a:4:{s:5:"child";a:1:{s:0:"";a:1:{s:3:"rss";a:1:{i:0;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:3:"


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




















































";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:1:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:16:"WordPress Planet";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"http://planet.wordpress.org/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:8:"language";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:2:"en";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:47:"WordPress Planet - http://planet.wordpress.org/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"item";a:50:{i:0;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:37:"Post Status: Barriers to Contributing";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:32:"https://poststatus.com/?p=103614";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:52:"https://cdn.poststatus.com/barriers-to-contributing/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:3377:"<h2 id="h-small-teams-face-frustrating-barriers-trying-to-make-their-contributions-count">Small teams face frustrating barriers trying to make their contributions count</h2>



<p class="has-theme-palette-8-background-color has-background"><strong>TL;DR:</strong> Small teams have common barriers to contributing to Five for the Future. Making efficient use of their time and team members is hard when tooling and communication can soak up the hours. Learning how to contribute — and keeping up with WordPress core — makes it hard to get started and sustain effective contributions. How much of this has to do with Trac/SVN and the Make WordPress Slack &#8220;firehose,&#8221; I wonder? </p>



<p>In Post Status Slack last month, Cory <a href="https://poststatus.slack.com/archives/C038426SA/p1658527463090219">got a number of responses when he asked</a>, </p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>&#8220;As a manager or owner of a WordPress company (or a WP professional), what are your obstacles/frustrations/challenges for contributing to Five for the Future?&#8221;</p></blockquote>



<p>A helpful pattern emerged in the responses, which I hadn't considered previously.</p>



<h2>Direction and Feedback Needed</h2>



<p><strong>Patrick Garman</strong> asked for clarity on what's wanted and what's actually being done for 5ftF. He also shared how tasking a dedicated staff member with a half day to contribute each week was far more effective than spreading it around his team on a totally voluntary basis. Sharing best practices for efficient contribution widely would be valuable.</p>



<h2>A Sustainable Model of Contribution for Small Teams</h2>



<p><strong>Justin Sainton</strong> agreed that &#8220;sustainable&#8221; contribution for a 1-10 person agency needs a good working model, and he hasn't found one yet. Barriers &#8220;include infrastructural issues&#8221; on both ends — the contributor and project.</p>



<p><strong>Timi Wahalahti</strong> also spoke to time management challenges in a small 8-person agency.</p>



<h2>Just Keeping Up Takes a Lot of Time</h2>



<p><strong>Thomas Maier</strong> noted the challenges of keeping up with the firehose of WordPress core communication and information: </p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>Keeping up to date with something happening in a team I am interested in working in already needs more than 5% of my and my companies time. That’s the burden for us. I don’t feel that there is a chance to make contributions that count to the project that only need 1-2 hours per week. Assuming that publishing code on GitHub or blogging about solutions don’t officially &#8220;count.&#8221;</p></blockquote>



<h2>Trying to Make the Most of a Few Hours</h2>



<p><strong>Brian Coords</strong> also related to feeling like a few hours a week is not helpful or accomplishing much. He also opined that many employers might rather just donate money to a non-profit at arm's length from any interested parties in the WordPress community.</p>



<p>One takeaway here for me is that learning/teaching how to contribute and keeping up with WordPress core is hard enough to make it feel like you can barely get to square one as a contributor with a few hours a week. </p>



<p>How much of this has to do with things like Trac/SVN and the WordPress Slack &#8220;firehose,&#8221; I wonder? </p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 02 Aug 2022 22:03:03 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:10:"Dan Knauss";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:1;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:84:"Post Status: Laura Nelson on WordPress and Email Marketing — Post Status Draft 122";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:32:"https://poststatus.com/?p=101223";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:69:"https://poststatus.com/laura-nelson-on-wordpress-and-email-marketing/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:3225:"<p class="has-drop-cap">Laura is the Marketing Manager at MailPoet — a popular email marketing plugin for WordPress. She’s been working in the WordPress space for the past eight years, with experience in both agency and in-house marketing teams.</p>



<p><strong>Laura Nelson and Cory Miller talk about creating content for email marketing.</strong></p>







<div class="wp-container-3 wp-block-columns sponsor has-theme-palette-8-background-color has-background" id="Gravity-Forms">
<div class="wp-container-1 wp-block-column">
<h3><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f64f.png" alt="?" class="wp-smiley" /> Sponsor: <a href="https://poststat.us/gravity">Gravity Forms</a></h3>



<p><strong><a href="https://poststat.us/gravity">Gravity Forms</a></strong> is a powerful form builder for WordPress and the #1 choice for businesses and web professionals across the globe. Its vast array of features, intuitive drag-and-drop form editor, and extensive ecosystem of add-ons, ensure customers can design beautiful, intelligent, and accessible forms for any project requirement.</p>
</div>



<div class="wp-container-2 wp-block-column is-vertically-aligned-center"><div class="wp-block-image cloudways-logo">
<a href="https://poststat.us/gravity"><img width="392" height="299" src="https://cdn.poststatus.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/gravity-forms-logo-stacked.png" alt="Gravity Forms" class="wp-image-88956" title="Cloudways Logo" /></a><a href="https://poststat.us/gravity">Gravity Forms</a></div></div>
</div>



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



<ul><li><a href="https://twitter.com/corymiller303">Cory Miller (Twitter)</a></li><li><a href="https://twitter.com/laura_nelson_">Laura Nelson (Twitter)</a></li><li><a href="https://twitter.com/post_status">Post Status (Twitter)</a></li></ul>



<p class="has-background">The <strong>Post Status Draft</strong> podcast is geared toward WordPress professionals, with interviews, news, and deep analysis. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f4dd.png" alt="?" class="wp-smiley" /><br /><br /><a href="https://poststatus.com/category/post-status-podcasts/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Browse our archives</a>, and don’t forget to subscribe via <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/post-status-draft-wordpress/id976403008" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">iTunes</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS8ySkU5c2M4UA" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Google Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/PostStatus" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">YouTube</a>, <a href="http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/krogsgard/post-status-draft-wordpress-podcast" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Stitcher</a>, <a href="https://wordpress-post-status-draft-podcast.simplecast.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Simplecast</a>, or <a href="https://feeds.simplecast.com/2JE9sc8P">RSS</a>. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f3a7.png" alt="?" class="wp-smiley" /></p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 02 Aug 2022 21:15:08 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Olivia Bisset";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:2;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:87:"Do The Woo Community: What is a WordPress Developer with Ebonie, Lisa, Kathy and Robbie";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=72557";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:50:"https://dothewoo.io/defining-a-worpress-developer/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:391:"<p>Defining the parameters of what a WordPress or WooCommerce developer is has never been cut and dry.</p>
<p>&gt;&gt; The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://dothewoo.io/defining-a-worpress-developer/">What is a WordPress Developer with Ebonie, Lisa, Kathy and Robbie</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://dothewoo.io">Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community</a>	.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 02 Aug 2022 09:43:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:3;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:79:"Post Status: Does “Full-Site Editing” Need a New, “User-Friendly” Name?";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:32:"https://poststatus.com/?p=103515";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:76:"https://poststatus.com/does-full-site-editing-need-a-new-user-friendly-name/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:1821:"<p class="has-drop-cap">I've been thinking about this question and the others related to it that <strong>Josepha Haden Chomphosy</strong> <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/07/27/giving-fse-a-more-user-friendly-name/">posted last week</a>. There's been a strong comment discussion so far, and I discovered <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/07/27/giving-fse-a-more-user-friendly-name/#comment-43537">what my view on it is now</a> by noticing what is going on in the grammar of &#8220;Editing&#8221; versus &#8220;Editor.&#8221;  </p>



<p>&#8220;Full Site Editing&#8221; ends with a gerund, which is a verb that's used like a noun, <a href="https://theeditorsblog.net/2018/03/07/talk-about-gerunds/">but even more specifically</a>: &#8220;a gerund names or identifies actions, states of being, and states of mind rather than people, places, things, and ideas.&#8221;</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>A gerund isn’t a verb showing what someone or something is doing; it is the thing itself that’s doing something or being something or having something done to it.</p></blockquote>



<p>&#8220;The &#8230; Editor&#8221; is a noun describing a thing that is also a place. You can &#8220;go into the editor.&#8221; But you &#8220;go into editing mode&#8221; — a change of state, not a different place. You acquire different capabilities. </p>



<p>Maybe eventually full site editing mode in some WordPress themes will mean you can edit layout (presentation) and content comprehensively. Maybe there will still need to be an option to zero in and focus on one piece of content. Currently, these are two distinct things that feel very different even in FSE themes. Complicating matters, classic, block, and hybrid themes without FSE are totally different user experience contexts.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 02 Aug 2022 03:38:53 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:10:"Dan Knauss";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:4;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:89:"WordPress.org blog: WP Briefing: Episode 37: The World of WordPress on World Wide Web Day";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:53:"https://wordpress.org/news/?post_type=podcast&p=13198";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:91:"https://wordpress.org/news/2022/08/episode-37-the-world-of-wordpress-on-world-wide-web-day/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:23622:"<p>In the thirty-seventh episode of the WordPress Briefing, WordPress users and contributors reflect on how WordPress has changed their understanding of the web as we celebrate World Wide Web Day.</p>



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



<h2>Credits</h2>



<p>Editor:&nbsp;<a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/dustinhartzler/">Dustin Hartzler</a><br />Logo:&nbsp;<a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/beafialho/">Beatriz Fialho</a><br />Production:&nbsp;<a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/santanainniss/">Santana Inniss</a> &amp; <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/cbringmann/">Chloé Bringmann</a><br />Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod</p>



<p>Guests: </p>



<ul><li><a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/awarner20/">Adam Warner</a></li><li><a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/aliceorru/">Alice Orrù</a></li><li><a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/thewebprincess/">Dee Teal</a></li><li><a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/femkreations/">Femy Praseeth</a></li><li><a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/jillbinder/">Jill Binder</a></li><li><a href="https://wordpress.org/support/users/mariaojob/">Mary Job</a></li><li><a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/onealtr/">Oneal Rosero</a></li><li><a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/iamsirotee/">Theophilus Adegbohungbe</a></li><li><a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/ugyensupport/">Ugyen Dorji</a></li></ul>



<h2>References</h2>



<p><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community/handbook/meetup-organizer/event-formats/diversity-speaker-training-workshop/">Diverse Speaker Training Group</a></p>



<p><a href="https://us.wordcamp.org/2022/support-underrepresented-speakers-at-wordcamp-us/">Support Underrepresented Speakers at WordCamp US</a></p>



<p><a href="https://asia.wordcamp.org/2023/call-for-speakers/">Call of Speakers &#8211; WordCamp Asia 2023</a></p>



<p><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/mobile/2022/07/27/refocusing-the-wordpress-app-on-core-features/">Refocusing the WordPress App on Core Features</a></p>



<p><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/design/2022/07/08/project-kickoff-wordpress-org-homepage-and-download-page-redesign/">WordPress.org Homepage and Download Redesign </a></p>



<h2>Transcript</h2>



<span id="more-13198"></span>



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



<p>Hello, everyone! And welcome to the WordPress Briefing: the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go!</p>



<p><strong>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:39]&nbsp;</strong></p>



<p>Today is one of my favorite niche holidays &#8211; World Wide Web Day &#8211; which serves to raise awareness about the origins of the World Wide Web project. WordPress, as part of Web 2.0, only ever had a chance to exist because the web, as we have come to know it exists. So in order to mark this nerdy day on the WP Briefing, I invited a number of community members to share a bit about how WordPress has been a part of their lives.</p>



<p>But first, let&#8217;s do some introductions.&nbsp;</p>



<p><strong>[Adam Warner 00:01:07]</strong></p>



<p>My name is <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/awarner20/">Adam Warner</a>, and I&#8217;m originally from a small town in west Michigan, now residing in Orlando, Florida.&nbsp;</p>



<p><strong>[Alice Orrù 00:01:15]&nbsp;</strong></p>



<p>My name is <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/aliceorru/">Alicia Orrù</a>. I&#8217;m Italian. I was born in the beautiful island of Sardinia, but I&#8217;ve been living in Spain in the province of Barcelona for 10 years.</p>



<p><strong>[Dee Teal 00:01:26]</strong></p>



<p>My name is <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/thewebprincess/">Dee Teal</a>; Dee is short for Denise. I&#8217;m from New Zealand, but I live In Melbourne.</p>



<p><strong>[Femy Praseeth 00:01:33]</strong></p>



<p>Yeah, my name is <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/femkreations/">Femy Praseeth</a>. I was born and raised in India and now live in San Jose, California, with my family and cuddly Doodle.</p>



<p><strong>[Jill Binder 00:01:41]&nbsp;</strong></p>



<p>My name is <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/jillbinder/">Jill Binder</a>, and I&#8217;ve just moved back to Vancouver, Canada.&nbsp;</p>



<p><strong>[Mary Job 00:01:47]&nbsp;</strong></p>



<p>My name is <a href="https://wordpress.org/support/users/mariaojob/">Mary Job</a>. I&#8217;ve been using WordPress since 2015, and I&#8217;m from Nigeria. I&#8217;m from the Western part of Nigeria. Ijebu precisely.&nbsp;</p>



<p><strong>[Oneal Rosero 00:01:57]</strong></p>



<p>Yes. My name is <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/onealtr/">Oneal Rosero</a>. I am from the Philippines and I&#8217;ve been using WordPress since 2007.&nbsp;</p>



<p><strong>[Theophilus Adegbohungbe</strong> <strong>00:02:06]&nbsp;</strong></p>



<p>Thank you. My name is <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/iamsirotee/">Theophilus Adegbohungbe</a> . And I&#8217;m from Ilesa, Osun State in Nigeria. </p>



<p><strong>[Ugyen Dorji 00:02:14]</strong></p>



<p>My name is <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/ugyensupport/">Ugyen Dorji</a> and I&#8217;m from Bhutan. And I&#8217;m working with WordPress for more than five years.&nbsp;</p>



<p><strong>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:22]&nbsp;</strong></p>



<p>One of the things I enjoy the most about being part of any community is being able to see how people change and grow over time as they learn and gain confidence in their own expertise. So a favorite early question is naturally, ‘How has WordPress changed your World?’</p>



<p><strong>[Alice Orrù 00:02:37]&nbsp;</strong></p>



<p>WordPress changed my world in many ways. But, uh, starting from the moment, it allowed me to become part of a global connected and welcome community. I started using WordPress as a blogger many, many years ago, but it was in 2015 that I started working behind the scenes of WordPress with a plugin company.</p>



<p>And that was the moment when everything changed, basically, because I realized that WordPress was much more than a CMS for creating websites. It was a world full of opportunities for networking, making new friends and walking a new professional path as well.&nbsp;</p>



<p><strong>[Ugyen Dorji 00:03:15]&nbsp;</strong></p>



<p>During one interview, I was asked many questions about WordPress and although I had a basic understanding of WordPress, I struggled to give detailed answers.</p>



<p>After that interview, I resolved to develop my skills and learn as much about WordPress as possible. A few months passed and I received a call from ServeMask In, [who] had developed a plugin called All-in-One WP Migration plugin. They offered me a position which fulfilled my wish to work with WordPress full time.</p>



<p>And because of that, I am now an active contributor to the WordPress community as bread and butter, with the best career in the world.</p>



<p><strong>[Theophilus Adegbohungbe 00:04:03]&nbsp;</strong></p>



<p>If you are very familiar with my country, Nigeria things here, it&#8217;s not as smooth as it is in other parts of the world. That is, when you are done in school in my university, you have to find means of surviving yourself.&nbsp; There is nothing like the government have work for you. There is nothing like you finish our institution and you get job instantly. So it&#8217;s very tough here. And, year by year, schools keep producing graduates with no companies to employ them and no government job again as well.</p>



<p>So I personally, I was able to gain freedom from this with the help of WordPress.</p>



<p><strong>[Femy Praseeth 00:04:51]</strong></p>



<p>WordPress completely changed my work life. I started working independently. I started freelancing with agencies and designers and, uh, building websites from their web designs. And this was around the time my son was born. Actually, he was in elementary school and I think this was around 2014 or so. I started working remotely when remote was not even a thing.</p>



<p>And there were very few companies that let you work from home and remote was not a mainstream thing at all, but with WordPress, I could set my own working hours while my son was in school.</p>



<p><strong>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:29]&nbsp;</strong></p>



<p>And of course, my preferred follow-up question of, ‘How did you hear about us?’ or ‘How did you connect to this global community?’</p>



<p><strong>[Oneal Rosero 00:05:36]&nbsp;</strong></p>



<p>Yes, actually what I love about WordPress is that it&#8217;s a community. It&#8217;s not a business. It&#8217;s not a company. It&#8217;s a community. It&#8217;s a community that&#8217;s always ready to help support, teach and encourage people. That&#8217;s how I felt when I joined the community. There&#8217;s always somebody who has your back.</p>



<p>There&#8217;s always somebody who&#8217;s going to guide you. There&#8217;s always an expert who will take your hand and lead you into the beauty that is WordPress.&nbsp;</p>



<p><strong>[Adam Warner 00:06:05]&nbsp;</strong></p>



<p>The way that I connect with the global community these days are one, of course, is .org Slack. Another of course is Twitter as there&#8217;s a very active WordPress community there.</p>



<p>And then with WordCamps all over the globe. I&#8217;m lucky enough to have been able to travel to several hundred WordCamps through the years in the US and abroad. And that&#8217;s one of the most rewarding parts is meeting people from all over the world and you see really how small and the world really is and how similar we really all are.</p>



<p><strong>[Theophilus Adegbohungbe 00:06:39]&nbsp;</strong></p>



<p>So, not until 2020. I don’t know if you know this lady, a very vibrant lady in WordPress. She&#8217;s from Nigeria; her name is Mary Job, and she&#8217;s really promoting WordPress here. So it was through her that I got to know about the community. Yes.</p>



<p><strong>[Jill Binder 00:06:54]</strong></p>



<p>My work is the global WordPress community. So we hold our three programs for the global WordPress community, and we are always trying to reach more and more countries. For quite a while, it was very North America-heavy, and then I made some efforts to expand. And it&#8217;s very exciting that this year, some contributors in our team have actually launched an Asia Pacific branch of our group.&nbsp;</p>



<p>And so we have two meetings every other week where we have the America/Europe and the APAC, and we&#8217;ve also been able to reach other countries as well, but we typically reach something like between 20 and 50 countries a year, depending on the year. So a hundred percent global. Yes.</p>



<p><strong>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:39]&nbsp;</strong></p>



<p>How has WordPress, either the CMS or the project, made you feel more connected? And are there any surprising connections that came from WordPress?</p>



<p><strong>[Dee Teal&nbsp; 00:07:47]&nbsp;</strong></p>



<p>I guess the surprising connections I think that have come from WordPress have been the fact that I feel like I&#8217;ve got friends all over the world. And a lot of those have come out of community involvement and from contributing. That I could go to a, a meetup pretty much anywhere in the world and probably find somebody I know, or at least a second degree connection of somebody that I haven&#8217;t, you know, that I might not have met, but know somebody that I know. And certainly that happens fairly regularly.&nbsp;</p>



<p><strong>[Mary Job 00:08:13]</strong></p>



<p>WordPress. The WordPress project, the community, has made me feel connected in a huge way, because I am literally surrounded by everything WordPress. So I like how, when you meet somebody who does WordPress, there&#8217;s this instant, ‘Oh, we&#8217;re brothers,’ or&nbsp; ‘Oh, we&#8217;re sisters!’ You know? There&#8217;s that feeling? That&#8217;s how I feel.&nbsp;</p>



<p>So when I see somebody who does WordPress, as I do, I&#8217;m like, ‘Oh yeah, we&#8217;re, kin.’ You know? We are family. That&#8217;s how I feel when I meet people who do WordPress. And I&#8217;ve met quite a number of people who do WordPress from like around the world. Like I have a friend here, he&#8217;s from the Benin Republic, and we host started a dinner on Friday night and one of my guests was asking me, ‘How did you guys meet?’</p>



<p>I was like, ‘Oh yeah, we work in the same WordPress ecosystem.’ He attended our WordCamp, we became friends, and we just literally became really good friends. So I have tons of people that I&#8217;ve met like that I hold in high esteem.</p>



<p><strong>[Ugyen Dorji 00:09:12]&nbsp;</strong></p>



<p>WordPress Meetups are the seeds that lead to the growth of WordPress communities. WordCamp is a platform for plugin and theme developers to meet WordPress users and website developers. It&#8217;s a great environment where many incredible discussions about WordPress takes place. With each WordCamp there is a &#8220;tribe&#8221; meeting, where I think people [can] get more connected. It&#8217;s a fantastic opportunity for aspiring computer engineers, generators and get to showcase their talent and meet each other.</p>



<p><strong>[Alice Orrù 00:09:51]&nbsp;</strong></p>



<p>On the project level, it has given me the opportunity to feel like an active part of a global project. The idea that I can give my contribution to making the web a better place &#8211; it’s amazing. And I do so with the Translation team, so making WordPress accessible to all the people that use the core plugins and themes in Italian, and prefer to do that in Italian.</p>



<p><strong>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:10:18]</strong>&nbsp;</p>



<p>What area of the WordPress world is most important to you?</p>



<p><strong>[Jill Binder 00:10:21]</strong></p>



<p>I have a little bit of a passion for diversity in tech and diversity in WordPress, specifically around events. And so, here&#8217;s a chance to name the three programs that we&#8217;ve been working on this year. So as mentioned a few times, we have our <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community/handbook/meetup-organizer/event-formats/diversity-speaker-training-workshop/">Diverse Speaker Workshop</a> that helps people go from not even having the thought that people could step up on stage.</p>



<p>And then the second program is because of the pandemic. There was no longer the straight path from taking our workshop to speaking, because we used to hold them or people used to hold them for their WordCamps and meetups. And so it was like, okay, you&#8217;ve taken. Apply for our next WordCamp or meetup. But during the pandemic, that wasn&#8217;t a thing.</p>



<p>So we have this amazing channel that we welcome everyone to join, allies and people from underrepresented groups who are interested in speaking or interested in supporting people and speaking. And that&#8217;s the Diverse Speaker channel <a href="https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C028SE81N3H">diverse-speaker-support</a> channel on the Make WordPress slack.</p>



<p>And the third program is, and we, we went through a name change recently. So I&#8217;ll try to remember the new change it&#8217;s Organizing Inclusive and Diverse WordPress Events. And this is for WordCamp and meetup organizers to learn. We&#8217;ve learned over the last couple years, how important it is to create inclusive spaces and be good allies.</p>



<p>But how do we actually do that? And a few of us created a very action oriented workshop in 2019 for WCUS, and that is now the basis of the work that we are bringing to people and people are loving it.. We&#8217;ve had people report a 40%, self-report 40%, increase in feeling prepared to create an inclusive event from before and after taking that workshop, which is super cool.</p>



<p>Yeah. So, that’s my passion.&nbsp;</p>



<p><strong>[Oneal Rosero 00:12:13]&nbsp;</strong></p>



<p>I really love helping the WP Diversity team. I love running the workshops. I love running the workshops for myself, because I used to do training for software back before the pandemic. I used to train up to a thousand people a year in person, sometimes like 500 people in a room at once.</p>



<p>But of course I had to shift. I had to pivot to online training, which is what the training team has brought for me. And the focus on the diversity. I like running the workshops. I like running workshops for different groups, different countries, because it&#8217;s nice to meet new people. It&#8217;s nice to hear about their culture, about the limitations that people have in Africa with connectivity.</p>



<p>So they, they resort to using WhatsApp on their phone in order to do a meetup. That&#8217;s how they do their, their meetings, their discussions. It&#8217;s unlike other countries where we can do video calls. They have to use their mobile phones because connectivity isn&#8217;t accessible.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Places like in the Philippines that get affected when it starts to rain a little bit, we lose our internet. So we have backups and our backups have backups. So there are many things that you learn that are different when you&#8217;re living in the city, when you&#8217;re living in the provinces, in the country. So it&#8217;s so many things that you learn about people and how they&#8217;re able to adapt.&nbsp;</p>



<p><strong>[Adam Warner 00:13:35]</strong>&nbsp;</p>



<p>Enabling end users to reach their goals. And whether that means participating in contributing to the software, to the Core software itself, in terms of UI/UX usability. That can include participating in the community and sharing your knowledge proactively with users who may be new to the platform, or have used WordPress for a while, but now want to step up their game, get a little deeper into using their websites as a tool for growth, for whatever business that they&#8217;re in. So, I mean, overall, the, the most important part of the WordPress world to me are the end users. And, you know, there, there is this quote unquote inner circle of WordPress community people. People who are involved in .org, people who contribute to the software, people who contribute to the 20 plus make.wordpress.org teams.</p>



<p>Those we have to keep in mind, are not the average user by and far. They are not the typical user that hears the word WordPress and then goes out and searches it and then has to figure out how to use it. So I think user experience is probably the most important part for me and making sure that any of that innate knowledge that we have in that inner circle of WordPress because many of us have been using it for so long, keeping in mind that is not the norm. And it&#8217;s not the scale at which WordPress is used and, and making sure we translate complex concepts down to a layperson&#8217;s terms that might not be as familiar.&nbsp;</p>



<p><strong>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:15:17]&nbsp;</strong></p>



<p>One of the things that I have always found so fascinating about the web and WordPress’ role in it is how it has made the world simultaneously smaller and bigger. By giving voices to the voiceless we help each other find our community niches regardless of where they are in the world. Some of your closest friends could be people you would never meet in your own neighborhood. Well, let’s hear what some of our community members had to say about that.</p>



<p><strong>[Dee Tea 00:15:42]</strong></p>



<p>I think the thing that has been most empowering is, is coming into the project either in terms of contributing time and efforts to the community, which is where most of my contribution has been &#8211; has always been about this is a really cool thing, and I really want to build this.</p>



<p>And so I&#8217;ll put my time and efforts into building WordPress. Not for me, but because I see its value and I see its community and I see that the contribution that it&#8217;s making to the world and I, and that&#8217;s really important. But finding that on the other side of that was a huge amount of personal benefit for me in my career, in the friendships that I&#8217;ve made.</p>



<p>But I feel like if I had been approaching the community with, I want a better career, I wanna meet all of these people and I want, and I want all of this. From, “I want” for me, instead of, I want for this project, for the community and effectively for the world with that, you know, that whole democratized, the democratizing of publishing is this thing that serves the world.</p>



<p>I think that&#8217;s been the key for me is that I absolutely have reaped amazing benefits from it, but it came out of that sense of, I see this value here and I want to contribute to that because it&#8217;s gonna have value, not just for me, but for a whole slew of people. And so, uh, you know, for much, much bigger impact than just on me.</p>



<p>And so I think that&#8217;s the important thing for me is that sense of, if you approach it with that attitude of what can I do to help? It&#8217;s amazing what you will find yourself helped with in return.</p>



<p><strong>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:17:24]&nbsp;</strong></p>



<p>I hope that you enjoyed this tour of WordPress in the World Wide Web. I want to share a big thank you to all of the folks who contributed to our little WordPress Briefing celebration of World Wide Web Day today.</p>



<p>And that brings us now to our small list of big things. So firstly, we&#8217;ve got a couple of updates from our upcoming flagship events. WordCamp US has announced a speaker support fund specifically for historically underrepresented speakers at the event. You can donate to the fund on the page if you&#8217;d like, and there are also directions on how to request support, if you are part of an underrepresented group.&nbsp;</p>



<p>From the folks over at WordCamp Asia, the call for speakers is live. That&#8217;s taking place in February, 2023. But it&#8217;s never too early to brush up those presentations and get them submitted.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Next big thing is that there are some changes coming to the WordPress mobile app. A lot of the Jetpack functionality will be removed from it, so this is going to have a little bit of an effect on daily users of the app, but it will also have an effect on regular contributors. I&#8217;ll have a link to the full write up in the show notes so that you don&#8217;t have to guess or hold it all in your memory.&nbsp;</p>



<p>And finally, this excellent design that you see on wordpress.org/news is finally making its way out to the next parts of the wordpress.org website. Before you know, it, there will be a fresh looking homepage as well as few other pages and then… to infinity and beyond (or something like that).&nbsp;</p>



<p>And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I&#8217;m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. And next up I&#8217;ll be taking just a mid-year break from the podcast. And so the next time that I actually see you again, will be in September.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Mon, 01 Aug 2022 23:15:02 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:15:"Chloe Bringmann";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:5;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:92:"Do The Woo Community: dev_life snippet: Back-end, Front-end WooCommerce Performance Insights";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=72483";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:72:"https://dothewoo.io/back-end-front-end-woocommerce-performance-insights/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:436:"<p>When it comes to performance on a WooCommerce site, without proper diagnostics, you're wasting your time quite often.</p>
<p>&gt;&gt; The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://dothewoo.io/back-end-front-end-woocommerce-performance-insights/">dev_life snippet: Back-end, Front-end WooCommerce Performance Insights</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://dothewoo.io">Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community</a>	.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Mon, 01 Aug 2022 09:42:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:6;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:52:"WordPress.org blog: People of WordPress: Carla Doria";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:35:"https://wordpress.org/news/?p=13201";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:67:"https://wordpress.org/news/2022/07/people-of-wordpress-carla-doria/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:10299:"<p><strong>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 Carla Doria, a customer support specialist from South America on how WordPress opened up a new world for her, and gave her the ability to help the local community</strong>.</p>



<p>For Carla, working with WordPress is a vital part of her life. It gave her a career and a community, in which she she would organize the first WordCamp in her city, Cochabamba, and the first in Bolivia.</p>



<p>Carla studied industrial engineering and has a master’s degree in environmental studies.<br />Her first experience with WordPress was when she decided to start a small business designing and selling cushions and bedclothes.&nbsp;While Carla sat in the small store she had rented, hoping that people stopping at the shop windows would step in to buy something, she decided she needed to create a website.</p>



<h2><strong>First steps with WordPress</strong></h2>



<p>Carla had no budget to hire somebody, but she felt confident&nbsp; she could learn things on her own.&nbsp;</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>“Learning to use WordPress requires no code skills or a technical background. It needs an adventurous and playful spirit.” </p><cite>Carla Doria</cite></blockquote>



<p>She had always been studious, and decided she would figure out how to build a website herself. Carla ended up building a simple blog with WordPress. At the time, she didn’t even have a budget to buy a custom domain, so she used a free subdomain.<br /><br />“Learning to use WordPress is easy. It requires no code skills or a technical background at all. It only needs an adventurous and playful spirit,” said Carla</p>



<p>There were no profits, and any income mainly went to pay the store’s rent. At the time, her previous company contacted her for a job opening that matched her profile. Carla needed that income and decided to closed the store and forget about being an entrepreneur.</p>



<p>Back in employee mode, Carla started her new job as a technical writer for a software development company. Since Carla had completed her master’s degree in the UK, she was proficient in English. Her close affinity for computers and technology made it easy for her to translate complex software jargon into simple tutorial steps.</p>



<p>As Carla got more interested in technical writing and started to improve her writing skills. This reconnected her with her previous enthusiasm for writing, and she decided to channel that interest into a blog.</p>



<h2><strong>Diving deep</strong></h2>



<p>Creating her blog helped her become more familiar with WordPress and building websites. In 2015, Carla blogged about writing, her thoughts, book reviews, and everything that came to mind.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Through looking for answers to specific issues using her WordPress blog, Carla found the support forums a useful place to go. Soon she realized that she could also help answer other people’s questions.</p>



<img width="600" height="900" src="https://i1.wp.com/wordpress.org/news/files/2022/07/carla-doria-2.jpg?resize=600%2C900&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-13189" />



<p>Carla began checking the forums as a hobby. She liked that she was able to help people and learn more while doing so. </p>



<p>Instead of surfing social media during her work breaks, Carla focused on checking the WordPress forums. Through this she learnt about a support job in one of the global firms.</p>



<p>She felt the job was made for her and was excited to support people in building their websites with WordPress. The role offered the possibility to work remotely and travel while still working.</p>



<p>After three years as a technical writer, her career felt stuck. She was certain she did not want to return to any job related to industrial engineering. </p>



<p>Carla did not get through the selection process the first time. But after nearly 18 months between three applications and learning HTML and CSS, Carla finally secured a support job in 2016. With this job, WordPress became her main source of income.</p>



<h2><strong>Leading a local WordPress community</strong></h2>



<p>On the job, Carla learned about the WordPress communities around the world and WordCamps. But when somebody asked about the WordPress community where Carla lived, she didn’t know what to say. Was there a community?</p>



<p>She discovered no local group existed, so she researched what was needed to setup a meetup. Carla discussed the idea with others, but hesitated as she thought it would require an expert WordPress developer to organize.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>



<p>But after trying to gauge interest, Carla realized that the only way to find community members was to start a community. In 2017, the <a href="https://www.meetup.com/Cochabamba-WordPress-Meetup/">WordPress community in Cochabamba</a> was born.</p>



<img width="684" height="391" src="https://i0.wp.com/wordpress.org/news/files/2022/07/Comunidad_WP_Cochabamba_FSE_event2022.jpg?resize=684%2C391&ssl=1" alt="The theme preview screen in the WordPress Cochabamba meeting on creating your website with blocks." class="wp-image-13236" /><em>WordPress meeting in Cochabamba explored creating your website with blocks</em>



<p>The group has had ups and downs, probably similar to any other community. Although Cochabamba is not a big city, they had issues finding a location that was free and available to anyone who wanted to join. People came with different levels of knowledge, from people with&nbsp;vast experience with WordPress to people with no experience but who wanted to learn.&nbsp;</p>



<p>The community grew during the pandemic, as meetups went online and people from other cities in Bolivia were able to attend. After restrictions were lifted, there was a lot of excitement amongst members to meet each other in person.</p>



<h2><strong>Giving back through speaking</strong></h2>



<img width="600" height="900" src="https://i1.wp.com/wordpress.org/news/files/2022/07/carla-doria-1.jpg?resize=600%2C900&ssl=1" alt="Carla reading a book under a tree" class="wp-image-13191" />



<p>The community also helped Carla to develop a new skill in public speaking. She applied to be a speaker at WordCamp Mexico <a href="https://mexicocity.wordcamp.org/2019/">2019</a> and <a href="https://mexicocity.wordcamp.org/2020/">2020</a>, <a href="https://guayaquil.wordcamp.org/2019/">WordCamp Guayaquil 2019</a>, and <a href="https://colombia.wordcamp.org/2020/">WordCamp Colombia in 2020</a>. Her confidence grew while she enjoyed connecting with other communities and meeting people who were on similar pathways. Not all of them were developers, as she had presumed. Many, like her, started out as bloggers.</p>



<img width="977" height="419" src="https://i1.wp.com/wordpress.org/news/files/2022/07/WCC.png?resize=977%2C419&ssl=1" alt="WordCamp Cochabamba's logo with blue and grey lettering and a hat" class="wp-image-13228" />



<p>Finally, after three years, Carla applied to organize her first WordCamp in 2021 in <a href="https://cochabamba.wordcamp.org/2021/">Cochabamba</a>. She had never imagined organizing any WordCamp, and through this having the experience to talk to sponsors and contact companies, and lead a group of people with different talents and backgrounds. Carla felt she had learnt so much from the experience.</p>



<p>Thanks to WordPress, Carla found a job she enjoyed, was able to work remotely, and help build something in her community to help people learn skills and find career opportunities.</p>



<p>Carla feels grateful for all she has been able to do thanks to WordPress. She said: “WordPress has led me to find good jobs. It also has allowed me to contribute to a community of friends that love learning about WordPress.”  </p>



<p></p>



<h2>Share the stories</h2>



<p>Help share these stories of open source contributors and continue to grow the community. Meet more WordPressers in the <a href="https://wordpress.org/news/category/newsletter/interviews/">People of WordPress series</a>.</p>



<h2>Contributors</h2>



<p>Thanks to Alison Rothwell (<a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/wpfiddlybits/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>wpfiddlybits</a>), Abha Thakor (<a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/webcommsat/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>webcommsat</a>), Larissa Murillo (<a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/lmurillom/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>lmurillom</a>), Meher Bala (<a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/meher/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>meher</a>), Chloe Bringmann (<a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/cbringmann/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>cbringmann</a>), and Surendra Thakor (<a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/sthakor/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>sthakor</a>) for work on this feature, and to all the contributors who helped with the series recently. Thank you too to Carla Doria (<a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/carlisdm/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>carlisdm</a>) for sharing her experiences.</p>



<p>Thank you to Josepha Haden (@chantaboune) and Topher DeRosia (<a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/topher1kenobe/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>topher1kenobe</a>) for their support of the People of WordPress series.</p>



<div class="wp-block-media-text is-stacked-on-mobile is-vertically-aligned-center"><img width="180" height="135" src="https://i1.wp.com/wordpress.org/news/files/2020/03/heropress_logo_180.png?resize=180%2C135&ssl=1" alt="HeroPress logo" class="wp-image-8409 size-full" /><div class="wp-block-media-text__content">
<p class="has-small-font-size"><em>This People of WordPress feature is inspired by an essay originally published on </em><a href="https://heropress.com/"><em>HeroPress.com</em></a><em>, a community initiative created by Topher DeRosia. It highlights people in the WordPress community who have overcome barriers and whose stories might otherwise go unheard. </em>#HeroPress </p>
</div></div>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Sun, 31 Jul 2022 19:00:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:10:"Meher Bala";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:7;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:87:"WPTavern: Gutenberg Contributors Experiment with Custom Labeling of Blocks in List View";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=136428";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:98:"https://wptavern.com/gutenberg-contributors-experiment-with-custom-labeling-of-blocks-in-list-view";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:3384:"<p>It&#8217;s easy to get lost among a sea of Cover, Group, and Paragraph blocks while navigating the block editor&#8217;s List View. Clicking around wildly will generally surface the block you&#8217;re seeking, but it&#8217;s not efficient or intuitive. Gutenberg contributors have some ideas and prototypes aimed at giving the List View more context.</p>



<p>Rich Tabor <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/33583">proposed</a> a solution where users can double-click to rename a block within the list, giving it a unique identifier. Gutenberg developer Dave Smith created <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/42605">an experimental PR</a> that adds custom labeling/naming of blocks in the List View. It currently works for Group blocks only. Tabor posted a demo to Twitter and the response was overwhelmingly positive.</p>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">It's coming → <a href="https://t.co/A9sbjIzYmL">https://t.co/A9sbjIzYmL</a> <a href="https://t.co/FHEhqOxjZL">pic.twitter.com/FHEhqOxjZL</a></p>&mdash; Rich Tabor (@richard_tabor) <a href="https://twitter.com/richard_tabor/status/1550155092837470208?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 21, 2022</a></blockquote>
</div>



<p>&#8220;Custom block labels in the List view is a must-have,&#8221; Chris Bell <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/33583#issuecomment-938557620">commented</a> on the original proposal. &#8220;It improves productivity and adds psychological order/control over the layout.</p>



<p>&#8220;I think popovers should only be used for extra long edge-case custom labels as I imagine most labels will be 2-3 words max.&#8221; He posted an example of what that might look like.</p>



<img />



<p>Extra long labels would simply be truncated to maintain the width of the List View:</p>



<img />



<p>Smith posted a list of questions regarding the technical implementation he proposed:</p>



<ul><li>Is&nbsp;<code>alias</code>&nbsp;attribute the best place to store the data?</li><li>Should the custom label be local to the editor or should it be attached to the block?</li><li>Can we add a means to &#8220;reset&#8221; the custom label and go back to the standard label?</li><li>Do we need a &#8220;submit&#8221; button as well as the&nbsp;<code>ENTER</code>-to-submit mechanic?</li></ul>



<p>Contributors are currently testing and weighing in on these questions. Smith recommended progress on the feature wait to align with the solution in another active <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/40393">ticket</a> that seeks to add a metadata attribute to blocks, allowing section naming and future semantic meta information. Once that is resolved, custom labeling for blocks in the List View will have a more straightforward technical solution.</p>



<p>In the meantime, Gutenberg 13.7 added a related <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/41855">update</a> as a first step that improves navigation in the List View. It will now automatically display Heading content for the button label text when available. </p>



<img />



<p>If you are using the Gutenberg plugin, this is available right now in the most recent update. Custom labels will be coming next to provide a clearer overview of other types of blocks and make page building/editing much easier.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 29 Jul 2022 20:23:29 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:8;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:54:"Post Status: Post Status Picks for the Week of July 25";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:32:"https://poststatus.com/?p=103385";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:54:"https://poststatus.com/post-status-picks-july-25-2022/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:2580:"<div class="has-background has-theme-palette-7-background-color wp-block-post-excerpt"><p class="wp-block-post-excerpt__excerpt"><strong>Syntax.fm</strong> has an interview with <strong>Syed Balkhi</strong> about <strong>Awesome Motive</strong>, how <strong>WordPress</strong> and <strong>PHP</strong> are viewed by developers, and his charity efforts. <strong>The WP Minute</strong> features <strong>Amber Hinds</strong> on <strong>Equalize Digital</strong>’s first exit. <strong>Sean Blakeley</strong> <a href="https://wptavern.com/podcast/36-sean-blakeley-on-transitioning-a-large-agency-over-to-gutenberg">talks about transitioning a large agency</a> over to <strong>Gutenberg</strong> at the <strong>WP Tavern</strong>&#8216;s <strong>Jukebox</strong>. </p></div>


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



<h2 id="h-post-status-podcast-picks">Post Status Podcast Picks <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f399.png" alt="?" class="wp-smiley" /></h2>



<ul><li><strong>Syntax.fm</strong>: <a href="https://syntax.fm/show/490/supper-club-syed-balkhi-and-wordpress">An interview with</a> <strong>Syed Balkhi</strong> about <strong>Awesome Motive</strong>, how <strong>WordPress</strong> and <strong>PHP</strong> are viewed by developers, and his charity efforts.</li><li><strong>The WP Minute:</strong> <strong>Amber Hinds</strong> <a href="https://thewpminute.com/selling-wp-conference-schedule/">shares her point of view</a> on <strong>Equalize Digital’s</strong> first “exit.”</li><li><strong>WP Tavern</strong>: <strong>Sean Blakeley</strong> <a href="https://wptavern.com/podcast/36-sean-blakeley-on-transitioning-a-large-agency-over-to-gutenberg">talks about transitioning a large agency</a> over to Gutenberg.</li></ul>



<div class="wp-container-7 wp-block-group has-theme-palette-8-background-color has-background"><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container">
<p><strong>Get our weekly WordPress community news digest</strong> — Post Status' <a href="https://poststatus.com/news-and-insights/week-in-review/">Week in Review</a> — also available in <a href="https://poststatus.com/newsletter">our newsletter</a>. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f48c.png" alt="?" class="wp-smiley" />  </p>



