hope you do too.</p>



<p> [00:04:07]</p>



<p>Which brings us now to our small list of big things. First, we just launched the Developer Blog. It&#8217;s over at developer.wordpress.org/news. It has a bunch of content on it that not only is geared specifically toward developers that are using WordPress but especially the folks who are extending WordPress. It gives you kind of an in-depth look at various changes and projects, and implementations and what goes into each one of them.</p>



<p>So it gives you a bit of like this aspirational overview of stuff that you could do with WordPress and then also gives you an inside look at how you would accomplish it yourself. It&#8217;s very cool. I like it a lot. Head on over there, but we&#8217;ll have a link to the show notes below.</p>



<p>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:00]&nbsp;</p>



<p>The second thing is that we have an MVP of our new mentorship program that is underway.</p>



<p>It should be debuting for essentially testing any day now, a link to the posts detailing that work, just in case you want to join that important initiative. But it is an important thing for me. I think that mentorship is a key element of many of our successful contributors&#8217; onboarding journeys, a part of their story of coming to us.</p>



<p>And so, creating a mentorship program that is a bit sustainable and looks toward the health of the overall project, I think, is an excellent plan.&nbsp;</p>



<p>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:38]&nbsp;</p>



<p>The third thing on our small list of big things is that Matt put out a nice little post about kind of the history of why jazz has this strong background in the WordPress project. It&#8217;s a brief read. I&#8217;ll put a link to that in the show notes as well. But suffice it to say that he&#8217;s saying that jazz has a little bit of learned processes and rules but that the primary expectation is that you&#8217;re able to make of the jazz what you want. Like you get to make your own thing out of it. You get to be extemporaneous. You get to be very measured, whatever it is, that expresses what you are trying to do and what you are trying to say with it.</p>



<p>That&#8217;s why he feels like jazz is such an important part of the DNA of the WordPress project. Like I said, it&#8217;s a short read. I&#8217;ll put a link to it in the show notes.</p>



<p>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:30]&nbsp;</p>



<p>And finally, there are a few working groups that folks can contribute to right now. We don&#8217;t always have working groups. We generally just kind of do stuff inside individual teams. But right now, we&#8217;ve got like the kids camp group, the sustainability group, and of course, that mentorship working group that I mentioned earlier in our list.</p>



<p>So if you&#8217;re wanting a little change of pace, I&#8217;d drop by their areas in the Making WordPress Slack to see if they have anything that&#8217;s up your alley. </p>



<p>And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I&#8217;m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and I&#8217;ll see you again in a couple of weeks.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Mon, 10 Apr 2023 12:00:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:15:"Chloe Bringmann";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:18;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:41:"Do The Woo Community: Woo DevChat Expands";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=74708";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:48:"https://dothewoo.io/woocommerce-devchat-expands/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:379:"<p>By expanding our Woo DevChat it gives more of the WooCommerce and WordPress builder community a chance to share what they are building.</p>
<p>&gt;&gt; The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://dothewoo.io/woocommerce-devchat-expands/">Woo DevChat Expands</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://dothewoo.io">Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community</a>	.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Mon, 10 Apr 2023 08:00:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:19;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:139:"Gutenberg Times: Gutenberg Changelog #81 – WordPress 6.2, Gutenberg 15.4 and 15.5, Phase 3 – Collaboration and a new  Interactivity API";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:53:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/?post_type=podcast&p=23825";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:90:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-81-wordpress-6-2-interactivity-api/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:68348:"<p>Leonardus Nugraha and Birgit Pauli-Haack discuss WordPress&nbsp; 6.2, Gutenberg Releases 15.4 and 15.5, Phase 3 of the Gutenberg Project and a new Proposal on Interactivity API.</p>



<p><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-69-gutenberg-releases-wordpress-6-0-1-the-create-block-theme/#shownotes">Show Notes</a> / <a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-81-wordpress-6-2-interactivity-api/#transcript">Transcript</a></p>



<ul>
<li>Music:&nbsp;<a href="https://soundcloud.com/xirclebox">Homer Gaines</a></li>



<li>Editor:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandy-reed/">Sandy Reed</a></li>



<li>Logo:&nbsp;<a href="https://markuraine.com/">Mark Uraine</a></li>



<li>Production:&nbsp;<a href="https://icodeforapurpose.com">Birgit Pauli-Haack</a></li>
</ul>



<p class="has-larger-font-size"></p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Leonardus</strong> Nugraha</h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://leoandlens.com/">Leo&#8217;s Photography site  leoandlens.com</a></li>



<li><a href="https://www.instagram.com/leonnugraha/">On Instagram @leonnugraha</a> </li>



<li><a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/leonnugraha/">WordPress Profile @leonnugraha</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">20-Year WordPress Anniversary</h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://wp20.wordpress.net/20-years-of-wordpress-jazz/">20 Years of WordPress Jazz</a> Playlist </li>



<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/about/history/">Jazz musicians and WordPress releases</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Community Contribution</h2>



<p><a href="https://blockvisibilitywp.com/block-visibility-3-0-0-a-new-chapter-begins/">Block Visibility 3.0.0: A New Chapter Begins</a></p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">What&#8217;s released</h2>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">WordPress 6.2</h3>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2023/03/dolphy/">WordPress 6.2 “Dolphy”&nbsp;</a></li>



<li>&nbsp;<a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/03/10/6-2-live-product-demo-qa/">6.2 Live Product Demo Q&amp;A</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/03/09/wordpress-6-2-field-guide/">WordPress 6.2 Field Guide</a></li>



<li><strong>Leonardus Nugraha</strong>&nbsp;for Hostinger:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.hostinger.com/blog/wordpress-6-2">WordPress 6.2 Is Finally Here: A Detailed Overview</a></li>



<li><strong>WPTavern</strong>: <a href="https://wptavern.com/wordpress-6-2-dolphy-introduces-a-revamped-site-editor-distraction-free-writing-mode-and-updated-block-inserter">WordPress 6.2 “Dolphy” Introduces a Revamped Site Editor, Distraction-Free Writing Mode, and Updated Block Inserter</a></li>
</ul>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Gutenberg 15.4 &amp; 15.5</h3>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/03/22/whats-new-in-gutenberg-15-4-22-march/">What’s new in Gutenberg 15.4 (22 March)</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/05/whats-new-in-gutenberg-15-5-05-april/">What’s new in Gutenberg 15.5? (05 April)</a></li>



<li><a href="https://wptavern.com/gutenberg-15-5-introduces-experimental-grid-layout-support">Gutenberg 15.5 Introduces Experimental Grid Layout Support</a></li>
</ul>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">What&#8217;s in active development or discussed</h3>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Phase 3: Collaboration </h3>



<ul>
<li>Post by Matias Ventura <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/03/24/phase-3-collaboration/">Phase 3: Collaboration</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/design/2022/06/13/thinking-through-the-wordpress-admin-experience/">Thinking Through the WordPress Admin Experience</a></li>



<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2023/03/episode-52-phase-three-with-hector-prieto/">WP Briefing: Episode 52: Workflows and Phase Three Visioning with Special Guest Héctor Prieto</a></li>
</ul>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Improve the Site Editor</h3>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/44461">Re-Introduce Content Editing in the Site Editor</a></li>



<li><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/49404">Optimize the content-centric edit experience</a></li>
</ul>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Interactivity API</h3>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/03/30/proposal-the-interactivity-api-a-better-developer-experience-in-building-interactive-blocks/">Proposal: The Interactivity API – A better developer experience in building interactive blocks</a></li>



<li><a href="https://wpmovies.dev/">Demo Site</a> </li>



<li>GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/wordpress/wp-movies-demo">Interactivity API Demo &#8211; WP Movies</a></li>



<li>4/17/23 &#8211; 8am UTC <a href="https://www.meetup.com/learn-wordpress-online-workshops/events/292575913/">Developer Hours: Introduction to the Interactivity API</a> </li>



<li>4/17/23 &#8211; 17:00 UTC <a href="https://www.meetup.com/learn-wordpress-online-workshops/events/292575942/">Developer Hours: Introduction to the Interactivity AP</a>I </li>



<li><a href="https://wptavern.com/wordpress-contributors-propose-new-interactivity-api-for-frontend-blocks">WordPress Contributors Propose New Interactivity API for Frontend Blocks</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">WordPress Design Team </h2>



<p><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/design/2023/03/27/design-share-mar-13-mar-24/">Design Share: Mar 13–Mar 24</a></p>



<p class="has-large-font-size">Stay in Touch</p>



<div class="wp-block-group is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow"><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container">
<ul>
<li>Did you like this episode? <a href="https://lovethepodcast.com/gutenbergchangelog"><strong>Please write us a review </strong></a></li>



<li>Ping us on Twitter or send DMs with questions. <a href="https://twitter.com/gutenbergtimes">@gutenbergtimes </a>and <a href="https://twitter.com/bph">@bph</a>.</li>



<li><em>If you have questions or suggestions, or news you want us to include, send them to <a href="mailto:changelog@gutenbergtimes.com">changelog@gutenbergtimes.com</a>. </em></li>



<li><em>Please write us a review on iTunes! <a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/itunes/">(Click here to learn how)</a></em></li>
</ul>
</div></div>



<p class="has-large-font-size">Transcript</p>



<p> </p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Hello, and welcome to our 81st episode of the Gutenberg Changelog Podcast. In today&#8217;s episode, we will talk about WordPress 6.2, Gutenberg releases 15.4 and 15.5, Phase 3 of the Gutenberg project, a new proposal on the interactivity API, and so much more. I&#8217;m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and full-time core contributor to the WordPress Open Source Project, and I&#8217;m so thrilled to introduce to you Leonardus Nugraha as my special guest today. Leonardus is a contributor to the WordPress docs team and content specialist at Hostinger, and we personally met at WordCamp Asia and had some great meals together. So welcome to the show, Leonardus. Thank you so much for agreeing to come to the show and talk about Gutenberg with me. How are you?</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; Yeah. Ah, thank you. Very good. Thank you for having me in the show. I&#8217;m good. And yeah, it&#8217;s nice to be here with your Gutenberg Changelog podcast. And it&#8217;s good to meet you again here after our in-person meetings. Yeah. It&#8217;s been two months we met in WordCamp Asia, right?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; So it&#8217;s nice to have a chat with you again, talk about Gutenberg, talk about WordPress. Yeah. And yeah, thanks for introducing me as well. Yeah, you can call me Leo for short.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Oh, hi, Leo.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; And yeah, content. Yeah, Leo. And as a content specialist, I curate and organize WordPress content in hosting our tutorials and blogs. And with the documentation team, I also work on mainly end user documentation articles. So yeah, my work is all about WordPress articles. Yeah, I&#8217;m loving it. I&#8217;m loving to do things and work about WordPress.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Well, wonderful, wonderful. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about you. Where you live and what you do for fun. Do you have family?</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; Yeah, I live in Indonesia in a city named Bogor, and it&#8217;s known as Rain City.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Oh, no.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; Yeah, it rains a lot here, but it&#8217;s nice, it&#8217;s cool, it&#8217;s chill. I think personally, I love the weather. I&#8217;m not sure everyone else. Yeah, when I&#8217;m not working with content or WordPress in general, just for fun, I usually play music. I play guitar, electric guitar mainly, and listening to music on my free time, or just have fun with my dogs. I have two big dogs and I consider them as my family, to be honest.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, yeah, of course, of course. Yeah. That&#8217;s awesome. So many of our listeners are also dog people, and I&#8217;m sure they would like to know what kind of dogs you have, and do you share photos of them somewhere online?</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha:</em>&nbsp; Yeah, one of them is a mixed breed. It&#8217;s a quite big dog. It&#8217;s about 20 kilograms. And the other one is a big golden retriever. So I have big dogs with me. I think with a combined weight, they&#8217;re bigger than me, to be honest. I love taking photos. Actually, as you may know, I&#8217;m a photography team in WordCamp, and I do have a online portfolio called <a href="https://leoandlens.com/">LeoandLens.com</a>, and I have some of photos of my docs there as well. And also WordCamp Asia photos, obviously. So, and I do have Instagram as well, and I upload or post docs, photos or just random photos there if you want to see it.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. And we&#8217;ll share the links in the show notes to catch up with you online or stalk you online.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; Sure.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: So speaking of music, as part of the 20-year celebration coming up for WordPress, Julia Golomb published a playlist on Spotify of 20 Years of WordPress Jazz. From Miles Davis to Mikhail &#8220;Misha&#8221; Alperin. And it includes one song for each of the 45 jazz artists selected to represent the releases in the last 20 years. So this is really cool. And sometimes I just listen to it when I&#8217;m curating content, reading, copy-pasting and doing that. So yeah, what kind of music do you play?</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; To be honest, it&#8217;s not jazz, so I hope I don&#8217;t disappoint the WordPress community for that.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: No.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; Mainly I listen to &#8217;80s, &#8217;90s rock and heavy metal, probably some blues and rock and roll. But as a part of WordPress committee and celebrating 20 years of WordPress, probably I should start listening to jazz.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Well, we have all our preferences. And some of the jazz like Django Reinhardt or something like that, it&#8217;s really great guitars showing off. So yeah, I&#8217;m not always a fan of jazz. It depends on my mood when I listen to jazz. Yeah. So yeah. So you want, let&#8217;s get further into the show.&nbsp;</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Community Contributions</strong></h3>



<p>We have a great show coming to you, dear listeners. And for the &#8220;Community Contributions&#8221; section we have in his post, Block Visibility 3.0. A new chapter begins. Nick Diego announced that he&#8217;s making all Pro features available for free on his plugin, Block Visibility. And there are a couple of exceptions for which he needs just more time to integrate them into the free versions, but he&#8217;s aiming to pack it all in one version, make it available at no cost. And with a plugin, if you don&#8217;t know it, Block Visibility plugin, you can control, show or hide blocks depending on, for instance, a date or a user role or a location or a referral source, and it extends the core block editor with additional settings on the right. So this is a really good plugin, and it has a few fans.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; Yeah, it&#8217;s definitely great plugins, especially if you are collaborating with big team on your WordPress site. Of course, we have user rules and user permissions, but with this plugin, you can extend the functionality and the controls with this plugin towards the blocks. And yeah, this is definitely good news to have this plugin for free for the community at no cost. And I read the blog post, and I really appreciate how Nick mentioned the importance of giving back to the community. It is all WordPress is about, right, to give to the community. And I believe with this decision, there will be more and more aspiring WordPress website owners to benefit from next creation. So yeah, everybody&#8217;s win.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, right. Everybody&#8217;s win. Yes, indeed. And since the plugin came out two years ago, I always had the hope that the core developers would consider bringing it to the core functionality of the Block Editor. Maybe that&#8217;s still in the stars, but the future is bright, so we never know what comes. But by the way, Nick Diego as a news item, joined Automattic as a full-time sponsored contributor, and I&#8217;m thrilled that he became a teammate. He has been a special guest on the show before, and I certainly see him joining again in the future. So watch out.&nbsp;</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>What’s Released &#8211; WordPress 6.2</strong></h3>



<p>Now we come to the last two weeks where a lot of releases happened, or actually four weeks since the last episode, and we&#8217;ll start with the big one, that&#8217;s WordPress 6.2. You heard us talking here on the show before. So WordPress 6.2 had over 600 contributors, and it&#8217;s the first major release in 2023.</p>



<p>The contributors come from at least 50 countries with 900 enhancements, 10 full Gutenberg releases or features from those releases, and then a slew of performance improvements. You might not be surprised to learn that Dolphy reached the impressive milestone of 2 million downloads in under two hours. So after the release and in the first week, it reached over 18 million downloads. So that&#8217;s pretty impressive. And also shows maybe there are some hosting companies that actually automatically update to new versions or at least other, there is a mechanism there that you can automatically update to the new version. And it seems to be working. So are you doing that at Hostinger, that there are automatic updates to the new version for WordPress sites?</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; Yeah, we do have a feature for the users to enable auto updates, both for the minor versions and major versions. Usually we enable it for the minor versions, like 6.2.1 because usually there&#8217;s not many new features or bug fixes. Users can enable for the major updates like 6.2, but usually it&#8217;s better to have that tested on staging site as well, which Hostinger also have, to make sure the site&#8217;s working properly, there&#8217;s no compatibility issues with their plugins or with their content. So yeah, we do have that feature, but it&#8217;s safer for the users to test it first for major updates like this, especially with more than 900 enhancements and new features to the workplace.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: No, totally get it. Yeah, when I was working with the agency and our client sites, we would wait at least two weeks, if not four, to see what&#8217;s happening with a new release and if there&#8217;s a patch release coming out. So yeah, test it please, dear listeners. So if you haven&#8217;t yet, the release candidate actually came out March 8th or 7th, so the last four weeks, it could have been that you could already test some of that quite extensively. So.</p>



<p>Now Rich Tabor and I discussed the site editor updates in WordPress 6.2 in the last episode, and summarize their significant updates to revamp the site editing interface to get new styling features for various blocks that were typography, styling, dimensions, and also color stylings. And then there&#8217;s a Distraction Free Writing mode and a new integration with Openverse, formerly Creative Commons Search, that enables a quick access to listen to that; 700 million free and openly licensed images and audio. So Leo, you published a blog post taking a detailed view on WordPress 6.2, and you are certainly now an expert on all the features. Have you decided what are your most exciting features for you?</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; It&#8217;s hard to pick one most exciting features, because I think this release is probably, in my opinion, brings more and more enhancement compared to 6.1, 6.2, from the perspective of end users. But obviously, for me, it&#8217;s the revamped Site Editor that is really exciting to have. Finally, we have a new, fresh, clean view of the interface. And users can just switch between templates, have a preview before actually start editing. And it&#8217;s also easy to pick a template. You just click on the canvas and start editing. You don&#8217;t have to actually click the button as well. So that&#8217;s a nice little touch there. And also the Global Styles panel with the zoom in, zoom out effect. Now users can just see the whole template and how the style federations affect the site. And the style works. It&#8217;s interesting to have it, to have all the blocks previewed with the tabs. And it also works with Commerce as well.</p>



<p>If you have WooCommerce installed, you can have the new tabs for the WooCommerce blocks and the Global Style Book as well. And Openverse integration, very exciting to hear, especially when the Openverse became the part of WordPress project. It&#8217;s already exciting, but still, back then, you still have to download the content to your local computer and then re-upload to WordPress, which is a lengthy process, to be honest. And with the new integration, everything&#8217;s now works seamlessly.</p>



<p>And I really do appreciate how to developers improve it during, was it on that? I think during the beta phase when they decided to upload the image to Media Library automatically instead of just linking to the content. So that&#8217;s nice. Lastly, for me, the biggest one, everything is big, but this one, Distraction Free mode is personally my favorite. Because I don&#8217;t remember how many times I got distracted or obscured by the block toolbar. When you start a new paragraph below the headings or maybe you have some few blocks near on top of each other, sometimes the block tool can obscure the content. And it&#8217;s annoying when you have a paragraph below a heading and you want to move back to edit the heading, you have to get rid of the toolbar first. So you have to click elsewhere, and it&#8217;s complicated.</p>



<p>But now with the Distraction Free, no toolbar, I can just focus on my content, writing. And yeah, that&#8217;s the main highlight for me personally. There&#8217;s other things like copy-paste styles, which speeds up the customization process. When you pick a block that you like and you decide, &#8220;Ah, I want to use this style,&#8221; you can just copy to another one. Or you can just post it globally to apply it to all blocks on your side.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. The changing of things, you can get very granular and you can escalate some of the styles to the global styles. And I think it&#8217;s quite intuitive to do that. But the Distraction Free mode is definitely one of the, I&#8217;m so glad that came to core. There was a plugin available called Iceberg by Rich Tabor and Jeffrey Caradang for a long time, and they actually created a Distraction Free mode. And I really loved it when I was doing some journaling, where you don&#8217;t need any pictures or something like that, you&#8217;re just channel your inner self or inner mom or inner dad and just write. And that makes it much better writing experience. And I think quite a few bloggers were put off by the block toolbar that gets in the way every time. And there was this, or there is still this feature that you can patch or stick the toolbar to the top, but you still get all the distractions from other things.</p>



<p>You move the mouse and something happens, and then it goes. And it&#8217;s just sometimes a little noisy. So the Distraction Free mode is definitely beneficial. I also like to surface some great material around the Site Editor for educators. So with WordCamps and conferences on the horizon, meetups are getting re-energized to meet in place, face-to-face meetings and localities, presentations need to be prepared. And Anne McCarthy has a post on her personal blog that&#8217;s called, &#8220;So you want to talk about Site Editor, Part Four.&#8221; And gives you all the resources that would need to speed up your preparations for any presentations. And of course, we&#8217;ll share that in the show notes.&nbsp;</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Gutenberg 15.4</strong></h3>



<p>So that brings us to the next Gutenberg plugin release. Gutenberg 15.4 was released. Justin Tadlock and Ryan Welcher handled it and it contained 186 PRs with 57 contributors. Six of them were first-timers, so congrats all around.</p>



<p>And it was a smaller release, because it also had a few bug fixes for the 6.2 that were doing the beta and release backported, as the techies say, to the release version of 6.2.&nbsp;</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Enhancements</strong></h3>



<p>So there are a few enhancements I wanted to talk about. So one is go direct to edit from a &#8220;Manage all template&#8221; list. That&#8217;s something you just mentioned, Leo, that you see the template in the preview and the Template Editor or in the Site Editor, you see the template. And then you click on it, and you&#8217;re right there in the edit mode for the template. And that came with 15.4, you mentioned it. Now you also see in the panel on the left-hand side, the PR says, &#8220;The Site Editor&#8217;s dark side.&#8221; Which, it&#8217;s not philosophical, it&#8217;s the black sidebar on the left-hand side. And now there are descriptions for each of the templates. So you know a little bit more when a theme comes in or you enable a new theme, what the templates are supposed to do. And theme editors are able to add templates as well.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; Yeah, I think the description, I didn&#8217;t really notice at first when the full Site Editor came to WordPress, but I think having description for its templates like 404 or &#8220;Single post&#8221; or &#8220;Archive,&#8221; it helps many, many first-time users, WordPressers who are still learning. Having this description will be great for them, definitely.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. And when you switch theme or have Template Parts or create new ones, you also get a signal from who created them, and from which theme do they come over. That is a signal for the future, where there is thinking about how to make Template Parts and templates less reliant on particular theme. So when you switch the theme and you created a new template as a site owner, you want the template to come over to the new theme as well and not just go away with the old theme. So there&#8217;s some big thinking to be done, because that can get complex so fast.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; Yeah. But that will really relevant with the next phase, which is collaboration, to have Template Parts and templates stick to the WordPress instead of the themes. And you can know which user create the template, or whether it&#8217;s made from the themes. So yeah, hopefully it&#8217;s a great path to the future.</p>



<p>So yeah, we can move on to the next one. It&#8217;s a navigation sidebar. So we have the new logic, which navigation to be shown on the dark side, as you mentioned. I think the first iteration, it shows the first navigation that is created on the team or templates. And now it shows the latest one that is published, which in my opinion, it&#8217;s really logical. It&#8217;s a good step because most likely users will use the latest one and the latest navigation block that they made.</p>



<p>But yeah, this is definitely still something, in my opinion, can be improved further, especially with the James Koster&#8217;s idea about having a label or hint to identify which menu actually been shown on the dark side. As for now, if you change the menu on the block tools, the navigation block tools, which on the right side, sometimes it doesn&#8217;t really change the one on the dark side. So you can switch to the older menu on the block tools, but then the dark side stick. And yeah, sometimes it can be confusing for new users. So hopefully, we are moving to the right direction here, in my opinion. But definitely, James Koster&#8217;s idea is definitely something worth to think about and to have labeling or hint, especially for new users again, who are still learning.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. And I think there was a reason why the navigation part was actually pulled from 6.2. It&#8217;s now coming back with a Gutenberg plugin, but it was pulled from the 6.2 because it was still not performing to the quality that I want. And it wasn&#8217;t really all that intuitive, because the sidebar, when you actually edit a navigation block on the sidebar, it behaves differently than what was on the left side. So that was good. I think it was a good decision, even late in the cycle. That&#8217;s what the next part is, the height navigation screen, that was in 15.4 and was backported to 6.2.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; Yeah, I remember testing it on the beta and the RC. The experience is still not perfect yet, I remember, because why is it different between the block tools and the sidebar? And then I heard the news from AN and that it&#8217;s backported again put from 6.2. So yeah, for me, it&#8217;s perfectly make sense. And hopefully they can deliver it, on the next layer is 6.3. They can get everything perfect with a perfect experience for users. And yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Good. Yeah, the Cover Block now also has constrained flow layout, which means that it can be used in different context, and then applied the block inner wrapper by default. And it means that the layered support will work in the Cover Block the same way as it does for the group block, but without the facts variations. So you cannot change how the Cover Block children behave in the full end wide alignment of the Cover Block context. I don&#8217;t know if that makes sense.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; Yeah, I think it makes sense for the Cover Block. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, the FontSizePicker, that&#8217;s just a small note here that the FontSizePicker now allows custom units for theme developers that you can offer to your users. It before was only using pixels, and what was the other one?</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; RVM?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Oh yeah, RVM. Yeah, or EMs. And now you can use all of them that are possible. Like VW and all that. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; Yeah. And on the next one we have new block support. So have a text column, or column support on the typographic settings. So I think on this PR, the example, the great example is the paragraph block. So usually if you have a paragraph block, it&#8217;s just like a block of text. But now with this text column support, you can add columns, the number of columns. So you can split the paragraph into separate columns without actually using a column blocks, which is a great option if you want to customize your content, maybe make it like a newspaper style. You don&#8217;t have to use the column block separately. You can just split your paragraph into columns.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. And it adjusts if you add more text to it and adjust the columns to it. And it&#8217;s great that there&#8217;s now typography support available, so you can actually change fonts or make them larger, smaller, or change the line height. What might be needed when you are in smaller columns, you can reduce the line height on your texts. So those controls are now available in the user interface. But one caveat on this, the text columns is only available when the theme actually enables it. It&#8217;s not coming out of the box yet, so you need to adjust the theme a little bit to actually be able to use that.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; Yeah, I think it used to, you have to add a little bit of code to make it enabled in the theme that JSON file, right?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Correct. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; For now.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, for now. And I need to figure out maybe next release, there will be a way to enable it as a site builder with not access to code to also make use of it. And the Cover Block now got Text Scholar Block support. I was thinking, &#8220;Okay, that didn&#8217;t happen before.&#8221; But obviously it didn&#8217;t, because it&#8217;s now in the plugin. Yes, those design tools are rolled out to the core blocks one at a time to enable them and then test them, to make sure that they&#8217;re work in every context nicely.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; And the next one, adding compound class to layout wrapper or global style spacing. Maybe you can cover this.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: So the problem was that the Cover Block didn&#8217;t work out of the box. The covers mark up the structure and they needed to change the classes to make them also available to the float. And so the Cover Block was a little bit revamped to specify target wrapper for the class, and for the layout of the object. So it was hard to target things that are inside the inner blocks. So that was a revamp that was necessary. So those who style themes can actually access those easily and style them. There was a specificity problem, I think. So for theme developers, they will make sense of it. So the spacing wasn&#8217;t clear for the block children. It was random inside the Cover Block. So they changed that and fixed it. It was a long way around it, explaining it, but sorry. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; Yeah, so developer focus one. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, seem develop the styles. Yeah, CSS. And sometimes I have a hard time with it.&nbsp;</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Bug Fixes</strong></h3>



