Remember that Woo Builder Meetup? Well after 12 months of dormancy, I have some thoughts and questions.

Gutenberg 13.6 was released this week with an expansion of full-site editing features and 26 bug fixes.

One of the highlights includes the addition of the pattern modal for users when they create new content within a custom post type. WordPress 6.0 introduced the ability to display patterns in a modal when a user creates a new page. The idea is to give them an optional jump start instead of just a blank page. In Gutenberg 13.6, this feature has been expanded to include custom post types, which developers can enable selectively.

The other headline feature for this release is the expansion of template types in the Site Editor. Users can now create a template for all of the posts of a specific post type. This is a major enhancement for WordPress’ underlying CMS features, as it allows more customization than ever before without having to edit any code or know how to create custom templates. Version 13.6 also introduces the ability to create a template for a specific post.

Gutenberg contributors have a roadmap for how they want to expand the available template types in the future beyond this update. It includes individual author templates, post type archives, and general/custom templates.

Other improvements include new keyboard shortcuts for Strikethrough and Inline Code, an updated post scheduler UI that says “Today” and “Tomorrow” when applicable, and template selection UI updated to be a popover.

The capabilities of theme.json have been expanded to include global control of button styles to change their appearance sitewide. Third party blocks with buttons that use the correct markup can also have their buttons included in sitewide style changes.

Captions can also be controlled using theme.json as of Gutenberg 13.6. Future releases will add a UI so that users can easily manage caption styles sitewide.

For a more detailed breakdown of all the enhancements and bug fixes in 13.6, view the release post or check out the full changelog on GitHub.

The Gutenberg Times will be hosting representatives from the Pew Research Center in its Live Q&A session on July 22, 2022, with co-hosts Birgit Pauli-Haack and Anne McCarthy. After an eight-month hiatus, the show will return with guests who are doing some exciting things with Gutenberg out in the wild.

The Pew Research Center is a non-profit organization that conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, content analysis, and other data-driven social science research. Producers and designers publish polls, charts, and findings through the organization’s website. Its unique use of custom and core blocks empowers them to create and publish interactive formats with minimal involvement from developers.

Michael Piccorossi, Director of Digital Strategy at the Pew Research Center, will be a featured guest along with his colleague Seth Rubenstein, who leads development.

In May, Rubenstein tweeted a thread demonstrating how the Pew Research Center is using Gutenberg. The homepage, which has a magazine style layout, along with the topic pages, were all built with the block editor. He also gave a quick editor demo of an updated block version of the organization’s Political Typology Quiz, which Rubenstein said is their most complex digital product.

“Before, if a producer wanted to make a design change on a quiz well that required a dev’s time,” Rubenstein said. “Now they can make all those choices (with input from the design team) themselves. This frees us up to build even more and gives us more time to maintain/improve functionality.”

The Pew Research Center’s development team does not plan to open source all of its block library but will be open sourcing their new Gutenberg-powered chart builder plugin (demonstrated below).

“For all its naysayers Gutenberg is a game changer for digital news apps,” Rubenstein said. “It’s a force multiplier for your team. We’ve spent the last three years going ‘all in’ on block development.

“This may seem like overkill, but it forced us into a block first approach that means by end of this fall we’ll be ready to go all in on full site editing, which just means we can do more with fewer people and more consistently and better than before.”

The Gutenberg Times Q&A session will cover how the Pew Reach Center streamlines its publishing process through a mix of core and custom blocks, and how they create powerful charts and quizzes. It will be hosted on Zoom at 11:00 AM in Eastern Time (US and Canada) and is free to attend with registration. Attendees will have the opportunity to ask their own questions after the guests demo some of their workflows and blocks in the backend.

In the last recorded episode via WordCamp Europe, Carl and Bōggie end the series with a fun conversation.

WordPress theme author Anders Norén has remade his popular Davis theme to support full-site editing. The new theme, Davis Blocks, is sporting the same clean design as its predecessor, and can be used as a starter theme or a lightweight blog theme.

Norén said he built Davis Blocks to be as small as possible, while retaining the same appearance as the original theme. The updated theme has no JavaScript and weighs just 248K, most of which is the PT Serif font files and the theme screenshot. It stands in stark contrast to Norén’s first block theme, Tove, which was loaded with 52K custom CSS.

“The promise of block themes is that eventually, themes won’t need to include any custom CSS at all,” Norén said. “A basic theme, without any custom block styles, should be able to get by just by using theme.json. Core is not there just yet – there are a couple of blocking issues, like alignment styles – but it’s getting pretty close.”

Norén’s introductory post for the theme covers many of the current challenges block theme authors face, such as structural issues like giving alignments to an outer margin on smaller displays, the necessity for overwriting some core styles, the inability to style buttons in the file and search blocks with theme.json settings, and more. He is eager to remove more of the CSS included in Davis Blocks as these issues are resolved.

Although Norén identifies Davis Blocks as a classic blogging theme with an emphasis on typography and long-form articles, it can be transformed into any kind of theme thanks to its support for full-site editing features. Users can easily customize the header and other templates to add or remove blocks and change the color scheme to suit their own needs.

Davis Blocks is packaged with six template files (404, Archive, Index, Page, Search and Single) and three template parts (Header, Footer, and Loop). Although there has been a lot of buzz around how indispensable patterns have become, Norén opted to forego including any in this theme.

“With the progress being made on the WordPress.org pattern directory, bundling block patterns in the theme folder felt like a step in the wrong direction,” he said. More than 800 patterns are now available in the directory, so it will be interesting to if other block theme authors go in a similar direction or insist on including their own custom patterns.

Davis Blocks is available for free from the WordPress Themes Directory and can also be installed via the admin Add New themes menu. The addition of Davis Blocks brings the directory’s count of block themes to 91.

With WordPress 6.1 already in the works, a lot of updates happened during June. Here’s a summary to catch up on the ones you may have missed.

WordPress 6.1 is Slated for Release on October 25, 2022

Planning for WordPress 6.1 kicked off a few weeks ago with a proposed schedule and a call for contributors to the release team. This will be the third major release in 2022 and will include up to Gutenberg 14.1 for a total of 11 Gutenberg releases.

Matías Ventura published the preliminary roadmap for version 6.1, which is expected to refine the full site editing experience introduced in the last two major releases. Stay tuned for a companion post with more details on what’s to come.

New in Gutenberg: Versions 13.4 and 13.5

There are two new versions of Gutenberg since last month’s edition of the Month in WordPress:

Team Updates: Gutenberg Page Redesign, Meetup Venue Support Funds, and More

Feedback/Testing Requests

WordCamp Asia 2023 is Calling for Sponsors

Have a story that we could include in the next issue of The Month in WordPress? Let us know by filling out this form.

David is the Web3 Lead at Automattic, which is a new role. He’s trying to understand what Web3 is and how it’s going to alter the course of the internet in the future.

You might have heard of Web3 and be confused about what it is exactly. DAOs, NFTs, smart contracts, Layer 2s and DeFi. These are all terms associated with Web3 but they’re not necessarily well understood. It’s complex. These technologies go about things in new and innovative ways. So what does it all mean?

David’s on the podcast today to help us understand the whole concept of Web3 and how it might affect the WordPress ecosystem. What it is, how it works and why it’s useful.

You’ve likely heard of examples of Web3 out there in the real world. Crypto currencies, people selling NFTs, and more. These may seem like interesting experiments, but not all that practical or useful for the majority of people. David wants to explain that it’s the underlying technology which is interesting here. A decentralised approach to gathering and storing data which is just beginning to find some practical applications.

Perhaps this technology has a future which is, as yet, unimagined. We’re just waiting for the perfect implementation to take this from an intriguing, but edge case technology, to something more widely adopted and understood.

Useful links.

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast, from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

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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 Web3, what it is and how it might work with WordPress.

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If you’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. If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, well I’m very keen to hear from you, and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head over to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox. And use the contact form there.

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So on the podcast today we have David Lockie. David is the Web3 lead at Automattic, which is a new role. He’s trying to understand what Web3 is and how it’s going to alter the course of the internet in the future. You might’ve heard of Web3 and be confused about what it is exactly. DAOs, NFTs, smart contracts, Layer2s, and DeFi. These are all terms associated with Web3. But they’re not necessarily well understood. It’s complex. These technologies go about things in new and innovative ways. So what does it all mean?

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David’s on the podcast today to help us to understand the whole concept of Web3 and how it might affect the WordPress ecosystem, what it is, how it works and why it’s useful.

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You’ve likely heard of examples of Web3 out there in the real world. Crypto currencies, people selling NFTs and more. These may seem like interesting experiments, but not all that practical or useful for the majority of people. David wants to explain that it’s the underlying technology, which is interesting here. A decentralized approach to gathering and storing data, which is just beginning to find some practical applications.

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Perhaps this technology has a future, which is, as yet, unimagined. We’re just waiting for the perfect implementation to take this from an intriguing, but edge case technology to something more widely adopted and understood.

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Typically when we record the podcast, there’s not a lot of background noise, but that’s not always the case with the conversations I recorded at WordCamp Europe. We were competing against crowds and the air conditioning. And whilst the podcast is more than listable. I hope that you understand that the vagaries of the real world we’re at play.

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If you’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. And you’ll find all of the other episodes there as well. And so without further delay, I bring you David Lockie.

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I am joined on the podcast today by David Lockie. Hello?

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[00:03:39] David Lockie: Hi Nathan how you doing?

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[00:03:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, really good. Day two of WordCamp Europe. You’re the first person that I’ve been able to actually say to, how’s the conference been going so far?

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[00:03:47] David Lockie: It’s been great. It’s been really nice just to see everyone again. I was mainly on the stall yesterday on the booth, the WooCommerce booth. I haven’t been to any talks yet. And so I can’t speak to the conference content, but just the experience of being around everyone of there being booths, of there being people like, it’s like jacking into the main line of excitement around WordPress.

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So I’m I’m loving it. A hundred percent.

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[00:04:12] Nathan Wrigley: Just give us a little bit, very briefly of your background with WordPress. Just to paint a picture of why you are here today and where the authority comes from.

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[00:04:19] David Lockie: Sure. I’ve been in the WebPress space about 15 years. I was a freelancer, and ran an agency called Pragmatic. I have been an entrepreneur in the space and I’ve been a marketer in the space as well. In terms of blockchain, crypto web three, I’ve been interested since about 2017, and over the intervening time I have become co-chair of the Beamer Blockchain Council. That’s the British Interactive Media Association.

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I advise a couple of startups in the space, and most recently I’ve been really fortunate to be able to bring those two worlds together by joining Automattic as web three lead. It means that I can keep working on the technology in the community and the ecosystem that I love, but also have a chance to work on technology that I’m excited about and believe will inevitably disrupt and join with WordPress. So it’s a real privilege to have that opportunity to kind of marry both my tech loves together.

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[00:05:15] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Now I think there’s a fairly low chance that somebody listening to this will not have heard the words web three, but I think there’s a fairly high chance that they won’t actually understand what that means, myself actually included.

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I’ve heard it. I’ve got the peripheral understanding. I’ve never bitten down into the middle of it, and probably I think I’ve got some misunderstandings that need cleaning up. So, just for a minute just tell us basically, if you can, probably without consuming the entire half hour podcast, tell us what web three is in it’s highest possible terms.

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[00:05:44] David Lockie: There are a bunch of different definitions. The one that I use is that it’s a family of decentralized technologies that allow people to coordinate in new and interesting ways. That’s a little bit more ethereal. A more practical, tangible definition would be technologies built on blockchains and related decentralized technologies. But the decentralization is at the core of everything that we talk about with web three.

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I also feel a bit funny about the kind of blockchain, crypto, web three rebrand, because actually I think there are other very significant technologies that are coming down the line and will sort of converge as web three becomes more mainstream. Things like 3d things like AI. That means that when we’re talking about web three, it’s not simply an evolution of where we are in terms of the centralization, but it’s also this sort of new immersive experiential realm in which ownership and rights and value transfer and transactions all become part of a very rich tapestry that will feel like a new evolution.

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For me, before the kind of blockchain web three rebrand, I used to talk about web three as the day when people stopped walking down the road, looking at their phones because they’re wearing glasses and it’s more ambient and immersive. So even to myself, I have a few different concepts of what it means, but decentralization is the key when people usually talk about web three.

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[00:07:00] Nathan Wrigley: I see web three written in two different ways and I don’t know if it’s different. So I see web three as in W E B, no space 3. And I see web 3.0. Is there any separation there or are they exactly the same?

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[00:07:13] David Lockie: I

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think it’s just exactly the same I’m old enough to remember when web two was the excitement um and being in O’Reilly conferences in Berlin, and it was web two dot, that was like the hotness. And of course there was never like a web 2.1 or

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web 2.5 And so I think web 3.0 is similarly redundant.

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[00:07:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it seems to me that inside of the web three space is a bunch of acronyms and a bunch of different technologies. So I’ve written down a couple here and none of them, I particularly understand.

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So I’ve got DAOs, got NFTs, I’ve got contracts, I’ve got something which was completely new to me, Layer 2s, and DeFi. Are these if you like sub domains of web three, are these just component parts that sit inside of it, or are they completely separate autonomous pieces?

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[00:07:59] David Lockie: I think that’s a really good observation. And I guess the genesis of that is that the blockchain technology, which supports all of the rest of web three has a bunch of new terms and new concepts in it of itself. A blockchain is a new concept. A Merkel tree is a cryptographic term that unless you’re a researcher you wouldn’t know about.

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The idea of cryptocurrencies and tokens and cryptography, some of this stuff, it was just not in the everyday parlance, and the things which have evolved from that, decentralized autonomous organizations, decentralized finance, non fungible tokens, smart contracts, layer zeros, ones, twos, scaling solutions, bridges, automated market makers. All of these things, they’re not just new words, they’re new concepts.

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And I think that’s part of what people struggle with when they’re getting their head round web three, is that it’s very fundamentally different. The whole nature of it, the decentralized nature of it means that things change in a very profound way. And so there is like a massive vocabulary to get your head around and that can feel quite daunting, quite inaccesible.

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And obviously you’ve got like the label for things, but then understanding what actually sits behind DeFi like, how is it different from traditional finance? How does it work to have a financial system that is entirely controlled by open source software? These are just brand new things. And so all of that terminology and all of those concepts are just things that you have to get your head around.

