Filtra per genere
- 31 - Goodbye, Marketing Team
With the creation of the Media Corps Team, we bid farewell to the Marketing Team after 9 years of operation.
Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.
Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
In this program, you’ll find the information from April 29th to May 5th, 2024.
Officially, on December 14, 2015, the journey of the WordPress.org Marketing Team began. The last 3 years had already been a working group at various Contributor Days, and their first project was the Security White Paper.
The team’s initial steps were to brainstorm to determine possible projects or information that should be communicated from WordPress. Proposals included comparisons with other CMS, the benefits of open source, and country-specific showcases.
Shortly after, weekly meetings began on Slack where different paths were opened, such as “I Love WordPress”, page redesigns, more WordPress Days, creating more white papers, and expanding the conversation about open source…
The first significant step was taken in person at WordCamp Europe 2016 where a working group of more than 20 people adopted a clear motto: here we are all volunteers and we give back what we receive. That WordCamp generated the so-called “Four Horsemen of WordPress.org Marketing” where the four pillars of the project’s marketing were defined: one group consists of developers; a second group includes agencies and clients; a third group comprises end users; and a fourth group is the community itself.
The Marketing Team was created from the community for the community and currently aims to promote WordPress to users and contributors, amplifying campaigns to promote the project.
When the marketing team started, WordPress’s market share was around 25% and it is now above 45%, so the strategy seems to have worked.
Although the tension in the atmosphere had been present for some time, the last public tense moment began on January 13, 2024, when, initially, it wasn’t clear who, tweeted inviting crowdfunding to restore the lighting on a bridge in San Francisco. The team usually in charge of social networks had their moment of stress until it was known that someone with direct access to the account posted the entry without discussing it with anyone else. Matt Mullenweg later posted on Slack that he has direct access to all accounts because he started the project, that they are delegated in the Sprout tool, and that the marketing team’s rules only affect those with access to Sprout.
Many people questioned whether a personalistic use of social media was the best option for the community, and even the manuals on the breach of asking for money through social media accounts were reviewed… and the responsible group got a probably unexpected response: the social media accounts of WordPress are not of the community but are lent out for their use.
This last situation, among several others made public, had made it clear that what the Marketing Team plans for the project’s communication and what the project direction wants, are on very different lines, leading to the moment of the new proposal.
In March, Josepha, the executive director of the WordPress project, proposed the creation of the WordPress Media Corps with the goal of dedicating efforts to grow WordPress’s market share, which has stagnated. One of the statements made it crystal clear: as it has become evident that volunteers and sponsored individuals cannot effectively collaborate together, a new team will be created.
Primarily referring to sponsored media and podcasts, it was proposed that a “media partner” should have 80% of content about WordPress, a high journalistic level, follow community guidelines, and comply with information embargoes. The discussion was long and broad, both in the article’s comments and in the Slack channel, where a special meeting had to be held to clarify why there would be embargoes or what having a high journalistic level means, when most of the content generated by the community is not made by journalists.
And, what was a proposal, is now a reality. This experiment will go ahead to provide reliable content to an independent team of marketing and media to produce high-quality content in less time and with less effort.
For this experiment, the majority of the team will be from Automattic to literally avoid a call to collaborators without a clear concept of what is being done or why it is being done.
Meanwhile, work will proceed in 4 steps:
The first will be the creation of the entire new structure of Slack, Make, team, manuals, documentation… and other necessary elements to have a Media Corps Team. This step has already been taken.
The second will be the closure of the current Marketing Team. It will be archived, although this last week’s meeting has already not been held; it seems that GitHub will remain open for some functionalities that, still, it is not clear who will manage, such as the Showcase or the amplification of information on networks.
The third is the creation of the minimum viable product which will be led by Reyes Martínez, a member of the Marketing Team, by Automattic.
And, as a fourth element, open the doors for everyone to subscribe to the new site and be in the Slack channel.
Undoubtedly, all the volunteers who have participated in the Marketing Team are left with a bad taste by the transition from a team that was created from and for the community, to a new Media Team that is created from Automattic for a group of media that not everyone will be able to access and with exhaustive control of the information, which some think goes against the very philosophy of open source, as can be read in the comments of the entry.
And the first steps of this new team are already underway. The roadmap for the Media Corps Team is already underway with the clear goal of creating high-quality independent production.
The project is divided into four phases. The first, between May and June 2024, will focus on finding candidates. The second, between July and November, will be the implementation phase with the preparation of information and work meetings with collaborators. Concurrently, in phase 3, which will be carried out between July and November, there will be monitoring and analysis of metrics. From December 2024, an analysis of what happened will be conducted, to define the plans for 2025.
In any case, WordPress continues with the preparation of WordPress 6.5.3 scheduled for release on May 7 with, at least, 8 fixes in the editor and 11 in the core.
Also, the roadmap for WordPress 6.6 has been launched with the key aspects of the future version.
The main changes seem to be focused on the user experience in the design of the new admin panel, easier creation and management of patterns, and seeing the inheritance of CSS styles. The editor and its tools will also have their own focus with an iteration of the font tools and style variations, the improvement of the Grid Block, and the possibility of extending pattern management to classic themes.
The iteration of various APIs, such as the Interactivity API, Block Hooks, or HTML API, in addition to boosting the Custom Fields and Block Bindings API, will be key in this version.
The Core team has announced what the next steps of the Data Liberation project will be, which aims to facilitate the import and export of content between platforms easily. It is not a project to migrate websites, but of their content, which includes both from one WordPress to another WordPress and from external platforms to WordPress.
The first step will be the creation of a plugin that concentrates all these new functionalities and that WordPress Playground will be helpful in managing these migrations.
The biggest challenge we have is the conversion of classic content to blocks, work that would involve reinforcing the HTML API integrated in the latest versions.
The project has a roadmap for this 2024, between January and November.
WP-CLI Hack Day has been a success with the completion of 15 tickets and the advancement of 6 more, with participation in this event by more than 15 contributors.
The Meta team has announced the launch of the new visual template in the Plugin Directory, available for a few days now, with the same functionalities, but a completely renewed style.
The Training team is working on several projects in different areas.
To start, one issue is visual, with an update of the designs of the WordPress courses. The lessons will have a more modern design adapted to screens, in addition to following the new design line of all of WordPress.org.
Another project that is coming is the second edition of the Learn WordPress Course that, between May 2 and July 4, will focus on synchronous training of a topic so that several students do it at the same time. In this case, the course “Develop Your First WordPress Block” will be used again.
The last project is the creation of digital voices with artificial intelligence for videos. The system is quite simple, as the videos focus on showing the contents, but the voice does not require being recorded by a person. Even so, this would involve a change in the guides, as it requires modifying the information about the background investigation of the person making the video.
A security update has led to the release of BuddyPress 12.4.1, which everyone is urged to update as soon as possible. The Dynamic Members, Friends, and Groups blocks were vulnerable to a Stored Cross-Site Scripting attack which has also been corrected in versions 9, 10, and 11 of the plugin.
And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the WordPress Podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information at WordPress Podcast .org.
You can follow the content in Catalan, German, Spanish, and French.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
Tue, 07 May 2024 - 14min - 30 - WordPress 6.6 is looking for leaders
With less than 3 months to go before the launch of WordPress 6.6, the leadership team is still not finalized, nor are the features that it will include clearly defined.
Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.
Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
In this program, you’ll find the information from April 22nd to 28th, 2024.
WordPress 6.6 has less than three months left, and the team that is supposed to lead this version is still not complete. That’s why there is a search for individuals who will lead the core triages, documentation, and themes.
Specifically for documentation, someone with experience is being sought who can manage the workload that a new version entails. In the case of themes, there is a dual focus: ensuring all WordPress themes are compatible with the new features and preparing WordPress 6.7 for the new default theme, which will likely be Twenty Twenty-Five.
However, some of the new features that we will see in the editor in these future versions of WordPress are clearer, thanks to the Gutenberg 18.2 plugin and its updates.
A first example in the editor is the ease of creating a structure using blocks, turning it into a pattern, and choosing the option whether it can be overwritten or not.
Another change included is the ability for non-administrator users to preview templates and edit them in the content editor, something that previously blocked the use of the editor for certain parts of the site.
One of the most requested features, and included by other visual editors, are the Starter Patterns. Up to now, when creating a new page, you face a blank canvas that you can start filling with some blocks or patterns you already have. But what if when creating a new page you were proposed complete pages with a content structure? Pages like about us, legal, contact, even a homepage, or blog page, that with one click allow you not to start with a blank screen, but with a structure to quickly launch your new site.
Another element that is beginning to be seen is the functionality that should come with WordPress 6.6, which should be the star project, the possibility of natively linking blocks thanks to the Blocks bindings. This system will require some technical knowledge, at least initially, such as the registration of custom fields. Currently, the only blocks that could synchronize with other data are paragraphs, headings, images, and buttons. This will allow for the creation of completely dynamic content that is filled in one place and displayed in another.
So far, it seems that WordPress 6.6 will be one of those versions that will bring many first versions of functionalities that will allow for better work in the next version, with the corresponding iterations.
Meanwhile, on May 7, WordPress 6.5.3 is expected to be released with some minor fixes.
On the Developer Blog, a post has been published explaining how to create a blueprint for quick demos with WordPress Playground, the tool that allows for temporarily loading a WordPress in the browser.
The text explains how to create these JSON files and run them in the browser, in addition to the possibility of using the Playground Query API to add functionality.
The Design team has presented some proposals. For example, the Style Book could have an iteration in terms of presentation and style in which the demonstration objects are shown, with a new summary page, the possibility of reordering blocks, adding subcategories to organize blocks, and expanding the demonstration content.
Another element that continues to advance and could be included in WordPress 6.6 is the grids, which would change the way content is displayed in the editor, with much simpler management.
In phase 3 of Gutenberg, the redesign of the WordPress admin panel was included, and work continues on the final form and the adaptability of the screens, possibly adding several levels of tool menus.
Shadows, list density, and filters are some other elements that are being worked on to improve the user experience within the editor.
The Documentation team has announced that in October 2024 there will be a WordCamp for Documentations lasting 24 hours, online, covering all possible time zones, with the aim of facilitating the work of all those who document WordPress, regardless of the team they belong to.
The Meta team has issued a note to plugin developers asking what should be the next steps for the integration of WordPress Playground in plugin directory previews.
It seems that most issues are centered on the creation of blueprints, and therefore, suggestions for future functionalities are also requested.
The Community team, now that the second edition of the mentorship program has concluded, is looking at the steps for future editions.
Some of the challenges are quite clear, considering the availability of both mentors and students and their involvement, in addition to seeking new ways, durations, and proposals for the program.
The second edition can be considered a success since the confidence and familiarity with contributions have grown from 50% to 80% among participants, and 80% of participants say they have achieved their goals with the program.
The BuddyPress team has disabled a feature that has been in compatibility mode for 10 years for user creation management. This functionality will now exit the plugin itself, and all those who used it are recommended to use the Signups API.
And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the WordPress Podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information at WordPress Podcast .org.
You can follow the content in Catalan, German, Spanish, and French.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
Tue, 30 Apr 2024 - 08min - 29 - WordPress is Faster
Two years after the formation of the Performance team, WordPress has managed to include several performance improvements in the latest versions.
Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.
Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
In this program, you’ll find the information from April 15 to 21, 2024.
About three years ago, a subgroup of the Core team known as Core-Performance was created, which has since become a standalone team within WordPress.
Initially, it seemed that the Performance team might not achieve much, but thanks to the addition of several people, and even the involvement of Google as a sponsor for some of them on the team, the situation has improved significantly. Thanks to experiments from the Performance Lab plugin now split into different plugins to test each functionality separately, we have some very interesting updates regarding WordPress performance.
For example, WordPress 6.3 included various changes that affect how WordPress loads images, and later added compatibility with formats like WebP or AVIF. This has improved loading times by 21% in some cases.
Another example is WordPress 6.5, which incorporated, as a first step towards other functionalities, improvements in the loading of translation files. Considering that more than half of the WordPress installations worldwide are in a language other than the default, this has had a significant effect, making WordPress load 23% faster in that regard.
However, we must not always talk about front-end elements. Performance improvements also need to affect the user experience… in this case, the editors, since WordPress 6.5 has incorporated improvements in the editor that have reduced access times to writing by 80% and doubled the speed of element loading.
Perhaps another interesting element is for plugin creators who, thanks to the Plugin Check plugin, can review some elements that affect the performance of the plugin, which can enhance the overall WordPress load and the experience of those using the plugin.
And generally speaking… while the internet has become 5% faster this year… if you use WordPress, it has improved by 8%.
The Core team has proposed the completion of the third phase of the Rollback Auto-Update project, which suggests that if something goes wrong during an automatic update, it can be reverted without the user having to do anything.
In WordPress 6.2, the move_dir() function was introduced, which is faster than copying. In WordPress 6.3, this functionality was introduced for manual updates so that, with the person present, if something fails, the system reverts. With this new proposal, in the automatic update system, if something fails, the system will also revert, with notifications to the users.
The Meta team has presented an update of the Pattern Directory which is now completely made with blocks, although this will not be the first iteration, as there will be adjustments in the future when all sections of WordPress.org are redesigned.
An interesting new feature is that the directory has begun to use the Interactivity API for some functionalities, such as marking as favorite. The load time has been reduced to 1 second, from previously 3 seconds.
The Openverse team has introduced Collections for tags, creators, and sources.
When accessing content, we can visit for the creator and for the source other related contents that we are viewing, belonging to the same collection.
For a tag, the functionality is similar, allowing viewing a collection of images that may have been taken at the same time or place, creating a single collection.
And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the WordPress Podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information at WordPress Podcast .org.
You can follow the content in Catalan, German, Spanish, and French.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
Tue, 23 Apr 2024 - 06min - 28 - Sabbatical Version
More than 700 contributors to WordPress 6.5, with over 2,500 changes, have enabled the release of the latest version: WordPress 6.5, aka Regina.
Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.
Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Pódcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
In this program, you’ll find the information from April 8th to 14th, 2024.
The correction of a security issue in the Avatar block has led to the release of WordPress 6.5.2. Up to this point, everything seems quite normal, although it’s notable that WordPress 6.5.1 was skipped, which was prepared for another update and, due to how tags are handled, it was necessary to create the subsequent version, hence updating the documentation to ensure this does not happen again in the future.