<p>So now we come to the bug fixes, those were all the enhances of the 15.4 Gutenberg plugin release. We have, I think only two bug fixes that we want to point out, because sometimes you want to know when a bug is fixed. And the first one is that to ensure that the aspect ratio selected is also applied to the post feature image block, and in the Post Template block. So it shows up when you have a summary page, and you have the featured image with the blocks in a grid, that the aspect ratio is actually applied to the post featured block. That&#8217;s really important. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; I remember I was having problem with featured image ratio quite a long time ago, but I didn&#8217;t realize that it&#8217;s actually a bug. So yeah, I&#8217;m glad that it&#8217;s fixed now with the 15.4. And I think the aspect ratio option is only available when you actually enable the link option for the featured image, right?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was the problem. And then for the navigation block, there is a major bug fix that when the input, the classic menu using in the menu name, that it&#8217;s also going to be the title for the block menu. So there is a seamless integration there. And people are not getting confused. They did not take my menu that I wanted to, or didn&#8217;t do it when you imported a classic menu. So this is fixed now with the Gutenberg 5.4. What else is in there?&nbsp;</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; I think this pull request in the demonstration, it&#8217;s actually hide the Meta Box at the bottom by default. Previously it shows the Meta Box when you&#8217;re in a certain width, but now it just hidden. So the interface is much more cleaner than ever now.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, Distraction Free. Don&#8217;t get distracted.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; Yes.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: The Meta Boxes, yes. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; It&#8217;s small, but sometimes people can get distracted by that, even though it&#8217;s this small thing at the bottom.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yes. Yeah. But if you have multiple custom fields or something like that, that can be quite long. So it&#8217;s good to hide it. Yes.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Documentation</strong></h3>



<p>And then there are quite a few documentation changes, and I want to mention them. So your listeners, you can go and look them up. They added examples on how programmatically remove the panels in the document sidebar. So if you don&#8217;t want featured image or don&#8217;t want the tags or the categories, now developers can look up how to actually remove those for their plugins, or for their theme, or the bespoke agency theme development.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; And then the next one is for the sticky position documentation. So I think this relates to the new sticky position features site. So this also been added to documentation.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. And that also fills in with a second one that we…</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; Oh, yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Which is, so the theme, JSON Schema now has two places where the sticky option is mentioned, and it didn&#8217;t before, but it&#8217;s now in the controls for the appearance tools. When you set them for true, there&#8217;s also a sticky option there. And then you can also in these further down in the Schema, you can add the sticky positions, and minimum height for the styles section as well. So that is now all documented, and you can look up how it works and how it helps you.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Gutenberg 15.5</strong></h3>



<p>And I think that&#8217;s the Changelog for Gutenberg 15.4, and we are now right into the Changelog for the latest Gutenberg 15.5 release that was released Wednesday, April 4th. And was again, the team Ryan Welcher and Justin Tadlock. April 5th, sorry. And it has 143 PRs with 52 contributors and some updates there. So the first enhancement is that the post date now block has now a variation to use the modified date rather than the published date. And it&#8217;s really important when you have a new site, and you want to get the updated post higher into the latest news, then you want to use the modified date. So it bubbles up again. &#8220;Okay, look here. There were changes in that and it&#8217;s still important.&#8221;</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; Yeah. And this is also great for end user as well, in my opinion, because this is basically the same block with this variation, with the modified date enabled by default. But for new users, it&#8217;s just much easier to find having a separate post date and post modified date. So if they want to show both in the single Post Template, they can just find these blocks without having to fiddle with the settings. So yeah, it&#8217;s a much more seamless and easier work process, workflow. And then similar to the post that we have &#8220;Time to Read&#8221; block, which I believe was released on 15.3. It was right?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yes.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; And now we have a plethora of settings like typographic support to the &#8220;Time to Read&#8221; block, and also spacing tool. So after this was introduced in 15.3, with 15.5, now you can customize the typography and the spacing tools.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. Sorry, go ahead.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; No, I&#8217;m finished.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Enhancements</strong></h3>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, no, I used it. So the &#8220;Time to Read&#8221; was actually already available in the outline of the post when you were in the block editor. You could see &#8220;Time to Read.&#8221; Two minutes, 15 minutes, yeah, 25 minutes. Never going to read that. But then immediately as it was available, people were asking, &#8220;Well, can I use that information also on my front end so I can notify or I can show it with my post grid or something like that? How long the Time to Read for that?&#8221; So because readers like that, they found. And it took a while to get it right, to get a new block in and figure out what&#8217;s the best approach. So it now only shows a number and the minutes, and that was the easiest way to make it available through all the languages, because each locale works differently with minutes, three minutes kind of thing in different languages.</p>



<p>So now you can put them in a row with your wording. So Time to Read, 15 minutes. The &#8220;Time to Read&#8221; is a paragraph, and then you stack it with a row. Group block, in a group block with the &#8220;Time to Read&#8221; block, and then you can have that in your Post Template block. So what did happen was that when I was testing it, I saw immediately that my default font size was different for the paragraph as it was for the Time to Read, but I didn&#8217;t have any controls to change that for the Time to Read. So I filed an issue and said, &#8220;Okay, I need typography control there, please.&#8221; And then I also thought, &#8220;Okay, I need some spacing as well,&#8221; because it was a little lower than the Time to Read. It was really weird. I figured it out for my personal blog, but then also found that it would probably be best to have both controls available to that.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; Yeah. And in case everyone wondering, it is actually possible to have Time to Read information previously, but you have to code it to your theme or install a plugin specific for that function. So yeah, it&#8217;s nice to have it in Gutenberg. And hopefully, in the future it&#8217;ll push to the core as well.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, yeah.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; So the next one, oh yeah, the sticky position. I think this feature didn&#8217;t have chance to see the light of day, because when the feature is added, it&#8217;s now reverted back. But essentially, there was a pull request to enable Template Part blocks to be sticky, which is perfectly logical. Because if you have a header, you want to have a sticky header, that means you have to make the Template Part for the header sticky. So there&#8217;s this pull request that adds that feature, but the way it worked was adding the Template Parts into a group block, which is already have the sticky position support, but that doesn&#8217;t really consistent with how the Template Part works. So we are now referred back to how it was, you cannot make it sticky anymore. But yeah, the idea is there. So hopefully, this will be a good starter to see, to look for a better solution for this one. Because yeah, I think many users will want to have Template Part header to be sticky instead of they have to use a group block on route level.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. And it&#8217;s quite unintuitive to figure out, &#8220;Okay, if I want to make it sticky, I need to put it in a group block, but it&#8217;s already a Template Part. Can&#8217;t we have that support just for the Template Part?&#8221; But yeah, that adds definitely to the complexity, because the Template Part sometimes doesn&#8217;t have, the sticky doesn&#8217;t know where to stick it, so to speak. When the Template Part is further down the page, then it&#8217;s hard where to stick it to. And yeah, where is it located? Is the Template Part on the sidebar? Then you have a sticky sidebar, but the sticky sidebar behaves totally differently from a sticky header or a sticky footer. So when you read through the PRs, your head might spin because it really shows the discussion between the designers.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; It&#8217;s just the complexity.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: It&#8217;s totally complex. Yeah, just take it from us. It&#8217;s a complex thing.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; I just skip to Rich Tabor feedback about how it doesn&#8217;t really sit with the consistency of the sticky position as well. Because on this PR, you make it sticky, I think to the Ellipsis menu instead of from the block tools. So it will create a different experience.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. And the same complexity we will enter when you make the experiment available on, so there is a new feature in 15.5 that&#8217;s first take on the grid layout group variation. So we have flex layouts, we have flow layouts, and now the designers and developers try to get it working with the grid layout. And if you want to try it, you need to enable it through the experiments menu item on the Gutenberg plugin menu item, and check that part to test it out. But please do test it. Because if you want it to get out of experiments and then into the Gutenberg plugin by default and then further into WordPress, it needs to be really working well. And all the use cases, people cannot think up about all the use cases that you would use it. So yeah, please test it and give feedback on the PRs. Or create new issues on the Gutenberg repo so the developers have a better feel from what is still missing and how it&#8217;s not working. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; Yeah. I just test the feature for a few minutes after the launch, because this is also on the launch post. So it&#8217;s quite interesting. And I love it because it was only after this update, I just realized that if you want to create a block, a grid layout with, let&#8217;s say, three columns and three rows, you have to mix it with row blocks or stack blocks, and you just create the whole complex structure. But now with the grid layout, it can just go straight out from the box with the way you want. You can have four columns, you can have six rows, maybe. And yeah, it&#8217;s nice to have this variation. I already tested, even though just few minutes, but I already see possibilities to use this layout for my website, my portfolio website.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Well, it&#8217;s great when those new features actually trigger some creativity on &#8220;Well, how can I use it? Yeah. Can I push it to the limits?&#8221; And that&#8217;s what it&#8217;s all for. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; And the great thing is it&#8217;s not something that I have in mind. So previously, okay, row blocks, type blocks, columns blocks, that works, but now you have a grid. &#8220;Oh my God, I can have that all in one now.&#8221;</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: And that was quite a few themes developers or theme builders were actually missing that, because grids came in to the CSS part, I think it was in &#8217;16 or 2017, and it&#8217;s been a while that other web developers were able to use it in different settings. But WordPress didn&#8217;t have. There was a plugin or there is a plugin where Automattic created some grid layouts. But now that this is in core, I think we can push it really further into the internet, so to speak. There&#8217;s another item that now you can actually style the caption element, also via the UI controls for color and topography. That&#8217;s the caption for the image…</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; Image block.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Image block, yeah, and Video block and Table block and all that. So now we have that, but it seems to have also the UI for you were able to do this via the theme JSON, but now you can do it without using the code for it.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; Yeah. You can access it through the global style panels for typography, there will be a new caption options, and the color as well.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; So yeah, the next one, we have the patterns to the template start modal. So when you add new templates now instead of having a fallback default templates, you can have this options to pick a pattern to start with. So yeah, this is also interesting, because in my opinion, this is a perfect middle ground. I remember when the Site Editor came in 5.9, when you add a new template, you start with blank canvas, which is quite daunting, to be honest. And then it was fixed in the feature of this 6.2, 6.0, I can&#8217;t remember that one. But basically, now you can choose it with the black templates and a default fallback template, which is great. But the problem is if you have different ideas with the default templates, you basically have to modify the existing template. You can remove some blocks, and you have to add more blocks. But now with the increasing number of patterns and increasing number of the pattern adoption by the theme developers, it&#8217;s nice to have just simply options to add patterns for the template and choose whatever suits your needs.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, the blank page is not good for anybody, not for writers and not for style, for theme builders. So what&#8217;s next?</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Bug Fixes</strong></h3>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; It&#8217;s quite a lot showing the featured images placeholders. Again, this is something I didn&#8217;t realize at first. Is it Blockfish? Oh, no, it&#8217;s block library. Yeah. It&#8217;s something that I didn&#8217;t realize previously that sometimes the featured image doesn&#8217;t show on the Query Loop block when there&#8217;s no featured set for the certain post. But I think now when you&#8217;re in the Site Editor and some posts may have a featured image and some don&#8217;t, the post with featured image will show the featured image on the Query Loop. And the post that doesn&#8217;t have any featured image will have this gray placeholder so you know that the featured image will be there.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. Or say, &#8220;Oh,&#8221; and if I want that design, it alerts you to not every post can help you with that design because there is no featured image. So it gets a little bit skewed there, where the headline comes up on the top of the image to the next post. Yeah, so it really helps with what you see is what you get kind of approach. Yeah. Yeah, there was quite a daunting bug there. And then the one other bug fix was that the Selecta&#8217;s API, the hook for the global style variation and Duotone has been fixed, and it&#8217;s now behaving consistently throughout the site. There&#8217;s a whole list of PRs that are with that. Not all of them are actually placed in, but this is definitely a very major fix to revamp the code consistency and code quality for it.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>What’s in Active Development or Discussed</strong></h3>



<p>All right. And this was Gutenberg 5.5. I&#8217;m glad that they were a little smaller as plug-in releases, because first, we got two and then, but we also have a lot to talk about what&#8217;s in active development and what&#8217;s discussed. And I prefixed that next section for the section is, we will include three and a half topics to talk about. First we talk about a little bit about Matias Ventura&#8217;s post on the next phase of the Gutenberg project, Phase 3. And there&#8217;s also work being done on making content and template editing less confusing, and then a proposal on the interactivity API by core contributors. And the half-topic is the design shares by Joen Asmussion from the WordPress design team showed what they are working on. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; Let&#8217;s start with Phase 3. Personally for me, this is the most excitingness of the year, probably, ever since Matt mentioned it on the State of the Word, that this year we are moving to Phase 3 with real-time collaboration. Personally, I believe if the Phase 3 is what I have in mind, and officially just like what Matias posted on his blog post. This is my personal take, but I really think, I believe that it will be a game changer in the content industry. Because right now, we rely on other tools like Google Docs to collaborate and create the draft for the content and then push it on the WordPress, which, it&#8217;s now better with the Block Editor, but still, you have to move the draft, you still have to clean the code, you still have to move the image with the alt tags. So if the Phase 3 finally mature, this can significantly improve the workflow and the pace of the content industry. So yeah, I really hope the Phase 3 gets underway as soon as possible. And let&#8217;s see how the development then. Definitely can&#8217;t wait for that.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, I&#8217;m totally with you. The other, I think the whole web development and web content creators of the last 25 years is actually waiting for this, that two people at the same time or four people at the same time can access a post and edit it. And not the last person who&#8217;s clicks saves wins. So yes, I think that, and bringing that to a web editor is certainly cutting down on the workflow of a lot of people that had to collaborate on Google Docs to get input from other people, to get approval from other people. So that definitely is that real-time collaboration part that Matias Ventura was talking about in his post. What he also sees is that there are asynchronous collaboration. That if Leo in Indonesia is writing a post, and I&#8217;m in America and that&#8217;s 12 hours apart, I want to comment on it, and it&#8217;s really hard right now to do this because there is no revision comments.</p>



<p>There is no comments at all unless you have a plugin. There were always a few things already, a plugin there. So PublishPress is one, and then Edit Flow that took care of some of that, but you weren&#8217;t able to customize it to your own liking. And then he also talks about the published flows where you have publishing checklists. So is the image rate in the aspect ratio? Do we have an excerpt? Do we have all the categories and tags, and do we have a different image for the header section and for the footer section? Or when different contacts can have different publish flows. So that is definitely going to be a little bit more complicated to make it extensible. And then also the post revisions interface, it&#8217;s really hard right now to see what really changed when you have a long post from one revisions to the next.</p>



<p>And this Phase 3 is aiming to make it understand blocks, and then also help you with theme switching as well as applying some other styles. And also have revisions that are scheduled. We have on the documentation team, yeah, Leo, you probably know this better than I do, but if you want to prepare for a release, you need to wait till the release is out, so you can publish it, publish the new version of your documents. But not everybody has time to wait for the release and be there in the middle of a night, and hit the publish button or the save button. You definitely want to schedule that. And yeah, we use a plugin for that, but having that in core would be definitely, we are not the only ones who have that trouble. Yeah, yeah.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; Yeah, definitely.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; But with the post revision interface, I think that&#8217;s the main, when talking about collaboration, people might think about real time and asynchronous collaboration. But post revisions are as important as the other ones. Because when you collaborate, especially with bigger themes, you really want to see not only what part has been changed, but who made the change to keep the accountability and content to be as good as possible. And to make sure there&#8217;s no mistake in the process. So yeah, and I think, I&#8217;m not sure, did Matias actually talk about this, but with the collaboration is now on WordPress, there must be some thinking to grant more access to collaborators, maybe from links and maybe how to control the user&#8217;s permissions. So I believe that&#8217;s something to tackle as well on the first three.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, it&#8217;s definitely will, especially the post revision interface. And although it will need different user roles for different things to do, and I know that bigger publishing houses, they have that really huge requirement that they need to have people access the images but not the text kind of thing or vice versa. And yeah, there&#8217;s definitely a part of the development will be about user roles and user capabilities that come with the publishing flow, for sure. There&#8217;s also the admin design. There was a separate post by Matias back in January, I think, that was thinking about through the WordPress admin experience. And that will now be part of the collaboration phase, where certain pieces of the admin definitely would need a revamp, like how we organize posts. What&#8217;s in the post you need for the collaboration you need, yeah, when was it revisioned?</p>



<p>Does that need to be in the list view of things? And all that kind of thing. And then also have a library. Expansion, that means spaces where you can manage your patterns, where you can manage your blocks, your styles and your fonts on the site, or at least for the site admin to be able to do that. Right now, there&#8217;s the two, all four of them that I&#8217;ve just mentioned. And the Matias mentioned in his post where are actually missing, and it&#8217;s felt quite a bit throughout the five years that the Block Editor is there, especially the blocks where you can switch on and switch off blocks in the interface. But then if you have third-party blocks, you don&#8217;t know which of the blocks have you used or which post uses which block. So you can switch it over to a different one when you say, &#8220;Okay, I want to remove the plugin.&#8221; But all of a sudden, some of your content disappears as well.</p>



<p>So there definitely needs to be a little bit more manageable space there. And then the last item is develop a global search and command component where you can say, &#8220;Okay, edit post in a search box,&#8221; and then it opens up the &#8220;Edit post&#8221; admin screen. So you don&#8217;t have to click through all the different levels of things. That&#8217;s the idea behind it. So I&#8217;m not sure if we do it really justice, going through those different sections of the collaboration post by Matias. Give it a read. It&#8217;s definitely is a little bit more expanded at what we are doing here. And see, and especially what Matias Ventura is asking and the whole core contributors are asking. So if there&#8217;s something that you are doing on your website and you want it in one part of the collaboration, because it fits in that scope, but it wasn&#8217;t yet mentioned, comment on the post, describe your flow, and see if that&#8217;s something that could be in core.</p>



<p>Nothing is, of course, prominent at this stage because I haven&#8217;t started working on it yet. So in the WP Briefing podcast, Episode 52, Josepha Haden Chomphosy and Hector Prieto also talking about the Phase 3, the workflows, the visioning about it. So it&#8217;s another version of it, and you probably can hear more about it. All right. So I mentioned it before, is also work being done, and we&#8217;ll share the links to the PR and discussions in the show notes.</p>



<p>Users repeatedly mentioned that they sometimes get confused of what they are actually editing in the Site Editor. And then they see a page and make updates to the content, and then they&#8217;re surprised that page template, actually, that they&#8217;re actually changed the page template. And that the content that they changed or that they added is replicated on all the pages because it was a template. So that&#8217;s quite a surprising thing, and it&#8217;s nowhere really alerted that that might happen. So the developers and designers are really working hard to make it a seamless switch from editing your content to editing a template. And there are two, there&#8217;s one PR that actually caters to that, but then there is a bigger effort to optimize also the content-centric editing experience in the site editor. So I&#8217;ll share those in the side notes. Show notes, side notes, show notes. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; It&#8217;s definitely a nice addition to the Site Editor. I remember when the browse mode first mentioned in past updates, I believe, this is actually what I had in mind. Users can browse their websites, can open pages and blog post to the Site Editors. And when they want to edit the content, they can just switch from editing the templates and just editing the page or post they&#8217;re browsing in. And I think with the new navigation UI in the site bar or the dark side of the Site Editor, it&#8217;s like that already. We can see the menu items in there and just click on it, and you can see the page. And if you click it, you can edit the page on the Site Editor. So yeah, it&#8217;s already in the good direction now. So it&#8217;s only the matter of expanding it to be more integrated between the Site Editors and put editor, and the post and page editor.</p>



<p>To be honest, when the first Site Editor came out in 5.9, this is also my first issue, figuring out what is the new Site Editor? And I just click it. &#8220;Okay, this is the template, so how do I edit the post or page? Oh, I still have to go to the old post and page editor.&#8221; Because in my mind, it was a page builder or website builder, but it&#8217;s not right. So it took me a while to understand what it is. And now we are working to integrate the Site Editor and the content editor better. So in the future, we might have a better experience with Block Editor and seamless content editing.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. And for a newer WordPress user, the difference between the page and the template for the page, that&#8217;s a certain cognitive hurdle there. An abstraction level that not everybody who wants to get their work done wants to deal with. So it&#8217;s definitely something that needs to be handled, but it&#8217;s also sometimes really hard to make that intuitive. And if the context is not known with a switch, so it&#8217;s going to be a training. Sometimes we always think that web editing should be something like using a car, without forgetting that we went to traffic school before we actually learned driving. And we don&#8217;t want have traffic school for the web there. So we need to make a compromise there.</p>



<p>I also wanted to point the more the developers amongst our listeners to the proposal for an interactivity API that a team of contributors has worked almost a year around it to figure out how can this be standardized. There is, of course, available any of the block builders or block developers or third-party blocks or core blocks. There is some interactivity already available, but it&#8217;s not standardized. And standardization also means that developers don&#8217;t have to relearn everything. Users don&#8217;t have to relearn everything every time they have a new plugin. And also, you can share data. So if one plugin knows about the block of another plugin, then new things and better things can happen. So Mario Santos published a proposal for the Interactivity API.</p>



<p>And for those of us who need a practical application to think through the abstractions there, it&#8217;s all very theoretically, Mario also put in a video demo of a movie database, where in you can browse the site publicly and developers can look at the code of things. But the video shows two use cases for add an interactivity to that movie directory. And navigating the directory is already by search, and that is one of the interactivity API, because it doesn&#8217;t go back to the server and reloads things. That&#8217;s pretty much what it abstracts is that only parts of the data will be replaced on the site, but it will not go back to reload the whole page that you&#8217;re looking at. And then the other one is click on hearts to favorite some of the movies. And it also has a favorite counter on that. So these kind of interactivity, that&#8217;s a simple example that we can all rely on or relate to.</p>



<p>And then there is the whole proposal itself. As a developer, you learn about directives, you see some code examples, and the FAQ also answers some of the more in-depth questions you might have. The post has already 40 comments. So grab a cup of coffee, put on some nice, slow music and read through it. It&#8217;s almost a book, but it&#8217;s very, very interesting in terms of what can actually happen when we standardize things. And then there is next week, no. Okay, so I don&#8217;t want to count it because I don&#8217;t know when you are listening to it. So two developers from the team who came up with a proposal will be speakers of the Developer Hours on April 17. I don&#8217;t know if you know about Developer Hours, but they had been revitalized from an experiment last year where you can connect with developers on the core team and have questions answered.</p>



<p>And this time has a little bit of a different format, when there is an introduction to the interactivity API. And they will hold two events to accommodate as many time zones as possible. One is at 8:00 AM UTC. And the other one, that&#8217;s with Mario Santos. And the other one is at 17:00 UTC. That&#8217;s going to be with Michal Czamplinski. And yeah, so that is actually the next generation of block development getting more interactivity into, it&#8217;s called a hydration process, where things come from the server. Yeah, it&#8217;s a connecting PHP with JavaScript and just update the necessary data on the front end upon user interactions. That&#8217;s pretty much the explanation for it. Yeah, so I don&#8217;t know if you have any comments on that, Leo?</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; Nope.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; Because I&#8217;m more of an end user in this regard.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. And what you see in the demo is actually quite impressive, because you see the seamless, that there is no time lost between changing different screens. So that&#8217;s really cool.&nbsp;</p>



<p>So there are two articles in the show notes, one from the Tavern and one the proposal. And then if you as a developer or want to be a developer kind of person, share or join those two developer hours with Michal and Mario. And the last thing, the half about topic for, what&#8217;s in the works is Joen Asmussen&#8217;s Design Share from March 27th on the &#8220;Make WordPress Design,&#8221; make blog. And he shares what&#8217;s happening, with one is that the mercantile store, the swag store gets some social images that are designed. Then the design team also thinks through making the padding and margin controls a little bit more intuitive and see how to provide easily clickable preset sizes and unlink variations, and take a look at it.</p>