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And I think people in this space often talk about this sort of rabbit hole where people can dance around on the surface and see the results of some of this stuff. Pictures of monkeys being worth millions of dollars, or like scams taking hundreds of millions of dollars by a smart contract floor. And so they form their judgments about this stuff, but actually when you find something that’s of interest and you follow that thread, you go down and the hole is long and varied and complex and ever changing. And the conversations that you have with people that have gone down that rabbit hole and haven’t, they just feel utterly different.

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You have a different, like a different, basis for the conversation. And I guess that’s one of the things which people find challenging about the space as well like, people already naturally form cliques and geek out and, in group out group stuff. And I think. If you have a negative perception, for whatever reason of what’s happening in this space, then it’s very easy to feel excluded.

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And that it’s just all this nonsense going on and you don’t wanna engage with it because it’s just too much. Like it’s a lot. It’s really a lot.

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[00:10:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I think that’s a part of the puzzle for me. When web two came along and social happened, you could completely get it. And it took a while for the harm of all of that to become obvious. What I’m seeing in the press at the minute is the inevitable backlash. I’m seeing people’s wallets being emptied and certain blockchains becoming disrupted and all sorts of negative press.

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Six months ago I felt there was a tidal wave in the opposite direction. It was just positivity, just Bitcoin, crypto, NFT. This is all brilliant. It feels to me at the moment as if we’re riding a wave of, hang on a minute, there’s danger here if you’re not careful, if you’re not thoughtful, if you don’t understand what you’re doing. And so that I suppose is a concern that maybe you’re gonna have to be confronting in your role in the near term.

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[00:11:14] David Lockie: It’s definitely something that’s on my mind. But this is far from the first cycle in crypto as well. And I guess having lived through the previous cycle, the 2017, 2018 and then right through to 2019 where everything started lifting up again. There were very clear patterns and they follow typical economic cycles as well.

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You get the positivity and then the overexuberance and then the sort of speculation, like the top. And then, there’s some bad news and then suddenly everyone starts getting fearful and the fear is a positive feedback loop. And so the price dumps and everyone gets scared and bored and runs away.

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But all that is like the bottom of that cycle. And then out of that will come, like in the UK, a new use case. New people with new funds, new ideas. Projects that were worked on during the bear cycle start to come to fruition. So we saw this with the previous cycle was really around, for me, it was around Ethereum and starting to see the promise of smart contracts and NFTs and some of this sort of the web three, rather than just Bitcoin price action.

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And this time round was catalyzed by decentralized finance and then continued into NFTs. So it could be, a pretty wintery situation for a couple of years. But then new use cases, new projects will emerge and we’ll be up and at ’em. And if you average out, the actual use of this technology, it doesn’t align brilliantly well with the market action, like the price action. It’s still going up and to the right, obviously like with some ups and downs, according to how exuberant everyone is.

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I guess that’s one of the things that’s sort of interesting is that it’s a very integrative technology, in that it is economic, is technological, is also social as well. It’s the first 24, 7 global permissionless marketplace for people to do stuff, whether that is financial stuff or coordination stuff or whatever. It’s the first time that we’ve been able to do that with meaning attached to it like economic meaning.

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So we’ve been able to do that with WordPress, with open source development for decades. And that’s been insanely valuable to everyone as a result. One of the challenges with web two is that we were creating all of this value, but there were no direct internet native ways to try and capture and program that value.

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So we relied on all these secondary business models. Particularly advertising and data collection to extract or convey some of that value around what was essentially an economy, but with no native currency to exchange. And I think that’s one of the, the most profoundly interesting things that web three does is it allows us to underpin, not overlay, but underpin everything else that we do online with internet native programmable money that can serve all the different use cases that we have now and into the future.

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[00:13:55] Nathan Wrigley: Do you feel that things like blockchain, decentralized ledgers and all of that is a clever idea, but is still trying to actually find a use case, which is useful for most people? Again, we’re harking back to the weird things that happened like NFTs and so on. That just strikes me as a bizarre use case, but the decentralized block chain, the idea of a ledger which is imutable and everybody can inspect and see. It feels like that’s got a lot of uses, we just haven’t figured out what they are. Practical, useful things for most people in the same way that the web is practical and useful for most people.

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It feels to me at the minute, it’s a stretch to get, for example, my mother to have any interest in web three because the barrier’s too high. The weirdness is too much. And maybe we’re just waiting for that golden apple, somebody comes up with something. Oh, that’s remarkable. That’s brilliant. Everybody can get ahold of that. I just wonder if that epiphany hasn’t happened yet.

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[00:14:51] David Lockie: I think it’s a, an interesting question. There are definitely elements of, and it’s a bit of a kind of web three trope. Like it’s still early, there’s still lots of innovation ahead of us. Like maybe there will be that killer app that suddenly everyone goes, oh, this is why blockchain’s important in our life. This is why web three’s important in our life.

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However, if you look at a lot of internet infrastructure and web infrastructure, like most people don’t understand the importance of any technology, really. They just jab at buttons on their phone and things happen as a result. But that doesn’t mean that the underlying technology isn’t important. People just wanna write a WordPress post.

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They don’t care about this pull request or, whether it’s Gutenberg or classic editor. They just want to do a job. So I think there’s an element to which a lot of people will never need to know or need to care about web three. We may well see some like breakthrough use cases.

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Personally, I do think NFTs and digital collectibles are gonna be one of those breakthroughs. We’ve seen it this cycle. Instagram is teasing at an upcoming release about allowing people to display and eventually to buy and sell collectibles on Instagram. If that rolls out to 3 billion people, that’s mass adoption.

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They’ve got a patent in for meta pay, which is their own payments, digital wallet and digital currency exchange infrastructure. But even then, like people might not know that is all part of blockchain. They might not understand the technology that…

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[00:16:12] Nathan Wrigley: It’ll still be a button on a screen.

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[00:16:14] David Lockie: Still be a button on a screen that they can use to buy a thing from the brand or the creator that they love and want to support or the clothes that they wanna wear. But I also think that there’s another aspect to it, which is that the world is not without its challenges right now. And things which don’t seem important now might suddenly become incredibly important. And we can always look at the edges to see where the innovation and the use cases are.

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So for example crypto has a very valid use case now of international remittence. So if you are a migrant worker, you’re working another country, we need to send money around the world. You can do that more safely and cheaply using crypto. And that’s what a large proportion of non trading or investing use is around. The ability for migrant workers to send their funds directly to their family, with the minimum fees involved.

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When we look at international businesses who have Ukrainian and Russian workers and still need to pay salary, crypto provides an option where there was not one before. And I think in this world that we are living in where potentially we’re looking at splinternets like you know the great fire wall of China. The Russian internet, if things continue the way they’re going having means for value transfer and coordination that is free from the constraints of nation states, might suddenly become super important to everyone. There’s also that element that I think is interesting and worthwhile. Even if the majority of people never understand it.

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[00:17:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah the whole decentralized thing, let me rewind. It feels like 25 years ago, proprietary software came on the market and you bought it and then free open source software also in parallel was going on. And I think we’re at the point where we can tentatively say that free open source software won that ultimately that’s what I think anyway, if you look at certain segments. So we now have proprietary centralized things and you are advocating for decentralized things.

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Is it to say that the centralized thing is, it’s something that we no longer desire? So a good example would be my bank. I wish my bank to have my money and I wish my bank to take care of my money. So that in the event that something happens then I’ve got some kind of backup.

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I know that institution full of those people is there to protect me. In the case of decentralized, I worry that an accidental theft of a phone might be enough to wipe out my life saving. And I wonder if this is a, a real difficult bridge that is never gonna get crossed. So in other words, what makes decentralized so much more superior than centralized? Maybe it doesn’t, maybe there’s a place for both forever.

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[00:18:56] David Lockie: Yeah. I think that latter is exactly where I come in. One beautiful concept that came out of web three is this idea of complimentary opposite. So whilst I’m advocating for people to learn and find out about decentralization and why it can be important and valuable. I’m definitely not saying like centralized stuff is bad.

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And actually when we look at a few examples of success, we see that anyway. Automattic, WordPress.com also WordPress.org. Arguably neither would be as successful without the other, but like combined, it means that where a centralized entity can be most impactful like, things can go down that route. Where there are opportunities to do stuff that a centralized organization simply can’t do the .org ecosystem can do it, it can innovate at the edges.

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So that’s, I think a very resonant example from the world we know. In crypto, there are some other examples as well. For example, there’s a crypto exchange called Binance. It’s a centralized, regulated KYC, AML, OFAC entity. You know it’s a financial organization and company that pays its taxes et cetera, but it also has a decentralized protocol called BSC Smart Chain which is plausibly decentralized and allows it to, allows innovation to happen around Binance whilst not being directly connected to it.

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And I think even sort of more traditional businesses like you know arguably what Elon has done with Tesla is to use the power of social media to build this decentralized community of fans around the business. And so one of the tools he uses to achieve his corporate regulated goals is this recruitment of, these people aren’t employee shareholders not necessarily even customers, but they’re fans and they’re motivated towards the same goals for whatever reason. And so it’s that combination that I think allows for, it just creates a wider, more fertile space for innovation to happen.

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[00:20:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It’s more of a more of a marriage and less of a war. Maybe both will coexist and we’ll figure out which bits work best over here and which bits work best over there as time goes on.

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[00:21:03] David Lockie: I also yeah, a hundred percent. I also think it’s about having checks and balances. Like for me before Bitcoin came along, there was really no, no non-destructive way to protest against the increasing centralization of power. There was nothing to prevent central banks doing whatever they wanted and, for governments to continue to exert pressure. Arguably with the genesis of Bitcoin and permissionless, public, decentralized protocols that can’t be stopped. If centralization goes too far, then people will flee to alternative currencies that are outside of government control.

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That’s really just my personal take on it. And it’s not one that everyone’s comfortable with, but I do think there’s a sort of, I think it’s healthy for the, there to be a balancing factor whenever we’ve got like an axis that’s out of control, it’s helpful to balance that out.

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[00:21:52] Nathan Wrigley: Are states able to disable their citizens from accessing this I’m thinking of China. Is it the case that if you were a citizen of China, you would be enabled to use the very things that you are describing or have they legislated against?

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[00:22:09] David Lockie: It’s an arms race, isn’t it? They could block the protocol. But it’d be very difficult and there would be innovation around it. And the fact that they haven’t is also kind of interesting.

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[00:22:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. This isn’t going away. People are very excited about it. And Automattic have jumped on the bandwagon. Here you are. This is now job. Tell us what the remit of that is in Automattic. Now maybe there’s a direct connection with WordPress, wordpress.org, wordpress.com. I don’t know, but just outline what you’ve been tasked to well either work on already or figure out what you’re going to work on.

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[00:22:39] David Lockie: Sure. And I should mention at this point the conversation that we are having today represents my personal views. Like I’m still working on the work that I’m doing within Automattic, and Automattic’s policy and position on stuff may well, not entirely align with mine. When I approached Automattic about the role, my thesis was that if WordPress and web three will forever remain separate we should understand why that is the case more deeply than just oh, we don’t like it, it’s a scam. It’s whatever.

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There were potential touchpoints for the creators that use our platform, the merchants that sell on our platform, the technologies that we integrate, decentralized storage, for example. There are potentially competitors that are gonna emerge in the space.

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I think there were just so many potential points of disruption for the WordPress community and ecosystem that I love, that I felt I could add some value to the whole ecosystem by increasing awareness, increasing understanding, and trying to bring some more nuance and balance to the dialogue that happens.

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So it could well be that Automattic does nothing at all with web three, but at least we’ll understand in a sophisticated way why that’s the case, why we’ve made those decisions. My guess is that isn’t going to happen. In my talk later today, I’m gonna talk about a couple of use cases that I feel are sort of inevitable.

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One is around crypto payments. So if we have the four freedoms of GPL, then arguably web three gives us the freedom to transact, the freedom to trade, and that’s a very ancient historical human trait, to trade to transact. Part of my argument is that’s what changed us from being hunting, gathering, tribal to societies and civilization, is the ability to trade and transact at increasing scales and over increasing timelines.

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So allowing people to not only publish, and sell online, but to transact freely as well, just feels like an obvious thing to do. Why would we not let merchants who don’t enjoy the financial stability of the US or the UK or whatever, to be able to accept a currency that they wanna accept? It seems like a, like I don’t see very many valid reasons not to let that happen.

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As long as we’re clear about the importance for merchants to do their own research to understand their own risks and to proceed with caution, essentially. To understand what they’re doing. And that’s part of my role as well, is to help make sure if we do stuff, then we are trying to educate and inform and raise awareness at the same time.

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The other one, I think, seems really interesting is NFTs. You know we’ve seen the weekly active wallet count go from pretty much zero a year ago to like a quarter of a million active wallets every week trading NFTs right now. They are an incredible way for creators to assert their rights and to monetize their content.

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And the most important people in the WordPress ecosystem for me, are the creators that use it. The people who have sites that run WordPress, the merchants who sell through WordPress and WooCommerce. Without them there are no agencies because nobody wants the sites. There’s no Automattic to provide services out to that ecosystem.

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So it’s about serving our users. And if creators of all types, writers, photographers, podcasters, musicians, videographers can generate a better fairer, a more durable living by using NFTs and royalties and the rights that it protects than by posting stuff to YouTube and getting 50% of the fees they make from advertising.

\n\n\n\n

For example, then I think that’s something that the WordPress community is, it’s innately supportive of because we support the open web. We support creators. Like we want to give people the freedom to publish and to sell online. And this for me is just an extension of that. People are most free to publish and sell online when they can do that with financial resilience and the ability to protect their income.

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[00:26:42] Nathan Wrigley: One of the pieces that I would imagine most people using WordPress are using is just the published button. They’re not producing videos. They’re not writing music or creating NFTs. They’re literally putting out written content and maybe there’s some images in there, what have you. And I think a curious, maybe underexplored, maybe it’ll happen, I don’t know, possibly it has, the idea of being able to prove definitively, that thing is mine. And I wrote it on that date and I can prove it forever. And I think that might be a curious, there’s no real financial benefit to that, but it’s a nice, almost legal.