<p>And don't miss <strong>the latest updates from the people making WordPress</strong>. We've got you covered with <a href="https://poststatus.com/make-wordpress/">This Week at WordPress.org</a>. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/2699.png" alt="⚙" class="wp-smiley" /></p>
</div></div>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 29 Jul 2022 17:48:55 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:10:"Dan Knauss";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:9;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:60:"WPTavern: WebP by Default Merged Into Core for WordPress 6.1";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=136600";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:71:"https://wptavern.com/webp-by-default-merged-into-core-for-wordpress-6-1";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4981:"<p>WebP, an image format developed by Google, which is intended to replace JPEG, PNG, and GIF file formats, will soon be generated by default for new JPEG image uploads in WordPress and used for website content. The main work for this feature was <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/53751">committed</a> to core for inclusion in the upcoming WordPress 6.1 release.</p>



<p>The initial proposal was <a href="https://wptavern.com/wordpress-performance-team-revises-proposal-for-webp-by-default">revised after significant critical feedback</a>. The most notable changes include automatically generating WebP versions of only core image sizes, keeping secondary (WebP) sub-sizes only if they are smaller than the primary MIME type, and only generating WebP images for image sizes that are intended for use in user-facing front-end content.</p>



<p>Despite a raft of revisions, and filters to control or disable WebP uploads, the proposal remained controversial. Contributors continue to report issues after testing. Many still have reservations about whether this should be opt-in or on by default.</p>



<p>&#8220;When converting medium-resolution photographs (approx 1600px – 2500px on the long edge), WebP files are often larger than the JPEG equivalent,&#8221; WordPress developer Mark Howells-Mead <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/55443#comment:14">commented</a> on the main ticket for WebP work. &#8220;(In my tests using my own photography, in around 60% of cases.) This change might make the &#8216;modern image format&#8217; test of Page Speed Insights happy, but enforcing WebP by default on sites which use a lot of photography will often cause longer image loading times.&#8221;</p>



<p>Some developers are supportive of the change but prefer for it to be off by default when it is first rolled out, to allow the ecosystem to prepare for the change.</p>



<p>&#8220;I definitely see it as a big advantage to add Core support for additional MIME types for sub-sized image files,&#8221; Matthias Reinholz <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/55443#comment:40">said</a>.  &#8220;But I can&#8217;t see adding conversion to a specific other file format as preferred behavior. This may help to optimize the market position of WebP but it will also be a serious threat to plugin authors and existing larger websites that do not pay attention to this change.</p>



<p>&#8220;Therefore, I&#8217;m questioning why this functionality should be activated by default at this stage. <strong>IMHO, it should be opt-in only.</strong> Plus ideally, we would already start to think about adding further image formats to be supported by this feature.&#8221;</p>



<p>NerdPress founder Andrew Wilder created a separate <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/56263">ticket</a> urging contributors to consider making the feature opt-in, but the ticket was closed and conversation directed back to the main ticket so as not to splinter the discussion.</p>



<p> &#8220;Making these new features opt-in instead of opt-out would be the best way to be cautious about potential impacts,&#8221; Wilder <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/55443#comment:44">said</a>.</p>



<p>&#8220;There have been many requests for this to be opt-in (as well as some asking for a setting on the Media page, rather than only a filter for developers). So far there hasn&#8217;t been any open conversation about why that&#8217;s not being taken into consideration.&#8221;</p>



<p>The notion that WebP by default should be opt-in was summarily dismissed and the conversation was not revisited before the changes were committed.</p>



<p>&#8220;The feature will have widespread benefits for users by opting in core sizes (to start) &#8211; if it were entirely opt-in it would have little impact &#8211; or benefit,&#8221; Google-sponsored Core Committer Adam Silverstein <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/55443#comment:62">said</a> in response to opponents.</p>



<p>In response to suggestions that this feature ship with a UI for enabling it on the media page, Silverstein said, &#8220;We have discussed both suggestions in chats and issues with mixed responses. Project <a href="https://wordpress.org/about/philosophy/">philosophy</a> is regularly mentioned as aligning with the current approach.&#8221; </p>



<p>The <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/55443#comment:69">ticket</a> remains open awaiting patches for a few loose threads on the technical implementation. Contributors have continued to chime in with additional concerns.</p>



<p><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/performance/2022/07/26/welcome-to-the-performance-team-blog/">The Performance team has a new blog</a> where people can follow updates on their current projects and proposals. Now that the main WebP work has been committed, the next steps will discussed in future meetings with notes posted to the new Core Performance blog.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 29 Jul 2022 17:47:47 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:10;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:113:"Post Status: “We’re not a small village anymore.” A Conversation with Kim Lipari — Post Status Draft 121";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:32:"https://poststatus.com/?p=103274";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:62:"https://poststatus.com/not-a-small-village-anymore-kim-lipari/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4560:"<div class="wp-container-9 wp-block-group has-theme-palette-8-background-color has-background"><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container"><div class="has-background has-theme-palette-8-background-color wp-block-post-excerpt"><p class="wp-block-post-excerpt__excerpt">WordPress as an economy or ecosystem is big, but the community and culture at its heart still feel small. Have we taken the time to really absorb the change that's come over the past decade? What questions should we be asking about what got us here and where we're going or want to go? </p></div>


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



<p class="yoast-reading-time__wrapper"><span class="yoast-reading-time__icon"></span><span class="yoast-reading-time__spacer"></span><span class="yoast-reading-time__descriptive-text">Estimated reading time:  </span><span class="yoast-reading-time__reading-time">1</span><span class="yoast-reading-time__time-unit"> minute</span></p>
</div></div>



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



<p class="has-drop-cap"><strong>Kim Lipari</strong> is our guest for this episode of Post Status Draft. Kim started building her career in WordPress over ten years ago, and her agency, <strong>Valet</strong>, is almost that old. WordPress isn't a small village community anymore, says Kim, but we still talk about it as if it is. That tightly knit community is still there because — not in spite of — incredible growth. </p>



<p>But what does the fact of growth mean for a small village culture? Can it turn into an enclave or cult? Is the language of a small village still an appropriate language for leadership? Do we need to act more like we're a busy city — and make an effort to get to know our newer neighbors' stories? Can we keep (let alone scale) the values, culture, and kindness of a healthy small community as we grow?</p>







<div class="wp-container-12 wp-block-columns has-theme-palette-8-background-color has-background" id="WP-Engine">
<div class="wp-container-10 wp-block-column">
<h3 id="sponsor-wpengine"><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f64f.png" alt="?" class="wp-smiley" /> Sponsor: <a href="https://poststat.us/pagely">WP </a><a href="https://poststat.us/wpengine">Engine</a></h3>



<p><strong>WP Engine</strong> is <a href="https://poststat.us/wpengine/">the WordPress Digital Experience Platform that drives your business forward faster</a>. WP Engine makes WordPress easier and faster. It does the heavy lifting so you can focus on your core business and win online.</p>
</div>



<div class="wp-container-11 wp-block-column is-vertically-aligned-center"><div class="wp-block-image">
<a href="https://poststat.us/wpengine/"><img width="112" height="151" src="https://cdn.poststatus.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/WPE-LOGO-S-Default.svg" alt="WP Engine" class="wp-image-95924" title="WP Engine" /></a></div></div>
</div>



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



<ul><li><a href="https://twitter.com/kimberlylipari">Kim Lipari (Twitter)</a></li><li><a href="https://twitter.com/dan_knauss">Dan Knauss (Twitter)</a></li><li><a href="https://twitter.com/post_status">Post Status (Twitter)</a></li></ul>



<p class="has-background">The <strong>Post Status Draft</strong> podcast is geared toward WordPress professionals, with interviews, news, and deep analysis. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f4dd.png" alt="?" class="wp-smiley" /><br /><br /><a href="https://poststatus.com/category/post-status-podcasts/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Browse our archives</a>, and don’t forget to subscribe via <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/post-status-draft-wordpress/id976403008" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">iTunes</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS8ySkU5c2M4UA" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Google Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/PostStatus" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">YouTube</a>, <a href="http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/krogsgard/post-status-draft-wordpress-podcast" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Stitcher</a>, <a href="https://wordpress-post-status-draft-podcast.simplecast.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Simplecast</a>, or <a href="https://feeds.simplecast.com/2JE9sc8P">RSS</a>. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f3a7.png" alt="?" class="wp-smiley" /></p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 29 Jul 2022 03:17:09 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Olivia Bisset";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:11;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:66:"WPTavern: WordPress Theme Authors Are Moving to Host Fonts Locally";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=135783";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:77:"https://wptavern.com/wordpress-theme-authors-are-moving-to-host-fonts-locally";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5235:"<img />



<p>The WordPress Themes team is poised to change its guidelines on remote hosting Google Fonts and is once again strongly urging theme authors to host their fonts locally. Yoast-sponsored contributor Ari Stathopoulos published an <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/themes/2022/07/28/using-locally-hosted-google-fonts-in-themes/">update</a> today to answer some questions the team has been receiving about fonts in themes:</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>Historically, WordPress themes hosted in the&nbsp;<a href="https://w.org/themes">w.org themes repository</a>&nbsp;were not allowed to use third-party resources. This included images,&nbsp;javascript&nbsp;files,&nbsp;CSS&nbsp;files, webfonts, and other assets loaded from a remote server.</p><p>Google fonts was an exception to this rule because, at the time, there was no reliable way to implement locally-hosted webfonts, and typography is an integral part of a theme’s design.</p><p>Google fonts, however, can no longer be considered an exception to this guideline because of the GDPR and privacy implications.</p></blockquote>



<p>The team is responding to a recent German court case, which&nbsp;<a href="https://wptavern.com/german-court-fines-website-owner-for-violating-the-gdpr-by-using-google-hosted-fonts">fined a website owner for violating the GDPR by using Google-hosted webfonts</a>. This case spurred a few other threats against website owners and many questions for the Themes team.</p>



<p>What was previously a strong <a href="https://wptavern.com/wordpress-org-strongly-urges-theme-authors-to-switch-to-locally-hosted-webfonts">recommendation</a> from WordPress.org is now a warning that guidelines will be changing imminently. </p>



<p>&#8220;A theme should not be allowed to use external resources,&#8221; Stathopoulos said. &#8220;The guidelines right now allow for remote Google fonts, but that will probably change soon. If the theme is using external assets, then yes, it should call a privacy function and ensure that these assets don’t get loaded without the user’s explicit consent.&#8221;</p>



<p>A <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/55985">ticket</a> for updating WordPress&#8217; default themes to load Google fonts locally has a patch but the milestone is set for WordPress 6.1. This will make all the core themes GDPR compliant but will not arrive until October.</p>



<p>Some theme authors saw the writing on the wall a few weeks ago and have been working to update their themes to load fonts locally. </p>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">I spent the day updating all* of my WordPress themes to replace Google Fonts with locally hosted font files, given the recent policy change on the theme directory. <a href="https://t.co/yp6ZHduHjI">https://t.co/yp6ZHduHjI</a><br /><br />(*Chaplin excluded – it supports disabling them in the Customizer.) <a href="https://t.co/eKyRFT4wGm">pic.twitter.com/eKyRFT4wGm</a></p>&mdash; Anders Norén (@andersnoren) <a href="https://twitter.com/andersnoren/status/1542126387078864901?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 29, 2022</a></blockquote>
</div>



<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve decided to do this too,&#8221; Rough Pixels founder André Jutras said. &#8220;Although a few themes have a font-choosing option in the Customizer with the full Google selection. This is going to be hard to change with existing users that use it. My new theme will definitely have local fonts.&#8221;</p>



<p>Offering font selection for users inside the theme is not as straightforward as simply including one or two fonts bundled with the theme.</p>



<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve been trying to do the same with Blockbase,&#8221; Automattic developer Jason Crist said. &#8220;But Blockbase ships with a LOT of fonts to choose from so it&#8217;s been a bit of a unique challenge.&#8221;</p>



<p>In 2020, the Themes team <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/themes/2020/09/25/new-package-to-allow-locally-hosting-webfonts/">created a package</a> that helps theme authors host their webfonts locally. It was created in anticipation of removing Google Fonts as the exception to the rule prohibiting the use of CDNs to load assets. </p>



<p><a href="https://fonts.bunny.net/">Bunny Fonts</a> are are an alternative to Google Fonts that some plugin authors have on their radar now that some European jurisdictions are cracking down on Google-hosted fonts. It is an open-source, privacy-first web font platform with no tracking or logging and is fully GDPR compliant. Bunny Fonts is compatible with the Google Fonts CSS v1 API so it can function as a drop-in replacement to Google Fonts by just switching the hostname. If the Themes Team was to add any service to its exception list, Bunny Fonts would be a more privacy respecting option than Google Fonts.</p>



<p>The Themes Team is waiting on core to implement <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/46370">better support for loading local fonts</a> before making a sweeping requirement for themes hosted in the directory. In the meantime, WordPress theme authors have the time to update their themes to load Google Fonts locally before a requirement is put in place.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 28 Jul 2022 20:01:46 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:12;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:67:"Do The Woo Community: When You Really Do the Woo with Ronald Gijsel";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=72536";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:46:"https://dothewoo.io/woocommerce-ronald-gijsel/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:362:"<p>Co-host Ronald shares his experience so far having joined the WooCommerce team at Automattic. </p>
<p>&gt;&gt; The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://dothewoo.io/woocommerce-ronald-gijsel/">When You Really Do the Woo with Ronald Gijsel</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://dothewoo.io">Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community</a>	.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 28 Jul 2022 08:59:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:13;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:127:"WordCamp Central: WordCamp Jinja: Diverse Speaker Sessions, Web Design Hackathon, Teachers Workshop and Fun at the Nile Source!";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:39:"https://central.wordcamp.org/?p=3151988";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:148:"https://central.wordcamp.org/news/2022/07/wordcamp-jinja-diverse-speaker-sessions-web-design-hackathon-teachers-workshop-and-fun-at-the-nile-source/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13421:"<a href="https://central.wordcamp.org/files/2022/07/image.png"><img /></a>



<p><em><a href="https://jinja.wordcamp.org/2022/">WordCamp Jinja 2022</a> (Fri 2nd– Sat 3rd Sept 2022) will be a major community event in Jinja City, Uganda, where WordPress developers, website designers, online publishers, students and teachers will converge to share comprehensive knowledge and experiences, and to meet other WordPress users. Its going to be a great networking event that will also attract guests from all over Uganda and beyond. The main host venue will be <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/place/The+Innovation+Village+-+Jinja/@0.4241821,33.2067269,3a,75y,90t/data=!3m8!1e2!3m6!1sAF1QipOQ2B4MxWlVvX3YXh2TrPo-KBaUlEwA1KYOsPBX!2e10!3e12!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipOQ2B4MxWlVvX3YXh2TrPo-KBaUlEwA1KYOsPBX%3Dw114-h86-k-no!7i4608!8i3456!4m12!1m6!3m5!1s0x177e7b8c49a3ea9b:0xea6213d867b205e!2sThe+Innovation+Village+-+Jinja!8m2!3d0.4241821!4d33.2067269!3m4!1s0x177e7b8c49a3ea9b:0xea6213d867b205e!8m2!3d0.4241821!4d33.2067269">The Innovation Village, Plot 5 Main Street, Jinja City</a>.</em></p>



<p><em>There will be something for everyone – beginner’s training, inspirational talks, showcases, best practices, latest trends, plus an after party with lots of fun and camping at the Source of the Nile in Jinja!</em></p>



<h2><strong>Planned Activities</strong></h2>



<ol><li><strong>Diverse Speaker Presentations</strong> will be delivered on various topics ranging from what&#8217;s new in the WordPress ecosystem, show cases, website optimization (SEO, security, performance), developer tools and best practices, contributing to open source and the WordPress project, web business and professionalism, digital marketing, etc.</li><li><strong>Web Design Hackathon</strong> will connect volunteer developers with local startups in need of websites. There will be a dev challenge for Websites to be setup and a showcase of work-done be presented on the last day of the WordCamp! The Hackathon will also serve as an opportunity for meeting and working with new people! More details about the hackathon in <a href="https://twitter.com/WordPressJinja/status/1551111250544939008">this tweet</a>.</li><li><strong>Teachers Workshop</strong> will explore the integration of WordPress in the local education curriculum. Teachers will be trained on how to introduce WordPress to their students for web design topic in O-level computer studies exam, for project work and world of work assessment. Vital teaching and learning resources such as the lesson plans at <a href="https://learn.wordpress.org">learn.wordpress.org</a> will be shared. Teachers will also be inspired to take on Web Design as a side business to earn extra income alongside their school salaries! Registration of teachers and students is being done by the ICT Teachers Association via this link: <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdTKI37jKRIULq1hbBgovtDV1_WsQMDNFzySsKJSn0OdW4rGQ/viewform">bit.ly/wordcampjinja</a>.</li><li><strong>A visit to the Source of the Nile</strong> &#8211; Jinja city is nestled on the shores of Lake Victoria, Africa’s largest lake, and is deeply rooted in colorful history. The city is home to the source of the Nile, the longest river in the world. River Nile is one of the major geographic superlatives on the earth and from time immemorial, and it has been an outstanding natural land feature worth mentioning in historical books including the holy bible. The New Iconic Nile Bridge is the gateway to Jinja City. WordCamp Jinja will be wrapped up in style with a group photo and fun at the Source of Nile!</li></ol>



<p>Full <a href="https://jinja.wordcamp.org/2022/schedule/">schedule </a>of activities will be published soon.</p>



<p><strong>Accommodation</strong> For those coming to Jinja for their first time, there are several hotels and guest houses where you can reside. Check through this listing by booking.com: bit.ly/jinjahotels. You can also contact the WordCamp team at jinja@wordcamp.org for more inquiries and guidance.</p>



<h2><strong>Get Involved</strong></h2>



<p>There are several ways to get involved! Check out the details below:</p>



<ul><li><strong>Purchase Attendee Tickets:</strong> <a href="https://jinja.wordcamp.org/2022/tickets/">https://jinja.wordcamp.org/2022/tickets/</a></li><li><strong>Call for Sponsors:</strong> <a href="https://jinja.wordcamp.org/2022/call-for-sponsors/">https://jinja.wordcamp.org/2022/call-for-sponsors/</a></li><li><strong>Call for Speakers:</strong> <a href="https://jinja.wordcamp.org/2022/call-for-speakers/">https://jinja.wordcamp.org/2022/call-for-speakers/</a></li><li><strong>Call for Volunteers:</strong> <a href="https://jinja.wordcamp.org/2022/call-for-volunteers/">https://jinja.wordcamp.org/2022/call-for-volunteers/</a></li></ul>



<h2>Join the discussion via #WordCampJinja hashtag on Twitter</h2>



<div class="wp-container-3 wp-block-columns">
<div class="wp-container-1 wp-block-column">
<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Preparations for <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WordCampJinja?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#WordCampJinja</a> are in high gear! Visit <a href="https://t.co/BwFGg9CSyL">https://t.co/BwFGg9CSyL</a> to apply as speaker, volunteer or sponsor! <a href="https://twitter.com/TheVillageUG?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@TheVillageUG</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/bluehost?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@bluehost</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/jetpack?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@jetpack</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/mrkwordpress?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@mrkwordpress</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/nexcess?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@nexcess</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/weglot?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@weglot</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/WooCommerce?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@WooCommerce</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/wordpressdotcom?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@wordpressdotcom</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/techrtblog?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@techrtblog</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/ictteachersug?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@ictteachersug</a>  <a href="https://twitter.com/WordPressKLA?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@WordPressKLA</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/WordcampEntebbe?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@WordcampEntebbe</a> <a href="https://t.co/PFKwQgPZGp">pic.twitter.com/PFKwQgPZGp</a></p>&mdash; WordPress Jinja Meetup (@WordPressJinja) <a href="https://twitter.com/WordPressJinja/status/1549326219027644416?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 19, 2022</a></blockquote>
</div>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Proud ICT Teacher @ <a href="https://t.co/A2YS8cBmH4">https://t.co/A2YS8cBmH4</a> ready to attend the WordCamp 2022 at <a href="https://twitter.com/TheVillageUG?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@TheVillageUG</a> Jinja. <a href="https://twitter.com/WordPressJinja?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@WordPressJinja</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/SteveUG?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@SteveUG</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/ICTClubsUg?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@ICTClubsUg</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/MatovuHermanJo1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@MatovuHermanJo1</a> <a href="https://t.co/huCnYTguLa">pic.twitter.com/huCnYTguLa</a></p>&mdash; Kibuuka Simon Peter (@SimonKibuuka2) <a href="https://twitter.com/SimonKibuuka2/status/1551487870070042624?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 25, 2022</a></blockquote>
</div>
</div>



<div class="wp-container-2 wp-block-column">
<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Looking forward to WordCamp Jinja in Uganda Africa Great things are happening in <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Africa?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Africa</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/LoveBuiltLife?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@LoveBuiltLife</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/myquesttoteach?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@myquesttoteach</a> excited about another awesome WordCamp in Africa<a href="https://twitter.com/WordcampEntebbe?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@WordcampEntebbe</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/wordcampegypt?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@wordcampegypt</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/WordCampAfrica?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@WordCampAfrica</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/WordCampKE?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@WordCampKE</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/WordCampLagos?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@WordCampLagos</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/wordcampnigeria?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@wordcampnigeria</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/WordCampMsa?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@WordCampMsa</a> <a href="https://t.co/eNHahBPnsn">https://t.co/eNHahBPnsn</a></p>&mdash; Wm Jackson, M.Ed 33yrs Teaching; SCSU Grad (@wmjackson) <a href="https://twitter.com/wmjackson/status/1550465693358952448?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 22, 2022</a></blockquote>
</div>
</div>
</div>



<div class="wp-container-6 wp-block-columns">
<div class="wp-container-4 wp-block-column">
<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">I am so looking forward to what may be my first <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WordCamp?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#WordCamp</a> post-covid &amp; the after-party at the Source of the Nile<img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f973.png" alt="?" class="wp-smiley" />! &#8211; at <a href="https://twitter.com/WordPressJinja?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@WordPressJinja</a> &#8211; speaker &amp; volunteer applications are open &#8211; sponsors are also welcome, please<img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f60a.png" alt="?" class="wp-smiley" /><br /><br />Get your tickets at <a href="https://t.co/b1yQxad2LZ">https://t.co/b1yQxad2LZ</a><br /> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WordCampJinja?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#WordCampJinja</a> <a href="https://t.co/yjm6HyJHHG">pic.twitter.com/yjm6HyJHHG</a></p>&mdash; Mary Job (@maryojob) <a href="https://twitter.com/maryojob/status/1551177175704944647?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 24, 2022</a></blockquote>
</div>
</div>



<div class="wp-container-5 wp-block-column">
<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr"><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f310.png" alt="?" class="wp-smiley" />Volunteer developers will offer  <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/FreeWebDesign?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#FreeWebDesign</a> and support during the <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/hackerthon?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#hackerthon</a> session on day one of <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WordCampJinja?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#WordCampJinja</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/TheVillageUG?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@TheVillageUG</a><br /><br /><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f310.png" alt="?" class="wp-smiley" />Interested? Here's the Website data collection form: <a href="https://t.co/x8UZL5HsMV">https://t.co/x8UZL5HsMV</a> <br /><br /><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f310.png" alt="?" class="wp-smiley" />Call for volunteer web developers: <a href="https://t.co/llyCAUfd80">https://t.co/llyCAUfd80</a> <a href="https://t.co/aDLs9ESaYI">pic.twitter.com/aDLs9ESaYI</a></p>&mdash; WordPress Jinja Meetup (@WordPressJinja) <a href="https://twitter.com/WordPressJinja/status/1551111250544939008?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 24, 2022</a></blockquote>
</div>
</div>
</div>



<div class="wp-container-9 wp-block-columns">
<div class="wp-container-7 wp-block-column">
<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Watch: Listen in to testimonies from some teachers as they share past WordCamp experiences: <a href="https://t.co/IQwzCIU1T6">https://t.co/IQwzCIU1T6</a><br /><br />This year's <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WordCampJinja?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#WordCampJinja</a> is your chance to be transformed FOREVER! Register with us via <a href="https://t.co/VEocuou0JJ">https://t.co/VEocuou0JJ</a> or buy general ticket at <a href="https://t.co/uK4a0qXd5O">https://t.co/uK4a0qXd5O</a></p>&mdash; ICT Teachers Association of Uganda (ITAU) (@ictteachersug) <a href="https://twitter.com/ictteachersug/status/1549632060414894087?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 20, 2022</a></blockquote>
</div>
</div>



<div class="wp-container-8 wp-block-column">
<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">We're excited to sponsor WordCamp Jinja at <a href="https://twitter.com/TheVillageUG?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@TheVillageUG</a> on September 2-3, 2022. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f389.png" alt="?" class="wp-smiley" /><br /><br />Join us and the Ugandan <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WordPress?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#WordPress</a> community as we learn from and support each other. We'd <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f49c.png" alt="?" class="wp-smiley" /> to see you there – get your ticket today at the link below. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f447.png" alt="?" class="wp-smiley" /><a href="https://t.co/lpQhWmdxWV">https://t.co/lpQhWmdxWV</a></p>&mdash; WooCommerce (@WooCommerce) <a href="https://twitter.com/WooCommerce/status/1549363522957705216?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 19, 2022</a></blockquote>
</div>
</div>
</div>



<p>Looking forward to a wonderful WordCamp at the Nile Source! </p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 28 Jul 2022 08:00:10 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:15:"Mukalele Rogers";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:14;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:41:"Post Status: EMEA and AMER Member Huddles";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:32:"https://poststatus.com/?p=103136";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:52:"https://poststatus.com/emea-and-amer-member-huddles/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:1516:"<h2 id="h-new-post-status-member-huddles">NEW: Post Status <a href="https://poststatus.com/huddles/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Member Huddles</a> ›</h2>



<p>We are hosting <a href="https://poststatus.com/huddles/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><strong>Two Weekly Post Status Member Huddles</strong></a> now.<strong> </strong>Huddles open time and space for our community of peers designed for<strong> camaraderie and connection for all WordPress Professionals, </strong><em>even if you're not a member yet.</em><br /><br /><strong>Sign up</strong> for one of our current Huddles:</p>



<ul><li><a href="https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcuf-uprT0oGdx2Pg91t1eADl5JOow2YwLR" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Wednesdays @ 9am Central (-6) / 4pm Paris (+2)</a> — Hosted by PS members <strong>Jason Rouet </strong>and<strong> Evangelia Pappa</strong></li><li><a href="https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEldeGtrjgsHNZEvzSYTIxv8vHmZb7T_3Tn" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Wednesdays @ 11am Central (-6) / 6pm Paris (+2)</a> — Hosted by PS teammates <strong>Michelle Frechette </strong>and<strong> Cory Miller</strong></li></ul>



<p><a href="https://poststatus.com/huddles/#survey" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><strong>What Days/Times Work Best To Join a Huddle?</strong></a><strong> — </strong>We’re looking to expand our Member Huddles offerings with new days/times to support our global community and need host/facilitators.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 28 Jul 2022 01:18:53 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:10:"Dan Knauss";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:15;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:68:"WPTavern: WordPress Contributors Consider Renaming Full-Site Editing";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=136635";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:79:"https://wptavern.com/wordpress-contributors-consider-renaming-full-site-editing";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:3425:"<p>WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy is <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/07/27/giving-fse-a-more-user-friendly-name/">proposing</a> contributors rename the terms &#8220;full-site editing&#8221; and &#8220;full-site editor&#8221; to something more user friendly. The terms came into use as WordPress moved into the Customization phase and are still used to differentiate the work being done on site editing as opposed to content editing in the block editor.</p>



<p>Haden Chomphosy has identified two issues with using the term “full-site editing:&#8221;</p>



<ul><li>It was already possible to edit every part of a WordPress site using code. The term “full site editing” differentiated between phases of a project, rather than a new capability in the CMS.</li><li>To us, “full site editing” implies the use of blocks, but for new users there’s no reason for them to expect anything else. The term isn’t descriptive of what makes it unique.</li></ul>



<p>Contributors who work in WordPress every day may not be fully aware of how specialized some of these terms are and how little they mean to a newcomer. Haden Chomphosy proposes WordPress adopt a new term that is &#8220;immediately meaningful for new users of our software, while also being an easy to reference term for all of us building and supporting the software.&#8221;</p>



<p>She opened a conversation today on updating our shared lexicon to use a new term for this aspect of editing and asked for feedback on additional contexts that need to be considered.</p>



<p>Ideas are already pouring in as it&#8217;s much easier to name something than to build it. &#8220;Site Editor&#8221; has been one of the must popular suggestions so far, but participants in the discussion have also suggested &#8220;Template Editor&#8221; and &#8220;Theme Builder,&#8221; as well as &#8220;Builder&#8221; and &#8220;Site Builder.&#8221;</p>



<p>&#8220;Future view, looking back from collaborative editing, what I would want to tell a user: The Editor,&#8221; Rob Glidden said. &#8220;In the WordPress editor you and your team can edit posts, pages and themes in the same, consistent user interface.&#8221;</p>



<p>WP Engine developer advocate Nick Diego suggested it&#8217;s too late to unring the bell on full-site editing and that WordPress should stick with the term. </p>



<p>&#8220;Many still refer to the Editor as&nbsp;Gutenberg,&#8221; Diego said. &#8220;I would be hesitant to introduce a new name when &#8216;Full Site Editing,&#8217; now that it has been so publicly talked about, will likely live on for years and years to come.</p>



<p>&#8220;I kind of like the term &#8216;Full Site Editing.&#8217; For new users in WordPress, it implies that they will be able to edit their entire site, which is true. Of course, there are many Classic themes and page builders that also allow you to do the same thing, but a theme that supports FSE differentiates it from traditional Classic themes.&#8221;</p>



<p>The discussion was just opened today and the community is invited to participate with comments on the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/07/27/giving-fse-a-more-user-friendly-name/">post</a>. Those who have knowledge of what users, clients, and people outside of WordPress call the editor in the context of full-site editing should also weigh in to help contributors get a better picture.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 27 Jul 2022 21:46:02 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:16;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:107:"Post Status: PHP 8.2 Compatibility, Renaming FSE, Custom Template Options, WP Feature Notifications Project";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:32:"https://poststatus.com/?p=102947";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:115:"https://poststatus.com/php-8-2-compatibility-renaming-fse-custom-template-options-wp-feature-notifications-project/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:16930:"<h2 id="h-this-week-at-wordpress-org-july-27-2022">This Week at WordPress.org (July 27, 2022)</h2>


<div class="has-background has-theme-palette-8-background-color wp-block-post-excerpt"><p class="wp-block-post-excerpt__excerpt">Getting Ready for PHP 8.2, Rebooting Feature Notifications, Additional Custom Template Options,  and Renaming Full Site Editing. </p></div>


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



<div id="kt-info-box_03177a-50" class="wp-block-kadence-infobox"><a class="kt-blocks-info-box-link-wrap info-box-link kt-blocks-info-box-media-align-left kt-info-halign-left"><div class="kt-blocks-info-box-media-container"><div class="kt-blocks-info-box-media kt-info-media-animate-none"><div class="kadence-info-box-icon-container kt-info-icon-animate-none"><div class="kadence-info-box-icon-inner-container"><span class="kt-info-svg-icon kt-info-svg-icon-fas_paint-brush"></span></div></div></div></div><div class="kt-infobox-textcontent"><h2 class="kt-blocks-info-box-title">Custom Template Options</h2><p class="kt-blocks-info-box-text">In WordPress 6.1 you'll be able to add custom post type or taxonomy templates. Watch how this area evolves as we anticipate it improving the 3rd party plugin support for Full Site Editing.</p></div></a></div>



<h2 id="h-news">News</h2>



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/project/2022/07/28/updates-on-the-five-for-the-future-program-and-proposed-improvements/">Updates on the Five for the Future program, and proposed improvements</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/07/27/giving-fse-a-more-user-friendly-name/">Giving FSE a More User Friendly Name</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2022/07/11/fse-program-testing-call-15-category-customization/">FSE Program Testing Call #15: Category Customization</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2022/07/25/a-mid-year-year-look-at-2022-goals/">A Mid-Year Look at 2022 Goals</a></li><li><a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2022/07/episode-36-beginners-guide-to-contributions-2-0/">WP Briefing: Episode 36: Beginner’s Guide to Contributions 2.0</a></li><li><a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/56009">Prepare for PHP 8.2</a></li><li><a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/56034">PHP 8.2: proposal for handling unknown dynamic properties deprecations</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/design/2022/07/27/project-update-wordpress-org-homepage-and-download-page-mockups/">Project Update: WordPress.org Homepage and Download page mockups</a></li></ul>



<div class="wp-block-kadence-spacer aligncenter kt-block-spacer-_598f7a-1a"><div class="kt-block-spacer kt-block-spacer-halign-center"><hr class="kt-divider" /></div></div>



<div class="wp-container-19 wp-block-columns">
<div class="wp-container-17 wp-block-column">
<h2 id="h-accessibility"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/accessibility">Accessibility</a></h2>



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/accessibility/2022/07/15/call-team-rep-nomination-july-2022/">Call for Team Rep Nomination – July 2022</a></li></ul>



<h2 id="h-community">Community</h2>



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community/2022/07/22/july-meetup-organizer-newsletter/">July Meetup Organizer newsletter</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community/2022/07/22/deputy-feedback-wanted-streamlining-wordcamp-phases/">Deputy Feedback Wanted: Streamlining WordCamp Phases</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community/2022/07/20/recap-of-the-diverse-speaker-training-group-wpdiversity-amer-emea-on-july-13-2022/">Recap of the Diverse Speaker Training group (#WPDiversity) AMER/EMEA on July 13, 2022</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community/2022/07/22/report-inclusion-and-diverse-speaker-workshops-june-2022/">Report: Inclusion and Diverse Speaker Workshops June 2022</a></li></ul>



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



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/07/26/wordpress-6-1-planning-roundup-v2/">WordPress 6.1 Planning Roundup v2</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/07/21/proposal-add-a-dominant-color-background-to-images/">Proposal: Add a dominant color background to images.</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/07/21/request-for-feedback-feature-notifications-proof-of-concept/">[Request for feedback] Feature Notifications Proof of Concept</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/07/21/core-editor-improvement-deeper-customization-with-more-template-options/">Core Editor Improvement: Deeper customization with more template options</a><ul><li><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/42007">Pre-populating new templates</a></li></ul></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/07/25/a-week-in-core-july-25-2022/">A Week in Core – July 25, 2022</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/07/26/editor-chat-agenda-27-july-2022-2-2/">Editor chat agenda: 27 July 2022</a></li></ul>



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



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/design/2022/07/19/proposal-a-new-kind-of-default-theme/">Proposal: A new kind of default theme</a></li></ul>



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



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2022/07/25/documentation-team-update-july-25-2022/">Documentation Team Update – July 25, 2022</a></li></ul>



<h3 id="h-support-articles"><a href="https://wordpress.org/support/articles">Support Articles:</a></h3>



<ul><li><a href="https://wordpress.org/support/article/comment-author-name-block/">Comment Author Name Block</a></li><li><a href="https://wordpress.org/support/article/comment-date-block/">Comment Date Block</a></li></ul>



<h3 id="h-developer-articles">Developer Articles:</h3>



<ul><li><a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/reference-guides/data/data-core-keyboard-shortcuts/">The Keyboard Shortcuts Data</a></li><li><a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/reference-guides/data/data-core-customize-widgets/">Customize Widgets</a></li><li><a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/reference-guides/data/data-core-block-directory/">Block directory</a></li><li><a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/reference-guides/data/data-core-edit-site/">Edit Site</a></li><li><a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/reference-guides/data/data-core-rich-text/">Rich Text</a></li><li><a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/reference-guides/data/data-core-edit-widgets/">Edit Widgets</a></li><li><a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/reference-guides/data/data-core-preferences/">Preferences</a></li><li><a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/reference-guides/data/data-core-reusable-blocks/">Reusable blocks</a></li></ul>



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



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/marketing/2022/07/20/agenda-global-marketing-team-meeting-20-july-2022/">Agenda: Global Marketing Team Meeting, 20 July 2022</a></li></ul>



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



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/meta/2022/07/21/pattern-previews-for-themes-in-the-directory-beta/">Pattern Previews for Themes&nbsp;in the Directory – Beta</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/meta/2022/07/01/exploration-improving-devhub/">Exploration: improving DevHub</a> (Developer Docs)</li></ul>



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



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/mobile/2022/07/27/refocusing-the-wordpress-app-on-core-features/">Refocusing the WordPress App on Core Features</a><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/mobile/2022/07/12/call-for-testing-wordpress-for-ios-20-3/"></a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/mobile/2022/07/26/call-for-testing-wordpress-for-android-20-4/">Call for Testing: WordPress for Android 20.4</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/mobile/2022/07/12/call-for-testing-wordpress-for-ios-20-3/"></a><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/mobile/2022/07/25/call-for-testing-wordpress-for-ios-20-4/">Call for Testing: WordPress for iOS 20.4</a></li></ul>
</div>



<div class="wp-container-18 wp-block-column">
<h2 id="h-openverse"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/openverse">Openverse</a></h2>



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/openverse/2022/07/14/community-meeting-recap-12-july-2022/">Community Meeting Recap (12 July 2022)</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/openverse/2022/07/13/check-in-meeting-idea/">Check-in meeting idea</a></li></ul>



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



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/07/19/performance-team-meeting-summary-19-july-2022/"></a><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/07/26/performance-team-meeting-summary-26-july-2022/"></a><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/07/26/performance-team-meeting-summary-26-july-2022/">Performance team meeting summary 26 July 2022</a></li><li><a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/55443">Create WebP sub-sizes and use for output</a></li><li><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/performance/issues/445">Regenerate Existing Images for non-technical users</a></li></ul>



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



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2022/07/25/plugin-review-team-update-25-july-2022/">Plugin Review Team Update: 25 July 2022</a></li></ul>



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



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2022/07/11/fse-program-testing-call-15-category-customization/">FSE Program Testing Call #15: Category Customization</a></li></ul>



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



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/themes/2022/07/28/using-locally-hosted-google-fonts-in-themes/">Using locally-hosted Google fonts in themes</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/themes/2022/07/27/gutenberg-13-6-themes/">Gutenberg 13.6 + Themes</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/themes/2022/07/25/themes-team-meeting-agenda-for-july-26-2022/">Themes team meeting agenda for July 26, 2022</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2022/07/26/themes-team-update-july-26-2022/">Themes team update July 26, 2022</a></li></ul>



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



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2022/07/15/whats-new-on-learnwp-in-july-2022/">What’s new on LearnWP in July 2022</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/training/2022/07/19/proposal-to-merging-lesson-plans-video-tutorials-and-slides/">Proposal: Merging Lesson Plans, Video Tutorials, and Slides</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/training/2022/07/21/summary-update-courses-currently-in/">Summary Update: Courses Currently in…</a></li></ul>



<h3 id="h-lesson-plans">Lesson Plans:</h3>



<ul><li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/lesson-plan/locking-blocks-in-the-full-site-editor/">Locking Blocks in the Full Site Editor</a></li><li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/lesson-plan/create-a-basic-child-theme-for-block-themes/">Create a Basic Child Theme for Block Themes</a></li><li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/lesson-plan/webp-images-in-wordpress/">WebP images in WordPress</a></li></ul>



<h3 id="h-video-tutorials">Video Tutorials</h3>



<ul><li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/tutorial/wordpress-filter-hooks/">WordPress Filter Hooks</a></li><li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/tutorial/horizontal-pyramid-gallery/">Horizontal Pyramid Gallery</a></li><li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/tutorial/wordpress-action-hooks/">WordPress Action Hooks</a></li></ul>



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



<ul><li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/?meeting=theme-development-workflows-for-different-types-of-developers">Theme Development Workflows for Different Types of Developers</a></li><li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/?meeting=lets-code-creating-your-first-wordpress-plugin">Let’s code! Creating your first WordPress Plugin</a></li><li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/?meeting=19634">[CANCELED – Moved to July 28] Theme Development Workflows for Different Types of Developers</a></li><li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/?meeting=power-up-with-free-wireframe-templates-and-advanced-blocks">Power Up With Free Wireframe Templates And Advanced Blocks</a></li></ul>



<h2 id="h-wordcamp-central">WordCamp Central</h2>



<ul><li><a href="https://central.wordcamp.org/news/2022/07/wordcamp-jinja-diverse-speaker-sessions-web-design-hackathon-teachers-workshop-and-fun-at-the-nile-source/">WordCamp Jinja: Diverse Speaker Sessions, Web Design Hackathon, Teachers Workshop and Fun at the Nile Source!</a></li></ul>



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



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



<h2><a href="https://wordpress.org/five-for-the-future/">Five for the Future</a></h2>



<p>What's happening specific to Five for the Future? Provide your feedback on these posts:</p>



<ul><li><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/five-for-the-future/pull/206">Send notification emails when contributors are inactive</a></li><li><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/five-for-the-future/issues/205">Outreach: emails to send to individuals who are dormant/inactive/etc</a></li><li><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/five-for-the-future/issues/204">Handle duplicate activities &#8211; added as a presenter activity (and other activities?)&nbsp;</a></li><li><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/five-for-the-future/issues/203">Noting milestones in contributions</a></li><li><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/five-for-the-future/issues/202">Charting corporate contributions over time</a></li><li><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/five-for-the-future/issues/201">New options in sponsored contributor profiles to show non-sponsored contributions too</a></li></ul>



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



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



<div class="wp-block-media-text alignwide is-stacked-on-mobile has-background"><a href="https://poststatus.com/"><img src="https://cdn.poststatus.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/vertical-post-status-logo-250.png" alt="Post Status" class="wp-image-85823 size-full" /></a><div class="wp-block-media-text__content">
<p class="has-text-align-left has-normal-font-size" id="h-get-ready-for-remote-work">You — and <a href="https://poststatus.com/business-membership/">your whole team</a> can <a href="https://poststatus.com/post-status-membership-club/">Join Post Status</a> too!</p>



<p class="has-text-align-left has-small-font-size"><strong>Build your network. Learn with others. Find your next job — or your next hire.</strong> Read the <strong>Post Status</strong> <a href="https://poststatus.com/newsletter/">newsletter</a>. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/2709.png" alt="✉" class="wp-smiley" /> Listen to <a href="https://poststatus.com/podcasts/">podcasts</a>. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f399.png" alt="?" class="wp-smiley" /> Follow <a href="https://twitter.com/post_status/">@Post_Status</a>. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f426.png" alt="?" class="wp-smiley" /></p>
</div></div>



<div class="wp-block-spacer"></div>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 27 Jul 2022 19:58:21 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:18:"Courtney Robertson";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:17;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:96:"Post Status: Refocusing the WordPress Mobile App on the Core User Experience — without Jetpack";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:32:"https://poststatus.com/?p=102985";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:87:"https://poststatus.com/refocusing-the-wordpress-mobile-app-on-the-core-user-experience/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:12305:"<h2 id="h-jetpack-s-mobile-app-will-absorb-outgoing-features">Jetpack's mobile app will absorb outgoing features</h2>



<div class="wp-container-23 wp-block-group has-theme-palette-8-background-color has-background"><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container"><div class="has-background has-theme-palette-8-background-color wp-block-post-excerpt"><p class="wp-block-post-excerpt__excerpt">The boundaries between WordPress .com and .org have never been very clear. That may change as the WordPress mobile app sheds features the Jetpack app will gain. </p></div>


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



<ul><li><strong>The WordPress mobile app will be dedicated to self-hosted WordPress.org sites without Jetpack-enabled services or core features enabled by the WordPress.com REST API.</strong></li><li><strong>The Jetpack mobile app will be possible to use with any WordPress site, with or without the Jetpack plugin installed.</strong></li><li><strong>Users and core contributors will face fewer blurred lines between community-owned features and third-party hosted services.</strong></li></ul>



<p class="yoast-reading-time__wrapper"><span class="yoast-reading-time__icon"></span><span class="yoast-reading-time__spacer"></span><span class="yoast-reading-time__descriptive-text">Estimated reading time:  </span><span class="yoast-reading-time__reading-time">7</span><span class="yoast-reading-time__time-unit"> minutes</span></p>
</div></div>



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



<p class="has-drop-cap">Today, Paul Von Schrottky, a core contributor and WordPress Mobile/iOS Engineer at Automattic <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/mobile/2022/07/27/refocusing-the-wordpress-app-on-core-features/">announced some big changes</a> on the Make WordPress Mobile blog. Currently in its 20.3 release, the mobile app has been part of the WordPress project since 2008 in the <a href="https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C02RQC4LY">#Mobile team</a>&#8216;s care. </p>



<p>According to Paul's Make blog post, the WordPress app's features and user experience will be simplified this year to reflect the WordPress core experience — by removing its WordPress.com and Jetpack-enabled features. Core features enabled by the WordPress.com REST API will be removed from the WordPress app as well. Everything that's being removed from the WordPress mobile app will be added to the Jetpack counterpart app, which <a href="https://jetpack.com/blog/jetpack-mobile-app/">debuted in 2021</a> for iOS and Android. </p>



<div class="wp-container-24 wp-block-group has-theme-palette-7-background-color has-background"><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container">
<h3 id="h-what-s-moving-from-the-wordpress-app-to-the-jetpack-app"><strong>What's moving from the WordPress app to the Jetpack app:</strong> </h3>



<p><strong>Stats</strong>, <strong>Activity Log</strong>, <strong>Backup</strong>, <strong>Sharing</strong> (Jetpack Social), <strong>Reader</strong>, <strong>Notifications</strong>, <strong>Jetpack Blocks</strong> (Gutenberg Editor), <strong>@-Mentions</strong>, <strong>Crossposting</strong> (Gutenberg Editor) — and potentially more features.</p>
</div></div>



<blockquote><p>Everything being removed will be added to the WordPress app's Jetpack counterpart, which debuted in 2021 for iOS and Android.</p></blockquote>



<p>The Jetpack app recently saw its <a href="https://jetpack.com/blog/jetpack-11-1-under-the-hood-improvements-for-your-site/">11.1 release</a> and the first stages of <a href="https://jetpack.com/blog/build-your-own-jetpack-now-with-individual-plugins/">decoupling its major features into standalone plugins</a>. Currently, the Backup, Boost, Protect, Social, Search, and CRM  add-ons for Jetpack <a href="https://jetpack.com/blog/meet-jetpack-11-0-and-our-new-individual-plugins/">can be downloaded separately</a> from <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/search/jetpack/">the WordPress.org directory</a>. As mobile app features, they will become exclusively available through the Jetpack app.  </p>



<p>Additionally, People, Themes, and Menus are features in the WordPress mobile app that rely on the WordPress.com API and will be moved to the Jetpack app to refocus the WordPress app on core-provided APIs.</p>



<img width="752" height="414" src="https://cdn.poststatus.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/multiple-devices-space-752x414.webp" alt="" class="wp-image-102986" />Automattic's mobile app for Jetpack.