The Core team has announced that from WordPress 6.6 onwards, support for PHP 7.0 and PHP 7.1 will be dropped, making the minimum development compatibility version PHP 7.2.24.
The release of the Gutenberg 18.1 plugin brings some new features to the editor, such as the ability to set background images directly from the editor and the possibility to swap and edit template parts much faster.
The Performance team has launched a new plugin called Speculative Loading following the experimental API of the Speculation Rules, designed to improve future navigation by trying to preload possible URLs that will be visited and not just some of their components.
On the Developer Blog, a post has been published explaining in detail the workings of the Interactivity API with an example of a basic toggle block and all the necessary steps and components to modify as a base idea to create your own interactive blocks in the future.
The Design team is working on the new grid experience and how it is displayed to users so that it can be used in the simplest and most intuitive way possible. The focus is on being able to create grids by dragging cells and how to manage the blocks in each of the cells.
The Accessibility team continues to work on improving the user experience with Gutenberg and is reviewing elements such as the overriding of patterns or the editing of templates.
Regarding Meta, the accessibility and usability of the new design proposal for the plugin directory are being reviewed.
And about that team, Meta has launched an update of the design of the WordPress support forums which is gradually being applied to the various WordPress.org sites of local editions.
The Support team is reviewing the contributor ladder with the goal of increasing people’s involvement in the team, making it sustainable in the long term.
The first steps that have been proposed to prepare the final document are to identify team tasks to create a transparent system and define clear roles, and then, match the tasks with contribution levels, considering the training and experience for each of them.
The Community team has announced the 44 students who have graduated from the Mentorship Program which had 28 mentors providing support over 6 weeks.
Among the achievements are thousands of strings translated in core, plugins, themes, and even documentation; collaboration in team meetings leading or taking notes; contributions with documentation; leading tables at a Contributor Day; organizing a WordCamp; or contributing in Playground and WP-CLI.
If everything goes as planned, along with WordPress 6.7 around November 2024, we will have the third edition of this program.
Meanwhile, following the acquisition of Meetup.com by Bending Spoons, the new team has been in contact with the WordPress community to discuss an investment of $50 million over the next few years in their platform, asking for feedback to improve their system; all this while the community finalizes the launch of GatherPress and a pilot program, in which control of WordPress events is in the hands of the community and not a private company.
WordCamp Europe 2024 has released its schedule.
Thursday, June 13th will be a Contributor Day with about 800 contributors. Friday, June 14th, spread across three rooms, will feature multiple talks and a morning with various workshops and multiple mini-talks. The model will be repeated on Saturday, June 15th, ending with the classic keynote by Matt Mullenweg and the announcement of WordCamp Europe 2025.
And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the WordPress Podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information at WordPress Podcast .org.
You can follow the content in Catalan, German, Spanish, and French.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
Tue, 16 Apr 2024 - 07min - 27 - WordPress 6.5 Regina
More than 700 contributors to WordPress 6.5, with over 2,500 changes, have enabled the release of the latest version: WordPress 6.5, aka Regina.
Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.
Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Pódcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
In this program, you’ll find the information from April 1st to 7th, 2024.
With a week’s delay from the original release date, WordPress 6.5, nicknamed “Regina”, arrives, inspired by violinist Regina Carter, an award-winning jazz artist and educator. Regina’s technical foundations in classical music and her deep understanding of jazz have earned her a reputation for boldly going beyond what’s possible with the violin.
And this is what this new version reflects, going further with a single instrument: WordPress.
The new version, WordPress 6.5, introduces several significant features and improvements such as the Font Library that facilitates the management of fonts without the need for code; more detailed revisions for templates and template parts; enhanced tools for backgrounds and shadows in blocks; new data views to organize and quickly access site information; improvements in drag-and-drop functionality; and more intuitive link controls.
For developers, the Interactivity API and the Block Bindings API are highlighted, expanding the possibilities for creating interactive experiences and connecting blocks with dynamic content.
More than 110 performance updates have been made, resulting in a faster and more efficient experience, and more than 65 accessibility improvements have been included to make WordPress more inclusive, thanks to over 700 contributors and 2,500 enhancements.
The Performance team has opened a discussion on the importance of field research to understand the real-world use of WordPress sites, focusing on the collection and analysis of performance data.
A collaborative tutorial and reference guide has been presented for those unfamiliar with BigQuery, HTTP Archive, and Chrome User Experience Report, so this resource can help WordPress developers, regardless of their experience level with these technologies, to collect and analyze performance data.
On the Developer Blog, an entry has been published about how to register a collection of fonts for the Font Library, and an introduction to Playground, the tool that allows launching a WordPress in the browser.
The CLI team returns once again with a WP-CLI Hack Day on April 26, 2024, with the goal of closing at least 20 tickets during the event.
The Hosting team has published the entry on compatibility between WordPress 6.5 and PHP. Besides documenting the minimum requirements, warning messages for possible known compatibility errors with PHP 8.0, 8.1, 8.2, and 8.3 have been defined.
The final recommendation for new installations is: WordPress 6.5, PHP 8.2, and MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 10.11.
The Accessibility team is already preparing some improvements for WordPress 6.6 related to Gutenberg, such as tracking the expanded view to add more tasks and individual items; the forms in DataViews to unify the different forms created as inspection panels or detail pages; the site editor index views; or the accessibility audit of data views, gathering feedback from 6.5 and focusing the next steps for version 6.6.
The Documentation team has begun the first steps to prepare the project for the localization of the documentation, which will be done in Spanish from Spain, preparing the initial team, meetings, and definition of prioritization of HelpHub articles.
The Polyglots team has included a small tool for translation reviewers indicating whether the translated text has been made with artificial intelligence and has not been reviewed or modified to adhere to style guides.
This is also expanded with a new option for reviewers, when responding, informing about poor quality due to automatic translation by artificial intelligence.
The Meta team has presented an update to the main page of WordPress.org focused on new and returning users of the platform, with information on the latest versions and including better information on events and how to learn about WordPress.
The Training team is working on thumbnails for the Learn WordPress redesign. Thumbnail templates have been created for use across multiple types of media, specifically for featured images of courses and lessons, YouTube video thumbnails, and online workshop thumbnails on Meetup.
The Community team will request adding a new menu called Events on all WordPress.org sites pointing to the site launched a few months ago that includes all official WordPress events.
They will also work on redefining the audience of the site to optimize the user experience, such as the filters to apply in the search for events.
The BuddyPress team has released the maintenance version 12.4, launched before WordPress 6.5, and the need to remove the last activity repair tool because it has become obsolete.
About the future version BuddyPress 14.0, it will focus on improvements such as integrating directory pages as subpages, Site Notifications as a core feature, and highlighting how to use the Block Editor for activities, exporting and importing data, disabling registration workflows, and improving the group moderator role.
And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the WordPress Podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information at WordPress Podcast .org.
Follow the content in Catalan, German, Spanish, and French.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
Tue, 09 Apr 2024 - 08min - 26 - Not without my fonts
The release of WordPress 6.5 has been delayed for a week to finalize the Font Library, which could cause problems for users.
Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.
Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Pódcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
In this program, you’ll find the information from March 25th to March 31st, 2024.
WordPress 6.5 has been delayed by a week. It’s something that doesn’t usually happen, but the situation with the Font Library was starting to get complicated, so it was decided to pause, work on the solution, and include it in this version. However, this required delaying the release and also led to the launch of an unplanned 4th release candidate.
This means that on April 2nd, with the final version, the fonts will be stored in
/wp-content/uploads/fonts/, in addition to fixing several errors related to this new functionality that had been identified in the latest versions of Gutenberg.The reason for this situation is quite simple: if the fonts, which were going to be dynamic user content, were not in the
uploadsfolder, some hosting providers would have to modify several elements that are blocked for security reasons. And this is what was going to happen by allowing the folder above that level.And now that we know everything that WordPress 6.5 includes and its release date, the next step is to learn more about WordPress 6.6, which already has a release date: it will be on July 16, 2024; previously the beta version on June 4 and the candidate on June 25.
Looking to the future version, we have Gutenberg 18.0 bringing us an update to the global styles, allowing to select a style, and separately, the colors and typography. The other part being worked on in depth are the Data Views, the new navigation and information system of the Admin Panel.
The Performance team has launched the Embed Optimizer plugin with the aim of reviewing the optimization of embedded content and proposing improvements that can be included in future versions.
The two most important projects currently open are the improvement of template loading, whether by files or content, and what opportunities the INP (Interaction to Next Paint) factor offers for the frontend.
On the Developer Blog, they show how to make use of the Block Hooks API, introduced in WordPress 6.4, which, for example, allows adding the icon of an e-commerce cart to the main menu without the user having to do it manually.
Another content is how to use WordPress React components on plugin configuration pages. This allows for a more modern interface style, which is in the process of evolution.
The last is how to effectively use the useSelect hook from React, which allows for interacting within the editor in very different ways.
The Design team is working on the future version of grids, evolving the work that will come in WordPress 6.5; they’re also working on a new navigation experience for editing template parts, being able to access and exit easily, for example, from a header when working on a page.
Another element is proximity selection, so if you click on a site that is not a block, but there is one nearby, that one will be selected.
They’re also working on a new version of the Admin Panel, the content saving process, Openverse’s dark mode, and a new version of the Blocks page on the WordPress.org site.
The Openverse team is working on some improvements such as adding new views, improving index results, documenting all media properties, improving the moderation of sensitive content, and even the possibility of including a recognition system.
BuddyPress 12.4 has been released as a maintenance version that includes 6 changes, of which 4 are fixes, referring to the BuddyPress Rewrites API and Activity.
If you’re planning to go to WordCamp United States, you have tickets available starting at 100 dollars, to enjoy 4 days of the event.
And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the WordPress Podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information at WordPress Podcast .org or follow the content in Catalan, Spanish, and French.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
Tue, 02 Apr 2024 - 06min - 25 - WordPress Media Corps
The community is looking to create a media corps to help with the information and publication related to WordPress.
Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.
Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
You’ll find updates from March 18th to 24th, 2024.
Creating a WordPress Media Corps has been proposed to improve WordPress’s presence and provide media coverage for the community.
This team would focus on expanding WordPress’s visibility and narrative through different communication and public relations initiatives. With an emphasis on diversity and inclusion, the project would seek to build a community of communicators to promote a more comprehensive and accurate image of WordPress in the media.
Goals include promoting success stories, collaborating with external organizations, and supporting a diversity of voices and perspectives in media coverage related to WordPress.
Interested individuals have been encouraged to join the team and contribute, although there has been much discussion about the possibility of using information embargoes, with the potential need to sign NDAs.
Some concerns have arisen, such as what is considered good journalism, or whether a site with ads could qualify to be part of this group of sites. Another aspect is the blocking of access by Automattic to some of the sites where information is located, such as social sites. The reach to all Rosetta sites, which include information in dozens of languages in which WordPress is available, is also a blocker.
Some community members think that creating such a team is unnecessary since the community itself is capable of self-managing information with traditional sites already processing it (like this podcast), some agencies or companies behind products, and even hosting providers.
As has happened on other occasions, this proposal is not so much a proposal as a reality that needs to be worked on and adapted because it is almost certain to be implemented soon, raising the classic questions of any project coming from Automattic, about information control, access to people from different teams, why one medium is going to have more access than others… questions that in an open-source community are more than respectable and that can cause media with more resources or sponsorships to have more power and possibly direct information over those without resources.
Undoubtedly, it is a first step in something very few open-source projects have, a press team, and it is more focused on selling WordPress to large companies rather than explaining what the product can do.
The Core team has announced that the compatibility system of putting fonts in the “uploads” folder and not in the “fonts” folder will not make it to WordPress 6.5, with the complications this may bring, especially with certain hosting providers.
The decision has been communicated in a specific entry where alternative options and solutions are provided in case the system causes problems.
The documentation will be updated, the Fonts to Uploads plugin could be converted into a canonical-plugin managed by the community, and the support teams of the forums will be informed of possible issues that may arise.
On the Developer Blog, two entries related to visual elements have been published.
The first one refers to how to develop patterns when creating themes and content, explaining the structure, styles, content, and providing many examples.
The second entry explains the updates in WordPress 6.5 regarding shadows, which will be available on buttons, images, and columns, both from the editing panel and from theme.json for global management.
The Hosting team participated in the Cloudfest Hackathon and made significant progress with a major update to the PHP unit test tool, making it multi-PHP, multi-environment, and supporting all-commits.
With this change, hosting providers will be able to perform multiple tests in each run and will help WordPress developers with more information about its operation and, above all, compatibility.
The Polyglots team has issued a call to revive the Korean language in WordPress translations, looking for new contributors and managers for the configuration, with a medium-to-long-term goal of support, maintenance of the glossary, style guides initiation, and review of all pending translations.
The Community team, which was still using Trello for its projects, has faced the situation of the change in rates and limits that reduce the free plan to only 10 users.
The new approach is to move everything to GitHub, as many other teams have done, and use the Issues and projects system for task management, becoming much more accessible, public, and centralized.
The WordCamp Asia team has published the questions and answers session with Matt Mullenweg, in an entry that includes the full video and the answers that could not be resolved in time.
And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the WordPress Podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information at WordPress Podcast .org or follow the content in Catalan, Spanish, and French.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
Tue, 26 Mar 2024 - 07min - 24 - GlotPress Supports PHP Files
The new version of the translation software now supports PHP translation files that will be integrated into WordPress 6.5.
Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.
Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
You’ll find updates from March 11th to 17th, 2024.
With WordPress 6.5 just around the corner, we have the Field Guide available, which explains all the technical, and not so technical, changes that this new version will include.
In summary, it’s reminded that the minimum MySQL version moves from 5.0 to 5.5.5, and the major additions to the new version such as the Interactivity API, Font Library, Blocks Bindings API, the viewScriptModule field, updates in the Blocks Hooks, performance improvements, or the unification between the Site Editor and the Post Editor. But it doesn’t stop there, as it also includes performance improvements for translations, AVIF support, and Plugin Dependencies.
It is expected that on Tuesday, March 26th, by the end of the day, this new version will be available for download.
Looking ahead to WordPress 6.6, some of the improvements that Gutenberg 17.9 brings include the configuration of color and typography in the global styles or the possibility of indenting a subitem of a list with the tab key.