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[00:27:13] David Lockie: There’s a company, WordProof who do exactly this, right. And there are a couple of really interesting use cases there. To speak to the sort of monetization bit, a lot of money is made through search engine ranking. And content theft and plagiarism, like are all problems for publishers, real problems. So if we can find a way to help search engines, parse who definitively created this bit of content, then that will protect the original content creators to some extent. There’s a lot of complexity with that.

\n\n\n\n

Another one is around trust. So if you’re a merchant and you’ve got like a shipping policy, a refund policy, general terms, and you timestamp them and you transparently show that something has changed and when it changed, then that builds trust with your consumer.

\n\n\n\n

As a consumer, I trust that this store isn’t gonna change its refund policy and leave me high and dry if like the refund period has changed since I bought it, how can I prove that definitively? So there are some direct monetization opportunities, but also some indirect ones as well.

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[00:28:12] Nathan Wrigley: Unfortunately we’re running out of time. So I’m just gonna ask one final question. If people are interested to find out more generically or it might be via you, what would be one or two of the quickest places to swot up on this topic?

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[00:28:24] David Lockie: So there’s a web three educational community called Kernel that I would recommend to anyone. It’s a very holistic and quite philosophical look at this technology. And if I can remember the link correctly, it’s bit.ly, so B I T dot L Y forward slash all caps, W P K B 7. So that’s whiskey papa kilo bravo seven.

\n\n\n\n

There’s also a bunch of learn to earn platforms out there. A good one to start with is rabbit hole, dot gg. rabbithole.gg. And there you can earn small amounts of crypto for learning to use a digital wallet or a decentralized exchange, or any of these other decentralized applications. So that’s a good, more guided, more practical way to start experiencing these technologies. And I think that experiencing it, whether you’re buying like $10 of crypto, whether you are signing up to a web three platform, actually just using this stuff is the best way to learn.

\n\n\n\n

It’s very immersive and there’s a lot to get your head around. Just reading stuff. You’ll be reading for years and you might still not get it.

\n\n\n\n

[00:29:31] Nathan Wrigley: David Lockie. Thanks for chatting to us today.

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[00:29:33] David Lockie: Thanks for your time, Nathan.

Here is a real life experience of the thought process for pricing a WooCommerce extension for your WordPress plugin.

Envato, the Australia-based digital assets company, announced it is shutting down Envato Studio, its community freelance platform, and Twenty20, a stock photo website. The company continues to tighten its belt and focus on newer products after it laid off 100 of its 700 employees, citing global conflicts and inflation.

“We were spread too thin across all of these products we’d established,” Envato CEO Hichame Assi told told The Australian Financial Review.

“They’re all creative products, but some are older with legacy platforms, whereas some are newer and going really well. We wanted to sharpen focus on our future products that are going really well.”

The company’s most recent update indicated Envato is shifting to focus on Envato Market, Envato Elements, and Placeit, a tool for creating branding and marketing assets, while phasing out other products. This week the Envato community found out that these legacy platforms include Envato Studio and Twenty20.

Many Envato Studio service providers, who have completed more than 230,000 jobs since it launched in 2014, were surprised to learn that Envato is giving them under two months notice before it shutters the service on August 21. Providers have built their profiles with positive reviews for their work on creative projects – everything from logo design to WordPress customization.

“It is not just bad news – it is a shocking news for me and to all who consider Envato Studio as a main earning source,” express customization provider WonderArt said.

“How I run my family now, it will take a long time to restart my marketplace earning again. You know how hard is to approve the item now and sales are not guaranteed. I am very much disappointed by this decision.”

Some saw the writing on the wall after Envato stopped investing in the platform and new clients and orders were dwindling. Others, for whom Envato Studio was their main source of income, are shocked and scrambling to find a new way to support themselves on short notice.

“Many of us rely on the steady income from express services to make a living, so really in my case such an abrupt and inconsiderate closure affects me greatly and hits me very hard, especially as I have two young children and a family to continue to support, plus bills that will keep coming in,” user touringxx said.

“With thousands of jobs done on my part (1733+) and 100% buyer satisfaction, I have put a lot of effort and patience into building and maintaining that reputation over the years, to now see it simply disappear as if it were worthless.”

After investing so many years building their profiles and serving clients, multiple longtime Envato Studio service providers begged for more time before closing the platform.

“This is not a good and fair decision in the middle of an economic crisis, we have spent our time here for 8-9 years and more, you should give more time before closing the platform,” one user Nofomsok said. “It’s just not fair.”

With under two months notice on the platform shutting down, many participants in the discussion said they felt the transition was too abrupt. They suggested six months to prepare for the shift, as well as creating a static, read-only version of the platform where clients can browse through service providers and send them messages through their profiles.

“It is incredible how Envato doesn’t at least comment on this matter, we are waiting to hear from them is this the treatment we deserve for so many hardworking years?” @jassdesigngroup said.

Envato eventually did respond, indicating they are listening to feedback but did not mention an extension of the timeline for shutting down the platform.

“We are in the process of creating a solution that will hopefully help with your Studio reviews,” an Envato representative commented.

These additional considerations may be too late for those who had all their eggs in one basket.

“It’s a business decision that is up to you,” hibiscustechno commented. “But this transition is passing a big message to the creative members in ThemeForest, ‘Hey guys, Today we burned all together, You authors have the time to save yourselves by selling your products using your own website rather than giving $$ commission to a platform and keep the clients with you.\'”

WordPress’ Performance team is kickstarting a proposal for developing a plugin checker tool similar to the theme check plugin, which ensures themes are meeting the latest standards and best practices.

In 2021, WordPress’ Meta team built a code scanner that detects potential security risks, such as unescaped SQL queries in plugin code, with the goal of reducing the Plugin Team’s load through automation. That particular tool wasn’t developed to encourage best practices but rather to ensure plugins entering the directory meet the bare minimum standards necessary for security.

The Performance team is proposing building a different kind of plugin that would flag any violations of the plugin development requirements and suggest best practices with errors or warnings.

“It should cover various aspects of plugin development, from basic requirements like correct usage of internationalization functions to accessibility, performance, and security best practices,” Google-sponsored contributor Felix Arntz said. He identified three main goals for the plugin:

The Performance team recommends the plugin also work from the command line (using WP-CLI) and that it go beyond static code analysis to include runtime checks that execute code.

The proposal has received mixed feedback so far. Several participants in the discussion welcome development on such a tool and would be eager to use it with their own plugins. Others are worried about the checks becoming too heavy-handed and negatively impacting the plugin ecosystem.

“Having a plugin to automate these checks sounds great,” WordPress developer Michael Nelson said. “I worry though that eventually this will mean WP plugin author devs will need to adopt WP’s code style too, which would be pretty annoying.”

WordPress developer Josh Pollock commented that he shares these concerns and is worried about how these standards may be applied towards plugins that were not created to support PHP5, use composer for dependency management and automation, and share PHP code with other frameworks.

“If this HELPS plugin developers, then fine, but if it is used as a weapon to insist on standards, then I suspect it will be a nail in WP’s coffin,” plugin developer Robin W said.

“If you want to insist on stuff that is not security critical, then the current documentation is far from useful to rookies.

“Now if the tool rewrote the code to standard, so the dev got a ‘this is a better version’ then I would be on board.

“But one that just says ‘you are not escaping your code correctly’ and then makes the plugin dev try and find what and where it is wrong will just drive less innovation.”

The Performance team is requesting feedback from the community, particularly plugin developers, plugin reviewers, and the meta team. If they are able to reach a consensus, Arntz said the next step is to design the infrastructure for the plugin checker in a GitHub repository.

“The performance team would be excited to take the lead on this project, but it is vital that additional contributors from other teams help with its development, especially when it comes to defining and implementing the different checks,” Arntz said.

“This is certainly an ambitious project, and it is not the first time that a plugin checker has come up. It also needs to be clarified that it will likely take a few months at least to get to a first version. However, we are optimistic that with a solid foundation and collaboration from the start, we can create a tool that will meet the requirements for reliable automated plugin checks.”

David and Robert have a lively discussion around payments, hosting and WooCommerce.

Some great Block themes resources are now available. And if you haven’t yet, consider joining the Full-Site-Editing Outreach program channel on WordPress Slack. Anne McCarthy always invites members to new conversations with other theme developers as well as Gutenberg developers. You also will be the first to know about new initiatives for User testing.

82 is the number of the week! In 82 minutes all tickets for WordCamp US were sold. If you didn’t get one, don’t despair yet: I have the feeling some people bught tickets with a just-in-case mind, like Brian Gardner notes on Twitter. Bookmark the tickets page to check back regurlarily. You can also subscribe to their notification service.

Speaking of FOMO (fear of missing out), the WordPress Europe team is uploading recordings from talks, workshops and interviews to WordPress.tv. Below, you’ll find the list of talks releated to Blocks and Gutenberg.

PS: Monday July 4 at 9 am EDT / 13:00 UTC, I will again on the livestream: This week in WordPress #215 with host Nathan Wrigley. The other guests will be Remkus de Vries, and Mark Westguard.

A Block-First Approach at Pew Research Center with lead developer Seth Rubenstein, head of digital strategy, Michael Piccorossi and co-host Anne McCarthy on July 22, at 11am EDT / 15:00 UTC

Content Creation with Block editor and #nocode Site building.

The WordPress Block News! This weeks video, Jamie Marsland introduces you to Block Themes, Block Generators, and Block Widgets. Marsland shows of Tabor’s Wei Theme, the legacy widget plugin and the create block theme plugin.

Recently, Justin Tadlock spent time in the support forums and learn that not being able to use 3rd party widgets in Theme templates was a real pain point. Not anymore, as he just released a plugin in the repository, that allows you to use any classic widget in the Site editor and add it to your template, or headers or footers. I am also thrilled that he blogged about it here on the Gutenberg Times. Using Classic Widgets with Blocked-Based Themes: Introducing the Legacy Widget Block Plugin

WordCamp Europe Talks on WordPressTV

Over the last couple of week, organizer of WordCamp Europe uploaded the video from the talks to WordPress.tv. Here are the block related, I found so far.

Sean Blakeley: The block pattern revolution – You will find out how Blocks Patterns have revolutionized the approach to WordPress site design and you’ll see some recent experiments and learn more about tools.

Greg Ziolkowski: Level Up Block Building Skills – Ziolkowski wrote in his description: “This year we witnessed the most groundbreaking WordPress release ever. It’s finally possible to create themes entirely composed of blocks. Users can use a single functionality to change every aspect of the website. I will present a wide range of ways to enrich the block editing experience with custom blocks. From no-code solutions practical for everyone to advanced development techniques that help programmers submit a new plugin to the Block Directory.”

“Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2022”
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. The index 2020 is here

Building Themes for FSE

Ben Dwyer, from the WordPress themes team, wrote more about the new Create Block Theme plugin, I mentioned a couple weeks ago. In his post, Create Block Theme, you learn who should use the plugin, how you can use it and how yo can contribute to it.

Beatriz Fiahlo, from the WordPress Design team and designer of the WordPress News theme, just posted about the Open Sourcing Theme Designs initiative. “As of July 1st, a number of themes authored by WordPress core and other theme developers have been added to the WordPress Figma. Users can now explore the designs for popular themes such as Stewart, Archeo or Pendant and add their own theme designs that have been submitted to the WordPress repository.” The WordPress Figma space makes it easy for all to view and duplicate files. Learn more about WordPress Figma and how to access it.

There are 87 FSE themes available in the directory. The newest theme is called The Evolution by Matheus Misumoto, a front-end developer from Santos,Brazil. This is his first ever Theme in the repository. Misomoto described this theme as “a minimalistic multi-purpose block theme. From single page website to complex navigations, it’s a great theme to publish stories, tutorials, documentations, etc”.

Anne McCarthy published a summary of this week’s Hallway Hangout: Discussion on Full Site Editing visions and plans (30 June) where “a few community members from the Full Site Editing Outreach program joined a call to talk about various short and very long term thoughts around future full site editing plans.”

Saxon Fletcher posted on GitHub The great unification and found ” It’s time we look at simplifying our mental models and establishing a stronger foundation for these concepts to thrive on.” In a series of videos and text, he lays out midterm plans and goals. It’s an interesting discussion between Fletcher and Matias Ventura. It’s also quite long. Something to read on a quiet Sunday afternoon, with a big glass off your favorite adult beverage.

Dave Smith published a video to walk theme developers through the newest features: Setting Hover & Focus States in Theme JSON and Global Styles! “I demo the recent advancements in the Gutenberg Plugin that allow Theme developers to define interactivity states (aka “psuedo classes”) from theme.json. I also cover work underway to allow users to set these states in the Global Styles UI.” Smith wrote. He also shared the PRs that have been merged and are now available via the Gutenberg Nightly or

Developing with Blocks

While we wait for Daisy Olsen‘s workshop at WordCamp Europe to go online, WordCamp Greece just released the recording of her presentation on Extending the WordPress Block Editor. The description states: “Learn three ways to do more with existing core blocks using block styles, block variations, and block patterns. Find out how and when to use each. Build real-world examples of how you can incorporate these powerful tools in your WordPress projects.

Munir Kamal is a block builder since 2017, creator of EditorPlus and maintainer of the EditorKit plugins and prolific educator in all things Gutenberg. He just published his in-depth developer tutorial on How to create a Gutenberg background shape generate. You will learn how create a background shape generator for Gutenberg, that specifically works on the core Gutenberg Cover block.

WordPress Events

October 10 – 14, 2022
WooSesh is a ‘virtual conference for WooCommerce store builders that will help grow your business.’ Event host, Brain Richards, is currently looking for speakers for pre-recorded 25-minutes sessions. Apply to speak.

Social Learning Spaces

Meetups

Featured Image: Comilla, Bangladesh by Tanvir Rahman Hridoy from the WordPress Photo Directory

The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), a non-profit that provides infrastructure support for free and open source software projects, is urging developers to stop using GitHub and move their projects to other platforms. The organization has historically had a number of public grievances with GitHub, which it outlines on its Give Up On GitHub site. GitHub’s public launch of Copilot last week was the final straw for SFC.