<h2 id="h-a-response-to-user-login-confusion">A Response to User Login Confusion</h2>



<p>One significant influence motivating these changes comes from user feedback in app reviews and support requests. These channels often &#8220;indicate confusion around which username and password people should use&#8221; to log into the app and their sites. Since it's possible to log into individual WordPress sites or use a WordPress.com account across multiple sites, it's not clear which should be used. Worse, &#8220;Using the wrong credentials can lead to vastly different experiences within the app, or frustrating experiences when creating a new account or resetting a password.&#8221; </p>



<blockquote><p>We’d like this change to help make those boundaries clear going forward. Jetpack powers WordPress.com as well as millions of self-hosted sites. For people that use Jetpack on a self-hosted site or via a WordPress.com site, the Jetpack app will be the best experience.                                                        </p><cite>Automattic's Jetpack Team</cite></blockquote>



<p>Eventually, the goal for the WordPress app is to ask only for user credentials on the site being logged into. It's hoped this clearer distinction between Automattic properties (WordPress.com and Jetpack) and any particular WordPress site will foster greater community contribution to the WordPress mobile app. The WordPress mobile app hasn't been clearly represented as a community-owned part of the WordPress.org project for quite some time, so this is a needed and welcome clarification. </p>



<p>It's not going to be an overnight transition, however. Paul's Make WordPress blog post notes user authentication is &#8220;a trickier challenge and something [the Mobile team is] still figuring out.&#8221; It's likely to take a longer time to transition .com logins out of the WordPress app to avoid stranding .com users who have been using it.</p>



<h2 id="h-a-response-to-app-store-confusion">A Response to App Store Confusion</h2>



<p>Another reason for differentiating the WordPress mobile apps is that the Apple App Store and Google Play naturally focus on in-app purchases because they take a cut of those sales. In the past, <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/21/21396316/apple-wordpress-in-app-purchase-tax-update-store" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Apple rejected the WordPress app</a> because it wanted a 30% cut of non-existent sales in this free app without in-app purchases! To issue updates to the WordPress app, it <a href="https://9to5mac.com/2020/08/22/apple-agrees-to-allow-wordpress-app-on-the-app-store-without-in-app-purchases-after-update/">had to take in some paid features</a> to comply with Apple's rules. Now the Jetpack app will have the freemium model in the app store while the WordPress app will go back to being free without upselling anything to its users.</p>



<img width="752" height="376" src="https://cdn.poststatus.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/wordpress-com-vs-org-what-is-the-difference-header-752x376.webp" alt="" class="wp-image-103002" />The differences and boundaries between WordPress .com and .org have always been difficult to identify.



<h2 id="h-clarifying-the-boundaries">Clarifying the Boundaries</h2>



<p>A large part of the problem for WordPress that Jetpack may help mitigate but can't address all by itself has been Automattic's branding and messaging. The differences between the WordPress.com and .org brands have always been indistinct. For example, the &#8220;WordPress mobile app&#8221; has been (and still is) identified as a &#8220;WordPress.com app&#8221; at <a href="https://apps.wordpress.com/mobile/">apps.wordpress.com/mobile</a> — but it's also the .org app. Referring to all instances of WordPress other than .com as &#8220;.org&#8221; is awkward too, and only WordPress community insiders are likely to be familiar with that term and its meaning. </p>



<p>Fortunately, more consistent naming across Automattic properties is in the works, according to Sean Marier. Sean told me &#8220;references to the WordPress app will be updated as part of these changes. It’s worth noting that this may not be immediate but is part of an overall transition plan that the team will be working on in the coming months.&#8221; </p>



<div class="wp-container-25 wp-block-group has-theme-palette-7-background-color has-background"><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container">
<h2 id="h-what-about-akismet">What about Akismet? </h2>



<p>Akismet has long been a standalone, mostly donation-based, virtually unmonetized plugin and a part of Jetpack, as well as fresh WordPress installs. It's not going anywhere amid all these other changes to the mobile apps. Akismet will remain everywhere, and based on current hiring at Automattic for a <a href="https://automattic.com/work-with-us/job/director-of-product-marketing-jetpack/">Director of Product Marketing for Jetpack</a>, it looks like Akismet will have a place alongside Jetpack, WPScan, and VideoPress as mid-market products. We can expect to see them introduced with a new pricing structure in the near future.</p>
</div></div>



<h2 id="h-changing-perceptions">Changing Perceptions</h2>



<p>I asked the team rolling out all these changes to the mobile apps how they hope Jetpack will be viewed by WordPress users who have looked at it with suspicion because of the blurred boundaries. Their answer:</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>&#8220;We’d like this change to help make those boundaries clear going forward. Jetpack powers WordPress.com as well as millions of self-hosted sites. For people that use Jetpack on a self-hosted site or via a WordPress.com site, the Jetpack app will be the best experience.&#8221;</p><cite>Automattic's Jetpack.com team via Chenda Ngak, head of communications for WordPress.com</cite></blockquote>



<p>These changes to the WordPress and jetpack mobile apps definitely take big steps in the direction of better boundaries where the community and commercial editions of WordPress are clearly delineated. It's important this is happening with a focus on decentralization, core contributors, and the unique ways SaaS and self-hosted WordPress can work together to mutual benefit, as I wrote <a href="https://poststatus.com/an-operating-system-for-the-web/">a few weeks ago</a>. </p>



<blockquote><p>In an increasingly competitive market, WordPress can uniquely embrace the strengths of an open platform, taking form as either a SaaS or self-hosted platform — or a mix of both.  </p></blockquote>



<p>Jetpack is available now as an all-in-one plugin or an à la carte mix of freemium add-ons that allow any WordPress site to leverage WordPress.com's services and infrastructure. That's quite a step <em>forward</em> by going <em>back</em> to the product's original promise. Given sufficient clarity on the boundaries between the free .org community code and freemium .com features, this might be a good and needed model for others. In an increasingly competitive market, WordPress can uniquely embrace the strengths of an open platform, taking form as either a SaaS or self-hosted platform — or a mix of both.  </p>



<div class="wp-container-27 wp-block-group has-theme-palette-7-background-color has-background"><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container">
<h3 id="h-what-are-your-thoughts-and-questions-leave-a-comment">What are your thoughts and questions? <a href="https://poststatus.com/planet/feed/#comments">Leave a comment</a>.</h3>



<div class="wp-container-26 wp-block-group"><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container">
<p>Can the WordPress and Jetpack mobile apps help clarify the boundaries of the WordPress .org and .com brands and services — and improve the WordPress community's view of Jetpack?</p>
</div></div>
</div></div>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 27 Jul 2022 17:00:12 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:10:"Dan Knauss";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:18;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:95:"WPTavern: Automattic Is Removing WordPress.com Features from the Official WordPress Mobile Apps";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=136516";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:106:"https://wptavern.com/automattic-is-removing-wordpress-com-features-from-the-official-wordpress-mobile-apps";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:6188:"<p>The WordPress mobile team <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/mobile/2022/07/27/refocusing-the-wordpress-app-on-core-features/">announced</a> today that it will be pulling all the Jetpack and WordPress.com features from the official WordPress mobile apps. They will be moved into the Jetpack app through a gradual process that is anticipated to conclude by the end of this year.</p>



<p>&#8220;Over the years, the WordPress app has evolved to meet a diverse range of site administration needs and use cases,&#8221; Automattic mobile engineer Paul Von Schrottky said. &#8220;Features like Stats, Reader, and Notifications were introduced with the hope of meeting some of these needs. However, these features require the Jetpack plugin or a WordPress.com account to function and can make the app overwhelming for folks who want a simpler experience.</p>



<p>&#8220;For the sake of clarity and closer-to-core experience, the mobile team will be working to refocus the app on staple features you&#8217;d find with a fresh download of WordPress.&#8221;</p>



<p>The following features will be removed and relocated to the Jetpack app:</p>



<ul><li>Stats</li><li>Activity Log</li><li>Backup</li><li>Sharing (Jetpack Social)</li><li>Reader</li><li>Notifications</li><li>Jetpack blocks (Gutenberg Editor)</li><li>@-Mentions and Crossposting (Gutenberg Editor)</li><li>More features as the team goes about this effort</li></ul>



<p>Automattic&#8217;s products in the official WordPress apps have been <a href="https://wptavern.com/matt-mullenweg-on-ensuring-the-future-of-wordpress">a source of controversy</a> for nearly a decade. Two years ago, when <a href="https://wptavern.com/automattic-tangles-with-apple-over-lack-of-in-app-purchases-in-the-wordpress-for-ios-app">Automattic tangled with Apple over a lack of in-app purchases in the WordPress for iOS App</a>, the community renewed its call for the company to separate its commercial interests from the official apps. Because Automattic has heavily subsidized the apps&#8217; development, it has been able to add WordPress.com and Jetpack-specific features without contest, but these pose a conflict of interest and are unnecessary for many self-hosted site owners.</p>



<p>In 2014, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg <a href="https://wptavern.com/matt-mullenweg-on-ensuring-the-future-of-wordpress">said</a> the goal with the mobile apps was to get more mobile app users, which included developing things that Automattic deemed most compelling on mobile &#8211; notifications, stats, and the reader. The company has now changed its stance on this, citing &#8220;less user confusion&#8221; as a primary motivator for the upcoming change.</p>



<p>&#8220;By attempting to cater to such a diverse range of users and needs, there are flows in the app that present many options to users,&#8221; Von Schrottky said. &#8220;An example of this is the current login flow. User feedback (via the app reviews) and support channels indicate confusion around which username and password people should use when authenticating.&#8221;</p>



<p>Historically, the mobile apps have had almost zero contributions from people outside of Automattic. Improving the contributor experience is one of the goals in decoupling Automattic&#8217;s commercial interests from the official apps.</p>



<p>&#8220;Although everything is open source, new contributors need to understand the blurred line between community-owned features and 3rd-party hosted services if all they want is to contribute to one or the other,&#8221; Von Schrottky said. &#8220;Also, it can be challenging to understand what functionality and which features are available based on the user’s authentication.&#8221;</p>



<p>The user confusion and contributor complexities have been evident for years. Providing a more straightforward experience for users has just now become an actionable priority. It appears that this is because Automattic is planning to add more paid features. At this point, the more principled move is to expand commercial features in the Jetpack app, instead of bombarding self-hosted users with upgrade prompts.</p>



<p>&#8220;The mobile team has been trying for years to provide a solid, modern experience on mobile, with the goal of helping all users start their WordPress adventure,&#8221; Von Schrottky said. &#8220;We&#8217;ve learned from the diversity and evolving needs of the app user base. In addition to the confusion caused by the current arrangement, the team found that user expectations are confounded by a lack of paid features, such as domain purchases. To better serve the needs of both self-hosted and Jetpack/WordPress.com users in the future, the team is now convinced that adding these specific features in a separate app is the way forward.&#8221;</p>



<p>Automattic plans to continue maintaining the official mobile apps, advancing the block editor development, and will be listed as the publisher in the store listings for the apps. Once the Jetpack features are removed, users will still be able to do everything included in the core publishing experience, as well as manage settings.</p>



<p>&#8220;With this change, we plan for the WordPress app to be a more focused companion to the WordPress.org open source project, leaving the Jetpack app to complement the WordPress.com experience,&#8221; Von Schrottky said. &#8220;This is more straightforward for users of the WordPress open source project and simplifies the relationship between the WordPress app and platform owners like Apple and Google.&#8221;</p>



<p>Von Schrottky said Automattic is not considering renaming the Jetpack app at this time. WordPress.com users will be able to access the Reader and other .com platform-specific features there. The transition will happen in phases and the mobile team will soon start introducing messages in the app to inform users about which features will be moved.</p>



<p>&#8220;The team is still working out the details of the plan as explained in the post, but this will be followed up with other relevant communications to make this change as frictionless as possible for users,&#8221; Von Schrottky said.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 27 Jul 2022 15:32:51 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:19;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:81:"WPTavern: #36 – Sean Blakeley on Transitioning a Large Agency Over to Gutenberg";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:48:"https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=136608";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:95:"https://wptavern.com/podcast/36-sean-blakeley-on-transitioning-a-large-agency-over-to-gutenberg";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:38714:"<p>On the podcast today we have <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/sean-blakeley/">Sean Blakeley</a>.</p>



<p>Sean works for a large agency called <a href="https://www.americaneagle.com/">Americaneagle.com</a>, a platform agnostic organisation working with enterprise clients on a wide variety of projects.</p>



<p>After years of experiments with different approaches and collaborations between designers and developers, their team has begun to rely heavily on block patterns, and they’ve found it is greatly increasing their productivity. It’s fair to say that block patterns have revolutionised the team&#8217;s approach to the entire design process.</p>



<p>In case you’ve not explored block patterns, they are collections of blocks which can be built by anyone. With thoughtful design, these blocks can be repurposed across pages and even different websites. Build once, deploy everywhere.</p>



<p>We talk about how and why Sean’s team decided to jump in early with block patterns. When they did, this was a somewhat risky strategy. There was no guarantee that patterns would begin to be widely adopted, but this strategy is now starting to bear fruit. It’s allowing their team to work with their clients in new and unexpected ways.</p>



<p>Clients are now working more closely with the American Eagle team in what Sean describes as less ‘impress us’ and more ‘collaborate with us’. It’s fostering a closer relationship with clients which encourages them to use the block editor and patterns and have some ownership in the process.</p>



<p>It’s an interesting episode, and if you’re curious about how you can start to use blocks and patterns with your clients, there’s sure to be something here for you.</p>



<p>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.</p>



<h2>Useful links.</h2>



<p><a href="https://wordpress.org/patterns/">Block Patterns Directory</a></p>



<p><a href="https://wordpress.org/patterns/new-pattern/">Create a new pattern</a></p>



<p><a href="https://wordpress.org/openverse/">Openverse</a></p>



Transcript<div>
<p>[00:00:00] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley. Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, the adoption of block patterns.</p>



<p>If you&#8217;d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast, player of choice, or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy and paste that URL into most podcast players. If there&#8217;s anything you&#8217;d like us to feature on the podcast, I&#8217;d love 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 use the contact form there.</p>



<p>So on the podcast today, we have Sean Blakeley. Sean works for a large agency called American Eagle. A platform agnostic organization working with enterprise clients on a wide variety of projects. After years of experiments with different approaches and collaborations between designers and developers, their team has begun to rely heavily on block patterns. And they found it&#8217;s greatly increasing their productivity. It&#8217;s fair to say that block patterns have revolutionized the team&#8217;s approach to the entire design process.</p>



<p>If you&#8217;ve not explored block patterns, they&#8217;re collections of blocks, which can be built by anyone. With thoughtful design, these blocks can be repurposed across pages and even different websites. Build once deploy everywhere.</p>



<p>We talk about how and why Sean&#8217;s team decided to jump in early with block patterns. When they did, this was a somewhat risky strategy. There was no guarantee that patterns would begin to be widely adopted. But this strategy is now starting to bear fruit. It&#8217;s allowing their team to work with their clients in new and unexpected ways.</p>



<p>Clients and are working more closely with the American Eagle team, in what Sean describes as, less impress us and more collaborate with us. It&#8217;s fostering a closer relationship with clients, which encourages them to use the block editor and patterns and have some ownership in the process.</p>



<p>It&#8217;s an interesting episode. And if you&#8217;re curious about how you can start to use blocks and patterns with your clients, there&#8217;s sure to be something here for you.</p>



<p>Typically when we record the podcast, there&#8217;s not a lot of background noise, but that&#8217;s not always the case with these WordCamp Europeans have use. We were competing against crowds and the air conditioning. And whilst the podcasts are more than listenable, I hope that you understand that the vagaries of the real world we&#8217;re at play.</p>



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



<p>And so without further delay, I bring you. Sean Blakeley.</p>



<p>I am joined on the podcast today by Sean Blakeley. How are you doing Sean?</p>



<p>[00:03:48] <strong>Sean Blakeley:</strong> I&#8217;m doing very well. Thank you, Nathan.</p>



<p>[00:03:49] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Sean and I have just been chatting for a few minutes and I think we&#8217;re going to be good friends.</p>



<p>[00:03:53] <strong>Sean Blakeley:</strong> I think you&#8217;re right.</p>



<p>[00:03:54] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> So you&#8217;re at WordCamp Europe. We&#8217;re currently sitting in the basement having a chat, but you did a presentation, which you are now very relieved to have done. It&#8217;s behind you now. What was it about?</p>



<p>[00:04:05] <strong>Sean Blakeley:</strong> I mean, it was a wonderful, it&#8217;s a wonderful feeling to have been the post talk feeling. Uh, it was about block patterns. The block pattern revolution. I was talking about how we&#8217;re using block patterns in our creative process. How we are evolving and adapting our creative process. Bringing together the designers and the developers, and we&#8217;re finding that block patterns is opening up all sorts of opportunities. Explore and adapt the collaborative space between designers and developers. So, I was really talking about those exciting opportunities that we see today.</p>



<p>[00:04:38] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> You&#8217;re working at the helm, maybe the helm&#8217;s the wrong word, but you&#8217;re near the helm of a very large agency. So I guess making that transition to block patterns was, is a big deal. You got a lot riding on that. Tell us a little bit about the company that you work for.</p>



<p>[00:04:54] <strong>Sean Blakeley:</strong> So I work for a company called American Eagle. American Eagle are 700 strong. It&#8217;s a large organization. It&#8217;s platform agnostic. Obviously there are dedicated teams to a number of sort of key platforms, including Sitecore and Sitefinity, but also of course WordPress. And that&#8217;s how it&#8217;s really reached that scale. What it tends to focus on is those big enterprise engagements and it, it&#8217;s able to address those kind of cross platform, those big digital transformation pieces, those big integrations.</p>



<p>And so you&#8217;re quite right that, you know, as we talk about transitions in organizations of that size, it can very challenging. But because we are, as we are building the WordPress enterprise team, we&#8217;re able to explore some of these different technologies and keep pushing at the boundaries of what we&#8217;re doing.</p>



<p>We have this incredible opportunity to keep exploring. Exploring WordPress at scale, and I&#8217;m sure we&#8217;ll talk in a minute about the sort of headness and composable kind of paradigm, but it enables us to keep exploring, to keep pushing these boundaries, and block patterns increasingly feel like they&#8217;re part of that journey and are beginning to become an important part of that journey.</p>



<p>[00:06:07] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> I would imagine that if we asked a typical WordPress user, how do you build your website? I think there&#8217;s gonna be a significant proportion who, maybe do it the old fashioned way, but I feel that&#8217;s dwindling. Template files and all that.</p>



<p>And then there&#8217;ll be a proportion of people probably still I&#8217;m guessing the majority who are using page builders, the commercial page builders. There does seem to be, especially very recently, by that, I mean maybe in the last six months, it does feel like there&#8217;s a lot more chatter about blocks and patterns and almost like, okay, this is a thing now. The time has come, we&#8217;re gonna shift over in that direction.</p>



<p>But, what would you say are the key benefits? The things that you identified in your business which made you say, oh, actually this is worthwhile now. We&#8217;ll stop doing it the way we used to do it, and we&#8217;re gonna start doing it with blocks. What were the key metrics that you judged that worthwhile against?</p>



<p>[00:06:52] <strong>Sean Blakeley:</strong> So, the commercial metrics is a kind of separate piece. And we&#8217;ll come back to that, because it is an interesting question. But from a technical or an implementation sort of perspective, it always felt jarring when we were bringing software, proprietary software, be it a page builder or some other service into the WordPress platform.</p>



<p>It always felt like we were introducing something that we would either have to be pulling out of WordPress at a later date, or we&#8217;re then tying our clients to this particular tool that we had chosen, or, or maybe us as an agency, you know, we preferred a particular page builder. And so that&#8217;s the one that our clients got because that was our preferred approach. And that always felt jarring.</p>



<p>It felt like there wasn&#8217;t, you know, we weren&#8217;t developing for the longevity. That we were slightly tunnel vision and, and narrow focused in terms of our needs as the agency, And so it always felt like we should be coming as close to core as we can. Moving our dependency to WordPress itself, rather than this sort of separate proprietary software. And it&#8217;s been a challenging journey at times as we&#8217;ve, we were early adopters for Gutenberg and, you know, we felt some of the pain that, that all of us, or many of us in the community have felt. Some of the challenges around creating custom blocks back in the day.</p>



<p>But it was very clear that this felt like the right journey, and it was the right journey to go on. And as we thought about, and talked to our clients about their experience, and their experience for creating content, That goal to move from shortcodes and the abstraction of dropdowns and filling in an input box. And then that leap of faith, as you hope something has changed on the front of your website, and it&#8217;s gonna work in the way that you hoped it would.</p>



<p>Well, that WYSIWYG experience has been something that we&#8217;ve been asked for for years, and of course that&#8217;s where the page builder space came from. But to be able to fulfill that in a drag and drop within the WordPress editor itself is, it&#8217;s a great thing to be able to provide our clients with that experience, that true WYSIWYG experience. And so the goals are so clear as we&#8217;re on this journey together.</p>



<p>And so, and we&#8217;ll come back to that final point around the commercial decision in terms of investing our, our efforts as a technical team. I mean, it was very clear that this is, this is the longevity. This is where we are empowering our clients to own their UI, their UI components. They can start to build out some of their own UI components as well as custom blocks that we might build. And there isn&#8217;t a dependency. If they wanna move to, you know, they wanna change their implementations. They can keep WordPress exactly the same.</p>



<p>And that, that notion of switching a theme, and a theme should be easy to change. Your styling, you know, re styling, making small design changes should be relatively easy. Yeah, that&#8217;s becoming true within the Gutenberg paradigm. That we can offer that longevity of, of architecture of platform. And that they can iterate in terms of a design on top of that.</p>



<p>So that&#8217;s been a hugely empowering journey, that incidentally that we&#8217;re, we&#8217;re still on. But we&#8217;re thoroughly enjoying the journey and it&#8217;s, you know, every step that we take can be daunting at times. But, we&#8217;ve found the value in each and every of those steps that we&#8217;ve been on so far as the community, working with Gutenberg.</p>



<p>[00:10:03] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> So at the point where you made the decision to hop on, presumably you&#8217;ve not just said, okay, everything from now on will be based upon Gutenberg. Maybe some clients are embedded in something in the WordPress space, like a proprietary page builder. Maybe you&#8217;re gonna carry that on, maybe not, I don&#8217;t know. But there must have been a lot of retraining, process changes, every which way for your staff. Just talk us through what that was, because obviously if you&#8217;re working within your company and building websites, you want to know, what&#8217;s the education piece? How am I gonna learn all of this stuff? What&#8217;s my company gonna provide for me to make sure that I&#8217;m skilled? Was there a lot of that, that had to be put into place?</p>



<p>[00:10:39] <strong>Sean Blakeley:</strong> There was a huge amount. There&#8217;s a kind of duality here that the first challenge was to enable developers to feel confident within React. And so feeling confident within a modern JavaScript framework. And we found that that was a hugely valuable first step to sort of, you know, allow them to ease them into familiarity with React.</p>



<p>Once we did that, we then moved into Gutenberg specifically and sort of eased our developers into Gutenberg. And we did it some ways from the interface. So getting familiarity with the interface, but of course, things, and we&#8217;re talking maybe two or three years ago now, things were moving so quickly that actually, it was, it was often easier to actually go from the backend forward.</p>



<p>And so look at, the anatomy of a block. How a block fits together and, we had some really curious developers and developers that were often looking under the bonnet and seeing how these things were constructed and it added to that sense, less of intimidation and more of awe that we&#8217;re on a journey together. And actually, you know, we can be part of this dialogue.</p>



<p>We can be part of this journey and, exploring the how we can evolve our processes. And I think that early, understanding the value that Gutenberg, this journey was gonna provide. Even when we were hesitant to put it into production, but it always felt like this was the direction we wanted to go in. We wanted to provide that extraordinary editorial, content creation experience. And then of course, you know, the value that we can give to end users as well.</p>



<p>[00:12:14] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> I&#8217;m imagining that if you had clients that were on the classic editor, There&#8217;s just no downside to that. One thing is nothing like the other, so a big boost. But I&#8217;m wondering about the clients who may be, were on those page builders. How are they coping, regardless of all that, how are they coping with the UI? Because even though it is a WYSIWYG, it&#8217;s kind of got some quirk still hasn&#8217;t it?</p>



<p>The UI is a bit funky in places and things don&#8217;t quite match up on the back as they do in the front. I&#8217;m just wondering how your clients and, you&#8217;re a big agency, there must be a lot of feedback coming in. How are they adopting it? Are they welcoming of it?</p>



<p>[00:12:48] <strong>Sean Blakeley:</strong> Yes, so they are in&#8230;</p>



<p>[00:12:50] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> That sounded like aqualified yes.</p>



<p>[00:12:52] <strong>Sean Blakeley:</strong> Well, it is a qualified yes. There is hesitation there at times, because as you&#8217;re quite right to point out, there are some rough edges in the implementation. We try and make sure that we are very transparent. That this is an exciting yet evolving part of the WordPress ecosystem. You know, don&#8217;t consider this as fully finished. It&#8217;s still evolving and adapting. But what we&#8217;re increasingly doing is focusing on a opt in approach.</p>



<p>So, the dashboard of blocks can be very intimidating. You know, there is a huge list, particularly if you include the embed options as well. That&#8217;s a huge list. If you happen to be running plugins on your site that are also introducing blocks, you can be talking about many dozens in that interface and you, and I might know the difference with a, a media and text block, but our clients aren&#8217;t going to know that unless we take them on that journey, unless we educate them.</p>



<p>So what we find ourselves doing increasingly is, is white listing blocks. So actually removing, and, and increasingly this is, this is often a principle in enterprise when you&#8217;re working with large scale projects that, it&#8217;s actually putting the guardrails in place, you know. It&#8217;s, it&#8217;s having your brand library or implementation, maybe your UI components. But you are limiting the ability of the editorial team to kind of work within those guidelines, that framework. And that&#8217;s how we treat Gutenberg, is that we provide those atomic building blocks, you know, those core blocks, and maybe a few custom blocks as well. We then put limitations in.</p>



<p>So those are your design system, essentially. Those are the UI, the library of UI components that our clients can use. And that&#8217;s really attractive then, because becomes very clear what the tools are that they can use to tell their stories, to tell their narratives to their users.</p>



<p>And it&#8217;s not this self serve mentality where you are kind of building from the atoms and trying to build everything from scratch. Actually they&#8217;re, they&#8217;re sort of pre-baked for you, and you are just going down and, and selecting the ones that you want.</p>



<p>[00:14:53] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> In WordPress 6.0, we&#8217;ve got, maybe it&#8217;s not the most fleshed out of block locking features, but does something, it puts a padlock icon there anyway, and you can unlock it. That feels like that would be a, a nice direction to go in as well. That particular feature, you know, the client can access this bit, but not that bit. And they can edit this bit, which our team have built. And if they don&#8217;t like the text, they can just go in and do it themselves. And it&#8217;s kind of empowering people to edit their own stuff, but not edit this piece.</p>



<p>[00:15:18] <strong>Sean Blakeley:</strong> We absolutely love this feature. And interestingly, we&#8217;re actually on a huge project at the moment, a huge headless project. And we were looking at our own custom solution for doing exactly this. So what we&#8217;re doing is, we&#8217;re bringing in quarter of a million programmatically generated pages, that we&#8217;re injecting into Gutenberg blocks.</p>



<p>So we&#8217;re kind of generating these Gutenberg blocks. We&#8217;re creating these slot in between the blocks to enable them to insert custom content. But essentially we&#8217;re programmatically generating that content. And then we&#8217;re locking down certain aspects. It&#8217;s almost like a, it&#8217;s a programmatically generated templated page, if you like, which is locked. And then they can add in between these sort of sections or indeed update some of the images. And there are certain areas that we allow them to update and some not so. And so that feature of locking blocks has been already incredibly valuable for us.</p>



<p>And exactly, as you say, it chimes with that notion of guidelines, of having a brand language. Of having that visual rhythm, your design system, and then you are working within those confines of your visual language.</p>



<p>[00:16:33] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> The reason I was talking about it being fairly basic is it can be unlocked by anybody. Doesn&#8217;t matter who you are, you just click the button and you&#8217;ve unlocked it, but, maybe in the future there&#8217;ll be a more granular permissions model that, it doesn&#8217;t matter how many times you click the button, you&#8217;re not unlocking it. That will be nice, you know, so the editor can edit this, and the subscriber could edit this, and the administrator can obviously edit everything. That was a much needed feature, I think.</p>



<p>[00:16:54] <strong>Sean Blakeley:</strong> And I think you&#8217;re right. And incidentally, as we talk about maybe block patterns forming that kind of notion of templates that maybe you and I are gonna create a custom post type. And as we click into that custom post type, we&#8217;ve got these pre-baked templates that we can select from and using block patterns to do that.</p>



<p>You&#8217;re exactly right that actually we can even allow editors to edit those templates, but we do have the challenge of permissions. And so we need to think about who has that meta level, almost like the super admin we could think of in terms of multisite. You know, who has that top level, that they can edit the template? And then who are the editorial level can just edit implementations of reflections of that.</p>



<p>[00:17:34] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Really interesting. So let&#8217;s get into the whole block pattern thing. I would be staggered if anybody listening to this, hadn&#8217;t heard of them at least. But nevertheless, there&#8217;s probably some who haven&#8217;t. So let&#8217;s just address that. Tell us about block patterns. What are they? They&#8217;re in use, I think more and more. As each day goes by, there&#8217;s gonna be more and more use of them. But just tell us what they are briefly.</p>



<p>[00:17:54] <strong>Sean Blakeley:</strong> In the simplest terms, block patterns are a contain for blocks. They&#8217;re a kind of vessel, that contain these, whichever blocks you want to allow to be within this pattern. But that&#8217;s deceptively simple. And what I talk about, the analogy that I like to use is that there are a finite number of musical notes, and so whatever your piece of music, your chosen interest is, be it Pixie&#8217;s Debasser, or Mozart or Beethoven, they&#8217;re still utilizing that finite number of notes. And yet they can create truly extraordinary, original compositions from those finite number of notes.</p>



<p>And I think for us Gutenberg are our notes, and the patterns are our favorite songs. Are those extraordinary compositions that we can create.</p>



<p>[00:18:42] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Here&#8217;s an interesting thought. If you have a Spotify account, there&#8217;s more songs than you can ever listen to. Block patterns, so in the same way, we&#8217;ve got plugins 50,000, 60,000, whatever the number is. There&#8217;s loads of plugins. If you want a form plugin, go and pick out of the 40 over there.</p>



<p>Is there gonna be overload? If everybody&#8217;s got hundreds and thousands and possibly millions in the future, of patterns. The impediment to creating patterns is so low. The impediment to creating a plugin is quite high. So it&#8217;s contained at roughly 50,000. But if block patterns are gonna be really, really easy to create, which they are, especially with things like the pattern creator tool. Then the library, the way that we download these is, presumably at some point gonna be deluged. Your clients may be faced with this atrophy of, I have no idea where to begin. There are 748,000 in there. And I do not even know where to start.</p>



<p>[00:19:33] <strong>Sean Blakeley:</strong> I think you&#8217;re quite right. That sort of paralysis, choice paralysis will undoubtedly be an issue that we need to deal with, but less like limiting the ability of people to create these block patterns. And really what we need to do is, is have a way of rating those block patterns or seeing those patterns, the popularity of those patterns. The one that seemed to be solving problems that maybe are achieving conversions in a greater way in your particular sector or your area.</p>



<p>And it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s having that validation. I think right now are in the, the wild west of we&#8217;re just so excited, and as you say, the friction is so low for creating block patterns. But that in and of itself, isn&#8217;t the goal. You know, and that&#8217;s not where we want to be. Where we want to be is creating truly original and amazing patterns that we can then validate against the use cases for our clients. The way that they want to introduce them into their sites. But yes, we will have a huge number of block patterns very soon.</p>



<p>[00:20:34] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> There is some editorial on the back of that. It&#8217;s not like you submit a block pattern and it&#8217;s just immediately in the library. There will be a team there looking and inspecting, and hopefully if your block pattern, I can&#8217;t remember what the exact reasons for dismissal were, but it was things along the lines of, if it&#8217;s not really using more than one block, if it&#8217;s not doing something innovative, for example, something along those lines. But given all of that, there could be this problem of just too many things to pick from.</p>



<p>[00:20:58] <strong>Sean Blakeley:</strong> I think you&#8217;re absolutely right. And then, trying to decide which patterns solve which problems and which to use. That choice paralysis will undoubtedly be an issue that as a community, we then need to start thinking about what&#8217;s the value, what&#8217;s the added value that block patterns are bringing and find a way of communicating that. Both to us as technologists, but also to our clients.</p>



<p>[00:21:18] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> One of the interesting ancillary bits of block patterns or blocks or WordPress in general. I don&#8217;t know if you&#8217;ve followed this thing, but the Openverse. The idea that you can submit block patterns that have all of the images already in, they&#8217;re probably placeholders. You probably won&#8217;t end up using them, but I do find that&#8217;s quite an interesting piece. For the first time you&#8217;ll be able to download these block patterns and you can actually stick with it. You can use that thing forever and a day, and there&#8217;ll be no license that you are treading on.</p>



<p>It&#8217;s totally usable. And I think that&#8217;s really interesting. I&#8217;ve actually been taking tons of photos this week with the intention of, as soon as I get home and I&#8217;ve got a reliable internet, it&#8217;s just to stick them onto Openverse, then people can see pictures of Porto for free.</p>



<p>[00:22:02] <strong>Sean Blakeley:</strong> Beautiful. Definitely, and I think it then raises an interesting question about reusable blocks and how block patterns interact with reusable blocks. And if we have these that you can really just drop in and they&#8217;re instantly displaying those images or instantly sort of showing that you really, you don&#8217;t change, you just drop those in. Whether that&#8217;s more the direction that reusable blocks will go in. Those kind of global blocks. So global entities that we use repeatedly. Or whether block patterns will actually evolve into a version of that. That rather than just being templates, UI components that we reuse, maybe they will evolve into something equally like an opportunity to be global. So, there&#8217;s definitely areas to explore there.</p>



<p>[00:22:45] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> When you agreed to have a podcast with me, it sounds subtle, but when I was thinking about it, the more I thought about it, the more I thought, actually, this is fairly seismic. You said that your design process in your agency, as a result of using patterns and the block editor had moved away, I&#8217;ll quote, you said it has moved the expectation, and I&#8217;m guessing we&#8217;re talking about the clients expectation.</p>



<p>It&#8217;s moved the expectation from impress us, to collaborate with us. And I think that&#8217;s really interesting because that is a big change. But it sounds like a really subtle one on the face of it. But so you are now it&#8217;s almost like do it, it&#8217;s not DIY, it&#8217;s more like do it with us.</p>



<p>[00:23:23] <strong>Sean Blakeley:</strong> It&#8217;s a profound change. You&#8217;re absolutely right .From being a passive consumer of that process.</p>



<p>[00:23:32] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Taking it off the shelf, the website&#8217;s off the shelf. There it is. It&#8217;s a commodity.</p>



<p>[00:23:37] <strong>Sean Blakeley:</strong> Exactly that, but also, when we&#8217;ve struggled through a design process and we present that design and we&#8217;ve often got that big gamble moment when it&#8217;s sort of Tada, and hoping fingers cross the client likes the designs that we&#8217;ve created.</p>



<p>That&#8217;s what we&#8217;re trying to address is, want to move away from these big gamble moments. These big, almost waterfall by designers. We&#8217;re doing big design stages and then big build processes. And so Bringing the clients in closer. Often I feel that we solve thousands of micro problems in the course of the design process and the course of the development process, but we kind of hide that away.</p>



<p>We&#8217;re not very good at being communicative and transparent about all of those problems that we&#8217;ve solved on that journey. And as we try and bring clients in closer, we want them to own the outcomes. We want them to be on that journey of, here&#8217;s some problems, like framing the problem and, and helping them to go on that journey of, okay, there&#8217;s some compromises here and there&#8217;s some reasoning here that maybe we need to be more mindful of.</p>



<p>And so when they&#8217;ve been part of that process, when they reach the outcomes, when we present that design, it&#8217;s no longer a Tada moment where there&#8217;s surprise, actually they become champions of that design because they have a sense of ownership. That they&#8217;ve bought into it, because they&#8217;ve been part of that ideation session and part of those sessions.</p>



<p>And so, they go into their organizations and they defend those designs. They can answer any questions about what&#8217;s the reasoning behind this? Or, or why is this like this? Well, well they know, they&#8217;ve been part of those processes.</p>



<p>Now, that&#8217;s when it works beautifully, and I&#8217;m not gonna pretend for one moment that we&#8217;ve found the unicorn, that we can all rest happy in our beds, that we&#8217;ve solved design and development, project builds. But with the right client and that right collaboration spirit, we are seeing huge value from this approach to design and development.</p>



<p>[00:25:37] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> I&#8217;m really curious as to what that actually looks like on the ground. In other words, presumably there was a transition over to this during the pandemic. Was this, like okay, we&#8217;re gonna screen share on Zoom, and we&#8217;re gonna show you what we&#8217;re doing and you are gonna interrupt us and tell us what you want us to do. Is it literally that? That they are contributing as they watch you do things and learning the process? Or is there more kind of instructional things that you are sending out to them and they approve one as opposed to the other? I&#8217;m just curious what the process really, really looks like.</p>



<p>[00:26:09] <strong>Sean Blakeley:</strong> So there&#8217;s no one size fits all. We tend to kind of move with the needs of the client and some clients are more collaborative than others. It sort of bubbled up to two approaches. So one might be that we are providing more regular feedback and regular check-ins. It&#8217;s worth mentioning because it&#8217;s, often designers work in sort of isolation and they, they don&#8217;t like to show their workings out. They don&#8217;t like to show the rough edges. They want to show something that&#8217;s beautiful that they&#8217;ve, worked very hard to create.</p>



<p>So it&#8217;s often quite hard to get them to actually be more transparent in terms of that process. In terms of their building up of ideas and their iterative, internal iterative approach. And so we&#8217;re increasingly encouraging that. And sometimes that might be the collaboration is that they&#8217;re seeing things much earlier.</p>



<p>But, with the right type of client, we can go much deeper. And so what we do is, and I think Nathan, you were kind of alluding to, this is actually we create collaboration sessions. We jump on zoom or equivalent, and we get the designers, we get the developers there, we open up Codepen or something similar.</p>