On the Developer Blog, an entry has been released explaining how to register block variations via PHP, something that has normally been done with JavaScript and is now available, from WordPress 6.5, through this other system. However, a specific API is expected in future versions to achieve this natively.
The Test team has reminded that thanks to WordPress Playground, a copy of the future WordPress 6.5 can be launched in test mode. By default, the tests are launched with PHP 8.1 and the Test Reports plugin installed.
The Design team is working on some improvements such as the application of the new headers to the forum and pattern sites, improvements regarding justified texts, and various changes in the details panel and the Document Inspector.
The Polyglots team has released GlotPress 4.0, which, as has been announced in the beta versions, includes fixes for some locales, code fixes and adaptation to a minimum of PHP 7.4, and among some of its major novelties is the support for the new PHP file translation format or the plugin preview feature.
And after the conclusion of WordCamp Asia 2024, with 1,320 attendees and more than 6,300 connected to the online broadcast, WordCamp Asia 2025 is already being prepared, which will be in Manila, Philippines, in February.
But that’s not the only announcement. The State of the Word 2024 will be held on December 16th from Tokyo, the birthplace of the Wapuu (the WordPress event mascot).
And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the WordPress Podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information at WordPress Podcast .org or follow the content in Catalan, Spanish, and French.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
Tue, 19 Mar 2024 - 05min - 23 - Almost Everything About WordPress 6.5
With the arrival of the first release candidate of WordPress 6.5, most of the final changes that this version will incorporate are announced.
Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.
Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
You’ll find updates from March 4th to 10th, 2024.
We now have the WordPress 6.5 Release Candidate, which, although still a development version, already includes all the features that will come in the final version.
And with this, practically all functionalities have been revealed.
The block hooks have received an update, introducing improvements and new features. It’s now possible to inject blocks into modified layouts and within the navigation block. New filters have been added for finer control over blocks, allowing for the adjustment of attributes and internal blocks. Additionally, confusing behaviors in the inspection panel have been corrected, and technical support has been improved to respect user customizations.
The “viewScriptModule” field has been introduced in the block metadata of WordPress 6.5, allowing developers to use script modules on the frontend. This field facilitates the inclusion of script modules that depend on others, such as the Interactivity API, improving the development experience.
And this can be related to the introduction of the “Script Modules” interface to support native JavaScript modules. This includes benefits such as the use of “import” and “export”, enforced strict mode, and deferred loading, thus improving JavaScript development.
Although it had been previously discussed in the development part, it now reaches end users. The Interactivity API allows developers to add interactions on the frontend of their blocks in a standard way, facilitating the creation of rich and interactive user experiences. Communication between blocks is improved, allowing for the sharing of data, actions, and callbacks.
The HTML API receives significant updates, improving the way HTML documents are processed. With the new Tag Processor, it’s possible to scan every token of the document, facilitating operations like removing tags or truncating HTML. Concepts such as editable text and new methods for advanced handling of HTML content are introduced.
Finally, the interface and behavior of the site editor and the post editor have been unified, aiming to offer a consistent user experience. This includes the unification of preferences such as the top toolbar, minimal distraction modes, and other relevant adjustments. The site editor is based on the editor package, facilitating uniform content and preference management.
Something already known is the introduction of plugin dependencies, allowing to specify required plugins for another plugin to function. Dependent plugins cannot be installed or activated without first meeting their dependencies. Moreover, plugins that others depend on cannot be deactivated or deleted while the dependents are active.
In addition to the major features, there are dozens of changes both in the editor and in the core of the new version.
By the way, the WordPress 6.5 version can now be translated from translate.wordpress.org into any of the available languages so that, on the day of its release, it is available in as many different languages as possible.
The Polyglots team has proposed a change in the functioning of suggestions for untranslated strings.
Until now, the system showed all available options, and the idea now is to show only one prioritized option, taking into account the Translation Memory, OpenAI, and Deepl, or all, in that order, depending on availability.
The Training team is proposing a collaboration to transform Learning Paths into Skill Trees.
The idea is that the skill tree format allows teachers to select the skills needed and immediately develop a curriculum and obtain learning resources tailored for each individual.
And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the WordPress Podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information at WordPress Podcast .org or follow the content in Catalan, Spanish, and French.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
Tue, 12 Mar 2024 - 06min - 22 - Translation Files
With the arrival of WordPress 6.5 comes the new format for PHP translation files.
Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.
Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
You’ll find updates from February 26th to March 3rd, 2024.
Although WordPress 6.5 is on its way, work on other parts of the project continues, such as in the Gutenberg plugin where experiments are still being added.
With Gutenberg 17.8, which will no longer include elements in the new version of WordPress, we can already see the first iterations of some components like the grid mode, which will give us access to define the sizes of the container blocks, or their size, being able, for example, to tell a block to be N rows and N columns of the grid.
Another experiment is the possibility of exporting patterns in bulk, which will generate a ZIP file with all of them.
Some other details include the possibility of having pagination in the Font Library and performance improvements.
And, in line with learning about elements of WordPress 6.5, although we already knew that Performant Translations had been integrated into this version, and that WP-CLI 2.10 included certain changes, it is now when the official launch of a new type of translation file is presented.
Until now, the most common formats for translations of a plugin and, in general, the entire system were PO and MO. With the launch of L10N.PHP, we will have PHP files that store translation strings in an array. This format allows, among other things, to be cached directly from PHP without having to be processed, and among the improvements is the process of reading all the old formats and converting them into the new, much more manageable ones.
This system also paves the way for the Preferred Languages project to make its way into future core versions, allowing for multiple prioritized languages on the site.
And the Outreach Group is already making its way among GitHub repositories allowing any project that needs general help or interconnection with other projects to do so through the user @outreach. In general, it is requested that this team be called upon in the testing phase to detect possible improvements and incompatibilities before being launched.
On the Developer Blog, a post has been released explaining how to create mega menus thanks to WordPress 6.5 and some of the functionalities it includes.
This will be possible with the combination of two elements: improvements in the navigation block, and the incorporation of the Interactivity API.
The manual explains step by step what elements need to be updated, how to configure the front end, and how to include interactions.
The Test team has prepared a table for the Contributor Day at WordCamp Asia, very focused on reviewing WordPress 6.5, just with the arrival of the first release candidate.
The focus of the latest reviews is on performance improvements of PHP translations, plugin dependencies, compliance with accessibility rules, AVIF support, and loading of JavaScript modules in classic themes.
The Design team will integrate an improvement in the Social block, which will automatically detect the URL and generate the corresponding block. In this way, if you start a URL with twitter.com, it will automatically select the social block of X.
Another element that could iterate is the inspection panel, which would bring all the contents to the detail panel in a much more suitable way.
Thus, when a page, template, or similar is selected, in the sidebar we will see the information in a much more integrated and visual way.
The Documentation team has proposed that, in the HelpHub, documentation pages include a tag indicating that it is documentation for non-technical people, as this is in the DevHub.
Additionally, something similar should begin to be done for Playground documentation, separating what is documentation for users from what is for developers.
Although a few weeks ago the pilot of the GatherPress project was announced, the Polyglots team has launched its prototype for creating events within the Translations site and integrated with GlotPress.
The idea is that this panel allows creating an event and that, if you follow it, the translation statistics during that event are synchronized separately.
And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the WordPress Podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information at WordPress Podcast .org or follow the content in Catalan, Spanish, and French.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
Tue, 05 Mar 2024 - 07min - 21 - Interactivity API
One of the most exciting upcoming features for WordPress will be introduced with the Interactivity API in WordPress 6.5.
Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.
Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
You’ll find updates from February 19th to 25th, 2024.
A year ago, we saw for the first time a demo website where everything seemed dynamic. Interacting with the site was simple, fast, and easy.
The example was a website with a list of movies, data, and among other things, you could mark a movie as a favorite or watch a trailer.
In the latter case, the video would overlay on the screen, and you could continue browsing without the video closing.
The release was planned a month ago when the first final version that would be included in WordPress 6.5 was proposed.
The Interactivity API, as its name suggests, allows interaction with WordPress sites, creating a dynamic layer on the frontend, much like what is usually done with AJAX, but with a clear Blocks-first and PHP-first strategy, backward compatible, reactive, high-performance, and with less JavaScript.
The first experiments started two years ago and culminated in Gutenberg 16.2. With its release in mind, WordPress 6.4 already includes many changes in blocks that allowed functioning with the private system of the Interactivity API, which, as a result, enabled the launch of the LightBox in images.
Now, with a small snippet of JavaScript indicating what you want to do, and a PHP render designing how it’s going to be done, we can have simple examples that allow a much more dynamic operation of WordPress.
New week, new version. WordPress 6.5 beta 2 is available, waiting for the final version to arrive on March 26.
And now that we have a new version of WordPress 6.5, we also know some more things we will encounter. One of them is the support for AVIF images, a modern format that can compress them up to 50% compared to JPEG, even with HDR support.
All browsers already support it, so it’s even possible to make all uploaded JPEGs automatically convert to AVIF, although it seems not all servers are equipped to generate this type of images.
An important element introduced in the Core Trac is the ability to mark a task with a sustainability label. The goal of these tasks from a coding perspective is the improvement and optimization of some tasks WordPress does. A simple example is the analysis to see whether a website uses HTTPS, which until now was run twice a day, with the computational cost it entails, to become an on-demand Site Health indicator.
On the Developer Blog, we have the first part of a detailed explanation of how to use the Blocks Bindings API, something awaited since WordPress 5.0 when the new editor was launched, and that, although still in a limited form, connects the content of a block with an external element.
This first entry refers to how to connect content with WordPress’s native Custom Fields, starting with a brief explanation of how blocks and blocks.json work, putting as examples how to connect the content of a paragraph with the Custom Field, or how to connect an image with these fields.
What things will be possible to use in this first foray into WordPress 6.5? In terms of text, paragraphs and titles, will be able to modify their content, images will be able to synchronize the link, title, and alternate text, and buttons their link, texts, and relationships.
Can you imagine selecting an item from a list and the button changes according to what is selected? Yes, it will be possible to do this natively, without external scripts.
The Training team has questioned whether a minimum of accessibility is being met in everything done by the team, and the possibility of bringing some elements closer to the content creation and review process.
An easily achievable first goal is to comply with WCAG 2.0 AA in content creation and validate that these minimums are being met, in addition to helping creators understand and be aware of these accessibility rules that include having alternative texts in media, subtitles in videos, audio-description of visible elements in videos, or contrast, among others.
An error from BuddyPress 12.0 to 12.2 has led to the release of BuddyPress 12.3, which fixes this and other errors.
Additionally, BuddyPress Classic 1.4 has been launched to help those with earlier versions to use plugins, themes, and widgets not compatible with the latest versions.
As a closing note, WordPress has been incorporated as a project into the Contributor Covenant. The process of adapting the Community Code of Conduct began a few years ago, and in recent weeks it has been updated in most places where WordPress contributes, including GitHub.
And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the WordPress Podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information at WordPress Podcast .org or follow the content in Catalan, Spanish, and French.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
Tue, 27 Feb 2024 - 08min - 20 - WordPress 6.5 beta
The next version of WordPress begins its rollout with the preparation of many features that will surprise in the near future.
Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.
Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
You’ll find updates from February 12th to 18th, 2024.
And the day has arrived. WordPress 6.5 emerges with its first beta version, which means that in the coming weeks we’ll see new versions until the final version is available for download and installation.
This version includes many of the experiments and tests that have been included from Gutenberg 16.8 to 17.7, with 681 improvements and 488 fixes to the editor, and 221 changes in the core.
What will you find in this new version? Mainly, many improvements in how sites are created, with a lot of focus on the developers themselves. Better management of fonts and styles, improvements in synchronized patterns, and a host of performance improvements are the focus of this version.
The first major novelty is the Font Library, which had been pending release for some versions and allows the management of fonts in a simple and safe way, as well as legal, since the fonts will be served locally without sending private information of your users to third parties.
Synchronized patterns, previously known as reusable blocks, have improved and will now easily allow modifying the structure of content without affecting the content itself.
Another major novelty that will improve the scalability of content publishing is the Blocks Bindings API, which will allow connecting block attributes to custom fields. This is a first step towards what we will see in the future, but it already allows for initial steps in creating dynamic content natively.
Speaking of dynamic content, another element arriving in the core is the Interactivity API, which will allow for the creation of fully dynamic sites on the frontend with experiences and interactions directly in the blocks. For example, displaying a new comment, search results, or interacting with elements without needing to reload the page, and without making incorrect use of the AJAX system.
The history of revisions, which we had already begun to see in previous versions, reaches many more components, and also the support of appearance tools to classic themes, for a better relationship with the editor and blocks, such as spacing and typography.
The way to view the editor and its use also improves with the possibility of renaming blocks, duplicating patterns, using the right-click button in the List View, and, in short, consolidating the experience of the Content Editor and the Site Editor, where we can also now see the new listings in list or grid form and their bulk management.
And, the recently announced Plugin Dependencies which indicates the dependencies between plugins so that plugins cannot be activated or deactivated breaking others, joins the already included Performant Translations, which will increase the loading speed of those sites not in American English.
Testing WordPress is also an important way to collaborate. Now that we have the beta version, it can be installed, tested, especially the new components, and used in different browsers, languages, or screen sizes. And if you find any details that don’t fit, you can go to the forums or open a ticket.
And, as in every beta and candidate phase of WordPress, remember that security issues can be reported and you can opt for rewards that, in this phase, are double the normal.
And as it was also announced, right at the preparation of WordPress 6.5 also comes the second edition of the Mentorship Program, starting on Monday, February 19. Finally, 50 students have been chosen from among 76, and about twenty mentors with a lot of focus on the core of WordPress, translations, and some projects such as the reactivation of events in India.
On the Developer Blog, a post has been presented that explains in detail the operation of the login and registration system.
Authentication filters and cookies are the two main elements to keep in mind, and user validation, in addition to some important details to consider, such as passwords cannot have spaces at the beginning or end, or that all email addresses are converted to lowercase.
The Design of the navigation menus of the WordPress.org sites is once again a focus of attention, as with the launch of WordPress 6.5 it can be polished off.
This also joins improving everything related to the font screens that are introduced in the version.
And, as a special detail, Openverse will have its dark mode, to which the color palette is being adjusted, and it will work with an LCH palette, a system supported in all browsers for a year now and that allows for a much more gradual palette.