<p>And he connects with the PRs on issues that are on the GitHub repo. They also have a visual idea on how to scale the Block Options menu. That gets really long now to cluster some of them, and then you can access and an arrow with a secondary menu item there. That&#8217;s quite nice. And then he had, the last one is the ideation of the Template Management view where he has a small video to mock up the view toggle patterns to moving between the browsing and the managing context. So that&#8217;s pretty much the topic that we talked before about content-centric Site Editor kind of thing. So they&#8217;re, of course, design, it&#8217;s all visuals. And we are here on a podcast, so it&#8217;s really hard. But we have the link in the show notes for you, so you can browse them at your own leisure. Yeah. All right.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; The block option in particular caught my eye because as you say, the block options get longer and longer over time. So it is quite short. But then we have block locking tools, we have &#8220;Create Template Part&#8221; options. We now have a copy style and paste styles. I mean, if we have a minimized Windows Manager, try to open the options, so you might have to scroll it down just to find the bottom ones. So yeah, it&#8217;s nice to have the new designs to just split it and with the sub-menus. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. You still need the space on the right-hand side when they pop out. So if there are too many options, it&#8217;s not enough room. But yeah, gradual adoption is pretty much the keyword word for that. Yeah. All right. This is the end of the Gutenberg Changelog Episode 81. Thank you so much for listening, people. Leo, thank you so much for being here and talking this through. You did an excellent job. It was wonderful to have the chat with you, and I really enjoyed it, being on the show with you. So you mentioned…</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; Yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: You mentioned a few links to your social web. If you can repeat the website where you have your portfolio for the photography, that would be great.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; Yeah, the website is <a href="https://leoandlens.com/">Leo and Lens</a>. I will type it down for you later, and maybe you can put it on the show notes.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: There&#8217;s no maybe about it.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; Thank you. Yeah. And yeah, lastly, thank you all, listeners, for listening to this episode. Thank you, Birgit, for having me. It&#8217;s such an honor to be in the Gutenberg Changelog podcast with you.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: It was definitely, the pleasure was all mine. And well, I might ask you to maybe come back in the future. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; Yeah, yeah, just contact me. I&#8217;ll definitely be happy to be in here again and talk about Gutenberg, about WordPress and how it evolves. Yeah, it is a great pleasure for me.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Thank you. Yeah, and as always, hey listeners, the show notes will be published on GutenbergTimes.com/podcast. This is Episode 81. And if you have questions or suggestions or news you want us to include, send them to <a href="mailto:Changelog@Gutenbergtimes.com">Changelog@Gutenbergtimes.com</a>. That&#8217;s email <a href="mailto:Changelog@Gutenbergtimes.com">Changelog@Gutenbergtimes.com</a>. And thanks again, and I wish you all a good weekend, a good day, a good year, and a good month, so bye. That&#8217;s it for me. Goodbye.</p>



<p><em>Leonardus Nugraha</em>:&nbsp; Goodbye.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Sun, 09 Apr 2023 13:22:06 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:18:"Birgit Pauli-Haack";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:20;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:107:"Gutenberg Times: Anniversary, Open Verse, Performance measuring, Interactivity API – Weekend Edition #249";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:35:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/?p=23782";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:110:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/anniversary-open-verse-performance-measuring-interactivity-api-weekend-edition-249/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:21724:"<p>Howdy, </p>



<p>Greetings from Munich, Germany! It&#8217;s good to be back in my hometown. Let the honeymoon phase of rekindling begin! </p>



<p>In the WordPress world,  the last two weeks were quite busy. The major release of WordPress 6.2, a preview of Gutenberg&#8217;s Phase Three, a new Gutenberg plugin version, and so much more. </p>



<p>Enjoy. Wishing you and yours a great weekend and Happy Easter to those who celebrate it. </p>



<p>Yours, 💕<br /><em>Birgit</em></p>



<p>PS: Did you know that as part of the 20-year celebrations coming up next month, <strong>Julia Golomb</strong>, published a play list on Spotify of <a href="https://wp20.wordpress.net/20-years-of-wordpress-jazz/"><strong>20 Years of WordPress Jazz</strong></a>? From Miles Davis to Mikhail “Misha” Alperin, this playlist includes one song for each of the 45 jazz artists selected to <a href="https://wordpress.org/about/history/">represent the releases</a>. Have a look at the site <a href="https://wp20.wordpress.net">wp20.WordPress.net</a> of what is in store for the 20-year anniversary coming up next month. </p>



<a href="https://wp20.wordpress.net/"><img /></a>




<div class="wp-block-group has-light-background-background-color has-background is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow"><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container">
<p><strong>Table of Contents</strong></p>



<div class="wp-block-sortabrilliant-guidepost"><ul><li><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#0-word-press-release-information">Developing Gutenberg and WordPress</a></li><li><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#0-p">Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners</a></li><li><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#2-word-press-6-0-1-and-6-1-scheduled">Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks</a></li><li><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#3-building-themes-for-fse-and-word-press">Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor. </a></li></ul></div>
</div></div>




<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="0-word-press-release-information">Developing Gutenberg and WordPress</h2>



<p>It is finally here!  <a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2023/03/dolphy/"><strong>WordPress 6.2 &#8220;Dolphy&#8221; </strong></a>was released on March 29, 2023. Over 600 contributors made the first major release in 2023 possible. They come from at least 50 countries. With 900+ enhancements, ten full Gutenberg release features, and a slew of performance improvements, you might not be surprised to learn that “Dolphy” reached the impressive milestone of 2 million downloads in under 2 hours after release. After the first week, it reached over 18 million downloads.&nbsp;</p>



<ul>
<li>The release post has the details: <a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2023/03/dolphy/"><strong>WordPress 6.2 &#8220;Dolphy&#8221;</strong></a></li>



<li>The field guide for developers is available since RC 1: <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/03/09/wordpress-6-2-field-guide/"><strong>WordPress 6.2 Field Guide</strong></a></li>



<li>Watch the recorded Product Demo video from the preview event. <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/03/10/6-2-live-product-demo-qa/"><strong>6.2 Live Product Demo Q&amp;A</strong></a></li>
</ul>



<a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2023/03/dolphy/"><img /></a>



<p>Here is a highly subjective list of detailed articles on various sites about the release and the features in WordPress 6.2:</p>



<ul>
<li><strong>Carlo Daniele</strong> for Kinsta: <a href="https://kinsta.com/blog/wordpress-6-2/">What’s New In WordPress 6.2: Browse Mode, Style Book, Improved Navigation Menus, New APIs, and Much More</a>.</li>



<li><strong>Leonardus Nugraha</strong> for Hostinger: <a href="https://www.hostinger.com/blog/wordpress-6-2">WordPress 6.2 Is Finally Here: A Detailed Overview</a></li>



<li><strong>Dan Knauss</strong>, for iThemes&nbsp;<a href="https://ithemes.com/blog/what-to-expect-in-wordpress-6-2"><strong>What to Expect in WordPress 6.2</strong></a> (<em>BTW iThemes just announced a <a href="https://solidwp.com/">total rebranding to SolidWP</a></em>)</li>



<li>And last but not least: <strong>Sarah Gooding </strong>for WPTavern: <a href="https://wptavern.com/wordpress-6-2-dolphy-introduces-a-revamped-site-editor-distraction-free-writing-mode-and-updated-block-inserter">WordPress 6.2 “Dolphy” Introduces a Revamped Site Editor, Distraction-Free Writing Mode, and Updated Block Inserter&nbsp;</a></li>
</ul>



<div class="wp-block-group has-light-background-background-color has-background is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow"><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container">
<p><strong>🎙️ </strong> New episode:  <a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-81-wordpress-6-2-interactivity-api/">Gutenberg Changelog #81 – WordPress 6.2, Gutenberg 15.4 and 15.5, Phase 3 – Collaboration and a new  Interactivity API</a> with Birgit Pauli-Haack and special guest Leonardus Nugraha</p>
</div></div>



<p><strong><a href="https://twitter.com/Leonugr">Leonardus Nugraha</a> </strong>joined me on Friday for Gutenberg Changelog episode 81, and we also talked about WordPress 6.2. We also covered Gutenberg plugin releases 15.4 and 15.5, Phase 3 and the Interactivity API proposal. If you are a subscriber, the episode will drop into your favorite Podcast app over the weekend. </p>



<img />



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide" />



<p>In the <a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/phase-3-collaboration-layout-and-spacing-controls-block-visibility-3-0-weekend-edition-248/"><em>Weekend edition #248</em></a>, we shared Matias Ventura&#8217;s announcement on the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/03/24/phase-3-collaboration/">Phase 3: Collaboration</a>  </p>



<p><strong>Josepha Haden Chomphosy</strong> and <strong>Hector Prieto</strong> discussed a few questions the community had about Phase 3 in the latest episode of the WP Briefing: <a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2023/03/episode-52-phase-three-with-hector-prieto/"><strong>Episode 52: Workflows and Phase Three Visioning with Special Guest Héctor Prieto</strong></a></p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide" />



<p>In his <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/design/2023/03/27/design-share-mar-13-mar-24/"><strong>Design Share: Mar 13–Mar 24</strong></a>, <strong>Joen Asmussen</strong> showcased the latest work by the WordPress Design team. One display is particular interesting as it imagines how the block options menu can scale and house even more options. In another section, Asmussen shows how the team is thinking about the template management. </p>



<img />



<p>This week, <strong>Ryan Welcher</strong> and <strong>Justin Tadlock</strong> wrangled the Gutenberg plugins release and published the release post: <strong><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/05/whats-new-in-gutenberg-15-5-05-april/">What’s new in Gutenberg 15.5? (05 April)</a>. </strong>In it, they highlight </p>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/05/whats-new-in-gutenberg-15-5-05-april/#patterns-as-template-starters">Patterns as template starters</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/05/whats-new-in-gutenberg-15-5-05-april/#style-captions-via-the-styles-interface">Style captions via the Styles interface</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/05/whats-new-in-gutenberg-15-5-05-april/#experimental-grid-layout-support">Experimental grid layout support</a></li>
</ul>



<p>I am particularly, curious about how the grid layout works. It seems quite complex as the editor needs to deal with several levels and Inner Blocks and how they follow the overall grid layout. It&#8217;s important that theme builders test this and provide feedback, so it can be solidified. </p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="0-p">Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners</h2>



<p><strong>Anne McCarthy</strong>, manager of the FSE-Outreach Project hosted a Hallway Hangout with <a href="https://twitter.com/bbertucc"><strong>Blake Bertuccelli-Booth</strong></a> on <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2023/04/04/hallway-hangout-lets-chat-about-moving-to-the-site-editor/">Moving to the Site Editor</a>. Bertucelli-Booth &#8220;sees a huge advantage in using the Site Editor directly as a design tool rather than using Figma before replicating in WordPress.&#8221; and &#8220;Generally speaking, they try not to build that many custom blocks and instead rely on patterns with an emphasis on employing as much as possible from&nbsp;<a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/how-to-guides/curating-the-editor-experience/">the curating the editor experience doc</a>.&#8221; McCarthy wrote. It&#8217;s a great conversation to have and one I will revisit, when starting to migrate the Gutenberg Times to a block theme. </p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide" />



<p><strong>Munir Kamal</strong> launched <a href="https://gutenberghub.com/launching-gutenberghub-shop/">GutenbergHub Shop</a> where he offers an extensive range of Gutenberg Blocks, Templates, and Extensions, designed to facilitate and enhance the website building process. Kamal has big plans for the future. I am excited to see <a href="https://shop.gutenberghub.com/">what&#8217;s in store </a>next</p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide" />



<p><strong>Anders Noren</strong>, an early adopter of block themes, published a new theme in the WordPress repository called <strong><a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/abisko/">Abisko</a>.</strong> &#8220;Abisko is a stylish blog theme with a heavy emphasis on bold typography and generous amounts of whitespace. It comes with 5 different theme styles to choose from, and over 30 different block patterns that you can use to build unique page layouts quickly.&#8221;<br /><br />Sarah Gooding has the skinny for you: <a href="https://wptavern.com/anders-noren-releases-abisko-a-new-free-wordpress-theme-with-30-block-patterns"><strong>Anders Norén Releases Abisko, a New Free WordPress Theme with 30+ Block Patterns</strong></a></p>



<img /><em>Features pattern. Theme Abiski by Andres Noren. </em>



<p>WordPress 6.2 comes with an Openverse integration for media and block inserter. <strong>Wes Theron </strong>has a tutorial for you on how to <a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/tutorial/add-media-and-openverse-images-to-your-content-directly-from-the-inserter/"><strong>Add media and Openverse images to your content directly from the Inserter</strong></a></p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="2-word-press-6-0-1-and-6-1-scheduled">Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks</h2>



<p><a href="https://twitter.com/jkoussertari"><strong>James Koussertari</strong></a> at GutenbergMarket, published <a href="https://gutenbergmarket.com/news/a-comprehensive-guide-to-building-wordpress-block-themes"><strong>A Comprehensive Guide to Building WordPress Block Themes</strong></a> with links to official and other sources. Apart from the official sources, Carolina Nymark&#8217;s fullsiteediting.com has the most details resources.  </p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide" />



<p>Previously, <strong>Felix Arntz</strong> shared his experience of&nbsp;<a href="https://felix-arntz.me/blog/rebuilding-my-website-using-a-block-theme/">rebuilding my WordPress website using a block theme</a>. In his latest blog post he shared how he was <a href="https://felix-arntz.me/blog/measuring-website-performance-using-webpagetest-with-wordpress-6-2/"><strong>measuring website performance using WebPageTest</strong></a>, using the latest WordPress version. Arntz shares his plan, how to select relevant test scenarios and what exactly he wanted to measure. It&#8217;s a great case study, that will help you to also benchmark some of the sites you are dealing with. Felix is super detailed in his post, and you might get lost in the weeds. Make sure you check out the tools he mentions to help with the endeavor. </p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide" />



<p><b>The WPEngine</b> team has released the Pattern Manager plugin in the WordPress plugins directory . The description reads: &#8220;When you design beautiful block patterns for your theme, Pattern Manager by WP Engine will automatically push them into PHP files for you, every time you save.&#8221; </p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide" />




<p><strong>&nbsp;<a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/references/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">&#8220;Keeping up with Gutenberg &#8211; Index 2022&#8221;</a>&nbsp;</strong><br />A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test, and Meta team from Jan. 2021 on. Updated by yours truly.  <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/references/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index-2020/"><em>The index 2020 is here</em></a></p>




<p><strong><a href="https://twitter.com/benjaminritner">Ben Ritner</a></strong> elaborated on the <a href="https://www.kadencewp.com/blog/wordpress-6-2-and-the-state-of-fse/"><strong>state of FSE themes,</strong></a> “…there is a lot about the site editor and FSE themes that are not quite ready…”. Ritner and his team at Kadence theme were early adopters of the Block editor and built a very popular Block Collection plugin. Together with the Kadence Theme, the plugin elevated the user experience to page building capabilities with features the block editor was missing for a long time. There are still things Ritner finds missing. Read  the article and see if his gaps are also relevant to your theme building journey. </p>



<p></p>



<p><a href="https://twitter.com/nschaeferhoff">Nick Schäferhoff</a> found <a href="https://torquemag.io/2023/03/wordpress-site-editor-features/"><strong>10 WordPress Site Editor (FSE) Features You Didn’t Know About</strong></a>, even if you know about some of them, you might not know all of them. </p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="3-building-themes-for-fse-and-word-press">Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor. </h2>



<p>In his post,<strong> <a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/news/2023/03/quick-and-easy-local-wordpress-development-with-wp-env/">Quick and easy local WordPress development with wp-env</a>, Michael Burridge</strong> introduced you to the WordPress development tool that comes with the Gutenberg plugin and allows you to quickly spin up a WordPress site on your computer to start working on proof of concepts, or follow an interesting idea. <em>(Docker required </em></p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide" />



<p><strong>Jonathan Bossenger</strong>&#8216;s new course is online on Learn.WordPress site.  <a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/course/converting-a-shortcode-to-a-block/"><strong>Converting a Shortcode to a Block</strong></a>. This is a newer style of course, where we&#8217;re using existing tutorial content, updating it with images, code examples and quizzes, and bundling it as a short course.  A short version of the course is available as a tutorial on the WordPress Developer Blog: <a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/news/2023/03/converting-your-shortcodes-to-blocks/"><strong>Converting your shortcodes to blocks</strong></a></p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide" />



<p><strong>Michael Burridge</strong> and <strong>Jonathan Bossenger</strong> held live Developer Hours for the Asia/Pacific timezones and uploaded the recording to WordPressTV: <a href="https://wordpress.tv/2023/04/03/developer-hours-migrate-a-plugin-to-blocks-emea-asia-pacific/"><strong>Developer Hours: Migrate a plugin to blocks (EMEA / Asia-Pacific)</strong></a></p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide" />



<p><strong>Ryan Welcher</strong>  invited developers to bring block development issues to the live stream on Twitch. Some recordings are available on YouTube:  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aut0EcsKbxM&t=3s"><strong>Block Development: Bring me your issues!</strong></a> In this edition, Welcher covers about 14 different issues submitted by viewers. </p>



<p>Among those: </p>



<ul>
<li>Adding some checks to only show the link to users with the correct level of access.</li>



<li>Creating a post-placeholder block and creating the parent/child relationship with the post-picker block.</li>



<li>Updating the Edit component to match the output of the front end.</li>
</ul>



<p><a href="https://www.twitch.tv/ryanwelchercodes">Ryan Welcher streams very Thursday at 10:30 ET / 15:30 UTC on Twitch </a></p>



<p></p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide" />



<p><strong><a href="https://twitter.com/santosguillamot">Mario Santos</a></strong> posted on the Make Core blog the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/03/30/proposal-the-interactivity-api-a-better-developer-experience-in-building-interactive-blocks/"><strong>Proposal: The Interactivity API – A better developer experience in building interactive blocks</strong></a>.  The vision:  &#8220;Imagine plugins providing interactions like “heart this post” or “add to cart” without page reloads. Picture instant search, commenting, and native full-page transitions as best-in-class built-ins without complex scaffolding or external tools. Envision achieving this in any block theme by default without sacrificing&nbsp;PHP&nbsp;server rendering and the&nbsp;plugin&nbsp;ecosystem for a&nbsp;JS&nbsp;runtime. Visualize block developers easily declaring and extending such behaviors in a way that is immediately familiar and compatible with the block ecosystem.&#8221; </p>



<p>Santos also shared a short demo of  Favorites in a Movies app. You can <a href="https://wpmovies.dev/">browse it yourself on the live site</a>, and if you are interested in the implementation, the <a href="https://github.com/wordpress/wp-movies-demo">demo code is also available on GitHub</a>. This post definitely has a high Geek-factor, but the aim is to make it easier for any developer to create interactive blocks. Stay tuned for more examples and examples code.</p>



<p>Two developers from the team working on the Interactivity API will be speakers at the <strong>Developer Hours on April 17,</strong> and give an<a href="https://www.meetup.com/learn-wordpress-online-workshops/events/292575913/"> </a><strong><a href="https://www.meetup.com/learn-wordpress-online-workshops/events/292575913/">Introduction of the </a>Interactivity API</strong>. They will hold two events  to accommodate as many times zones as possible: <a href="https://www.meetup.com/learn-wordpress-online-workshops/events/292575913/">at 8am UTC</a> with Mario Santos and <a href="https://www.meetup.com/learn-wordpress-online-workshops/events/292575942/"><strong>at 17:00 UTC</strong></a> with Michal Czamplinski</p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide" />




<p><strong><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/need-a-zip-from-master/">Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg&#8217;s master branch?</a></strong><br />Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review. <br />Have you been using it? Hit reply and let me know.</p>



<p><img alt="GitHub all releases" src="https://img.shields.io/github/downloads/bph/gutenberg/total?style=for-the-badge" /></p>




<p class="has-text-align-right has-small-font-size"><em>Questions? Suggestions? Ideas? Don&#8217;t hesitate to send <a href="mailto:pauli@gutenbergtimes.com">them via email</a> or send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph</em>. </p>



<p class="has-text-align-right has-small-font-size">For questions to be answered on the <a href="http://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast">Gutenberg Changelog</a>, send them to <a href="mailto:changelog@gutenbergtimes.com">changelog@gutenbergtimes.com</a></p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide" />




<p>Featured Image: Munich, view from the tower of St. Paul by Birgit Pauli-Haack, found on wordpress.org/photos. </p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-css-opacity is-style-wide" />



<p class="has-text-align-left"><strong>Don&#8217;t want to miss the next Weekend Edition? </strong></p>



<form class="wp-block-newsletterglue-form ngl-form ngl-portrait" action="https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/" method="post"><div class="ngl-form-container"><div class="ngl-form-field"><label class="ngl-form-label" for="ngl_email"><br />Type in your Email address to subscribe.</label><div class="ngl-form-input"><input type="email" class="ngl-form-input-text" name="ngl_email" id="ngl_email" /></div></div><button type="submit" class="ngl-form-button">Subscribe</button><p class="ngl-form-text">We hate spam, too and won&#8217;t give your email address to anyone except Mailchimp to send out our Weekend Edition</p></div><div class="ngl-message-overlay"><div class="ngl-message-svg-wrap"></div><div class="ngl-message-overlay-text">Thanks for subscribing.</div></div><input type="hidden" name="ngl_list_id" id="ngl_list_id" value="26f81bd8ae" /><input type="hidden" name="ngl_double_optin" id="ngl_double_optin" value="yes" /></form>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-css-opacity is-style-wide" />";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Sat, 08 Apr 2023 07:09:27 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:18:"Birgit Pauli-Haack";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:21;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:68:"WPTavern: Gutenberg 15.5 Introduces Experimental Grid Layout Support";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=143396";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:79:"https://wptavern.com/gutenberg-15-5-introduces-experimental-grid-layout-support";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:3586:"<p><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/05/whats-new-in-gutenberg-15-5-05-april/">Gutenberg 15.5</a> was released this week with more new features and refinements to WordPress&#8217; full-site editing capabilities. The project will soon be moving on to Phase 3 with <a href="https://wptavern.com/real-time-collaboration-is-coming-to-wordpress">real-time collaboration</a> on the roadmap, but there are still many improvements on the way for the Site Editor and core blocks.</p>



<p>This release introduces experimental support for grid layouts in the Group block. Gutenberg contributors are testing a Grid layout type as a new variation for the Group block. They decided on this implementation instead of a new block in order to get more real-world use on the first iteration. </p>



<img />



<p>After testing, I found the Grid layout type fits as a natural addition to other Group variations. This first iteration ships with one setting for configuring the minimum column width, but more options can be added in the future. I found it to be far easier to manipulate than the Columns block for basic grids. It may be easier for users to discover and understand if it were implemented as a new block, with the grouping implicit instead of having to add a Group block first and then select a layout.</p>







<p>Grid layouts are a common feature of page builder plugins and this new capability is necessary to make Gutenberg&#8217;s page building capabilities more robust. With more testing, contributors can settle on an implementation and build it out from there. If you want to give it a try, the Grid variation for the Group block can be enabled under <strong>Gutenberg > Experiments</strong>.</p>



<img />



<p>Gutenberg 5.5 also introduces the ability for theme authors to identify a custom pattern to be displayed when users load a specific template, such as a 404 page, author page, or single post, instead of relying on a fallback template or starting from a blank slate. This makes it possible to have <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/05/whats-new-in-gutenberg-15-5-05-april/">custom patterns as template starters</a>, a friendlier jumping off point for users who are editing their sites.</p>



<p>The update brings the ability for users to <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/49141">style their Captions in the Styles interface</a>. Captions&#8217; color, typography, and size can now be easily edited with changes applied globally.</p>



<img />image credit: <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/05/whats-new-in-gutenberg-15-5-05-april/">Gutenberg 5.5 release post</a>



<p>A few other important updates in this release include the following: </p>



<ul>
<li>New <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/49111">Post Modified Date variation</a> for the Post Date block lets users display the post&#8217;s most recent date updated</li>



<li>Sticky Position: New “Make sticky” action added to the Template Part block</li>



<li>Buttons: Disabled support for &#8220;edit as HTML&#8221; in block options</li>



<li> Time to Read block adds spacing and typography support</li>



<li>Columns block adds support for template locking</li>



<li>“Image size” replaced with “Resolution” in image size controls</li>
</ul>



<p>Check out the changelog in the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/05/whats-new-in-gutenberg-15-5-05-april/">release post</a> for a full list of all the bug fixes, enhancements, and performance, documentation, and code quality improvements.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 07 Apr 2023 15:54:22 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:22;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:55:"WPTavern: WordPress Mobile Apps Get a New Support Forum";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=143415";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:66:"https://wptavern.com/wordpress-mobile-apps-get-a-new-support-forum";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:1939:"<p>Support for the WordPress mobile apps is <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/mobile/2023/03/28/new-mobile-support-forum/">moving to the WordPress.org forums</a>. Previously, users were routed to WordPress.com, even those who were self-hosted, and Automattic employees handled support tickets related to the mobile apps. </p>



<p>This move to WordPress.org is part of an effort to disentangle the official WordPress mobile apps from Automattic&#8217;s services. In July 2022, the Mobile Team announced it will be <a href="https://wptavern.com/automattic-is-removing-wordpress-com-features-from-the-official-wordpress-mobile-apps">pulling all the Jetpack and WordPress.com features from the official WordPress mobile apps</a> and moving them into the Jetpack app.</p>



<p>Although the mobile apps previously had forums on an older bbPress installation, they were rarely used as those in need of helped were piped through the WordPress.com support queue. The new <a href="https://wordpress.org/support/forum/mobile/">mobile support forum</a> is listed on the Support page and is already active with requests regarding <a href="https://wordpress.org/support/topic/wordpress-app-crash-samsung-galaxy-tablet/">app crashes</a>, <a href="https://wordpress.org/support/topic/cannot-connect-to-site-with-mobile-wp-app-403-error-xmlrpc-endpoint/">XML-RPC errors</a>, and <a href="https://wordpress.org/support/topic/gallery-block-glitch/">issues with core blocks</a>.</p>



<p>Bringing mobile support to a public place has the advantage of allowing users to help each other, search through old threads, and look for answers in the same way they do for problems with themes or plugins. It standardizes the support experience so users know what to expect. The Meta trac <a href="https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6686">ticket</a> for the forum creation has been closed now that the initiative is complete and the forum is operational.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 07 Apr 2023 05:10:39 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:23;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:58:"WPTavern: Preferred Languages Feature Plugin Needs Testing";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=143376";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:69:"https://wptavern.com/preferred-languages-feature-plugin-needs-testing";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:2925:"<p>The Preferred Languages project is gaining some momentum with this week&#8217;s <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/03/preferred-languages-help-test-the-latest-version/">2.0 release</a> of the feature plugin. In 2017, WordPress Core Committer Pascal Birchler <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2017/05/20/preferred-languages-the-prototype/">released a prototype</a> that lets users select multiple preferred languages in their settings so that WordPress will load the first translation available, falling back to the next language in the list. </p>