“We are ending all our own uses of GitHub, and announcing a long-term plan to assist FOSS projects to migrate away from GitHub,” SFC Policy Fellow Bradley M. Kuhn said. “While we will not mandate our existing member projects to move at this time, we will no longer accept new member projects that do not have a long-term plan to migrate away from GitHub.”

The SFC’s member projects include BusyBox, Git, Homebrew, OpenWrt, Buildbot, Houdini, and phpMyAdmin, to name a few. The organization is financially supported by Google, Mozilla, and Redhat, among others.

Kuhn said the SFC has been actively communicating with Microsoft and GitHub for a year about concerns regarding Copilot. He claims GitHub ignored invitations to discussions on the moral implications of AI-assisted software, and neglected to answer the SFC’s questions.

“Launching a for-profit product that disrespects the FOSS community in the way Copilot does simply makes the weight of GitHub’s bad behavior too much to bear,” Kuhn said.

The SFC contends that Microsoft and GitHub are exploiting FOSS for profit and that its behavior, relative to its peers (Amazon, Atlassian, and GitLab), is markedly worse when it comes to supporting FOSS.

“GitHub also has a record of ignoring, dismissing and/or belittling community complaints on so many issues, that we must urge all FOSS developers to leave GitHub as soon as they can,” Kuhn said.

“While Microsoft’s GitHub was the first mover in this area, by way of comparison, early reports suggest that Amazon’s new CodeWhisperer system (also launched last week) seeks to provide proper attribution and licensing information for code suggestions,” Kuhn said.

So far SFC’s call for action has received a tepid response. Although Copilot remains a controversial tool to many, its use of open source code is perceived differently by those who have embraced it as a utility.

“It’s been really useful in beta when I had to make some config files in Ruby, which I rarely use and often forget,” software engineer Joe Mattiello said. “FOSS is give and take. The point of open-source is to be open. Though any projects that use non-commercial licenses shouldn’t be included if it’s a paid project.”

Another prevailing opinion is that GitHub didn’t misuse open source software in training its AI on OSS projects but rather allowed AI to read the source code and learn from it. In this context, the SFC’s fervent crusade against GitHub for using shared code appears more absurd.

For the time being, it appears the SFC is content to continue research with the help of its committee, but part of the organization’s work is to assist member projects in enforcing the terms of FLOSS licenses, including through litigation. Its heavy focus on copyleft compliance, including enforcement of the GPL, may come to bear on Copilot in the future, as the SFC’s committee learns more about the copyleft implications of AI-assisted programming.

One year ago, WordPress 5.8 introduced support for WebP, allowing users to upload and use WebP images in their content. In March 2022, the Performance Team moved to expand core support for the image format by proposing WordPress enable WebP by default. This would include generating WebP images for new JPEG uploads and using WebP images for website content. In April the controversial proposal was put on hold after significant critical feedback.

After months of research, the team has reassessed its approach and summarized its findings. The concern about WebP compatibility doesn’t seem warranted, as research shows more than 97% of web browsers are compatible, as are more than 97% of email clients.

Mobile apps have strong compatibility with iOS 14+ supporting WebP (older versions will be served JPEGs) and Android supporting WebP natively from Android 4.0. The team found all the top RSS readers support WebP. The only outlier in compatibility is Open Graph consumers, which have mixed support.

One of the chief concerns from prior feedback was that the proposal has the potential to double the amount of disk space used for images, as it would generate WebP thumbnails in addition to the JPEG sub sizes. Performance team contributor Adam Silverstein shared the team’s findings after surveying hosting companies:

There may be a few assumptions baked into the statement that “the number of stored files is generally not an issue for most hosts/sites.” Responses to the team’s survey indicated that 58% of users would be unaffected by a doubling of their storage requirements. Only 17 hosts were surveyed and the names of the companies were not included in the data. Even with an estimated 14% of sites at risk of being near capacity, this has the potential to impact millions of WordPress sites.

The Performance team is proposing a few notable changes to address concerns, including providing a JavaScript snippet that detects browsers that lack WebP support and loads JPEGs instead. Additional WebP by default revisions include the following:

The proposal for WebP by default will only affect new images uploaded after its inclusion in core. It would not automatically generate WebP images for existing uploads. Users who want to convert past uploads would need to use WP-CLI or a plugin like Regenerate Thumbnails.

Revisions to the proposal have so far received mixed feedback. Some are strongly in favor of the new approach and others encouraged the team to consider some of the practical implications for users who may be impacted.

“One can’t simply say it’s OK because ‘the vast majority of sites (> 86%) would be unaffected,\'” WordPress developer Jon Brown said. “First, 14% is terms of WordPress is a lot. We somehow need to keep supporting the 2.8% of sites still running PHP 5.6, but 14% isn’t significant?

“One needs to consider here not just IF, but HOW this 14% of sites will be affected, and not just today, but in the future as well. Will sites just have to smoothly upgrade storage, or will they run out of disk space and crash? Or backups suddenly start failing?”

Multiple participants in the comments suggested WordPress look at adopting the more modern AVIF format, which has better quality and compression when compared to WebP.

“Since this initiative is essentially a progressive enhancement, wouldn’t it make more sense to support next-gen formats like AVIF instead while gracefully falling back?” JavaScript developer Kevin Batdorf said. “Then browsers will fall into place as they add support over time.

“Moving to WebP support feels like when WordPress added the REST API while everyone was starting to shift to GraphQL. REST is great, as is WebP, but it’s current gen tech and will feel stale fast.”

Performance team contributor Bethany Chobanian Lang said AVIF is on their radar, but its browser support is still lacking at less than 70% of the web.

The conversation continues in the comments of the update and Silverstein also encouraged participation on the Trac ticket for the revised approach. Performance team contributors aim to merge this change early in the 6.1 release cycle to get more testing.

Awhile back I made the decision to not write anymore tutorials. Now I have taken that a step further and deleted all past tutorials.

Two weeks ago, WordPress theme author Rich Tabor tweeted, “Even with my theme developer hat on, I’m finding it easier and easier to create block themes ~ within ~ WordPress. I’m positive one day (soon) this will be the norm.”

It looks like that day has arrived sooner than expected, as Automattic has had a team working on this capability for awhile. Today, a group of eight full-time sponsored Themes Team contributors released a plugin called Create Block Theme that can create standalone block themes and child themes inside the WordPress admin.

The idea is that users can design their own themes using full-site editing features and then export their finished creation as a theme that can be installed on any other WordPress site. Ben Dwyer shared a video called Designing a theme in the WordPress Editor where designer Beatriz Fialho demonstrated the possibilities. She created a unique new theme using full-site editing features in just a couple of hours.

The plugin offers a variety of exports for different use cases. Users can export their work in the following ways:

All of these export options are available under Appearance >> Create Block Theme.

“This plugin is aimed at theme builders – both designers and developers,” Dwyer said in the announcement. “It is useful for sharing your designs between multiple sites or users. If you’re just building a site for yourself you probably don’t need it.”

I tested the plugin with the child theme option and it worked as expected. I was able to install it on another site with its unique name and template changes instantly applied. The export screen allows users to give the theme a name, description, and author information, which is saved to the new theme’s style.css file.

“At the moment the UI of this plugin is totally separate from Gutenberg,” Dwyer said. “In time we expect more integration with the Site Editor UI, to make it easier to access these features.

It would be helpful if the theme creation options allowed users to upload a unique screenshot that would be packaged with the theme download. I added this as an issue on the plugin’s GitHub repository, where anyone is welcome to contribute.

The Create Block Theme plugin makes designing and authoring a WordPress theme more approachable than ever before. It has the potential to rapidly increase the number of block themes available, if designers understand how to use it and submit their works to the Themes Directory. The Training Team is currently working on a course for Learn WordPress that will teach people how to create block themes using this plugin.

Create Block Theme was released under the WordPress.org plugins account and can be installed by searching for the plugin’s name in quotes.

What happens when a user activates a block theme while still relying on a widget from a third-party plugin?

That seemed to be a particular pain point in a one-star review of Twenty Twenty-Two, WordPress’ flagship theme for the year. The primary complaint was that it did not have built-in widget support. For those of us building with WordPress every day, this was the expected result. The theme is, after all, a block theme. It represents a new era that firmly splits itself from the old, shedding the weight of years of legacy baggage that existed with previous versions of WordPress. And, widgets are very much a part of that baggage.

While I am often a fan of the “out with the old, in with the new” mantra, that is simply not the reality for the average WordPress users. Rebuilding their entire site is not something most do on a whim.

My first thought while reading the review was that WordPress had a built-in Legacy Widget block. Why not just use that? Unbeknown to me at the time, or at least until I ran a quick test, this was never shipped outside of the block-based widgets editor. An earlier, pre-FSE decision scaled it back. There are legitimate reasons to not include it by default in the other editing interfaces. Loading the extra widgets code does come at some performance cost. There are also no guarantees that all third-party widgets will play nicely within the block editor.

At the time of the decision, the site editor did not exist, and widgets were never meant for use within post/page content. Perhaps we should reconsider the decision for the site editor if it becomes too much of a problem.

When I say I “built a solution,” what I really mean is that I copied the code from existing documentation in the Developer Handbook and turned it into a plugin. Thank you to whoever wrote the original snippets. All I needed to do was put a bit of custom CSS on top of things to smooth out some of the rougher parts of the UI. In particular, there was no clear separation of the widget options and the front-end output.

I primarily tested the core widgets and those from old plugins of my own. However, it should work with most classic widgets. There are likely some exceptions where a specific widget has custom JavaScript that does not jive with the editor.

The experience is not ideal. To work in an editor context, the Legacy Widget block is loaded via an iframe. Instead of widget options appearing in the editor toolbar or block inspector, they sit above the widget output, at least while the block is selected.

Overall, this is more of a stopgap solution than a permanent one. The goal is for plugin authors to build block equivalents of their classic widgets (and shortcodes) as this new era of block themes arises.

Unfortunately, I do not know if I helped the original user/reviewer. After a productive conversation that led to a potential fix for his issue, most of the topic replies were “archived” by one of the WordPress forum moderators. I can only hope that the user saw that the fix was live before that happened. If nothing else, maybe it helps someone else along the way.

WordCamp US will be hosting its first in-person event since 2019 in San Diego this year. The three-day event will run from September 9-11 at Town and Country Resort.

Tickets went on sale today and are still available but likely to sell out soon. Unlike previous years, which had attendees number in the thousands, WCUS 2022 will be capped at 650 tickets sold. Organizers said this is to allow for adequate social distancing and to give the team better flexibility in case changes are necessary.

Tickets will include lunch on Friday and Saturday as well as entry to Contributor Day on Sunday. It also includes admittance to the Saturday night after party and a commemorative t-shirt. WCUS will feature more than 30 speaker presentations and six workshops. Attendees will have the opportunity to network with fellow WordPress enthusiasts and approximately three dozen sponsors.

WordCamp US 2022 is requiring all attendees to be vaccinated or test negative within 24 hours of the event. Masks will be required indoors and organizers have hired a company to enforce proper mask wearing and verify vaccination and testing.

WCUS has negotiated a hotel block with a reduced rate ($199/night) at the Town and Country Resort. A reservation link will be published July 7.

There were only 50 tickets remaining at the time of publishing. Speakers have not yet been announced. Volunteers and speakers will receive a free ticket but are advised to buy one just in case and will be able to receive a full refund. Sponsors and organizers do not need to purchase a ticket.

In this series, we share some of the inspiring stories of how WordPress and its global network of contributors can change people’s lives for the better. This month we feature Leo Gopal, from South Africa, a back-end Developer and Customer Support agent on the encouragement and learning support the WordPress community can give.

Writing as a channel of expression

Curiosity, writing, and resilience are recurring themes in Leo’s story, and have mapped with his WordPress journey.

High school was a difficult time for Leo, as he had a speech impediment which only subsided when he was with close friends or family.

He began writing a journal as an avenue of expression and found every word arrived smoothly for him.

It all began with WordPress 1.2 ‘Mingus’

In 2004, Leo discovered the joy of blogging as a way of combining keeping a journal with ‘conversations’ he could have with those who commented on his blogs. The potential and power of blogs would be an influence in the rest of his life.

As Leo’s confidence grew through expressing himself in writing, he was determined that his stutter would ‘no longer hold power over him’. In 2005, with the encouragement of his blog readers, he spent his school summer break in his room working on reducing his stutter. WordPress would be the tool that would enable him to connect with his blog readers and to express his creativity and thoughts.

Making WordPress your own

In high school, Leo had opted for programming as one of his subjects. In 2008, he built his first website using WordPress for the students at the school. This was the first time he saw the real value of WordPress and open source.

During the following years, he increasingly spent time searching online for information on ‘Customising WordPress’ and ‘Making WordPress your own’.

Leo wanted to keep busy and as soon as he finished school, he applied for every entry-level web-related job that he could find. He was hired by a company for the role of webmaster for its Marketing team focused on WordPress.

He continued to grow his skills as a WordPress developer with the help of useful documentation that he could find and through his helpful local WordPress Community. This helped him earn a living and support his family.

Helping yourself through helping others in the community

In 2015, Leo moved full-time to Cape Town, South Africa, and started as a developer at a web development agency, eventually progressing to its Head of Development and managing a small team.

He chose WordPress as his main platform for development mainly because of the community behind it.

Leo felt he had a hurdle to overcome working in web sector. He didn’t feel like a ‘real developer’ being self-taught. However, through the community, he realized that there were many self-taught developers and he was not alone.

Alongside his development path, Leo faced a mental health journey. He had suffered from depression and found the community to be accepting and understanding of this.

At WordCamp Cape Town 2016, he stood in front of an audience and gave a talk: “The WordPress Community, Mental Wellness, and You”. Following this talk, he was greeted by many attendees who thanked him for talking so openly about mental health issues.

Leo has been diagnosed with bipolar, previously known as manic depression. In 2017, he hit a low period and struggled to keep going. He found support and understanding in the community in WordPress.

He has openly written about his experiences with depression and started an initiative where topics of mental health and general wellbeing can be freely and non-judgmentally discussed.

Contributing to WordPress

Leo has contributed to the community as a Co-organizer in South Africa for the 2016 and 2017 WordCamp Cape Town, WordPress Meetup Cape Town 2015 – 2016, and WordPress Durban 2017 – 2020. He has also spoken at a number of WordCamps.