The Accessibility team is already working on WordPress 6.5 making improvements in a dozen tasks. Most have to do with a lack of labeling or navigation or related to new features such as Plugin Dependencies.
The Meta team will iterate once more the final user documentation, known as HelpHub, with the goal of applying the improvements that have been introduced in the advanced documentation, that is, the DevHub.
After applying the first design and the switch to blocks of all the functionality, some improvements were applied to the advanced documentation part that makes its navigation and use better, and all those small changes will also be applied to the rest of the sections that will mainly affect the main page, improve the child theme, and standardize the typography and feedback management.
The Community team has resumed the Latin America Community Reactivation Project. The objectives are clear: increase participation, create continuous monthly events, and, as much as possible, have groups help each other.
Translating material into Spanish, a course on how to become an organizer, and offering mentorships are some of the work plans.
BuddyPress 14.0 could include a Slack-style conversation system, where groups would be used as channels, although it faces a major blockage due to lack of backward compatibility.
Another of the works being prepared, now that the whole system mainly works with blocks, is the creation of templates and patterns for faster and simpler integration.
And in the annual 2023 survey conducted within the community, we see some interesting details and trends.
For example, the use of Gutenberg as the main editor continues to grow to 40% of users, 20% continue to use the classic editor, 20% use both interchangeably, and 12% use a different editor, although slightly less than half say that the new editor has the tools they need.
For users, the decision to use WordPress is centered on 3 elements: security, performance, and stability, with the utmost focus on being open source and the availability of an infinite number of plugins and a lot of customization.
Regarding the Community, half of the users do not know how to contribute, are aware of WordPress events, or can differentiate between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. In addition, the experience of contributors has worsened both in reception to the Community and in their recognition.
And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the WordPress Podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information at WordPress Podcast .org or follow the content in Catalan, Spanish, and French. Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
Tue, 20 Feb 2024 - 11min - 19 - Open Website Alliance
The initial steps of the Open Website Alliance are underway to promote the rights of open-source projects and strive to create a better web.
Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.
Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
You’ll find updates from February 5th to 11th, 2024.
Drupal, Joomla, Typo3, and WordPress have joined forces once again for a common cause: the creation of the Open Website Alliance. This is “once again” because they previously united in response to the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) which could impact open-source developments.
The Open Website Alliance aims to facilitate collaboration among open-source content management projects to promote education and advocacy for the benefits and principles of open source.
The members seek to promote the rights of open-source projects and aspire to create a better web, encouraging the choice of open-source software over proprietary systems and sharing best practices to improve public perception, reliability, quality, and security of open-source software and communities.
Furthermore, the alliance is accompanied by the “Open Web Manifesto,” which declares the alliance’s commitment to an open web, seen as a digital public good based on freedom, decentralization, inclusion, participation, and empowerment.
It also emphasizes that the open web should be non-proprietary, protect personal data, allow fair competition, be resilient, and earn people’s trust through innovation, technology, and integrity.
The importance of community and diversity in finding solutions and opportunities for innovation is highlighted, ensuring independence and inclusion.
Speaking of organizations, the WordPress Foundation has presented a summary of 2023. New programs supporting hackathons and open-source education worldwide were introduced.
Meetup have been established in 748 groups that have offered 3,869 events. As for WordCamp, 76 were held, with nearly 25,000 attendees.
By the way, Mac users who create ZIP files of their plugins or themes, be aware that uploading them to WordPress will not work until WordPress 6.5 or 6.4.4 is released. Until then, it’s necessary to use a tool to generate those ZIP files, as the native system on the operating system is not compatible and will show an “Incompatible File” message.
WordPress 6.5 is on the horizon, starting with the first beta version on February 13th, and the Core team is already revealing some details to be included in the editor.
In the List View, we will have quick access to block settings. In the Content Editor, we can activate an option for template preview if we want; this way, we’ll see not just the content, but how it fits directly on the entire public page.
All patterns, when duplicated, will allow the option to be synchronized to be activated or deactivated, including those that come with the themes, which were locked.
Another announced change is in the revisions section, but now when changes are made to global styles, we’ll see a summary of all the elements it will affect.
The preferences panel will separate Accessibility elements into a distinct tab.
Another change being worked on is the new Media Library, which will have a look more similar to that of the Editor. In this version, different types of content will be separated, allowing for a specific editing system for images or videos, in addition to enabling extensibility with plugins or the ability to organize content by folders.
However, these are not the only possible changes coming. With the release of the Gutenberg 17.7 release candidate, the latest changes that could be included have been defined.
The first novelty is the introduction of the Block Bindings API, which will basically change the way blocks are extended, as it will allow the management of a block’s content dynamically, bringing in content from elsewhere, like a Custom Field.
Another novelty, already known but without a confirmed release date, is the introduction of Plugin Dependencies, which allows adding a list of plugins on which another depends. The simplest example is an e-commerce payment gateway requiring that e-commerce plugin to function.
The list of more technical novelties continues, with the definition of Inner Blocks, improvements in the WordPress Playground, greater support for the HTML API, the Font Library, the Interactivity API, and the Blocks Hooks API, or the expansion of patterns with new categories like audio, gallery, media, and videos.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
On the Developer Blog, a post has been released about visual support for grids, that system of creating a grid and organizing elements internally.
The first version was included in Gutenberg 15.5 and arrived in WordPress 6.3.
In the experimental section of the Gutenberg plugin, many more options are added than those already included, allowing for the inclusion of variations.
The developers of WP-CLI have released version 2.10.0.
Among the new features, we can highlight the creation of PHP translation files, the possibility of updating themes to minor versions, or adding or removing several user roles at once.
In the case of Multisite, it’s possible to list the sites a user belongs to.
All this is just a small sample of the 233 changes applied since the last version.
The Polyglots team is preparing for the launch of GlotPress 4.0, the new version of the WordPress translation plugin, which helps translate the core, plugins, and themes, among other things.
In addition to improving code quality and modernizing it, many details have been added. Some highlighted elements include support for translating strings coming from JavaScript, emphasizing the use of plurals, and the possibility of having plugin previews.
If all goes well, the final version will be available on March 7th, during the Contributor Day of WordCamp Asia.
The Openverse team continues to work on upcoming features. Among the ongoing projects are better search result relevance, more search views, and continuing to improve sensitive content filters.
The Support team has implemented a change in the documentation regarding guidelines for allowing reviews of commercial plugins and themes on WordPress.org, specifying that they should focus on user-oriented functionality or features. Reviews that are payment disputes or attempts to get support will be archived, clarifying that such issues should be handled privately.
Also, improvements proposed for 2024 by the team include documenting current work, better understanding the tasks performed and workload, and sustainably expanding the team.
There’s a suggestion to improve the onboarding process, introduce mentoring opportunities, and foster a community among forum contributors.
These initiatives aim to reduce team burnout and ensure long-term sustainability.
The 2023 Community Survey on Meetup has revealed common challenges, such as a lack of free venues and community information.
For 2024, actions such as collaborating with the Marketing and Training teams to increase visibility and improve training for local Meetup leaders are suggested.
There’s also a plan to improve the Community Team’s documentation and create mentoring programs for speakers and event organizers.
The Photos team has surpassed 13,000 photos and is now considering better management of image alt texts.
The focus is on the importance of providing accurate and accessible alternative text descriptions for images in the Directory, especially for those using screen readers.
Therefore, it’s advised to avoid descriptions that express feelings or are narrative and instead provide concrete and visible details in the image, considering the object, action, and setting.
And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the WordPress Podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information at WordPress Podcast .org or follow the content in Catalan, English, and French.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
Tue, 13 Feb 2024 - 12min - 18 - PHP Preloading
A proposal has been made to preload parts of the WordPress core to optimize its speed and functionality, thereby enhancing the performance of all websites.
Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.
Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
You’ll find updates from January 29th to February 4th, 2024.
It’s been 8 years since a ticket was first submitted proposing the preloading of certain PHP parts of WordPress. Now, a new proposal has been developed over the past few months.
This new implementation aims to improve performance by reducing load times and memory usage by only loading the necessary files, which is essentially the goal of this preloading system.
The approach has been kept simple, focusing only on core classes and, for now, excluding an API for plugins or themes, or the use of Composer, though it’s not ruled out that these could be incorporated in the future.
This modernization represents a significant step in optimizing WordPress and offers benefits for both core developers and the overall performance of websites.
With WordPress 6.4.3, we have a maintenance and security update that includes 5 bug fixes in the core, 16 fixes in the block editor, and 2 minor security updates.
It’s recommended to update sites immediately, and the update is also available for earlier versions starting from 4.1.
Another update is Gutenberg 17.6, notable for allowing block developers to control which blocks can be included within their own.
A major change will be the unification of features found in both editors. For example, in page editing, we’ll see that all the functionalities available in the Content Editor will also be available in the Site Editor, allowing work with all options in both places.
The Core team has introduced new requirements for commit messages in Git, focusing on ensuring that all contributors receive proper recognition.
This includes a specific format using “Co-authored-by” to credit collaborators without needing their personal emails.
Additionally, a tool called “Props Bot” has been launched on GitHub to automate the compilation of contributor lists in pull requests, thus promoting more efficient and comprehensive recognition of all forms of contribution to the project.
Furthermore, a proposal has been made to evolve the WordPress outreach program six months after transitioning from version 6.4.
The suggestion is to rename the Slack channel #fse-outreach-experiment to #outreach, encompassing more than Full Site Editing and moving beyond an experimental phase, to discuss future functionalities, facilitate contributions, and connect WordPress site creators with core developers.
The Performance team remains focused on their main projects. One, likely to be included in WordPress 6.5, aims to optimize the reading of translation files, significantly reducing load times for non-American English sites. In tests on WordPress.org, load times were reduced by 20%.
The Developer Blog has posted an article on different ways to hide blocks. The simplest method is to disable them from the panel, but what if you’re an agency looking to disable some blocks in the content editor, but not in the site editor? Yes, you can create a small plugin that hides these blocks for your clients using PHP or JavaScript.
But it’s not just about hiding blocks… if you’re creating a block theme and want to offer users a few patterns to ease their work, the post on adding patterns to block themes provides an easy and quick way to do so.
The Hosting team has outlined its goals for 2024, focusing heavily on improving testing tools for future WordPress versions across all possible providers. Several Office Hours sessions have been scheduled in February to enhance these tools at the Cloudfest Hackathon.
The Design team has proposed some improvements, such as lightbox options, where you can choose which images can be expanded.
Another change will be seen in the Cover block, which will allow aspect ratios, and the top toolbar, which will improve which elements are displayed, especially on smaller screens.
The Marketing team has announced that the WordPress Foundation has been approved to receive a Google Ads grant aimed at increasing awareness and coverage of the foundation and its mission-related topics.
The campaign, launching in March 2024, will focus on creating text ads to promote the Foundation’s mission, scholarship programs, WordCamp events, open-source software, and educational materials.
The campaign’s success will be measured through performance indicators and the potential increase in donations to the Foundation.
The Community team has evaluated the “Next-Generation WordPress Events” pilot project, initiated in May 2023, with the goal of testing event formats beyond the usual WordCamp and Meetup.
Following positive results, it’s suggested to permanently include a wider variety of more creative formats in WordPress events.
These events should be replicable, appealing, sustainable, and scalable, and plans are underway to launch new tools and guides to support this initiative.
Finally, this podcast is distributed under the EUPL license. For more information and links, please visit WordPress Podcast .org or follow the content, also, in Catalan, Spanish, and French.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
Tue, 06 Feb 2024 - 08min - 17 - Testing GatherPress
The WordPress Community should have full control of event data, something that doesn’t happen with Meetups.
Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.
Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
You’ll find updates from January 22nd to 28th, 2024.
Currently, we all depend on Meetup.com as the platform for WordPress Community Meetup events. But the cost to the Community exceeds $200,000 annually to maintain this service, which is extremely expensive for what it offers.
That’s why, back in 2019, a group of contributors decided to start thinking about GatherPress, a WordPress plugin that allows for the creation and management of events, as well as venues and seat reservations.
The plugin is now in a functional phase, and there is a proposal to launch a pilot project in which various local communities will use it to improve and start considering it as a major platform that unifies all users directly from WordPress.org.
Pros and cons? On the one hand, the data will be in the hands of the Community and not private companies, the tool’s improvement will depend on the Community and not external parties, and the project will be open source, allowing for improvements and reviews from all over. However, on the other hand, it will be almost like starting from scratch, because everything will depend on the Community itself to publicize the events.
Additionally, the current cost of Meetup.com can be redirected to events, rather than an external company to WordPress.
Half a year has passed since the Community Summit, and based on all the feedback from various meetings, a list of recommendations has been presented to improve Five for the Future, the project within WordPress that encourages companies to get involved with WordPress in some way.
Among the proposals, we have improving tools for new contributors’ arrival, as well as better communication among those who decide to get involved with a team.
Another facilitation is the way companies that provide sponsorship do so by tasks or projects, or even sponsor specific individuals for a certain time, for example, during the launch of a new WordPress version.
We now have a future version of WordPress at hand: WordPress 6.4.3 candidate 1, which fixes 5 core elements and 16 from the editor.
The final version is scheduled for Tuesday, January 30th.
The Core team has announced that one of the major updates of WordPress 6.5 will be the revision system, mainly due to the significant change it represents. Tests can already be seen in WordPress 6.4.2 with Gutenberg 17.5.1.
The update, in addition to offering a new design, provides a more granular system of information and a summary of changes, making it not solely dependent on a visual review.
Changes will be paginated, and changes in the Style Book are also included.
On the Developers’ blog, a post was published explaining how to improve templates related to attachments.
Generally, these pages display an image or video with default elements, with little to say.
The post suggests, for example, improving the image size and including the EXIF data of the photograph, something we probably wouldn’t find where it’s likely to be displayed.
The Themes team has received a request from major theme authors to allow the submission of more than one theme for review at a time.
Among some opinions is that authors who usually send themes that require little or no review, basically because they do it well, should be allowed this possibility. Even so, it wouldn’t be allowed for an author to send a hundred themes, but it could be limited to having 2 or 3 pending themes at most.
In any case, for now, the decision on this change has been left in the hands of the team representatives, although, considering the approval time is quite fast, even for block themes it’s almost hours, it seems the strategy won’t change.