<p>&#8220;<a href="https://wordpress.org/about/stats/#locales">More than half of all WordPress sites</a> in the world use a language other than US English,&#8221; Birchler said in a previous update. &#8220;For these sites and users, the options to change the site <em>and</em> user language are great. But when there’s no translation for a given plugin or theme, WordPress falls back to US English. That’s a poor user experience for many non-English speakers.&#8221;</p>



<p>Version 2.0 introduces some major changes with a full refactoring of the UI to use React. (Previously it was using jQuery and jQuery UI.) Birchler removed the drag and drop sorting functionality to improve accessibility but users should find that almost everything the plugin still looks the same as before.  </p>



<p>This update also brings compaibility with with <code>WP_Textdomain_Registry</code> and <code>switch_to_user_locale()</code> for users on WordPress 6.1+ and brings unit test coverage to nearly 100%. </p>



<p>The <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/preferred-languages/">Preferred Languages plugin</a> has more than 2,000 active installs but Birchler is calling for people to test the update, as he believes the plugin is close to a core merge proposal.</p>



<p>&#8220;One big remaining question mark is the concept of <em>translation merging</em>,&#8221; he said. &#8220;By default, if there are only some missing strings in a selected locale, these would be displayed in English. But with translation merging, the missing strings will be taken from the locale next in line instead. While this works great, it could be <a href="https://github.com/swissspidy/preferred-languages/issues/536">a tad slow</a> due to the way translations are loaded in WordPress. Any help addressing this potential performance concern would be greatly appreciated.&#8221;</p>



<p>Testers can <a href="https://github.com/swissspidy/preferred-languages">contribute to the code on GitHub</a>, leave feedback on the <a href="https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/preferred-languages/">support forum</a>, and open <a href="https://github.com/swissspidy/preferred-languages/issues">new issues</a> to submit bug reports. Getting this project into core will make using WordPress and its plugin and theme ecosystems more accessible for non-English speakers.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 06 Apr 2023 13:58:10 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:24;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:63:"Post Status: Launching a WordPress Product in Public: Session 8";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:32:"https://poststatus.com/?p=148693";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:73:"https://poststatus.com/launching-a-wordpress-product-in-public-session-8/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:82314:"<div class="is-layout-flow wp-block-group eplus-wrapper has-theme-palette-2-color has-theme-palette-8-background-color has-text-color has-background"><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container"><div class="wp-block-post-excerpt"><p class="wp-block-post-excerpt__excerpt">In this episode, <a href="https://twitter.com/corymiller303">Cory Miller</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/coreymaass">Corey Maass </a>discuss their experiences and insights on launching <a href="https://crop.express/">Crop.Express</a>. They share valuable advice on building a brand, developing a minimum viable product (MVP), getting feedback from the community, and handling challenges along the way. </p></div>


<div class="wp-block-spacer eplus-wrapper"></div>



<p class="yoast-reading-time__wrapper"><span class="yoast-reading-time__icon"></span><span class="yoast-reading-time__spacer"></span><span class="yoast-reading-time__descriptive-text">Estimated reading time:  </span><span class="yoast-reading-time__reading-time">34</span><span class="yoast-reading-time__time-unit"> minutes</span></p>
</div></div>







<p><a href="https://poststatus.com/planet/feed/#h-transcript">Transcript</a> ↓</p>



<p>As <a href="https://twitter.com/coreymaass">Corey Maass</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/corymiller303">Cory Miller</a> move further into their experience of launching a WordPress product in public, they delve into the insights they’ve gained and the obstacles they are facing. Listen to their perspectives on building a community around the product, overcoming challenges, handling feedback, and implementing effective marketing strategies.</p>



<p><strong>Top Takeaways:</strong></p>



<ul>
<li><strong>The Impact of Technology on Personal and Professional Lives</strong>: Technology has revolutionized various aspects of our lives, from communication and information access to work and productivity. This brings about the benefits and challenges of living in a digitally connected world, including privacy, cybersecurity, and work-life balance.</li>



<li><strong>The Role of Mindfulness in the Digital Age:</strong> Mindfulness practices can help individuals navigate the challenges of the digital age, such as reducing stress, improving focus and concentration, and promoting healthy technology habits. Integrating mindfulness into daily routines and setting boundaries with technology is more important than ever.</li>



<li><strong>The Need for Conscious and Intentional Technology Use:</strong> Being conscious and intentional about how we use technology, including being mindful of the impact of technology on our physical and mental health, relationships, and overall well-being, is critical. Being thoughtful about developing healthy technology habits, such as managing screen time, practicing digital detox, and being mindful of online behavior, can have a significant impact.</li>
</ul>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">

</div>



<h3 class="eplus-wrapper" id="h-mentioned-in-the-show"><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f517.png" alt="🔗" class="wp-smiley" /> Mentioned in the show:</h3>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://crop.express/">Crop.Express</a></li>



<li><a href="https://ithemes.com/">iThemes</a></li>



<li><a href="https://calderaforms.com/">Caldera Forms</a></li>



<li><a href="https://restrictcontentpro.com/">Restrict Content Pro</a></li>



<li><a href="https://woocommerce.com/">WooCommerce</a></li>



<li><a href="https://www.gravityforms.com/">Gravity Forms</a></li>
</ul>



<h3 class="eplus-wrapper" id="h-you-can-follow-post-status-and-our-guests-on-twitter"><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f426.png" alt="🐦" class="wp-smiley" /> You can follow Post Status and our guests on Twitter:</h3>



<ul class="eplus-wrapper">
<li><a href="http://twitter.com/coreymaass">Corey Maass</a></li>



<li><a href="https://twitter.com/corymiller303">Cory Miller</a> (CEO, <a href="https://twitter.com/post_status">Post Status</a>)</li>



<li><a href="https://twitter.com/lemonadecode">Olivia Bisset</a> (Intern, <a href="https://twitter.com/post_status">Post Status</a>)</li>
</ul>



<p class="eplus-wrapper has-background">The <strong>Post Status Draft</strong> podcast is geared toward WordPress professionals, with interviews, news, and deep analysis. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f4dd.png" alt="📝" class="wp-smiley" /><br /><br /><a href="https://poststatus.com/category/post-status-podcasts/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Browse our archives</a>, and don’t forget to subscribe via <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/post-status-draft-wordpress/id976403008" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">iTunes</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS8ySkU5c2M4UA" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Google Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/PostStatus" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">YouTube</a>, <a href="http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/krogsgard/post-status-draft-wordpress-podcast" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Stitcher</a>, <a href="https://wordpress-post-status-draft-podcast.simplecast.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Simplecast</a>, or <a href="https://feeds.simplecast.com/2JE9sc8P">RSS</a>. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f3a7.png" alt="🎧" class="wp-smiley" /></p>



<h2 class="eplus-wrapper" id="h-transcript">Transcript</h2>



<h2>Session 8 Corey &amp; Cory Launch a WordPress Product Live</h2>



<p>Corey Maass: [00:00:00] Sort of summarize the, summarize what we wanted, all of the features<br />we wanted, where we&#8217;re at, and then what the next steps are. Okay. Because I think, I think the<br />power balance is about to shift the power balance. Yeah. Previously we were waiting for me, I<br />think we&#8217;re, oh, I think I&#8217;m, I think I&#8217;m caught up.<br />And so I think we&#8217;re stepping more into w you know, you being able to do stuff for, um, you<br />know, we can start working on marketing assets and the website and stuff like that because the<br />plugin&#8217;s actually worth talking about .<br />Cory Miller: Okay. Gotcha. Well, do you want to catch me up on where we&#8217;re at with the<br />product?<br />Then we can shift gears to what&#8217;s<br />Corey Maass: next. Yeah, so the good news is, [00:01:00] um, we had started with Featured<br />image and I had jumped over and featured Image was, uh, had a nice walkthrough or a nice<br />flow. Choose your image, choose your shape, do your cropping. There it is. Um, I had added a<br />bypass button, um, and then had started stubbing out settings, um, so that you could build your<br />own, um, presets or calling them your own shapes, basically.<br />Um, size, width, whatever. Um, and then I had jumped over to Media Library cuz that was the<br />other one that I really wanted, or the next one that I really wanted, again, as a non guttenberg<br />user. Um, And so had brought that up to speed. So it, [00:02:00] now, if you go into media<br />library, there&#8217;s now a second button at the top is the choice we&#8217;ve made thus far.<br />Um, so if you go to library Yep. There&#8217;s a critical error. Uh oh.<br />is that, um, uh, we need to start using Insta. Insta, wp,<br />Cory Miller: um, oh,<br />Corey Maass: this is just my, yeah, go to, um, go to Insta WP and do it. Spin up a site<br />they really want. Um, I mean they&#8217;re, this product&#8217;s amazing Anyway, so you just launch one<br />click.<br />Oh, you reach your limit. Do it in incognito. Okay.[00:03:00]<br />Hackers. Um, but they, they&#8217;ve actually offered us a, um, a test account for, um, for using to use<br />c WP for this product, for these kinds of demos. So,<br />or you can do that.<br />Passwords. I&#8217;ve memorized it. I&#8217;ve memorized it. I&#8217;m gonna hack your account.<br />No kidding. .<br />Cory Miller: Oh my God. Come on, .<br />Corey Maass: Seriously, just do, uh, incognito. You don&#8217;t have to do any of this. There you go.<br />Oh, but now you have to share that window.<br />Nothing [00:04:00] is easy. Um, but anyway. Yeah, so Well, you&#8217;re good. Well you&#8217;re setting that<br />up. Um, so media library, uh, doing two things. One is<br />cheeky boogers. Do you want me to just share? I can walk us through it. Yeah. Okay. Um, how<br />are they tracking cookies? Uh, into incognito. That&#8217;s, uh, they&#8217;re being very sneaky. I think.<br />Enter my name. I don&#8217;t want to one click log in. All right. So I&#8217;m gonna share my screen.<br />Cory Miller: Um, okay. I&#8217;m into, oh, okay. Well then go,<br />Corey Maass: Okay, I got the<br />Cory Miller: free account. There you go. You&#8217;re a hackers. Okay, yeah,<br />Corey Maass: go for it. I&#8217;m here. So, [00:05:00] uh, magic login. There you go. And then plugins<br />add new crop, express, crop of the express.<br />And this is something we need to start working on. There you go. Cuz we, we wanna be first, so<br />we&#8217;ll have to start doing some testing on that. Um, so did you notice we had 10 plus click on<br />view details?<br />Uh, we are up to over 10 active installs, 10 plus.<br />Cory Miller: Oh, is that why you were showing me that? I was like, oh man, are you having a<br />bad day? Cuz you showed me that like Active was like, yeah, but they have these gaps and<br />stuff. But what you were trying to say was the plus<br />Corey Maass: we&#8217;re over 10. We finally made it over 10.</p>



<p>That&#8217;s awesome. So yeah. So if you go to, yeah, so there&#8217;s now, uh, [00:06:00] settings, uh,<br />crop Express. Um, I put in just a little placeholder welcome. And what we&#8217;ve got here is identical<br />settings, but for all three instances of crop express, right? So you can crop, uh, your featured<br />image in posts, you can crop. There&#8217;s a block in Gutenberg and then media library.<br />So, um, all of them are, are identical. So click on media library, cuz then we&#8217;ll jump over to that.<br />Um, so you&#8217;ve got your presets. Um, so all of the default ones you can turn on and off and then<br />you can add your own. And then down below, uh, are the sizes and we just populate with some<br />sensible defaults, basically.<br />But you can say, uh, you know, make my image, um, oh, defaults shouldn&#8217;t say [00:07:00] max,<br />so I need to fix that. Um, but it&#8217;s the, if you upload a square, it&#8217;ll, it&#8217;ll automatically generate an<br />image that&#8217;s 2000 by 2000. Um, but if you up upload a rectangle one way or the other, The<br />wider side will be the maximum and the, and the smaller side will be the minimum.<br />Mm-hmm. , um, it took me a while to figure out what the heck they were talking about with Men&#8217;s<br />Max and default, but it&#8217;s that, so we need some, some happy text there to explain that. Um, and<br />then, yeah, so if you go back up to the top portion, portion in this page and turn off a couple of<br />these, the four threes or something, whatever, um, and then hit save.<br />And then if you go to media library or media in your menu, um, and if you click add new, it<br />automatically throws you back [00:08:00] to the media library, but with the crop Express open so<br />that you&#8217;re always using it. Um, which could be an option that we give. Um, and then, um, but,<br />and if you go to Media Library and say, Add new, there&#8217;s again, there&#8217;s a new button at the top.<br />Cory Miller: Okay. Can we go back for just one second cuz I wanna make sure I understand<br />this so that I could give feedback and help people. So yeah, of course. Okay. I think this is what</p>



<p>tripped me up and it&#8217;s probably, cuz I&#8217;ve got old, old school, Adobe Photoshop in mind. Mm-<br />hmm. . But we&#8217;re saying for all the image settings, like here is the preset ratios in a sense, but</p>



<p>it&#8217;s not just ratios, it&#8217;s like circles. It&#8217;s the preset what.<br />Corey Maass: Sure . Um, I&#8217;ve [00:09:00] gone back and forth between, uh, shapes and sizes.<br />So originally we were calling them sizes, but they&#8217;re not really sizes cuz that&#8217;s Yeah. Pixels. So<br />shapes, um, or preset aspect ratios is what they really are.<br />Mm-hmm. , I just, I worry that people don&#8217;t, that&#8217;s progress, right? Like that&#8217;s, that&#8217;s the most<br />correct way to put it. Um, but people don&#8217;t think that way. Mm-hmm. or like, again, using, using<br />one of my clients, uh, using my clients as an example, um, one of them this week, we kept<br />going back and forth unrelated to the plugin.<br />Obviously we kept going back and forth where, uh, she&#8217;s like, there&#8217;s a bug about uploading an<br />image. And I, I had it. Um, set so that they could upload, they should upload 16.9 featured<br />[00:10:00] images and, and she&#8217;s like, yeah, but what if it&#8217;s really tall? And I&#8217;m like, 16 nine is<br />16.9. And in her head, 16.9 and nine 16 are the same thing.<br />And Hmm. And that to me is like one, we, we can do some education, but two, you know, people<br />aren&#8217;t, uh, people don&#8217;t, aren&#8217;t nerds like me and thinking about 16 nine and nine 16 and yada<br />yada. So, um, yeah, I definitely think some video or a video that explains what any of this stuff<br />is. Mm-hmm. like I, maybe, maybe we&#8217;ve been taking that for granted, or now you and I on<br />session eight are, you know, in it, so we totally get it, but users may not, that kind of thing.<br />Okay.<br />Cory Miller: Um, Okay. Can we spend just a little time thinking about that? Um, yeah, of course.<br />[00:11:00] How, how nor, because I saw this and I was like, man, I know you&#8217;ve got these<br />incredibly smart thoughts about all this, but I was like, okay, I&#8217;m trying to get my head around it,<br />but if I think of, maybe I just share what I think and then Yep.<br />You compare that. Help me, because I don&#8217;t know if my knowledge is ancient. Um, okay. So I<br />go, I need a photo for, or I, I know I&#8217;m gonna want a photo featured image, whatever that is.<br />Okay. And then I go, okay, how wide is my now featured image blows this out. But I just, I go,<br />how wide do I need the photo to be?<br />Like, for most of these, I think I&#8217;m just processing my way. And then absolutely. Tell me.<br />Absolutely. Keep going. . So I go, okay. My constant pain in the butt with WordPress for years.<br />Anything like this. Yeah. Is you&#8217;re constrained [00:12:00] by column width mostly. Okay.<br />Featured image. Image. Just like our post stuff. I hate it because it&#8217;s like, I don&#8217;t want post<br />billboards on top of our, our posts.<br />I want them to get to the post anyway, so thank you for letting me digress. . Okay. So I go, I&#8217;m<br />writing a post, I want an image for it. I either think featured type in like a big image that kind of</p>



<p>sets the tone, but to me, I&#8217;ve, I&#8217;ve always still gone, like it&#8217;s the post width. Mm-hmm. . Um, and I<br />don&#8217;t like the featured image issue there because in themes, for instance, like I&#8217;ll do an image<br />because.<br />I would do want to set a tone, but then it ends up in the featured and then a lot of themes will<br />pull that and it just looks wonky to me. Yeah. Like I haven&#8217;t thought about it, maybe thought<br />about it correctly, but I go, I want an image [00:13:00] and I default to width, like mm-hmm. , how<br />wide is, you know, the newsletter or the blog post or the theme that I have.<br />And then I kind of wanted to crop down to that specification appropriately for me. And<br />sometimes I just go, I just want width. And I&#8217;ll kind of adjust the height if I have a tool that lets me<br />do that. Um, like, I&#8217;m trying to think. When I was cropping in Photoshop, I would set, maybe we<br />could pull up photo.<br />I don&#8217;t have Photoshop, but I would go to their little cropping tool and go, I want it to be, what I<br />would do, Corey, is I would. Previously go it&#8217;s, I don&#8217;t know, four or 500 pixels is typically what<br />I&#8217;ve locked in my memory somehow is like most column widths for posts are four to 500 pixels<br />wide. Mm-hmm.<br />So I&#8217;d go and Photoshop, I&#8217;d go [00:14:00] to the crop tool, I&#8217;d have my image up, I&#8217;d go to the<br />crop tool and I&#8217;d say 400. And I would leave the height, um, uh, open. Mm-hmm. . And because,<br />you know, not every image does that. And then go, okay. Crop and save. Mm-hmm. , um, and<br />then upload to the, to WordPress. But again, I&#8217;m gonna acknowledge, I don&#8217;t even know if that&#8217;s<br />all probably the right workflow, but that&#8217;s how I&#8217;ve done it.<br />Yeah. You know,<br />Corey Maass: I, I think so. I, I think you&#8217;re right. Like one of my takeaways from that is,<br />I think we&#8217;re, we&#8217;re at a high level anyway. We&#8217;re making the same point that people don&#8217;t think<br />about aspect ratios necessarily as aspect ratios. But, you know, and talking about previously<br />we&#8217;ve talked about, uh, [00:15:00] consistency and that kind of thing, um, and, and making<br />images appear correct for your theme.<br />And so using featured image, you know, something&#8217;s popped into my head, which I think is a<br />neat idea. Um, featured image. So using featured image specifically, it&#8217;s like, how wide do you<br />need it? How wide does your theme want your image to be? And then what aspect ratio do you<br />want it to be? Mm-hmm. . So it&#8217;s like you&#8217;re, you go, you go look at, and we could do a little<br />video that&#8217;s like create a post.<br />Laura Ipsum post, add an image, even even publish it privately. And then go look at the image<br />and how it looks and you right click on it. Like we can give some instructions, but it&#8217;s like right<br />click on it, you know, how big is it rendering, [00:16:00] you know, and, and make your screen<br />the biggest. It it could, it can go.<br />So it&#8217;s like you, your theme is a maximum of 1300 pixels wide. And currently your design says<br />your image, your images go full width. So, so 1300 is the number you want. So width 1300. And<br />then we could e and we could do something, do a little UI in here that&#8217;s like, okay, here&#8217;s a<br />placeholder image, 1300 pixels wide.<br />You know, how much height do you want? That&#8217;s your aspect ratio. So click on 16 nine, right?<br />And it&#8217;s like, keep in mind, I mean, this is all education. Like I don&#8217;t, I&#8217;m not really sure how we<br />get there, but, um mm-hmm. , uh, but to say like, keep in mind, you know, on small screens, like<br />if you&#8217;re going 1300 wide, you don&#8217;t want to be, you know, 1300 tall and you really don&#8217;t wanna<br />be nine [00:17:00] 16 cuz then you are, you know, tw 2000 tall or whatever it is.<br />And it&#8217;s like, that takes, here&#8217;s why the re the reason is you don&#8217;t, you don&#8217;t want your reader to<br />have to scroll and scroll and scroll before actually getting to your words unless you do. Um, but<br />yeah, that&#8217;s, I think that&#8217;s something that, that we&#8217;re gonna have to<br />education too is, is a very grand word, but it&#8217;s like people don&#8217;t think about it. This much. Maybe,<br />you know, if they&#8217;re a writer, then they&#8217;ve never thought about it. They just grabbed a photo,<br />made it look cool. Mm-hmm. and uploaded. Mm-hmm. . And never thought other than like, do I<br />want a circle or not A circle.<br />Or there&#8217;s, I want a picture of a guy on a beach building a sandcastle and I don&#8217;t want the, the<br />shark in the background, so I&#8217;m gonna crop it.<br />Cory Miller: So I wonder, are there websites, [00:18:00] and I just happened to think of<br />beginner cause I know they do things really well. Like the final product, what mm-hmm. , see<br />how they do like this technically.</p>



<p>Is there feature featured image? Mm-hmm. . Um, is there any other sites, I don&#8217;t want to just<br />hone in on this, but any other sites you think do a really good job of using photos in their blog<br />posts that we could look at real quick? Be The reason why I say that is because mm-hmm. .<br />Final product is really kind of what we&#8217;re selling.<br />You know what I mean? Like what they&#8217;re trying to get to is we, we had that extended talk where<br />we said, you know, it&#8217;s somehow flavors up the content and kind of Right. You know. Um, do you<br />have anybody else you&#8217;d think I&#8217;d like that we could just kinda look and get some ideas real<br />quick?<br />Corey Maass: Uh, no, cuz I never go to blogs.<br />Cory Miller: Okay. [00:19:00] Well let&#8217;s use them real quick. So see, like, I don&#8217;t know if they&#8217;ve<br />tagged this as a featured image, you know, in WordPress mm-hmm. , but you go, okay, from an<br />SEO side, headline, gray headline music and WordPress. Two good things they&#8217;re gonna get,<br />then they&#8217;ve got enough text here. I mean, this is a great formula, WP Beginner, you know?<br />Yeah. Because yeah, they own all the WordPress search terms. Um, what about to, so yeah, so<br />intro, and then they give this little nice little thing. So what are they doing here? They&#8217;re<br />restating, restating the, the headline and then providing something that looks kind of nice. Like, I<br />think this adds value to the Post personally.<br />Corey Maass: So go, go to, uh, Freemius . They always have good blog posts.[00:20:00]<br />Go to any of them. Um, and so these, I think this to me is the more standard blog post format.<br />Click on any. Um, I like Zach, right? So big image in this case, they have the headline over the<br />image and then a blog post. And so I bet the, the background of Zach is the featured image.<br />Okay.<br />Entry header. Entry thumbnail,[00:21:00]<br />yeah. With a title overlay.<br />And their image is 1600 by 500. So an aspect ratio of 16 five. 16 five.<br />Cory Miller: So there&#8217;s a lot here that I really like. Um, like this is a nice looking featured<br />images. Mm-hmm. , they&#8217;re taking, you know, they&#8217;re really, I think this is gonna be important for<br />us if you&#8217;ll indulge me for a second. Mm-hmm. . Um, okay. So they&#8217;ve taken profile photos easy.<br />I don&#8217;t know if they&#8217;re creating this, like where are they getting, how are they doing all these, but<br />looks standard, right?<br />Like there&#8217;s the same character,<br />Corey Maass: their little robot is theirs, so they must have an illustrator who&#8217;s creating them.<br />[00:22:00] But I bet some of this is probably just clip art,<br />but somebody&#8217;s taking the time to create these images. Yeah. Canva. P. Yeah. You know, some<br />other editor.<br />Cory Miller: Okay,<br />same here. Like, probably find the source to do that. Cutting. These are like screenshots, which<br />I think kind of might flow into your other project you were talking about, right?<br />Corey Maass: Ooh, here&#8217;s another good example. Um, go to, I&#8217;m gonna send it to in Slack.<br />What&#8217;s your name again? Just kidding. Bob<br />So this is actually really, I just googled for, you know, baking blog or [00:23:00] something, but<br />this is actually really neat. So this tape I, this jumps we&#8217;re jumped right into a category, but look<br />at the aspect ratio of these images. And if you click on any of them, they&#8217;re the. They&#8217;re the<br />same. And if you click through, they&#8217;re actually using the featured image, uh, to the side of the<br />title.<br />So like, here, here, I see it twice, go hit back once and click on the first one. There&#8217;s like swirly<br />brownies, which look very good. Yeah. Click on that. So there&#8217;s, there&#8217;s, you know, big brownie<br />image. Scroll down a little and let&#8217;s see if they use it again. I&#8217;m just curious. Yeah, so it does<br />repeat, but you see, it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s the, the coincidentally, I found a blog that has featured images that<br />are taller than they are wide, little unconventional, but again, an a, a different, a another<br />example of a [00:24:00] different layout.<br />Right. So you found, you went to WP Beginner. They use, it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s horizontal. And it&#8217;s in line. So<br />it&#8217;s gonna be smaller cuz it&#8217;s in that with it&#8217;s confined, confined by that column. Go to Freemius .<br />It&#8217;s, you know, 1600, it&#8217;s full width cuz they&#8217;re using it the way, um, I often think of a blog, they<br />want a big, big, big image that takes up the full header.<br />Um, and then found a cooking blog that does taller rather than wider, which I, I was sort of<br />including to just include, but coincidentally right away found a blog that does in fact do that. Um,</p>