<p>And really we start like through the conduit, we kind of play what Dan Mall calls the kind of hot potato process where, you know, maybe the designer is center stage for a moment as we are looking at some typography and maybe some color elements, maybe we&#8217;ve already got a palette established from the guidelines from a brand existing brand guidelines.</p>



<p>And then the developer using Tailwind, or again, something similar, you know, there&#8217;s that friction to getting something on the screen is very low. We can start to explore and collaborate together. And, and this is where the client&#8217;s opinion can start to come in, you know? Well, well, what do you think about the use of, this color in, in this formation. Or, what do you feel about the interplay of these different elements?</p>



<p>And so what we&#8217;ve found is that trying to do that at the meta level, trying to do that in a kind more old fashioned template driven design. That&#8217;s really challenging. Because that, that doesn&#8217;t really work until you see the whole, and the interplay of all of those components. It&#8217;s, it&#8217;s hard to kind of break it down.</p>



<p>If you are truly component driven. Well then you can break off, let&#8217;s work on the hero component. And what&#8217;s incredibly valuable about these sessions is the client can tell you instantly that, oh no, we can&#8217;t do that because the marketing team must have a dot, dot dot. Or actually we sell a bit of, we get some, a revenue stream from one of those. It has to be a carousel because we get a revenue stream from one of their slides.</p>



<p>Now that minutiae insight is very hard to unfold in a discovery and definition process. That complexity emerges over time. But if you are in that space, if you are collaborating in real time, you get those insights. You get the business objective insights, coming right into the design and development process.</p>



<p>[00:28:58] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> How do you feel about, I&#8217;m pretty sure that I know that you don&#8217;t use any of these, but just as a sort of short circuit. How do you feel about these pattern libraries, which have popped up in the last year or so. Where you can go and you can discover template libraries and block pattern libraries. And so these are not the free open source ones that you can get through WordPress, but the proprietary ones.</p>



<p>Have you embedded and explored any of those and decided to use them. A minute ago, you were talking about the fact that you were free of all of that with Gutenberg. And I just wondered if you&#8217;d strayed into any of that or had any thoughts.</p>



<p>[00:29:32] <strong>Sean Blakeley:</strong> So I felt a for a long time that I don&#8217;t like to bring proprietary software into WordPress. As we should all be very mindful of creating dependencies. And that was always true of page builders. It was always a concern that we&#8217;re creating a dependency, a future dependency for our clients, you know, whatever our choice of page builder may have been.</p>



<p>And so the exact principle, the same principle applies here, that we are really creating a dependency. And exactly, as you say, Nathan, this is a young and evolving and adapting area, and maybe we back the wrong horse. You know, maybe the one that we choose is the one that just deprecates into GitHub.</p>



<p>And then we&#8217;ve suddenly got this dependency in one or two of our sites that we have to maintain. And, you know, the support desk need to learn this particular implementation. So, you know, it&#8217;s always interesting to explore. It&#8217;s always interesting to see what the community are creating both in terms of commercial offerings as well as open source.</p>



<p>But I&#8217;m very mindful that we are, it&#8217;s an infinite game. We&#8217;re not looking for those quick shortcuts in terms of implementing something today. And then we are thinking about that partnership with our clients, that life cycle of a platform, you know, of a, a true solution to their needs.</p>



<p>And that almost invariably means trying to stay as close to core as we can. We&#8217;re trying to reduce dependencies. We&#8217;re trying to reduce any sort of proprietary dependencies. With those sort of parameters in mind, it&#8217;s not really been part of our journey and I don&#8217;t, as yet, you know, we haven&#8217;t seen something that has bubbled up that has, has seemingly been so good that we feel like it&#8217;s worthy, worth taking in that compromise.</p>



<p>[00:31:12] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Sean Blakeley, thank you for joining me on the podcast.</p>



<p>[00:31:16] <strong>Sean Blakeley:</strong> Thank you.</p>
</div>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 27 Jul 2022 14:00:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"Nathan Wrigley";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:20;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:78:"Do The Woo Community: What Storytelling Means to a WooCommerce Product Builder";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=72465";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:66:"https://dothewoo.io/storytelling-for-woocommerce-product-builders/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:436:"<p>A story, to be effective, has to have certain components to help people understand that story and to reach and to be moved by that story.</p>
<p>&gt;&gt; The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://dothewoo.io/storytelling-for-woocommerce-product-builders/">What Storytelling Means to a WooCommerce Product Builder</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://dothewoo.io">Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community</a>	.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 27 Jul 2022 08:09:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:21;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:85:"Gutenberg Times: Conditionally Registering Patterns in Themes with Third-Party Blocks";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:35:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/?p=21723";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:96:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/conditionally-registering-patterns-in-themes-with-third-party-blocks/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:8608:"<p><em>What happens when a theme registers a pattern with a third-party block?</em> If the user has the block plugin installed, it appears as it should. WordPress also does a good job at handling the flipside of this scenario:  the user does not have the block installed.</p>



<p>When users attempt to use such a pattern in the editor, they will see an error like the following for self-closing blocks:</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>Your site doesn&#8217;t include support for the &#8220;pluginslug/test&#8221; block. You can leave this block intact or remove it entirely.</p></blockquote>



<p>If the block encompasses some HTML, the user will see a different message sitting above the HTML output:</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>Your site doesn&#8217;t include support for the &#8220;pluginslug/test&#8221; block. You can leave this block intact, convert its content to a Custom HTML block, or remove it entirely.</p></blockquote>



<p>On the front end, self-closing blocks are simply not shown. However, if the block has HTML, its output will appear. This system is better than something like a fatal PHP error on the front end. However, it is often not ideal.</p>



<p>Last week, WordPress.org <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/meta/2022/07/21/pattern-previews-for-themes-in-the-directory-beta/">began showing pattern previews</a> in the theme directory, as shown in the following screenshot from the <a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/bright-mode/">Bright Mode</a> theme page:</p>



<img />



<p>This change is a huge win in showing off a theme&#8217;s design.  In the past, users could not see the patterns without manually installing and testing. </p>



<p>However, it brought back that original question about dealing with third-party blocks in patterns. WordPress.org&#8217;s preview system does not have these blocks installed, so it has no way of showing them. There is currently an <a href="https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6420">open Meta ticket</a> to address this issue, and the ideal solution would be for the theme directory to simply not attempt to preview patterns for unsupported blocks.</p>



<p>Regardless of how things are handled in the theme directory, WordPress theme authors have control over whether their patterns appear. Plus, it is generally good practice to not clutter the UI with patterns that do not work.</p>



<p>The easiest way to disable a pattern, keeping it from showing in the UI, is by checking if a particular plugin is active. All you need to know is a function or class name from the plugin.</p>



<p>Themes can register patterns either via the <code>register_block_pattern()</code> function or by placing headered files into the <code>/patterns</code> subfolder.  I will cover each scenario in this tutorial. Then, I will offer a couple of alternative solutions that may work, depending on the scenario.</p>



<h2>When Registered via register_block_pattern()</h2>



<p>If registering a pattern via the <code>register_block_pattern()</code> function, you should only need to check if a plugin is active before calling the function. The simplest way to do this is to conditionally check for the plugin via <code>function_exists()</code> or <code>class_exists()</code>.</p>


<pre class="wp-block-code"><div><code class="hljs language-php">add_action( <span class="hljs-string">'init'</span>, <span class="hljs-function"><span class="hljs-keyword">function</span><span class="hljs-params">()</span> </span>{
    <span class="hljs-keyword">if</span> ( function_exists( <span class="hljs-string">'pluginslug_some_function'</span> ) ) {
        register_block_pattern( <span class="hljs-string">'themeslug/pattern-abc'</span> );
    }
} );</code></div><small class="shcb-language" id="shcb-language-1"><span class="shcb-language__label">Code language:</span> <span class="shcb-language__name">PHP</span> <span class="shcb-language__paren">(</span><span class="shcb-language__slug">php</span><span class="shcb-language__paren">)</span></small></pre>


<p>This method is no different from classic PHP-based themes when calling a function or class from a third-party plugin.</p>



<h2>When Registered via the /patterns Folder</h2>



<p>Patterns housed in the <code>/patterns</code> folder are auto-registered by WordPress on the <code>init</code> action hook. There is currently no filter to short-circuit this process. This method requires unregistering the pattern instead.</p>



<p>Once again, you must conditionally check if a function or class exists. If not, unregister the pattern:</p>


<pre class="wp-block-code"><div><code class="hljs language-php">add_action( <span class="hljs-string">'init'</span>, <span class="hljs-function"><span class="hljs-keyword">function</span><span class="hljs-params">()</span> </span>{
    <span class="hljs-keyword">if</span> ( ! function_exists( <span class="hljs-string">'pluginslug_some_function'</span> ) ) {
        unregister_block_pattern( <span class="hljs-string">'themeslug/pattern-abc'</span> );
    }
} );</code></div><small class="shcb-language" id="shcb-language-2"><span class="shcb-language__label">Code language:</span> <span class="shcb-language__name">PHP</span> <span class="shcb-language__paren">(</span><span class="shcb-language__slug">php</span><span class="shcb-language__paren">)</span></small></pre>


<h2>An Alternative: Conditionally Adding Blocks to Patterns</h2>



<p>It is possible to register a pattern while conditionally supporting a particular block. For example, suppose your theme supports a contact form block named <code>pluginslug/contact</code> that you want to display in a &#8220;Contact&#8221; pattern. Further suppose that the contact form only makes up one section of the pattern but isn&#8217;t necessarily a requirement for the layout to work.</p>



<p>This method allows all users to make use of the pattern but does not require the third-party block to be installed. It will simply not be a part of the pattern if the user doesn&#8217;t have it.</p>



<p>Since we have access to PHP when building patterns, we can do the same conditional check within the pattern itself. The following is an example of a such a pattern:</p>


<pre class="wp-block-code"><div><code class="hljs language-php"><span class="hljs-meta">&lt;?php</span>
<span class="hljs-comment">/*
 * Title: Contact
 * Slug: themeslug/contact
 */</span>
<span class="hljs-meta">?&gt;</span>
&lt;!-- some core WordPress blocks --&gt;

<span class="hljs-meta">&lt;?php</span> <span class="hljs-keyword">if</span> ( function_exists( <span class="hljs-string">'pluginslug_some_function'</span> ) ) : <span class="hljs-meta">?&gt;</span>
	&lt;!-- wp:pluginslug/contact /--&gt;
<span class="hljs-meta">&lt;?php</span> <span class="hljs-keyword">endif</span> <span class="hljs-meta">?&gt;</span>

&lt;!-- some other core WordPress blocks --&gt;</code></div><small class="shcb-language" id="shcb-language-3"><span class="shcb-language__label">Code language:</span> <span class="shcb-language__name">PHP</span> <span class="shcb-language__paren">(</span><span class="shcb-language__slug">php</span><span class="shcb-language__paren">)</span></small></pre>


<p>This method can grow complex quickly for themes that require multiple third-party blocks in a pattern or need to perform checks in dozens of pattern files. It is more suited to simple or one-off uses. Otherwise, it may become a management headache.</p>



<h2>Alternative to function/class_exists()</h2>



<p>It is also possible to check if a specific block is registered instead of relying on a plugin function/class name. However, this only works if the block is registered on the server-side.</p>



<p>WordPress does not have a dedicated <code>is_block_type()</code> or <code>is_registered_block_type()</code> helper function, but the <code>WP_Block_Type_Registry</code> class does have a public <code>is_registered()</code> method that you can use to check if a block exists:</p>


<pre class="wp-block-code"><div><code class="hljs language-php"><span class="hljs-keyword">if</span> ( WP_Block_Type_Registry::get_instance()-&gt;is_registered( <span class="hljs-string">'pluginslug/test'</span> ) ) {
    register_block_pattern( <span class="hljs-string">'themeslug/pattern-abc'</span> );
}</code></div><small class="shcb-language" id="shcb-language-4"><span class="shcb-language__label">Code language:</span> <span class="shcb-language__name">PHP</span> <span class="shcb-language__paren">(</span><span class="shcb-language__slug">php</span><span class="shcb-language__paren">)</span></small></pre>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 27 Jul 2022 08:01:28 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"Justin Tadlock";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:22;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:40:"HeroPress: Finding My Place In The World";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:56:"https://heropress.com/?post_type=heropress-essays&p=4641";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:132:"https://heropress.com/essays/finding-my-place-in-the-world/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=finding-my-place-in-the-world";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:22222:"<img width="1024" height="512" src="https://heropress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/072622-min.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Pull Quote: The experience was so great and the community so warm, that it pulled me all the way in." />
<p><a href="https://heropress.com/feed/#finnish">Tämä kirjoitus on luettavissa myös suomeksi.</a></p>



Here is Timi reading his own story aloud.



<p>From a young age, I’ve been interested in computers. That probably comes from our family tree, as my grandad was a home appliance repairer and father has had a career related to the Internet since the early 2000s dot-com boom.</p>



<p>I remember looking at schematics of different household appliances at our grandad’s repair shop. Thinking how on earth the television game shows, where you could send a text message to “throw” a ball towards the goal on the virtual background behind the host, do work. Spending time at the computer, going thru different websites and being impressed by those. Father being head of e-commerce for a hairdressing industry chain and seeing the growth of e-commerce during the mid-2000s.</p>



<p>At that time I was in primary school and didn’t understand much of what all that was about. And surely wouldn’t have even guessed that someday I would have a career in IT.</p>



<h2 id="h-getting-familiar-with-the-internet">Getting familiar with the Internet</h2>



<p>Sure, back in the days, you had MySpace, virtual horse stables, guestbooks, IRC-Galleria, and different “website builders”… everyone explored the possibilities of these tools and technologies. You almost weren’t cool if you didn’t. So of course I built a few websites mainly just for fun, like almost everyone else of my age at that time. I also purchased my first domains and made a few sites public. One of those, for a scout group, was “coded” with excel. That’s how I started learning HTML and CSS.</p>



<p>When secondary school started, I did get really interested in sewing, and light-and-audio equipment for live productions. And politics.</p>



<blockquote><p>Copyright, patent law, freedom of information and net neutrality were hot topics around that time in Finland. </p></blockquote>



<p>I felt that the Internet I had grown with, was threatened. The Pirate Party movement had just landed in Finland and they were defending everything I believed in: open access to information and people’s online rights. Despite my young age, they welcomed me, so I got involved with registering the party for elections and in general.</p>



<p>They used IRC for all the communications, and soon I became frustrated because of missed conversations due to shutting off the computer and thus signing off from IRC as well. That led me to assemble, install and run my first home server so I would always have IRC on. Of course, the new server intrigued me and almost invited to try out hosting the websites myself. That way I learned the basics about Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL. My interest in these things was understood by only a few classmates and for everyone else, I was a bit of a weirdo. Because of that, I didn’t make many friends from the same age group with me – and that stays true to this day.</p>



<h2 id="h-finding-wordpress">Finding WordPress</h2>



<p>At some point in all this, I found WordPress. It was around 2009 and version 2.8 when I installed WordPress for the first time. I immediately started looking for ways to modify and extend the website. One thing lead to another. Soon I had installed WordPress quite a few more times, and even helped one of my friends to set up a website for their parliamentary election campaign. For getting the timeline right in this post, I looked up my old websites and found out that in 2010 I had published a guide on how to translate WordPress into Finnish and even offered some theme translations to download.</p>



<p>And yet I still didn’t think that IT, servers, websites or WordPress could be my career. When secondary school ended, I applied to study live production. Like audio and lights in concerts and all that stuff. Didn’t get selected for that school, because of the low numbers on the diploma. That was devastating.</p>



<p>But little did I know. The third school I applied to, selected me and there I was, going to study multimedia for three years. Photography, video editing, design and a little bit of web development.</p>



<h2 id="h-the-most-inspiring-and-toughest-times-of-life-at-the-same-time">The most inspiring and toughest times of life at the same time</h2>



<p>Looking back, this was one of the most pivotal points in my life. Three years in that school taught me how to be creative with design and boosted my self-confidence in coding skills. Starting almost from the first web development classes, teachers saw my skills and encouraged me to continue coding. I started helping other students during the classes, as most of the web development stuff was already familiar to me. I really enjoyed the print design classes, photography and school in general after a long time.</p>



<p>I had also become active in running one of the few Internet cafes in Helsinki that were left in the early 2010s. At the time, we were one of the few places which served only vegetarian food, had open wifi and laptops available for customers. As I was interested in tech and some knowledge, the natural thing was to be involved with maintaining those laptops and the website for the cafe.</p>



<p>Some same founders of that cafe cooperative had founded another cooperative in the early 2000s, to offer reasonably priced hosting and email services for associations and other NGOs. After some time, they invited me to join and soon I started helping with server upkeep and customer service. I would also make a number of websites with WordPress for our clients. </p>



<blockquote><p>For the first time in my life, I was getting some money from doing things on the Internet.</p></blockquote>



<p>I started to feel that I had found what I want to do in my life.</p>



<p>Then my partner at the time did get severely ill mentally. That started to affect me as well, and the last year of school with one half at on-the-job training and another half at school doing a bigger final project was very emotional and filled with deep worry. During that year we broke up and that led to depression.</p>



<p>I didn’t go to school. I didn’t answer the emails or phone calls from my teachers. For a good few months, my life was filled with going out to nightclubs and doing the cooperative work for which I felt a responsibility.</p>



<p>One day, when one of the teachers was calling yet again, I gathered myself and picked up the phone. It was only a month before graduation and I had some courses and a final project to complete before that. Somehow we managed to arrange everything and with the support of all my teachers, the last course was accepted as completed two days before the graduation ceremony.</p>



<h2 id="h-not-finding-a-job-in-the-industry">Not finding a job in the industry</h2>



<p>Right after graduation, I started looking for a job in the web industry. Tens of applications lead to few interviews, but nobody wanted to hire a newly graduated 18-year-old. I had some experience working in the kitchen from summer jobs, so I started applying to those types of openings, from fast-food chains to being a dishwasher at restaurants in need of income. </p>



<blockquote><p>Finally, one small school kitchen hired me to do the salads and desserts and help with dishwashing.</p></blockquote>



<p>A few months passed, and even though the school kitchen work was nice, I knew that it was something I didn’t want to do for too long. Finland has mandatory military or civil service for all adult males, so I started planning to complete my service soon with the hopes of finding a job in web development after that.</p>



<p>Only a few weeks before my civil service was due to start, one of the companies I had applied to reached out to me and offered a job. Being thrilled about finally getting a job offer in the industry, I did take that offer right away to learn that I would be a sole developer. At the age of 19. At a company with multiple seriously big clients and custom systems written in PHP.</p>



<h2 id="h-finding-wordpress-community">Finding WordPress community</h2>



<p>During that time, I also learned about the WordPress community in Finland and attended a few very early unofficial meetups. A bit earlier, I had met <a href="https://rolle.design/">Rolle</a> online, who happened to found a WordPress agency around the same time we started offering WordPress websites, on my initiative, at the company I was working for. At its best, we chatted daily and helped each other with our work.</p>



<p>Fast-forward a year. I was hired by a newly founded digital agency whose owners previously used me as a freelancer. It was really inspiring. I learned a lot and submitted my first patch to WordPress core during that employment. But something was missing. The owners didn’t really see the value in the community and, in fact, denied me from attending the first WordCamp in Finland.</p>



<p>Being very stubborn at that age and really interested in the community based on meetups, I cheated a little and booked train tickets to WordCamp Finland 2015. Ignoring the fact that my bosses haven’t allowed using one workday for that.</p>



<p>It was worth it and a second pivotal point in my life. I finally met Rolle in person and many other Finnish WordPress’ers I looked up to. Including Daniel, who was responsible for Finnish translations for years and Mikko, who was considered a WordPress guru.</p>



<h2 id="h-growing-in-the-wordpress-community">Growing in the WordPress community</h2>



<p>The experience was so great and the community so warm, that it pulled me all the way in. I started attending official meetups and over the years first became a volunteer at WordCamp, then organiser and lead the organiser. I also moved to another city and was the first hire in Rolle’s company.</p>



<p>Nowadays, multiple years later, I’m a partner in the very same company called <a href="https://www.dude.fi/">Dude</a>. A Community Deputy and a WordCamp mentor. Our company sponsors my time partially for the WordPress project. I’ve built WordPress websites for Finnish government agencies and big corporates. Mentored WordCamp Europe. Helped numerous WordPress’ers around the world in various ways.</p>



<p>And found my place in the world. From an industry and community, I could not have predicted, but to which the journey is quite obvious when looking back. A community that does not only share the same ideology that is still important to me, the freedom of information, but helps to make it true. A community whose members I consider close friends, some even as an extended family.</p>



<p>For those who are interested in my journey in WordPress Community, there’s a post titled “<a href="https://sipp.is/12-years-with-wordpress/">12 years with WordPress</a>” in my personal blog waiting for you.</p>



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



<p>&nbsp;</p>



<h1>Miten löysin paikkani maailmassa</h1>



Timi lukee tässä tarinansa ääneen.



<p>Olin kiinnostunut tietokoneista ja nuoresta iästä lähtien. Sukurasite todennäköisesti, vaari kun oli kodinkonekorjaaja ja isä luonut uraa Internetin parissa 2000-luvun huumasta lähtien.</p>



<p>Muistan ihmetelleeni eri kodinkoneiden korjauskaavioita vaarin pajalla. Miettineeni miten television peliohjelmat, joissa pystyit “heittämään” palloa tekstarilla virtuaalisen taustan edessä kekkuloivan juontajan iloksi, voi toimia. Kuluttaneeni aikaa tietokoneella selaten läpi Internetiä. Näheeni valtakunnallisen kampaamoketjun verkkokauppapäällikön, isäni, kautta verkkokaupan kasvun 2000-luvun puolivälissä.</p>



<p>Tuohon aikaan olin ala-asteella enkä ymmärtänyt isommassa mittakaavassa mitä ympärilläni tapahtui. Enkä olisi koskaan osannut edes arvata, että joku päivä olisin IT-alalla.</p>



<h2 id="h-tutustuminen-internetiin-alkaa">Tutustuminen Internetiin alkaa</h2>



<p>Toki MySpace, virtuaalitallit, erilaiset vieraskirjat, IRC-Galleria, Suntuubi ja vastaavat oli tuohon aikaan pienimuotoinen juttu. Kaikki kokeilkivat ja testailivat näitä uusia työkaluja sekä tekniikoita. Et lähestulkoon ollut cool, jos et testaillut. Niinpä minkäkin rakensin ensimmäisiä verkkosivujani, kuten moni oman ikäiseni noihin aikoihin. Hankin myös muutaman ensimmäisen verkkotunnukseni ja laitoin sivuja julkiseksi. Yksi noista oli partiolippukunnalle excelillä “koodattu” sivusto. Tällä tavoin aloin oppimaan HTML:ää sekä CSS:ää.</p>



<p>Ylä-asteen alkaessa kiinnostuin todella ompelusta sekä livetuotantojen ääni- ja valotekniikasta. Ja politiikasta.</p>



<p>Noihin aikoihin tekijänoikeusasiat, patenttilaki, tiedon vapaus ja nettineutraliteetti olivat tapetilla suomessa. Tunsin, että Internet jonka kanssa olin kasvanut oli uhattuna. Piraattiliike oli juuri saapunut suomeen ja he puolustivat kaikkea mihin uskoin: vapaata pääsyä tietoon sekä ihmisten oikeuksia Internetissä. Nuoresta iästäni huolimatta minut toivotettiin tervetulleeki ja näin osallistuin Piraattipuolueen puoluerekisteriin saamiseen.</p>



<p>Piraattipuolueessa käytettiin IRC:iä kaikkeen kommunikointiin, ja pian turhauduinkin kun menetin chattilokeja tietokoneen sammuttamisen takia. Näin päädyin rakentamaan, asentamaan ja pyörittämään ensimmäistä kotipalvelintani – jotta voisin pitää IRC:iä päällä koko ajan. Luonnollisesti tämä houkutti ja lähes kutsui minua testaamaan nettisivujen hostaamista itsekkin. Näin aloin oppimaan perusteita Linuxista, Apachesta, PHP:sta aj MySQL:ästä. Ainoastaan muutama luokkakaverini ymmärsi kiinnostukseni näihin asioihin, muille olin hieman outolintu. Ehkä siksi en saanutkaan kovin montaa ystävää oman ikäisistäni – asia joka muuten pätee edelleen.</p>



<h2 id="h-wordpressin-loytamisen-hetki">WordPressin löytämisen hetki</h2>



<p>Jossain kohtaa kaikkea tätä löysin WordPressin. Se oli joskus vuonna 2009 ja version 2.8 paikkeilla, kun asensin WordPressin ensimmäistä kertaa. Välittömästi aloin tutkia tapoja muokata sekä laajentaa luomaani nettisivua. Yksi asia johti toiseen. Pian olinkin asentanut WordPressin jo useampaan kertaan ja jopa auttanut ystävääni luomalla hänen eduskuntavaalikampanjasivuston. Tutkistekin tätä kirjoitusta varten vanhoja sivustojani, ja huomasin että 2010 olen julkaissut ohjeen miten saada WordPress suomeksi ja tarjosin jopa muutaman teeman käännöstä ladattavaksi.</p>



<p>Silti en vieläkään uskonut, että IT, palvelimet, nettisivut tai WordPress voisi olla joskus ura minulle. Peruskoulun lähestyessä loppuaan, hain opiskelemaan livetuotantojen tekniikkaa. En tullut valituksi päättötodistuksen huonojen arvosanojen takia. Olin lannistunut.</p>



<p>Mutta vähänpä tiesin. Pääsin kolmanteen hakuvaihtoehtooni ja siinä minä olin, aloittamassa media-assistentin opinnot. Valokuvausta, videoiden editointia, suunnittelua ja vähän nettisivujen tekemistä.</p>



<h2 id="h-elamani-inspiroivimmat-ja-haastavimmat-ajat-samaan-aikaan">Elämäni inspiroivimmat ja haastavimmat ajat samaan aikaan</h2>



<p>Taaksepäin katsoen tämä oli yksi elämäni käännekohdista. Kolme vuotta ammattikoulussa opetti minulle luovuutta ja vahvisti itsetuntoani koodaustaidoistani. Melkein ensimmäisistä tunneista lähtien, opettajat huomasivat kykyni ja kannustivat jatkamaan. Aloin auttamaan muita oppilaita verkkoviestinnän tunneilla, koska lähes kaikki mitä opiskelimme koodaamiseen liittyen oli jo tuttua minulle. Nautin printtimateriaalien suunnittelusta, valokuvauksesta ja pitkästä aikaa koulusta.</p>



<p>Noihin aikoihin olin myös ryhtynyt aktiiviseksi yhdessä Helsingin ainoista jäljellä olevista internetkahviloista. Tuohon aikaan osuuskuntamme oli yksi harvoista, joilla oli täysin lihaton valikoima, vapaasti käytettävissä oleva langaton verkko sekä läppäreitä lainaan asiakkaille. Luonnollisesti, koska olin kiinnostunut teknologiasta ja jonkin verran kokenut, päädyin auttamaan näiden läppäreiden sekä kahvilan nettisivujen ylläpitämisessä.</p>



<p>Samat perustajat olivat perustaneet toisen osuuskunnan 2000-luvun alussa, tarjotakseen järkevästi hinnoiteltuja verkkopalveluita yhdistyksille sekä yhteisöille. Tulin kutsutuksi mukaan tuohon osuuskuntaan ja pian aloin auttamaan palvelinten ylläpidossa sekä asiakaspalvelussa. Tein myös jonkin verran WordPress-sivustoja asiakkaillemme. Ensimmäistä kertaa elämässäni sain rahaa siitä, että tein asioita Internetissä.</p>



<p>Alkoi tuntumaan, että olen löytänyt sen mitä haluan tehdä elämässäni.</p>



<p>Sitten silloinen kumppanini sairastui mielenterveydeltään vakavasti. Se alkoi vaikuttaa myös minuun ja viimeinen vuosi koulussa, toinen puolisko työssäoppimassa ja toinen lopputyön parissa, täyttyi vahvoilla tunteilla sekä syvällä huolella. Erosimme tuon vuoden aikana, ja masennuin.</p>



<p>En mennyt kouluun. En vastannut opettajien puheluihin tai sähköposteihin. Muutaman kuukauden ajan elämäni täyttyi yökerhoissa käymisellä sekä osuuskunnan töillä, joihin koin velvollisuutta.</p>



<p>Eräs päivä, kun yksi opettajista soitti jälleen, keräsin itseni ja vastasin. Oli noin kuukausi valmistumiseen ja minulla oli muutama kurssi suoritettavana sekä lopputyö kesken. Jollain tavalla saimme asiat järjestynään opettajieni tuella, ja viimeinen kurssi merkittiin suoritetuksi kaksi päivää ennen valmistujaisia.</p>



<p>Välittömästi valmistumisen jälkeen aloin etsimään töitä. Kymmenet hekmukset johtivat muutamaan haastatteluun, mutta kukaan ei halunnut palkata 18 vuotiasta vastavalmistunutta. Olin saanut kesätöistä jonkin verran koemusta keittiössä työskentelemisestä, joten rahan tarpeessa aloin hakemaan työpaikkoja mistä tahansa ravintola-alalta, pikaruokaketjuista aina ravintoloiden tiskariksi. Lopulta eräs pienempi koulukeittiö palkkasi minut auttamaan salaattien, jälkiruokien sekä tiskien kanssa.</p>



<p>Jokunen kuukausi kului ja vaikka työ oli mukavaa, tiesin etten halua tehdä sitä turhan pitkään. Niinpä aloin suunnittelemaan siviilipalvelukseen astumista ja toivoin, että löytäisin sen jälkeen oman alan töitä.</p>



<p>Vain muutama viikko ennen palvelukseen astumista, eräs yrityksistä joihin olin hakenut palasi asiaan ja tarjosi töitä. Olin innoissani, eikä tarvinnut miettiä pitkään paikan vastaanottamista. Pian kuitenkin opin, että tulisin olemaan yrityksen ainoa koodari. 19 vuoden ikäisenä. Yrityksessä jolla oli isoja asiakkuuksia ja lukuisia itse kehitettyjä PHP-sovelluksia.</p>



<h2 id="h-wordpress-yhteison-loytaminen">WordPress-yhteisön löytäminen</h2>



<p>Noihin aikoihin tulin myös tietoiseksi suomen WordPress-yhteisöstä ja osallistuin muutamaan ensimmäisistä epävirallisista tapaamisista. Hieman aiemmin, olin tustunut netissä <a href="https://rolle.design/">Rolleen</a>, joka sattui perustamaan WordPress-toimiston samoihin aikoihin kuin meidän yritys alkoi tarjoamaan WordPress-sivustoja aloitteestani. Parhaimmillaan juttelimme päivittäin ja autoimme toisiamme työssämme.</p>



<p>Pikakelataan vuosi. Olin palkattu vastaperustettuun digitoimistoon, joiden omistajille olin tehnyt joitain vuosia aiemmin hommia freelancerina. Tuo aika oli todella inspiroivaa. Opin paljon uutta ja lähetin jopa ensimmäisen pienen korjaukseni WordPressin ytimeen. Mutta jotain puuttui. Omistajat eivät oikein nähneet arvoa yhteisössä, ja itseasiassa kielsivät osallistumasta suomen enimmäiseen WordCamp-tapahtumaan.</p>



<p>Jääräpäinen kun olin, ja erittäin kiinnostunut yhteisöstä, huijasin hieman ja varasin junaliput osallistuaakseni WordCamp Finland 2015 -tapahtumaan. Huolimatta siitä, että minua oli kielletty kuluttamasta työpäivää siihen.</p>



<p>Osallistuminen oli sen arvoista ja toinen käännekohdista elämässäni. Tapasin vihdoin Rollen ensimmäistä kertaa livenä, sekä muita suomen WordPress-maailman hahmoja joita ihailin. Mukaanlukien Daniel joka vastasi suomenkielisistä käännöksistä pitkään sekä Mikon, jota pidettiin lähes WordPress-guruna.</p>



<h2 id="h-wordpress-yhteisossa-kasvaminen">WordPress-yhteisössä kasvaminen</h2>



<p>Kokemus oli niin mahtava ja yhteisö niin lämmin, että se veti heti mukaansa. Aloin osallistumaan virallisiin WordPress meetuppeihin säännöllisesti ja vuosien aikana ilmoittauduin ensin vapaaehtoiseksi WordCamppiin, sitten järjestäjäksi ja lopulta pääjärjestäjäksi. Muutin toiseen kaupunkiin ja olin Rollen perustaman firman ensimmäinen palkkaus.</p>



<p>Nykyään, vuosia myöhemmin, olen osakas tuossa samassa firmassa nimeltään Dude. Osa kansainvälistä yhteisötiimiä ja mentoroin WordCamppeja. Firma sponsoroi osan työajastani WordPress yhteisön hyväksi. Olen ollut mukana tekemässä nettisivuja valtionhallionhallinnolle ja isoille korporaatioille. Mentoroinut maailmans suurinta WordCampia. Auttanut lukuisia WordPressin käyttäjiä ympäri maailman.</p>



<p>Ja löytänyt paikkani maailmassa. Alalta ja yhteisöstä jota en olisi voinut koskaan ennustaa, mutta johon matka on selkeästi nähtävissä kun katsoo taaksepäin. Yhteisössä, joka ei ainoastaan jaa kanssani samaa ideologiaa joka on edelleen minulle tärkeä, tiedon vapaus, vaan myös auttaa tekemään siitä totta. Yhteisössä, jonka jäsenet ovat tärkeitä ystäviä ja osa jopa melkein kuin perhettä.</p>



<p>Matkastani WordPress-yhteisössä kiinnostuneille, henkilökohtaisesta blogistani löytyy kirjoitus “<a href="https://sipp.is/12-years-with-wordpress/">12 years with WordPress</a>”.</p>
<p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://heropress.com/essays/finding-my-place-in-the-world/">Finding My Place In The World</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://heropress.com">HeroPress</a>.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 27 Jul 2022 08:00:29 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"Timi Wahalahti";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:23;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:91:"WPTavern: Akismet 5.0 Adds New Spam Detection Feature That Analyzes How Comments Are Posted";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=136573";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:102:"https://wptavern.com/akismet-5-0-adds-new-spam-detection-feature-that-analyzes-how-comments-are-posted";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:2157:"<p>For years, the vast majority of Akismet releases have been centered around bug fixes and improving compatibility with various plugins. <a href="https://blog.akismet.com/2022/07/26/version-5-0-of-the-akismet-wordpress-plugin-is-now-available/">Version 5.0</a> was released today, following 4.2.5 earlier this month, with a <a href="https://blog.akismet.com/2022/07/26/spambots-theyre-not-just-like-us-introducing-akismets-newest-spam-fighting-feature/">new feature</a> that should improve Askismet&#8217;s ability to detect spam comments.</p>



<p>Akismet engineer Christopher Finke explained how the plugin will now analyze how a comment is posted, in addition to analyzing what is posted:</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>A typical human commenter on the Web takes about 40 seconds to read a blog post and another 40 seconds to write and submit a comment. Their typing speed varies significantly throughout the creation of their comment, and they regularly use their mouse to click around the page. An automated spambot (even one programmed to act like a person) doesn’t act so human-like: its typing speed and mouseclick speed are superhumanly consistent. It doesn’t spend time “reading” blog posts. Its mouse usage is sparse.</p></blockquote>



<p>This new feature can detect spam that is posted in a machine-like fashion, even if the spambot is attempting to post a comment with content identical to one that has already been approved. </p>



<p>&#8220;The Akismet plugin will begin observing these behaviors so that they can be used as part of the spam-checking process,&#8221; Finke said. &#8220;None of this data is personally identifiable, and it won’t be used for any purpose other than identifying spam.&#8221;</p>



<p><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/akismet">Akismet</a> is bundled with WordPress and is active on more than 5 million sites. More than 62% of users are running on 4.2.x and ~38% are on version 4.1 or older. WordPress users who are having a lot of spam breaking through Akismet&#8217;s protection will want to upgrade to take advantage of the new spambot detection features in version 5.0. </p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 26 Jul 2022 18:26:46 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:24;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:69:"Akismet: Version 5.0 of the Akismet WordPress Plugin is Now Available";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"http://blog.akismet.com/?p=2408";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:97:"https://blog.akismet.com/2022/07/26/version-5-0-of-the-akismet-wordpress-plugin-is-now-available/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:614:"<p>Version 5.0 of <a href="http://wordpress.org/plugins/akismet/">the Akismet plugin for WordPress</a> is now available. This update contains one main improvement: <a href="https://blog.akismet.com/?p=2398">a new feature that helps stop spambots</a> by observing how they interact with the page, not just what content they submit.</p>



<p>To upgrade, visit the Updates page of your WordPress dashboard and follow the instructions. If you need to download the plugin zip file directly, links to all versions are available in <a href="http://wordpress.org/plugins/akismet/">the WordPress plugins directory</a>.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 26 Jul 2022 16:16:15 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:17:"Christopher Finke";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:25;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:102:"Akismet: Spambots: They’re (Not) Just Like Us. Introducing Akismet’s Newest Spam-fighting Feature.";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"http://blog.akismet.com/?p=2398";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:119:"https://blog.akismet.com/2022/07/26/spambots-theyre-not-just-like-us-introducing-akismets-newest-spam-fighting-feature/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:2153:"<p>For years, Akismet has improved life on the Web by analyzing comment form and contact form submissions and comparing them against millions of pieces of real-time content to catch and stop spam. This has gone well (533,000,000,000 times and counting), but it could be going even better.</p>



<p>Starting with <a href="https://blog.akismet.com/2022/07/26/version-5-0-of-the-akismet-wordpress-plugin-is-now-available/">version 5.0 of the Akismet plugin for WordPress</a>, Akismet will begin analyzing <strong><em>how</em></strong> the content was posted in addition to <strong><em>what</em></strong> content is posted. What does this mean?</p>



<p>A typical human commenter on the Web takes about 40 seconds to read a blog post and another 40 seconds to write and submit a comment. Their typing speed varies significantly throughout the creation of their comment, and they regularly use their mouse to click around the page. An automated spambot (even one programmed to act like a person) doesn&#8217;t act so human-like: its typing speed and mouseclick speed are superhumanly consistent. It doesn&#8217;t spend time &#8220;reading&#8221; blog posts. Its mouse usage is sparse. </p>



<p>The differences in these behaviors between people and people-impersonating bots can be used to stop spam &#8212; even if <a href="https://blog.akismet.com/2007/11/27/it-really-is-spam/">a spambot is posting a comment identical to that of a real person</a>, the way it does it is uniquely machine-like.  The Akismet plugin will begin observing these behaviors so that they can be used as part of the spam-checking process. (None of this data is personally identifiable, and it won&#8217;t be used for any purpose other than identifying spam.)</p>



<p>To ensure that this latest anti-spam technology is being used to protect your website, upgrade to <a href="https://blog.akismet.com/2022/07/26/version-5-0-of-the-akismet-wordpress-plugin-is-now-available/">Akismet 5.0</a> by visiting the Updates page of your WordPress admin dashboard or by downloading it directly from <a href="http://wordpress.org/plugins/akismet/">the WordPress plugins directory</a>.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 26 Jul 2022 16:15:27 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:17:"Christopher Finke";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:26;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:84:"Do The Woo Community: The Twists and Turns to Becoming a Developer with Carmen Maymo";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=72529";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:64:"https://dothewoo.io/the-developer-journey-that-twists-and-turns/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:420:"<p>Carmen Maymo started out as an artist, and following a twisted path, ended up a WordPress and WooCommerce developer. </p>
<p>&gt;&gt; The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://dothewoo.io/the-developer-journey-that-twists-and-turns/">The Twists and Turns to Becoming a Developer with Carmen Maymo</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://dothewoo.io">Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community</a>	.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 26 Jul 2022 09:59:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:27;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:95:"WPTavern: Review Signal Publishes 2022 WordPress and WooCommerce Hosting Performance Benchmarks";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=136533";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:106:"https://wptavern.com/review-signal-publishes-2022-wordpress-and-woocommerce-hosting-performance-benchmarks";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:7716:"<p>Kevin Ohashi from Review Signal has published the <a href="https://wphostingbenchmarks.com/">2022 WordPress and WooCommerce hosting performance benchmarks</a>. These benchmarks are some of the most trusted review sources in the hosting industry due to Ohashi&#8217;s transparent <a href="https://wphostingbenchmarks.com/methodology/">methodology</a>. No hosting company sponsors the work. Instead, Ohashi charges a standard, publicly documented fee for participation that covers the cost of the tests.</p>



<p>In 2022, Ohashi tested 33 companies with 79 different plans across seven different price tiers, including the WooCommerce tier.</p>



<p>If speed is one of your chief concerns when selecting a hosting company, these performance reviews may be of interest. The benchmarks include a Load Storm test designed to simulate real users visiting the site, logging in, and browsing (uncached performance). They also test cached performance, SSL, WP queries per second, performance on some computational and database operations, and a WebPageTest that fully loads the homepage and records how long it takes from 12 different locations around the world.</p>



<p>The results are easy to examine at a glance. Top Tier (Full Star) status is given to hosts that perform well under the battery of tests:</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p><strong>Top Tier WordPress Hosting (Full Star)</strong></p><p>This is awarded to companies who maintain 99.9% uptime throughout the entire testing and show little to no performance degradation during load testing, primarily focused on error rate and consistent response times. Error rates above 0.1% and response times above 1000ms* will keep a company away from achieving Top Tier marks.</p></blockquote>



<p>In the budget &lt;$25/Month category, the 2022 Top Tier winners included 20i, 34SP, EasyWP by Namecheap, Eco Web Hosting, GreenGeeks, HostXNow, ICDSoft, LightningBase, MechanicWeb, Pressable, SiteGround, and WPX.</p>



<img />



<p>On the other end of the spectrum, in the <a href="https://wphostingbenchmarks.com/benchmark/2022-enterprise-wordpress/">Enterprise tier ($500+/month)</a>, there were far fewer participants but the majority of them achieved Top Tier status, including Performant Websites, Presslabs, Scaleforce powered by Virtuozzo, Servebolt (Scale + ACD), Servebolt, and WordPress VIP.</p>



<img />



<p>This is the second year Ohashi has performed WooCommerce hosting reviews. The tests are performed on a WooCommerce dummy website with Storefront set as the theme and <a href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/master/sample-data/sample_products.xml">sample products</a> loaded.</p>



<p>Top Tier winners for WooCommerce hosting include GreenGeeks, Pressable, Servebolt, and WordPress.com.  Two others achieved Honorable Mentions &#8211; ICDSoft and SiteGround. </p>



<img />



<p>Clicking on &#8220;View full results&#8221; for any of the tiers will show a detailed breakdown of all the tests with comparison charts and summaries for each host participating.</p>