Maintaining connections with people he had met through these events Leo felt was a great aid to his mental wellbeing during the Covid pandemic.

He has contributed to core and plugins and believes that WordPress and its community make it extremely easy to contribute.

When the ability to create and add patterns to the WordPress.org library came out in 2021, Leo used it almost immediately and created a call-to-action box which could be used by both his clients and the community. He plans to release a few more complex patterns.

Yes, we can.

Getting over a stutter, overcoming poverty, being urgently self-taught, growing up in a country with “load shedding” electricity outages, and one of the slowest rated internet speeds in the developing world, and strengthening mental wellness are not easy feats., And yet, he knows he can do it.

As Leo puts it, the WordPress community doesn’t just power a percentage of the internet; it empowers too.

Share the stories

Help share these stories of open source contributors and continue to grow the community. Meet more WordPressers in the People of WordPress series.

Contributors

Thanks to Nalini Thakor (@nalininonstopnewsuk), Larissa Murillo (@lmurillom), Meher Bala (@meher), Abha Thakor (@webcommsat), Chloe Bringmann (@cbringmann) for work on this feature, and to all the contributors who helped with specific areas and the series this last few months. Thank you too to Leo Gopal (@leogopal) for sharing her experiences.

Thank you to Josepha Haden (@chanthaboune) and Topher DeRosia (@topher1kenobe) for support of the People of WordPress series.

Daugirdas Jankus from Hostinger shares a bit of hosting history, thoughts on WooCommerce and the challenges that come with it.

WordPress theme authors and contributors from the Themes team are exploring ways to make block themes more prominent on the official directory. These are themes that are specifically tagged with support for full-site editing. Despite WordPress having a block theme for its most recent default theme, authors have been slow to create more. There are currently only 86 themes that support the full range of WordPress site editing capabilities.

A meta trac ticket opened five weeks ago proposes giving block themes priority in the directory. Themes Team contributor Sandilya Kafle kicked off the discussion with two ideas:

“There might be some other way to encourage block theme authors to contribute more,” Kafle said.

“We don’t need this always, but we can try this for at least one year and see how it will go. Block themes need some attention and encouragement. Only very few FSE themes are maintained properly.”

“If block themes are the future and are better and easier, they don’t need any extra promotion,” Reynolds said. “Since the WP software handles both, it is very disrespectful to the authors that followed all the rules to build up their placement in the repository, for WP to suddenly give the new type an advantage. (The site editor still has a “beta” label.) All themes should be treated equally.”

Automattic-sponsored Themes Team contributor Sarah Norris was more amenable to the idea, noting that block themes are “a different type of theme from classic themes and enable so many different features.” She said putting ‘Block’ in the Themes Directory menu next to ‘Latest’ would be “a good, small first step.”

WordPress theme author Rich Tabor addressed the criticism of the proposal and reframed it to be more about improving the visibility of block themes.

“I don’t think that priority is quite the correct context,” Tabor contended. “Block themes are categorically different than ‘classic’ themes, because of the nature of the theme, the Site Editor experience, and Global Styles.

“It’s not that we should prioritize block themes, but rather indicate that these are a new class of themes that diverge from the classic theme WordPress experience. If someone unknowingly switches from a block theme (like the default Twenty Twenty-Two theme) to a classic theme, they will lose the core WordPress functionality that they may be familiar with/reliant on.”

Currently, the list of FSE themes is buried three clicks deep. These are the themes that work with all the latest capabilities of WordPress and they should not be this difficult to find. Users have to know to go to the ‘features filter’ menu item, select ‘full-site editing,’ and then click ‘apply.’ Not everyone who uses the Themes Directory will understand the limitations of legacy themes when selecting a theme.

“Last week in the FSE hangout, we also discussed the issue of block themes not getting featured in the theme repository,” theme and block developer Ellen Bauer commented on the ticket. “As a result, users simply don’t know that WordPress is introducing these new themes along with Full Site Editing features. I don’t think this is beneficial for WordPress.”

Bauer proposed an even more bold approach to featuring FSE themes, which mirrors the design in the Plugins Directory. This approach would prominently display block themes above classic themes at the top of the page.

“We can add a similar second section on the theme page in the same fashion as on the plugin page with ‘Block-Enabled Plugins’,” she proposed. “So we could add ‘Block Themes’ or ‘Full Site Editing-enabled Themes’ above the regular theme list. This would add to a consistent experience between searching for plugins and themes, which make sense to me.”

WordPress lead developer Dion Hulse weighed in on the technical challenges of the solutions proposed and concluded that re-doing the front page of the directory would likely be the best way to solve the needs communicated in the ticket. He updated the headers for the WordPress Theme Directory – Local development environment and added development notes to the readme for getting started, if contributors want to work on the project.

The ticket is still open for discussion for anyone who wants to add feedback or jump in on contributing to this improvement to the Themes Directory.

Daisy works for Automattic as a Developer Relations contributor on the WordPress Project. She’s been working with WordPress since 2007 and during that time has worn many hats, including speaking at WordCamps in New York City, Boston and Chicago, as well as helping to organise the first WordCamp Boston in 2010.

I met up with Daisy at the recent WordCamp Europe to discuss the newly arrived block themes. She was giving a workshop there in which she taught attendees how to create a block theme from scratch. As you’ll hear in the podcast, it was a great success.

We talk about what a block theme is and how it differs from the ‘classic’ themes that have been used in WordPress in recent years. What are the advantages of moving over to block themes, and what additional features and functionality do they present for WordPress websites?

As block themes are new, we get into how there’s still a lot of work to be done to make the experience of working with them as easy as it might be, and where those improvements are most needed.

We round off by talking about the new technologies that need to be learned, and whether or not you need new tools to get up and running with block themes.

Typically, when we record the podcast, there’s not a lot of background noise, but that’s not always the case with these WordCamp Europe interviews. We were competing against crowds and the air-conditioning. Whilst the podcasts are more than listenable, I hope that you understand that the vagaries of the real world were at play.

Useful links.

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley. Juke box is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the community, and in this case block-based themes.

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If you’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 and paste that URL into most podcast players.

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If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m very keen to hear from you. And hopefully get you or your idea featured on the show. Head to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and fill out the contact form there.

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So on the podcast today, we have Daisy Olsen. Daisy works for Automattic as a developer relations contributor on the WordPress project. She’s been working with WordPress since 2007. And during that time has worn many hats, including speaking at WordCamps in New York City, Boston and Chicago, as well as helping to organize the first WordCamp Boston in 2010.

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I met up with Daisy at the recent WordCamp Europe to discuss the newly arrived block themes. She was giving a workshop there in which she was teaching how to create a block theme from scratch. As you’ll hear in the podcast, it was a great success. We talk about what a block theme is and how it differs from classic themes that have been used in WordPress’s recent past.

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What are the advantages of moving over to block themes and what additional features and functionality do they present for WordPress websites? As block themes are new, we get into how there’s still a lot of work to be done to make the experience of using them as easy as it might be. And where those improvements are most needed.

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We round off by talking about the new technologies that need to be learned and whether or not you need new tools to get up and running with block themes.

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Typically when we record the podcast, there’s not a lot of background noise. But that’s not always the case with these WordCamp Europe interviews. We were competing against crowds and the air conditioning, and whilst the podcasts are certainly more than listable. I hope that you understand that the vagaries of the real world were at play.

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If you’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. And there you’ll find all the other episodes as well. And so without further delay, I bring you Daisy Olsen.

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I am joined on the podcast today by Daisy Olson. Hello Daisy.

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[00:03:19] Daisy Olsen: Hello. So nice to be here with you today.

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[00:03:21] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. Joining us in the Super Bock Arena, we’re actually at WordCamp EU 2022, and you’ve had a workshop or have?

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[00:03:32] Daisy Olsen: I had it yesterday, yes. Watch for that video to be made available at some point on WordPress TV.

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So I took a group of about 80 people that signed up for this workshop through the process of creating a very simple block theme from nothing. We created it from scratch.

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[00:03:52] Nathan Wrigley: Did you get some interesting insights?

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[00:03:54] Daisy Olsen: A few, yes. There are things yet to be worked out as far as making the process smooth. But we did indeed actually manage to get a working theme activated and installed on a site, in two hours.

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[00:04:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I wondered if it was a two way process. In other words, you were obviously trying to educate the audience, but also maybe there’s the reverse process where their failure or lack of failure, their success, that’s a better word, indicates to you that either things are working or need to be looked at in the future and you can feed back that to the relevant teams.

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[00:04:26] Daisy Olsen: Absolutely, and that’s a big part of my role is to, as a developer relations, and a developer advocate in the community is to work with the developers and also bring that feedback to the development team so that they can make it actionable.

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So if we find the same problem is coming up again and again, a pain point or maybe a workflow issue or a UI issue where people getting stuck, then that’s something that I can then bring back and figure out what’s next.

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[00:04:57] Nathan Wrigley: Eighty people as well. You must have been pleased with that.

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[00:05:00] Daisy Olsen: It sold out very quickly. I think a lot of attendees are quite interested in the topic.

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[00:05:04] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so I’m imagining the reason for that is for the longest time, themes have been themes have been themes. There’s just been themes, variety of different themes, but they’ve all behaved in similar ways. Until very recently when a new theme type came on the horizon and we’ve got now a block based theme.

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I’m imagining that most of the people that are listening to this podcast have not come into contact with it. I could be wrong about that, but the listenership is fairly broad. So I think we need to do a job of saying what a block based theme is. So I’m gonna hand that over to you. What is a block based theme?

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[00:05:39] Daisy Olsen: All right, so you’re right, the themes, as we know them have stayed the same since around, I think it was 2005 that the themeing engine was introduced to WordPress. And before that we had, it was just a template effectively. Like you could hack it, and you could change the CSS, but it was effectively changing Core files.

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So we introduced the theme engine, which has remained basically the same ever since. So we have hooks and filters and actions and all of the things that we’re used to working with the PHP for WordPress. And you can take that first default theme that came with, it was called, I think it’s just called default, often referred to as Kubrick. You can still install it today and it’ll still work.

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So we have a long history of backward compatibility, but now we’re introducing this new way of considering themes as being blocks. So we work with blocks in our content and we’ve grown accustomed to that over the last five years, four years, something like that. And now we’re starting to move out of just the content area into the other parts of the site. So you hear a lot about full site editing. Block themes are in addition to that.

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So full site editing allows us to work within WordPress as our development tool to build the entire site, not only the content area. And this is really it’s really exciting, but it can also cause some nerves because it’s such a different paradigm from what we’ve had in the past. So instead of having a header and a footer file, well, now we will have something called template parts.

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we have had template parts, but they were an unofficial thing that was used frequently in theming. Now it’s really integral to the theme engine. If you want to have a sidebar, instead of having a sidebar that you register, as we have done in the past, now you would just have another template part that you would place in a sidebar or wherever else you wanted it to be.

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[00:07:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. it’s quite a big change and whilst it’s not irreversible, it is toggleable. And what I mean by that is, if you go down the route of block themes, then you are gonna be using a block theme during the time you’ve got it switched on. There isn’t a, we’re gonna use the term classic theme. You can’t mix and match classic themes on the same site at the same time, but you certainly can use classic themes on a site and use the new block based themes, but you have to choose one or the other at any particular moment.

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[00:08:09] Daisy Olsen: Well, yes, however you can have what’s called a hybrid theme that will include both elements of the classic theme engine and also the block theme engine. So if you have a site that you wanted to adopt block theming gradually, there’s a mechanism to come in more slowly. You can do as little as adding a theme dot json file to activate the template editor, and then you can create full site templates for your site. So you, it’s a new way of creating custom pages.

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Or you can activate the site editor with a directory in your theme that’s called templates and then an index.html. The gotcha there, of course, is that you are then replacing your index dot PHP file with blocks. So that would be the first thing that you would convert. But all of your other PHP templates would remain intact until you replace them with an HTML file.

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So what it means is you can not have to go all in.

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[00:09:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

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[00:09:05] Daisy Olsen: You can adopt it gradually, which I think is a huge win because it’s hard to change your tooling and not all of your clients, if you’re working in an agency setting are going to be ready for a full redesign, but they might be ready to start to move in that direction.

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[00:09:20] Nathan Wrigley: So just to be clear, there is still, and there, as far as I’m aware, there always will be backwards compatibility. The theme that you’ve got last year will always work. So the sky is not falling in. Don’t worry.

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[00:09:32] Daisy Olsen: No, there is no plan to fully deprecate the existing theme engine.

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[00:09:37] Nathan Wrigley: So we can still use Kubrick? That’s all I needed to know. So, on a high level, give us the one or two advantages, which you’ve perceived over the last few years, not years, months, about going to block based themes. In other words, if I’m a regular WordPress user, I’ve got a theme it’s being updated. I’m happy with it. It’s secure. What are the compelling reasons why you would say, at least go and have a look, go and explore block based themes. Sell it to us.

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[00:10:02] Daisy Olsen: So I think the number one benefit would be rapid development. You can start really quickly. If you understand how to use the block editor in WordPress, you’re probably gonna be okay creating a theme because the majority of the work is actually done within WordPress. There is some other work still that you do manually in, theme dot json, and you may still end up using custom styles because you can’t do everything from a configuration file.

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But the majority of it is just creating your blocks. Not creating blocks, like the block would already exist on your site, but to use the blocks that are available to you in your site. And a big question often is, do I need to know React in order to do this? And you absolutely don’t If you’re going to work on Core WordPress and you’re gonna help create WordPress itself, then React is pretty useful. But you can actually do a lot without very much or any React knowledge, especially in the theming area.

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[00:11:01] Nathan Wrigley: You touched earlier upon the parts of a WordPress theme, classically, you mentioned the header and the footer, and whilst for developers, those are very much in play for most users., I imagine it was just a case of you picked a menu item and the theme chose where that would go and so on and so forth.

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Yeah. That’s all up for grabs now, because it’s block based, you can put it literally in the middle of the content, if you want. So you can put anything, anywhere and surround it by anything. You could put buttons above the menu, below the menu. Text here, there, and everywhere. In other words, it’s completely up to you, what you do with it.

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I don’t know if that point ever got through to me until I started playing with it. But just the idea that you could literally build your header with any block, put anything, anywhere. I mean, images in the header, who knows why, but you could do all of that.