<p>and so I think what, you know, what we&#8217;re really getting at is, uh, again, it&#8217;s the, you know,<br />you&#8217;ve selected a theme or you already have a theme.<br />How are the images being shown? [00:25:00] And so the, you know, the, let&#8217;s pretend that<br />Hummingbird High. Is, uh, an amateur blogger. And so they are new to WordPress. Um, and so<br />they install a theme and they add start adding recipes, and they&#8217;re just taking, like we&#8217;ve talked<br />about, they&#8217;re just taking photos off their phone.<br />So they don&#8217;t know. I think, you know, to your point, they&#8217;re like, I haven&#8217;t put in any posts yet. I<br />don&#8217;t know how big I need my images. Um, the theme seems to want such and such an aspect<br />ratio where I&#8217;ve read the, let&#8217;s pretend they&#8217;re even like, nerdy enough to read the docs. Do the<br />docs include any mention of here&#8217;s how big you want your images, that kind of thing.<br />And so yeah, there&#8217;s, there&#8217;s a need for. [00:26:00] Again, the, the most thorough process of like<br />AIP, post, add a fake image, even temporarily, see how it renders, and then tho that&#8217;s the<br />information you want. Um, and I don&#8217;t know how to do that. I don&#8217;t know that we can do that for<br />them because as we&#8217;ve shown, you know, if you&#8217;ve got a blog that, if you&#8217;ve got a layout that<br />doesn&#8217;t label your featured image as a featured image, like I have no way of going and writing a<br />little code that like goes and scrapes it.<br />Mm-hmm. and imports that and tries to import that information.<br />Cory Miller: So what if we looked at the, okay, yes, that is, um, all that stuff underneath all this<br />that someone would need to, if they&#8217;re really gonna do this at a high, high level, they need to<br />understand all that stuff. Um, you [00:27:00] know, like really what is your theme?<br />I think for the premise for this free one could be like, if I just look at WP Beginner, um, you want<br />to, the outcome is nice looking, um, scaled appropriate images. There&#8217;s an NCO side to it, but<br />like how do you get somebody, and this is bigger than the plugin right now for sure, but you go, I<br />think a huge win could be like this makes it easier to get nice images that kind of break up.<br />Mm-hmm. your post and show specific things. And if I just go default. Don&#8217;t worry about themes<br />so much cuz those could be specific integrations. Like Cadence has an integration builder.<br />Builder. Right. You know, specific for that. That could be all that paid stuff that we talked about.<br />Yeah. But if I [00:28:00] go, if we keep it the way it is now, which is in, well it&#8217;s either fit featured<br />image, which for sure has the theme stuff that you were talking about, where you go in post,<br />how do you create something like, like this is, these sites we&#8217;ve seen have for are formulas and<br />I&#8217;m trying to think through how we can get through the formula is an easy button to nice looking<br />blog post with some images appropriately sized.<br />Mm-hmm. , um, you know, like I&#8217;ve long admired what WP Beginner does cause they&#8217;ve got this<br />formula that works. Like, yeah. All this, every post. Not trying to, this is not a negative to me.<br />Every post is a very defined formula. Yep. Screenshots are in here, you know? Um, they do<br />have to create an image and then still get it in there.<br />So they, that&#8217;s part of their formula. Just like your, [00:29:00] the baking site with the brownies,<br />you were, you were pulling apart the tech specs for how they do all that. And it seems like, yeah,<br />so anchoring back, back in these presets is like, how do you just get somebody to, Hmm. Sorry,<br />I&#8217;m probably getting a little lost in my own thoughts here, but<br />Corey Maass: as long as you keep talking,<br />you&#8217;re good.<br />Cory Miller: Um. But you go, like when you buy, when you get a product or you buy a product,<br />whatever, you&#8217;re, you&#8217;re really buying whatever the result of it is, you&#8217;re actually not buying the<br />product, you&#8217;re buying this out, this outcome.<br />Corey Maass: And when you buy a piece of software and fire it up, you start hacking away at it,<br />Photoshop you, you&#8217;re create new and then, [00:30:00] and it, and it says, here&#8217;s some, here&#8217;s<br />some document sizes, but you know, here&#8217;s a thousand by a thousand, a white canvas.<br />And off you go. And then you&#8217;re like, well, but I really want, I wanna see my text options. I wanna<br />see. And so then you start playing with what menus to show or hide or you start playing with,<br />and that&#8217;s when you dig in, right? So, um, yeah, I, we, what would be great, and this is, this is<br />sort of what we&#8217;ve started with.<br />again, sensible presets I, or sensible, I mean, I, again, I&#8217;m calling &#8217;em presets, preset aspect<br />ratios. So if somebody doesn&#8217;t go to the setting screen at all, they click featured image. They&#8217;ve<br />got six predefined aspect ratios that, again, are sensible. Um, and they&#8217;ve got, and, and they<br />don&#8217;t know anything about sizes, but we&#8217;ve put in some pretty [00:31:00] industry standard.</p>



<p>Mm-hmm. , safe for mobile, safe for desktop image size, men and Max. So we might be pretty<br />close to what you&#8217;re talking about. Mm-hmm. and maybe six isn&#8217;t the magic number. Maybe it<br />should only be Square Circle and 16, nine. And the other ones are. Extra. So maybe it&#8217;s too<br />many. We don&#8217;t know that yet, but,<br />Cory Miller: well, you know what, I lost track a little bit of the settings page because this was<br />intended for the agency, like mm-hmm.<br />I mean, you deliver, like, one of our thesis here was you deliver a client project. This really, like<br />the intention for the settings was for those freelancers, web owners, agencies delivering<br />products or delivering websites to clients. And then from that point, like I was trying to reconcile<br />the settings page with just [00:32:00] being a user, but that wasn&#8217;t our intention.<br />Our intention was give those tools to put in the little scoot in the little bumpers on the bowling<br />lane, right? Like that&#8217;s what the agency does pull, you know, Hey, were you, we, whatever<br />theme framework we use, we know it&#8217;s gonna be 69. You know, put the minimal X. Yeah. And<br />then when they do that stuff from the featured image, And, and the user starts using it, it&#8217;s<br />already there.<br />So we&#8217;ve, we&#8217;ve taken this thought of like, this is, to me, this is for an agency to ship better<br />guardrails for images for their client work. Yeah. So my question to you, I mean, as a, you&#8217;ve set<br />this up with the thought, I thought, you know, as a developer, right? So like, I, I&#8217;m not, but I go,<br />your mindset was to do, put these tools, settings in here for that technical person at the agency.<br />Yeah. Or we delivered it. [00:33:00] Make sure this is like, go through real quick and set these,<br />and that&#8217;s, that was our intention for this. Yep. So as long as it speaks to the, like, I don&#8217;t have to<br />note it, know it necessarily as a user, as long as the devs do. And if we check that box, I think<br />it&#8217;s, we ship it and we start talking about like, we, what we try to do is give a.<br />Guard, I&#8217;m rehearsing some of this for a copy. Mm-hmm. , it was like, this is to give guardrails to<br />your clients for their images. Take, take it, take 30 seconds, you know, when before you deliver<br />the client and do these real quick, and then you&#8217;ll put the little bumpers on the bowling alley for<br />&#8217;em.<br />Corey Maass: Yeah. And I, I think I want to, the only, the only caveat or addition I want to add to<br />what you just said is that it&#8217;s not, let&#8217;s not say dev, right, because dev implies code is, it&#8217;s a scary<br />thing to [00:34:00] a lot of people, whereas.<br />Uh, you know, in my mind the, the word like there, there&#8217;s never been a good word for the<br />people who are WordPress pros who don&#8217;t necessarily write code or write a lot of code or write<br />custom plugins, right? So there&#8217;s still experts in my mind at some, at some time. Like 10 years<br />ago the word was, um, that I was introduced was implementer.<br />So it&#8217;s like someone who implements WordPress and WordPress tools but isn&#8217;t a developer,<br />right? But, so to me, this is like somebody who doesn&#8217;t even, doesn&#8217;t write code, but is setting<br />up a site for a client, installs their favorite theme, knows that the theme looks great with 16 nine<br />images. And so they&#8217;re the ones that are gonna go in and tweak these settings.<br />Um, and so, yeah, and, and I think the analogy of, there&#8217;s nothing that says. There&#8217;s really<br />nothing that [00:35:00] says you have to even touch that setting screen if 16, nine or circle<br />meets your needs. Um, and then the, and, but, but I agree, like the language could be a, a heck<br />of a lot friendlier. Um, and we need docs that explain it, right?<br />Um, and so that&#8217;s where like, I think, I think you come in and the kind of thinking that you&#8217;re<br />doing of, you know, the, the, the unknowledgeable, the as yet unknowledgeable user, you know.<br />So on that little welcome screen, on the settings page, it says, welcome, you know, watch a<br />62nd video that explains what the heck is going on here with 10 seconds.<br />That explains, you know, why image size and shape is important in the simplest possible terms.<br />Um, And then the other thing that just occurred to me is actually that, that you kind of alluded<br />[00:36:00] to is, uh, I don&#8217;t remember how you put it, but the, the idea of the sort of pre preset,<br />like, I&#8217;m, I&#8217;m way down, I&#8217;m close to the metal where I&#8217;m, I&#8217;m calling a preset, or when I say<br />preset, I&#8217;m saying preset aspect ratio.<br />But I, but you actually kind of alluded to, um, like a preset featured image or a preset something,<br />something, right? Mm-hmm. . Um, and I realized that like, again, what I&#8217;ve created I think is a<br />great, we&#8217;re still on version 0.0 0.3. Mm-hmm. , so I think it&#8217;s appropriate. Um, but, uh, uh, and<br />so, or what I&#8217;m say, sorry.</p>



<p>Um, we have the crop. That is identical in three different places. Right? Featured image. And the<br />likelihood is your, what, what The assumption that we&#8217;re going under, which I think is, is pretty<br />safe, is [00:37:00] you always, once you get rolling, you always want your featured image to be<br />the same size and shape. Mm-hmm.<br />So that mm-hmm. , all of your posts look consistent. Mm-hmm. . And the same might go for,<br />might not go for in, in post images, cuz you might want a smaller one shifted, left or shifted right.<br />You might want an infographic that&#8217;s tall and so you don&#8217;t necessarily want to be confined, but<br />here are some, some presets that, you know, look we like, you know, getting a level deeper with<br />design is you often want.<br />Your images to be similar throughout a website, the same way you want fonts to be. Similar<br />throughout a website, you want colors to be similar without throughout a website. So, you know,<br />in a perfect world, not that you shouldn&#8217;t sometimes break the rules, but you often want, if your<br />featured images are all 16, nine, you know, [00:38:00] design a a design guideline might<br />encourage you to have 16, nine images elsewhere.<br />That&#8217;s a little digression, but I think that&#8217;s true. And then taking this even further, if you go to the<br />media library, uh, again, right now for the sake of simplicity, I&#8217;ve got the same settings and the<br />same UI applied to the media library, upload a 16 nine image. But here I actually see, uh, a<br />different, or I&#8217;m envisioning a different UI that says, Upload a featured image, which uses the<br />settings from the featured images.<br />But we could also include things like upload an image for Twitter, upload a, you know, and this is<br />where a preset comes in, right? Upload, you know, a circles a circle, but upload a, and this is, I<br />think what, going back to, uh, the, [00:39:00] the little, um, sticker mule menu that we were<br />talking about where there&#8217;s sort of these predefined touchpoints.<br />And so, yeah, so it&#8217;s like you&#8217;re, you&#8217;re in a post, you&#8217;re writing a post. And we also, I think we<br />are spending a lot of time, we are being very word pressy. Um, and it might be to our detriment,<br />um, we are assuming anybody is actually writing a post. And I even saw a headline I think this<br />morning that was like, should WordPress get rid of the blog?<br />You know, it started as a blog, but should we, should it actually get rid of the blog focus<br />altogether? Because most people are using it as a C M S and building pages more than posts.<br />Mm-hmm. is, is the, was the hypothesis. But anyway, uh, you know, feature image images still<br />applies to pages. Um, when you&#8217;re writing a page, you know, we say in post [00:40:00] image,<br />but an in, in page image, so we&#8217;re not thinking wrong.<br />But, you know, thinking of WordPress as a c m s, you&#8217;re like, you build a page, but then you also<br />need an image for two, an OG image, open graph image for social, you might want to da da da<br />da da. And this is where we were talking about, you know, what, what you really need is an<br />image crop so that no image gets uploaded to WordPress incorrectly.<br />Mm-hmm. , right? And that&#8217;s where, uh, I, I&#8217;m, you know, again, I, we&#8217;ve sort of talked about it<br />and you kind of alluded to it a minute ago as like, within at least media library to have a, you<br />know, what kind of image do you want to upload an image for Twitter? Okay, well that needs to<br />be this size, the shape. I wanna upload a header for Facebook.<br />Or, you know, it&#8217;s like, I mean, these are bad examples cuz you&#8217;d upload those to Twitter or<br />[00:41:00] to Facebook. Um, but it could also be, uh, you know, it doesn&#8217;t even necessarily get<br />up, get saved to your media library, crop in image for Twitter. Download it and now, now post it<br />to Twitter. Crop an image for Facebook.<br />Now post it to Facebook. Do you wanna also save this in your media library?<br />and that&#8217;s where we kind of end up taking over. You know, it&#8217;s like media library bec, you know,<br />becomes, uh, Photoshop within WordPress. Okay. Now that&#8217;s interesting. Um,<br />what kind of image do you want to create today?<br />Cory Miller: You said something that was really interesting to me, um, that stuck out and it&#8217;s like<br />the c m s conversation. Hmm. Is it just the c m s or, you know, [00:42:00] do we, so I was trying<br />to find this blog site to see how they did it, but you go like, but there are people that still use<br />publishing their WordPress is their publishing tool.<br />Um, and I think of that like your client&#8217;s content journey clients mm-hmm. and. They&#8217;re using the<br />blog side. And I go, that was a helpful distinguishing for me is like if you just using the c m s, our<br />image is gonna be static. For instance, most cases, like you&#8217;re not gonna do a lot of image<br />manipulation.</p>



<p>You may in turn, uh, initially, but we&#8217;re turning over to people that are pushing the publish button.<br />Like you have a newspaper or a magazine client, for instance. They are like, they&#8217;re in the<br />business of publishing. Yeah. Steady content. And that just made me think about the use case<br />again, is I still think the settings [00:43:00] conversation is great because a lot of these people<br />are gonna have agencies build the site because they.<br />To do the publishing really fast. So we&#8217;ve given those tools to the setting, they&#8217;ll look over here.<br />It&#8217;s like I went to moz.com just to see how they use damages. Oh, sure. I went to HubSpot, like<br />the bakery site. Oh, HubSpot. Yeah.<br />Corey Maass: Since they&#8217;re big on SEO and, but I bet. But they do a lot of content.<br />Cory Miller: They&#8217;re publishers, um mm-hmm.<br />which is really interesting. That aligns with where WordPress is, you know? Yeah. Okay. Let me<br />find, try to find,<br />I, I think this is important. This isn&#8217;t wasted because it&#8217;s, um, we&#8217;re drilling down closer to<br />really crystallizing who, yeah. Who, who, yeah. Okay, so [00:44:00] lemme just go back. Okay.<br />So they&#8217;re obviously using, this is probably, Well, hope has their own thing, but like they&#8217;re using<br />some image to draw some interest to the,<br />Corey Maass: so up top you&#8217;ve got four, three. I&#8217;m just, I&#8217;m gonna keep nerding out about this<br />cuz it&#8217;s like, this is what people aren&#8217;t seeing.<br />They&#8217;re, they&#8217;re seeing but not absorbing right? Is Right. On that previous page, you had four,<br />three images and square images, and then you drill, drill down and what would be, you know, a<br />primary image at the top again after the paragraph? Looks like it&#8217;s about four three. But it, but I,<br />I, I liked your WP beginner example.<br />Same with HubSpot, is that they&#8217;re just, they&#8217;re just, they&#8217;re essentially just putting images in line<br />and just like a magazine. So you&#8217;re reading a magazine and they might have a big pretty<br />picture, but they&#8217;re, um, you know, throughout an article they&#8217;ll have [00:45:00] photos.<br />So like,<br />Cory Miller: huh, good<br />Corey Maass: God. Okay. I go to like rolling stone.com.<br />Like go to a publisher. That&#8217;s interesting. Whoops. Yeah,<br />so those look like four, three images and then some square images. Just scroll down a little<br />interesting that this layout is almost identical to, um, Huffington Post , or not Huffington Post, uh,<br />the Atlantic. If you go to the Atlantic , it&#8217;s almost identical. Um, but anyway, there&#8217;s another<br />example. So [00:46:00] like we get into actual news sites, so they&#8217;ve got those look closer to like<br />16, nine.<br />Um, yeah, go back to Rolling Stone. I don&#8217;t need to see Huffington Post homepage. That&#8217;s too<br />depressing. . Um, but click, click into, click into any one of these stories. And here&#8217;s a pretty<br />typical layout. You know, there&#8217;s that featured image again, and then the story below it, and<br />then, but I bet they have images within, I guess this one&#8217;s just a short story, but anyway.<br />Yeah. You think this is four 30? It looks pretty close. I mean, I&#8217;m eyeballing it. Yeah. But,<br />but also, but I guess close enough that if somebody who isn&#8217;t rolling Stone wanted to create<br />their own website, they&#8217;d be like, okay, every time I in. Insert an image into a story, [00:47:00] I<br />will use the four three. Like we, so we, you know what, what, I guess I never finished the<br />description of the, the new version is we have settings and we also now have a block, a<br />Gutenberg block.<br />Yeah.<br />Cory Miller: By the way, you snuck that in on me.<br />Corey Maass: Yeah. So, so we now have, we&#8217;re, we&#8217;re, we&#8217;re pretty close to like feature<br />complete, right? So we have fe you can crop a featured image, you can crop, um, a Gutenberg<br />block and you can crop images going into the media library. Um, and so I think, you know,<br />again, I, uh, I th we&#8217;re focusing a lot on settings, but I think that there&#8217;s a good chance that most<br />people, your average person, will never need to go to those settings.<br />The likelihood is that most will, uh, so I called it cropped image because I think most people are<br />gonna look for image. So it says, select, select an image to crop, and then here&#8217;s our presets.<br />And so I think what most people are gonna do is [00:48:00] they&#8217;re like, they will decide, they will<br />choose four, three, and then, and then every time they do this again, they will choose four three.</p>



<p>Like, that&#8217;s how most people use these kinds of tools. Like they, they do something once or they<br />learn, click, click, click. They don&#8217;t necessarily think about optimizing their clicking, and so they&#8217;ll<br />just choose four, three every time. If it looks good, the first.<br />Cory Miller: So question about the four three. So we&#8217;ve just said this is probably one of the four,<br />three and 16 by nine, you already know this, but four three was a lot on these sites and that<br />typically, like I&#8217;d look at beginner and all these others, and I go, it&#8217;s four three, like in the, in the<br />vicinity, right?<br />So how did you determine what this with is?<br />Corey Maass: Uh, so that is what&#8217;s set by the, on the settings page. I&#8217;m not saying go there, but<br />there are, [00:49:00] um, some common sense defaults. So it&#8217;s at least a thousand wide and it&#8217;s<br />less than 2000 wide. So if you tried to upload something that was off of your phone, high res,<br />you know, 8,000 wide, it would bring it down to 2000 or something.<br />But you also, if you tried to upload just an emoji, it would make it. Bigger, unless you said<br />bypass.<br />Cory Miller: I see. Okay. So the rationale, so we&#8217;re picking four, three, and then we&#8217;ve got these<br />bigger bumpers. So like this mm-hmm. , if we, so this image is actually whatever the settings</p>



<p>are a thousand wide. So it&#8217;s technically bigger than it needs to be because of the settings. Mm-<br />hmm. . But that probably has advantages, I&#8217;m guessing, [00:50:00] for.</p>



<p>Corey Maass: For and for responsive. Like, I&#8217;ve actually built sites before that. So, you know,<br />when you think about responsive and I, I know I&#8217;m devving out here, but, um, no, go for it.<br />You&#8217;ve generally responsive. You&#8217;re thinking mobile phone, you&#8217;re thinking tablet, and you&#8217;re<br />thinking desktop. Right. And uh, I&#8217;ve actually seen sites where, uh, on desktop we had multiple<br />columns of content.<br />So the images were a third of the total width of the site, which, which didn&#8217;t go edge to edge on<br />the screen. So an image was never more than like 800 wide. But then if you looked at it on<br />tablet, it, it went to a one column view images over text and, and not multiple columns of<br />content. And so suddenly it was 10,000 or it was a thousand wide, uh, or, you know, [00:51:00]<br />the size of my iPad here with right.<br />And so it actually went wider on mobile. And so a lot of people will be messing around building<br />their website on their desktop computer or on their laptop, and then eventually they&#8217;ll look at<br />their phone or they&#8217;ll look at their tablet, um, to do, to test it, and the images will actually go<br />wider. Um, and so it&#8217;s not a bad thing to have an image that&#8217;s, again, it&#8217;s if it&#8217;s compressed,<br />which is a whole different conversation.<br />Um, and not, if it&#8217;s not four megs and 8,000 pixels wide, it&#8217;s okay. That. A little too big cuz<br />browsers will size things down. Um, and better that than then it&#8217;s the, then it&#8217;s 800 and gets<br />upsized to be 1200. Cuz that&#8217;s when it looks bad.<br />Cory Miller: Gotcha. Okay. I&#8217;m, I&#8217;m much more understanding this now and it makes [00:52:00]<br />sense, um, because it&#8217;s okay to have like a thousand, whatever the default settings are Yeah.<br />Because you&#8217;ve got these benefits, but it&#8217;s not like an 18 meg file. Exactly. You know? Exactly.<br />But it, it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s in the window of like being quality image and you can set those differently if you<br />want.<br />Like in the setting. Yeah. So that&#8217;s, that&#8217;s great there. Yeah. Um, I gotta tell you, I think right here<br />you&#8217;ve nailed it. , like we&#8217;ve got the Gutenberg block. Mm-hmm. . All right, magician, how&#8217;d you,<br />how&#8217;d you get this done? Have you been working on this ? I think you told me you were gonna<br />work.<br />Corey Maass: No, no, no, no. We, so we, you know, early days when you and I first started<br />talking about this, um, I hired a couple of different developers, one who helped me out with<br />featured image and one who helped me out with block.<br />Um, and they got me [00:53:00] pretty close to the block working, but I couldn&#8217;t, I hadn&#8217;t<br />wrapped my head around. Uh, everything else that I&#8217;ve subsequently wrapped my head around<br />by building it for featured images and building it for media library. So then when I went back and<br />looked at, uh, what he did for the block, I was like, I literally copied the code from Featured<br />Image.<br />And so it took 45 minutes or something because he had already done the, the tricky part. And I,<br />again, have learned a lot more in the interim time. So, uh, so yeah, it was, it was, uh, too big of<br />a lift early on, but coming back to it, it was almost easy. So, yeah. Um, for me, I want to. See if<br />[00:54:00] I can, cuz again, I, I&#8217;m using, um, the classic editor.</p>



<p>I wanna see if I can overwrite the featured image for that. And then we&#8217;re pretty close to, um, I<br />guess we need the media, like if you click on the add, add image button, you know, in the<br />classic text editor, um, you know, there&#8217;s a couple of, of little things, but they&#8217;re not, they&#8217;re not<br />insignificant, but they are not like modern WordPress.<br />So we&#8217;re, we&#8217;re in pretty good shape. But yeah, I, I definitely would love your input. Like things<br />like, don&#8217;t call them presets, call them preset aspect ratio. Mm-hmm. , um, um, and start thinking<br />about the, you know, the happy text, the explanation text, the, um, do you upload one of your<br />broken images again? Yeah.<br />um, You know, and, and docs and, and welcome text. [00:55:00] And, and if we start talking<br />about, um, a little video for, um, you know, to put on that welcome screen, like that&#8217;s, that&#8217;s<br />where we&#8217;re at. Like starting to actually make this, uh, friendlier and, and more clear. I like your<br />guy.<br />Cory Miller: Okay, now I was just playing with that. Yep.<br />That&#8217;s awesome man. I think this is a game changer. I think this right here could be the v1, like<br />in this, you know, that&#8217;s where we started from a long time ago. We just weren&#8217;t there. We<br />needed some time and space to like be able in opportunity obviously to do this, but like that right<br />there. Hits my original.<br />Holy crap. Can we have this? Can I have this? Mm-hmm. , I want this thing [00:56:00] because<br />Yeah. That&#8217;s super cool. But now some more, I, I heard what you were sayings like more all text.<br />If, if I, if I may though. So is the, em the image is cropped right here. Mm-hmm. . But there&#8217;s<br />white space. So is this the block takes up the whole thing.<br />So we, we would, we can&#8217;t do like Right. Justified or something like that.<br />Corey Maass: What? Right. These are things we need to, to work on. Okay. Add, yeah. These<br />are, and I, and the truth is, is, is I need more real world usage. Mm-hmm. and people telling me<br />what they need for me to know what to add. Okay. I mean, the, I think, you know, the, the easy<br />analogy is if you go at a regular image block,<br />Good luck figuring it out, cuz Gutenberg is confusing [00:57:00] as heck. Not that I&#8217;m cynical.<br />Um, but you&#8217;ve already got, uh, yeah, alignment. Um, what&#8217;s the little triangle next to it?<br />Oh, those filters. Mm-hmm. . So there&#8217;s, you know, like that&#8217;s where, you know, if people are<br />using them, if they want them, we can start adding stuff like that. And this is where, what we&#8217;ve<br />talked about, like we can, you know, we can start messing around with other stuff if, if people<br />want them, um, people need them.<br />You know, we&#8217;re, we&#8217;re still currently at version 0 0 3, so,<br />Cory Miller: okay man, you can get lost in these settings. They&#8217;ve added a lot of the settings it<br />seems. . Mm-hmm. . So would we be able to take, I think somewhere along the way, you<br />mentioned you [00:58:00] looked at a current block and saw some opportunities here, but would<br />these, taking this block with some of these things like the filter, um, would be, we&#8217;d be able to<br />hook into that.<br />I mean essentially like fork? Fork.<br />Corey Maass: Yeah, I think so. I think so. Or ex extend it basically.<br />Yeah. See there&#8217;s your aspect ratios.<br />Cory Miller: This must have got a big update or I&#8217;ve never looked at it.<br />Corey Maass: Yeah.<br />And you know, and part of why it was, I loved your idea of. Doubling down on featured images is<br />none of these are available and, and are not at, at least as far as I know and are not available in<br />media library.[00:59:00]<br />But, so maybe we should do a session where we like, walk through these and, um, yeah. Begin<br />further. Seriously.<br />Wow.<br />Cory Miller: Okay.<br />That&#8217;s, yeah. We de I, I, I for sure need to do this because I had no<br />Corey Maass: idea.<br />People at watching are gonna be like, uh, yeah, it&#8217;s been there for six weeks.<br />Cory Miller: Now that, oh, you have to upload the image first. Okay. Or you have to get the<br />image.<br />Corey Maass: Sorry. Yeah. I think, I think especially, I especially think the alignment [01:00:00]<br />stuff, because that, that to me is version one, right? Like, you need an image, you need the</p>