The Training team aims to launch the Learning Pathways project by July 2024, in which community content creators help learn something specific within the WordPress ecosystem.
However, it seems that due to a lack of collaborators, this project will be delayed, forcing a prioritization of the proposal, focusing on identifying the minimum necessary elements to start, and then expanding them. A proposal to improve the arrival of new contributors will also be launched.
The Community team has organized an online presentation for February 8th, where they will present some tips related to budgets for a WordPress event. How much money do I need? What’s normal?
Finally, this podcast is distributed under the EUPL license. For more information and links, please visit WordPress Podcast .org or follow the content, also, in Catalan, Spanish, and French.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
Tue, 30 Jan 2024 - 07min - 16 - 2024 Goals
What’s in store with WordPress in 2024? The project’s main goals have been defined, and the challenges are also known.
Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.
Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
You’ll find updates from January 15th to 21st, 2024.
2024 has already begun, the holidays are over, and now that everyone is back to work, it’s time to define what the year holds for us.
At the forefront, as anticipated, is Phase 3 of Gutenberg, focusing on comprehensive revision systems and collaborative management. Launch, test, and improve are central to the content management system’s core.
Another major project is Data Liberation, aiming to facilitate the migration of information and data between platforms, either manually or automatically, with guides for all possible systems.
It’s important to note that WordPress’s growth has plateaued. Although it remains by far the most used content management system in the world, its growth has stalled.
In the Community aspect, the main goals include getting more volunteers involved through the Mentorship Program, education through Learn WordPress, and in-person events, with a new generation strategy where events will be more focused.
Apart from these general lines, each of the more than 20 teams has their own projects, equally vital for the proper functioning of both the software and the community.
And what better way to achieve these objectives than launching a new version of WordPress? The WordPress 6.5 release team is already formed, and we’ll have the first beta version on February 13.
Some of the features coming with the new version will include those from Gutenberg 17.5, such as the experiment to unify the Content Editor with the Site Editor, allowing almost everything to be designed or saved from a single screen.
But before WordPress 6.5, we’ll see WordPress 6.4.3, coming on January 30, focusing on minor improvements and, for the first time outside a major release, new versions of the Twenty Seventeen, Twenty Twenty, and Twenty Twenty-One themes, mainly aimed at modernizing and making the code compatible.
The Hosting team has launched their 2024 goals, focusing essentially on three elements. Firstly, continuing with advanced documentation of WordPress and completing the reorganization of their handbook, secondly, a potential event before WordCamp Europe, and finally, improving testing tools for hosting providers, which will join the project selected at the Cloudfest hackathon.
The BuddyPress team has released a security and maintenance update, where BuddyPress 12.1.1 fixes a security issue and includes 10 plugin improvements.
Finally, this podcast is distributed under the EUPL license. For more information and links, please visit WordPress Podcast .org or follow the content, also, in Catalan, Spanish, and French.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
Tue, 23 Jan 2024 - 04min - 15 - New Edition of the Mentorship Program
The second edition of the WordPress Community Mentorship Program is starting, featuring some new developments and, above all, many more participants.
Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.
Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
You’ll find updates from January 8th to 14th, 2024.
At the beginning of 2023, a pilot program was launched in the WordPress Community focused on mentoring people to improve their entry into the Community and, subsequently, their involvement and continuity.
The Mentorship Program started small, with just a few mentors and a few mentees, not even reaching twenty. And it must be said, it was an absolute success. Many of those who participated, both as mentors and mentees, are continuing, and there’s even a possibility that these students will now become potential mentors.
The Mentorship Program is, as its name suggests, a way for people who already have significant experience with WordPress in general, or in a specific area, to help train new people, both those with no knowledge who want to volunteer, and those who have dipped their toes in but aren’t quite sure what the next step is or how to get more involved.
And now, this second edition is starting, coinciding with the launch of WordPress 6.5.
Who can apply? Both mentors and mentees, because this time the selection is expanded.
If you already contribute to the project, want to learn, and improve in a specific area, or if you’ve never contributed and want to, you just need to have a WordPress.org account and some activity, easily achievable by taking a course, translating, or uploading a photograph. If you meet these minimum requirements, you can fill out the form and apply.
Although the project is planned entirely in English, it’s likely that for some languages there will be mentors who can guide you. In any case, language should not be a blocking element.
If you want to be part of the mentoring staff, you can do that too. If you’re an active contributor, have been around for some time, and can spare one or two hours a week to help someone enter the Community, now is your chance! Even if you don’t want to be in the general system, but have a specific project for those weeks, you can also get involved.
Although there is already a large group of people who are part of the mentoring staff, you can apply to be a mentor in this new edition by filling out the form.
The forms open on January 12th and will be available until February 7th. The program will start running on February 19th and will be active until March 29th.
But that’s not the only news. Announced at the State of the Word, but now officially, is the Data Liberation project.
The idea behind this project is that WordPress should be able to import and export its data from and to practically any platform. Yes, we already had the WordPress Importer and the WordPress data export format.
Each of these guides will have its own space with its software, documentation, GitHub repository, and forums, and a review and approval will be done quickly, within a matter of hours.
Affecting Phase 3 of Gutenberg is the real-time collaboration within the Editor. For this, top-level agencies have been contacted, although the response has been quite limited.
Among other things, it was noted that collaboration is not currently a focus for large companies, which doesn’t mean it isn’t for others, and it’s suggested that in general, it’s something that will happen outside of WordPress.
What does require much more work are the revisions, which need a lot of improvement, mainly to function smoothly in Phase 4.
The Performance team is already working on integrating, possibly for WordPress 6.5, the translation cache system and the possibility of supporting the AVIF format, probably first with an external module or plugin.
The Test team has opened the possibility of starting to review WordPress 6.5, before the launch of the first beta version.
There are four elements to focus on:
Data Views in the Site Editor Pattern Overrides More robust revisions And the Font LibraryThe Accessibility team is already in motion with the new features coming in WordPress 6.5, such as Data Views, the Font Library, the Command Palette, Navigation, or Patterns. Most of these come from the high priority of the latest versions of Gutenberg.
The Marketing team has opened a proposal for a review procedure for WordPress sites featured in the Showcase.
The current review process is quite manual, and nearly half of the sites that arrive must be discarded due to basic errors, like simply not loading, having no content, or not being WordPress sites, in addition to defects like low image quality or an excess of ads.
The rest are passed to a sheet for review and approval, and this procedure that must continue is the one proposed for better review.
The Community team has announced the five new global gold-level sponsors for 2024, including Automattic, Bluehost, GoDaddy, Woo, and WPBeginner.
Meanwhile, BuddyPress continues advancing its work and preparing a minor version to correct some errors, although its focus is already set on the next version, which will be 14. This version will be for WordPress 6.1 and above, focusing on maximum compatibility with block themes and creating more functionalities in plugin mode.
Finally, WordCamp US is on the agenda with a major update: it will have two days of Contributor Day.
Thus, in Portland, Oregon, September 17th and 18th will be Contributor Days, and September 19th and 20th will be the program days.
Finally, this podcast is distributed under the EUPL license. For more information and links, please visit WordPress Podcast .org or follow the content, also, in Catalan, Spanish, and French.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
Tue, 16 Jan 2024 - 08min - 14 - Gutenberg 17.4
Some things like the year change, but the releases of the Gutenberg plugin continue at their relentless pace.
Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.
Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
You’ll find updates from January 1st to 7th, 2024.
One thing that, at least for now, doesn’t change, even though the year has, is the release of new versions of Gutenberg. And in this case, it’s Gutenberg 17.4 that brings us the updates.
In addition to dozens of improvements, we can highlight some interesting ones for the next version of the Editor, such as the Data View, which now includes the list of Templates and has removed the experimental tag.
Another significant enhancement for Phase 3 is the integration and pagination of revisions in the Style Book, which now includes all changes, whether the change is applied, and who and when made it.
Another feature that some were missing is the ability to have more control over the background images of blocks, now with size and repetition controls.
The List View, improving with each version, will now have a configuration menu accessible with the right-click of the mouse.
And, for those who have activated appearance tools in classic themes, support has been expanded to manage the palette and Duotone.
Some languages in the WordPress translations are duplicated.
In the list, we find languages such as Catalan, Dutch, English, French, German, Portuguese, or Serbian.
In each of the duplicated languages, mainly due to the presence of the same variant as both a variant and a separate language, or containing a formal and default version, the decision has been made to, in each case, hide some of these languages from the consistency tool lists.
Finally, this podcast is distributed under the EUPL license. For more information and links, please visit WordPress Podcast .org or follow the content, also, in Catalan, Spanish, and French.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
Tue, 09 Jan 2024 - 03min - 13 - Opening 2024
2023 has ended, and 2024 is here, bringing calm but also updates on what we’ll see in the upcoming WordPress versions.
Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.
Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
You’ll find updates from December 25th to 31st, 2023.
The quietest week of the year has come to an end, as the close of the year is traditionally a time of rest in the Community.
However, this hasn’t stopped some teams from doing some work and publishing summaries of what 2023 has brought and what’s coming in 2024.
One team doing a retrospective is the Openverse team, the multimedia search engine of WordPress. They’ve focused on unifying all subprojects into one and launching Openverse.org, their main site, in addition to providing more analytics information and improving security measures in contents, particularly regarding sensitive content.
This effort involved 25 contributors, over 1500 tickets, the addition of 7 new content providers, surpassing 750 million images and 3 million audios.
What can we expect in 2024? Mainly, improvements in user experience and quality of results, with a daily expansion of data sources.
Another team summarizing their year is the Themes team, which has added over 1400 new themes, 300 of which are block themes, all thanks to the collaboration of 15 theme reviewers.
But the most visible changes in WordPress will be in the editor, especially in the Site Editor, where most work was focused in 2023.
To start, we have the Command Palette, which allows us to move more easily, and with fewer clicks, through the various editing screens.
Another new feature is the Style Book, where you can see an example of all the blocks and how they look, as well as make general or specific modifications to perfect your site.
A hidden gem is the style shortcuts. Not only can we copy and paste blocks from one content to another, from one WordPress to another, but we can also copy the style to keep it exact.
And for those who don’t want menus or distractions, the Distraction-Free Mode arrives, leaving the editor in full-screen mode, hiding menus and tools so you can work as if you were on the front end of your site.
Two tools that have evolved a lot in the past 12 months are Patterns, which have become a basic system for quickly creating sites, and the List View, which helps clarify the organization of each block in that place.
However, undoubtedly, if there is something that will be representative of 2024, it is the continuation of the Mentorship Project, coming with its second edition.
It will be the first major project of the year, as calls for mentors and students will begin on January 8th, and they will be announced on February 14th.
The program will last between 4 and 6 weeks, running parallel to WordPress 6.5, meaning those who want to participate should reserve from February 19th to March 29th.
Another approach we might see in this second edition is Projects.
The goal of this system, applied in other open-source projects, is to train a student with a specific goal or project to focus on and learn from. A couple of proposed examples are the creation of community themes or creating courses, among several people, for Learn WordPress.
These projects should be short in duration, about 4 weeks, mentorable, and with a general benefit to the Community. And as it’s for students, it should be relatively simple.
2024 begins, accompanied by a proposal for those participating in the Community who want to explain it, and for those looking to join the Community and seeking a goal to do so.
Finally, this podcast is distributed under the EUPL license. For more information and links, please visit WordPress Podcast .org or follow the content, also, in Catalan, Spanish, and French.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
Tue, 02 Jan 2024 - 06min - 12 - Closing 2023
The last week of 2023 is approaching, and summaries of how the year went and goals for 2024 are being prepared.
Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.
Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
You’ll find updates from December 18 to 24, 2023.
2023 is coming to an end, and it’s time to look back at everything that has happened over the year and celebrate what has been achieved in the WordPress Community.
This year, 304 new contributors have been added to the core of WordPress, across the 3 major versions, 6.2, 6.3, and 6.4, and 6 minor versions.
Phase 2 of Gutenberg has ended, and Phase 3 has begun, enhanced with significant performance improvements both in the editor and on the front end.
Support for PHP 5.6 has been dropped, and PHP 8.0 and 8.1 have been moved out of beta, in addition to adding a bunch of new APIs: HTML, Interactivity, Lightbox, Custom Fields, Layout, Block Bindings, and improvements in block synchronization.
The Plugins team has been completely reformed, optimizing processes and plugin reviews, along with launching the Plugin Checker plugin.
The Themes team focused on improving documentation for block themes and on the Create Block Theme plugin.
The Meta team finalized the redesign of different parts of the website, which will continue throughout 2024; included two-factor authentication in the system, and supported many improvements to the directories of plugins, themes, events, and the creation of various microsites.
Many of these changes were carried out by the Design team, which supported designs for WordPress 6.3, WordPress network sites, and block themes.
The Community team supported 70 WordCamp, with over 25,000 tickets sold, reactivated 268 Meetup groups; held the Community Summit after several years, and conducted more than 10 youth-focused events.
The Training team launched its new onboarding system and mentorship program, as well as improved the contribution ladder. Most notably, 104 new contents and 258 online workshops were created, along with new learning pathways.
The Marketing team achieved over 7.5 million views of WordPress videos, published over 3,000 contents on 8 platforms with a growth of 100,000 users, the From Blogs to Blocks twentieth-anniversary campaign, and tools for contribution and collaboration.
The Polyglots team launched Translate Live thanks to Playground, aiding in online translation, alongside the Tour Plugin for the various P2s.
Playground has been one of the most advanced components since its participation in the Cloudfest Hackathon, with over 60,000 users who have used it for plugin previews, block demonstrations, online translations, previewing future changes, or even creating a plugin from scratch.
The Openverse team finally launched openverse.org, added new security filters, surpassed 3 million audios and 700 million images, and won the OEG Open Infrastructure Award.
The Five for the Future project concluded with 45% more companies and 25% more confirmed contributors.
Additionally, the Mentorship Program was launched with 11 graduates and an 89% course completion rate.
And, the Developer Blog was launched, where advanced technical content for WordPress developers is published.
And while this may seem like a lot, there is even more from many teams that have been working quietly, gradually affecting the different projects and versions of WordPress throughout 2023.
But that’s what has happened throughout 2023… and this last week has also seen some developments.
Looking ahead to 2024, there are updates in the Core team and the launch of future versions.