<h3>WordPress Hosting Is Getting Faster</h3>



<p>&#8220;I think the most remarkable trend is how fast things are getting,&#8221; Ohashi said. &#8220;For example if we look at the enterprise tier from 2021 vs 2022, the fastest average response time (Static test) was 9ms and 6.4ms and p95 was 41ms to 20ms. The 3rd fastest p95 last year was 65ms which would be 7th (out of 9) fastest this year if you moved it.</p>



<p>&#8220;Despite the numbers already being staggeringly fast already, the whole cohort accelerated even faster.</p>



<p>&#8220;And it&#8217;s not just at the high end, at the &lt;25 tier, on the Static test there was 1 company with under 100ms p95 last year (CynderHost &#8211; 61ms). This year you have three &#8211; Pressable (18ms), SiteGround (67ms), WPX (89ms).</p>



<p>&#8220;At the slow end, the slowest &lt;25 Static average response time was 267ms, last year there were 5 companies with equal or slower averages (max being over 1200ms).&#8221;</p>



<p>Ohashi said there may be some selection bias as companies who do badly may not want to participate again and filter themselves out. </p>



<p>&#8220;But some of those companies improved quite a bit like GoDaddy was 295ms to 234ms which is a 61ms improvement,&#8221; he said. &#8220;I want to call out the companies who have sometimes struggled on these tests, and keep participating. I respect them and it makes me happy to see them making continuous improvements. </p>



<p>&#8220;While I do give awards for companies who do well, I think it&#8217;s important to recognize that not doing as well isn&#8217;t a failure, it&#8217;s about what the companies do with that information and how they improve their services. Overall, it seems everyone is improving and that&#8217;s a win for hosts and consumers alike.&#8221;</p>



<p>Ohashi said one of his goals for 2022 is talking with the companies to explain the value of participating. Beyond the value of the benchmarks themselves, these reviews help the ecosystem push for better performance. One of Ohashi&#8217;s testing policies is a big driver for this: </p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>&#8220;The hosting packages are as close to default as possible. In some circumstances where turning on performance enhancements is very simple, e.g. clicking an option to turn on caching, this will be done. These changes must be obvious or communicated clearly in the welcome email so that every user is guaranteed to at least be presented the option. Otherwise everything is as-is for new customers upon sign up to avoid, as much as possible, the extra benefit of companies knowing they are being tested.&#8221;</p></blockquote>



<p>Companies that do well in these tests are those that have embraced performance by default, so that any performance improving technology is already turned on or presented proactively to customers. </p>



<p>&#8220;One of the things I got a degree in is economics and we talk about opt-in vs opt-out policies like organ donation and how defaults can drastically influence outcomes,&#8221; Ohashi said. &#8220;By forcing opt-in performance improvements, I don&#8217;t know how many thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of sites have been positively impacted by these benchmarks without ever being aware because hosting companies are forced to enable better defaults.&#8221;</p>



<p>Ohashi also works with the companies on things that do not make it into the benchmarks, such as pointing out issues with onboarding/UI/UX experience and reporting bugs.</p>



<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve probably used more different WordPress hosting companies than anyone else in the world at this point (I have to be in the top 10 doing these benchmarks for a decade right?),&#8221; he said. &#8220;If I cannot figure out how to do something in your system, it&#8217;s probably your system, not me. I truly want to see everyone do better, because everyone wins in that scenario and I will try to help as much as I can to make that happen.&#8221;</p>



<p>Check out the <a href="https://wphostingbenchmarks.com/">2022 WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks</a> for a more detailed breakdown of all the different pricing tiers and a full explanation of the testing methodology. Past years&#8217; benchmarks are also available on the website. This year Load Storm went out of business, so Ohashi replicated the tests into k6. All of his load testing scripts are open source and <a href="https://github.com/ReviewSignal/k6-WordPress-benchmarks">available on GitHub</a>, so others are welcome to use them for testing their own sites or building their own testing suites.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 26 Jul 2022 02:40:37 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:28;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:56:"WPTavern: SiteCare Acquires Maintainn from WebDevStudios";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=136520";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:67:"https://wptavern.com/sitecare-acquires-maintainn-from-webdevstudios";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:2720:"<p>More consolidation is happening in the WordPress maintenance services space, as SiteCare <a href="https://sitecare.com/blog/sitecare-acquires-maintainn/">announced</a> it has acquired <a href="https://maintainn.com/">Maintainn</a>, a long-time competitor, from WebDevStudios.</p>



<p>&#8220;As we’ve grown and our clientele has grown [with] definitely more of a focus on the enterprise and big business, we’ve simply kind of grown away where that side of the house wasn’t really in line with the web dev side of the house in terms of the clients we&#8217;re working with,&#8221; WebDevStudios CEO Brad Williams said in an interview with <a href="https://thewpminute.com/wordpress-support-company-sitecare-acquires-maintainn-from-webdevstudios/">The WP Minute</a>.</p>



<p>&#8220;So it’s been a bit of a, struggle in terms of how best to support those clients, because of course we want to take care of our clients and they are a big reason why we’re here. That’s why, Lisa, my partner, and myself, kind of took a step back and said, maybe this doesn&#8217;t make sense for WebDev, where we&#8217;re at, where we&#8217;re continuing to go.&#8221;</p>



<p>As WebDevStudios began focusing more on taking on larger, more technical projects that run WordPress at scale for clients like The Wall Street Journal, Starbucks, Microsoft, Viacom, and the NBA, the company struggled to effectively market Maintainn with messaging that conveyed its distinction from WebDevStudios&#8217; enterprise development offerings.</p>



<p>&#8220;Struggle of the message, the marketing message to say, hey, we can support, blogs, SMB all the way up to, enterprise and Microsoft is a hard message to get across,&#8221; Williams said. </p>



<p>&#8220;We knew that the marketing of that would be almost impossible for us to, to nail. It really just came from the separation of where WebDev was kind of growing more towards the enterprise and Maintainn was primarily supporting more of that SMB to to mid-tier.&#8221;</p>



<p>Maintainn&#8217;s current maintenance plan customers, which range from $49-$249/month, will remain at the same pricing for one year. SiteCare may reevaluate these pricing tiers in the future. Customers are promised the same level of service as their current plan but may also receive some enhanced benefits that they had not received before. In addition to maintenance services, SiteCare also offers its customers a range of digital marketing services.</p>



<p>This is SiteCare&#8217;s second acquisition of a WordPress site management company after acquiring WP Site Care in 2018. The company will take on all of Maintainn&#8217;s assets but the employees will remain with WebDevStudios.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Mon, 25 Jul 2022 18:47:19 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:29;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:76:"Gutenberg Times: Live Q &amp; A: Block-First Approach at Pew Research Center";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:35:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/?p=21696";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:80:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/live-q-a-block-first-approach-at-pew-research-center/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:67879:"<p>On July 22, 2022, Michael Piccorossi, Head of Digital Strategy and Seth Rubenstein, Lead Developer at Pew Research Center talked to co-hosts Anne McCarthy, WordPress Product Liason and Birgit Pauli-Haack, WordPress Developer advocate and curater at Gutenberg Times, on they use a mixture of Core and Custom Blocks to streamline their publishing process, and to create powerful charts and quizzes for the Pew Research Center.</p>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<div class="toolbelt-video-wrapper"></div>
</div>



<h2>Resources</h2>



<p><a href="https://github.com/sethrubenstein/gutenberg-times-livestream-examples">Seth Rubenstein&#8217;s Example Code Repo</a> (GitHub) </p>



<p><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/37943">Issue: Allow usage of block based &#8220;template parts&#8221; without using block based &#8220;templates&#8221;</a>: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=video_description&redir_token=QUFFLUhqbGFDbmN0Y3ViaFFBU1RHM0xtYkZ4cVV5RGgyZ3xBQ3Jtc0tsSGRKTzhCRGJQc3Bpd3kzc1A5cVo0dmM4WThacVJyLXhCa1NDSllzckwtLUNxSTlKajZDTmtKUFhfN3h2TXdNb29ESkh5MVczNVZGNE03WnlldDdDM09uNUlxZ3BEZTlBYTNPTGNNWlFEMHJyV3cwVQ&q=https%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F3aWn55a&v=bvQYPa5vxVk" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://bit.ly/3aWn55a</a> (GitHub) </p>



<p><a href="https://wordpress.org/support/article/comparing-patterns-template-parts-and-reusable-blocks/">Comparing Patterns, Template Parts, and Reusable Blocks</a> (WordPress Support) </p>



<p><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/24934">Tracking issue: Missing Query block functionality</a> (GitHub) </p>



<p><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2022/07/11/fse-program-testing-call-15-category-customization/">FSE Program Testing Call #15: Category Customization</a> (WordPress Make Blog)</p>



<p>Connect on Twitter </p>



<ul><li>Michael Piccorossi <a href="https://twitter.com/mpiccorossi">@mpiccorossi</a></li><li>Seth Rubenstein <a href="https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=video_description&redir_token=QUFFLUhqbFYwNDRSQ2gzdEtDNUhYcFhLY0F5QmtrQlZEQXxBQ3Jtc0trVEdjY25XR1dFOWNWY3BvYS1vX0I0elcwbjlWeVhLaVFMRkM2T3hzWk1yV1g5QUxWeHlKbHMwX1R4bjR3Sm5lLUpEQlVaaUVqRno2TnpkcEJTbG9hUUdzaXJ6VWg1ckptSHRCTUtKTVJDNzVrZ3Jjcw&q=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2FSethRubenstein&v=bvQYPa5vxVk" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">@SethRubenstein</a></li><li>Pew Research <a href="https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=video_description&redir_token=QUFFLUhqbVBuZ09tWjB1Nms5OVEyRUlsS3J5eEdfQVZNZ3xBQ3Jtc0tubXkzMkUxTDBsQ2FyQ2xma3dsYmRydkxldzlmUTZSMVJSZjZSSVZMdGMzbXVKbnNpdXhDeXVqQ2tQM3E4MU1kQzMyVi1tNmNxU3QteHg2VTNmMkc1ckJNOXZNVS1OUkJtLVJhRFJ6aWhVbWJTX2VMZw&q=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fpewresearch&v=bvQYPa5vxVk" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">@pewresearch</a></li></ul>



<h2>Speaker information</h2>



<div class="wp-container-7 is-nowrap wp-block-group alignwide">
<div class="wp-container-5 is-vertical wp-block-group">
<img /><strong>Michael Pioccorossi, Director of Digital Strategy</strong>



<p>Michael Piccorossi is the Director of Digital Strategy at the Pew Research Center where he leads a multidisciplinary team that includes web development, design, product, user experience, analytics, social media and video. He has extensive experience with all phases of digital product and audience development. Before Pew Research, he was Director of Online Operations at U.S. News &amp; World Report. </p>
</div>



<div class="wp-container-6 is-vertical wp-block-group">
<img /><strong>Seth Rubenstein, Lead Develope</strong>r



<p>Seth Rubenstein is the Lead Developer at the Pew Research Center, where he leads a team of 3 developers. He has 12 years of experience in developing enterprise level WordPress applications. Before joining Pew Research, he was the Senior WordPress Developer at the Center for American Progress.</p>
</div>
</div>



<h2>Transcript of Live Q &amp; A</h2>



<p> </p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Welcome to our 32nd live Q&amp;A on Gutenberg Times. It&#8217;s a great way to connect with people who are using Gutenberg and we have an excellent show today for you. My name is Birgit Pauli-Haack, and I&#8217;m the host of and the publisher of Gutenberg Times. Thanks for joining everybody. With me is a co-host, Anne McCarthy, who&#8217;s the WordPress Product Liaison. Howdy, Anne, thank you for being here.</p>



<p><em>Anne McCarthy</em>: Thanks for having me. I&#8217;m very excited to introduce how we&#8217;re going to talk to folks in the Pew Research Center about how they use a mixture of core and custom blocks to streamline their publishing process and to create a lot of the stuff that you know and love from them, with their charts and quizzes and all that good stuff. So with me here today, Seth Rubenstein, lead developer&#8230; Rubenstein. Apologies, lead developer and Michael Piccorossi Director of Digital Strategy. Thank you both so much for coming Seth and Michael apologies if I completely ruined both your last names and thank you so much for taking the time to just talk about all the cool stuff you&#8217;re doing at the WordPress block editor. I know it&#8217;s going to inspire a lot of folks. How are you both doing today? We&#8217;ll start with Seth.</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; Oh, I&#8217;m doing fine. I&#8217;m living in the middle of a post-home renovation construction zone, but other than that I&#8217;m doing great.</p>



<p><em>Anne McCarthy</em>: Amazing. Minor details, Michael, how are you doing?</p>



<p><em>Michael Piccorossi</em>: I&#8217;m doing great. Thanks. Thanks for having us. We&#8217;re really excited to talk about the work that we&#8217;re doing and how we might help other people with what they&#8217;re trying to do. So, thanks.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. So I&#8217;m so happy. Totally thrilled. I couldn&#8217;t wait because we were talking about this since end of May and now it&#8217;s end of June. I had to wait two months, but we do proper introduction in less than a minute, but I have a few housekeeping notes. So please use the chat feature to let us know where you are watching from.</p>



<p>Then for the question process, for those who are watching on YouTube livestream, use the chat bot next to the video player for your questions. Here on Zoom, use the Q&amp;A button on the bottom of the screen for your questions and the chat bubble to share your thoughts and comments.</p>



<p>A little reminder, yes, please be kind even if you disagree. This is a family-friendly endeavor.</p>



<p>So before we head first into the behind-the-scenes tour we are going to get, I want to ask both of you to tell us briefly about your WordPress story and how long have you been using it. Seth first, and then Michael.</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; Sure. I&#8217;ll go first. I mean, I&#8217;ve been using WordPress for, I don&#8217;t know, 18 years or something like that now? I started using WordPress in college. I was responsible for all the school&#8217;s clubs and newspaper, websites and all that stuff. So that&#8217;s when I started to learn WordPress.</p>



<p>Then I just went successively from one job to the next, building out different WordPress products. I think I built one of the first learning management systems in WordPress many, many years ago, in my first job. Then I started at Pew in 2015 and they were doing some interesting stuff with WordPress and WordPress Multisite and we just went from there. I&#8217;m excited to show you what we have built over the last couple of years.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Well, that&#8217;s a great career and a lot of nonprofit and going from Drupal to WordPress must have been a major switch of culture as well. So, Michael, how about you? What is your story?</p>



<p><em>Michael Piccorossi</em>: Yeah, I&#8217;ve been doing digital stuff for more than 20 years, more years than I like to admit sometimes. Prior to Pew Research, I managed a team at U.S. News &amp; World Report. We built a custom-based, a Python-based CMS and e-commerce system. That was back like in 2006. So I&#8217;ve been doing a lot of different content management things.</p>



<p>I started at Pew Research in 2009. When I got here, we had four different CMSs, none of them WordPress, 2 DotNet, Drupal, custom PHP so it was really kind of a mess. One of my first hires after I got here was another person you may know from the WordPress community, Russ Heimlick. He was our first web developer and he and I talked about where we should take this organization and we decided that WordPress was the right way to go.</p>



<p>So we ran a custom-hosted version out of a data center in Virginia for a while and then Seth joined us, as he said in 2015. For a couple of years, we were managing on our own AWS infrastructure and then we moved over to WordPress VIP in 2018, and we&#8217;ve been really happy working in that environment ever since. So we&#8217;ve really never been happier and we&#8217;re really committed to the platform.</p>



<p><em>Anne McCarthy</em>: I love this. This is very cool. I&#8217;m going to later have a question so just tuck this away for now, around why you chose WordPress, especially with what seems to be more of an emphasis on the data side of things. I&#8217;ve read books about how for humanity&#8217;s sake, we need to find ways to preserve data for the long term. So I&#8217;m curious, that played into part of, for human knowledge sake of, what platform can we choose that will have the most longevity and sustainability into the future? So I&#8217;m fascinated by that entire concept when it comes to this kind of work and research, but just tuck that away for later. I just had to mention it for now.</p>



<p><em>Michael Piccorossi</em>: Sure.</p>



<p><em>Anne McCarthy</em>: Oh, Birgit, you&#8217;re muted. Sorry.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: &#8230; to type some things. I apologize, our chat was disabled for a few minutes here and now you can all tell us where you&#8217;re watching from. I&#8217;m sorry about that, but it seems to be that Zoom is changing the default settings all the time, and I had this set up. Well anyway, so Michael, so what do you exactly do at the Pew Research Center?</p>



<p><em>Michael Piccorossi</em>: Sure, sure. So me personally, I&#8217;m the director of Digital Strategy. It&#8217;s really product and strategy and like I said, I&#8217;ve been here for 13 years now. So I oversee a larger team of 20 people. In addition to the web dev, I also oversee the design team, video products, social, email, user experience, and audience measurement. So basically I&#8217;m the chief cat hurder.</p>



<p>I think we&#8217;re similar to a lot of news organizations. So I really describe us as, we&#8217;re news adjacent. So, the work of the center is, if you&#8217;re not familiar with it, we are a nonpartisan, non-advocacy, public opinion polling, demographic analysis and a variety of other social science research. Historically, the roots of the center is in survey research and polling, but in the last five years, we&#8217;ve really made a strategic shift to seek new ways of measuring public opinion and that facilitated us starting our data labs team. They&#8217;re doing data science and computational social science so that&#8217;s a new area of research for us.</p>



<p>Our core product, as is baked into our name is, nonpartisan, non-advocacy research. So these authoritative, data-driven reports, they&#8217;re big things, they&#8217;re multi chapter, and those are still really in many ways, one of our core products, but we also do shorter but equally rigorous and authoritative data-rich blog posts and things like that.</p>



<p>But the digital team here also, in addition to doing all of the regular day-to-day publishing, we&#8217;ll publish in a given year maybe 40 or 50 data-driven features based on center research. And they run the gamut from D3 visualizations to interactive maps, data lookup tools, essays, and quizzes. And I don&#8217;t want to overlook the fact that we&#8217;ll publish about 2,500 static charts in a given year and it&#8217;s really an important part of how we get our information out there. So shout out to our design team, I think they&#8217;re the best in the business and I think they do great stuff. So it just doesn&#8217;t have to be interactive to be important to us.</p>



<p>I think in general, one of our real special sauce for these features that we do is, allowing users to see themselves in our data. So Anne mentioned some of our quizzes and things like that. That&#8217;s really in terms of broad reach, we know that for the public, that&#8217;s what they want to see. So that&#8217;s it.</p>



<p>So, like I said, we are really similar to a news organization and we&#8217;re involved in a lot of the same communities as news orgs, Online News Association, NYCAR, the News Product Alliance, those are sort of the people we hang out with.</p>



<p>In addition to being a pointing head and middle manager, I&#8217;m really a product guy at heart so I really do spend a lot of time in WordPress. So that&#8217;s my story.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Right. Well, thank you, Michael. I had no idea about the full scope of the Pew Research Center. I only have been an avid reader of the internet research since the early 90s, I think because that was the one research where you knew who&#8217;s online and who&#8217;s online where, and especially then with the advent of user-generated content, social media, it was really nice. Yeah. It was the one authority about internet usage, especially in America. So I&#8217;m really happy that I know now more about it. So Seth, what do you do at Pew Research Center?</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; Well, I am the lead developer. So when I started at Pew, there were a few developers, but there wasn&#8217;t a defined dev team and there wasn&#8217;t modern dev team practices. So a lot of the challenge was getting that spun up in the first couple of years.</p>



<p>Now, we have three other developers beside myself. We have two developers that focus on these digital features that Michael alluded to maps, interactives, we call them scrolly teleinteractives. You scroll through and different things happen. Then another developer and myself, we manage the majority of the WordPress app and especially now, the Gutenberg infrastructure.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. I just want to go through the chat. Hi to Washington DC. Heimlich is here. No. Nice, wonderful. Bud is here. Hi Bud. Henrietta, Matt and well, yeah, Ann is online the chat and thank you for greeting everybody.</p>



<p>So the Genesis of this live Q&amp;A is actually that I, around the Web 6.0 release, Seth tweeted the following, &#8220;For all its naysayers, Gutenberg is a gamechanger for digital and news apps. It&#8217;s a force multiplier for your team and we&#8217;ve spent about the last three years going all-in, in block development.&#8221; Then in the thread, you shared quite a few videos of examples and it was really interesting. I jumped at it and DMed you if you and your team come on the show. So what is it that you&#8217;re going to show us today?</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; Sure. So I have a couple of examples from that kind of thread. I think we&#8217;ll dive in and I&#8217;ll show you how we can build out homepages, that&#8217;s one thing, how we are using Gutenberg in a quasi full-site editing method to edit taxonomy archive pages, as well as a couple examples of how we build out digital features like quizzes, like charts and interactives now, some of these scrolly tele things I&#8217;ve told you about.</p>



<p>We also have this other concept of a quote sorter, where we get quotes from the public and we sort them into different groups and things so you can browse that information. We&#8217;ve just created the ability for this, and it&#8217;s not launched yet, to build those out in Gutenberg. So let me share my screen here.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, that would be lovely. Well to the audience, if you have questions, just put it in the chat and after the demo, well, Anne and I get the privilege of first questions and then we&#8217;ll go through your questions and have Seth and Michael answer them.</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; Sure.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Go ahead, Seth.</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; So the first thing that you see when you hit pewresearch.org is this page here. In the past, this might have been something built out with God knows how many short codes, if that was even possible at all. So now, and I&#8217;ll just kind of, I have a couple tabs lined up here, now, it&#8217;s very simple for an editor to come in and build out a homepage, especially with things like block patterns. We&#8217;ve established some of these basic sections of the homepage that you can just drag and drop in.</p>



<p>So let&#8217;s see, I&#8217;ll just throw one together real quick and maybe we&#8217;ll do that. So the first block that we built in our journey on Gutenberg was what we call story item block. It&#8217;s definitely our most used block. It&#8217;s our most custom, the most developed out block. With it, you can just drop in a story and we have a couple of different variations. We&#8217;re using block variations throughout our block library for quick shortcuts to…</p>



<p><em>Anne McCarthy</em>: It&#8217;s so cool you&#8217;re using variations for this, I just have to say. I&#8217;m like&#8230; I&#8217;m already seeing the pieces and like this is amazing.</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; Yeah. And using WordPress REST API and all of the WordPress components to build these things out. So let me just type in a post. I&#8217;m running this on my local dev so it will be a little bit slower. An editor can just search for a post or they can drop in either a live link or another feature that they requested, which I think has come in handy is the edit URL for like an article that&#8217;s not been published yet, so we can go try to grab some information about that.</p>



<p>Then once in here, this block is using block context as well. We have found block context to be extremely important to our efforts, to guide producers into how things should be set up and set restrictions on how things should work. So for example, we have our own grid block as well. If I were redoing it today, I probably would stick with the core column blocks, but this was years ago and there were some features and stuff and we didn&#8217;t know how to tap into core blocks the way we do now. So we just went through and made our own grid block.</p>



<p>The column block passes down through block context, the width of the column so that, for example, a story item block, when you&#8217;re choosing the image position can say, &#8220;Oh, you can&#8217;t do left or right position because this column is not large enough.&#8221; So this is great because this makes sure that, once again, I go back to shortcuts because this is how it used to be. With shortcuts, you really could place those restrictions on the interface that maybe had to happen on the back end and an editor would go and drop in a short code and they will, &#8220;This doesn&#8217;t look the way I wanted it to look. I didn&#8217;t know about these restrictions.&#8221;</p>



<p>So now an editor can come in here and do all this visually. They could set an image size, enable different features, like bulleted items underneath here. They can include links in here, whatever.</p>



<p>Then we are also using the query block. This is one of our more recent core block modifications. I&#8217;ll actually get rid of this to show you how that works. So you can drop in a query block and we are registering through the block API, our own variation here. We&#8217;ve got all the basic query block things, but we&#8217;ve added our own thing, which will drop in the default settings for the story item block.</p>



<p>This, I think also alludes to what I was describing in that thread of our block first approach. Everything is a block in the site, or at least everything&#8217;s moving in that direction, to be a block in the site. To give you an idea of what that looks like, lets just save this real quick.</p>



<p>Another important thing and probably the most important thing about Gutenberg is the fact that what you build here, hopefully is how it&#8217;s going to look on the front end. We&#8217;re still dealing with some typography stuff. I think when we go in all-in a full-site editing, that&#8217;ll be more one-to-one. But now if I come over to our new homepage&#8230; Come on. What I&#8217;ve built out here is exactly as you&#8217;re going to see it on the front so there should be no mistakes, there should be no, this doesn&#8217;t look how I thought it was going to look like, all that stuff is visible in the back end.</p>



<p>On the front end here, in the query block, obviously, I&#8217;m sure most people aren&#8217;t aware the nuts and bolts on how the query block works, but on the back end, obviously there&#8217;s a block called post template block and that is rendering out your blocks using PHP on the backend. This is a story in a block, basically being rendered out in PHP on the backend. These aren&#8217;t actually static blocks. These are dynamic. So the query block gets the information. It says, &#8220;There&#8217;s a post type we want a query,&#8221; then it outputs all that using the story item block as a template. So that&#8217;s homepages.</p>



<p>I think the other thing I wanted to dive into was the taxonomy pages. Where do I have that? So this is an example of a taxonomy page for us, our most important taxonomy topic.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Sorry, but so what I&#8217;m hearing is, that you are actually way ahead of the Gutenberg team. You have build query blocks and templates all before it actually went to the plugin.</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; We did build out our own query block originally, because when we first started looking at doing query blocks in places, the query block did not have taxonomy support, or at least very, very minimal taxonomy support. That&#8217;s since changed so we have now moved over to the core query block, but there were a lot of cases where we had to build out stuff before it was ready in Gutenberg, and then come back later and figure out if we were going to use the core block that Gutenberg had built out. In the most cases we do, we do end up going with whatever the core block is.</p>



<p>So this is, I think, our best example of our approach to full-site editing before we got full-site editing. So this is your standard taxonomy archive page, but we have two positions, one we call menu and the other we&#8217;re called top. Actually, we have another one at the bottom called bottom. These link up to a post type that we&#8217;re calling taxonomy block area, which is not super creative, but it describes what it does. There&#8217;s a taxonomy for that for location, menu, top, bottom. So you can go into here and you can say, edit the menu, edit the top, whatever and just like on the homepage, you can build out these featured content areas in Gutenberg using whatever block you want, in this case story item. We also have a promo block we built out on our own MailChimp block and that&#8217;s what you get.</p>



<p><em>Michael Piccorossi:</em> Yeah.&nbsp;</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; Then&#8230; Yeah, go ahead.</p>



<p><em>Michael Piccorossi</em>: I just wanted to add, yes. So last summer we launched a site redesign with a whole new information architecture and a multi-level content taxonomy. As Seth pointed out, these topic pages were really the central component of that entire redesign. Being able to manage these in the ways that he&#8217;s discussing has really been transformational for us. One of the things I like is, you can create one of these topic blocks and assign it to multiple pages if they&#8217;re the same. We can also create these pages in a very short period of time, literally in minutes. Usually, it&#8217;s more the editorial decisions that take longer than any of the actual production stuff.</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; So yeah. Yeah. The other nice thing is that you can schedule these, because we are ostensibly, a news site. We, I think we, Mike alluded to, like to think of ourselves as being a resource for the news rather than being an actual news service, but we post things that are on the topics of the day and so we can change these. We can schedule changes out. We can schedule tomorrow&#8217;s homepage, we can schedule next week&#8217;s big release of some report we have, we can schedule the topic page changes that&#8217;ll happen for that, because this is just a post-type. So we just create a new post, slot it into this topic in the top location and schedule it for next Wednesday to publish at 10:00 AM. This will change at 10:00 AM. So that&#8217;s also, I think been a really great feature and that of course applies to homepages and any of these full-site editing things that we&#8217;re doing.</p>



<p>Then the other thing is that we&#8230; This is one of the things that we&#8217;re going to have to struggle with in the next couple months is, we also built out our own navigation block. When I say we built out, we forked the early efforts of the Gutenberg team&#8217;s navigation block and we went a little bit further with how we needed it to work. So a lot of that change was making these different menu links that would point to topic pages specifically, and stuff like this and the ability to have a sub menu and that would follow our CSS and stuff like that. So that&#8217;s taxonomy pages, that&#8217;s full-site editing.</p>



<p>The other thing I wanted to show was quizzes. We might not have enough time to show us some of these other interactive, but the quizzes stuff, this we launched last fall in order to support what is by far, our most popular product. I mean, it blows our analytics out of the water every year. That is our political typology quiz. It&#8217;s definitely one of our complex interactives too. If you haven&#8217;t taken this, you should, it&#8217;s pretty fun. People will enjoy it.</p>



<p><em>Anne McCarthy</em>: I&#8217;ve taken this with friends, like at a bar years ago. We&#8217;re like, &#8220;Let&#8217;s all take the quiz and we can talk about it.&#8221; Yes. This is really fun.</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; And we have a group feature too. So if you sign up for an account on our website, you get a little login and you can go create your own little community group. So you can say, here&#8217;s how this group of people is responding to this, which is fun. So here&#8217;s what it looks like. Go through, ask questions, to answer them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.</p>



<p>Before, we were using Gravity Forms for this. Before that, there was a completely homegrown system. That was, we were finding, kind of taking down the site under load. So we switched to Gravity Forms pretty quickly when I started just to get things stable. We could have stayed there, right? We could have kept iterating on that Gravity Forms built system that we had, but we want everything to be a block, we want everything to be under Gutenberg. So we built our quiz builder in Gutenberg.</p>



<p>To give you an idea of how that works, this is a framework that we&#8217;ve played around with, to great success. I&#8217;m just calling it the controller block paradigm. So here we have one parent level block, the controller. All it does is, it stores some attributes. It doesn&#8217;t really do anything, at least on the back end here and it&#8217;s just a way for us to contain inside blocks or inner blocks.</p>



<p>Then within that, we have a pages block that controls the pages and a results block that controls the results. Then in each of these, you can insert any of the core blocks, headings, images, whatever, but we also have a question block and then an answer block. As you go through here, you just type out what the answer is or what the question is. You can set an image, question type, all these sort things. This is way more visual than we had, and what you build out here is what you see.</p>



<p>I have a smaller example that I can show you a little bit more of what&#8217;s going on in the back end. For example, this quiz. This is a pretty simple quiz for us. This is what we call it knowledge quiz, as opposed to typology quiz, meaning there are correct answers here. So as you go through, you just click the little smiley face to determine that&#8217;s the correct answer, not correct answer. But then when we get down to the bottom here, I think this is the most exciting part, or the best example of block context, is, the results block. So here, an editor can drop in all the different things that you might see in a results page, &#8220;You scored X out of whatever, share your score.&#8221; You can build out some horizontal bar chart blocks that we&#8217;ve built out, all this sort of stuff.</p>



<p>Then we have a general response table block. Let me just run through this quiz real quick and show you how that works. So when you hit the quiz, at first, what we do is, on the back end in PHP, we&#8217;re pulling out all of the question and the answer blocks and we&#8217;re formatting it out so that you get the correct layout. None of these are going to be right. I&#8217;m going to get a terrible score, but just click through some of these.</p>



<p><em>Michael Piccorossi</em>: We&#8217;re not here to judge.</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; No. Might have missed one. That&#8217;s okay.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: You won&#8217;t be graded.</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; Okay. So then you submit your quiz. When you submit the quiz, we store your results as an archetype rather than each individual entry. So we say, &#8220;Here&#8217;s all the possible combinations of answers. Here&#8217;s what you gave. Let&#8217;s store that.&#8221; That way, the next person that gives that possible combination of answers, we&#8217;re not duplicating database space for no reason. We just store that archetype of answers.</p>



<p>When you hit the quiz page again, with URL rewrite here for this archetype query bar, we go to the database, we grab that. Then through block context, we pass that through the controller block as your score. So that means that all of the blocks put in the results block, grab that context from the controller block, what the score is, and they can change accordingly. Maybe the bar chart changes to match what your score is. This thing changes to whatever your score is. Then of course the table response goes through and it gets the database entry and returns all this stuff through block context to the table block.</p>



<p>So that was really exciting for us. That proved out the concept that we could do interactive things. We could build out little mini web apps, basically, for users and they could interact with them and we could construct a data model around that. So that&#8217;s our quizzes. What else do I have for you?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Those are pretty neat, yeah.</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; Chart builder. This is definitely one of the more exciting things we&#8217;ve been working on lately. We launched this in the spring and it&#8217;s a twofold project for us. One there&#8217;s the backend charting library and then there is the WordPress plugin part of it.</p>



<p>Let me get this load again. As I mentioned, we have three developers on our team. One other developer is working with me on all this stuff. This is from one of our other developers, Ben Wormald. He spearheaded this project and it came out just fantastic. Not only did we gain the ability for editors to come in and make charts, but using the Gutenberg PHP API, we are using this in a more static database, which I&#8217;ll show you in a moment, to generate charts for that. So it provides us one endpoint for accessing charts and creating charts.</p>



<p>So it starts off with a table. This one has a lot of data, just an example I threw together. We&#8217;re using block transforms here, so we can target the table block and say-</p>



<p><em>Anne McCarthy</em>: You are using everything, you have the you have the transforms, you have-</p>



<p>Seth Rubenstein:&nbsp; We&#8217;re using the whole kitchen sink. Yes.</p>



<p><em>Anne McCarthy</em>: Yeah, it&#8217;s amazing. This is really, really cool.</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; So you can start off with the chart builder block and that&#8217;ll have a table in there and you can fill that information, or you can just start out with a table and convert that to a chart. So I&#8217;ll do that now.</p>



<p>So once again, the concept here is, you have a controller block, the builder controller, you have your table for your data. Then if we come down to the bottom here, you&#8217;ve got your chart. As you edit data, let me just see if I can change this, you&#8217;ll see that this stuff updates in real time, which is fantastic.</p>



<p>Then in the chart itself&#8230; Oops, I think this data&#8217;s not formatted for that, you can customize pretty much all the visual aspects, spacing, what type of chart it is, colors, et cetera, et cetera. Let me let this load again one more time.</p>



<p><em>Anne McCarthy</em>: So fond of live demos.</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; Isn&#8217;t it? Isn&#8217;t it great.</p>



<p><em>Anne McCarthy</em>: I was doing some the other day where I was like, &#8220;Let me make this really dramatic,&#8221; and then it broke and I was like, &#8220;Got it. Okay, cool. I found the edge.&#8221;</p>



<p><em>Michael Piccorossi</em>: Seth, this is independent of whatever charting library you want to use, correct?</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; That&#8217;s correct. Yeah. I spoke about this in the thread that I posted to Twitter. Some people were asking questions about it. And that we do intend to open source the block at some point so you&#8217;ll gain the ability to convert tables to charts and then pick all your different settings that you might have, but it will be up to you to create the middleware to link that to your own charting library. We won&#8217;t be open sourcing our charting library.</p>



<p>So let me just see. I mean, we have a lot of options here. I&#8217;m not going to go through all of these. Let me just tweak some of the visual stuff for better effect. So you can tweak this however you want. We&#8217;re also using the resizing component so that you could do that visually in real time if you&#8217;d like. You can go in and give this title, test charts or a subtitle, whatever you want. So best chart builder, there&#8217;s a lot more complex things you can do with it. This is a very simple chart. To give you an idea of once again, our whole block process, let me just go to this page real quick.</p>



<p>This is a database that we run. It&#8217;s very exhaustive, called the religious landscape study. It has a lot of information about all the various religious groups in the United States, populations, things like this. In those, we have a lot of charts. Maps are not part of it yet, but all of these charts, all the bar charts, pie charts, and things like that, you might see that in this product are actually rendering out a block via PHP. So this is just the chart builder block being manually rendered through PHP on the back end. That way, any updates we make to chart builder for editors also get applied here to this product.</p>



<p>I think that&#8217;s another important part to make about Gutenberg is that it&#8217;s not just in the Gutenberg editor, anything you make there, any block you make there you can also do in PHP. I think that&#8217;s important for maybe the PHP-only developers in the WordPress community to know is that, this doesn&#8217;t have to be just a JavaScript-only thing. You can utilize this using PHP as well. So that&#8217;s chart builder.</p>



<p>I think that&#8217;s all the demos I have for right now. I do have a repo I was going to share of some of the modifications that we&#8217;ve done to core blocks. So like I walk through those real quick. Let me just pull open a post, because I think that&#8217;s probably the best example of this.</p>



<p><em>Michael Piccorossi</em>: I would just one add one thing on chart builder. Since we do so many charts, it&#8217;s unlikely that we&#8217;re going to do all of our charts using chart builder, but for really custom-lead charts, or these data-driven acts like Seth just showed it, it&#8217;s really fantastic and we&#8217;d like to be able to use more of it when it&#8217;s appropriate for the content.</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; Yeah. No not every chart will be this, so it&#8217;s right. Yeah. Sometimes it&#8217;s just the fidelity that you go with a static chart that we just can&#8217;t achieve. I don&#8217;t know that we&#8217;d ever be able to achieve in Wizzy Wig drag-and-drop builder.</p>



<p>So this is an example of a post for us. Once again, what you see here is what you get. This is another block that we built out, the collapsible block. We use these at the top of all of our posts. What else was I going to show about that? Let this load.</p>



<p>One of the other things that we had to build out with Gutenberg, one of the other things that Gutenberg gives you is, I think a great UI library that we&#8217;ve never really had in WordPress, with WordPress components and with inspector controls and advanced panels and stuff like this.</p>



<p>So another part of our Gutenberg journey was not just the blocks, but how are we going to utilize this editor to its fullest extent for our publishing platform? Part of that is, we&#8217;ve built out some controls for the stuff that you might see here in the sidebar. So the report PDF, top line promo, you can change these things around, you can drag and drop them just in a more visual way than you were able to before.</p>



<p>In the past, we used advanced custom fields for all this stuff, and that was great and all, but once again, there was only so much you could do to customize how that looked, how it worked. It had to fit in that ACF framework, but here, we&#8217;re given all those tools by Gutenberg through components to build out exactly what we want.</p>



<p>One of the things here is, this is a block. The table contents is a block that&#8217;s being rendered out in PHP on the back end. What that also means is, that if you build out an essay or something and you want to throw a table of contents in, you can. You can just throw the table of contents block in the editor. But one of the core customizations that we had to do, we&#8217;ve done a number, is, add support to the heading block to support our table of contents block. So when you&#8217;re going through here, let&#8217;s go to&#8230; Well, actually this is using an older version of that block, not a good example, but I&#8217;ll change it out.</p>



<p>When you&#8217;re going through here, you can type in a heading block, right? Just, and we&#8217;ve added a little icon. Not much is going on here. We&#8217;ve added one attribute called is chapter, and then we&#8217;ve added an icon to toggle that on or off. So I&#8217;m going to toggle that on. Then this might freak out because of the variety of blocks from this older post and it didn&#8217;t show up, but each of these is one of our older blocks called the chapter block, another thing we had to build out before we could figure out how we were going to book into core blocks.</p>



<p>The way that works is&#8230; This is a high level, I&#8217;ll share this link in the chat so people can take a look at these examples. I&#8217;ve got two examples here. One is how we&#8217;ve added chapter support to headings and how we&#8217;ve added an alternate mobile background for the cover block. So that when you&#8217;re on mobile, maybe you get a different sized image for your cover block than you might get on desktop.</p>



<p>So the heading block is comprised of two things obviously. One is using the PHP API that Gutenberg affords is adding an attribute in. It can be very easy to do. You can just use the block type metadata filter to change a lot of things, but specifically you can splice in new attributes in this case this chapter, which is just a bullion yes or no. Then you can affect the rendering of it using the render block filter. We&#8217;re doing this in a lot of places with the core blocks. We say if you do have the chapter attribute and it&#8217;s true, then we just add a little data attribute to the H element. So that&#8217;s a very simple example. People can take a look at this and use this.</p>



<p>Another part of that obviously is the actual little toolbar icon itself. Once again, this is pretty simple too, using the filters, the JavaScript filters in Gutenberg. So you intercept the editing block. You say, Hey, if this isn&#8217;t the heading block, just give what was already there. Otherwise, we put in a little toolbar button and click it. Sets the attribute or unsets it. Then also have a variation which I alluded to. We use variations a lot as shortcuts. So you could just type in slash chapter if you wanted to and that would insert a heading with the chapter already selected. So it&#8217;s pretty easy to actually take a core block and give it completely new functionality that it didn&#8217;t have before, which I think is great. We&#8217;re trying to get more of our stuff into using core blocks.</p>



<p>I don&#8217;t have any examples of this, but probably our most modified core block is the group block. We&#8217;ve added the ability to make it sticky, so that a group will stick to the top of the pages you scroll. We&#8217;ve added the ability to set a responsive threshold. When you reach set threshold, then it will move itself to this div or this idea or something that so that editors can change things around the page based on whether you&#8217;re on mobile or not.</p>



<p>The other example is, in the cover block, we are adding another media field, or actually I guess, more of an ID field so that you can associate an image ID so that when you go to mobile, the cover block, we use a different version of the image. Same thing here. Intercept the block edit. You say, if you&#8217;re not the cover, just go ahead and return to what you&#8217;re doing.</p>



<p>Otherwise, we have a little panel that we insert into the editor and a component that we&#8217;ve written. It&#8217;s a riff on a variety of different things in core for a drop zone for media. That&#8217;s also in this example if people want to use it. On the back end, it&#8217;s pretty simple here too. We&#8217;re using jetpack_is_mobile to detect if someone&#8217;s on mobile. If so, we get the image ID and splice it in, replace the image with that. So these are pretty easy, simple core block customizations, but I think if people dive in here, they might get a feel for what is possible for taking core blocks and making your own block library out of that basically.</p>



<p><em>Anne McCarthy</em>: Thanks so much for putting that in GitHub too.</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; Yeah, no problem. No problem.</p>



<p><em>Anne McCarthy</em>: Yeah. That&#8217;s awesome.</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; But also just one last thing, this is a story in a block being rendered out in PHP. This is actually one of those full-site editing template block areas I told you about before. So we&#8217;re going to have something at the end of our sidebar. We have a little block area there that people can go into Gutenberg and drop this stuff out. Michael manages this most popular list using every usable block so that I can show up on the homepage or the sidebar anywhere else and we added it in one place and it edits everywhere. Yeah. So I think that&#8217;s all of my demos today.</p>



<p><em>Michael Piccorossi</em>: Yeah. We use reusable blocks in a couple of different contexts so, there&#8217;s&nbsp;</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; Mm-hmm. Oh yeah. We use them at the end of posts as well for various promos, newsletter signups, this sort of things.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: This was an awesome demonstration. Thank you so much. I&#8217;m totally thrilled that you brought some code examples that we can share with the developers that are watching and also maybe come back to in the recorded version and want to follow up on, on some of the things.</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; Sure. No problem. Sure.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. So what are our first questions here?</p>