<p>image to behave the way you want. Yeah. Shift left, shift right. Whatever. Um, and then getting<br />into this kind of stuff is, is gravy and is a rabbit hole.<br />Oh yeah. Like, you know, we can start again. I, I, I like that we set up a request for feedback.<br />Um, It would be nice if we started getting people using it cuz then they&#8217;d be like, oh, the default<br />block has such and such. Three, two, why don&#8217;t you have three, two, and go, okay, so let&#8217;s go<br />add three, two as a default preset aspect ratio.<br />And you know, or hey, we, you know, why doesn&#8217;t the image shift left sh you know, uh, or why<br />can&#8217;t I set widths? Okay, great. We&#8217;ll go add that. Mm-hmm. . [01:01:00]<br />Cory Miller: Okay. Maybe I need to play with that a little bit more. Um, yeah. Now, but standing<br />now you don&#8217;t wanna like best, uh, that we don&#8217;t have at the moment, but alignment, we&#8217;ve<br />already talked about that.<br />Having that, that&#8217;s, that&#8217;s pretty cool. Cause you can go over here. Right, exactly. You know, all<br />that stuff. This is incredibly compelling to me. Um, because it&#8217;s kind of your way like. You know<br />how themes do this with your color settings. Mm-hmm. , but having some, I don&#8217;t, this is just a,<br />this is a pretty cool way to Dr.<br />Like, this is just this boring image just done with a little filter. Mm-hmm. , or they call these filters,<br />duotone filters. Yep. The filters are really interesting to me because you can make it like, it&#8217;s not<br />gonna be just another stock. Yours. Yeah. You kinda make it yours. Um, but I think now with the<br />Gutenberg plug, man, that&#8217;s the, [01:02:00] that&#8217;s the feature.<br />Um, I could get us to more installs. Um,<br />Corey Maass: I agree. Um, I don&#8217;t, I don&#8217;t know that I&#8217;d, I&#8217;d be curious why that&#8217;s not the right<br />word. How the core team and, you know, 500 volunteers, et cetera, landed on Duotone. Um,<br />mm-hmm. rather than something else, because it&#8217;s, you know, WordPress is at the whim of the<br />people who, who are involved.<br />So it&#8217;s like, did they ask for this? Did they want this? You know, did somebody like me come<br />along and go, oh, this is a neat thing, let&#8217;s add it. And everybody was like, yeah, it&#8217;s cool. We&#8217;ll<br />add it, you know, or people using it. I, which is, and that&#8217;s of course the black box, black box part<br />of WordPress is [01:03:00] we will never have any idea whether people are actually using<br />Duotone filters, um, et cetera.<br />I know that&#8217;s a bit of a cynical approach, but it&#8217;s like, I want to, I wanna make sure that we are<br />focused on. We want our own bumpers because it&#8217;s, you know, this is, this is the slippery slope<br />that I often fall into. It&#8217;s like, I trusted my gut when you were like, I need a circle. And I was like,<br />yeah, we need a circle.<br />But I don&#8217;t, my gut doesn&#8217;t jump when, when we say duotone filters unless, yeah. You know, but<br />unless we have compelling evidence that people are using them.<br />Cory Miller: Yeah. Well I think though the, the single po single block, the, the, the crop to image<br />block could be really that ticker for, uh, um, getting those active installs.<br />Um, and now we [01:04:00] need to switch to, I wanted to make sure we talked to that side<br />because, uh, you surprised me with it. I saw it in there and I was waiting. I was like, no, let him<br />talk about the settings. You&#8217;re like, go. Featured image or whatever, and I was like, I really want<br />to click on GI Berg Block by White<br />Corey Maass: Um, well, and that&#8217;s, I really, yeah. Uh, the block I think will evolve unto itself. It&#8217;ll<br />have those settings, right? Because your, your media library, even your featured image doesn&#8217;t<br />have left or right. A line, like that&#8217;s up to your theme, how it&#8217;s being used. Um, so, so the block<br />will start to evolve with additional settings.<br />Whatev, and we did, again, my gut jumps. Yes, we need alignment for sure. Um, you pointed out<br />yourself, you&#8217;re like, I uploaded a Lego man and he&#8217;s always aligned, left, like, that&#8217;s useless. So<br />immediately we need those, we need alignment. Um, and then I also want to start [01:05:00]<br />evolving the idea of, again, media library presets, meaning, you know, what kind of image do<br />you want to upload?<br />And, and again, and I, I start to get really excited about the idea of images that aren&#8217;t even<br />stored in the library. You&#8217;re going to, like media library implies, or we are taught by WordPress<br />that this is where we store images for WordPress. But why isn&#8217;t it just called media? And why<br />isn&#8217;t a place where you can go and edit an image and download it and it, and it has nothing to<br />do with WordPress.<br />And that&#8217;s exactly the, the sticker mule conversation we had. Mm-hmm. like utility, go to media.<br />Yeah. It&#8217;s a utility to go to media. And it&#8217;s not a media library or it&#8217;s not just a media library. It&#8217;s a</p>



<p>place where, you know, you can edit an image and then download it. So it&#8217;s like, yo, you just<br />created a post for.[01:06:00]<br />You know, a new post about the brownies, the brownies images image is already in there. Now<br />you need to create an image for Twitter, you need to create an image for Facebook, you need to<br />create a square image for Instagram. So jump into media, grab that image that&#8217;s already in the<br />media library, edited a bunch of times, maybe put a title over it.<br />Download the result. Again, doesn&#8217;t get uploaded to Media Library necessarily. And then now<br />you go over to your socials, or go into Buffer or whatever tool you use for scheduling your, you</p>



<p>know, multi broadcast to all of your socials and upload the appropriate image for each one. Mm-<br />hmm. . And that also diverges us from Word.</p>



<p>which I think is important, especially now seeing the default image. Like you said, I didn&#8217;t realize<br />half that stuff was in there. And so we are starting to overlap with them, [01:07:00] which I don&#8217;t<br />want to do. Like, what&#8217;s the point? If it&#8217;s built into core. I mean their, our original thesis was<br />within media library image cropping is awful and I&#8217;ve maintained that.<br />It still is. But if you can crop an image as quick as we can inside of a block, then, then maybe we<br />don&#8217;t need a block. What&#8217;s our differentiator there? But image manipulation elsewhere within<br />WordPress. Like right now, I would absolutely argue that our featured image handler is better<br />than the defaults.<br />And same with media library still. Mm-hmm. . Cause that, that&#8217;s that original crop. That&#8217;s awful.<br />So these are the things that we need to, to balance. Yeah. I,<br />Cory Miller: I mean, I still think the image blocking burg, the, the crop tool is just, I don&#8217;t, I don&#8217;t<br />even know how to use it. Right. [01:08:00] Um,<br />Corey Maass: yeah, yeah. I&#8217;m not, I&#8217;m not necessarily saying we, we rip, you know, I&#8217;m not<br />gonna go rip it out in version 0 0 4.<br />Mm-hmm. , but I don&#8217;t wanna, we don&#8217;t need to recreate that, which WordPress already does.<br />That&#8217;s silly. Yeah. Um, because, and, and I mean, to be like, there, there are plugins out there<br />that do core features better, and we can still do that. But that, that&#8217;s, that, uh, the me, the margin<br />is thin. The, the margin of value that we add is thin if the features are already there, whereas not<br />jumping over, having.<br />Create a post, a story, a page in WordPress, and then jump over to Canva to create your social<br />images. To me, the margin of value add is much larger. Mm-hmm. . So,<br />Cory Miller: yeah. I, I was just trying [01:09:00] to think about, you know, you look at,<br />you look at, like some of the sites we just looked at and you go, there&#8217;s a formula here for how<br />to create a good image. And<br />I would think like, like showing w beginner, for instance, they&#8217;re gonna need Camba or some<br />photo editing, graphic design software. Um, but there&#8217;s this case potentially for the output you<br />want is something like, like I just went to Medium for a second. And was kinda looking at a<br />couple of the articles.<br />Cause I go, you know, high readability, beautiful design, um, very standard. And, you know, I&#8217;m<br />looking at all these posts here and they all have, you know, an image and we know, we know it<br />would be better if you had the image. [01:10:00] Um, my, so I&#8217;m just kind of keeping thinking<br />about what&#8217;s the three value proposition, what&#8217;s the paid value proposition on this?<br />Mm-hmm. and what&#8217;s our space for this? Um, but I do think, like, here, here&#8217;s the, here&#8217;s one<br />part. There&#8217;s all, there&#8217;s this image block within Gate Burke and you go a lot of stuff, a lot of<br />people have thought through those things. A lot of options. Most people won&#8217;t even touch &#8217;em.<br />Mm-hmm. , you know, um, just, most people won&#8217;t touch &#8217;em because it&#8217;s too deep of tools.<br />But what, what are you really wanting? , you want a post that looks nice? Mm-hmm. like<br />attractive and the images help supplement the story. Mm-hmm. . Um, so I&#8217;m just kind of think<br />there with our angle, like we&#8217;re here and just kind of continuing to look at where, what&#8217;s our<br />angle for all this? Until we, until we kind of go, okay.<br />I think this is it. [01:11:00] Like we knew the agency settings case, we got that, we got the block,<br />then we discovered this other thing. And um, I just keep trying to think through like, if we can get<br />enough of a pattern of people that have this, have a problem, we can, it&#8217;ll really help us<br />crystallize the all this stuff.<br />Because you continually say, this is what I love working with awesome developers. We could do<br />that. Oh, by the way, I already did it. Here it is. And um, now we&#8217;ve got enough ingredients I<br />think. We need to nail that use case where, right.</p>



<p>Corey Maass: Yeah. We&#8217;ve got, we&#8217;ve got screwdrivers, we&#8217;ve got a hammer, we&#8217;ve, we&#8217;ve now<br />got the tool belt.<br />What the hell are we gonna build? Literally<br />Cory Miller: any, yeah, exactly. We need a person. I wrote this down as you were talking. I was<br />like, we need a person, you know, the, the, [01:12:00] the user in client, whatever that is, and<br />whether they want it, you go, I want it to speed it up, what I&#8217;m trying to do. Mm-hmm. Like if we<br />just looked at, because for the publishing conversation, you&#8217;re like, what do you really need?<br />You need to be able to get your content. You&#8217;re gonna do the text. That&#8217;s your thing when you&#8217;re<br />looking for the images. You want something that kind of fits a formula, like the WP beginner<br />formula medium, Moz, I looked at Moz, the bakery site. You&#8217;re like, that&#8217;s a, that&#8217;s a formula, a<br />pattern for how to do content.<br />So, mm-hmm. , some of this comes into the finding, but like I go, like that duotone use case, I&#8217;d<br />go, why not make every image of Duotone? It&#8217;s just something different. You know what I mean?<br />Like it&#8217;s something unique. So I might think through, and where I go back to my past is I like to<br />use templates for those things.<br />Mm-hmm. . [01:13:00] So I&#8217;m trying to keep that in mind for our product or what we&#8217;re doing is<br />the outcome they&#8217;re trying to get is really something that, like you look on medium and you go,<br />some people don&#8217;t. By and large, this just really works. It looks like a clean site. The images are<br />plusing, the value of the content, which I don&#8217;t ever do.<br />Um, We talked about the four threes, like that seems the standard in a lot of these posts. So I&#8217;m<br />really thinking for that user, the publisher user, um, and trying to build that case for the product<br />of what we&#8217;re doing. Um, mm-hmm. , because like I, I think about the filters and I go, um, I told<br />you, we, we talked about my cartoon app,<br />I&#8217;m like, now the problem when I write content is I don&#8217;t have an image in mind. Mm. So finding<br />an image is pain the butt, like, let&#8217;s put down, we have discovered a [01:14:00] problem. It is<br />finding, creating sourcing images that are good is a big problem. We haven&#8217;t, we haven&#8217;t, we&#8217;ve<br />just identified it&#8217;s just a problem.<br />We&#8217;re over here. Um, but like I go, if we had, it&#8217;s like Instagram. I can take, okay. I&#8217;ve got a<br />camera in my pocket, carry with me all the time. My iPhone, it lets me take pictures. What did<br />Instagram did? Make them look a little better. Mm-hmm. , you know, just a little bit better. And<br />that&#8217;s, that&#8217;s something in this where I think that this is what pulls me back to the duo turn thing,<br />is it doesn&#8217;t have to be due to, it&#8217;s just the, a aspect of Sure.<br />You know, how do I look like it&#8217;s not stock<br />Corey Maass: or Well, and that&#8217;s, it&#8217;s not, I mean, that&#8217;s why AI is, is going running rampant, is<br />that people are like, I can now generate original art without paying for it, or paying nominally for<br />[01:15:00] it that nobody else has over and over and over again. Yeah. And that&#8217;s why people<br />are over the moon.<br />You know, obviously there&#8217;s no substitute for hiring a photographer to take pictures of products,<br />people, things like that. But if you need a. Abstract picture to just kind of add that compelling<br />human visual element. You&#8217;re like, generate a picture of I&#8217;m writing a post about coffee, so<br />generate a picture of a guy on a horse drinking a cup of coffee, you know, I don&#8217;t have to spend<br />hours.<br />The, the image will come to me and it&#8217;ll be unique and literally nobody else will have that.<br />Whereas, you know, the sites like stock, whatever, the stock photo, stock image sites historically<br />would charge you more. You could go buy an image, you could pay, you know, a thousand times<br />more for them to take it off the site to guarantee that nobody else ever used it again.<br />[01:16:00] Right. Um, that&#8217;s not a, that&#8217;s not gonna be an issue for much longer, you know?<br />Cory Miller: Um, it&#8217;s not Will it? Okay. So something you said, I wrote down here, I was like,<br />nobody else has it. See. Like we, we are looking at the, I&#8217;m gonna share my screen again. Do<br />you have a second to keep talking about<br />Corey Maass: this? Yeah, let&#8217;s<br />Cory Miller: go 10 more minutes.<br />Um, okay, so Rolling Stone. I don&#8217;t have a, the Desi design ability, I don&#8217;t have the resources to<br />create this, this thing now with ai, is there that opportunity That&#8217;s mm-hmm. . That&#8217;s, that&#8217;s really<br />interesting. But that&#8217;s a sidebar. Yep. But like, you think about this now, for now, when I look at<br />this site, I go, this is thoughtful.</p>



<p>Like this is unique. It&#8217;s interesting. Like this, Ima I didn&#8217;t even read what this is, but I [01:17:00]<br />was like, it it fits, you know, the, the case and cuz what you&#8217;re trying to, I&#8217;m sorry, I&#8217;m just trying<br />to keep talking about the use case. Here is what you&#8217;re trying to get is. , you know, back to<br />beginner, like, hey, nice sight, nice clean, clear side design.<br />They&#8217;re trying to get you to the content. So they&#8217;re doing a great job with SEO here with the<br />intro, restating what the headline&#8217;s about. Then they use the image, which I think is clever. Like,<br />I don&#8217;t like the featured image going outside of the post because it just fills out a whack for me.<br />But I&#8217;m like, this is interesting.<br />They have given an image that probably, you know, uh, this has SEO in it, you know? Mm-hmm.<br />, I, I, I would guess, look at this. They&#8217;ve restated, they&#8217;ve restated again, the headline.<br />Corey Maass: Yeah. Well, and that&#8217;s that also, that image is [01:18:00] gonna be, um, usable<br />for social. Right. If picture that as a, as a Facebook post it, it says their headline right int it.<br />Cory Miller: Okay, now, now, now you got got me something here. Okay. So may not go<br />anywhere, but the social share side, you&#8217;ve done all of this work to create some kind of content<br />and that social share, like our stuff from post status. I hate it because it&#8217;s not something we don&#8217;t<br />have set up. Right? You know? But what you want is, I&#8217;ve just done this cool post here that<br />hopefully is of interest to you and you&#8217;re using the image in social to pull somebody into it.<br />It&#8217;s kinda like this, almost like this. Well, or who is the<br />Freemius or are they, there [01:19:00] you go. Like if you look at this from a social Sears<br />standpoint, it&#8217;s probably more interesting. Visually, you can kind of say, I see Covid and I see<br />some kinda like weird things around it. Mm-hmm. , right? But I go, it&#8217;s something to do with<br />Covid, like from a social share. That&#8217;s pretty good.<br />Like that&#8217;s what you&#8217;d want represented out on social is it&#8217;s uh, it&#8217;s the product packaging to say,<br />there&#8217;s something in here I want and to go get it. We talked a little bit about that yo side, but<br />man, all of that social sharing stuff is just a mess. Like when I post my, I should do it here when I<br />post my, let me show you something.<br />If you have a second. If I go into to Slack and I&#8217;m gonna, then I&#8217;m gonna try to share this so you<br />can see it. Okay. Maybe this has [01:20:00] been fixed, but this thing right.<br />This, this little snippet that&#8217;s now fixed. I don&#8217;t, oh, it&#8217;s cuz I clicked the social share stuff. But<br />see, like when you do<br />any day now<br />Okay. Anyway, it doesn&#8217;t look good. Like it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s not, there we go. Yeah, sure. Okay. So<br />somehow this, this has attached to the homepage, right? But the idea that you want is, it<br />represents that f. Social share, whatever the image thing, whatever we titled it, feature name or<br />whatever it is, like that, whatever [01:21:00] this, I don&#8217;t know if it&#8217;s graphical or whatever it&#8217;s<br />called.<br />But, um, what you&#8217;re trying to do when you post that to social is show this effect of what, like, w<br />if you beginner on different things, designs, like here&#8217;s something to show you see, show you<br />what this post is about. That&#8217;s an interesting angle, but I, I don&#8217;t know where it goes from here,<br />but like,<br />Corey Maass: so like here&#8217;s, here&#8217;s a tool that I&#8217;ve been playing around with lately is, uh, so<br />Twitter has introduced cards the same way that Facebook a while ago introduced their open<br />graph. So you come here and you plug in post status and you say preview card. Card preview<br />has moved to tweet composer . Okay. Uh, but we can do tweet card preview banner bear.<br />So if I [01:22:00] plug in post status, they built their own preview. There you go. So like, that&#8217;s<br />what it&#8217;s gonna look like on social.<br />And these are the tools, you know, that are becoming more and more prevalent. And it&#8217;s like, so<br />in Yeah, in Yost, using them as an example, and I think the other SEO plugins have this too, is<br />you, you know, you, you set your featured image and it will automatically suck in your featured<br />image as the OG image, but you can also set a different one.<br />And so you can go and, and so like, I actually wanted to do just what you said, um, previous and<br />go to their blog and pick a blog post. . And so like this is, uh, I&#8217;m breaking their site, [01:23:00]<br />so they&#8217;ve got an image in the background. This is text, you know, an H one or whatever. But,<br />um, you know, VVA is so phenomenal with social media and stuff like that, that I bet if I take this<br />U R L and I plug it in here and I hit enter that he&#8217;s created.<br />Yeah. See, so he&#8217;s created a custom image that is that same background image, but has his<br />little photo in it has a title, you know, and this is all one image that is been generated Canva,</p>



<p>somewhere different from, you know, the, the title up here. Whereas this is all actually H T M L<br />element.<br />Yeah, food for thought and, and actually a conversation to take offline, um, is there are features<br />here that, um, [01:24:00] overlap with other stuff that I&#8217;ve been working on. And so maybe it&#8217;s,<br />maybe we wanna wrap it all in together, or maybe this is a different kind of like the, you know,<br />we keep talking around ai, but we&#8217;re just not, that&#8217;s not the product we&#8217;re building this year, let&#8217;s<br />say.<br />Unless it, it, it&#8217;s the on unless we get to the point where it&#8217;s the only thing we can build. Right.<br />Um, and so it&#8217;s, maybe it&#8217;s something like that or maybe it&#8217;s the direction that we we&#8217;re, we&#8217;re<br />talking about, I dunno. Mm-hmm.<br />Cory Miller: Yeah. Now you got my mind rolling.<br />Corey Maass: Yep. Um, I gotta get. Okay. I do think that we need bringing, bringing you way<br />back down . Um, I mean, and I&#8217;m not picking on you, both of us, like these are our<br />conversations, but [01:25:00] um, I think having you go through the plugin and just saying, look,<br />we need, this needs a little design or this needs some intro text, or what the heck is the word<br />preset mean?<br />Um, would take us pretty far. Cuz right now we do have a very developer friendly product. And<br />so me going in and just changing some labels and things, if that makes it 20% more usable,<br />which I think is true, um, then, then we&#8217;re gonna be better off. The other thing is the Readme<br />needs updating now because we have a block.<br />We have featured images, we have. Media library. We have some basic settings. Okay. So let&#8217;s,<br />you know, I, I, I think we&#8217;re having, in a good way, we&#8217;re having all of the different company<br />meetings in one . We&#8217;re having the executive level discussions, [01:26:00] which are arguably<br />way more fun, but we also need to be having the, you know, low level mm-hmm.<br />dev, you know, dev conversations to make sure that we keep moving, moving what we&#8217;ve got<br />forward, um, in a, in a practical sense. Mm-hmm. .<br />Cory Miller: Yep. Okay. Well I&#8217;ve got down here, review the plugin. I&#8217;ll do a video on that, walk<br />through several things and just note stuff.<br />Corey Maass: Hi puppy. Um, your background changed. How did I take this long to even<br />notice?<br />Cory Miller: Yeah, I know, right? I got the fancy new sleeper.<br />Corey Maass: So it&#8217;s so respectable now. Don&#8217;t go that far<br />Cory Miller: yet. . I do. I think, I think, I&#8217;ll tell you what, I need a big poster right over there. Yeah.<br />Um, yeah. Looking respectable, man. What can you say?<br />Corey Maass: I&#8217;m proud of you, buddy. Thank you, . [01:27:00]<br />Cory Miller: Um, and then I&#8217;ve got the read me file too.<br />Um, to go back to Yeah. And I<br />Corey Maass: think that for me, like we now have Yeah. Read, read Me as you, um, or us like<br />we, we did it together last time. We can do it again. Um, I, I guess what I&#8217;m envisioning right is<br />we&#8217;re, we&#8217;re pretty close to feature, complete, um, Or something that&#8217;s actually usable. Like I&#8217;m,<br />I&#8217;m on the verge of actually installing this on my client&#8217;s websites.<br />I&#8217;ve got it on some of my own cuz I&#8217;m willing to muddle through the things that were confusing<br />or, um, you know, or, or not clear or, um, that&#8217;s redundant, um, or not what I needed. Whereas<br />now I&#8217;m like, okay, my clients have to upload a 16.9 featured image every day and currently they<br />have to go use a separate tool.<br />I&#8217;m ready to install this [01:28:00] plugin cuz it actually does what I need. Um, and so I wanna<br />make sure that we are. Product complete. So Dev builds the features and then we as a team<br />have complete the product. And then frankly, we can sit on it for a long time and keep having<br />more of these conversations or ex, you know, start from there.<br />It&#8217;s like we&#8217;ve built the dock out into the lake and so then we can start dipping our toe in more,<br />but mm-hmm. , we&#8217;re, you know, we&#8217;re out there, we&#8217;re in the world. Um, and, and people, other<br />people can use the dock too. I feel like right now we&#8217;ve got the, uh, the, the janky, uh, we&#8217;re, it&#8217;s<br />a, it&#8217;s a wooden pallet floating on empty beer cans.<br />And so we wouldn&#8217;t allow our loved ones to go use it to get out into the lake. Yes, I&#8217;m running<br />with this metaphor. You know, we&#8217;re close to having actually swimming built a reasonable dock.<br />Um, you know, that&#8217;s safe enough for our, for children to [01:29:00] use that kind of thing.<br />Cory Miller: You&#8217;re swimming with that metaphor.</p>



<p>Sta. All right. Thanks man. Um, okay. Yeah, I&#8217;ve got my team marching items. Thanks for<br />keeping us grounded. Let me, uh, float in the atmosphere a little bit. I, it really is for specific<br />reasons cause I know when we go Got it. You know, like right there and, and some of that&#8217;s<br />validation, but just a little bit more clarity on how, who is gonna value this and is it the right thing<br />for what they need.<br />Um, but Okay. Thanks dude. Thanks for jumping on today. All right.</p>



<h2><br /></h2>
<p>This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 06 Apr 2023 13:22:29 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:11:"Cory Miller";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:25;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:79:"WPTavern: ACF 6.1 Adds Support for Registering Custom Post Types and Taxonomies";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=143319";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:90:"https://wptavern.com/acf-6-1-adds-support-for-registering-custom-post-types-and-taxonomies";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:3772:"<p>ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) <a href="https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/blog/acf-6-1-0-released/">version 6.1</a> was released this week with support for creating Custom Post Types and Taxonomies. This is a long-awaited feature that users have been asking for since the earliest days of the plugin when it was still developed by its original author, Elliot Condon. </p>



<p>When Delicious Brains acquired the plugin, the ACF community reiterated this feature request. WP Engine kept it on the roadmap when they <a href="https://wptavern.com/wp-engine-acquires-5-plugins-from-delicious-brains">acquired ACF in June 2022</a> and has finally been able to deliver. Registering post types and taxonomies is now available through a simple interface that works in a similar way to creating field groups and fields.</p>



<img />



<p>After registering the CPT, users can then add an existing or new field group for it or create a taxonomy, and move on from there. The advantage is that users don&#8217;t have to break their workflows and use a different plugin for this functionality. For those managing client websites, it is one fewer plugin required. </p>



<p>&#8220;We know there are a large number of ACF users registering custom post types (CPTs) and creating custom fields for them,&#8221; WP Engine Senior Product Manager Iain Poulson said. &#8220;But they have to register the CPTs either manually with code or using another plugin. The overarching workflow of modeling the data needed for a site build is fragmented between different plugins, UIs, and user experiences. We wanted to fix that!&#8221;</p>