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[00:11:48] Daisy Olsen: Yeah, in fact, so the theme we created yesterday was the 2010 theme. And it does have an image in the header. You can change it, but it is there. And. I don’t know, some people might like to have an image in their header.

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[00:12:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Why not? But the point being that image could be anything else. Just imagine the array of blocks, which every time you open the block inserter, all of those can be into play, and I guess traditionally, you’re just gonna be going for something like a navigation block.

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Let’s talk about the UI. Where we’re at the moment. Because when I last played with block based themes, I was caught a little bit short by the way it was set up. Because we are very much used to the appearance menu item in the WordPress admin area. All that’s gone. Now we just have the option to edit the theme. We are left with all of those things that we’re familiar with, selecting menus and things like that. All gone.

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You now do it inside of the block editor. How do you feel all of that’s going? How do you feel that the UI for all of that is progressing? I know it’s a work in play. Today it will be different from next week, probably by the time this podcast goes out, there’ll have been changes made, but it feels like at the minute, almost like a more difficult thing to use than what we’ve got at the moment.

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[00:12:59] Daisy Olsen: I think that there are some benefits. I think that it’s coming a long way very quickly. There are some things that it takes a minute to figure out exactly how to work with it. Sometimes there’s a little frustration. It’s new. Anytime you have a new user interface, it’s going to take a little while to get used to it. And honestly, the design teams on the project are always working to make it more intuitive. To remove as much friction as possible.

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And I think that it’s come a long way. An example of that is if you’re not using this, you definitely should. The list view on any block editor screen to open that, and you can get a, like a tree view of where all of the blocks in your editor. And this is available in content areas. It’s available in the template editor. It’s available in the site editor. I use it always. It is how I select my blocks before I start working with them, so.

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[00:13:52] Nathan Wrigley: The muscle memory has now kicked in for me so that’s never closed. It just seems pointless not having it there. I guess the only constraint would be the width of the view that you’ve got at that particular moment. Cause it does consume, a fifth of a typical monitor or something.

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[00:14:05] Daisy Olsen: Yes, it does. It is fairly wide. And then if you also have the block side bar open then that takes up another bit of space.

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[00:14:12] Nathan Wrigley: So you build out things like the header. Let’s just describe the way that looks. Let’s go for the navigation block. If you drop the navigation block in, to enable the sitewide navigation, where you decide to put it, doesn’t really matter, but we’ve got it somewhere in the top. Let’s say it’s in the header. How do you actually construct what’s in the menu?

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[00:14:29] Daisy Olsen: You can add more blocks inside the navigation block. So what we have is if you’re familiar with group blocks or columns block, you can add more blocks inside of blocks. And that is basically the mechanism that we can use when working with the block editor to create really complex designs.

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Once you’re familiar with what’s available to you, you can do a lot with it. But there is a learning curve. You start to learn like when you should use a row block or a column block or a stack block, or just a group. And what controls are available to you to make it the design that you want. And then it’s all built with some responsivity built into it. So it will usually gracefully collapse down into a mobile view.

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[00:15:15] Nathan Wrigley: Have you noticed over time, I know that there’s a lot of flux and a lot of change. Do any of these blocks, have they changed periodically in ways which have broken things? In other words you’ve got a site today which is working and you view it a little bit later, things have updated, the block has updated now it’s not working in the theme in the way that you’d anticipated.

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[00:15:34] Daisy Olsen: Yeah. The correct way to change a block’s markup is to deprecate the markup from that block. So it still will translate into its new version and not give you errors.

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However, it is possible that a class has changed or something has changed that maybe a theme has tagged onto that could change the way that it appears. But theoretically, if the blocks are being modified in the correct way, and this is for both Core blocks and custom blocks, then they shouldn’t break on an update, but they might change an appearance a little bit if that sort of change happens. But for Core blocks, at least they make a really big effort to avoid that as much as possible.

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[00:16:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that was another thought on my radar was the idea of proprietary blocks, which are not Core whether or not that might disrupt things. There’s no oversight into how they will behave over time. Maybe you’ll need to be contacting their support to figure out if they break things.

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[00:16:28] Daisy Olsen: That is always a possibility. We do have best practices, but there’s nothing to say that they’re going to be followed.

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[00:16:33] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So yesterday you mentioned these 80 people, did you get all of them up and running?

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[00:16:39] Daisy Olsen: I can’t say for sure. We didn’t exactly go around and check.

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[00:16:42] Nathan Wrigley: It felt good though?

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[00:16:43] Daisy Olsen: It felt good. Yeah. Yeah.

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[00:16:45] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so the next question here is the 80 people in there are probably not the typical users, because they’ve turned up to WordCamp Europe. They’re fairly into WordPress. Let’s put it that way. Do you get any sort of feedback as to how this is going for the more typical user?

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And when I say the more typical user, what I actually mean is the non-technical user. The user who literally wants to log in, create a post, click publish, log out. It’s a business website. It’s something that they need to do, but they’re not necessarily interested in WordPress at all.

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[00:17:14] Daisy Olsen: Sure. So I think that the bar is lowered for that type of a user to then be able to adjust things in their site that they never would’ve been able to before. Now, there’s maybe sometimes when you don’t want to give that type of user that control. If you’re the one that created a beautiful website for a client, you might not want them to be able to edit the design. But if you are working with, we could maybe call them a power user. As far as content creation goes, I would say that they would be able then to go into their header and make a change and not have to contact a developer for that.

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But I think that most of the, like the ones that really want to just do their content, just write a blog post, they’re mostly using paragraph blocks and image blocks. They’re probably still gonna go back to their developer for a lot of those kinds of changes.

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[00:18:05] Nathan Wrigley: If people were keen to learn, do you communicate with the Learn team? Are there resources being made or resources in the pipeline to help with all of this?

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[00:18:13] Daisy Olsen: Absolutely. So there are a number of courses, workshops, videos, text based tutorials in the works. They are time consuming to create but they are in process.

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[00:18:24] Nathan Wrigley: And I’m guessing that’s completely in flux. That they need to be revisited fairly regularly.

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[00:18:28] Daisy Olsen: Yeah, things change. The Gutenberg plugin, which is what ultimately feeds into Core, updates every two weeks. So we have changes to things very frequently at that point. In Core, it changes every version, just like it always has, but it changes in batches in Core. So we see a lot of change all at once, but if you’ve been familiar with using the plugin, then you would see those changes more frequently and gradually.

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[00:18:53] Nathan Wrigley: Now you mentioned that a typical user doesn’t need to modify any tooling. There’s nothing complicated here. You don’t need to get your head into React and all of that kind of stuff. But let’s say that you are a themer who isn’t yet to explore all of this, and you really wanna push the boundaries. Are there any new things that need to be learned in order to really make it your own and to really modify things and make it unique, and, well, let’s say commercial.

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[00:19:17] Daisy Olsen: So if you really want to get started quickly and you could go and create all your files manually. It doesn’t actually take that many files to do it, but you need to know where to start. But if you’d like to get a little jumpstart on it, Carolina Nymark has created a tool to generate a theme. It’s pretty neat. And I believe that it’s at the um, URLs fullsiteediting.com.

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And you fill in a form and then it creates the theme for you. You download it. So then you can have a starting point. And, you know, you work from the files that it gives you, you get a feel for what makes it tick. And you can make it your own.

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[00:19:56] Nathan Wrigley: I’m guessing that you are in touch with the theming community pretty closely.

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[00:20:00] Daisy Olsen: Yes. Yeah.

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[00:20:01] Nathan Wrigley: So, how’s the feedback? Is there general excitement? Are we at that point where half of them are not sure half of them are excited? Where are we at now? I imagine a few months ago it was different. And a few months before that it was different and maybe the tide is going in one direction. I don’t know.

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[00:20:15] Daisy Olsen: Yeah. So I think they’re all trying to figure out where they need to be. Obviously if you’re in the commercial theme market, you’re trying to make sure that you’re gonna be where you need to be when things change. And so I have talked to a few people that have been like, should we do this now? I have a hundred themes commercially available.

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Should I be adopting block themes now? And my advice probably right now is to start working with them. Get familiar. It might not be quite ready to jump all in on it, but definitely be moving in that direction and you’ll be in good shape for when the tooling is a little more mature.

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[00:20:53] Nathan Wrigley: So why is that? Is it because their users are not yet at the point where they’re happy to do that? Or is it just too experimental?

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[00:21:01] Daisy Olsen: I would say that, so there is some effort being made into locking things down so that you are only giving access to the things that you want to give access to. This is particularly useful for agency work, where you might not want them to be able to go and do certain things. Like you might not want to allow them to use the color picker, for example. Or you might only want to give them access to certain colors in certain spaces. We can lock that. You might have block patterns, which are very cool. And if you don’t know about them, you should learn.

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And you can lock the position of the blocks so that they maybe can’t be moved or they can’t be removed from the pattern, once it’s been inserted. So there is a lot of really interesting things coming and, it’s a good time to get familiar and then try to keep up with it as it changes. you can build a block theme now and it would work perfectly fine.

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[00:21:56] Nathan Wrigley: How’s the theme directory shaping up with the new block themes. I know the numbers were very small and then more got added. I haven’t looked at it for weeks and weeks, so maybe it’s positive.

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[00:22:05] Daisy Olsen: I don’t actually know the current number, but it has definitely grown. And we’re seeing some prominent figures in the community start to add themes.

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[00:22:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah

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[00:22:13] Daisy Olsen: Which is pretty exciting to see.

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[00:22:16] Nathan Wrigley: What was your take on the default theme for WordPress? I think it was 5.9 becoming a block based theme. Some sort of pushback in the community. Suddenly there was this theme and if you installed a new version of WordPress, obviously the new default theme becomes the theme and that cognitive dissonance of logging into a website for the first time and, hang on where have all the items gone.

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Where’s all the bits and pieces. I guess, at some point that needed to occur, but there seemed to be some sort of outcry of couldn’t we have just had this as a choice, as opposed to a every version of WordPress by default from now on will be block based.

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[00:22:47] Daisy Olsen: I guess the choice is that you either drag it out or you just start. And they landed at just start. And I think there’s a lot to learn. I think that the theme that is default for WordPress is there in order to be a a learning tool. I mean, you can obviously use it as your design, but a lot of it is about demonstrating what can be done with your theme, almost like a playground.

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So you can open up the files and see what makes it work. I learned some things from the 2022 theme that I would never have come up with on my own, but it was a creative solution to a problem.

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[00:23:24] Nathan Wrigley: That’s a beautiful theme.

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[00:23:25] Daisy Olsen: It is beautiful. I love the birds and black, very nice. And there are some other color schemes in there. And the other thing is that with 6.0, we added some new features. And they were integrated into the default theme. So now it still looks the same, basically behaves the same, but maybe some of the mechanism used to do some of the work have shifted into the newer version. So it has already even been updated.

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[00:23:51] Nathan Wrigley: A little while ago, you talked about patterns and your eyes lit up. And the idea of patterns and themes is not one that necessarily occurred to me before. I’m thinking of, I ought to be throwing in just individual blocks and building on it myself. But of course the patterns could encompass all of the bits, preconfigured that you would need for a header say.

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And I’m guessing that’s a space, which is gonna mature and people are gonna come up with header patterns and footer patterns and typical use patterns, which might fit beautifully inside of a theme.

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[00:24:18] Daisy Olsen: Yes, so we have a pattern directory. That’s part of the wordpress.org network of sites. And these are users submitted patterns. You can create it using a block editor right on that site. They’re moderated, so we keep inappropriate content out of the system. And then others can use these patterns and it’s only Core blocks at this time. But if they want to use this pattern that someone else created, it’s very easy to pull it into their site.

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And you can actually use the block inserter, right from your own site to pull in any of the patterns that have been shared in this directory.

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[00:24:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I think that’s just a unique byproduct of the way I typically do things. I start with the blank canvas, and build it up myself, but the idea of short circuiting, that process. There’s a pattern looks good. Let’s try it out. Click the button. Nope. Next one. Try that. And you’ve just made a lot less work for yourself.

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[00:25:09] Daisy Olsen: Sure. And then if you find something that comes close.

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[00:25:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yep.

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[00:25:12] Daisy Olsen: You pull it in and you modify it a little bit because it’s yours at that point.

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[00:25:16] Nathan Wrigley: So the reason for using Core blocks is just so that everything is open, easy to use. I think in saying that any imagery as well is now gonna be coming from Openverse, so even that is admissible on a site, you don’t even have to think about, okay, let’s remove that and swap it out for something else.

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[00:25:28] Daisy Olsen: Right? Yeah. The imagery has traditionally been a big problem for demo content to make sure that you have something that was both visually appealing and also legal to use.

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[00:25:38] Nathan Wrigley: And just for the benefit of people listening to this, if you want to go and submit your photos, you can do that, at Openverse, I’m going to be submitting lots of pictures of WordCamp Europe.

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[00:25:46] Daisy Olsen: I’d I love to hear that. That’s wonderful.

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[00:25:49] Nathan Wrigley: Rich Tabor, who is a, he has been a very prominent themer over the years. He’s created some terrific work. He came up with this idea not so long ago of wouldn’t it be an interesting experiment? Would it be a good idea to just have one theme in the theme directory and he called it a base theme. The idea being that well, if there’s just a base theme, and everybody knows the base theme inside out, back to front.

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Everybody understands what it can do, how it works, and then patterns drop in for everything in the way that we’ve been describing. And it occurred to me on some level that was quite a good idea, just a very light framework and everything then that drops in is patterns. And there could be a pattern for literally everything. What are your thoughts on that idea?

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[00:26:36] Daisy Olsen: I have not had a great deal of time to think this through, but my hot take would be that in a way we are already doing that to some extent. Where the majority of our markup is being created by WordPress. So you could maybe think about it from the perspective that WordPress is creating that base theme.

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And we are just building a version of it in our block theme. So you are setting up defaults and settings and presets in your theme dot json file. You are creating HTML files to build out your templates and your headers and your footers, your template parts is what we refer to them as. And then you might be creating patterns in a patterns directory.

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Those are PHP files, but they’re quite simple, really to create. Most of it is actually HTML, but we still pull them in as PHP. Now we have a mechanism to actually register a block pattern from some header information in the file, and you don’t have to, it’s a simpler process. It’s more automated now.