<p><em>Anne McCarthy</em>: I&#8217;ll just say I&#8217;m itching to ask a bunch of questions.</p>



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



<p><em>Anne McCarthy</em>: Yeah. Can I jump in?</p>



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



<p><em>Anne McCarthy</em>: I want to just drop this GitHub issue in that I think will be of interest. This is like hyper practical, but just around allowing usage of block-based template parts without actually accessing the whole template. A lot of what you&#8217;re describing with the taxonomy pages fuels very similar to that, where you can create template areas and then have access to just edit those. So that&#8217;s something I really look forward to and I see as a huge way&#8230; I&#8217;ve heard from a lot of different page agencies and organizations that&#8217;s what they&#8217;d love to have access to. It&#8217;s like we can define a template area and just allow people to edit that, that would be huge rather than opening up the whole gamut.</p>



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



<p><em>Anne McCarthy</em>: So I wanted to put that out there. And I definitely think you could have some really cool insights in helping shape this going forward so I want to encourage, be like, bring all your insights and all your experience of maybe what has tripped up users or what features you&#8217;d want to see.</p>



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



<p><em>Anne McCarthy</em>: &#8230; all that good stuff. Yeah. I&#8217;d love to go back to the original, why WordPress? Was it part of wanting to rely on the open web? Was it what made you want to adopt Gutenberg? Is that also related to data consistency over time and not in the migrate stuff? I&#8217;m very curious with all the work that you do and the value brand.</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; Sure. I think I could touch on the why Gutenberg stuff real quick and I think maybe Michael can touch on the why word WordPress stuff. I&#8217;m sure that the audience here knows why WordPress. It&#8217;s, we&#8217;re all fans of it, but at the why Gutenberg front, I think that it was just kind of, I don&#8217;t know, kismet that we were looking to redo these topic pages. We were looking to make all these big editorial changes to the site and the question was, how are we going to manage all this? How are people going to slot in these different stories to these templates and so on and so forth? I think I had gone to a word camp for publishers in Chicago-</p>



<p><em>Anne McCarthy</em>: Oh yeah.</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; &#8230; a couple years back, and I really didn&#8217;t know much about Gutenberg. I knew it was coming and I really hadn&#8217;t tried it out. I think I was resistant to it. I think a lot of WordPress devs were and part of the reason I made the thread is, because I think some people still are, because it really is a complete sea change for WordPress. I&#8217;m a self-taught WordPress developer and I&#8217;m only a self-taught WordPress developer because when I started in WordPress, there were frameworks, there were guidelines, coding standards, there was the WordPress way to do things so that made it easy to get in.</p>



<p>Now, we&#8217;re dealing with something entirely new and a completely new paradigm with blocks. So the guidelines aren&#8217;t there yet, the frameworks aren&#8217;t there yet, the Gutenberg way isn&#8217;t really well defined yet. I&#8217;m hoping that what we show here and what we give back to the community in the next couple of months as we open source more of this stuff and review more code is, we can help shape what is the Gutenberg way of doing things.&nbsp;</p>



<p><em>Michael Piccorossi:</em> Yeah, and if-</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; &#8230; yeah, it was just fortuitous that we stumbled upon it at the right time.</p>



<p><em>Michael Piccorossi</em>: Yeah. Going back to the earlier times, as I mentioned, when I got here, we were running every different type of CMS except for WordPress. And actually Russell and I at the time, did an analysis. And kudos to Russell too, because he really sort of pushed me in this direction, but it was open web, was part of it. We liked the open source ethos. We liked the fact that we weren&#8217;t getting charged a per user license or anything like that. So, a lot of it was commitment to opensource and it really was I think a really smart decision for us and it got us into the WordPress ecosystem. Then when Russell moved on and I was looking for a new developer, the community was really strong and we were able to find Seth and it just has always been a really good, a good fit for us.</p>



<p>One thing on the Gutenberg thing, I think Seth has been really great about, we don&#8217;t try to swallow the ocean at one time. As you pointed out, we dealt with the topic pages first and we roll out one little component of this thing to this one little portion of our site. As he mentioned, we&#8217;re about to bring a medium blog in-house and I think that&#8217;s going to be the first time we take our next big step with this full-site editing. So, really doing it incrementally is, I think, a really smart product ethos for us so that&#8217;s how it&#8217;s worked great for us.</p>



<p><em>Anne McCarthy</em>: That&#8217;s really neat. It&#8217;s amazing to hear about both historically and just at the right time and working for publishers, folks should definitely check them out. I think two years ago went and talked to them about full siting, in the early, early, early days. So it&#8217;s neat to hear them mentioned as a way in.</p>



<p>I&#8217;m curious too, because I know some folks have, I was talking to someone else this week who&#8217;s from Agencyland and how much the workflow has changed as people have adopted Gutenberg. I&#8217;m curious if that is the case with editors or people you&#8217;re working with, or it&#8217;s both a technology change and a workflow change. That&#8217;s the piece that I think often gets overlooked as people just talk about the technological change and mean to do things like learn JavaScript deeply or dig into blocks. But then I think there&#8217;s also a very real organizational way of how do you train people up in this new way or potentially have design look at things after the fact or before, and switching around the workflow. So I&#8217;d be curious to know what that&#8217;s been like.</p>



<p><em>Michael Piccorossi</em>: I was&#8230; Do you mind?</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; Go ahead definitely.</p>



<p><em>Michael Piccorossi</em>: One thing, I actually think to be candid, I think that&#8217;s an area we&#8217;re making sure that everybody&#8217;s on the same page, it&#8217;s an area where we&#8217;re always striving to do better. There is this tension between innovation and making sure that your editors understand what&#8217;s going on. I&#8217;m sure they would probably plus one on this. So I would say that it&#8217;s not something that we&#8217;ve really solved the problem. I think it&#8217;s common in most organizations like, so I think-</p>



<p><em>Anne McCarthy</em>: You&#8217;re definitely not alone there.</p>



<p><em>Michael Piccorossi</em>: Yeah. I think it&#8217;s one thing I think we&#8217;re aspire to is doing a better job at making sure that everybody&#8217;s up to speed as we roll stuff out, but I think we do what we can. So Seth, do you want to add to that or?</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; I think that that is still a struggle for us, for anyone. I was listening to a Gutenberg podcast, it might have been Gutenberg Changelog or something like that a while back. There was some guest on. I think he&#8217;s the head of Florida&#8217;s state&#8217;s web properties or something. He had mentioned that what they did when they brought on Gutenberg was, they recorded a bunch of videos and snuck it into the help menu. I thought that was really clever. That&#8217;s something that we&#8217;re going to look to do by the end of the year, too.</p>



<p>It has been a struggle to get people to understand Gutenberg and not just the editor interface, but the concept of blocks and inner blocks and how they&#8217;ll nest together and stuff like that. We have a lot of blocks and we&#8217;ve tried a bunch of different ideas as far as interface and how you interact with these things. I think we&#8217;re finally settling on a good practice. We try to keep things in the block toolbar if you need them a lot, otherwise we hide them away in panels. There&#8217;s a fine line of when to use a block style, when should that just be a toggle on an attribute or something. That stuff&#8217;s hard to figure out and I don&#8217;t know that anyone has the right answer yet, but we&#8217;re trying.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. So we have one question from Matt Redford and I think it touches on that. &#8220;How do you find content editors with reusable blocks? When I&#8217;ve exposed them,&#8221; he writes, &#8220;to users before the idea that it was a global element they were inserting and changing rather than something they thought they would be duplicating, caused issues.&#8221;</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; Yeah. It has caused issues. We had&#8230; I think there&#8217;s a lot of confusion about the difference between a reusable block and a block pattern. I know there&#8217;s a ticket. It&#8217;s been pretty active the last couple days, actually on-</p>



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



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; &#8230; exploring the interface for that. I think it looks like it&#8217;s heading in the right direction to me. I&#8217;m pretty excited to see if this makes it into the plugin soon, but it&#8217;s been a problem because someone will drop in a reusable block thinking that this is like a template, a block template, and they&#8217;ll edit something. Maybe that something was a post ID attribute that told that block specific information about that post and now, every single post that was using that block is referencing that one thing. That has been a problem for us. So getting people to use block patterns I think has been harder to do. People instinctively go to the reusable blocks. I&#8217;m not sure why. Maybe it&#8217;s a little bit easier to surface, but it has been a problem.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. It was also the first concept for two, for almost three years before pattern.</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; Oh, right, right. We didn&#8217;t have patterns. Yeah, exactly.</p>



<p><em>Michael Piccorossi:</em> Yeah. I think it&#8217;s a UX issue right on the admin side and communicating to the end user what you&#8217;re&#8230; Yeah. I agree with Seth. It&#8217;s something where we haven&#8217;t really looked and so, and yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne McCarthy</em>: I&#8217;ll note&#8230; Oh, sorry.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Go ahead.</p>



<p><em>Anne McCarthy</em>: I was going to say, one of the things that I&#8217;m really looking forward to tied to this is, block locking and adding the ability to disable editing and block locking specifically for the reusable block. This was actually looked into for 6.0 and did not make the cut, but it is something that is on the line because this is something that has come up a lot in the community is, the reasonable block, being able to edit in a way that is more intuitive.</p>



<p>This is also where I think I saw you all using some block locking whenever you&#8217;re going through the demos, which is very neat. So I&#8217;m excited to see that system expand, but we have to make it intuitive for editors too. So if you limit options, it needs to make sense. I liked how you were doing that, where some of the options with the custom blocks that you have going already pick different headers and different image sizes. There&#8217;s a lot of interesting work being done there.</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; Yeah. We&#8217;re using block locking in some situations. We&#8217;re also&#8230; I have found, it&#8217;s useful if you&#8217;re making a custom block that has a lot of inner blocks is, you can set the template, lock that, but unlock maybe some of the inner blocks that you want people to edit. I think that&#8217;s worked out pretty well actually to funnel people into how you want people to use this block. They click and say, &#8220;Oh, I can&#8217;t change that,&#8221; you know?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. There&#8217;s something that&#8230; Just with the 13.7 version of Gutenberg plugin, you can now with one toggle actually lock all the inner blocks as well. So you don&#8217;t have to go from block to block to block, but I&#8217;m now thinking about reversing a test for that to say, &#8220;Okay, what happens if I want to edit just one block? What do I have to do?&#8221; and if that block works. It&#8217;s kind of the QA person in me, that is saying, let&#8217;s see if we can go back to the original idea.</p>



<p>So, but I wanted to go back to two things. Well, it&#8217;s actually one thing. So there is this whole 10 years big, great plugins that helped out a lot of people, millions of developers. One is Gravity Forms and the other one is ACF, advanced custom fields. You said you were using them, but then moved away from it. Can you dive in that a little bit more?</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; Sure. No shade to those plugs. I mean, Gravity Forms is phenomenal as is Advanced Custom Fields. I mean, I don&#8217;t know where we would&#8217;ve been without ACF years ago, honestly, because I think the broader, Hey, WordPress needs a field&#8217;s API stuff, stuttered out after a while and there really no movement happened there because Gutenberg was coming and ACF was great. So mad props to Eliot Condon and I guess Delicious Brains now owns them. I don&#8217;t know.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: They&#8217;re sold to WP Engine now.</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; Oh, okay. Wow. Yeah. So we stuck with ACF for a while into our Gutenberg transition. I think we have a few locations where it&#8217;s still being used, taxonomy term, edit page, we&#8217;re still using ACF for some fields there, but it just made sense that for all of the stuff that was in the editor screen when you&#8217;re actually editing a post or something, to go all-in on Gutenberg. That&#8217;s the whole point of what we&#8217;re doing. We are going all-in on Gutenberg.</p>



<p>We have this UI library with WordPress components and it felt like a shame not to use it. So almost all the stuff that originally was in ACF report materials, I showed you that in the block side bar, table of contents, child posts&#8230; We do a lot of reports, so we have one post and we&#8217;ll associate other posts as a child of that so they appear in the information architecture correctly. That&#8217;s now all happening using WordPress components and REST API and stuff like that.</p>



<p>So, there was no reason not to use ACF. There was no reason not to use Gravity Forms. It was just a matter of long term, we have to maintain these things. Everything you have to maintain, and it&#8217;s better, I think if we&#8217;re all-in on Gutenberg and the concept of blocks, to handle all that stuff.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Well, thank you. So with ACF, moving away from just kind of thinking about, you would need to build a block about that. Then with the block, came the interfaces, well, the inspector control on the right hand side of the side bar?</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; Mm-hmm. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. All right. Do we have any more questions from the audience? And do you have more questions?</p>



<p><em>Anne McCarthy</em>: I mean, I feel like I always have more questions. I&#8217;m curious, what&#8217;s your wish? It looks like-</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, we&#8217;ve got another two minutes.</p>



<p><em>Anne McCarthy</em>: I know. Sure. It&#8217;s like, do you have anything that&#8217;s on your mind where maybe it&#8217;s really out there, but either current pain points or wishlist items far into the future? I&#8217;d be curious.</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; I think a lot of them center around full-site editing and I haven&#8217;t gone deep into full site editing yet. That&#8217;s happening next month. As Michael said, we have a new sub-site we&#8217;re launching, so that we&#8217;re going to use that as an opportunity to learn about block themes and full-site editing.</p>



<p>I think if there&#8217;s one wish that I would have it is, that on the PHP side of things, of core blocks, there were more filters. The query block is a good example of this. You have to intercept the whole thing. If you want to modify it, you have to intercept the whole post template block and the WP query there, which we are doing unfortunately. I would love it if you could just tap into the query arguments before they&#8217;re sent to WP query in the query loop block and modify things. So I think probably even more PHP APIs and more endpoints that we can access through PHP would be my top wish list. I think on the JavaScript side thing, I mean, whatever you want to change is there, it&#8217;s pretty easy to do. That&#8217;s probably my biggest thing.</p>



<p><em>Anne McCarthy</em>: I dropped in an issue if you want to. I think it&#8217;s related to what you&#8217;re talking about, because this is also&#8230; I&#8217;ve heard from a lot of agency folks that they tend to hack apart the query block and extend it for their own purposes. So it&#8217;d be neat to gather what those main requests are, see what&#8217;s going on and see what can evolve from there, what&#8217;s missing. So that&#8217;s a great one. It&#8217;s a good call out.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: So there is JavaScript is one change coming. I don&#8217;t know if it will really affect you, but it is on the components. They are all now refactored with TypeScript and I think it&#8217;s a big project.</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; Yeah, it is.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: So to increase the developer experience because TypeScript, then your IDE taps into that and helps you with the types of the parameters and everything. So, yeah, I just wanted to tell you, this is coming.</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; That&#8217;ll be great. We use, many years ago now, we settled on Semantic UI as a way to bootstrap our theme redevelopment efforts. We were standardizing everything under one parent theme and we went with Semantic QI. They have a great react set of components. I actually think Microsoft hired the guy who made that to lead their TypeScript team, because they&#8217;re so good. So yeah, getting all those hints and stuff while you&#8217;re typing out those components is great so I look forward to that.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: All right. Okay. So I think that&#8217;s all the time we had. It has been very, very interesting and totally inspiring to think a little bit beyond what normal websites do, especially in the news side. So at this point, I only have two more questions to all three of you. So are there any announcements that you have and couldn&#8217;t get into, because we were talking other things? The other thing is, when people want to get in touch with you, how could they? What&#8217;s the best way? Michael, did you want to start?</p>



<p><em>Michael Piccorossi</em>: I would just say I don&#8217;t really have any announcements, but if you want to get in touch with me, you can email me <a href="mailto:mpiccorossi@pewresearch.org">mpiccorossi@pewresearch.org</a>. You can hit me up on Twitter. Those are the two ways to do it. If you can figure out how to spell my name from Twitter, then you can M that my last name @pewresearch, you can get to me. So thank you for having us. It&#8217;s really been enjoyable.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Wonderful, wonderful. Seth?</p>



<p><em>Seth Rubenstein</em>:&nbsp; Yeah, you can get ahold of me on Twitter, LinkedIn, wherever I have links or might get a profile. If you&#8217;re interested in getting in touch with me, that link for that repo is in the chat so you can find that there. And yeah, thank you for having us. It&#8217;s great to show what we&#8217;ve built. We&#8217;re very proud of it. We think we&#8217;ve built a pretty rocksolid Gutenberg news publishing system and it&#8217;s cool to show it off.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Anne?</p>



<p><em>Anne McCarthy</em>: I&#8217;ll close this off. I&#8217;m just going to plug the latest call for testing the cool setting outreach program I have too. So if you&#8217;re interested in the staff and whatever stage you were in, whether you&#8217;re deep in the customizations and Gutenberg first, like these folks are, or if you&#8217;re scared to adopt feedback on all this stuff and what would make it easier is really helpful, there&#8217;s a whole outreach program designed to bring that stuff in and I would love to hear about the blockers. So I just want to nudge that.</p>



<p>Otherwise, I am not really on social media. So LinkedIn, I don&#8217;t know if that counts as social media, but I&#8217;m on LinkedIn and you can also find me at nomad.blog. There&#8217;s a contact form and I welcome people to use it.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: And for those who are on the WordPress Slack, it&#8217;s on the WordPress Slack and my name, Birgit Pauli-Haack, bph on Twitter, on Slack and also <a href="mailto:pauli@gutenbergtimes.com">pauli@gutenbergtimes.com</a>. So I don&#8217;t have an announcement either, but just my brain is really full of these great demos. I&#8217;m going to watch this probably quite a few times again.</p>



<p>Speaking about recording, after YouTube is through the rendering, it will be on YouTube, on our Gutenberg Times channel and a big thank you to the viewers and to our panelists. It was fabulous. It&#8217;s wonderful to see that. I know there are quite a few developers on the Gutenberg team or around that are going to look for that, especially also digital strategists like Michael, to what is really possible. I think you&#8217;re really, really on the forefront on the&#8230; I&#8217;m not allowed to say that so I&#8217;m saying the leading edge of the Gutenberg development. So thank you so much.If you have questions or so, send me to <a href="mailto:pauli@gutenbergtimes.com">pauli@gutenbergtimes.com</a>. Thanks everybody and bye-bye. Let&#8217;s get out of here. Thank you. Bye-bye.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Mon, 25 Jul 2022 13:18:48 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:18:"Birgit Pauli-Haack";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:30;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:84:"WordPress.org blog: WP Briefing: Episode 36: Beginner’s Guide to Contributions 2.0";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:53:"https://wordpress.org/news/?post_type=podcast&p=13162";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:83:"https://wordpress.org/news/2022/07/episode-36-beginners-guide-to-contributions-2-0/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:16313:"<p>In the thirty-sixth episode of the WordPress Briefing, Josepha Haden Chomphosy revisits the Beginner&#8217;s Guide to Contributions to the WordPress open source project. </p>



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



<h2>Credits</h2>



<p>Editor:&nbsp;<a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/dustinhartzler/">Dustin Hartzler</a><br />Logo:&nbsp;<a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/beafialho/">Beatriz Fialho</a><br />Production:&nbsp;<a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/santanainniss/">Santana Inniss</a><br />Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod</p>



<h2>References</h2>



<ol><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/performance">Performance Team Information</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community/2022/07/07/wcus2022-contributor-team-signup/">WordCamp US Contributor Day Table Lead Info</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2022/07/11/fse-program-testing-call-15-category-customization/">Call for Testing #15: Category Customization </a></li><li><a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/2019/contributor-orientation-tool/">Contributor Quizlet</a></li></ol>



<h2>Transcript</h2>



<span id="more-13162"></span>



<p>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:10]&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>



<p>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&#8217;m your host Josepha Haden Chomphosy.</p>



<p>Here we go.</p>



<p>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:40]&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>



<p>WordPress is an open source software project and, like many other open source software projects, has an entire community of people who show up to help improve it however they can. Most of you probably use WordPress every day in some way. And I&#8217;m going to assume that since you listen to this podcast, you&#8217;re also interested in how this all works.</p>



<p>One of the things I mention practically every episode is that WordPress works and continues to work because of generous contributions from people all around the world. I consider my work with WordPress to be my way of giving back for everything that this software enabled me and my family to do. But I once was a first-time contributor, and I remember what it felt like before I knew everything.&nbsp;</p>



<p>I felt like it moved at the speed of light and that I could never tell what to do now, let alone what to do next. And that everyone around me basically already knew everything. And if you are feeling that way right now, I encourage you to take a big deep breath [breathe] and let me help you get started.&nbsp;</p>



<p>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:43]&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>



<p>I&#8217;m a roadmap sort of person. So I&#8217;m going to start by sharing the stages I&#8217;ve observed for folks who are contributing to open source. That way, you can tell where you are right now, which spoiler alert is probably a bit further along than you realize. Then I&#8217;ll give you some questions you can ask yourself for each stage to figure out what is a good fit for you. Think of it as a guided exploration.&nbsp;</p>



<p>All right, the five stages. So these are they:&nbsp;</p>



<ol><li><strong>Connecting</strong>. That&#8217;s when you&#8217;re first learning about the community. You know WordPress exists, but now you&#8217;ve just discovered that the community exists. That&#8217;s where you are.&nbsp;</li><li>The second phase is <strong>Understanding</strong>. It&#8217;s when you are researching the community, like, you know it exists, you think you want to give back, and so you&#8217;re trying to figure out where everything is.&nbsp;</li><li>The third phase is what I call <strong>Engaging</strong>. It&#8217;s when you&#8217;re first interacting, you&#8217;ve downloaded the CMS, you have figured out which team you think you&#8217;re interested in, and you&#8217;re headed to events or meetings or whatever.&nbsp;</li><li>The fourth stage is one that I refer to as <strong>Performing</strong>. And that&#8217;s when you&#8217;ve decided that you&#8217;re gonna volunteer and you&#8217;re gonna take some action. You&#8217;re going to like a contributor day or running a release or whatever. I think that&#8217;s probably not the first place you land, running a release is probably a lot, but, you know, coordinating work on the release or something like that.&nbsp;</li><li>And then phase five, which is the <strong>Leading</strong> phase. That&#8217;s when you&#8217;re taking responsibility for things getting done.&nbsp;</li></ol>



<p>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:08]&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>



<p>Before we get any further, there are four important things to remember about those stages.</p>



<p>The first thing to remember is that there is no set time between any of those stages. You can start in one and then three years later go to the next one, or you can start in one and go into the next stage tomorrow. The next thing to know is that each stage builds on the one before it. In my observation, anytime I have seen a contributor who feels like they&#8217;re really struggling, it&#8217;s because they skipped a stage in there, which really causes some trouble for them.</p>



<p>The next thing to remember is that not everyone will make it through these stages, which is okay. The majority of the community stops at three. Most contributors stop at four. And that is perfectly fine. That is expected. That is normal and completely in line with what we expect from contribution.</p>



<p>Uh, and the final thing to remember about that list of the phases is that very few people make it into that leadership stage. If we assume, like I do, that 1% of the people who are using WordPress also show up and contribute back to WordPress, then it&#8217;s kind of safe to assume also that about 1% of those people who have shown up to contribute to WordPress are moving into a space where they feel like they&#8217;re willing to take responsibility for making sure things get done in WordPress.</p>



<p>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:31]&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>



<p>Like we all collectively feel responsible for WordPress&#8217;s success, but in that leadership area, you&#8217;re kind of taking responsibility for 40% of the web or whatever&#8217;s going on there. And not a lot of people make it there, and that is completely fine, too. So that&#8217;s our basic terminology today. Those are the caveats that go with our basic terminology.</p>



<p>Most difficulties that arise for new contributors happen because a stage got skipped somewhere along the way. It&#8217;s almost never intentional, but from what I&#8217;ve observed, that&#8217;s what makes it really difficult to get started and what makes it difficult to keep going once you&#8217;ve kind of already gotten in there.</p>



<p>So, all right. Big breath, folks with me again [breathe]. Alright, it&#8217;s guided exploration time.&nbsp;</p>



<p>First phase, the connecting phase. Remember, this is where you&#8217;ve just learned the community exists, people are talking about it, you don&#8217;t know much more. The first step for you is asking yourself what it is you could do. Or if there&#8217;s a project out there that looks particularly interesting.</p>



<p>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:36]&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>



<p>So you can ask yourself questions, like, am I a writer? And if I am a writer, do I write technical or prose. The other thing you can ask is, am I a PHP developer, a JavaScript developer, Python, Go; which language am I writing in because I find it most beautiful. Another thing you can ask yourself is, am I a teacher or a mentor, or do I just generally like to be a mighty helper? And I like to make sure that things keep running.&nbsp;</p>



<p>So once you&#8217;ve asked yourself those things, it&#8217;s on to phase two, the understanding phase. This is when you&#8217;re looking around at this new-to-you community to see what is happening where. So you take a look at the teams that are around, you think about whatever it was you said you were good at in the last question and you look at which teams might be a good fit.&nbsp;</p>



<p>So if you said that you&#8217;re a good technical writer, then Docs probably is for you. Have you been training others to use WordPress for years? Then you might wanna look into Training. There are a lot of other things, obviously, like if you think you&#8217;re good at working with code PHP or JavaScript, you&#8217;re probably gonna end up in Core.</p>



<p>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:46]&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>



<p>If you are particularly good at any of the other tech stacks that we have around in our Trac area or an Openverse, then that&#8217;s where you&#8217;ll land over there. You have design options. Like if design is really your thing, we have a Design team, but we also have a Themes team. There are plenty of places that you can land depending on what it is that you feel like you are the best at and could really help the WordPress project. And so that&#8217;s your phase two.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Now that you have gotten a good guess at a team, we&#8217;re gonna swing through to phase three, which is the engaging phase. This is the phase that is the scariest for most people, but it&#8217;s okay. I am here for you. I am here for you in this podcast. So you have figured out what you want to do in order to contribute, and you&#8217;ve got a sense for the team that looks right. There are two things that you do next.&nbsp;</p>



<p>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:34]&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>



<p>One is that you can go to a meeting. There are many kinds of meetings. There are team meetings, bug scrubs, and testing sessions, but they&#8217;re all in Slack, which means that you can attend one from anywhere. When they kick off, you wave, you introduce yourself, you let everybody know that you&#8217;re there and you&#8217;re observing. Folks will welcome you and just kind of give you some concept of what they&#8217;re working on. Easy as that. You&#8217;ve done your first time meeting attendance.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Another good option is to keep an eye out for specific events. Some of those events happen online, like Global Translation Day. But also some of them happen in person like, Meetups or WordCamps. And there again, you show up, you wave, you introduce yourself, see if you can make a connection or two, let people know that you&#8217;re new and you&#8217;re just trying to figure out where you are and what you wanna do.&nbsp;</p>



<p>If you&#8217;ve made it now, all the way to phase four, the performing phase, then give yourself a little pat on the back! Figuring out where you want to go and who your friendly faces are is the biggest challenge when you get started. So congratulations!&nbsp;</p>



<p>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:08:37]&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>



<p>Phase four is the phase where you&#8217;ve decided you&#8217;re brave enough to volunteer &#8211; to do some contribution. You&#8217;re volunteering your time. That&#8217;s where you are now. So oddly enough, you start this phase by assigning yourself something, assigning yourself, a task. This seems counterintuitive.</p>



<p>There&#8217;s this feeling that you can&#8217;t say that you&#8217;re gonna do something. That you can&#8217;t just assign something to yourself and say that you&#8217;re gonna do it. But in open source projects, you always can. You find a task where you&#8217;re comfortable, and you just mention that you would like to give it a try while the team is having their weekly meeting. And it&#8217;s simple as that. And not big things either. Like organizing an event or maintaining a component, those are probably too big for your first time around.</p>



<p>I&#8217;m talking things like, &#8216;I will test that patch that you mentioned in the meeting.&#8217; Or &#8216;I will review the docs and make sure that they&#8217;re up to date with the most recent release.&#8217; Or &#8216;I can help run meetings for the next release.&#8217;</p>



<p>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:09:40]&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>



<p>And then you have phase five, where you just repeat phase four until you are leading something! And I don&#8217;t mean leading in the 1950s sort of way, where you have like a corner office and you&#8217;re ordering people around. I mean, in the warm, inviting millennial way where you&#8217;re leading by inspiring people to do something or you&#8217;re leading because you make sure that the meeting happens every single week.</p>



<p>Or you&#8217;re leading because you added screenshots to tickets that needed testing and so you moved something forward in a way that was helpful. Easy peasy. You can go to your first contributor today or a WordPress Slack meeting and just be a contributor by the time you leave, right? You might feel like ‘easy as that isn&#8217;t quite the right set of words right there. And as a matter of fact, you might be thinking to yourself, this woman is just plain wrong. It could not possibly be that easy. And I agree. It really isn&#8217;t literally quote-unquote just that easy. Just like handing someone a notebook and a pen will not instantly make them an award-winning novelist, handing someone a wordpress.org profile and credentials to Slack won&#8217;t instantly make them a contributor.&nbsp;</p>



<p>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:10:46]&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>



<p>For both of those examples, what makes someone good is the ability to try and fail and still be encouraged to try again. So if it&#8217;s been a while since you contributed and you&#8217;re thinking about returning, or if you&#8217;ve been listening to me for a while and you&#8217;re ready to give this contribution thing a try, I hope this helps you to feel brave enough to try and brave enough to fail.</p>



<p>And I encourage you to be brave enough to try again.</p>



<p>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:11:20]&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>



<p>Let&#8217;s take a look at our small list of big things. My friends, we have a Performance team. This team has been a working group for a long time and is focused on some deep, inner workings of WordPress and its surrounding ecosystem to make sure that we are as fast and slick as possible. You can check them out on make.wordpress.org/performance, their brand new site, and see when they&#8217;re meeting, what they&#8217;re aiming to get into the WordPress 6.1 release, and if that&#8217;s something that you would like to contribute to.&nbsp;</p>



<p>The second thing is that there&#8217;s a brand new call out for testing. This time it&#8217;s focused on templates and retroactively applying them to an entire category of posts. So it&#8217;s a little bit workflow testing, a little bit technology testing, and we could really use your help in bug hunting for both of those things.</p>



<p>And the final thing is that you know since contribution is obviously the focus of today&#8217;s podcast, we are looking for table leads for WordCamp US’ contributor day that&#8217;s coming up in September. There&#8217;s a whole blog post about it, I&#8217;ll link to it in the show notes so that you&#8217;ll have all the info and can raise your hand if you want.&nbsp;</p>



<p>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:12:25]&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>



<p>And speaking of things that I&#8217;ll have in the show notes, I also am going to put like a contributor quizlet guide thing. If the guided, figuring out of the teams in the phase two section, if that didn&#8217;t make any sense to you and you just need something to direct you specifically to potential teams, I&#8217;m gonna link to the contributor kind of sorting hat quiz that came out with WordCamp Europe. And that should help you work your way through phase two and get ready for phase three if that is where the spirit takes you.&nbsp;</p>



<p>And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I&#8217;m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. And I&#8217;ll see you again in a couple of weeks.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Mon, 25 Jul 2022 11:05:33 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"Santana Inniss";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:31;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:76:"Do The Woo Community: dev_life snippet: One of My Greatest Crushes is WP-CLI";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=72458";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:32:"https://dothewoo.io/love-wp-cli/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:425:"<p>WP-CLI has a tab completions, which means you can start typing commands and after three characters, just hit tab and the terminal will complete that word for you.</p>
<p>&gt;&gt; The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://dothewoo.io/love-wp-cli/">dev_life snippet: One of My Greatest Crushes is WP-CLI</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://dothewoo.io">Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community</a>	.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Mon, 25 Jul 2022 09:53:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:32;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:154:"Gutenberg Times: Gutenberg Changelog #70 – Gutenberg 13.7, Template Creation Enhancements and First Full-Site Editing Themes in Woo Commerce Marketplace";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:53:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/?post_type=podcast&p=21683";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:98:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-70-gutenberg-13-7-woo-commerce-marketplace/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:60236:"<p></p>



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



<ul><li>Music:&nbsp;<a href="https://soundcloud.com/xirclebox">Homer Gaines</a></li><li>Editor:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandy-reed/">Sandy Reed</a></li><li>Logo:&nbsp;<a href="https://markuraine.com/">Mark Uraine</a></li><li>Production:&nbsp;<a href="https://icodeforapurpose.com">Birgit Pauli-Haack</a></li></ul>



<p class="has-larger-font-size" id="shownotes"><strong>Show Notes</strong></p>



<p><a href="https://jinja.wordcamp.org/2022/">WordCamp Jinja, Uganda</a>  / <a href="https://jinja.wordcamp.org/2022/call-for-speakers/">Call for speakers</a></p>



<p><a href="https://twitter.com/ryanwelcher"><strong>Ryan Welcher</strong></a></p>



<ul><li><a href="https://www.twitch.tv/ryanwelchercodes">on Twitch </a> </li><li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/ryanwelchercodes">on YouTube</a></li></ul>



<p>Announcements</p>



<p><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/meta/2022/07/21/pattern-previews-for-themes-in-the-directory-beta/">Pattern Previews are now available in the theme directory</a></p>



<p><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/07/21/request-for-feedback-feature-notifications-proof-of-concept/">Call for Comments on a Feature plugin for Notifications</a></p>



<h2><strong>First Block Themes on WooCommerce Marketplace</strong></h2>



<ul><li><a href="https://woocommerce.com/products/bonum/">Bonum by ThemesKingdom</a></li><li><a href="https://woocommerce.com/products/basti/">Basti by Ana Segota of Anariel Design</a></li><li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFqdHZco1Cg">The most beautiful WordPress Gutenberg Block Theme</a></li></ul>



<h2>Gutenberg 13.7</h2>



<p><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/07/20/whats-new-in-gutenberg-13-7-20-july/">What’s new in Gutenberg 13.7? (20 July)</a></p>



<p><a href="https://wptavern.com/gutenberg-13-7-expands-custom-template-capabilities-adds-estimated-reading-time-to-info-panel">Gutenberg 13.7 Expands Custom Template Capabilities, Adds Estimated Reading Time to Info Panel</a></p>



<p><a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/how-to-guides/curating-the-editor-experience/">Curating the editor experience</a></p>



<h2>What&#8217;s in the discussed or worked on</h2>



<p><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/42125">Add code examples for actions/selectors in Data Module packages</a></p>



<p><a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/reference-guides/filters/">Hooks Reference</a></p>



<p><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/39529">Block supports: add fluid typography</a></p>



<p><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/42605">Experimental: Custom labelling/naming of blocks in List View</a></p>



<p>/</p>



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



<div class="wp-container-8 wp-block-group"><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container">
<ul><li>Did you like this episode? <a href="https://lovethepodcast.com/gutenbergchangelog"><strong>Please write us a review </strong></a></li><li>Ping us on Twitter or send DMs with questions. <a href="https://twitter.com/maryojob">@maryojob </a>and <a href="https://twitter.com/bph">@bph</a>.</li><li><em>If you have questions or suggestions, or news you want us to include, send them to <a href="mailto:changelog@gutenbergtimes.com">changelog@gutenbergtimes.com</a>. </em></li><li><em>Please write us a review on iTunes! <a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/itunes/">(Click here to learn how)</a></em></li></ul>
</div></div>



<h2>Transcript</h2>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Hello, and welcome to our 17th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog Podcast. Today&#8217;s episode, we will talk about the latest Gutenberg plugin release 13.7, more template creation enhancements, full side editing themes in WooCommerce, and a lot more.</p>



<p>I&#8217;m Birgit Pauli-Haack, Curator at the Gutenberg Times and WordPress Developer Advocate. And I&#8217;m here with my co-host, Mary Job, WordPress Community Organizer at wpafrica.org and Support Engineer at Paid Membership Pro.</p>



<p>So glad you&#8217;re here again with me, Mary. How are you today?</p>



<p><em>Mary Job</em>: Oh, I&#8217;m doing very okay. Thank you, Birgit. I&#8217;m also looking forward to my first WordCamp post-COVID. I believe this is also a good time to mention that a call for speakers for WordCamp Ginger is out, so if you&#8217;re interested, I look forward to meeting you there. Please apply to speak. WordCamp, again, Ginger will take place on the 2nd and 3rd of September 2022.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: All right. Well, thank you. And I&#8217;m also so happy to welcome from Canada core team contributor and Twitch streamer, Ryan Welcher. He&#8217;s on the second time on the show.</p>



<p>So, how are you today, Ryan? Thanks for joining us.</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: I&#8217;m good, Birgit. Thanks for having me again. It&#8217;s always a pleasure. It was a great time last time, and I&#8217;m looking forward to diving into all the new features.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: All right. Excellent. You just finished this week&#8217;s live stream on Twitch. How did it go? And what did you talk about?</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: It went well. It was a smattering of topics. I have been working on a lot of documentation around some data store stuff, and I learned something new about useSelect, which is a hook that we use to retrieve data from Gutenberg and from the data stores. And I kind of poked around it into Gutenberg 13.7 a little bit. But we kind of ad hoc jumped into this really, this concept of one block being able to refer to another block to get its attributes and talking together and having them update and everything. And that was a lot of fun, but it was pretty in the weeds, as far as working with blocks go. But, yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Well, that sounds really interesting.</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: Yeah, it was fun.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, excellent. Excellent. So. Go ahead.</p>



<p><em>Mary Job</em>: Oh, yeah. I was going to say that sounds like a lot of fun.</p>



<p>Welcome again, Ryan, and thank you for joining us on the second time here.</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: Glad to be here. Very, very much so. Thanks for having me.</p>



<p><em>Mary Job</em>: All right. So, let&#8217;s get this show on the road. We have a couple of announcements.</p>



<h3><strong>Announcements</strong></h3>



<p>First off, I&#8217;m glad to announce that Pattern Previews are now available in the Team Directory. Now, the Meta Team has released a better version of this new future in a team directory.</p>



<p>What this does is, it allows you to see the patterns that are available within a team. The patterns at the space are thumbnails on the team stage. And when you click on them, you can see a larger version, which is what you would also see when you click on a page on your website.</p>



<p>This is a first iteration, and in the release post on the Meta Team blog, Steven Dufresne different as asks for feedback. So, if you&#8217;re testing this and you see something that is not working right, please, please do give them a feedback so that they can improve more on this future.</p>



<p>Do you have any thoughts on this, Ryan or Birgit?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Well, I find it&#8217;s really fantastic that it&#8217;s out there. And yeah, because I suspect that patterns will become so much more important on WordPress than they are now. And this is another example of how patterns will get a much bigger exposure.</p>



<p><em>Mary Job</em>: Awesome. Okay. All right. Still on announcements, next up, there is a call for comments on a feature plugin for notifications.</p>



<p>I&#8217;m actually excited about this one. I don&#8217;t know if I have OCD or something, but it freaks me out when I enter into a WordPress site and I&#8217;m seeing all this notifications there and there I&#8217;m just clicking X and X, and then I come back and I see them. It&#8217;s really upsetting. So, actually, this is not block- or editor-related, but the group of contributors working on this review for the API, for the BP admins just published this in their current approach.</p>



<p>So, the problem this seeks to address is actually simple. Imagine you log into your WebPress site. You haven&#8217;t been there for weeks. And the moment you do, you&#8217;re bombarded with update notifications, premium plugin advertisements. I think the one that gets me is the premium plugin advertisements that come on the main dashboard instead of on the plugin itself dashboard. I mean, when I see them, like, &#8220;What are you doing here?&#8221; So this is what the team around the WP notification project tries to change.</p>



<p>Cutting from the post by Brian Coords, it says, &#8220;This project is focused on building a new framework for notifications from the ground up, and potentially providing a tool that encourages consistency in presentation, follows best practices in standards and accessibility, and discourages disruptive interactions in the WordPress admin screen.&#8221;</p>



<p>Do you have thoughts on this, Ryan?</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: I love it. I love the idea of it. I know it&#8217;s the bane of most site owners&#8217; existence to deal with the&#8230; Every plugin handles notifications differently. I mean, when people are left to sort of roll their own solution to a problem, then we get 100,000 different solutions, so having something that&#8217;s standard, and it&#8217;s thoughtful, and built from the ground up, it&#8217;s going to be great. Because I just think we can&#8230; Well, even the most obtrusive notifications with a system like that will still not be that obtrusive, and not be that glaring. It won&#8217;t be bright orange or whatever it is, all those sort of horrible UX decisions that get made.</p>



<p>Yeah, I don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s anything really bad that can come out of a proposal like this, in my opinion.</p>



<p><em>Mary Job</em>: Yeah.</p>



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



<p><em>Mary Job</em>: Sorry. Go on-</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: &#8230; totally. I agree totally. After 19 years, I think it would be really&#8230; It&#8217;s good to have a team looking at it, and the team has been working on this for a few years now, on and off, because&#8230; Yeah, some of us have life outside of WordPress. But, yeah. I&#8217;m glad they got to the next step in showing the world what they&#8217;re up to. And that is always good because now feedback comes in.</p>



<p>Especially also, for the planning developers, because admin notices are important. Yeah, but what are the importance of this, and how would you work it if you&#8217;re a plug-in developer as well? So, yeah.</p>



<p><em>Mary Job</em>: Awesome. I look forward to testing it and giving you my own feedback on how it works. So, yeah. Okay.</p>



<h3><strong>Community Contributions</strong></h3>



<p>So, moving forward to our section on community contributions. First up, I&#8217;m happy to let you know that the first block teams are now available in the WooCommerce marketplace. This is exciting.</p>



<p>So, if you&#8217;re building Woocom masters, Bonum by Themes Kingdom was the first. This particular one favors a great set of patterns for all kinds of sellers.</p>



<p>The second one also just landed, and it&#8217;s called Basti by Ana Segota of Honorary Design. As always, this one shows off a beautiful design, and it has great attention to detail. It also provides wonderful patterns, and also some great style variations for your buttons, columns, and other books. It also has some great overall style variations that would let you change the character of the theme. On installation, you would find a set of four design variations, depending on the nature of your business.</p>



<p>Jamie Marsland is a review of this particular team. So if you&#8217;re building newcomer sites often, you should also take a look and explore this block teams.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. Yeah, Jamie Marsland did a review, an eight-minute review of it, and really did a deep dive into it. And I was always wondering, yeah, with the block themes, what would make a theme, the value that of cost? Yeah, what would I pay for when I buy a theme that is full-site editing, and it&#8217;s definitely the style variations for my buttons, or for every block, or/and it&#8217;s also the style variations for the global styles.</p>



<p>And, of course, the nature of the patterns, and how they fit into the versatility of the theme. So, I think this is very well, both themes, the Basti theme, as well as the Bonum theme in the Bonum marketplace. It pretty much says it all in the marketplace announced there are free themes in there, but those two are not free themes. There are both premium things, just to do a little caveat there.</p>