<p>The ACF development team has also created a <a href="https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/resources/post-types-and-taxonomies/#disabling-cpts-taxonomies">dedicated import tool</a> for users who want to migrate post types and taxonomies from the <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/custom-post-type-ui/">Custom Post Type UI</a> (CPTUI) plugin to ACF in order to manage them all from one plugin.  ACF has also built in the ability to <a href="https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/resources/acf-settings-enable_post_types/">disable post types and taxonomies from the plugin admin</a> in case users do not require this feature in the update.</p>



<p>ACF reports more than 4.5 million users, so it will be interesting to see how having this built in will impact the CPTUI user base, which is active on more than a million websites. Some users simply need custom post types but won&#8217;t require all of ACF&#8217;s capabilities, but there is certainly a large overlap between the two plugins.</p>



<p>After expanding well beyond the creation of custom fields with this and previous updates, Poulson said they will be referring to the plugin as &#8220;ACF&#8221; more going forward. The plugin&#8217;s admin sidebar menu has been updated from &#8220;Custom Fields&#8221; to ACF.</p>



<p>Version 6.1 also includes the following highlights and important changes:</p>



<ul>
<li>New &#8216;browse fields&#8217; button opens a modal to search and showcase all field types</li>



<li>Post Object, Page Link and Relationship fields now support filtering by post status</li>



<li> Full compatibility with PHP versions 8.1 and 8.2</li>



<li>New option to filter field settings tabs so other plugins can add custom tabs and arrange their fields</li>



<li>Security fix backported to ACF 5.12.5 for a security issue where ACF might unserialize maliciously manipulated data which instantiates a class</li>
</ul>



<p>All of these new features are available in both the free version and ACF Pro. Check out the <a href="https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/changelog/">changelog</a> for the full rundown of everything included in version 6.1.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 05 Apr 2023 21:21:12 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:26;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:101:"Post Status: Build a Block Theme • Theme Performance Improvements * Interactivity API • Why Jazz?";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:32:"https://poststatus.com/?p=148717";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:101:"https://poststatus.com/build-a-block-theme-theme-performance-improvements-interactivity-api-why-jazz/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:19172:"<h2 id="h-this-week-at-wordpress-org-april-3-2023">This Week at WordPress.org (April 3, 2023)</h2>


<div class="has-background has-theme-palette-8-background-color wp-block-post-excerpt"><p class="wp-block-post-excerpt__excerpt">Matt shares why WordPress releases are named after jazz musicians. The FSE block theme explores functionality gaps and gathers feedback on the Site Editor experience. WordPress 6.2 improves load times and server-side performance for block and classic themes. The Interactivity API proposal standardizes frontend interactivity for Gutenberg blocks. </p></div>


<div class="wp-block-spacer"></div>



<div class="wp-block-kadence-infobox kt-info-box_94d1bd-77"><div class="kt-blocks-info-box-link-wrap kt-blocks-info-box-media-align-left kt-info-halign-left"><div class="kt-blocks-info-box-media-container"><div class="kt-blocks-info-box-media kt-info-media-animate-none"><div class="kadence-info-box-icon-container kt-info-icon-animate-none"><div class="kadence-info-box-icon-inner-container"><span class="kb-svg-icon-wrap kb-svg-icon-fas_paint-brush kt-info-svg-icon"></span></div></div></div></div><div class="kt-infobox-textcontent"><h2 class="kt-blocks-info-box-title">Build a Theme, Time to First Byte, Jazz, and Interactivity API</h2><p class="kt-blocks-info-box-text"><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f9b8-1f3fb-200d-2640-fe0f.png" alt="🦸🏻‍♀️" class="wp-smiley" /> <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/07/preparing-for-the-next-women-nonbinary-release-squad/">Preparing for the Next Women &amp; Nonbinary Release Squad</a><br /><br /><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f477-1f3fe.png" alt="👷🏾" class="wp-smiley" /> <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2023/03/29/fse-program-exploration-build-a-block-theme/">FSE Program Exploration: Build a block theme</a><br /><br /><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f680.png" alt="🚀" class="wp-smiley" /> <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/05/wordpress-6-2-performance-improvements-for-all-themes/">WordPress 6.2 Performance improvements for all themes</a><br /><br /><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f3b7.png" alt="🎷" class="wp-smiley" /> <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/design/2023/03/30/why-jazz/">Why Jazz?</a><br /><br /><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f7e6.png" alt="🟦" class="wp-smiley" /> <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/03/30/proposal-the-interactivity-api-a-better-developer-experience-in-building-interactive-blocks/">Proposal: The Interactivity API – A better developer experience in building interactive blocks</a><br /><br /><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f469-1f3fb-200d-1f4bb.png" alt="👩🏻‍💻" class="wp-smiley" /> <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/cli/2023/04/05/wp-cli-v2-8-0-release-date/">WP-CLI v2.8.0 release date</a></p></div></div></div>



<div class="wp-block-kadence-spacer aligncenter kt-block-spacer-_b57166-6e"><div class="kt-block-spacer kt-block-spacer-halign-center"><hr class="kt-divider" /></div></div>



<h2 id="h-news"><a href="https://wordpress.org/news">News</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2023/04/the-month-in-wordpress-march-2023/">The Month in WordPress – March 2023</a></li>
</ul>



<div class="wp-block-kadence-spacer aligncenter kt-block-spacer-_8f6276-eb"><div class="kt-block-spacer kt-block-spacer-halign-center"><hr class="kt-divider" /></div></div>



<div class="is-layout-flex wp-container-13 wp-block-columns">
<div class="is-layout-flow wp-block-column">
<h2 id="h-accessibility"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/accessibility">Accessibility</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/accessibility/2023/04/05/accessibility-team-meeting-agenda-april-7-2023/">Accessibility Team Meeting Agenda: April 7, 2023</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-central"><a href="https://wordcamp.central.org">Central</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://central.wordcamp.org/news/2023/03/wordcamp-buffalo-2023/">WordCamp Buffalo 2023</a></li>



<li><a href="https://central.wordcamp.org/news/2023/03/wordcamp-entebbe-2023-an-amazing-recap/">WordCamp Entebbe 2023: An Amazing Recap</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-community"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community">Community</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community/2023/04/07/its-time-to-plan-your-wp20-anniversary-celebration/">It’s Time to Plan Your WP20 Anniversary Celebration!!</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community/2023/04/06/personalised-coupon-codes-for-wordcamps/">Personalised Coupon Codes for WordCamps</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community/2023/04/03/community-team-training-7-community-team-roles-overview-discussion/">Community Team Training #7: Community Team Roles Overview &amp; Discussion</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community/2023/04/01/wordcamp-mentors-april-check-in/">WordCamp Mentors’ April check-in!</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-core"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core">Core</a> </h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/07/preparing-for-the-next-women-nonbinary-release-squad/">Preparing for the Next Women &amp; Nonbinary Release Squad</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/05/whats-new-in-gutenberg-15-5-05-april/">What’s new in Gutenberg 15.5? (05 April)</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/05/wordpress-6-2-performance-improvements-for-all-themes/">WordPress 6.2 Performance improvements for all themes</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/04/a-week-in-core-april-3-2023/">Two Weeks in Core – April 3, 2023</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/03/preferred-languages-help-test-the-latest-version/">Preferred Languages: Help test the latest version</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/03/30/proposal-the-interactivity-api-a-better-developer-experience-in-building-interactive-blocks/">Proposal: The Interactivity API – A better developer experience in building interactive blocks</a></li>
</ul>



<h3 id="h-meetings">Meetings</h3>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/04/editor-chat-agenda-april-5th-2023/">Editor Chat Agenda: April 5th, 2023</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/06/dev-chat-summary-april-5-2023/">Dev Chat Summary, April 5, 2023</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-design"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/design">Design</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/design/2023/03/30/why-jazz/">Why Jazz?</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-docs"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/docs">Docs</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/docs/2023/03/26/agenda-for-docs-team-bi-weekly-meeting-april-4-2023/">Agenda for Docs Team bi-weekly meeting April 4, 2023</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2023/04/03/documentation-team-update-april-3-2023/">Documentation Team Update – April 3, 2023</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-hosting"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/hosting">Hosting</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/hosting/2023/04/05/hosting-team-meeting-agenda-2023-04-05/">Hosting Team meeting agenda 2023-04-05</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-marketing"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/marketing">Marketing</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/marketing/2023/04/04/notes-global-marketing-team-meeting-28-march-2023/">Notes: Global Marketing Team meeting, 28 March 2023</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-meta"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/meta">Meta</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/meta/2023/04/06/matrix-chat-summary-april-6-2023/">Matrix chat Summary, April 6, 2023</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/meta/2023/04/04/agenda-biweekly-matrix-chat-thu-april-6-2023-10am-utc/">Agenda: Biweekly Matrix Chat – Thu, April 6, 2023 (10AM UTC)</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-mobile"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/mobile">Mobile</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2023/04/07/mobile-team-update-april-6th-2/">Mobile Team Update – April 6th</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-openverse"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/openverse">Openverse</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/openverse/2023/04/05/community-meeting-recap-2023-04-04/">Community Meeting Recap (2023-04-04)</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/openverse/2023/04/03/last-week-openverse-2023-03-27-2023-04-03/">A week in Openverse: 2023-03-27 – 2023-04-03</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/openverse/2023/03/30/community-meeting-recap-28-march-2023/">Community Meeting Recap (28 March 2023)</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/openverse/2023/03/29/openverse-monthly-priorities-meeting-2023-04-05/">Openverse Monthly Priorities Meeting 2023-04-05</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-performance"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/performance/">Performance</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/05/performance-chat-summary-04-april-2023/">Performance Chat Summary: 4 April 2023</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-plugins"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/plugins">Plugins</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/plugins/2023/03/21/use-of-code-generators-must-remain-gpl-compatible/">Use of Code Generators Must Remain GPL Compatible</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/plugins/2023/03/10/advance-notice-of-retirement/">Advance Notice of Retirement</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2023/04/04/plugin-review-team-3-april-2023/">Plugin Review Team – 3 April 2023</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-polyglots"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots">Polyglots</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/2023/04/05/agenda-weekly-polyglots-chat-april-05-2023-0700-utc/">Agenda: Weekly Polyglots Chat – April 05, 2023 (07:00 UTC)</a></li>
</ul>
</div>



<div class="is-layout-flow wp-block-column">
<h2 id="h-project">Project</h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/project/2023/02/06/proposal-creating-a-wordpress-contributor-mentorship-program/">Proposal: Creating a WordPress Contributor Mentorship Program</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/project/2023/01/27/discussion-ending-the-eternal-september/">Discussion: Ending the Eternal September</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-support"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/support">Support</a></h2>



<ul>
<li> <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/support/2023/03/support-ticket-triage-session-april-5th-2023-at-1600-utc/">Support ticket triage session – April 5th 2023 at 16:00 UTC&nbsp;</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-test"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test">Test</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2023/04/04/hallway-hangout-lets-chat-about-moving-to-the-site-editor/">Hallway Hangout: Let’s chat about Moving to the Site Editor</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2023/03/29/fse-program-exploration-build-a-block-theme/">FSE Program Exploration: Build a block theme</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2023/04/03/test-team-update-3-april-2023/">Test Team Update: 3 April 2023</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-theme">Theme</h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/themes/2023/04/04/theme-handbook-overhaul-proposal/">Theme Handbook Overhaul Proposal</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2023/04/04/themes-team-update-april-04-2023/">Themes team update April 04, 2023</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-training"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/training">Training</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/training/2023/04/07/next-steps-for-the-faculty-program/">Next Steps for the Faculty Program</a></li>



<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/learn-wordpress-april-2023-newsletter/">Learn WordPress April 2023 Newsletter</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/training/2023/04/05/proposal-creating-learning-pathways-for-learn-wordpress/">Proposal: Creating Learning Pathways for Learn WordPress</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/training/2023/03/29/introduction-to-wordpress-development-syllabus/">Introduction to WordPress Development syllabus</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/training/2023/04/03/meeting-agenda-for-april-04-2023/">Meeting agenda for April 04, 2023</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2023/04/01/whats-new-on-learn-wordpress-in-march-2023/">What’s new on Learn WordPress in March 2023</a></li>
</ul>



<h3 id="h-lesson-plans"><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/lesson-plans">Lesson Plans</a></h3>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/lesson-plan/ar-dashboard-overview/">نبذة عن لوحة البيانات </a></li>
</ul>



<h3 id="h-tutorials"><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/tutorials">Tutorials</a></h3>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/tutorial/using-block-patterns/">Using Block Patterns</a></li>



<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/tutorial/add-media-and-openverse-images-to-your-content-directly-from-the-inserter/">Add media and Openverse images to your content directly from the Inserter</a></li>



<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/tutorial/wordpress-rest-api-custom-routes-endpoints/">WordPress REST API – custom routes &amp; endpoints</a></li>



<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/tutorial/intro-to-the-site-editor-and-template-editor/">Intro to the Site Editor and Template Editor</a></li>



<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/tutorial/how-to-use-the-wordpress-stylebook-with-your-block-theme/">How to use the WordPress Stylebook with your block theme</a></li>
</ul>



<h3 id="h-online-workshops">Online Workshops</h3>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/?meeting=how-to-validate-content-feedback-for-the-wordpress-training-team">How to validate content feedback for the WordPress Training Team</a></li>



<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/?meeting=33114">WordPress 6.2 のアップデート内容を見てみよう！</a></li>



<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/?meeting=wordpress-6-2-%E3%81%AE%E3%82%A2%E3%83%83%E3%83%97%E3%83%87%E3%83%BC%E3%83%88%E5%86%85%E5%AE%B9%E3%82%92%E8%A6%8B%E3%81%A6%E3%81%BF%E3%82%88%E3%81%86%EF%BC%81">WordPress 6.2 のアップデート内容を見てみよう！</a></li>



<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/?meeting=updating-a-blogs-design-informal-live-stream-part-4">Updating a blog’s design (Informal live stream) – Part 4</a></li>



<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/?meeting=the-wordpress-request-lifecycle-2">WP dev livestream: WordPress request lifecycle</a></li>



<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/?meeting=the-wordpress-request-lifecycle">The WordPress request lifecycle</a></li>



<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/?meeting=a-guide-to-open-source-and-wordpress-timezone-2">A Guide to Open Source and WordPress (Timezone 2)</a></li>



<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/?meeting=a-guide-to-open-source-and-wordpress">A Guide to Open Source and WordPress</a></li>
</ul>



<h3 id="h-courses"><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/courses">Courses</a></h3>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/course/converting-a-shortcode-to-a-block/">Converting a Shortcode to a Block</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-wp-cli">WP-CLI</h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/cli/2023/04/05/wp-cli-v2-8-0-release-date/">WP-CLI v2.8.0 release date</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 id="h-wptv">WPTV</h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.tv/category/year/2022/">Latest WordPress TV videos</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity" />



<h2 id="h-related-news">Related News:</h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.php.net/archive/2023.php#2023-02-14-2">PHP 8.2.4 Released!</a></li>



<li><a href="https://www.php.net/archive/2023.php#2023-03-16-1">PHP 8.1.17 Released!</a></li>



<li><a href="https://262.ecma-international.org/13.0/">TC39</a></li>



<li><a href="https://github.com/composer/composer/releases/tag/2.5.5">Composer 2.5.5</a></li>
</ul>



<p class="has-theme-palette-7-background-color has-background">Thanks for reading our WP dot .org roundup! Each week we are highlighting the news and discussions coming from the good folks making WordPress possible. If you or your company create products or services that use WordPress, you need to be engaged with them and their work. Be sure to share this resource with your product and project managers. <br /><br /><strong>Are you interested in giving back and contributing your time and skills to WordPress.org?</strong> <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f64f.png" alt="🙏" class="wp-smiley" /> <a href="https://wordpress.org/support/article/contributing-to-wordpress/">Start Here ›</a><br /><br /><strong>Get our weekly WordPress community news digest</strong> — Post Status&#8217; <a href="https://poststatus.com/news/week-in-review/">Week in Review</a> — covering the WP/Woo news plus significant writing and podcasts. It&#8217;s also available in <a href="https://poststatus.com/newsletter">our newsletter</a>. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f48c.png" alt="💌" class="wp-smiley" /></p>



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<p class="has-text-align-left has-small-font-size"><strong>Build your network. Learn with others. Find your next job — or your next hire.</strong> Read the <strong>Post Status</strong> <a href="https://poststatus.com/newsletter/">newsletter</a>. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/2709.png" alt="✉" class="wp-smiley" /> Listen to <a href="https://poststatus.com/podcasts/">podcasts</a>. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f399.png" alt="🎙" class="wp-smiley" /> Follow <a href="https://twitter.com/post_status/">@Post_Status</a> <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f426.png" alt="🐦" class="wp-smiley" /> and <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/post-status-llc/">LinkedIn</a>. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f4bc.png" alt="💼" class="wp-smiley" /></p>
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";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:73:"WPTavern: #70 – Steve Persch and Brian Perry on How Hosting Is Changing";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:48:"https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=143278";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:87:"https://wptavern.com/podcast/70-steve-persch-and-brian-perry-on-how-hosting-is-changing";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:53090:"Transcription<div>
<p>[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.</p>



<p>Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, the past and future of website hosting.</p>



<p>If you&#8217;d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.</p>



<p>If you have a topic that you&#8217;d like us to feature on the show, I&#8217;m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you all your idea on the podcast as soon as possible. Head over to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the form there.</p>



<p>So on the podcast today, we have Steve Persch and Brian Perry. They&#8217;re both employed at Pantheon, an enterprise website operations platform. And they&#8217;re here to talk about the evolution of website hosting.</p>



<p>Back when the internet started, hosting was a fairly straightforward enterprise. You created HTML files and uploaded them to a server. That was it. An HTML file was a page.</p>



<p>Server-side technology such as PHP came along, and the picture became a little more complex. Web pages needed to be constructed on the fly. Databases were thrown into the mix, and the complexity increased. Add in the different languages that you could write your code in, and the server configurations. The CMS that you choose also plays into this mix. Now we&#8217;ve got CDNs, headless, React, Gatsby, Node.js and much more. Is it even possible for the non-technical to have any understanding of where their website is?</p>



<p>Steve and Brian talk about how they got into the hosting space, and what&#8217;s changed over the years. We address what Pantheon is doing with WordPress and Drupal.</p>



<p>We discuss how headless can be difficult for content teams, given that there&#8217;s a disconnect with hitting the publish button and that content going live on the site.</p>



<p>What&#8217;s certain is that there&#8217;s no end in sight in terms of the rate of innovation in the website hosting space. What&#8217;s popular today might not be several years from now. And so it&#8217;s a timely discussion of what Steve and Brian see as the best bets for the future.</p>



<p>If you&#8217;re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading over to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast, where you&#8217;ll find all the other episodes as well.</p>



<p>And so, without further delay I bring you Steve Persch and Brian Perry.</p>



<p>I am joined on the podcast today by Steve Persch and Brian Perry. Hello.</p>



<p>[00:03:37] Steve Persch: Hello, Steve Persh here. Happy to be here.</p>



<p>[00:03:39] Brian Perry: Yeah, Brian Perry also really excited to chat.</p>



<p>[00:03:42] Nathan Wrigley: Well, thank you for joining me on the podcast today. We&#8217;re going to talk about something, and I seem to have said this sentence much more often recently, about something that that really is a mystery to me. You are going to school me in all sorts of ways about something that I&#8217;m really not that familiar with, and that is all about how files get served up. Where are our website files being kept? Where are the computers? Where&#8217;s the infrastructure, and how much more complicated it has become over the last 10 or 15 years.</p>



<p>Before we begin that, I think we&#8217;ll take you in order. I&#8217;ll go Steve first, if that&#8217;s all right? I&#8217;m wondering if both of you can give us a little bit of orientation about who you are, who you work for. Your history with technology and possibly WordPress in particular. So yeah, we&#8217;ll launch that with Steve.</p>



<p>[00:04:28] Steve Persch: Sure, so Steve Persch here in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I&#8217;m the director of technical marketing at Pantheon. We&#8217;re a website operations platform for Drupal, WordPress and now front end frameworks, which is, much of what, thinking about that question of what computer makes the website.</p>



<p>I&#8217;ve been in the web space for a while now. I first started making websites, first semi-professionally, and then professionally in the early days of WordPress. I built some of my first professional websites in WordPress 2, back in 2006. Then for some of the sites that I wanted to make, that took me into the Drupal world. And now in Pantheon, we play in both of those worlds, in the lamp stack, and as Pantheon is aiming itself at running extraordinary websites, as we like to say, the best possible websites. We see that that requires us to step more fully into the JavaScript centric front end framework ecosystem.</p>



<p>[00:05:23] Nathan Wrigley: Well thank you Steve. That was great. We&#8217;ll hand it over to Brian to do a similar job.</p>



<p>[00:05:28] Brian Perry: I&#8217;m Brian Perry. I&#8217;m a staff software engineer at Pantheon. What I&#8217;m focusing on at Pantheon is leading a project we&#8217;re calling Decoupled Kit, which is a set of open source utilities and projects that aim to make this decoupled architecture or running headless WordPress and Drupal sites easier.</p>



<p>What brought me to that is, prior to Pantheon, a lot of my background was in the agency space. Specifically focusing on front end and front end develop. More and more I found myself interested in what was going on in the JavaScript ecosystem, and working on projects where using a CMS like WordPress or Drupal to feed data into the front end. But also found that there were a lot of solutions that were being invented over and over to solve those problems. So being able to focus on trying to make that easier for folks has been really exciting.</p>



<p>[00:06:24] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much indeed. So you&#8217;re both coming from Pantheon and you mentioned there that you have a very keen focus on, well you mentioned two CMSs, which is curious actually. Obviously this is a WordPress podcast, but we&#8217;re not here to destroy the opposition if you like. But Drupal and WordPress, I think I&#8217;m right in saying that you don&#8217;t find too many hosting companies that lay claim to both of those. Is that a relic of the past of Pantheon, how it all began back in the day?</p>



<p>[00:06:51] Steve Persch: It&#8217;s an intentional choice. We think that supporting both of those systems gives us more flexibility. It ends up fitting us better to our core audience. Pantheon started with digital agencies. Our four founders came from running web development agencies, that&#8217;s the background.</p>



<p>And for a lot of the agencies and in the ecosystems we came from, we knew that it was normal for those sorts of agencies to have a preference between Drupal, WordPress or, you know, Ruby and Rails or any other of system. But often, the given client you&#8217;re working for might have both, for any number of historical reasons.</p>



<p>So yes, the initiation of that was, uh, somewhat happenstance. Our customers figuring out like, this platform was first built for Drupal, I bet we could make it run WordPress. And then Pantheon as a company realizing like, yes, we should support WordPress. That&#8217;s something that I think was a bit inevitable.</p>



<p>It&#8217;s good for us technologically and business wise to support more than one. And at the same time it&#8217;s good for us to not open it up as wide as, well, anything PHP. Some of our competitors take the other extreme of, hey, if you can make it run then you&#8217;re good. We think of ourselves as, we prefer the term, a website operations platform.</p>



<p>And hosting is a feature of that. But don&#8217;t want to have a relationship with our customers that&#8217;s as simple as like, well, yeah, if you can make it run, that&#8217;s good. We&#8217;re only here to provide the server. We see ourselves as facilitating more growth of value of the websites, not just the question of can this run at all?</p>



<p>[00:08:21] Brian Perry: Yeah, I think that, that same sort of concept also extends to the front end and JavaScript frameworks in that, there&#8217;s definitely a lot of excitement around Next.js. But we are looking to build a platform where other future frameworks can run on it. But also, yeah, we&#8217;re not necessarily trying to be like, run whatever crazy JavaScript project you want. We want to have some guardrails there.</p>



<p>[00:08:44] Nathan Wrigley: I remember back in the day prior to stumbling across WordPress, which I did quite a long time ago now, I used to use Drupal exclusively actually, and I have a, have a memory of Pantheon cropping up, and at the time, really hadn&#8217;t heard of a hosting company that was binding itself to a CMS in that way.</p>



<p>It was curious to me that Pantheon had laid claim to, okay, if you&#8217;re using a CMS, we&#8217;re somebody that you should look at. Prior to that, it was always, we&#8217;re just a hosting company. You know, we&#8217;ll host anything.</p>



<p>[00:09:16] Steve Persch: I often go back to the first blog post that was done by, one of our co-founders, our four co-founders, when Pantheon started. I think the title of the blog post was Putting the Humans at the Top of the Stack. And it laid out, or at the time, but a decade plus ago, two common ways of running websites.</p>



<p>One was just that hosting mode of a host providing some baseline technological capabilities, but the team buying the hosting is responsible for assembling the parts and making it all work. And yes, that&#8217;s an appropriate choice for some teams, but it&#8217;s not a great recipe for success for what we see as the broad plurality of professional web teams.</p>



<p>The other extreme at the time, and it&#8217;s still present there, is the Squarespace, Wix, very templatized, cookie cutter way of building a site. Which again, is totally appropriate for certain people who need websites. But Pantheon, a decade ago and still now, wants to find a middle path that empowers the majority, or a plurality of professional web teams to make the best possible websites.</p>



<p>And we see that, fulfilling that mission does require us to build CMS specific capabilities, and now front end framework specific capabilities, while not putting ourselves as narrow as only WordPress, or only Next.js.</p>



<p>[00:10:35] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That&#8217;s really interesting. Thank you for that. The subject at hand is really about how hosting has changed over the last decade, two decades, what have you. And it might be of interest to the listeners to the podcast if they pause for a moment and go and watch one of the videos. It was created by Steve, I believe, created the video.</p>



<p>It&#8217;s called Decoupled Architectures, What Computer Assembles the website, and it&#8217;s a great watch. It&#8217;s. 10 minutes long, and it&#8217;ll give you a real insight into the things that we&#8217;re going to talk about. What Steve brings to bear is lots of papers and drawing, which we can&#8217;t do on this podcast, but they really do help solidify the problem. He&#8217;s got lots of nice diagrams of how things are working.</p>