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But I think one of the beauties of block themes is the ability to create very specific niche, websites and themes and designs. And be very targeted in how you would market that design. So when I worked in the theme world, the number one question that always came out in our support forums was, you have all these themes, which themes should I use for this site?

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And we always said well, you can use any theme because you make it your own, you add your own content and your own imagery and then it’s yours. But it was really not what people wanted to hear. They wanted to hear that this is the perfect theme.

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[00:28:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That theme’s got pictures of houses on it. So it must be for real estate.

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[00:28:24] Daisy Olsen: Exactly. So you can very easily market a theme, two different verticals pretty easily just by making a few changes, but having variations of that theme that might at its core, be the same one across the board, you’ve just changed the imagery, so it looks right for that market.

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[00:28:45] Nathan Wrigley: You’ve sold it to me. It’s an exciting time. I’m guessing that you would like as many people as possible to get in there and create their own themes and possibly even contact you and find out what you’re doing. What is the best way to discover about these new block themes? Where would you point them one or maybe two URLs?

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[00:29:04] Daisy Olsen: So I would start at the block editor handbook, and there are a couple of pages there about block themes as well as in the theme handbook. And these are all at developer.wordpress.org. These are a good place to get a primer.

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I would also greatly encourage going to the full site editing dot com site, where Carolina has created some really great instructional content for stepping through the process of creating one of these themes.

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[00:29:35] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much. It’s always nice to be at the beginning of something, seeing something starting and maturing over time. And, uh, you never know, maybe in sort of 10 years time, we’ll have a Kubrick moment when we move on to something else, but for now block based themes is the future. Thank you very much.

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[00:29:48] Daisy Olsen: Absolutely.

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[00:29:48] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you Daisy, for chatting to me today.

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[00:29:50] Daisy Olsen: Thank you so much.

Robert and Milan sit down for a friendly chat about WordCamp Europe and the future of WordCamps.

Rich Tabor’s new Wei theme is one of the most well-designed contributions to hit WordPress.org’s free themes directory this month. Wei is a minimalist block theme that keeps things simple while offering users a range of artfully selected accent color combinations. It also includes support for full-site editing and Global Styles for a wider range of site customizations.

Wei joins WordPress.org’s collection of 86 full-site editing themes. The number of FSE themes is growing but it is a far sight behind the goal of 500 for 2022, which WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy set for the community. While the Themes Team discusses ideas for making block theming easier for theme authors, a few trailblazers like Tabor are pushing forward with contagious enthusiasm and creative works that show what is possible in the new era of block themes.

Wei is a follow-up to Tabor’s popular Wabi theme. The name was selected to highlight its simplicity as a supporting tool in the user’s publishing workflow.

“It’s derived from ‘Wu wei,’ which has a lot of meanings, but I lean towards the ‘effortless/actionless’ bit,” he said. “I wanted to build a theme that lets you effortlessly publish — and looks really creative/inspiring as well.”

Tabor said Wei took him less time to make than any traditional legacy theme he created in the past.

“I started, and nearly finished, Wei on the flight back from WordCamp Europe,” he said. “A couple years ago, this would have taken weeks — at least.”

Tabor’s expert curation of dynamic accent colors is the highlight of this theme. Since most people are not designers, Wei offers four different overall styles that users can browse inside the Site Editor and enable with one click.

Depending on what theme style you select in the Site Editor, the post editor will display a different set of accent colors. These options are unique to each style and all of them are aesthetically pleasing combinations that can be set based on the mood of each individual post.

Tabor’s Wei theme announcement post includes an image with all the style variations included. He selected colors that are AAA contrasting for all available styles.

One of the most magical things Wei does is seamlessly blend the background with the featured image on the single post template. The template includes a Cover block that fetches the post’s featured image and applies the duotone from the color scheme assigned to the post. This just works in the background and users don’t have to do anything to enable it.

Wei does not include any custom patterns, but everything in the theme is a block and can be easily manipulated. Users can change the headers, footers, change the layout on single post templates, add blocks to the homepage, edit template parts, and anything else supported by the latest full-site editing features.

Check out the demo to see the theme in action with different color schemes assigned to each post. Wei is available for free on WordPress.org and requires WordPress version 6.0 or later.

Integration, testing and deployment. An in-depth developer chat on WordPress and WooCommerce.

Recent turbulence in the ClassicPress community has resulted in the directors resigning and new leadership installed. The WordPress fork is run under a non-profit organization called the ClassicPress Initiative. It supports work on a pared back version of WordPress, based on version 4.9, that uses the TinyMCE classic editor as the default option with no block editor.

The project appeared to be on the rocks a week ago when its directors published their resignation with a call for replacements.

“Over the last few days it has become crystal clear that the community feels that the Directors of the ClassicPress Initiative are now hindering the progress of the ClassicPress Project,” former director Wade Striebel said.

“As such, Michelle and I have decided to resign our positions as part of the non-profit organization that oversees the ClassicPress community, the ClassicPress Initiative. This will allow others to step in and move the ClassicPress Project forward.

“Both Michelle and I have been here since the beginning of ClassicPress, back almost four years ago. While it is sad to be leaving the community we saw grow and evolve over time to be the most successful fork of WordPress in years, it is time for a new direction under new governance.”

ClassicPress’ monthly costs in 2021 averaged $99.74 USD with donations averaging $10.34 per month. When the directors announced their intention to resign, there was $352 in the bank account. The project published its 2021 profit/loss statement from its 2021 taxes.

Over the weekend Striebel identified Viktor Nagornyy, William Patton, and Tim Kaye as the initiative’s new directors.

Community financial support for the project does not seem strong, but the prospect of getting people to do the work of maintaining the fork in addition to managing its administrative overhead has been a greater challenge.

“We’ve had committees with elected members, we had team leads, and we ended up here because they failed to work, people failed to do the work they said they would, and disappeared,” new diretor Nagornyy said. “We reached this point after grueling four years, including pandemic.

“If we do the same thing again, we will end up with the same results. Nobody wants that. We want CP to succeed, so we need to make changes with community’s support and input. We don’t want to do it alone, we need community’s support. It’s a community project.”

Nagornyy published a new project plan today, confirming that the Classic Press Initiative will continue to be the owner of the project infrastructure.

“This ownership model eliminates any one individual from being in charge and prevents egos from getting in the way,” he said. “This model also provides limited liability to everyone involved.”

As the project is barely scraping by financially, Nagornyy identified fundraising as its top priority, along with cutting expenses, and simplifying server infrastructure. He was also adamant about not having the full responsibility of running the project fall on the directors again.

“We are not in favor of having a rigid committee (or ‘council) structure,” Nagornyy said. “ClassicPress did try the ‘committee’ approach between 2018-2020. Unfortunately, it did not work out as expected and caused frequent disagreements between the members. Voting on issues became divisive and was one of the primary reasons for project stalling.

“As members left or became less active with the pandemic in full swing, the committees were dissolved, and directors took on the responsibilities no one wanted to keep the project alive.”

ClassicPress appears to be in a tenuous position as its new directors assume responsibility for the organization. The project is struggling to get people to contribute and will need to hit its fundraising goals fairly aggressively to ensure individual members do not become financially responsible for its support.

“History should not repeat itself, and we must learn from it,” Nagornyy said. “Making decisions is worthless if those decisions cannot or are not acted upon. It is instead much more important that we focus on encouraging and facilitating people to actually contribute.”

The developers of the Rollback Update Failure feature plugin put out a call for testing over the weekend, with the aim of getting it included in WordPress 6.1. The goal of the plugin is to offer a safety mechanism in core for when updates or auto-updates fail. Instead of leaving the user’s site in a broken state, the rollback update failure feature will restore the site to a usable state.

Successful updates are the default experience for most WordPress users. The auto-updates team embraced the challenge of creating a fallback for users who experience the most common issues with updates, which include having a plugin folder’s content be get deleted and the plugin being no longer active, along with the scenario where a plugin cannot completely update, resulting in a PHP fatal message or “white screen of death.”

For the past 19 months, Andy Fragen, Colin Stewart, and Paul Biron have been leading development and testing. They settled on a solution that is awaiting feedback from core committers.

“It was determined that copying the current plugin to an alternate location and in the event of an update failure, copying it back into wp-content/plugins, would be the least resource intensive method,” Fragen said. “This does require one additional plugin copying operation and two if there is a update failure.”

The auto-updates team needs broad testing and feedback from people using different hosting companies at all price ranges. The process involves setting up a test environment with the WordPress Beta Tester plugin set to Bleeding edge and Nightlies, and the Rollback Update Failure plugin installed. Testers will then download old versions of a bunch of plugins and test single and bulk updates. A filter is available for forcing an update failure. Testers will be asked to record the time required to perform plugin updates.

More testing details and instructions are available in the call for testing post, with a few example results in the comments for reference. If the feature plugin gets enough broad testing, it may finally have the right timing and momentum to be committed for WordPress 6.1.

In the thirty-fourth episode of the WordPress Briefing, hear WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy discuss planning for the major release and how you can get involved in the WordPress 6.1 release cycle!

Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording.

Credits

References

Transcript

Hello everyone. And welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of some of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project and the community around it, as well as get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host Josepha Haden Chomphosy.

All right my friends. So it’s been about a month since WordPress 6.0 came out and you know what that means. It means we are already looking at the next major WordPress release because, as most of you know, WordPress never sleeps. Y’all are honestly up and hustling like 24/7 as far as I can tell, which is great! And is one of the many benefits of being a global community, I suppose.

But anyway, back to this major release. There was a high-level roadmap shared by Mattias Ventura at the start of June. And it lists some focus areas for the Block Editor, continued refinements to the template editor and navigation block, and some work on global styles and more / better blocks and design tools that are slated to ship with WordPress 6.1. From the WordPress core side, though, there are a couple hundred tickets that are milestoned for the next major.

Being milestoned for a release means that either a ticket wasn’t ready for the last release and was moved to the next available one, or a ticket has become ready for a release since the last major release occurred. That list as it stands might be a little bit too big for a single release. However, honestly, no list is too big if we have enough folks contributing.

So if you’ve never contributed to a major release of WordPress before, and you’re interested to know how that works, there are some things to keep an eye out for over the next few weeks. We are in what is considered the planning phase for the next big release. And so there are two or three things you’re gonna see pretty soon.

First is a planning kickoff post. That post gets published on make.wordpress.org/core, and it includes notes on volunteering for the release squad, some guesses at areas of focus based on the tickets that we’re seeing in track, a schedule, the whole kit, and caboodle. It’s all in there. If you are wanting to know how to lend a hand and how to take your first steps to core contribution, apart from the new contributor meeting that happens before the dev chat, that post is the place to start.

So keep an eye out on make.wordpress.org/core for that. And then the second thing that shows up in the planning phase for any major release is bug scrub and ticket triage meetings. Like I mentioned, there are the new contributor meetings where they scrub tickets and talk through the basics of what we’re seeing on good first bugs.

And I mentioned that here often, I just mentioned it in the last, in the last bullet point, but there are also regular bug scrubs and ticket triaging sessions where a kind contributor chooses a set of tickets to review and then leads other contributors through the process of checking to see if a ticket is valid to see if it can be replicated to see if it has a patch.

If there are decisions that are blocking it and how to move those decisions forward, and generally just kind of discuss what else has to be done in order to take the ticket to the next step. Those get announced in the dev chat every Wednesday, but also there is a post that will go up on make.wordpress.org/core.

I wish I had a faster way to say that instead of just racing through the whole URL every time. But it’ll be okay. We’ll put it in the show notes in case you would rather just click some stuff. And the third thing to keep an eye out for. If development is not your thing, so writing code is not already part of your tool belt, that’s totally fine. There are many other important areas where you can contribute, too. Design, training, support, polyglots, marketing, documentation, and more. These teams all do work in and around a release that is vital to WordPress’ overall success.

And a final thought of all. If that felt a little too intense if you want to see where this ship is headed, but you can’t quite commit to grabbing an oar today, that’s fine, too. The most important thing is that if you are a member of the community, as an extender or a user or a die-hard contributor, or a new contributor, the most important thing is that you have some general awareness of what the overall direction is.

You might do that by experimenting with blocks in your products or by testing screen readers against your workflow or even by setting aside an hour to participate in the latest testing prompt. Being aware of what’s happening in and around your area of the project will help to keep you kind of prepared and knowledgeable to lend a hand whenever it is that you are ready.

And that then brings us to our small list of big things. My friends, registration is now open for the WordPress Speaker Workshop for Women Voices in India. That’s taking place on September 24th and 25th. Uh, it’s happening over Zoom, so location or travel shouldn’t really be an obstacle for you. I’m going to leave a link to some information about that in the show notes. It should be an excellent opportunity that [the] WP Diversity initiative that WordPress has, that the community team helps to foster, is really an excellent experience. And so I hope that you register and attend that.

And the second thing actually is a bit of a celebration. The Photo Directory recently hit a huge milestone of 3000 photos! And you also can submit your photos to wordpress.org/photos. If you feel so inclined to make a contribution of that type.

And then the third thing on my smallest of big things is actually kind of a, a WordPress tooltip a little bit of a WordPress project did-ya-know? So, there is a special channel in WordPress Slack for sharing thanks to folks who were especially helpful to you. It’s called the Props Channel. And when someone shares props with you, it even shows up in your activity on your wordpress.org profile. Pretty cool, huh? Props to the Meta team for that one.

And that my friends is your small list of big things. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. And I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks.

Ronald was able to have a short chat with Marieke about some Woo SEO and a bit of an inside look at how Yoast keeps things running internally.

It’s good to be home again. As much as I enjoyed spending time with WordPressers in Porto, and with my family and long-time friends in Germany, it’s good to be back, too. It’s easier to work when there are less distractions.

Isn’t it an odd way of putting things? We are trying to find the sweet spot between working remotely from anywhere in the world, be it the home town where parents live or a new city, like Porto. There are always temptations and more fun things to do, or people to see, that make it hard to focus on work. If you work remotely, how are you dealing with it?

Anyway, speaking of distractions, there were some rumblings in the WordPress space, that took away some focus from WordPress 6.1, Gutenberg and the block editor and other cool things that are happening around the open-source project. You can read all about it on the WPTavern or this week’s issue of The Repository.