<p><em>Mary Job</em>: All right.</p>



<h3><strong>What’s Released &#8211; Gutenberg 13.7</strong></h3>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: So, that brings us to our what&#8217;s releases section, and we released yesterday or the Gutenberg team released yesterday, on Wednesday 20th, the Gutenberg 13.7. Yeah, Gutenberg 13.7 brings an updated model design. And we&#8217;ll talk about the features later.</p>



<p>So, this release comes 167 PRs with 58 contributors, including four first-time contributors. So, excellent. Kudos to all the contributors who helped with the release.</p>



<p>Go ahead.</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: Sorry. I just want to say that it&#8217;s been fairly recently, I think, in the release post that we&#8217;ve been specifically calling out first-time contributors. I think it&#8217;s probably not that recent, but I think that&#8217;s phenomenal. I know when I was first trying to get my first core props, it&#8217;s just such a win. It&#8217;s such a huge win, and you feel so good. And it&#8217;s great that people are calling, that they&#8217;re getting mentioned every two weeks, as opposed to every six months, or three months, I guess, when the next version of WordPress comes out. I just think it&#8217;s great. It&#8217;s such a good way of thanking people that are putting in their time to get this done.</p>



<p>Anyways, sorry. Continue.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: If you want to know who the new contributors are, check out the release post because, on the low end, after the Changelog, you&#8217;ll see who they are and what did they contribute? So, you can see also, is it something that you would want to do? Or just thank them personally when you know them, or when you see them in Slack.</p>



<h3><strong>Enhancements</strong></h3>



<p>So, there are a few enhancements in that release. One is the update of the model design and it&#8217;s subtle, but it&#8217;s very, very helpful because it provides you focus on what you might want to accomplish because it blurs the background. It kind of comes up on top of the page, and then blurs the background a little bit. It also reduces visual noise in the corners. So, it&#8217;s definitely a quality-of-life enhancements, as we call it. But it&#8217;s definitely something that will replicate through all the models. So, it&#8217;s the preferences, it&#8217;s the keyboard shortcut, it&#8217;s the&#8230; Or any other model that&#8217;s kind of in use.</p>



<p>For the theme developers, the next one is&#8230; You will really find that helpful, but now there&#8217;s text decoration support for the post title block, which was still missing, especially when you do for query blocks or something like that.</p>



<p>And then, there&#8217;s also now a change in the featured image. No, in the media placeholder. Now, if you use an image block or a cover block in a post, you can actually say you want to use the featured image, so you don&#8217;t have to reload it up again into the post, if it&#8217;s a featured image, and if your theme doesn&#8217;t show it already with your single post. And in the query blocks, you now can use them in your templates and you just have one click where you can select the featured image. You could do it before, but you had to click twice in the toolbar to actually attach the featured image to that block.</p>



<p>Yeah, Mary, Ryan, if you have anything, yeah? Feel free to comment.</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: Yeah, I think that kind of changed just to make it easier to do something, like two clicks doesn&#8217;t seem like a lot, but if you&#8217;re building out hundreds of pages, two clicks ends up being a lot of time, right? So, being able to reduce even down one click, it&#8217;s nice. I think it&#8217;s great.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. Yeah, it&#8217;s half the time, right? And it&#8217;s not always two clicks. It&#8217;s also that you have to move them out to find the click, yeah. So now, that is all much nicer.</p>



<p>A similar redesign was made also for the document settings. That&#8217;s on the sidebar, not the block settings, but the post settings for post or page settings for the page. So, in the previous releases, the post settings panel in the side bar was already redesigned. And in this release, it all becomes a little bit more refined. So, the fields for post format, slug, template, and authors are now aligned, and they all have the same width.</p>



<p>And then, the template displays the default template string instead of none, so it opens up the dropdown box to select the new one, or edit the existing one.</p>



<p>Also, the perma link opens now. If you want to change it into a pop-over to edit it, and it&#8217;s a much nicer experience than trying to fit it into the small screen there when you want to re-edit the slug. So, the result is cleaner. It&#8217;s more organized, and should help to readily access the important information about the post and page at a glance.</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: I&#8217;m just going to say, again, these kind of changes just make&#8230; They&#8217;re all quality-of-life changes, right? It doesn&#8217;t really matter to your website if all those things align, but it&#8217;s some visual dissonance, and stuff like that. So, yeah. It&#8217;s nice to be able to….</p>



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



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: &#8230; to refine these things as we move forward, as the project move forward.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Totally agree. And when you look at the release post, and there is&#8230; The design team put two images together, and the web episode org side has a compare block where you can have before-and-after pictures. And then you have a slider in the middle of it, and you can slide along. That&#8217;s in there, but for this one, you just see the two sidebars next to each other. And it&#8217;s so weird, yeah? I&#8217;ve never noticed how disjointed it actually was before than it is. And now that it&#8217;s in order, yeah, it&#8217;s so much nicer to look at. Yeah.</p>



<p>Yeah, and now we come to the bigger feature. The biggest feature that&#8217;s actually in the release is that you now can create templates for all kinds of different post types, different taxonomies, specific terms, specific categories on tags for authors. You can even create a custom general template.</p>



<p>So, when you add or edit a template for custom post types and taxonomies, you can do it for a single post. So, you get a list, for the single custom post-type pages that you can select and then edit or create a new one, if your theme hasn&#8217;t provided them, because you just created your own custom post type with a plugin or something like that. You see it in the Add New Template for it. So, that&#8217;s pretty cool.</p>



<p>So, you can, for instance, have a different template on your blog. You can have it for personal blogs. Blog post, you have a different template than for a developer-related blog post, or a third one for travel posts. So, you can do a lot more creativity here. And if you have custom post types, as I said, it&#8217;s already automatically in there.</p>



<p>I already got a question on Twitter after I tweeted out the new features about the new plugin. And there was a question, &#8220;So, how do I get an archive post type? So, is there an archive for my books? If my post type is books, can I have an archive?&#8221; You can, but not with the template engine yet. You can certainly do a new page and pull in the query block, which already covers the custom post types. But that is the only template that has not been yet created. It&#8217;s in the works. I saw the tracking issue for all the different templates that developers want to create, and that one is the only one that doesn&#8217;t have a checkbox. It was pretty interesting.</p>



<p>So I think that&#8217;s pretty big because without….</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: It&#8217;s huge.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: &#8230; access&#8230; Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: Yeah. Oh, sorry. Yeah, sorry. I didn&#8217;t mean to&#8230; For theme developers or anyone, really, who&#8217;s building block themes, this is massive. Because one of the things that I&#8217;ve heard is the&#8230; When it first came out, we couldn&#8217;t do&#8230; We can&#8217;t create the theme templating system that WordPress has had since, I don&#8217;t know, Version 1 on the PHP side, in the full-site editing experience, until now, basically. Right? So it&#8217;s huge because there are so many times where just having that specific template that you want to have for a very specific thing meant that you had to go and create a new file in your theme, upload that to your server, or whatever. And then, you could work with it. But now, I mean, it&#8217;s going to put a bunch of developers out of work. I mean, it&#8217;s not. I&#8217;m kidding. But a lot of that, it&#8217;s not completely in the hands of the admin, which is great.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Right, right. And yeah, for those who design themes, it&#8217;s definitely, you don&#8217;t need to have access to the final theme file system anymore. Yeah?</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: And you don&#8217;t need to know about the template hierarchy that WordPress has because it kind of gives you a clear jumping point for the next block template that you want to create. So, it definitely expands the reach of the creativity or template editing beyond just the developer. Yeah, I really love that.</p>



<p>So, the next step for that would be custom fields, right? How to-</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: &#8230; surface custom fields and custom post templates. Yeah. So, it&#8217;s going to be interesting to see what will be next for WordPress and the block editor.</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: I don&#8217;t know if this is in the works, but I just recently built a site for a friend of mine. And there was a lot of&#8230; It would be great if you could create a template that was inherited from an existing template. Maybe there&#8217;s a way of doing it. I haven&#8217;t really dived into it that far, but I can see that being something that people want to do. Like I create a new template for a very specific tag. I don&#8217;t want to have to go and set my header in my footer again. I just want to inherit that from whatever, from a template. So, if anyone&#8217;s listening.</p>



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



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: That&#8217;s what you should do.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: And it&#8217;s geniuses all kind of think alike. So, there is actually an issue in the GitHub repo, or at least it&#8217;s talked about that those templates shouldn&#8217;t start from scratch on a blank page. They should have some default, be it the header and footer in there so it kind of starts out like a page on my site and not so much, &#8220;Okay. What is missing here?&#8221; Yeah, kind of thing. Because the surprise would be that if it&#8217;s a white blank page, and you just put the things in that you want, it won&#8217;t have a header and footer right now, but that is definitely in the works. Yeah, you&#8217;re absolutely…</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: &#8230; right.</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: Which I think would be great, yeah. Because I think the path of least resistance is where 90% of the people are&#8230; That&#8217;s 90% of the use cases. I just want a new tag template, so I don&#8217;t want to have to go and reset up my whole page. If I want all that, then I probably wouldn&#8217;t have any problem saying, &#8220;Copy this template,&#8221; and then changing the things that I need, as opposed to brand new template. And I got to rebuild all things, and maybe I have to match settings and stuff. Anyways. It sounds like it&#8217;s definitely on the radar, which is awesome.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: It is, yeah. I don&#8217;t know how the implementation will look, but there&#8217;s definitely, yeah , the GitHub space. You listeners, if you want to do some input, there&#8217;s always great discussions on GitHub on how to approach a feature like that, that hasn&#8217;t been done before. And that&#8217;s actually the beauty of community, yeah, that more people have better ideas, and it comes out of better product.</p>



<p>All right. Another quality-of-life, so to speak, or a start of a new feature is in the Information Panel on the Editor. That&#8217;s the little eye circle. Now has received a new number, and that&#8217;s the estimated time to read in the Table of Contents in the Editor. So, next to the numbers of words and characters and numbers of blocks, numbers of headings, numbers of paragraphs, the sixth one is now estimated time to read for whatever this asset is.</p>



<p>And I really like that because then you can kind of gauge, &#8220;Am I too long now?&#8221; Or, &#8220;Do I need to put a TLDR on top of it because it&#8217;s now longer than two minutes?&#8221; Or something like that. Yeah, you can kind of build your own rules around this. Not rules, but kind of think about your own rules, yeah. Yeah?</p>



<p><em>Mary Job</em>: Yeah. You can also copy that instead of using a plugin, add a plugin to your site to do that. You can just copy and put Estimated reading time at the top of all your posts.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. Yeah, of course, it would also be better. So, it&#8217;s only displayed in the Editor right now, and it cannot be used on the front end without additional feature. But I put in a feature request for a new post, Time to Read block in GitHub. So chime in, if you want to, and kind of have a bubble up. It would be one of the new blocks for a post, and that you can use in a query block or even on a single a post template, yeah.</p>



<p>So, that&#8217;s kind of for the enhancements. We&#8217;re quite a few&#8230; Not the big swings, but they are apart from the huge amount of templates that you can create now.</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: There&#8217;s one that we skipped over from full-site editing, Birgit, that I just wanted to call out.&nbsp;</p>



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



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: &#8230; Apply to the block locking that applies to air blocks.</p>



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



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: I think that&#8217;s fantastic. Was it 5.9 that released that block locking came out? Or was it 6.0. I can&#8217;t remember. But the ability to go in and lock a block, and now you can apply that to any of its children blocks, which I think it&#8217;s a huge quality-of-life thing, which is so nice.</p>



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



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: Because that&#8217;s a lot of work, especially if you have nested blocks and nested blocks and nested blocks, you have to go in to every single one and mark them and lock them, which is great.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. Now you have just a little toggle switch on the bottom of-</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: Yeah?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: &#8230; the module, and where you say, &#8220;Apply to all blocks in this container.&#8221;</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: Which is great.</p>



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



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: So, that could extend the patterns, which would be great, because you could probably have your patterns start out as locked. And there&#8217;s a lot of options here. Block locking&#8217;s a really powerful tool, especially when you get into user-based block locking where, as a administrator, I have access to all the blocks, but as, say an editor, I can&#8217;t move two or three of those blocks. When you get into that level of editorial control, especially across a team, it gets super, super powerful.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. And we will later on also talk a little bit about the new handbook page about that. Yeah.</p>



<h3><strong>APIs&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</strong></h3>



<p>So, bug fixes. Oh, we had one new API, which I find quite interesting. From my perspective, it&#8217;s JavaScript arrow tracking, and it allows a custom error reporting logic to be called. And then, the error boundaries kind of&#8230; It kind of bubbles up to the front end or to wherever you want it, but it is not suppressed by the block editor. So it definitely very helpful when you&#8217;re debugging things.</p>



<p>Do you know anything more about that? Or any comments?</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: Yeah, I think it&#8217;s super powerful. I think one thing that, as a block developer, errors are problematic because they&#8217;re hard to track. They&#8217;re hard to track down. So, if you&#8217;ve ever seen this sort of Cannot Display Block and An Error Occurred, that&#8217;s the error boundary. So basically, the way the react works is it&#8217;s wrapping every error, and it catches it all and says An Error Happened.</p>



<p>So what this API allows you to do is, when that error happens, you can actually do something with the error message. One of the examples in the pull request is, if you were going to Century, Century I/O, I think it is. It&#8217;s an error logging tool, right? So if you had a block that was, say, hitting an API that you wrote or whatever, and you wanted to log errors back to Century to be able to see what happened, this enables that. This allows you to do really complicated things.</p>



<p>Or even if you just wanted to, say, fire a notice, and say, &#8220;Hey, you didn&#8217;t input your API key. That&#8217;s why this failed,&#8221; that helps to give your user a better indication of why their block failed. Now, hopefully, you shouldn&#8217;t be having a block fail in the wild, sort of thing. But sometimes we need certain things to be in place before these blocks will work. But I&#8230; Yeah.</p>



<p>So I think it&#8217;s the beginning of a lot more developer experience, style of quality-of-life changes, things that allow the developers building these blocks to be able to handle things more gracefully, specifically errors. Especially&#8230; Yeah.</p>



<p>So, I don&#8217;t know. I think it&#8217;s really, really good. It&#8217;s super interesting to me, but I&#8217;m a big developer nerd, so I think it&#8217;s&#8230; I don&#8217;t know a lot of use cases for it right now, but I can definitely see it growing. As it matures, it&#8217;ll be more and more useful.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Well, there were quite a few bug fixes coming out of it, but I think that there was none that actually jumped out at me and said, &#8220;Oh, thank God that it&#8217;s fixed now,&#8221; kind of thing. But, of course it&#8217;s also&#8230; Yeah. It&#8217;s in the&#8230; Yeah, it&#8217;s every personal experience is a little bit different.</p>



<h3><strong>Documentation</strong></h3>



<p>But we come to the documentation settings. And Ryan, you have done quite some work there to enhance or make the documentation better through the Generation Tool.</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: Yeah. It&#8217;s always been a bit of a pet peeve of mine that the Block Editor Handbook has got a lot of information, and it&#8217;s great. And it&#8217;s all generated dynamically directly from the Gutenberg repository. But there&#8217;s not a lot of code examples. And, specifically in the data store realm, there&#8217;s a lot of&#8230; You can see what is available to you, but using it is sometimes a lot more complicated than just, say, making a call to a function.</p>



<p>Part of what I&#8217;ve been working on is the ability to&#8230; Well, adding all examples for as many packages as I can. We have examples now for the Get Notices package, so you can use those. The other part that I&#8217;m working on is removing things from the documentation that probably shouldn&#8217;t be there for an end user.</p>



<p>For example, this is a bit in the weeds, but when you&#8217;re dealing with data stores specifically Redux-based data stores, which is what Gutenberg is basing its data stores on, you have these functions called Actions, and some are only dispatched or run internally to the store. So the store says, &#8220;Get me a thing,&#8221; and then that thing gets returned. And then the store internally says, &#8220;Oh, I&#8217;ve got that thing. Now I could do something else with it.&#8221; So those actions aren&#8217;t ever going to be used by a developer using a public API.</p>



<p>So, one of the things that I&#8217;ve been working on is adding a support for a doc block tag that will basically exclude things from the documentation. And so, that&#8217;s a big win, I think for us, because it&#8217;s already complicated and the functions don&#8217;t really explain what they do, and they shouldn&#8217;t be used at all because you would never call them. It wouldn&#8217;t make any sense. And if you did call them, it&#8217;d probably just break the data store. So that&#8217;s one thing.</p>



<p>And so, another thing that I&#8217;ve been working on is&#8230; Actually, I guess that&#8217;s it. They ignore stuff. Getting examples in, I just literally merged half an hour ago a PR that gets rid of all of the internal actions for the data package, which is great. So it&#8217;s going to reduce the amount of documentation, but make it more concise. But, yeah. It&#8217;s a long process. There&#8217;s like 10 packages and there&#8217;s a lot of selectors and actions that I have to document.</p>



<p>So, if anyone wants to help, there&#8217;s a tracking ticket in Gutenberg.</p>



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



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: &#8230; all of our sections, yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, I&#8217;ll find that for you. And we&#8217;ll share the tracking issue link in the show notes, so you can jump on board. It could also be quite interesting too, because that gets you a little bit into the weeds, but not deep enough.</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: I will tell you this; you will know the package inside out and backwards, because you have to write documents. You have to write examples that work. You have to figure out how they work, and then you have to figure out a real reason to use it. I know lots about this now, way more than I ever thought I would, but…</p>



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



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: &#8230; Yeah.</p>



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



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: So, it was a great way to get right into the API.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: I wanted to also&#8230; So, thank you for doing that, picking up on that.</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: No problem.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: And going through with it. What I also found on the documentation, how it&#8217;s also part of the documentation revamp, or more people looking at documentation from a point of developer experience, or is that we might reorganize things. Yeah, so having a different header or a different pass to a certain document, or even the document URLs changes. But we need to have a redirect directly attached to it, so we can say, &#8220;Okay, this old page now needs to redirect to the new page,&#8221; so we don&#8217;t lose people that have been in that documentation for a long time.</p>



<p>And yeah, I connected with the Mater Team and figure out how can this be done on the Gutenberg manifest, the JSON repo. Yeah, to also add the redirect later on, so when they import it to, when the importer, into the webpress.org pages, then also can take care of those redirects directly, and not have a second step to it.</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: I think that&#8217;s great. I think that&#8217;s going to allow us&#8230; Us, the Royal us. Is that a thing to-</p>



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



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: &#8230; to be more fluid with the docs because I know that&#8217;s been&#8230; Our docs&#8230; If you look at some of these pages, they&#8217;re massive. They&#8217;re just super long, and there&#8217;s that there&#8217;s that zero to expert problem that we sort of have in the documentation realm where, &#8220;Here&#8217;s a basic example, and now here&#8217;s all the information you&#8217;ll ever need to know about it ever.&#8221; And it&#8217;s all kind of on the same page. And so, if by being able to be more dynamic with how often we change pages, and we can set redirects and things, it&#8217;ll allow us to kind of play with the documentation format, and maybe we can be a bit more. We can play a bit more fast and loose with it and try things. And it&#8217;s not a huge undertaking, and people don&#8217;t lose all their bookmarks, and it&#8217;s bad times. So I think it&#8217;s great, being able to do that.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. And I wanted to bring it back to what you talked about before, the locking experience for&#8230; There is a new page in the Block Editor Developer Handbook, and that is called Curating the Editor Experience. And you&#8217;ll find it under the How To Guides. And it talks about the locking API, what the user can do, and how you can suppress that, and how you lock patterns or templates, how you can set the permissions, change the permissions to the control-locking ability with code examples. Very well done. And providing default controls and options in the theme JSON file, and how to find how to work that.</p>



<p>And then also, to limit the interface options to the Theme JSON. That&#8217;s the global styles kind of on the right-hand side. Yeah, you don&#8217;t&#8230; not necessarily want somebody to use the custom color or to use the custom doer tone links because you want to stay on design color, on brand color, all that.</p>



<p>There was a make blog post about it, but now it&#8217;s in the handbook and it&#8217;s&#8230; If I look through it, I find it really comprehensive. And it has some nice section adders, and additional resources that are also on the Learn. So there is one video on the WP space from the Learn Worker space. It&#8217;s working with templates and full-set editing. And, yeah.</p>



<p>So that&#8217;s a great page, and that is new. And yeah, I love that it&#8217;s now all in one place and not distributed over the whole web universe, because somebody found something and shared it. But then, yeah, I can do that, but I also want to lock down this, so now you have it all on one page.</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: That&#8217;s great.</p>



<h3><strong>Experiments</strong></h3>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. There are a few experiments that are called, globally, the style engine, and there were some updates there. I will share the style engine tracking issue. And there&#8217;s also a block layout tracking issue for that. So you can stay up to date in what it&#8217;s all about. It&#8217;s pretty much how styles are treated from theme to block, to elements, and back again, in terms of how you can change things, yeah. Because, for some of the things you have UI, and for some of them, it&#8217;s only in Theme Jason. Some of them, you need to still do with CSS. So, there&#8217;s quite a big work to be done to standardize that.</p>



<p>I think that&#8217;s it. Do have anything else that you&#8230; Oh, yeah! That was the first idea that I had when I thought about getting Ryan on the show. There&#8217;s a section in the grade block about the grade block script. And that is that you get a prompt for minimum system requirements, if they are not met. And also, careful prompts to, yeah, how to continue with that. And it also fixes a regression from the size, underscore size refactoring.</p>



<p>So, great block. Ryan, you have done quite a few demos, and quite some work on it. What does it do for those who haven&#8217;t heard about it?</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: Well, it&#8217;s my favorite package in all WordPress, first of all. What it does is…</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: And now, we get into the second hour of our podcast.</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: Yeah, yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: &#8230; easier a bit.</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: Do you have a minute?</p>



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



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: Do you have an hour and a half?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, I have a minute.</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: Okay. Sit down. Let me tell you about Create Block.</p>



<p>It is, basically, the TLDR is that it is the tool that allows you to quickly scaffold blocks. So it will create a plugin, and it will create for you a block, a scaffolded, simple block that you can then do whatever you want with. So it&#8217;s very, very powerful.</p>



<p>It can accept custom templates. You can write your own templates and publish them. The NPM, you can use local templates. So if you have a very specific way that you like to build your blocks, or work for an agency, and your agency&#8217;s got a very specific way, you can create a template and have the Create Block package just refer to that template, and it&#8217;ll build blocks out for you however you like. It&#8217;s super powerful.</p>



<p>So, the two pull requests that are in there around a prompting, there are some edge cases when it comes to, I think it&#8217;s Linux, and maybe a bit of Windows, that for where we were getting some false positives. When you run Create Block, what it does behind the scenes is it checks to make sure you have the right version of, know the right version of all these things installed.</p>



<p>And sometimes, depending on the platform, it would say, &#8220;That&#8217;s not right. You&#8217;re missing,&#8221; and whatever, and it would just stop, so you couldn&#8217;t use it. So, what this is allowing you to do is it&#8217;ll say, &#8220;Hey, I don&#8217;t think you&#8217;ve got the right things. Do you want to still go?&#8221; And if you know that you do indeed have everything you need, you can continue the process. It makes it a lot easier, because it&#8217;s a huge blocker for someone that&#8217;s not maybe working on the most sort of standard system set-up, that they can&#8217;t use this tool, even though they know they&#8217;ve got it set up the way they want it, and that it&#8217;s set up correctly and it will work, that the tool fails.</p>



<p>So, that&#8217;s what this is all about. Just allowing us&#8230; Well, it just drives adoption. It just allows more people to use the tool. The last one, the fixing the regression from size, there was a internal effort to move away from Lodash, I believe.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Yeah. _.size is a Lodash function. So this, it was moved away from using Lodash, but then they found that there was a regression, so they fixed it, and that&#8217;s all that was. But-</p>



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



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, it is, actually…</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: &#8230; dependencies.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: &#8230; a huge effort to move away from Lodash for performance reasons. And if you count in the change lock all the PRs together that are listed, you will not get to 167. You will only get to 120 or 30 because there were about 40 different PRs that touched quite a few files to move away from Lodash.</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: Yeah. Which I think makes sense. I mean, if we don&#8217;t need it. I don&#8217;t know if Lodash&#8230; I don&#8217;t know which&#8230; There&#8217;s a Lodash that sort of allows tree-shaking and one that does not, and I don&#8217;t know which one we&#8217;re using. And so, leads to large bundle sizes, and all sorts of bad times in the JavaScript world.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. And I wanted to&#8230; Create Block is also my favorite tool, and I just wanted…</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: Yeah, me too.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: &#8230; to add many people tried it out before, and they were only kind of fixated on single blocks. But now you can have&#8230; I don&#8217;t know if that&#8217;s already implemented. I know you were working on it to allow for multi blocks?</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: Multi blocks? Yeah.</p>



<p>That is actually built into the Scripts package, so you don&#8217;t need to have a special template. And so, originally, you needed to have a special template and a special Webpack file that would allow you to build a multiple blocks using a single-build process.</p>



<p>So, myself and Greg, who&#8217;s an alumni of Gutenberg changelog. We worked really hard on working on scripts and Create Block to allow scripts by default to handle multiple blocks. It wasn&#8217;t just us. There was a lot of people, and Greg did all the heavy lifting. I&#8217;m just taking credit for it.</p>



<p>So now, if you, if you structure your setup in a certain way, basically putting a block that JSON file inside of a directory inside of your source files, your source directory, the Scripts Package will see it and it will create a block for each one of those that it finds. So we don&#8217;t need anything custom to do that.</p>



<p>What we are doing with Create Block, and this is hopefully going to get in soon, is we are trying to make it so you can just scaffold the block, so when you run Create Block now it will scaffold an entire plugin, and then put a block inside that plugin.</p>



<p>What we want to be able to do is have it scaffold the plugin, and then if you run it a second time with a flag, it&#8217;ll only just add another plugin to your existing one. And that&#8217;s-</p>



<p>That&#8217;s something that&#8217;s going to add a lot of power to it.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: All right.</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: And we&#8217;re sort of working on that now. And we&#8217;re also working on the ability to of, within this, we could do a whole nother podcast on this, so I&#8217;ll stop.&nbsp;</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Maybe we should.</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: &#8230; a lot of cool&#8230; Yeah, there&#8217;s a lot of really cool things coming for both scripts and Create Block.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: And I also know there is a flag that you can set when you create it that it&#8217;s going to be a dynamic block.&nbsp;</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: Yeah, sure. That&#8217;s not merged yet, but that is-</p>



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



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: &#8230; the other one. Because we are working on making that as simple as possible, there has been talk of, instead of it being dynamic block, it would be like dash dash variation. And then you can tell it&#8217;s static or dynamic, or if there&#8217;s another type that gets introduced along the way. We can do that as well. So, we&#8217;re still working on that. It&#8217;s definitely something that I don&#8217;t think anyone&#8217;s could going to say no to. It&#8217;s just a matter of making sure that we get it right before it launches, because it&#8217;s really hard to change something after it&#8217;s out in the world. So, yeah. So, there&#8217;s a few things that Greg and I have been working on, that I think is going to hopefully make Create Block the defacto package for building blocks.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: That&#8217;s awesome, yeah. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: That&#8217;s my pitch. That&#8217;s my elevator pitch.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Very good. And this was a great segue into our What&#8217;s an Active Development were discussed. And one is that I mentioned about documentation be restructuring. And we mentioned Greg. So Greg has gone in and has looked at the hooks references for the Block Editor and found that the documentation is using the term hook filters differently than the rest of the WordPress documentation. Because there are hooks with actions and filters, not just filters. So, he wanted to restructure the reference for that. And he has. The only thing, he hasn&#8217;t changed the name on the titles yet. He has changed the page title, but not the slugs because we discovered we needed a redirect thing. So this was merged. It&#8217;s in the handbook now, but the slug does not match the title of the page, which sometimes a little unfortunate. But that&#8217;s definitely updated. It will come, and it&#8217;s already in the handbook because the handbook updates are not tied to the release. Yeah, they are listed in the release notes just to have them, give them a place, but they are, pretty much as soon as the PR is merged into Gutenberg, within 15 minutes, the documentation page is updated. So, that&#8217;s actually a great process here.</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: It&#8217;s great. But it can also be a little bit&#8230; And this is probably something that we can talk about. But because it&#8217;s built from Trunk. Trunk is the bleeding edge of everything that&#8217;s in Gutenberg. And since, sometimes, things end up in documentation that aren&#8217;t released in Core and aren&#8217;t released in any plugin versions. And there&#8217;s no sort of simple way right now of indicating that.</p>



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



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: &#8230; But it is awesome that when documentation gets up&#8230; Like I merged my poll request just before we started, and it&#8217;s already live.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: That&#8217;s awesome.</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: The doc changes are already there, and that&#8217;s great. But, yeah. So that&#8217;s something to keep in mind.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. Keep in mind that it&#8217;s not a version control. It&#8217;s just a bleeding edge and it also doesn&#8217;t disseminate between what&#8217;s in WordPress and what&#8217;s just available in plugin and future WordPress. So, yeah. It&#8217;s sometimes we need to kind of read it a little bit carefully, especially when you are an early adopter of things and love that life on the bleeding edge. Yeah, sometimes it gets you there bloody, yeah. Oh, leading edge. Not that, yeah.</p>



<p>Another thing that&#8217;s in the works is, and a lot of people definitely have been waiting for it. It&#8217;s the fluid typography. So, the first iteration is already merged, and will come to 13.8. It&#8217;s still experimental, but for theme developers only in theme JSON to have the settings for the fluid typography. So, they set minimum and maximum sizes for the font, and then it automatically expands and&#8230; Or is it expands and&#8230;</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: Contracts.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: What&#8217;s the other one, word?</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: Contracts.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Contracts. Yeah, not a D. It was of long wrong. Yeah.</p>



<p>And if all is good, you can test it with Gutenberg Nightly already. Or you wait for the Gutenberg 13.8 coming out on August 3rd.</p>



<p>Dave Smith, who was, I guess, here on the Episode 68, he is experimenting with a feature to actually attach custom labeling to blocks in the list view. And that has come up quite repeatedly in the call for on the FSE program, and also in the user testing that when you have more group blocks in your page, that it&#8217;s hard to kind of find the one that you actually want to work on. And because they&#8217;re all called group blocks, and you have six or seven of them, or three of them, you hit them no say, &#8220;No, that&#8217;s not it. That&#8217;s not it,&#8221; yeah. But if you can give them a name, then you can identify them.</p>



<p>The same is with headings or even with paragraphs, yeah. You can kind of, each of them. It&#8217;s not merged yet. It&#8217;s a PR that you can&#8230; And I&#8217;ll link it in the show notes that you can maybe even test out there. And it just gives you&#8230; You click into the block row where the block is mentioned, and then it opens up an editing field that you can write in, yeah.&nbsp;</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: I think this feature&#8230; I think it&#8217;s very cool. First of all, it&#8217;s something that&#8217;s needed to be able to&#8230; If you&#8217;re in the list view and you&#8217;ve got 20 blocks, and it&#8217;s hard to know what&#8217;s what. But a side effect of this, which is something that actually just came up in my livestream today, when we were trying&#8230; I think I said this earlier&#8230; But we were trying to have one block refer to another block, and get its attributes, and then do something with those attributes in the first block. And the issue that we were running into was, there&#8217;s no unique identifier for blocks that are persistent. So, they&#8217;re in the bowels of the code. There is a Client ID that you can get access to, but that Client ID is refreshed every page load.</p>



<p>So having something like this, a really cool side effect is that now we&#8217;ve got a unique identifier for a block. So you can give the block a name, and then that&#8230; Because in the implementation, I believe they&#8217;re saving it as a block attribute, so it gets saved with the block. So now, other blocks can get that block by getting the list of blocks and filtering by that attribute for the thing that they want.</p>



<p>So I think that that&#8230; I mean, this is a perfect case of we built for one thing, but now there&#8217;s a whole nother use case that people can really use it for. And I&#8217;m super excited about that.</p>



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



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: I will-</p>



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



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: &#8230; I will help Dave with it.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: &#8230; And it probably would be helpful to keep that in mind when the first iteration comes out. Yeah, how that can be used in plugins or in&#8230; Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: Yeah. Yeah, I&#8217;ve already-</p>



<p>Birgit Pauli-Haack: Or because it&#8217;s…</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: &#8230; left a comment on the PRs. Yeah, it&#8217;s so powerful.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: But it&#8217;s-</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: The user…</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, but it&#8217;s user controlled, so the plugin doesn&#8217;t know what the user going to do. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: That&#8217;s true. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. So, it&#8217;s-</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: I mean, in the use case that I&#8217;m talking about, it&#8217;s sort of you would need to have that user level to connect those two things anyways. But it solves the development problem of, &#8220;How do I make a connection between two blocks when I have no unique identifier anywhere to save as a reference?&#8221; There&#8217;s no Block ID that&#8217;s persistent. It&#8217;s always new every page load. But this could potentially solve a problem like that.</p>



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



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: &#8230; cases around the same name. What do you do with the same name? But that sort of stuff.</p>



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



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: And it&#8217;s very cool, though.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: So, it&#8217;s not because it&#8217;s experimental and it&#8217;s relatively new. We don&#8217;t know when it&#8217;s going to be merged or when it&#8217;s coming through the Gutenberg Nightly, but that&#8217;s kind of that a little PR bleeding edge or leading edge, sorry. I need to kind of get the bleeding out of it.</p>



<p>And that is pretty much the end of our Changelog today. So, Mary and Ryan, is there anything that you want the community to know or remind them of, before we end the show so they can kind of look out for it, or see you, or&#8230;</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: Well, I&#8217;m going to shamelessly self-promote. You can watch me every Thursday at 10:30 Eastern at on Twitch. My handle&#8217;s Ryan Welcher Codes. I&#8217;ve also got the YouTube channel with the same name, Ryan Welcher Codes. So, anything on my stream, that&#8217;s anything that&#8217;s decent, I usually put on YouTube. And, yeah.</p>



<p>But yeah, we do all kinds of coding stuff, usually block-related. So, that&#8217;s my shameless.</p>



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



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: &#8230; self-promotion.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, super. And we&#8217;ll put, of course, the links in the show notes.</p>



<p>Mary?</p>



<p><em>Mary Job</em>: Well, on my end, I&#8217;m good. I&#8217;m good. And I like what Ryan did. You know what they say. They say, &#8220;If you don&#8217;t promote yourself, nobody&#8217;s going to do it for you.&#8221;</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: Awesome.</p>



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



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: Thank you.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. Yeah. So&#8230; And before we end the show, I just wanted to remind you, dear listener, that if you like the change of podcast and of&#8230; Write us a review, either on Stitcher or on Apple or on Google. It helps us promote it and kind of get more people interested in it, and they know that it&#8217;s around.</p>



<p>And then, as always, the show notes will be published on gutenbergtimes.com/podcast.</p>



<p>This is episode 70. And if you have questions, suggestions or news you want us to talk about, send them to <a href="mailto:changelog@gutenbergtimes.com">changelog@gutenbergtimes.com</a>. That&#8217;s the email address at <a href="mailto:changelog@gutenbergtimes.com">changelog@gutenbergtimes.com</a>. Or you can always ping me on Twitter, BPH, or Gutenberg Times. All the DMs are open, so I&#8217;ll also look at them.</p>



<p>Well, a huge thank you to Ryan to join us today for this hour, and bring so much new interesting stuff there.</p>



<p>Thank you so much, Mary. It was great to see you again, and talk to you.</p>



<p>And I&#8217;ll see you next time in two weeks.</p>



<p><em>Mary Job</em>: Thank you, sir.</p>



<p><em>Ryan Welcher</em>: Thank you for having me. It&#8217;s always fun.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Sun, 24 Jul 2022 12:38:54 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:19:"Gutenberg Changelog";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:33;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:124:"Gutenberg Times: New kind of default theme, pattern preview in the theme directory  and so much more – Weekend Edition 224";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:35:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/?p=21640";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:129:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/new-kind-of-default-theme-pattern-preview-in-the-theme-directory-and-so-much-more-weekend-edition-224/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:23141:"<p>Howdy, </p>



<p>This week, there was a lot going on. It started with a great conversation on the DoTheWoo podcast, and ended on a high note again, with the the Live Q &amp; A on how Pew Research Center use blocks for everything on their sites. The recording is on the YouTube channel, post will transcript will follow. </p>



<p>Those shows were the bookends to my work as release lead for the latest Gutenberg plugin 13.7 version. I learned lot and thanks to the help by seasoned contributors, I pushed the release over the finish line. I learned a ton about all the moving parts that need to come together and also lot about what I don&#8217;t know. </p>



<p>There was much so much more going on in the WordPress space, and I am so happy to share some of it below. </p>



<p>Stay cool this summer! ? ?</p>



<p>Yours, ?<br /><em>Birgit</em></p>



<p>PS: <a href="https://dothewoo.io/future-woocommerce-wordpress-blocks/"><strong>DoTheWoo Vision Podcast: The Future of Blocks</strong></a> is now available in your favorite podcast app. </p>





<p> </p>




<div class="wp-container-9 wp-block-group has-light-background-background-color has-background"><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container">
<p><strong>Table of Contents</strong></p>



<div class="wp-block-sortabrilliant-guidepost"><ul><li><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#0-word-press-release-information">Developing and extending the block editor</a><ul><li><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#1-g">Gutenberg 13.7 </a></li><li><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#2-word-press-6-0-1-and-6-1-scheduled">Building Block Themes and Patterns</a></li></ul></li><li><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#3-plugins-and-other">Plugins and other NoCode tools for site owners and builders</a></li><li><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#3-building-themes-for-fse-and-word-press">WordCamp Europe Talks on WordPress TV (Part 3) </a></li><li><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#5-s">Upcoming WordPress Events</a><ul><li><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#6-word-camps-around-the-world">WordCamps around the World</a></li><li><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#6-social-learning-spaces">Learn WordPress Online Workshop</a></li><li><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#9-meetups">Virtual WordPress Meetups</a></li></ul></li></ul></div>
</div></div>




<h2 id="0-word-press-release-information">Developing and extending the block editor</h2>



<p>Video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvQYPa5vxVk"><strong>Gutenberg Times Live Q &amp; A: Block First Approach at the Pew Research Center</strong></a>. Anne McCarthy and I discussed with Seth Rubenstein, Lead Developer, and Michael Piccorossi, Director of Digital Strategy, how they use a mixture of Core and Custom Blocks to streamline their publishing process, and to create powerful charts and quizzes.for the Pew Research Center.</p>



<p>Matt Ratford <a href="https://twitter.com/mattradford/status/1550580599286636547">tweeted:</a> &#8220;I highly recommend watching this live-stream with a presentation on <a href="https://twitter.com/pewresearch">@pewresearch</a>&#8216;s superb Block Editor implementation. Lots there that I previously only thought I would do with <a href="https://twitter.com/wp_acf">@wp_acf</a> in making WP work for their editors.&#8221;</p>



<h3 id="1-g">Gutenberg 13.7 </h3>



<p>On Wednesday, the plugin version 13.7 was released and is now available as 13.7.2 with a fast turn around fixing two bugs. Gutenberg 13.7 brings an updated modal design, the ability to apply&nbsp;block&nbsp;locking to inner blocks with a click of a button, a myriad of new template types, and plenty of improvements to existing features based on feedback from the community.&nbsp;Here are the highlights from the release post: <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/07/20/whats-new-in-gutenberg-13-7-20-july/"><strong>What’s new in Gutenberg 13.7? (20 July)</strong></a></p>



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/07/20/whats-new-in-gutenberg-13-7-20-july/#lock">Lock inside container block with one click</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/07/20/whats-new-in-gutenberg-13-7-20-july/#modal">Updated and unified modal design</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/07/20/whats-new-in-gutenberg-13-7-20-july/#templates">Create templates now for specific categories, pages and more</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/07/20/whats-new-in-gutenberg-13-7-20-july/#notable">Other notable highlights</a></li></ul>



<img />



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



<p>Thursday, we recorded <a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-70-gutenberg-13-7-woo-commerce-marketplace/"><strong>Gutenberg Changelog #70</strong>.</a> We had great fun talking about the block editor, Gutenberg 13.7 release and what&#8217;s in the works. Huge Thank you to our special guest Ryan Welcher and  my co-host Mary Job. </p>



<a href="bhttps://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-70-gutenberg-13-7-woo-commerce-marketplace/"><img /></a>



<div class="wp-container-10 wp-block-group has-light-background-background-color has-background"><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container">
<p><strong>?️ </strong> New episode: <a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-70-gutenberg-13-7-woo-commerce-marketplace/">Gutenberg Changelog #70 – Gutenberg 13.7, Template Creation Enhancements and First Full-Site Editing Themes in Woo Commerce Marketplace</a> with Birgit Pauli-Haack and Mary Job, and special guest: <strong>Ryan Welcher</strong></p>
</div></div>



<p><strong>Sarah Gooding</strong> went into further details on some new features in her article <a href="https://wptavern.com/gutenberg-13-7-expands-custom-template-capabilities-adds-estimated-reading-time-to-info-panel"><strong>Gutenberg 13.7 Expands Custom Template Capabilities, Adds Estimated Reading Time to Info Panel</strong></a></p>



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



<p><strong><a href="https://twitter.com/pootlepress">Jamie Marsland</a></strong> is back with <strong><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIY9nkqF2mI">WordPress Block News</a>.</strong> This week he demos how to use the new templates for single post type pages and single category pages that are in Gutenberg 13.7. Marsland also highlight three new block themes from the directory.</p>



<p>For a considerably deeper dive into the matters of creating templates for FSE, <strong>Justin Tadlock</strong> published <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/07/21/core-editor-improvement-deeper-customization-with-more-template-options/"><strong>Deeper customization with more template options</strong></a>. He outlines various use cases, how you can spruce up your website, online magazine or blog. The how-to section describes the steps to successfully create custom page templates</p>




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




<h3 id="2-word-press-6-0-1-and-6-1-scheduled">Building Block Themes and Patterns</h3>



<p>Last week we introduced the first Bock Theme in the <em>WooCommerce marketplace</em>. The second Block Theme, called <a href="https://woocommerce.com/products/basti/">Basti by Ana Segota of Anariel Design</a> landed this week. It shows off beautiful designs, shows great attention to detail by the designer, provides some wonderful patterns and also some great block styles for your buttons, columns other blocks. From a selection of elaborate style variations, you change the character of your site without changing your theme. On installation, you’ll find a set of four designs depending on the nature or industry of your business. </p>



<p>In his video, Jamie Marsland gives you a detailed tour of the theme and shine a light on all the little details that make this theme so great. Marsland called it <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFqdHZco1Cg"><strong>The most beautiful WordPress Gutenberg Block Theme</strong></a>.</p>