For starters, the launch team for WordPress 6.5 is being prepared, and as seen in previous editions, a shadowing process in the teams of this version is proposed for more active participation in subsequent versions. This new version will be led by Héctor Prieto.
This means that the versions to be released later, i.e., WordPress 6.6 and 6.7, are already being prepared.
For the first, 6.6, beta 1 is estimated to be on June 4th, with the launch on July 16th.
For the second, 6.7, beta 1 is planned for October 1st, and the launch for November 12th, delayed from the initial idea to give some breathing room around WordCamp US in September 2024.
And about of the updates, Gutenberg 17.3 has also arrived as the last version of the year, including some interesting features for Phase 3.
For starters, the revision history now has a very different and more visual appearance, including a small summary of the changes, who made them, and other elements that will facilitate collaborative work.
Improvements have also been made to the preferences panel, and Gravatar has been integrated as one of the social sites.
The Performance team has released a summary of improvements in Core Web Vitals compared to the previous year, going from 28% to 36% on mobile devices, and from 32% to 40% on desktop, meaning an overall improvement of 8% across all devices.
As a general fact, of the 5.35% global improvement on mobile, 1.67% is thanks to WordPress. In the case of desktop, of the 6.26% global improvement, 0.97% is thanks to WordPress.
The Developer Blog published a post on extending plugins through SlotFills, which help integrate with the Content Editor and Site Editor, adding and modifying features.
One of the examples integrated is the possibility of adding native premium features in the editor, or extending the Query Loop system.
The Polyglots team continues to improve GlotPress, and in this case, they have reduced the tabs in the side menu.
The Meta and Discussion tabs will remain as they are, but the History, Other Locales, and Translation Memory tabs will merge into a single tab called Others, which will include the contents of all those elements.
The Community team is preparing the second edition of the Mentorship Program, which will open the call for mentors and students from January 8th and would run from February 19th to March 29th, once WordPress 6.5 is launched.
A novelty being considered is participation in specific projects, in addition to general knowledge, with specific objectives for some teams.
The first week of BuddyPress 12 has seen more than 30,000 downloads on its first day, with this new version already accounting for 25% of active installations and over 2,000 installations of BuddyPress Classic, the backward compatibility plugin.
Following the launch, some corrections for the future have been identified, and the presented agenda for the launch has been validated, although some improvements are being considered, such as a more detailed testing plan.
Finally, this podcast is distributed under the EUPL license. For more information and links, please visit WordPress Podcast .org or follow the content, also, in Catalan, Spanish, and French.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
Tue, 26 Dec 2023 - 11min - 11 - State of the Word 2023
The week’s highlight was the State of the Word, internationally hosted for the first time, and it took place in Madrid, Spain.
Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.
Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
You’ll find updates from December 11 to 17, 2023.
Last Monday, the WordPress Community gathered to attend the State of the Word 2023, held outside the United States for the first time, with Spain as its first global location.
Matt Mullenweg started by reviewing 2023, with WordPress’s twentieth anniversary as a spearhead, how WordPress played a part in Taylor Swift’s announcement as Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, with 100,000 requests per second at its peak, and a review of the return to normalcy for Meetup and WordCamp in terms of events, a look at WordPress.org’s design and Playground improvements, finishing with a review of the always anticipated new theme: Twenty Twenty-Four.
Then, Matías Ventura took the reins, showcasing some of the major improvements in the Block Editor and what’s being prepared with Gutenberg, mainly focusing on Phase 3, so, collaborative editing. There was also emphasis on changes to WordPress’s admin panel design, aiming for a more modern format.
The Interactivity API and the Fields API, planned for WordPress 6.5, were two of the most highlighted elements of what WordPress will allow in the future, and how WordPress and Editor performance are being considered in each step.
Another standout project was Data Liberation, a novelty of the event, making data migration much easier both from and to WordPress from other content management systems.
One of the last announcements was WordCamp US 2024, which will be in Portland, Oregon, in mid-September.
Before the event’s conclusion, a questions and answers session began, also available on the project’s website.
The State of the Word revealed two major surprises for the Community.
The first was the pause of the Slack to Matrix migration project, announced just a couple of weeks earlier.
There are two main reasons. One, already known and under improvement, is the accessibility of the tools, something Slack has worked on extensively, but not Element.
The other, perhaps more important, is Matrix’s unilateral change of its license to AGPL and the signing of a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) to contribute to the project.
The second surprise, which caused quite a stir, was the use of global Slack to host channels for local communities.
The process is still unclear, but it’s a first step toward centralizing the entire community in one place under the umbrella of a single tool and access system.
But these aren’t the only announcements we’ve had this week… after several months of work, the new WordPress events page at events.wordpress.org has been announced.
Another site undergoing improvements is the Developer Documentation page, which also receives a facelift, making documentation navigation much easier with clearer typography and improved navigation menus.
Regarding translations, we also have improvements.
The first is the real-time preview of patterns while translating, allowing for checking all texts in their final version.
The other is the prioritization of related languages, displaying translations in a more orderly manner based on format and semantics rather than alphabetical order, taking approved strings from other languages as examples.
The Themes team has defined a set of rules for the landing and configuration screens of block themes.
All notification messages must be made through admin_notices.
Themes can add sub-menus in the Appearance tab, using WordPress’s standard design and corresponding functions. This also applies to data storage methods.
And three important elements are not allowed: importing demo content, external calls, or tracking affiliate links.
The Openverse search engine has included improvements in the filter for sensitive content, such as automatically excluding sensitive text within multimedia.
And finally, BuddyPress 12.0.0 “Nonno”, named after the famous Parisian pizzeria and after a year of work, launches this version of WordPress’s social networking plugin, complete with corresponding documentation and a backward compatibility plugin. This version becomes one of the most significant in its existence.
The Rewrites API resolves a ticket that had been pending for 10 years, allowing the generation of custom URLs.
It also includes a “members-only” option to create 100% private communities.
Among the new features, we also find Nouveau, the built-in theme compatible with Twenty Twenty-Four, a 100% block theme that allows you to build your own social network using only blocks.
And updates on global events.
On one hand, WordCamp Asia is going to open invitations for Contributor Day, which will be limited to 450 attendees.
On the other, WordCamp Europe has extended the deadline for speaker applications until January 15th, and has started the call for the city that will host WordCamp in 2025.
Finally, this podcast is distributed under the EUPL license. For more information and links, please visit WordPress Podcast .org or follow the content, also, in Catalan, Spanish, and French.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
Tue, 19 Dec 2023 - 08min - 10 - WordPress 6.5 Roadmap
The initial steps towards the release of WordPress 6.5 are underway, along with the major updates it will incorporate.
Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.
Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
You’ll find updates from December 4 to 10, 2023.
Starting with WordPress 6.4.2, a security and maintenance update of WordPress that primarily fixes a potential vulnerability and mainly affects the combination of plugins and WordPress Multisite. This update only applies to WordPress 6.4, not to previous versions.
Regarding the release of WordPress 6.4, we now have a retrospective summary, highlighting suggestions for future versions, such as maintaining the community’s wish list, forming launch teams during the previous cycle for better coordination, and posting blog updates for each new feature or major change.
It’s also proposed to add minor releases between major ones, focusing equally on fixing old bugs and on new features, and dedicating Core sessions to testing releases.
Participants expressed that following the development cycle as new contributors is challenging. WordPress contributor mentorship programs are planned to coincide with major releases, providing documentation and support. The shorter development cycle felt rushed for feature development and testing, hence an extended roadmap for 2024 is proposed.
Looking ahead, Gutenberg 17.2 has already landed, bringing some interesting features, like the ability to drag an entire block or template into the document header or footer, or an improvement in the toolbar appearance in distraction-free mode.
And watch out for emails, because, as always in the computers’ world, when a tool becomes popular, cyber scams begin. In this case, it’s happening with emails supposedly coming from the WordPress security team.
Remember that all messages sent should be digitally signed, and you can find all the messages on the WordPress team blogs.
But without a doubt, the most interesting announcement is the WordPress 6.5 roadmap, with the release planned for March 26, 2024.
What can we expect from this new version? The list is not short:
Complete typography management from the Font Library. Support in classic themes for Appearance Tools. A much more detailed and visual Change History, including template and template part revisions. The Interactivity API. The Custom Field API. PHP compatibility will be a major issue. And Rollback for plugins and themes will help in case of update errors.The Core team has announced that the minimum MySQL version will move from 5.0 to 5.5 with the arrival of WordPress 6.5.
But that’s not the only announcement. A proposal that has been discussed since the launch of the Twenty Twenty-Four theme is to create a working team for the default WordPress themes.
Maintaining all the themes, from Twenty Ten to Twenty Twenty-Four, requires a lot of time, dedication, and compatibility to work with all WordPress versions. There are more than 400 tickets related to the themes, with small or significant improvements that can’t be carried out due to the focus on advancing WordPress’s own development.
On the Developers Blog, a tutorial has been published explaining how to create a block theme from scratch, similar to how it was done with Underscores for classic themes.
The Create Block Theme plugin is based on the same principle, and it is frequently updated to include new WordPress and Gutenberg functionalities.
Thanks to this, without coding knowledge, you can clone a theme, add styles, rewrite global styles, or create a child or empty theme.
The Design team has presented some proposals, like improving image dragging into the Editor; this was already possible, but now it allows dragging to a specific part of a block, adding images within the header as an icon, for example.
Another change is in the lightboxes, which could allow for captions; improvement of social icons; simplification of the navigation menu and breadcrumbs; or establishing a single button size in the toolbar.
A change already in progress is the listing of data, for example, posts, pages, or media, which is worked on in grid mode and not list, focusing on the highlighted visual element.
The Meta team has announced the possibility of activating Plugin previews from the Advanced Panel and using the blueprint.json file.
The Training Team has announced the start of using YouTube as a video provider instead of WordPress TV, although the videos will be on both platforms.
This will allow videos to be embedded directly from YouTube, enabling better video accessibility, automatic subtitles, better analytics data, and possibly greater visibility of training courses.
It seems that BuddyPress will finally launch version 12 on December 11, a week later than planned, to finish some details related to compatibility with Twenty Twenty-Four and a bug detected in the Activity system.
And the call for speakers for WordCamp Europe 2024 is now open. With 45-minute long talks, 10-minute flash talks, or 1-hour workshops, and on virtually any topic, anyone can apply and has time until the end of 2023, because the deadline is December 31.
Finally, this podcast is distributed under the EUPL license. For more information and links, please visit WordPress Podcast .org or follow the content, also, in Catalan, Spanish, and French.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
Tue, 12 Dec 2023 - 08min - 9 - Matrix, the New WordPress Chat
The WordPress Community welcomes a new instant messaging technology, Matrix, now available to all WordPress.org members.
Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.
Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
You’ll find updates from November 27 to December 3, 2023.
Ask anyone in the WordPress Community about the WordPress chat platform, and the resounding answer will be one: Slack.
Until now.
For some time, more visible in recent weeks, work had begun on a tool to migrate all public Slack messages to Matrix, a task now completed.
This isn’t the first time a platform switch has occurred; the first major change was in 2014, moving from IRC to Slack.
But what is Matrix?
Matrix is a real-time communication protocol and an open standard. It’s used for online chatting, voice over IP, and video telephony.
Technically, Matrix is an application layer protocol that uses HTTP APIs to distribute and persist messages in JSON format across an open federation of servers. It can also integrate with standard web services via WebRTC, facilitating browser-to-browser applications.
While Matrix is a protocol, the most well-known tool is Element, its software available for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, and Web. Visually, we can say it resembles Slack.
It makes a lot of sense for an open-source tool like WordPress to consider using a protocol like Matrix, but why Matrix?
The reason is simple. Automattic, the company of Matt Mullenweg, co-creator of WordPress, invested 4.6 million US dollars in New Vector (now Element) in May 2020.
Is this technology already usable? Yes, and in different ways.
The simplest way to start testing is to use the web chats created for each Make team.
The other option is to use any of the Matrix applications, specifying community.wordpress.org as the connection server. This will lead you to connect your WordPress user account, and from there, you’ll have access to all the chats.
On the Developers Blog, there’s an interesting post about the new Details block and how it can be used and customized, both from a user’s perspective and from developers’, with examples of usage like FAQ or spoiler sections.
The Plugins team has once again opened its call for volunteers.
In recent weeks, the onboarding process for the team has been refined, which will expand in January by three more people.
The tasks include reviewing new plugins that arrive, responding to emails, improving team processes, and developing some tools, like Plugin Check.
The Meta team has enabled a new feature allowing Make P2 sites to create explanatory tours of the site.
This system allows highlighting different parts of the site in a step-by-step model, where each step includes a brief explanation of that element’s usefulness.
Should sponsors be allowed to have a demo room or a track at events? This is the question the Community team has posed for discussion, generating positions for, against, and neutral.
This proposal, for now, seems not to be entirely closed off as a possibility, but it won’t be applied universally and cannot be demanded by sponsors, although the door is left open for events that want to experiment.
And the BuddyPress 12.0 version enters its release candidate phase. Scheduled for final release on December 6, it primarily includes two major changes.
First, we have the Rewrites API, which essentially allows changing all BuddyPress URLs.
The other significant change is the option of having a community only for registered members, keeping all information accessible only to those who can log in.
Finally, this podcast is distributed under the EUPL license. For more information and links, please visit WordPress Podcast .org or follow the content, also, in Catalan, Spanish, and French.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
Tue, 05 Dec 2023 - 06min - 8 - Previewing Plugins, Again
The button to preview a plugin within the plugin directory is making a comeback, but this time it’s in a very different way.
Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.
Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
You’ll find updates from November 20 to 26, 2023.
After the initial attempt to introduce a button for previewing plugins in the directory, it seems that the functionality has finally arrived in a way that will please most people.
The button and functionality are the same, but there are some changes from the previous attempt.
To start with, the new system is double opt-in, meaning it doesn’t appear by default and requires a process on the developer’s part to activate it.
Even in this activation process, dependencies on other themes or plugins can be included.
The system also allows developers to validate functionality before going live, ensuring there are no serious errors.
Additionally, it includes two major features: most PHP extensions are active, and remote requests to external services are allowed.
But that’s not the only news, as we have Gutenberg 17.1, a version very focused on fixing bugs rather than launching new features, though it does have some.