<p>But just to rewind the clock, let&#8217;s go back 20 years or so ago. It seems like an age almost at the birth of the internet almost. But if you had a website, whatever CMS it was. You would have to host it somewhere, and you would probably select a host and upload the files.</p>



<p>They were probably at that point, just static HTML. I imagine CSS probably hadn&#8217;t even emerged at that point. And you just uploaded them. And you had a great idea of where that computer was. You had a slice, a share of that computer. It was yours. You could point to where it was on the map and so on and so forth.</p>



<p>And that&#8217;s not how it&#8217;s done now. Or at least that&#8217;s not how everybody&#8217;s doing it. So I want us to run through a history of how that&#8217;s changed over time. Going right back from the beginnings when the internet began and you could build your own websites. Right up to how it&#8217;s done now. We can really be ponderous about this, we&#8217;ve got a whole episode ahead of us. So, whoever wants to begin that journey, you can flip flop and change, do tag team if you like, but that&#8217;s what I want to do. The history of how hosting has changed.</p>



<p>[00:12:19] Steve Persch: Brian, if you don&#8217;t mind, I&#8217;ll start from flat HTML files, and enter us into the era of PHP. And then you can talk about CMSs. So one of my first experiences getting paid to maintain a website, a thing, I wasn&#8217;t even pondering as a career path. I was a theater major, and then I found myself working in the marketing department of a theater company. And they had a flat HTML website that did the job, was good enough for the early two thousands. A few hundred pages of flat HTML files, mostly it&#8217;s like if you want to buy tickets, call this phone number. Here&#8217;s the production that we&#8217;re producing, here&#8217;s the calendar.</p>



<p>And one of the most annoying tasks, once I became the person getting paid to update the website was, add this menu link in the sidebar. And that sidebar appears on like a dozen pages. Okay, so I open up a dozen flat HTML files and then I notice, oh, this sub sidebar menu for the education department of the theater company. This menu isn&#8217;t even consistent on these 12 HTML files, because over however many years, copy paste errors happened. And that&#8217;s annoying, and creates a bad, confusing experience.</p>



<p>But, I know enough to realize that I could put in some PHP tags, and save myself some time. That&#8217;s how I first started transitioning that question of, what computer assembles the website? How does this website really come together? The first answer of, it&#8217;s all flat HTML that I&#8217;ve got to hand code on my own machine to, what if I put a little bit more, just a little bit more intelligence in the server and told it to like PHP include education sub sidebar dot PHP.</p>



<p>Then I don&#8217;t have to worry about copy pasting menu updates across 12 HTML files. That started to transition the question of what computer assembles the website, but the content management systems that were cropping up at the same time, WordPress, Drupal, others, provided a much more robust answer. But I can let Brian talk about that.</p>



<p>[00:14:25] Nathan Wrigley: I&#8217;ll just interject at that point because the pain that you&#8217;ve just described was my pain. I remember exactly that. I mean, it wasn&#8217;t the 200 page website, but I remember the exact same thing. And then stumbling across the, oh, you can include something with PHP can you? That will take that whole burden, maybe the header or the footer or wherever it may be on the website.</p>



<p>And I do remember finding that really quite startling, and thinking good grief. I&#8217;ve just saved myself literally hours of time, and it was fabulous. It was really, really an excellent moment. So, okay, so.</p>



<p>[00:15:00] Brian Perry: It&#8217;s also a, it&#8217;s a gateway to the danger of creating your own CMS, I don&#8217;t know if anybody on this has done that?</p>



<p>[00:15:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yes, that&#8217;s exactly what I did. We&#8217;ve laid the pathway then to, we&#8217;ve got PHP in there somehow now, and so now we&#8217;re moving towards CMSs. So I guess we&#8217;ll hand it to Brian to tell us what came next.</p>



<p>[00:15:19] Brian Perry: Yeah, and Steve, feel free to jump in as the overall tour guide with any color commentary. But yeah so, many of us have rolled our own CMSs. But then projects like WordPress and Drupal come along and provide a consistent user experience to being able to manage your data. Have an associated front end.</p>



<p>It&#8217;s the great situation where there&#8217;s a community of folks making that project better, rather than the CMS we built on our own. That is a situation where you have your CMS, that handles that data. But it is essentially a single lamp stack. And your CMS is responsible for assembling your website. So you can edit things in the admin. But at the end of the day, WordPress, for example, is what puts everything together, using its templates and providing the end page that the user interacts with.</p>



<p>[00:16:15] Steve Persch: Another way I think about this progression is through the lens of the three really broad groups of people who make a website like this possible. Especially in those early PHP days, to make something like this work there&#8217;s someone probably with an IT sort of job title who&#8217;s setting up the server. There&#8217;s someone with like a web developer type of job title who&#8217;s making the Drupal or WordPress part work, and they may be working with designers as well. And then there are people managing the content.</p>



<p>So in addition to what computer assembles the website, a more specific framing is where is the work of these three broad groups of people coming together? It&#8217;s coming together over and over and over and over again, to make a functioning website. And in the lamp stack era, it&#8217;s that PHP server, you know, be it shared hosting or a server in the closet. That is where the work of those three groups has to fit together.</p>



<p>And for the decade or so that the lamp stack was dominant, there became pretty solidified best practices on how those three groups need to work together in order to do their jobs most effectively.</p>



<p>[00:17:26] Nathan Wrigley: I feel that&#8217;s a really nice segregation of the different things that were going on. But also it makes the two bits that you are not involved with suddenly quite mysterious. If you&#8217;re the content editor, suddenly the IT bit, the hosting if you like, you&#8217;re no longer involved in that in any way. And, so that over time becomes a little bit more murky and what have you.</p>



<p>But the advent of the CMS suddenly opened up a whole range of possibilities for people who really don&#8217;t have any technical, they don&#8217;t desire to be technical. They want to be consumed with the content. They want to log into something, type away, upload images, what have you, and press publish, and for it to be done.</p>



<p>So I think that&#8217;s a really useful definition. Prior to that, you had to be fairly technical, at least technically enough to create the HTML and what have you, to then upload it to the server. And now we&#8217;ve got a kind of career path coming out of it, haven&#8217;t we? We&#8217;ve got the IT people, we&#8217;ve got the editor people, and various other different pieces of the puzzle.</p>



<p>It feels like maybe that is where quite a few people will still be with WordPress. That is to say they&#8217;ve got a WordPress website, they&#8217;re paying a monthly fee to a hosting company. That hosting company is literally holding the files of the CMS, in our case, WordPress. Holding them on a particular box somewhere. The DNS is pointed correctly. It all works. That set up is still doable, but I guess the journey doesn&#8217;t end there. I suppose we&#8217;ve got quite a long way to go in this journey.</p>



<p>[00:18:59] Steve Persch: Yeah, the journey does not end there. Actually it might, because it comes back around. There are other steps along the way. So, I see the next big event in this history as the release of the iPhone. Which for a while I wondered like, am I drawn to that as the key moment? Because that&#8217;s when I was coming into professional web development, around 2007. In the decade plus remove, I can see, no, that really was a big deal when we had to figure out how to make websites squish, and fit on different size devices. Phones, tablets, Android devices of every single size and resolution.</p>



<p>That was a huge change. And it came about at the same time these native application ecosystems sprung up, and really, really raised the bar for how good of an experience you could have on these devices. So not only is this just a new form factor to make work at all. The quality bar jumps up very, very high. In retrospect, I can see like, oh, that set off a bit of a panic in the web development community. And different people reacted in different ways and, you look at the 2010s and think, oh yeah, people ran in a bunch of different directions trying to handle or deal with the existential question of, how does the web stay relevant when literally billions of dollars are pushing technology towards native applications.</p>



<p>[00:20:33] Nathan Wrigley: I feel there&#8217;s some other pieces I might add into that as well, and that is, the invention of the iPhone, which then spawned so many other similar devices, some slightly larger, some competing operating systems. But the thing there was suddenly the internet went from something which was probably peripheral in your life.</p>



<p>You would interact with it, maybe with email or something at work. You&#8217;d have to turn on a computer and sit in a chair. And the internet would be on that screen and then you&#8217;d walk away from it and you&#8217;ve forgotten about the internet. Suddenly you&#8217;re at a point where the internet is with you 24 7, should you wish. It&#8217;s there all the time. So it marks a moment where not only is it technically possible to do it, but it increases the importance in everybody&#8217;s lives. So, almost everything now, what are we now about 15 years later or something?</p>



<p>Almost everything can have a web presence. You know, you were talking about buying tickets earlier. Well, what&#8217;s the best way to do that now? It&#8217;s the internet. How do you consume your radio? It&#8217;s the internet. Where does your entertainment come from? It&#8217;s the internet. There&#8217;s almost nothing, which the internet hasn&#8217;t touched, and I feel that that was the inflection point when it went in your back pocket and suddenly every company on earth had a window into everybody&#8217;s lives.</p>



<p>[00:21:50] Brian Perry: It&#8217;s a blessing and a curse.</p>



<p>[00:21:52] Nathan Wrigley: But also a convergence of the technology, you know. So cellular data was suddenly getting rolled out. Prior to that it was just mobile phones was as, as much as you could do. You could do voice chat and so on. But then mobile data came along and it all coincided at the same time. So I, yeah, Steve, I think that&#8217;s a really insight thing. The iPhone being this moment.</p>



<p>[00:22:09] Steve Persch: So the iPhone, when it comes out, it suddenly becomes the most powerful computer in the whole stack. If you&#8217;re thinking about what can we make a website or a native application? What can I do with this device? A lot of people consciously or unconsciously realized if we push more responsibility to this last computer in the chain. From the developer&#8217;s computers. There are still servers involved.</p>



<p>There are increasing number of computers in the cloud that are involved in getting the website to that iPhone. But the iPhone in many respects, the most powerful computer in the whole stack, and that leads to an architecture of, oh, let&#8217;s make that end device, be it a laptop, a high powered iPhone or a low powered budget Android phone. Let&#8217;s put all the responsibility there. Brian, I bet you could talk in greater detail about the upsides and the downsides of the single page application architecture that came about when a lot of the web development ecosystems said, oh, let&#8217;s put all the responsibility in the client, in the end device.</p>



<p>[00:23:16] Brian Perry: Yeah, there&#8217;s definitely like a huge trade off to that in that the end result that we&#8217;re doing there, especially thinking about modern JavaScript frameworks, were essentially pushing more responsibility, more code, more JavaScript to that end device. So there&#8217;s more places where things could potentially go wrong.</p>



<p>There&#8217;s more cases where rather than having just a HTML document that is passed from a device to device, it actually has responsible, responsibility for rendering the page and executing all of that code. And it&#8217;s even a situation where things as simple as being able to click the back button in your browser to go to the previous HTML document, that&#8217;s things that need to be handled within that client device.</p>



<p>So it really does increase the complexity there. And then also related to what we&#8217;ve been talking about and thinking about, the three audiences that we talked about before. One thing that jumped out to me is that as we&#8217;re finding all of these, you know, the internet everywhere, and all of these, different devices that can be used for these different purposes. I think some of also what brings us to the headless architectures that we&#8217;re going to get to down the line, is in some ways, I think driven by the content editor. In that they still want to have one place where they can go and manage content that is going to show up in all of these different places.</p>



<p>Whether it&#8217;s a client side page, a traditional website, things managed by PHP, and I think that also does start to lead us in the direction of how can we manage this content in one place and make that data available to all kinds of different consumers.</p>



<p>[00:25:01] Nathan Wrigley: So we have the, we have the iPhone, and prior to that we have just regular servers. I guess we&#8217;ve now got to take a bit of a leap and stray into an area where maybe many of us really don&#8217;t know what we&#8217;re talking about, and I&#8217;ve very much include myself in this. What are the evolution of things that have happened subsequently since the iPhone?</p>



<p>And what was the purpose of all of that? Were there things which were tried and failed? And I suppose we are slowly getting towards the present day, but if there&#8217;s been some interesting evolutions during that time which need to be mentioned to give context, please do.</p>



<p>[00:25:35] Steve Persch: Absolutely, I think one dynamic that played out in the 2010s was the splintering of all these different disciplines. I said in that lamp stack era, there are these three broad groups, of IT and content editors and developers. And I was even lumping in designers with the developers there.</p>



<p>There might be some designers who take offense to that, but you know, it&#8217;s a blurry line. I lump them together because at a very, a very zoom out level that that&#8217;s the group that&#8217;s responsible for controlling how the website looks. And the handoffs that happened between designer and developer have changed over the years.</p>



<p>But in the 2010s, there&#8217;s just an incredible splintering of the amount of detailed knowledge necessary to make websites look good across all these different devices was so large it was just unreasonable to think that you can hire one human being to know how to even implement a good design across all of these devices.</p>



<p>Who also knows how to, like, configure Advanced Custom Fields and WordPress. That&#8217;s not a terribly reasonable expectation, to think you can find one person who is excellent at both of those things. Some of those people do exist in the world, but for many team leaders putting together teams, they&#8217;re realizing, we&#8217;re going to be better off if we say like, Steve, you&#8217;re going to be the backend expert, and Brian, you&#8217;re going to be the front end expert. And, even though Brian has a whole lot of that backend expertise, for many teams, they just decided to make a hard divide in the people.</p>



<p>And then subsequently, or the order was sometimes flipped, a hard divide in the technology. So for, you know, a lot of websites built in this era, there is a very hard divide between the content management system is over here, be it WordPress or Drupal or a natively headless system like Contentful or Sanity. That&#8217;s going to be managed by one group, and then this group of front end specialists will handle the front end presentation.</p>



<p>That&#8217;s a hard cut to make. A question I&#8217;ve been asking for the last decade or so is, if we&#8217;re going to cut off WordPress&#8217;s head or Drupal&#8217;s head, where is the neck? That is an answer that is constantly moving. The next era, after single page applications, is static site generation. As people saw the, you know, that downside of single page applications, then it&#8217;s, oh, well what if we, what if we get some of the benefits of that old way of doing it where it was just flat files? Can we have flat files again, Brian.</p>



<p>[00:28:06] Nathan Wrigley: Full circle.</p>



<p>[00:28:07] Brian Perry: Exactly. That introduces a whole new set of challenges and trade offs. You know, it certainly does, things being completely static does provide a build asset that is immutable, and it&#8217;s easy to roll back. It&#8217;s something that can be cached on a CDN. But also it really changes, kind of going back to again, the editing experience. It really drastically changes that experience where someone who was used to editing a page in WordPress and clicking publish and then being able to see the page.</p>



<p>Now you have a workflow where you make a change in your CMS or whatever the source of the data is, and then a build has to run to be able to have the end website updated. And how do you preview what that looks like before the build runs? Do you need a separate environment? That trade off definitely brings a lot of additional complexity potentially to the content editing experience now.</p>



<p>[00:29:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think it&#8217;s potentially very frustrating as well because although the technological benefits and probably things like SEO and all of those things. There probably are great benefits there. If you&#8217;re the content editor, there&#8217;s probably only annoyance that when you click publish nothing happens.</p>



<p>We&#8217;ve got to wait for some, like you say, some build process to carry on. You&#8217;re adding in a great deal of incredible technological innovation, which speed things up and pushes things to different parts of the world, and I&#8217;m sure it&#8217;s something we can get into. But also from the content editing point of view, we&#8217;ve had this evolution toward being able to edit everything right away, and click publish and seeing it, to then suddenly yanking that carpet out from underneath them, which is yeah, kind of frustrating I guess.</p>



<p>[00:29:55] Steve Persch: I called this the cliff of complexity. If you search on YouTube for that phrase, you can probably find a presentation that I did at Gatsby Conf. So Gatsby, as a front end framework, really became popular as that static site generator pattern was on the ascendance, because there are so many technological benefits to be had, but when you add in a handful of possibly extra requirements. Requirements like, well, the content editors really like to be able to press publish and see it immediately. That shoots you up this cliff where making that work in an architecture that is fundamentally static, is really cutting against the grain.</p>



<p>Like it can be made to work, but is massively complex. And we think for a lot of teams like that complexity is just now worth it. The fundamental mode that WordPress has done for 20 years of like, you press publish and then you see it immediately. That is something that should not be compromised on for most teams.</p>



<p>[00:30:56] Nathan Wrigley: We&#8217;re used to a trajectory where technology just gets better in every respect. So, not only does it get quicker, but the, you know, the UI is easier to use and there&#8217;s a complete expectation that if I could publish it yesterday, and click publish and it was published right away and I could examine and look for errors that I&#8217;d made.</p>



<p>Well, we&#8217;re a year on from that. Why have you taken that capability away from me? We&#8217;re going backwards? Well, we&#8217;re kind of going sideways. We&#8217;re not going back because we&#8217;re just changing things. I think that would be a bitter pill to swallow. Hard to understand if you&#8217;re not technical.</p>



<p>[00:31:30] Steve Persch: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that&#8217;s, that backwards moving or that sideways moving does happen in other places. That&#8217;s not something I think that&#8217;s unique to web development. I remember the first time I got a car that relied heavily on a touchscreen. I was like, no, I want a knob to turn up the volume on the radio. This is so much worse. But somebody thought, no touchscreens, that&#8217;s the future. No. A lot of cars are now backswinging. There&#8217;s some parts that we do need physical buttons and dials for. That is better.</p>



<p>[00:32:01] Brian Perry: I was going to say, it&#8217;s funny that you bring up the car example because, my car actually has both, which is somewhat infuriating. There is a touchscreen that could do everything. And then on the console, all the knobs and buttons, they can do the exact same things. I feel like the JavaScript frameworks in trying to address the shift aggressively in the direction of static sites has had a period of time where it was the equivalent of my car that had both.</p>



<p>So things started shifting back over to server side rendering. But a lot of the frameworks had, and still have, concepts of both at one time. So there are ways that you can say, I want to either build things statically by default, and after some period of time they&#8217;re invalidated and re rendered on the server. Or say that it&#8217;s this subset of pages that are pre-rendered statically. Maybe it&#8217;s my homepage, and my 100 most popular pages.</p>



<p>And then other things are handled server side. That also does increase the complexity now. You have to know what things are static, what things are not. It&#8217;s kind of two different approaches. But yeah, it does feel a lot like my car that has essentially two completely redundant ways to interface with it.</p>



<p>[00:33:19] Nathan Wrigley: I&#8217;m waiting for somebody to invent the car which has levers in it. So that you&#8217;ve got screens, dials, and levers. Then we&#8217;ll, we&#8217;ll truly have the car from across the entire century. So is that where we&#8217;re at now then? If we chart our history we spoke about HTML files, and then PHP coming along and then flattening things. Is that this history lesson ends, or is there more to say?</p>



<p>[00:33:42] Steve Persch: The way I think about it, a phrase I often like to repeat to myself that came from a customer of ours, is that Pantheon needs to aim for state of the art, not bleeding edge. We see the state of the art for many web teams right now is one where you use a totally stable content management system like WordPress or Dupal for the content management systems.</p>



<p>And because so many front end developers simply expect to be working in JavaScript centric tools for teams in that, in that pool. Yes, you should have the front end then controlled through JavaScript centric tools. But do so with server side rendering because the content editors expect to press publish and then immediately see the change. And that works well with server side rendering.</p>



<p>So that&#8217;s, that&#8217;s a mode that we support in our front end sites product, the front end sites product does also support that static mode. Which is beneficial for a subset of teams out there. Like Pantheon&#8217;s own documentation site has been a totally static site for nearly a decade. I think as long as we&#8217;ve had a standalone docs site, it&#8217;s been static. And that works for that team where everything is all just in a Git repo. An edit to code can happen at the same time as an edit to the content markdown files. That works for that mode.</p>



<p>But we see that, you know, the state of the art for some web teams, as that mix of a contact management system, and a server side rendered Node.js framework. I should also say, because we&#8217;re on a WordPress centric podcast here, if you are totally comfortable with WordPress, as is, you don&#8217;t need to jump on a new React framework or a new JavaScript framework, just because there are a lot of people on Twitter saying it&#8217;s great. If you can do your job without taking on the extra complexity, stick with what works.</p>



<p>[00:35:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it&#8217;s a really good point. You mentioned there, now, I can&#8217;t remember the exact phrasing that you used, but you made a differentiation between bleeding edge and something else. Is that an approach that you take? Do you keep a watchful eye on what is happening at the extremes of technology.</p>



<p>[00:35:44] Steve Persch: Oh absolutely, yes.</p>



<p>[00:35:46] Nathan Wrigley: PhD thesis which are describing what the future might look like. But holding back just a little bit until it&#8217;s embedded and we figured out what all of this stuff is. That&#8217;s the approach?</p>



<p>[00:35:56] Steve Persch: Absolutely. So it is not a coincidence that Pantheon as a company started a decade after Drupal came into being. It was starting as a Drupal centric company, and then adding WordPress a few years later. That&#8217;s not a coincidence. There needed to be a decade or so of figuring out, how do we make websites like this before Pantheon or any company like Pantheon could do what we did. Which is put guardrails around what our founders considered to be a best practice mode of developing and maintaining and improving a lamp stack site.</p>



<p>Trying to impose those guardrails the same year that a system like WordPress or Drupal comes out, that wouldn&#8217;t make sense. Similarly, we didn&#8217;t really enter this front end framework ecosystem until about a decade in. I think almost exactly a decade after React, was released publicly is when we entered this space fully.</p>



<p>We&#8217;ve been keeping an eye on it for a very long time. I&#8217;ve been at Pantheon for seven years and that was one of my very first questions, my first week, like, when are we going to get into the Node.js space? And the answer then was not yet. And then for a while, it was soon. And then the answer was like, okay, now.</p>



<p>And now we can see, okay, the edge and one of the reasons I like to use that term bleeding edge is because that&#8217;s also the term for where the bleeding edge is now. The edge, as a synonym for the content delivery network. So companies like Cloudflare or Fastly that cache your website all over the world, have been adding more and more advanced capabilities beyond the simple caching that makes the website faster. That is very clearly where the bleeding edge or the cutting edge is now. We have a CDN baked in. We have ways of exploring that. However, put it all on the edge is not an acceptable answer yet for the broad plurality of professional web teams.</p>



<p>[00:37:50] Nathan Wrigley: Why is that? What&#8217;s the thing which makes that untenable?</p>



<p>[00:37:53] Steve Persch: The very short answer is because your database is still in one place. Even though the cloud abstracts so much like. There is a MySQL database or an abstraction thereof that lives physically in one place. Because we run on Google Cloud, that place for most sites on Pantheon is in Council Bluffs, Iowa.</p>



<p>For a WordPress site that you know, may be making in some cases hundreds of MySQL queries to generate an HTML page, hopefully fewer than, than a few hundred, but in many cases, hundreds of queries. It&#8217;s best if the PHP process that&#8217;s making those queries is right next to, physically right next to that database.</p>



<p>There are new companies popping up spreading your database all over the world at the edge. Okay, that sounds cool, but before, before we take some of the biggest websites in the world and say, oh yeah, your database will be everywhere. We need to see how that plays out with those who, who want to jump on the edge earlier. Because for the sites we serve and cater to they need to be planning in very long terms.</p>



<p>We&#8217;re highly adopted in the edu space, and I, I&#8217;ve put together timelines on yardsticks to represent like the multi hundred year history of these universities that we&#8217;re working with. And asking like, on a multi a hundred year scale or a scale of decades, it doesn&#8217;t matter that much if you switch to the new thing, whatever the new thing is, this semester or next semester, or this year or next year? Let&#8217;s wait till we know that that next thing is solid before we jump on it.</p>



<p>[00:39:23] Brian Perry: As the JavaScript guy, I got to say I want it now. But, aside from that, one thing that&#8217;s interesting from the front end perspective as well, thinking about running things on the edge. One of the challenges there is that right now, all of the different solutions for edge functions tend to use different variations of JavaScript runtime. So there&#8217;s really no consistency there. And I think that&#8217;s another thing that&#8217;s going to have to change before that gets real wide adoption, when there can be one consistent JavaScript runtime that is typically used for that solution.</p>



<p>[00:39:54] Nathan Wrigley: You mentioned Steve, but Brian maybe can answer this as well, I don&#8217;t know. You mentioned that there are people who are endeavoring to break up the database and put it in all sorts of different parts of the world and what have you. So that&#8217;s one innovation which people are trying to achieve. I&#8217;m just curious about what the next 10 years will look like. What kind of fun, interesting projects have you guys been keeping your eye on, which the listeners may be interested in? Just to give some insight into what hosting a WordPress website might look like Well, in 2025, 2026, whatever it may be.</p>



<p>[00:40:29] Brian Perry: My kind of, it&#8217;s partially my hope, but also where I&#8217;d like to think that things are going. With all of the constant changes in the JavaScript framework landscape, I think that more and more of the things that people like about that sort of developer experience is going to find its way just more generally into the platform and into browser standards.</p>



<p>Again, like looking back in the rear view, jQuery is a good example of that, in that jQuery brought so many wonderful niceties for how you can interact with the DOM. And then over time, most of the things that jQuery can do are just in JavaScript now. So they&#8217;re part of the platform.</p>



<p>So my hope is that the things that people like about React and Vue and et cetera, start to find their way into the general platform. Web components are one potential technology that might help there. A component based approach that can be used regardless of the framework.</p>



<p>My hope is that in the next 10 years, a lot of the things that people turn to React or Vue or different frameworks for, are just a part of the platform, rather than having to find your cool JavaScript framework that was released three months ago,</p>



<p>[00:41:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Nice. Thank you, Brian. Steve, anything to add to that?</p>



<p>[00:41:51] Steve Persch: I&#8217;ll give a quick tech answer, then a longer, uh, philosophical sort of answer. So the quick tech answer is web assembly. I&#8217;ll be quick because I can&#8217;t speak to many of the details of web assembly, maybe Brian can? I see it as a layer that can abstract away many of the differences between the different computer languages that we&#8217;re all writing in. PHP, JavaScript, TypeScript, Rust. If web assembly is a common target that can be used to leverage software. You write in these different modes. Run it in the same place, be it at the edge, or I saw a demo recently that I think involved web assembly getting WordPress to fully run in your browser, like the WordPress running in web assembly in your browser. Okay, that, that looks cool.</p>