WordPress Release Information

Gutenberg 13.5

Anne McCarthy was the lead for this week’s Gutenberg plugin release and in her post What’s new in Gutenberg 13.5? she highlighted: “The 13.5 release comes with 12 enhancements and 15 bug fixes, with an improved featured image UX, expanded design tools for the Post Navigation Link block, a few solid accessibility fixes, and some nice quality of life improvements.”

Mary Job and I will bundle the changelog of Gutenberg 13.5 and 13.6 together in our next episode of Gutenberg Changelog, which will be recorded around July 7th, 2022. If you have questions for us or Gutenberg developer send us an email to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com.

WordPress 6.0.1 and 6.1 scheduled

The core team identified the team for the minor release 6.0.1 and proposed to schedule the RC for July 5th, 2022 and the final release a week later on July 12th,2022. Sergey Biryukov and Adam Zielinsky will coordinate the release. Anne McCarthy posted more details on tickets and PRs in her post WordPress 6.0.x release team and 6.0.1 schedule

Hector Prieto shared in his post WordPress 6.1 Planning Roundup the proposal schedule for the next major WordPress release, 6.1 and added a call for contributors to join the release team. If you are intested, leave a comment on the post. Proposed Release date is October 25, 2022 with Feature Freeze and first Beta on September 20, 2022. ICYMI, Matias Ventura posted a the Roadmap for 6.1 (block editor edition) a few weeks ago.

Building Themes for FSE and WordPress

On WordPress TV, the Anatomy of a Block Theme was published. “You quickly learn the key components of what makes up a block theme.”

Ramon James Dodd, Contributor to Gutenberg, posted an update on initiatives and goals around Block editor styles. “The purpose of this post is to highlight ongoing initiatives targeted at addressing these issues, and to outline longer-term ambitions to output more readable, efficient and extensible frontend styles.”

Dodd divided his post into three sections: First he highlights the recurring challenges for theme developers to style blocks, then he offers a three part strategy to tackle those challenges, and then he outlines how the contributors could get there, admitting: “Style nirvana might well be out there, however the path comprises individual stepping stones, discovering how individual parts contribute to the whole, and balancing compatibility and stability with innovation.”

This week, Mike McAlister, creator of Atomic Blocks in the early days, and now product designer and principal software enginieer at WPEngine announced on Twitter the alpha phase of FSE Studio, a “developer tool to make building full-site editing themes faster and easier to manage.” McAlister and Phil Johnston also shared a YouTube video of a first FSE Studio walk-through. It reminds me a little bit of Carolina Nymark’s Theme Generator and of David Gwyers ThemeGen App, both have a different goal in mind. From little I saw of the FSE Studio in the video, I like the one page list to check or uncheck the various design tools for users, and I am also intriged by the built in pattern creation tool. It promises “to streamline the theme building process and make theme management a breeze”. Can’t wait to see the alpha version. You can do, as they are looking for alpha testers. Connect with Mike McAlister via Twitter DM

If you can’t wait for the tool to go public, I wrote about four other block theme generators before.

Also this week, the WPWatercooler gang hosted Brian Gardner, creator for the theme Frost and developer advocate at WPEngine in their show about Full Site editing and Block Theme. Listen in on WordPress Themes Block It Like Its Hot. Brian Gardner also talked about his new theme he just announced via Twitter.

WordPress Social Learning Spaces

Immediately available is BP Rewrites 1.3.0. This maintenance release fixes two bugs and brings BP Rewrites compatibility to bbPress. For details on the changes, please read the 1.3.0 release notes.

Many thanks to 1.3.0 contributors

In a recent Twitter storm, Matt Mullenweg characterized GoDaddy as “a parasitic company,” that is “an existential threat to WordPress’ future.” In a series of tweets that were subsequently deleted, Mullenweg contended that GoDaddy is lacking support for WordPress and WooCommerce, relative to how much the company is benefiting from the projects. He also said the company’s investment in proprietary website and store products is at odds with how much it gives back to WordPress.org.

This sparked a heated discussion across Twitter, the Advanced WordPress Facebook group, blog comments, and Post Status Slack. The most outspoken people were those who felt Mullenweg was arbitrarily disparaging one company’s contributions while commending another. There was also a significant group of people who vehemently agreed with his assessment.

“I think parasitic is the right word to apply to GoDaddy,” Boulder WordPress Meetup organizer Angela Bowman tweeted. “Taking something that is free and leveraging it for maximum profits by undercutting the very thing you are selling out of existence. Capitalism at its best, most ruthless, and short sighted.”

I contacted GoDaddy to find out how many people the company sponsors and how much they spend on sponsoring events.

“Our company contributes to open-source in a variety of ways, including through dedicated employee roles, specific projects on which these employees work, and many employees who have a passion for the WordPress community and give back whenever possible,” GoDaddy Director of Public Relations Nick Fuller said.

The company declined to comment on specifics but pointed to its Five for the Future pledge page, which shows that GoDaddy sponsors 34 contributors for a total of 217 hours per week across 15 teams. With 9,000 employees, this amounts to a relatively small number of hours compared to other hosting and product companies, like Automattic (4098 hrs/week) and Yoast (250 hrs/week).

Compared to the other economy hosts listed on WordPress.org’s recommended hosting page, GoDaddy’s contributions are much smaller relative to its size:

While GoDaddy’s contributions may be smaller in terms of work hours, the company allocates hundreds of thousands of dollars for sponsoring WordCamps and related events. After another successful WordCamp Europe in the books, many attendees agreed that the value of these events cannot be overstated. Without corporate sponsors, WordCamps would not happen on the scale that they currently do.

“Beyond contributions to open-source projects, GoDaddy is extremely active at various WordPress events,” Fuller said. “In 2022, our plan is to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on WordCamp and other related events such as WordSesh and WordFest. Many of our employees will be active participants in these community events.”

When asked to comment on the accusations of being a “parasitic company” and “an existential threat to WordPress’ future,” Fuller would not address the complaints directly.

“We all have the same goal, to make WordPress better each and every day,” he said. “Our team is passionate about making WordPress better, both for the community and for our customers, and we greatly appreciate the support expressed by many in the WordPress community in recent days.”

Matt Mullenweg took to Post Status Slack today to clarify some of the opinions he voiced on Twitter yesterday. He hinted at strategies behind the scenes that even employees may not know about.

“Keep in mind that people might not be aware of actions happening in other parts of the company, for example the pressure from their new activist investors,” Mullenweg said. “As an example: I 100% believe the good intentions of the Google folks who were working on AMP, and of course we learned later it was part of a larger strategy they were unaware of that, after being disclosed in litigation discovery, appears malicious.”

Mullenweg also referenced the free-rider problem, a type of market failure where those who benefit from public goods do not pay or under-pay, which leads to over-consumption. This is similar to the Tragedy of Commons situation he mentioned in the past as a fate that WordPress is tying to avoid with its Five for the Future program.

“Failed open source projects usually succumb to the free rider trap — the parasites kill the host, which ultimately hurts the parasites as well but they can’t think beyond short-term,” Mullenweg said. “Successful open source projects escape the free rider problem, as WordPress has so far, largely because of awareness of it and people voting where to invest their talent and their dollars in organizations that contribute to the shared resource in a way that keeps it sustainable.”

If looking solely at the definition of Five for the Future contributions, GoDaddy may constitute a free rider. They are not conforming to what the project has requested from companies in order to keep WordPress sustainable for generations to come. However, highlighting GoDaddy in this fashion may not be the best way to extract more contributions or inspire others to be part of this initiative. WordPress needs to find a better means of dealing with what it deems to be under-performing contributors, because many well-meaning individuals can get trampled underneath the heavy tread of social sanctioning.

Awesome Motive, makers of popular plugins like OptinMonster, WPForms, and MonsterInsights, acquired WP Charitable this week. The plugin is used by more than 10,000 non-profits for creating fundraising campaigns and collecting online donations. It does not charge any transaction fees and currently has a 4.9/5-star average rating on WordPress.org.

“Wes and I launched Charitable in 2015 because we were tired of seeing non-profits use hosted fundraising platforms that charge hefty fees and strip them of the ability to brand and control their donation pages,” WP Charitable co-founder Eric Daams said in his farewell post.

“After being a small team splitting our time on the product as well as our agency business for the last 7 years, we are ready to pass the reins to someone who shares the same passion and has the resources to make Charitable even better than it is today.”

Awesome Motive CEO Syed Balkhi said the company’s non-profit users had long been requesting a beginner-friendly donations plugin. They could either acquire one or build one from scratch. WP Charitable’s timing to sell coincided with Awesome Motive’s next move on expanding tools for non-profit customers.

“As you know, at Awesome Motive, our mission is to help small businesses grow and compete with the big guys,” Balkhi said. “Our software today powers over 20 million websites and helps shape the web for billions worldwide.

“Along with our core mission, we believe that companies should be forces for good.

“The WP Charitable plugin allows us to use our knowledge, experience, and resources to empower those who are changing the world for good.”

WP Charitable’s chief competitor is GiveWP, a donation plugin and fundraising platform with more than 100,00 users. While WP Charitable doesn’t collect any transaction fees whatsoever, one of the big differences with GiveWP is that it collects a 2% fee on Stripe donations taken via the company’s free Stripe integration with GiveWP core. There are no fees for GiveWP’s commercial Stripe add-on.

Demonstrating one of the more endearing aspects of the WordPress ecosystem where competitors often support each other, GiveWP co-founder Matt Cromwell congratulated WP Charitable on the acquisition.

WP Charitable co-founders said current users can expect “business as usual” without any interruptions. They will be helping the transition process but moving on to their own new endeavors. David Bisset will be leading product development moving forward with Awesome Motive. Balkhi said he has an “an extensive list of ideas and a feature roadmap” that the company will begin working on with the plugin’s new team.

It\'s been several years since WooCommerce had their last WooConf, aside from the fact of Covid. Is it time again? What would that look like?

On Thursday Matt Mullenweg responded to an inquiry on Twitter from Jeff Matson, a Pagely employee, about whether Automattic’s Newspack platform had all open open source components or some proprietary elements. In his response, he formally identified GoDaddy as “an existential threat to WordPress’ future.”

The response raised more than a few eyebrows on Twitter as it seemed unrelated to the topic of discussion, which was Amazon’s expansion of its proprietary digital publishing technology.

The conversation following this statement grew more heated and escalated, as GoDaddy employees felt this statement disparaged their contributions and careers dedicated to WordPress.

Mullenweg elaborated on why he sees GoDaddy as an existential threat in a series of tweets that have now been deleted but were preserved in screenshots below. He urged GoDaddy employees to examine how many people are contributing to WordPress and WooCommerce, two open source projects from which the company makes what he estimates to be hundreds of millions of dollars, versus the company’s investment in proprietary website and store products. “How much did GoDaddy put back into .org vs spend on cPanel licenses?” he asked.

In response to a tweet from WordPress digital producer Allie Nimmons, Mullenweg said that although GoDaddy employs some great people, they are “unfortunately overshadowed by massive corporate actions made many levels above them.”

“Those who care about the future of WordPress should spend their dollars with less parasitic companies,” Mullenweg said.

He commended Bluehost for its support of WordPress and its ecosystem since 2003.

Citing GoDaddy’s market dominance, revenue estimates, and 25% of its commerce customers using GoDaddy Payments, the concern seemed more strongly aimed at preserving WooCommerce and the its ability to benefit the rest of the ecosystem.

Some speculated that GoDaddy is more likely an existential threat to WooCommerce and WordPress.com than it is to the WordPress project.

“What I’m worried about is the future of WordPress if GoDaddy succeeds and suffocates the rest of the ecosystem,” Mullenweg said.

In a strange turn of events that would have been unimaginable years ago, many in the WordPress community took to Twitter to defend GoDaddy, even though the company has historically been criticized for its poor performance and predatory sales practices. GoDaddy has been working to improve its tarnished reputation by sponsoring open source contributors and events. Representatives from GoDaddy have not yet responded to a request for comment.

“People have contributed some really great work to the WordPress ecosystem over the years while employed by Godaddy,” Mullenweg told the Tavern. “I wish the company great success and many happy returns.”

Although the tweets were ultimately deleted, fragmenting the resulting conversation, it is clear that Mullenweg perceives GoDaddy as lacking support for the WordPress project and WooCommerce, relative to how much the hosting company is benefiting in revenue. He also sees GoDaddy’s support for proprietary solutions at grave odds with its purported support for WordPress.

Gutenberg 13.5 is now available. The release comes two weeks after the plugin introduced support for button elements in theme.json, axial spacing in the Gallery block, and a redesigned Publish popover in 13.4. The latest release includes 12 enhancements and 15 bug fixes with the most notable changes landing in the Cover block.

Prior to 13.5, the Cover block’s support for using a featured image had a more confusing UI with a separate button in the block toolbar. The featured image toggle has now been relocated to the media replace flow. The Cover block has also been updated to display a placeholder when the featured image in use.

Gutenberg 13.5 also expands the design tools available to the Post Navigation block. Users can now set the link color and font family. This is one of those situations where contributors discussed how much design control makes sense for users in this context. Automattic-sponsored contributor Jeff Ong made the case for instances where users may want to have post navigation use the heading font, instead of the body font.

One small update to the Publish date picker is that it now highlights today’s date, expanding on the popover design update introduced in 13.4.

Gutenberg users who frequently copy and paste between other writing apps may be pleased to learn that version 13.5 introduces a change that strips the HTML from copied block markup for the text/plain version of the clipboard. Gutenberg engineer Andrei Draganescu explained the reasoning behind the change:

Prior to this change, pasting from Gutenberg into another app looked something like this:

Stripping the HTML out of serialized data in the copy handler before placing it in the text/plain version results in a cleaner paste, as Draganescu demonstrated in a video:

Check out the release post for a full list of changes in 13.5. If you don’t have the Gutenberg plugin installed, you will have to wait until the next major WordPress release to take advantage of these fixes and enhancements. WordPress 6.1’s release date was announced today as October 25, 2022, following a long alpha and two short beta periods.

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Como um novo usuário do WordPress, você deveria ir ao painel para excluir essa página e criar novas páginas para o seu conteúdo. Divirta-se!

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