<p><strong><a href="https://twitter.com/bgardner/status/1550556360064081920">Brian Gardner</a></strong> tweeted: &#8220;Without question, Basti by <a href="https://twitter.com/Ana_Segota">@Ana_Segota</a> + <a href="https://twitter.com/AnarielDesign">@AnarielDesign</a> is one of the most beautiful FSE <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WordPress?src=hashtag_click">#WordPress</a> themes. (Easily better than anything I have designed.)&#8221; </p>



<p><strong>Ana Segota</strong> published the <a href="https://www.anarieldesign.com/demos/?theme=Basti">demo site </a>for your perusal. Give it whirl. </p>



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



<p><strong>Steve Dufresne</strong> announced the new beta feature: <strong><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/meta/2022/07/21/pattern-previews-for-themes-in-the-directory-beta/">Pattern Previews for Themes&nbsp;in the Directory</a>.</strong> Users can now browse the pattern via the thumbnails on the single Theme page. The first feedback reveals that only patterns using core blocks will be displayed. Patterns that include references to 3rd party blocks won&#8217;t be visible in the Theme Directory in this first version. It&#8217;s also unlikely that they ever will. It would require for the meta time to install  all the possible 3rd party block plugins on the Theme Directory site. That is very unlikely. </p>



<a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/archeo/"><img /></a><a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/archeo/">Pattern display for the Theme: Archeo</a>



<p>In her post on the Make Design blog: <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/design/2022/07/19/proposal-a-new-kind-of-default-theme/">Proposal: A new kind of default theme</a>, <strong>Channing Ritter</strong> suggests a more collaborative approach to building the next WordPress default theme Twenty-Twenty-Three. The design and theme team will work together on a base theme,  and once it&#8217;s available for further development, community designers will be able to submit Style variations. The teams will then select some to be included into the default theme. The process is not quite refined. </p>



<p><a href="https://twitter.com/raemoreywrites"><strong>Rae Morey</strong></a> of <em>The Repository</em> wrote in <a href="https://www.therepository.email/?mailpoet_router&endpoint=view_in_browser&action=view&data=WzE1NCwiOTBjZDMxZDFmYWU3Iiw1NTYsIjFqb2g0ZGtiNnZmbzh3NG9vb3dnNG9zODhnazA0czR3IiwzNTYsMF0">Issue 132</a>:  &#8220;Responses to Ritter&#8217;s proposal have been overwhelmingly positive with designers and developers—including&nbsp;Brian Gardner&nbsp;(designer and Principal Developer Advocate at&nbsp;WP Engine),&nbsp;Rich Tabor&nbsp;(Product Manager at&nbsp;Extendify), and&nbsp;Anariel Design—indicating their eagerness to participate.&#8221; </p>



<p>In his article, <strong><a href="https://speckyboy.com/create-block-theme-within-wordpress/">You Can Now Create Your Own Block Theme Within WordPress</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/karks88">Eric Karkovack</a></strong> walks you through the features of the <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/create-block-theme/">WordPress Create a Block Theme plugin</a>, developed by the WordPress themes team. &#8220;The ability to create a block theme from within WordPress and then use it anywhere could be a&nbsp;<a href="https://speckyboy.com/how-wordpress-full-site-editing-could-impact-the-design-process/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">game-changer</a>&nbsp;for your workflow. It potentially cuts out a lot of time spent dealing with code and makes for a complete visual design experience.&#8221; Karkovack wrote. </p>



<p><strong>Brian Gardner</strong>&#8216;s new block theme <a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/bright-mode/"><strong>Bright Mode</strong></a> is now available in the Theme Directory. It is &#8220;for those who love modern design and vibrant colors.&#8221; reads the theme description.  </p>



<p><strong>Sarah Gooding</strong> posted a review on WPTavern: <a href="https://wptavern.com/bright-mode-a-new-block-theme-with-vibrant-colors-patterns-and-custom-block-styles"><strong>Bright Mode: A New Block Theme with Vibrant Colors, Patterns, and Custom Block Styles</strong></a>. &#8220;If you look closely, you can see subtle hints of Gardner’s trademark style. It’s forthright and minimalist with meticulous attention to typography and spacing. The colors are bright but harmonious and balanced, so it doesn’t preclude Bright Mode from use in professional contexts.&#8221; Gooding wrote. </p>



<h2 id="3-plugins-and-other">Plugins and other NoCode tools for site owners and builders</h2>



<p><strong>Nick Diego</strong> also gave a talk at West Orlando WordPress Meetup: Here is the recording. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQEeOb0qcEo"><strong>Introduction to WordPress Full Site Editing</strong></a>. &#8220;In this presentation, Nick provided a thorough overview of FSE and discussed how you can leverage these changes to build better websites. FSE is the future of modern theming in WordPress Core, and we could not be more excited!&#8221; </p>



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



<p>The team of <strong>GenerateBlocks </strong>changed the name of ‘Template Library’ to <a href="https://generateblocks.com/library/"><strong>‘Patterns Library&#8217;</strong></a> and provide 218 patterns (69 free and 149 paid) to their users </p>



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



<p>The team of <strong><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/stackable-ultimate-gutenberg-blocks/">Stackable</a></strong> added a <a href="https://wpstackable.com/blog/introducing-map-block/">new Map Block</a> for displaying the map with the location marker. It comes with customization options for height and size and zoom level as well as choice to display additional buttons for Street View, full-size view or to offer different map types. </p>



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



<p><a href="https://twitter.com/Free_LanceTools"><strong>Ivica Delic</strong></a> just released the <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/blocks-detector-finder/"><strong>Blocks Detector Finder</strong></a> plugin, and it joins the league of other block finder tools. It analyses your website to find all the Gutenberg Blocks that are in use. It also detects the blocks that don&#8217;t work any more because plugins were removed. </p>



<p><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/find-my-blocks/"><strong>Find my Blocks</strong></a> by <strong>Eddy Sims</strong> offers similar insights in the usage of blocks around your site. </p>



<h2 id="3-building-themes-for-fse-and-word-press">WordCamp Europe Talks on WordPress TV (Part 3) </h2>



<p>This is the last part of the 3-part series of listing WordPress Europe talks that were uploaded to WordPressTV. More recordings are listed in  <a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/classic-widgets-in-fse-3d-cut-out-image-open-source-theme-designs-and-more-weekend-edition-221/#wceutv">Part 1</a> and <a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/99-block-themes-block-templates-and-gutenberg-nightly-at-120k-downloads-weekend-edition-223/#4-word-camp-europe-talks-and-workshops">Part 2</a></p>



<p><a href="https://wordpress.tv/2022/07/21/ryan-welcher-creating-a-pre-publish-checklist-for-gutenberg/"><strong>Ryan Welcher: Creating a pre-publish checklist for Gutenberg</strong></a> (Workshop)<br />In this workshop, geared towards developers, participants created a custom plugin that will define a configurable pre-publish checklist that must be met before content can be published.</p>



<p><a href="https://wordpress.tv/2022/07/21/tammie-lister-growing-the-wordpress-design-system/"><strong>Tammie Lister: Growing the WordPress design&nbsp;system</strong></a><br />In this talk, Lister showed why one needs the system and how important it is for the project, why if one doesn’t build on those foundations, it&#8217;ll make an unstable base. Lister dreams beyond today at what could be, where could we go, and what can we learn from the existing design systems? She covered processes and tools to look at possible solutions to our problems today.</p>



<p><a href="https://wordpress.tv/2022/07/22/paul-halfpenny-imran-sayed-evan-mullins-ryan-welcher-juanma-garrido-lightning-talks/">Paul Halfpenny, Imran Sayed, Evan Mullins, Ryan Welcher, JuanMa Garrido: <strong>Lightning talks</strong></a></p>



<ul><li>Creating interactive blocks: old, new, and good ways, JuanMa Garrido</li><li>Extending Gutenberg with SlotFill, Ryan Welcher</li><li>Blockity McBlock Blocks, Oh My! w/ Evan Mullins</li><li>Block Themes – The Future of FSE, Imran Sayed</li><li>Delivering Personalised Experiences using WordPress, Paul Halfpenny</li></ul>



<p><a href="https://wordpress.tv/2022/07/17/matt-mullenweg-josepha-haden-in-conversation/"><strong>Matt Mullenweg, Josepha Haden: In Conversation</strong></a> &#8211; a Town hall style Q &amp; A with Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and Josepha Haden Chomphosy, executive directory of the WordPress open-source project. </p>



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




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



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




<h2 id="5-s">Upcoming WordPress Events</h2>



<p>July 27 , 2022 &#8211; 3 pm EDT / 19:00 pm UTC <br />Webinar: <strong><a href="https://events.godaddy.com/events/details/godaddy-events-godaddy-pro-online-presents-call-for-testing-wordpress-full-site-editing-category-customization/?utm_source=therepositorynewsletter_2022_sponsorship&utm_medium=events&utm_campaign=en-us_events_prg_awa_partners_part_open_001">Call for Testing WordPress Full Site Editing: Category Customization</a></strong> with Courtney Robertson, presented by GoDaddy Pro</p>



<p><strong>November 18, 2022</strong><br /><a href="https://www.wordfest.live/2022/november/"><strong>WordFest Live 2022</strong></a> <br />Call for speakers ends August 15, 2022</p>



<h3 id="6-word-camps-around-the-world">WordCamps around the World</h3>



<p>September 2 + 3, 2022<br /><strong><a href="https://jinja.wordcamp.org/2022/">WordCamp Jinja 2022</a></strong>, about 2 hrs West of Kampala, Uganda. Calls for sponsors, speakers, and volunteers are open now.</p>



<p>September 3 + 4, 2022<br /><a href="https://kathmandu.wordcamp.org/2022/"><strong>WordCamp Kathmandu</strong></a>, Nepal</p>



<p>September 9 – 11, 2022<br /><strong><a href="https://us.wordcamp.org/2022/">WordCamp US</a></strong>&nbsp;in San Diego</p>



<p>September 15 + 16, 2022<br /><a href="https://netherlands.wordcamp.org/2022/"><strong>WordCamp Netherlands</strong></a>&nbsp;at the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.burgerszoo.com/">Royal Burger’s Zoo</a>&nbsp;in Arnhem</p>



<p>September 24 + 25, 2022<br /><a href="https://pontevedra.wordcamp.org/2022"><strong>WordCamp Pontevedra</strong></a></p>



<p>February 17 – 19, 2023<br /><strong><a href="https://asia.wordcamp.org/2023/">WordCamp Asia</a></strong>, Bangkok, Thailand<br /><a href="https://asia.wordcamp.org/2023/call-for-speakers/">Call for speaker was just published</a>. Deadline: September 15th, 2022 (UTC +7)<br />Contributor Day is planned for February 17, 2023 (Day 1)</p>



<h3 id="6-social-learning-spaces">Learn WordPress Online Workshop</h3>



<p>July 26, 2022 – 12 pm EDT / 16:00 UTC<br /><strong><a href="https://www.meetup.com/learn-wordpress-online-workshops/events/287148930/">The ABCs of Blogging: Advanced Blogging (Part Two)</a></strong>&nbsp;with Bud Kraus</p>



<p>July 26, 2022 5pm EDT / 21:00 UTC<br /><strong><a href="https://www.meetup.com/learn-wordpress-online-workshops/events/287048356/">Styling your site with global styles</a></strong>&nbsp;with Wes Theron and Alycia</p>



<p>July 28th, 2022 &#8211; 3 pm EDT / 19:00 UTC <br /><a href="https://www.meetup.com/learn-wordpress-online-workshops/events/287169611/"><strong>Builder Basics: Let’s Build a Custom Theme (No Coding Required) – Part 2</strong></a> with Nick Diego</p>



<p>July 28, 2022 5 pm EDT / 21:00 UTC <br /><a href="https://www.meetup.com/learn-wordpress-online-workshops/events/287308585/"><strong>Theme Development Workflows for Different Types of Developers</strong></a> with Daisy Olsen</p>



<h3 id="9-meetups">Virtual WordPress Meetups</h3>



<p><strong>July 26 at 6:00 PM EDT / 22:00 UTC</strong><br /><a href="https://www.meetup.com/sf-wordpress-users/events/287163862/"><strong>“Mega Meetup” – Block Intro &amp; Project Frameworks</strong></a>&nbsp;with Vito Peleg showing off Atarim.io and with Anne Katzeff providing a Beginner’s Guide to Gutenberg Blocks.</p>



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




<p><em>Featured Image: New York &#8211; View from The Highline 2015 by Birgit Pauli-Haack</em></p>



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



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



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



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-css-opacity is-style-wide" />";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Sat, 23 Jul 2022 15:09:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:18:"Birgit Pauli-Haack";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:34;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:42:"Post Status: Putting it together, together";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:32:"https://poststatus.com/?p=102519";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:52:"https://poststatus.com/putting-it-together-together/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4859:"<div class="wp-container-33 wp-block-group"><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container">
<p class="has-small-font-size">By <a href="https://poststatus.com/author/corymiller/">Cory Miller</a> and <a href="https://poststatus.com/author/dan-knauss/">Dan Knauss</a> • July 22, 2022 <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f5d3.png" alt="?" class="wp-smiley" /></p>
</div></div>



<div class="wp-container-34 wp-block-group has-theme-palette-8-background-color has-background"><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container"><div class="has-background has-theme-palette-8-background-color wp-block-post-excerpt"><p class="wp-block-post-excerpt__excerpt">Today Cory took the lead on the Post Status newsletter release and joined Dan in co-authoring the introduction to it, which we usually share here. Some thoughts on newsletter integration, Newsletter Glue, Newspack, and the challenges facing plugin owners at WordPress.org in trying to determine the true size of their potential customer base. </p></div>


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



<p class="yoast-reading-time__wrapper"><span class="yoast-reading-time__icon"></span><span class="yoast-reading-time__spacer"></span><span class="yoast-reading-time__descriptive-text">Estimated reading time:  </span><span class="yoast-reading-time__reading-time">1</span><span class="yoast-reading-time__time-unit"> minute</span></p>
</div></div>



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



<p class="has-drop-cap">The workflow from WordPress content to newsletter campaigns (<a href="https://mailchi.mp/poststatus/507?e=ace7e1119f">like this week's</a>) isn’t a great experience without good integration. (See Dan’s post, <strong>“</strong><a href="https://poststatus.us6.list-manage.com/track/click?u=ff3456b27ebe0be0155087894&id=097d725a8b&e=ace7e1119f" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><strong>It’s Hard to COPE Without a WordPress Lite</strong></a><strong>.”</strong>) Create Once, Publish Everywhere is more aspirational than reality.</p>



<p>At Post Status, we’re continually working on our content and email workflow as we adapt and evolve. For anyone creating email newsletters,<strong> it’s often a huge time-consuming tedious pain.</strong> (Ask Dan — and joining in this week, Cory — about newsletter assembly.)</p>



<p>Solutions like Post Status member and <a href="https://poststatus.us6.list-manage.com/track/click?u=ff3456b27ebe0be0155087894&id=22f36f6a78&e=ace7e1119f" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">contributing writer</a> <strong>Lesley Sim</strong>’s <a href="https://poststatus.us6.list-manage.com/track/click?u=ff3456b27ebe0be0155087894&id=4bfb1a8eb4&e=ace7e1119f" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><strong>Newsletter Glue</strong></a> are really compelling. Newsletter Glue keeps your newsletter production fully inside WordPress. That’s awesome, especially for those of us with a small production team. <strong>WordPress VIP</strong> just announced a cool-looking newsletter integration for <a href="https://poststatus.us6.list-manage.com/track/click?u=ff3456b27ebe0be0155087894&id=d1f458d7d1&e=ace7e1119f" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">SalesForce Marketing Cloud</a> too.</p>



<p>We’ve been testing out some of the options for a while at Post Status, including <strong>Automattic</strong>’s <a href="https://poststatus.us6.list-manage.com/track/click?u=ff3456b27ebe0be0155087894&id=04336bf5d1&e=ace7e1119f" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><strong>Newspack Newsletters</strong></a>, which is <a href="https://poststatus.us6.list-manage.com/track/click?u=ff3456b27ebe0be0155087894&id=bb416f50a2&e=ace7e1119f" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">in the .org repo</a> waiting for their first review.</p>



<p>Newspack and all its pieces are readily available for download now. You can learn more about Newspack’s contribution to open source and independent journalism in <strong>Blake Bertucelli</strong>’s post this week, <a href="https://poststatus.us6.list-manage.com/track/click?u=ff3456b27ebe0be0155087894&id=9ff1eee6f1&e=ace7e1119f" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><strong>The Unsung Hero of Indie Journalism</strong></a><strong>.</strong></p>



<p>Speaking of the .org repo, don’t miss <strong>Barış Ünver</strong>’s story of <a href="https://poststatus.us6.list-manage.com/track/click?u=ff3456b27ebe0be0155087894&id=0a7a9ebcb4&e=ace7e1119f" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><strong>The Decline of Speed Booster Pack</strong></a> where he reflects on his past struggles in the commercial plugin marketplace. If you haven’t done it yourself, you may not know how plugin authors have to work in the dark with vague and potentially bad data about the size of their market and potential customer base.</p>



<p><strong>— Cory and Dan</strong></p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 22 Jul 2022 21:55:26 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:10:"Dan Knauss";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:35;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:79:"WPTavern: WordPress Accessibility Day 2022 Opens Call for Speakers and Sponsors";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=136391";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:90:"https://wptavern.com/wordpress-accessibility-day-2022-opens-call-for-speakers-and-sponsors";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:2461:"<img />



<p><a href="https://wpaccessibility.day/">WordPress Accessibility Day</a>, a free, 24-hour virtual event, is set for November 2-3, 2022. The event was first founded in 2020 and will continue this year led by Joe Dolson and Amber Hinds. It was previously run by the WordPress core Accessibility Team through the WordPress Foundation but organizers are running it independently this year for ease of planning.</p>



<p>Sessions will be focused on promoting and learning website accessibility best practices for WordPress websites.</p>



<p>&#8220;We aim to enhance the collective knowledge of accessibility for all WordPressers<strong> </strong>and provide advice and tools that will allow more and more accessible WordPress websites to be created (or remediated),&#8221; organizer Isla Waite said.</p>



<p>The call for speakers is open and it offers a great opportunity for sharing your accessibility knowledge with a global community of WordPress enthusiasts. Organizers are aiming for a single track of 26-28 presentations.</p>



<p>Talks will be 40 minutes with 10-minute Q&amp;A at the end. A few hours will be dedicated to Lightning Talks, which are under 15 minutes long. Organizers are also open to people submitting panels with multiple speakers for a 50-minute session.</p>



<p>The event plans to compensate speakers with &#8220;a modest honorarium,&#8221; with the final amount dependent on fundraising. Speaker applications will remain open until August 8th, 2022, and applicants will be notified by September 15, 2022.</p>



<p>Organizers have also opened the <a href="https://wpaccessibility.day/call-for-sponsors/">call for sponsors</a> so they have the opportunity to reach as many people as possible and pay speakers for their time.</p>



<p>&#8220;This year, in addition to providing live captioning, we’re hoping to also have American Sign Language Interpretation during presentations, and budget for post-event transcription to ensure all videos on the WP Accessibility Day YouTube channel have accurate captions,&#8221; organizer Amber Hinds said.</p>



<p>Sponsor packages range from $500 to $3,000 so organizations of all sizes can be a part of supporting the event. Individuals can also <a href="https://wpaccessibility.day/participate/volunteer/">volunteer</a> or <a href="https://wpaccessibility.day/consider-donating-to-support-wp-accessibility-day/">donate</a> to help the event reach its financial goals.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 22 Jul 2022 17:42:13 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:36;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:104:"WPTavern: Gutenberg 13.7 Expands Custom Template Capabilities, Adds Estimated Reading Time to Info Panel";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=136412";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:114:"https://wptavern.com/gutenberg-13-7-expands-custom-template-capabilities-adds-estimated-reading-time-to-info-panel";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4195:"<p><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/07/20/whats-new-in-gutenberg-13-7-20-july/">Gutenberg 13.7</a> was released this week with major updates to full-site editing (FSE) capabilities that <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/41875">expand custom template creation</a>. Users can now create templates for custom taxonomies, specific terms, and single categories and tags. The update also includes the ability to create templates for specific pages.</p>



<p>Clicking on &#8220;Add New&#8221; template and selecting Category will launch a new modal where users can select a specific category: </p>



<img />



<p>In a <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/07/21/core-editor-improvement-deeper-customization-with-more-template-options/">separate writeup</a> about the expanded custom template capabilities, Automattic-sponsored contributor Justin Tadlock  gave a walkthrough of the template creation process and summarized the continued work on this arm of FSE features.</p>



<p>&#8220;There are tons of use cases for these types of templates, only limited by what their creators want to build,&#8221; Tadlock said. &#8220;For example, a user might want to show a grid of posts for a specific &#8216;photography&#8217; category but not change the default list style for others. A restaurant owner might remove the site’s default sidebar on the &#8216;menu&#8217; page to let photos of the dishes take center stage.&#8221;</p>



<p>All of these additions put more control of the CMS into users&#8217; hands than they have ever had in the earlier days of WordPress. Creating a custom template for a taxonomy or for a specific page would have been a task for which most users would have needed to hire a developer. Now anyone can create custom templates with just a few clicks inside the Site Editor.</p>



<p>Category customization is also the subject of the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2022/07/11/fse-program-testing-call-15-category-customization/">latest round of the FSE Program&#8217;s testing</a>, closing on August 1. The test focuses on guiding users through exploration of the general Category template and the new template picker design introduced in Gutenberg 13.6. Each testing call comes with a structured way to explore beta features along with specific questions to answer during the process.  It&#8217;s essentially a guided way to contribute to WordPress that allows people of all abilities to shape the user experience with their feedback.</p>



<p>Gutenberg 13.7 also introduces a new &#8220;<a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/41611">Time to read</a>&#8221; count that users will find in the information panel at the top of the editor. It estimates the time to read for pages, posts, and custom post types.</p>



<img />



<p>Gutenberg&#8217;s block locking feature already offers quite a bit of granular control, but this release <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/41876">expands these capabilities</a> to allow for locking all the blocks inside a container (Group, Cover, and Column blocks) with one click. </p>



<img />source: <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/07/20/whats-new-in-gutenberg-13-7-20-july/">Gutenberg 13.7 release post</a>



<p>Other notable improvements in 13.7 include the following:</p>



<ul><li>Updates modal design for Preferences screen and other screens to reduce noise, add background blur, and make design more consistent &#8211; <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/40781">PR #40781</a></li><li>Adds &#8220;Use featured image&#8221; to Upload and Media Library options in the placeholder for a new Cover block &#8211; <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/41722">PR #41722</a></li><li>Adds text decoration support to post title block &#8211; <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/42328">PR #42328</a></li></ul>



<p>This release includes 167 PRs thanks to contributions from 58 people. For a full breakdown of all the changes and bug fixes, check out the full changelog in the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/07/20/whats-new-in-gutenberg-13-7-20-july/">release post</a>.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 22 Jul 2022 16:55:07 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:37;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:96:"Do The Woo Community: WooBits: Do the Woo is Heading to WordCampUS in San Diego + Hosts + Guests";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=72521";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:56:"https://dothewoo.io/do-the-woo-heads-to-wordcampus-2022/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:434:"<p>As I head to San Diego, I will find several hosts and even more past guests attending and ready to take on the next WordCampUS.</p>
<p>&gt;&gt; The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://dothewoo.io/do-the-woo-heads-to-wordcampus-2022/">WooBits: Do the Woo is Heading to WordCampUS in San Diego + Hosts + Guests</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://dothewoo.io">Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community</a>	.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 22 Jul 2022 09:48:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:38;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:81:"WPTavern: WordPress.com Ends Recent Pricing Experiment, Reverts to Previous Model";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=136414";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:91:"https://wptavern.com/wordpress-com-ends-recent-pricing-experiment-reverts-to-previous-model";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:2538:"<p>WordPress.com has ended the pricing experiment it began at the beginning of April. The company announced today that it is rolling back its <a href="https://wordpress.com/pricing/">pricing</a> structure to the previous model, which offered five plans, including the free tier. </p>



<img />WordPress.com&#8217;s updated pricing table &#8211; July 21, 2022



<p>A few months ago, WordPress.com pared back its pricing table from five to just two plans (Free and a $15/month Pro plan) as <a href="https://wptavern.com/wordpress-com-makes-major-unannounced-pricing-changes-slashes-free-storage-limits">a major unannounced change</a>, slashing free storage limits and imposing a traffic ceiling. After nearly two months of <a href="https://wptavern.com/wordpress-com-increases-traffic-and-storage-limits-on-new-plans-after-overwhelmingly-negative-feedback-on-initial-rollout">overwhelmingly negative feedback</a>, the company added a new $5/month Starter plan to bridge the gap between Free and Pro, but even this entry level plan didn&#8217;t remove ads. </p>



<p>The changes were not clicking with users and many of them announced plans to move away from WordPress.com to new platforms. The company claims it was responding to feedback in reverting to the previous pricing model, but after 15 weeks of running the experiment, they likely had enough data to force the decision.</p>



<p>&#8220;As we began to roll out our new pricing plans a couple of months back, we took note of the feedback you shared,&#8221; Automattic VP of Content Michael Pick said in the new pricing <a href="https://wordpress.com/blog/2022/07/21/changes-to-our-pricing-plans/">announcement</a>. &#8220;What we heard is that some of you missed the more granular flexibility of our previous plans. Additionally, the features you needed and pricing of the new plans didn’t always align for you.&#8221;</p>



<p>WordPress.com also emailed its customs about the availability of add-ons for à la carte upgrades for features like access to premium themes, removal of ads, and custom CSS. Notably missing was an add-on for storage upgrades, which multiple customers expressed in the comments that they are eager to have.</p>



<img />



<p>Customers reacted positively to announcement of the pricing reverting back and several thanked the company for taking their feedback seriously. WordPress.com confirmed that customers who switched to the previous Starter and Pro plans will be able to remain on those plans indefinitely with auto-renew if they choose.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 22 Jul 2022 02:44:26 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:39;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:70:"WPTavern: WordPress Themes Directory Launches Pattern Previews in Beta";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=136410";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:81:"https://wptavern.com/wordpress-themes-directory-launches-pattern-previews-in-beta";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:3179:"<p>Meta contributors have turned on a new feature in WordPress.org theme listings that allows visitors to preview themes&#8217; bundled patterns. A grid displaying the patterns is now shown underneath a theme&#8217;s description and tags. These are automatically fetched from any theme that registers patterns and works for both block and classic themes.</p>



<img />Patterns included in the <a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/zeever/">Zeever</a> theme



<p>Clicking on a pattern will launch it within the theme preview. Visitors can see what it looks like within the context of the theme but cannot manipulate it or customize it.</p>



<img />



<p>Automattic-sponsored Meta Team contributor Steve Dufresne published a short <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/meta/2022/07/21/pattern-previews-for-themes-in-the-directory-beta/">announcement</a> of the pattern previews moving into beta, with a request for feedback from theme authors.</p>



<p>&#8220;From a technical standpoint, the pattern preview screenshots are generated by adding patterns into whichever template handles &#8216;page&#8217; rendering,&#8221; Dufresne said. &#8220;If you think the pattern preview isn’t rendering properly, try adding the pattern to a page in your theme (as a user would). If the screenshot differs significantly from what you see, please open a&nbsp;<a href="https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/newticket">meta ticket</a>&nbsp;so we can take a look.&#8221;</p>



<p>Elma Studio co-founder Ellen Bauer noted that the preview does not render third-party blocks and opened a <a href="https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6420">ticket</a> to track this issue. Patterns that require WooCommerce or another plugin will not display correctly. Bauer said the patterns for their <a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/aino/">Aino theme</a> do look as intended, because they use the <a href="https://ainoblocks.io/">AinoBlocks</a> plugin.  Unless this can be resolved, relying on a plugin to provide a theme&#8217;s patterns may be a drawback for theme authors whose primary distribution channel is WordPress.org.</p>



<p>Another quirk at the moment is that patterns designed to be full-width or wide width may not be displaying as intended due to being restricted to the narrower default content size. This issue is in progress and should be resolved soon.</p>



<p>Pattern previews help users get a better picture of what patterns a theme offers and how they might look inside the theme. Feedback has been positive so far, as it gives theme authors another way to showcase the possibilities their themes enable. Themes without patterns are not necessarily disadvantaged by this new preview section, as the Pattern Directory has grown considerably since its launch to host more than 800 block patterns.</p>



<p>This early beta for pattern previews is the result of work on a <a href="https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/5995">ticket</a> opened seven months ago requesting a demo for patterns when browsing themes in the directory. The Meta Team requests feedback and bug reports to be filed as a new ticket on <a href="https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/newticket">Meta trac</a>.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 22 Jul 2022 00:17:57 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:40;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:93:"Post Status: Strattic, WordCamps, and Growing through Relationships — Post Status Draft 120";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:32:"https://poststatus.com/?p=102273";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:76:"https://poststatus.com/strattic-wordcamps-and-growing-through-relationships/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:3516:"<p class="has-drop-cap">Miriam Schwab is CEO and co-founder of Strattic, the first WordPress hosting company to allow customers to quickly spin up fast static and headless WordPress sites. Strattic was recently acquired by Elementor. In this episode of Post Status Draft, Miriam talks with Post Status Editor Dan Knauss about her WordPress journey as a WordCamp organizer, agency owner, and web host founder.</p>



<h2>In this conversation you’ll also learn about:</h2>



<ul><li>WordPress and performance optimization</li><li>Why everyone should embrace regular people building “terrible” websites</li><li>Why WordCamps are special</li></ul>







<div class="wp-container-39 wp-block-columns sponsor has-theme-palette-8-background-color has-background" id="Gravity-Forms">
<div class="wp-container-37 wp-block-column">
<h3><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f64f.png" alt="?" class="wp-smiley" /> Sponsor: <a href="https://poststat.us/gravity">Gravity Forms</a></h3>



<p><strong><a href="https://poststat.us/gravity">Gravity Forms</a></strong> is a powerful form builder for WordPress and the #1 choice for businesses and web professionals across the globe. Its vast array of features, intuitive drag-and-drop form editor, and extensive ecosystem of add-ons, ensure customers can design beautiful, intelligent, and accessible forms for any project requirement.</p>
</div>



<div class="wp-container-38 wp-block-column is-vertically-aligned-center"><div class="wp-block-image cloudways-logo">
<a href="https://poststat.us/gravity"><img width="392" height="299" src="https://cdn.poststatus.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/gravity-forms-logo-stacked.png" alt="Gravity Forms" class="wp-image-88956" title="Cloudways Logo" /></a><a href="https://poststat.us/gravity">Gravity Forms</a></div></div>
</div>



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



<ul><li><a href="https://twitter.com/miriamschwab">Miriam Schwab (Twitter)</a></li><li><a href="https://twitter.com/dan_knauss">Dan Knauss (Twitter)</a></li><li><a href="https://twitter.com/post_status">Post Status (Twitter)</a></li></ul>



<p class="has-background">The <strong>Post Status Draft</strong> podcast is geared toward WordPress professionals, with interviews, news, and deep analysis. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f4dd.png" alt="?" class="wp-smiley" /><br /><br /><a href="https://poststatus.com/category/post-status-podcasts/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Browse our archives</a>, and don’t forget to subscribe via <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/post-status-draft-wordpress/id976403008" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">iTunes</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS8ySkU5c2M4UA" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Google Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/PostStatus" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">YouTube</a>, <a href="http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/krogsgard/post-status-draft-wordpress-podcast" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Stitcher</a>, <a href="https://wordpress-post-status-draft-podcast.simplecast.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Simplecast</a>, or <a href="https://feeds.simplecast.com/2JE9sc8P">RSS</a>. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f3a7.png" alt="?" class="wp-smiley" /></p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 21 Jul 2022 18:37:01 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Olivia Bisset";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:41;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:46:"Post Status: The Decline of Speed Booster Pack";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:32:"https://poststatus.com/?p=102241";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:57:"https://poststatus.com/the-decline-of-speed-booster-pack/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:22759:"<div class="wp-container-43 wp-block-group has-theme-palette-8-background-color has-background"><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container">
<p id="d616bf72-6c52-4927-a9f4-f976016a10d6">We all enjoy reading success stories, right? A website reached a million visitors in just 10 days, a SaaS tool valued at $1 billion in less than a year, an author and her book translated into 100 languages worldwide. But if you think about it, there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of failed projects for every successful one.</p>



<p class="yoast-reading-time__wrapper"><span class="yoast-reading-time__icon"></span><span class="yoast-reading-time__spacer"></span><span class="yoast-reading-time__descriptive-text">Estimated reading time:  </span><span class="yoast-reading-time__reading-time">0</span><span class="yoast-reading-time__time-unit"> minutes</span></p>
</div></div>



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



<p class="has-drop-cap" id="033efdd6-3b58-43bc-9526-c006bee05960">Success stories are great, but this time, you’re going to read about a failure. It’s about <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/speed-booster-pack/">Speed Booster Pack</a> and the depressing, constant decline of its active installs. What's the point of that? I hope you'll learn how things went wrong to learn from my mistakes, as I have.</p>



<h3 id="bedc9a30-b5e7-42af-814b-df608eb1ba6d">My story of becoming a WordPress enthusiast… and a web performance junkie</h3>



<p id="ad9518f1-2f9c-4638-8d61-49bd04ef2d41">In 2006 I created a WordPress website for the first time. Blogs were “in,” and I wanted to become a writer. So I published my first blog post on WordPress.com in January 2006. Several weeks later, I started from scratch on a free hosting space, then moved that blog to <a href="https://beyn.org/">beyn.org</a> in July. It was so fun to write about my own teenage ramblings!</p>



<p id="e77eb156-84fb-4a18-9dfb-7952ee7afd2c">After moving to Beyn, I started obsessing about getting it to load faster so I wrote my own theme, used minimal CSS (compressing it manually), and learned about the differences between image formats. As I got better at WordPress, I started freelancing and made <em>acceptable</em> websites.</p>



<p id="38ed382b-9ea7-4e11-84d8-d0189951de45">In 2012, I saw a writing gig at Tuts+ Code, applied, and was hired. <a href="https://tutsplus.com/authors/baris-unver">I wrote close to 150 articles & tutorials in four years</a> — two as a writer, and two as “lead WordPress instructor.” After writing everything I knew about WordPress in the first year, I started researching and learning to have more things to write about. Teaching is a strange but great way to learn something. Believe me — writing about things I didn’t know forced me to learn <em>everything</em> about that topic.</p>



<p id="b0f68eca-4828-4e4d-9544-b2e19dd0e168">Close to the end of my time as a Tuts+ writer, I rediscovered my obsession with speed. Writing about it was easy enough, but I was surprised to see that there were fewer than five companies (in 2015) that offered web performance optimization services. I started a small business called <a href="https://optimocha.com/">Optimocha</a> in April 2016, and after a very rough year, it got better. I met Frank Goossens, the creator of <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/autoptimize/">Autoptimize</a>, and as “partners in performance,” we optimized a ton of websites (in addition to half a ton of websites I optimized on my own) between February 2017 and August 2021.</p>



<p class="has-theme-palette-8-background-color has-background" id="15f52c18-b12e-4af9-aae7-f81da53c39b9"><em>To keep this part short, I left out a lot of details. If you want to, <a href="https://heropress.com/essays/blogging-solopreneurship-terrorism/">you can visit HeroPress.com to read more about my story</a></em>. You'll learn about the time a blog post got me sued by the Prime Minister of Turkey.</p>



<p id="119caece-f5fd-468d-84d3-227e56fcd234">Since I’m obsessed with optimizing websites, and my clients usually share my obsession, the satisfaction rate on my jobs is close to 100%… but Optimocha is not the main focus of this post. So, let’s get to the part when I became the owner of Speed Booster Pack.</p>



<h3 id="0310cec4-99ef-4484-a1a0-4d9ce4ecc151">Acquiring Speed Booster Pack in 2019</h3>



<p id="2dde708e-d80c-4538-b7ec-30b4a47aed5b">In 2019, Frank told me the folks at Macho Themes were looking for someone to adopt Speed Booster Pack. He introduced me to Cristian Raiber, and after negotiating, we agreed on a deal, and Optimocha became the owner and maintainer of the Speed Booster Pack plugin.</p>



<p id="e289e719-9a71-4dc6-970b-73d2bac86896">The plugin's codebase wasn’t in good shape, and it was already in a state of decline. About three months after the acquisition (19 May 2019, to be exact), Speed Booster Pack’s “Active Installations” count in the WordPress.org plugin repository started showing “30,000+” instead of “40,000+.” It was a bummer, but I wasn’t really interested because it simply meant the active install count was around 39,000. Plus, I had bigger things in mind.</p>



<h3 id="0d12779a-aba1-4573-9dac-eff4483c1cf0">A complete rewrite</h3>



<p id="cb780310-3044-44d2-8807-b212bc28a9bf">After a rather unsuccessful attempt to fix Speed Booster Pack’s bugs, I decided to rewrite the whole thing from scratch and turn this plugin from “something with a few checkboxes to apply small optimizations” into “a complete optimization suite.” I wasn’t a good programmer so I searched for one. After meeting with <a href="https://zahidefe.net/">Zahid</a> in October 2019 and talking about my vision of transforming Speed Booster Pack, he agreed to work with me to rewrite the plugin. Unfortunately, I kept focusing on fixing small bugs in the existing code, and the delay saw the further loss of active installs.</p>



<p id="ad482b98-e660-43b7-b65f-7b54d46b6259">As it turns out, things weren’t going to change after the rewrite. We released the complete rewrite (version 4.0) in July 2020, but it only <em>stopped</em> users from leaving — we didn’t get new users.</p>



<p id="a0490d12-5a4e-4c1f-bde7-4fb320bba69d">That’s when I started wondering about the exact number of users Speed Booster Pack had.</p>



<h3 id="006a1aee-0d6d-47bd-9180-8360cd730bb0">Calculating the near-exact user count</h3>



<p id="13052aa9-70dd-42a8-8f72-72e97a70c1ae">It might be silly to wonder how many websites are using your plugin, but for analytics freaks like me, it’s always nice to have more (and better) data in hand. That’s why in 2020, I began searching for a way to see the <em>exact</em> number of Speed Booster Pack users.</p>



<p id="ed376282-d5bd-4cd1-aa1d-88936dc03619">It’s against WordPress guidelines (and GDPR, CCPA, etc.) to spy on users, so updating my plugin to include a counter was out of the question — plus, users of older versions wouldn’t have the counter.</p>



<p id="94214347-7ddc-4bc4-8291-454bc8c3e4d6">I discovered that WordPress.org calculates the number of active installs by counting the websites pinging wordpress.org for plugin, theme, and core updates. Then it rounds down to the nearest “ballpark number,” like 500, 1,000, 10,000, etc. Since <a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/cron/">WP-Cron</a> (<code><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/master/wp-cron.php">wp-cron.php</a></code>) is responsible for periodically pinging the update servers but only fires when a website is actually visited, websites with no visits aren’t counted, but a site with one visit (including search bots and downtime monitors) might be counted as active.</p>



<p id="94214347-7ddc-4bc4-8291-454bc8c3e4d6">So that active install number is an estimate and probably on the high side as the number grows. Worse, you can't see what's happening to it when you're between the large ballpark figures the plugin repo provides. Are your active installs going up or down? You can look at the Active Install Growth chart for your plugin at WordPress.org for this, but it only shows weekly percentage changes.</p>



<p id="8fd8eafa-5965-4e45-ac11-c9348fc1f6ac">Fortunately, Benjamin Wintal found <a href="https://benjaminintal.com/2020/09/12/how-to-get-the-actual-number-of-active-installs-of-your-wordpress-plugin/">a really smart way to count active plugin installs</a>.</p>



<p id="1d8d82d3-d779-41d5-ae45-72154efac43d">The gist of Benjamin’s method is this:</p>



<ol type="1" id="5ad7f185-6be0-452c-a986-812343679b3b"><li>Find out the exact date (a Sunday) when the ballpark number changed (e.g. from 1,000+ to 2,000+ or 20,000+ to 30,000+) by waiting or using the <a href="https://archive.org/web/">Wayback Machine</a> to view older versions.</li><li>Use the Active Installs Growth chart to calculate how many new users installed (or stopped using) your plugin.</li></ol>



<p id="de0653dc-008d-4e95-92d2-0e1f3110a81d">(You can also retrospectively calculate active install counts using the date as an anchor.)</p>



<p id="7ad10ce4-8627-47a2-beed-40c7b9925f3a">After setting up a Google Sheet and adding the necessary data, plus some handy formulas, I was able to calculate the near-exact number of active installs. Here’s Speed Booster Pack’s <del>growth</del> decline graph from 2020:</p>



<img width="752" height="429" src="https://cdn.poststatus.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Untitled-752x429.png" alt="" class="wp-image-102318" />Speed Booster Pack's active installs in 2020



<h3 id="1baf2bae-217a-4726-96e5-8caf840a566a">A big bump, then a huge collapse</h3>



<p id="07f7edc1-ec79-4ce9-9e72-8740457a1af4">Let’s jump to the first half of 2021 when Speed Booster Pack <em>finally</em> began getting new users — as high as 1,000 new users in some weeks!</p>



<p id="667bfd1d-2741-45b5-bf2d-131616580b54">Zahid and I had released a new version (4.1.0) which had new features like Critical CSS, Sucuri integration, and an experimental feature called “PageSpeed Tricker.” It was part joke, part real: It actually set your PageSpeed test results to 100% on both mobile and desktop, because it added a line to wp-config.php to exit immediately for all browser user agents including the word “Lighthouse.” The joke was to show people how easy it was to manipulate PageSpeed/Lighthouse tests and say “you should optimize your website for real people, not for PageSpeed” to our users.</p>



<p id="0d8eb991-a857-4190-9c75-f82aafc95ed3">It was a fun, <em>educational</em> joke that we decided to remove after a few versions, and we showed an immutable notice (when the Tricker was enabled) to prevent people from tricking others into believing their website was really optimized. We thought the increase in active installs was related to that.</p>



<p id="f0a37063-071d-4aac-9fe0-571122d3ff26">Over the course of four months after releasing version 4.1.0, we saw over 5,000 new active installs and we even got past 40K users:</p>



<img width="752" height="429" src="https://cdn.poststatus.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Untitled-1-752x429.png" alt="Speed Booster Pack" class="kb-img wp-image-102292" />


<div class="wp-block-image">
<img width="342" height="737" src="https://cdn.poststatus.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Untitled-2.png" alt="" class="wp-image-102293" /></div>


<p id="d0e7e919-a9aa-4e67-b4ce-c7e70fd6871b">Awesome, right? Well, it turns out the increase in the active install count wasn’t at all related to our work.</p>