Starting with improvements in accessibility and the fluidity of writing, with changes in the Media and Text block with state changes, Buttons working like the List one, and the List View allows selecting all the blocks with the keyboard shortcut. Plus, the Quote block allows spacing.
The Core team continues to progress with JavaScript Modules support and the use of Maps within the editor.
This work is in line with improving the use of JavaScript throughout the entire project, not just the editor, even affecting the way scripts are enqueued.
On the Developer Blog, we can find an interesting article about the Command Palette API, which arrived in WordPress 6.3.
The post details how to register commands, manage them from a plugin, and provides several code examples.
The Design team has put forward some proposals.
To start, small visual improvements like fixed table headers, or improvements to the URL modal to simplify them.
The styles of Openverse’s audio components have also been enhanced, and work continues on all the possibilities of the Editor’s dropdown menus.
An interesting change is the process by which, when a page is changed to the home page, if it does not include the latest blog entries, the creation of a new page is proposed so that this functionality is not lost.
The Polyglots team has prepared a next step in the localization of WordPress’s general documentation, in this case with the pilot language, Spanish.
Challenges such as the 14 local editions of the language, the way of communication, formal or informal, or gender identity, are posed with the goal of creating a Style Guide, just like the one that already exists in English.
There are still some technical challenges being addressed to make the translations as easy to work with as possible, seeking tools that serve all teams, all local editions, and are compatible with future changes in WordPress itself.
The Meta team has launched a proposal for the new design and format of the resources for developers.
This change will affect all developer.wordpress.org sites.
The Community team’s Mentorship Program is continuing its progress, closing one cycle to open the next.
Following the results of the latest surveys, the most outstanding aspects for participants have been gaining confidence, learning more about Core, understanding the release of a new version, and getting to know all the WordPress teams in general.
This doesn’t mean there aren’t suggestions for the next ones, like shadowing in a Core ticket contribution process, expanding to other languages, having students try different teams with simple contributions, and better connecting students among themselves.
And the second edition is approaching, with no exact dates yet, but it could be between February and April 2024, around the launch of WordPress 6.5.
This leads to the planning phase ending in December. The call for tutors and students will be made at the end of 2023, student selection could be in early February, along with its announcement, and the program would be around February 19 to March 29, with graduation closing around April 12.
Finally, this podcast is distributed under the EUPL license. For more information and links, please visit WordPress Podcast .org or follow the content, also, in Catalan, Spanish, and French.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
Tue, 28 Nov 2023 - 07min - 7 - Twenty Twenty-Four
With WordPress 6.4, the annually prepared theme is included: Twenty Twenty-Four, featuring novelties that set it apart from previous editions.
Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.
Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
You’ll find updates from November 13 to 19, 2023.
The Twenty Twenty-Four theme is the most versatile default WordPress theme to date, included by default in WordPress 6.4.
It’s designed to suit a wide array of websites and users, from entrepreneurs to artists and writers.
Breaking with the tradition of default themes by not focusing on a specific style, it offers a broad collection of over 35 patterns for customizing pages and sections.
It also introduces new design tools, such as background image support in group blocks and vertical text, and optimizes the user experience with smoother navigation and a contemporary aesthetic.
The theme was designed by Beatriz Fialho and developed with the help of more than 120 contributors.
The Core team is already working on the first reviews of WordPress 6.5 alpha and has set the next few weeks, before the end of 2023, to review tickets and errors to leave a stable Alpha version before opening the process of what will come new in this version, which will focus on Editor collaboration.
The Performance team has released a summary of the improvements applied in WordPress 6.4.
Compared to the previous version, WordPress 6.3.2, this version improves server load by 4%.
An important detail is the ongoing work on how performance is measured and what is being measured.
The Hosting team has published their post related to the major version and PHP, that is, the compatibility of PHP with WordPress 6.4.
The final recommendation is that for WordPress 6.4, PHP 8.1 or PHP 8.2 should be used, even with some known documented exceptions, many of which will be worked on in the coming months.
On the other hand, WordPress 6.4 has also been prepared to work error-free with PHP 8.3, which will be released in a matter of days.
Thus, the team’s recommendation for WordPress 6.4 is:
PHP 8.1 or PHP 8.2 MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 10.11and, as always, the latest stable and secure versions of any necessary server plugins.
The Documentation team continues to look for ways to reach the launch of a new major version with all documentation up to date.
On one hand, they are working on improving the system for notifying new tasks, including simple tasks, and on the other hand on how to involve more people in the weeks leading up to the preparation of a new major version so that by the candidate phase everyone is available.
The Training team has completed their internal team training project, which took place during September and October.
Fourteen people participated, six of whom completed the entire course.
Now, after the completion of this course, it’s time to gather information, update the materials, and prepare the next phase.
Another proposal from the team is to move all video courses to YouTube, in addition to keeping them on WordPress.TV. This aims to consolidate training, use the data, and provide a platform without advertising to users.
The Community team has announced the annual Meetup events survey.
In addition to the usual participation questions, some have been included to find ways in which events can grow, both in the number of events and the number of attendees.
The countdown to State of the Word has begun, and on December 11, a group of WordPressers will gather in Madrid, Spain, to attend the annual summary presented by Matt Mullenweg, co-creator of WordPress.
You can apply to participate in the event in person, or mark Monday, December 11 at 15:00 Universal Time in your calendar for the live broadcast.
Finally, this podcast is distributed under the EUPL license. For more information and links, please visit WordPress Podcast .org or follow the content, also, in Spanish, and Catalan.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
Tue, 21 Nov 2023 - 06min - 6 - The Curl Issue
WordPress 6.4.0 is likely the version that has lived the shortest life as a major release following the chaos caused by curl.
Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.
Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
You’ll find updates from November 6 to 12, 2023.
The launch of a major version of any product is always traumatic. Many people will tell you to wait a few days, others to wait for the next update… but this is not the case with WordPress.
For many years, the four weeks prior to the release of a major version have been mainly dedicated to testing, ensuring that everything works correctly. And this time was no exception.
Less than 24 hours after the release of WordPress 6.4.0, some people started noticing connection issues with external sites. It all came down to the functionality of curl, a library that allows you to connect to other sites and is essential in WordPress for, for example, checking for updates or downloading external elements.
Why did WordPress fail? Due to outdated versions that some hosting companies have because of the lack of updates and maintenance of their infrastructure. This has even led several teams, like the Hosting team, to consider including minimum versions of certain components in their list of versions and compatibility.
It should be noted that this has affected less than 10% of installations, but if you were one of those affected, you should consider talking to your provider to see what solution they are going to offer.
Has WordPress and its development worked well? Yes, because once the problem was detected, within about 12 hours, WordPress 6.4.1 was released, which mitigates the curl vulnerability via software. It’s not elegant, but it works.
Although we should not be blinded by this unforeseen situation, after all, we have two new versions of WordPress: 6.4.0 and 6.4.1.
It all began with the release of an extra version, WordPress 6.4.0 RC 4, which would not affect the general launch and corrected three elements mainly affecting themes and patterns.
And as in the last versions, the process began with a 24-hour code freeze and the launch party the following day, as planned.
WordPress 6.4 “Shirley”, in reference to the iconic jazz artist Shirley Horn, includes the new default theme Twenty Twenty-Four, improvements in the Editor, an expansion of the Command Palette, categorization of patterns, and hundreds of other enhancements.
Although 24 hours later, we had the release candidate of WordPress 6.4.1, which included an updated version of the Request library and was accompanied, a few hours earlier, by an update to the WordPress infrastructure so that those failed requests being made could work and the core, plugins, and themes could be downloaded normally.
Just 4 hours later, WordPress 6.4.1 was released, primarily focused on those sites experiencing problems with outdated and insecure versions of curl.
And now that the last version of WordPress for 2023 has been released, we look forward to the next year. For 2024, three new core versions are expected.
The first, WordPress 6.5, wouldstart its beta on February 13, go through WordCamp Asia in early March, and have its final release on March 26. This version will focus on collaboration features.
The second, WordPress 6.6, will begin its journey on June 4, which means it will take its first steps alongside WordCamp Europe, to finally be released on July 16. This version will focus on improvements and fixes.
Finally, the third, WordPress 6.7, will start its beta phase on September 24, probably go through WordCamp US, yet to be dated, to have its launch on November 5. And, like the first, it will focus on collaboration features.
And about WordPress 6.5, we already have news, as the Performance team has already started the next step to include the main features of the Performant Translations plugin in the core, which means that the next version will be much faster for those sites that are not in American English.
And speaking of news, we must also mention Gutenberg 17.0, which brings us improvements in the Command Palette, dropdown menus, and some iterations of performance and accessibility.
For all developers, an entry has been launched on the Development Blog with a complete summary of all the changes affecting code and functions with WordPress 6.4, in addition to the latest versions of Gutenberg. Among the highlights: the ability to rename blocks, experimental form blocks, and the Data View.
The CLI team has closed their WordPress CLI Hack Day with 21 pull requests already included, and 4 more that are in the queue for final reviews.
A dozen contributors spent hours reviewing the backlog, picking tasks, and conversing to improve some of the processes.
The Design team has presented some very interesting visual improvements for the Editor.
The first is the system of dropdown and nested menus that will allow the creation of submenus and thus reduce the endless list of options.
Another new feature will be the grid mode page listing, allowing to view the featured image in addition to some extra information about each of the pages.
And if we combine both new features, we have that pages will have a system of advanced editing menus much simpler to navigate.
The Community team has opened the call to all local communities to meet again and celebrate another year of State of the Word.
The live broadcast will be next December 11 at 1500 hours Universal Time, and it will be held in Madrid, Spain.
If you are going to organize a meeting, visit the resources page and sign up as an organizer.
We already have BuddyPress 12.0 beta 4, the last version planned before the release of the final version. And it does so with 3 updates that pave the way for it to be available on December 6.
Finally, this podcast is distributed under the EUPL license. For more information and links, please visit WordPress Podcast .org or follow the content, also, in Spanish.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
Tue, 14 Nov 2023 - 09min - 5 - Ready for 6.4
While WordPress 6.4 arrives, and with an eye on WordPress 6.5, concrete proposals are launched as to what the next version of the editor should include.
Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.
Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
You’ll find updates from October 30th to November 5th, 2023.
Following the WordPress 6.4 RC3 24-hour delay from October 31 to November 1, the final version release is now being prepared.
This release candidate was held up by 3 tickets that stalled its creation, mainly due to improvements in the Twenty Twenty-Four theme.
On one hand, there were pagination issues in the Query block when patterns or template parts were involved.
On the other, some internal elements of the theme’s main screen were changed.
And finally, there were revisions in the RTL system, which displays information from right to left on the screen, because the styles were not loading correctly.
Now that everything is ready for the launch of WordPress 6.4 on November 7, the team in charge of maintaining this new version is being prepared, which is reduced from the 16 people who usually lead a major release.
These individuals will focus on ticket management and coordination with those maintaining the different components of this version and prepare documentation on these minor versions, including both the documentation itself and the corresponding entries on the various sites.
Taking advantage of the fact that everything is almost finalized, the team has released a summary of the accessibility improvements for WordPress 6.4. These include a ticket from 6 years ago about separating the save and delete buttons on a menu to surpassing over 50 applied improvements and updates.
What is still unknown is when WordPress 6.5 will be prepared. The call for volunteers wishing to participate in this version is not yet closed, and the dates have not been defined, although it is quite clear that the release could be around early to mid-February.
The Performance team has already started working with the upcoming WordPress 6.5 version and is working on improvements to validate the existence of files in the system and other tickets that mainly affect the improvement of the WordPress core loading time.
On the Developers‘ blog, a very detailed entry has been published about color management in blocks, and how custom color options can be added. Adding attributes, gradients, saving the block and its code, or adding styles are some of the elements explained.
The Openverse team has released work proposals for the coming months, and to start with, the content-sensitive blur system on the front end has already been launched. It’s not official yet but is available for use. Other projects being worked on include reducing the API response time or additional search views.
As expected, BuddyPress 11.4 has been released as a maintenance version where a bug is fixed, and Admin Notifications are added, ensuring full compatibility with the upcoming WordPress 6.4.
Finally, this podcast is distributed under the EUPL license. For more information and links, please visit WordPress Podcast .org or follow the content, also, in Spanish.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
Tue, 07 Nov 2023 - 04min - 4 - Defining Gutenberg Phase 3
While WordPress 6.4 arrives, and with an eye on WordPress 6.5, concrete proposals are launched as to what the next version of the editor should include.
Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.
Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
You’ll find updates from October 23rd to 29nd, 2023.
The Phase 3 of Gutenberg continues, following several meetings with companies and individuals working simultaneously on content editing.
Concerning collaborative editing and asynchronous collaboration, there has been expressed a need for asynchronous collaboration tools rather than real-time editing, especially in larger organizations. This highlights the need for specific role permissions, granular editing capabilities, commenting features, and public preview link functionalities.
For workflows, which are currently diverse, there is a clear demand for a task manager, seamless integration with other tools, and improvement in task management linked to content creation.
More visual revision histories have been requested, as well as the ability to track changes beyond the post content. This includes features for effectively managing revisions, especially for posts with extensive revision histories, and the ability to schedule massive changes across the site.
Another important element is the Block Library, as there are issues managing access to and configurations of blocks due to inconsistencies and a lack of control. This calls for more granular control, clearer insights into the use of patterns across the site, and the ability to apply theme.json configurations to groups of blocks.
A classic in editing is found in the Media Library, crucial especially for large organizations with high volumes of daily uploads. This includes better management of copyright and attributions, improvement in managing alt texts, folder functionality, enhanced search capabilities, and more efficient photo uploading for specific posts.
And one of the largest elements to be seen in upcoming versions is the redesign of the Admin Panel, focusing on the need for a more modern admin experience, customizable menu items, and overall design improvements.
Speaking of updates, we have WordPress 6.4 release candidate 2, accompanied by the classic Field Guide, which includes a list of all the new features in this version.
A last addition has been the incorporation of a framework for future reviews of Phase 3, in which developers are asked to use metadata and apply the new filter to enable this functionality in the future.
The recommended PHP versions for WordPress 6.4 have also been defined as PHP 8.1 and PHP 8.2, pending some additional documentation on known exceptions.
Speaking of new features, we have the first version that will not be included in WordPress 6.4 of the editor: Gutenberg 16.9.
This new experimental version allows renaming practically all the editor’s blocks, duplicating and renaming patterns, and multiple improvements in CSS viewports.
And we now have the new WP-CLI 2.9.0 version, with 225 changes from 62 contributors.
The last details of compatibility with PHP 8.2 and WordPress 6.4 have been polished, and a new feature has been added: wp config is-true. When you pass it a constant, it will tell you whether it exists or not, very useful for creating scripts.
Another major new feature is the ability to test WordPress with SQLite without the need for MySQL or MariaDB.
The Design Team has released a promotional video for the Showcase, as well as testing with the search and selection of images from Openverse within the editor.
Another element being designed is the image compression system, which could allow for optimization and compression directly from the editor.
The Documentation Team is calling for volunteers to finalize the new end-user documentation content prior to the release of WordPress 6.4.
There are approximately 30 documents that correspond to new features or changes in current features.
Finally, this podcast is distributed under the EUPL license. For more information and links, please visit WordPress Podcast .org or follow the content, also, in Spanish.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
Tue, 31 Oct 2023 - 06min - 3 - WordPress 6.4, candidate phase
With the release of the first release candidate comes the technical documentation of the new version’s new features.
Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.
Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing you the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
You’ll find updates from October 16th to 22nd, 2023.
After 3 weeks of beta updates for WordPress 6.4, including both what’s new and what was left out, WordPress 6.4 RC 1 is now available for download. This comes with a lot of behind-the-scenes technical documentation, which often proves more critical than what’s readily apparent.
And, in no particular order, some of the updates include:
Block Hooks for dynamic blocks, which extend block themes. This is an initial step to mimic the extensibility system of classic themes. Importantly, users will now have the ability to alter the default behavior set by the theme.
WordPress core’s browser tests now operate with Playwright. This means that all End-2-End, performance, and visual regression tests are now conducted using this new system, making it easier for developers to create simpler and more efficient unit tests.
A new API has been introduced, allowing for the addition of new categories in Media. Developers can now add features like the already-existing Openverse. This system lets you manage categories but not modify the pre-existing ones in WordPress’s core.
Some components have been updated. For instance, Popovers can now be utilized anywhere, Tooltips and Panel tabs have been rewritten, Modals come with new features, and there’s improved consistency and control in the interface.
A new function to manage notification messages in the admin panel has been introduced, which will unify messages. Using these new “admin_notice” functions, you can retrieve all messages and generate new ones across 4 levels: success, info, warning, and error.
A change that could impact SEO is the handling of attachments. New installations will, by default, disable attachment page links, so newly uploaded attachments won’t link out.
A feature enhancing security and site performance is the improved method of script loading. The usage of ‘defer’ or ‘async’ has been optimized, allowing plugins to choose the desired loading method.
In the editor, besides significant changes, new enhancements have been added like theme.json support for background images, fluid typography with max and min viewport sizes, control deactivations, and stabilization of features introduced in the previous version.
Template loading gets better with new registration functions, removal of certain file validation, and faster folder search performance.
Speaking of performance boosts, object caching has seen substantial improvements, especially with “notoptions” optimization and improvements in WP_Query and WP_Term_Query caching.
Regarding options, new functions have been integrated that load multiple options with just one call. This enables plugins that store vast amounts of separate information to retrieve all of it with a single request.
Image optimization processes continue with enhancements in lazy-load and fetchpriority. Work has also begun on decoding-async and attribute control.
Another WordPress-wide change is shifting from manual style loading to style function usage, allowing other plugins or developers to tap into CSS optimization.
The login and registration screen has changed — not visually, but its HTML code has been optimized, also enhancing accessibility.
Introduced in WordPress 6.2, the HTML API continues to see improvements, like accessing content around images or breadcrumb trails. Improved class usage is another addition.
This is just the tip of the iceberg for WordPress 6.4. This release candidate still has two more versions before all new components are finalized and revised, plus any last-minute enhancements found.
As is typical with release candidate openings, the path to WordPress 6.5 begins with the Alpha branch for its development and whatever features didn’t make it into the upcoming major release.
The CLI team has announced their next WP-CLI Hack Day! set for Friday, November 10th, starting at 0800 Universal Time. They aim to close 20 pull requests worked on throughout the event.
The Plugins team has asked all Directory-involved teams, especially Meta, to collaborate on changes.
After chaos erupted from plugin previews using Playground, many users approached the Plugins team — not Meta — with questions, even though they had no control over that platform segment.
Now, any Directory of Plugins improvement or change needs to be reported to the plugin review team, so they can anticipate potential user feedback or suggestions.
The Themes team created a guideline in 2015 ensuring all themes used the Customize API, standardizing theme customization. But with block themes on the horizon, questions arise: Should a new standard be developed? Should the old one be discarded? What’s best for users?
The Polyglots team has announced the translation opening for WordPress 6.4, and its accompanying theme, Twenty Twenty-Four.
Following recent tests, Meta has made the new Showcase available to the public at [wordpress.org/showcase].
The Support Team has released an update to their guidelines, meaning that all those who moderate the forums will need to follow them.
The changes focus on two main elements.
The first pertains to commercial products. Starting October 16, 2023, any comments, or proposals for moderation that reference anything that happens after the purchase process of a premium product will not be supported on WordPress.org. Only products that can be purchased from the system will be able to accept comments about this process, but not beyond that.
The other change is about accounts. Initially, everyone can have their own WordPress.org account, but it’s allowed for a company to have its own account to provide support for its product corporately.
The Community Team continues to work on the technical architecture for the new events. Until now, WordCamp followed a format like [location.wordcamp.org], but the idea is to transition to a format like [events.wordpress.org/location/year/event-type].
Another feature being proposed is the automation of surveys for attendees, which would be sent out automatically 2 days after the conclusion of the event. This system would also apply to the organizers.
A preview has also been presented, still in development, of the new page where all WordPress events will be centralized.
As WordPress 6.4 approaches, various projects like BuddyPress are also receiving updates.
On one hand, we have version 11.3.2, which is a security release. Therefore, everyone on the 11.x branch should upgrade to this new version, although updates for branches 7, 8, 9, and 10 have also been released.
But that’s not the only new development. There’s also version 11.4.0 beta 1, which introduces the Admin Notifications Center.
Lastly, the date for State of the Word 2023 has been set. This year, it will be celebrated and broadcasted for the first time outside of the United States, in Madrid, Spain, on December 11th, starting at 1500 Universal Time.
Finally, this podcast is distributed under the EUPL license. For more information and links, please visit WordPress Podcast .org or follow the program, also in Spanish.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
Tue, 24 Oct 2023 - 11min - 2 - WordPress 6.3.2, 6.4b3, and 6.4b4
The release of WordPress 6.4 is approaching, accompanied by the security update of WordPress 6.3.2.
Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.
Transcripción del programa
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing you the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
You’ll find updates from October 9th to 15th, 2023.
Several new versions have been rolled out, with WordPress 6.3.2 being the standout.
This release fixes 19 core bugs, 22 editor bugs, and most crucially, includes 8 security fixes.
In addition to this minor version addressing these security fixes, updates have been released for WordPress versions 4.1 through 6.2, each implementing the appropriate patches since not all these issues affect every version.
Unlike previous times, issues of varying severity have been discovered across different code sections, allowing for a range of potential attacks.
Regarding WordPress 6.4, which enters its candidate phase this week, we have the beta 3 and beta 4 versions.
Beta 3 introduces over 60 updates from its predecessor, while beta 4 applies the security patches, already rolled out to other versions.
However, moving the Font Library to WordPress 6.5 is now confirmed.
The updates continue with the release of the experimental plugin, Gutenberg 16.8.
Notable features include overlay color application when setting a background in the cover block, displaying the template when editing pages, and shifting font uploads to a tab in the Font Library.
More updates from the WordPress.org website.
The main navigation menu underwent several changes since its introduction a year ago.
The Showcase, a display of sites built with WordPress, has returned to the menu.
Hosting has been highlighted in the primary menu as it’s a foundational element for WordPress use.
Download and Extend has been simplified to just Extend, as downloading has been moved to another section. Mobile app downloads have transitioned to the download zone. Additionally, a new Blocks subsection has been added.
Some minor changes have been made to the footer menu as well.
The reintroduction of the Showcase is mainly due to the upcoming new release version.
After the initial redesign, it was rolled back due to user experience challenges.
With this second version, which is publicly available in a hidden section, users can explore 100 highlighted sites organized by tags, categories, and “flavors.”
The Performance team has closed all outstanding tickets for WordPress 6.4 and is now considering proposals for WordPress 6.5.
The upcoming version contemplates integrating the canonical plugin Performant Translations directly into WordPress’s core, enhancing the performance of core translation files and plugins.
The CLI team announced the release of WP-CLI 2.9.0 on October 25th.
This version will not only bring improvements but also fix the latest compatibility issues with PHP 8.2, gearing up for compatibility with WordPress 6.4.
The Hosting team shared a summary of compatibility and recommendations between WordPress 6.3 and PHP.
Given that WordPress 6.3 has dropped support for PHP 5.6 and considering the current PHP versions, the recommendation for WordPress 6.3 is PHP 8.1, which is likely to extend to WordPress 6.4.
The Design team introduced enhancements to the new Lightbox, allowing an image to link in four ways: to a URL, the image itself, the attachment page, or through the Lightbox.
Work is underway to refine colors for the Admin Panel, streamline button sizes, block titles, enhance the pattern page when empty, and improve pattern previews.
The Marketing team held a discussion about the management and proposals for WordPress’s Annual Community Survey.
With the involvement of Josepha Haden, they addressed questions about the survey’s purpose, size, data handling, and the interest of various teams in adding supplementary information.
The Polyglots team suggested two proposals to reduce the approval queue for pending strings, especially in widely spoken languages.
The first is auto-approval for strings stored in the translation memory, meaning previously approved and validated words, phrases, or texts would be approved without further review.
The second, for validators, is to narrow down the project list displayed, so validators aren’t overwhelmed with pending projects and can approve them systematically.
The Training team reviewed the Guide Project initiated in September to assist new contributors.
During the pilot month, 9 new contributors were paired with one of the 5 guides.
Feedback was mostly positive, with contributions including 3 translations, 1 set of meeting notes, and 5 tutorial reviews.
However, suggestions for improvement were made, like refining the guides’ time management skills and increasing real-time check-ins.
The Community team has started preparing for its call to team representatives, proposing the new structure for 2024.
A change being considered is having 3 representatives instead of two and extending the tenure possibility from 1 to 2 years.
The Photos team approved its 10,000th image. Approximately 85% of photographs get approved, with rejections mainly for three reasons: visible faces, identifiable information like license plates, or low quality.
Although Openverse is beginning to integrate into WordPress’s core, a proposal has been made to directly include the WordPress Photos directory as a source.
Finally, this podcast is distributed under the EUPL license. For more information and links, please visit WordPress Podcast .org.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
Tue, 17 Oct 2023 - 08min - 1 - Previewing Plugins
Clicking on a plugin’s info, pressing the preview button, and there you have it—a plugin ready for testing. Sounds like a great idea, right? Well, it is, but there’s more…
Recuerda que puedes escuchar este programa desde Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts e iVoox o suscribirte al feed directamente.
Transcripción del programa
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing you the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
You’ll find updates from October 2nd to 8th, 2023.
Great ideas often strike when you least expect them. Imagine this: on the WordPress website, beside the download button for a plugin, there’s another button labeled “Preview.” Pressing this opens a new window, revealing a freshly installed WordPress with the chosen plugin already activated.
This concept has been brought to life through a Meta ticket that has gained much attention for two main reasons.
First, it was implemented without prior notice. The buzz began on Twitter as users discovered that it doesn’t always work seamlessly because not all plugins are “install-and-go” compatible, especially within the WordPress Playground.
The second issue, contributing to what’s been dubbed “WordPress Drama,” is that plugin developers weren’t informed or given the option to opt-in or opt-out of this feature.
In the wake of this, other proposals and improvements have surfaced from the Community, including the idea of using plugin dependencies. For instance, if you wish to test an e-commerce payment gateway plugin, the main e-commerce plugin would also need to be installed. Other intriguing suggestions include having a preview option stated in the plugins’ readme.txt file, incorporating a “plugin.json” much like themes have their configuration file, and even including demo data in some cases to give users content to work with.
This slight “drama” encapsulates both the good and the bad within the WordPress Community. On one hand, you have individuals eager to create and launch something, even though it often begins without much initial response because the news doesn’t reach everyone. A bit of commotion follows due to unforeseen issues, ultimately leading back to the starting point: collective proposals to launch a product beneficial to all.
In other news, although it may not qualify as “WordPress Drama,” it seems like the Font Library—slated as a significant feature in WordPress 6.4—will have to wait until the next major release.
Upon a comprehensive review of the code, functionalities, and overall operation, there were elements found not entirely aligned with “The WordPress Way.”
While the base functionality of the project is intact and operational, it’s clear that the focus has been predominantly on making it work, not necessarily considering all implications it might have on WordPress itself, like issues with deleting a font, where files are stored, code quality, API structure, and managing collections. It’s crucial to acknowledge that this feature is included in the Gutenberg plugin, garnering substantial feedback from the thousands of users engaging with this innovative platform.
Meanwhile, the Test team has released a post detailing how to experiment with this new WordPress functionality and where and how to report any issues encountered. It will undoubtedly be worth the wait for a reliable, compatible, and extensible product, which we can expect to see in WordPress 6.5.
Speaking of new releases, WordPress 6.4 beta 2 is now available for testing, featuring Twenty Twenty-Four as the default theme—although some sample images are reportedly not working correctly. Additionally, WordPress 6.3.2 RC1 is set to launch on October 11th, addressing 19 core WordPress bugs and 22 editor bugs.
After the inclusion of the new Twenty Twenty-Four theme in the latest beta, the Core team is calling for child theme testing, particularly to validate the functionality of patterns.
In more updates, the Performance team has officially transferred the “Plugin Check” project repository to the official WordPress account. This plugin is designed to validate the code quality of plugins installed on a test WordPress site. Preliminary testing on WordPress 6.4 beta 1 indicates improvements ranging from 15% to 30% in the loading times of classic themes.
Finally, this podcast is distributed under the EUPL license. For more information and links, please visit WordPress Podcast .org.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
Tue, 10 Oct 2023 - 06min
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