WordPress at 18

Posted by download in Software on 27-05-2021

Today marks the 18th anniversary of WordPress’ launch, a day that I fondly refer to as WordPress’ birthday, which means WordPress is 6,575 days old. To celebrate another turn around the sun, the community has had parties, we have shared data, and we have told our story.

Since our last birthday we developed our 40th release and now also support over 40% of the web. So it seems fitting that this year’s celebration should be a list of 40 milestones that have helped us get there.

Grab a slice of cake or festive beverage and give it a scroll!

Coloring Your Images With Duotone Filters

Posted by download in Software on 26-05-2021

Created by Alex Lende

Beginning with WordPress 5.8, you can colorize your image and cover blocks with duotone filters! Duotone can add a pop of color to your designs and style your images to integrate well with your themes.

Filters? Like on Instagram?

Duotone doesn’t work in quite the same way as Instagram filters. Whereas Instagram filters do color adjustments (color levels/curves and sometimes a vignette for the photo editors among us), the new duotone filters entirely replace the colors of your images.

Photo by Charles Pragnell.

You can think of the duotone effect as a black and white filter, but instead of the shadows being black and the highlights being white, you pick your own colors for the shadows and highlights.

For example, a grayscale filter can be created by selecting black and white as shadow/highlight colors, and a sepia filter by choosing brown and tan.

Analogous colors can add a subtle effect and work well for cover backgrounds where the overlaid text still needs to stand out.

Much more vibrant and interesting effects can be made with complementary colors.

How Do I Add Duotone Filter?

The duotone effect works best on high-contrast images, so start with an image with a lot of large dark and light areas. From the block toolbar, use the filter button and choose a preset:

You can also choose colors from your theme’s palette, or a custom color of your choice.

In addition to the image block, duotone can be applied to both images and video in the cover block.

Duotone

Will This Overwrite Images in My Media Library?

Images and videos in your media library will remain unchanged. The duotone effect works using SVG filters and the CSS filter property, so the image or video is never modified in your library. On the one hand, this means that you can apply a filter to an image that you link to that doesn’t exist in your media library. On the other hand, this means that the filter won’t show up in RSS feeds or places that use the image URL directly.

Can I Add Duotone Colors to Blocks or Themes That I Develop?

The API for adding duotone colors to blocks is experimental in Gutenberg v10.6. Still, the documentation for using it in your own blocks can be found and will be updated under Supports Color in the Block Editor Handbook. Themes can add duotone presets with theme.json. More information can be found under Global Settings & Styles Presets in the Block Editor Handbook.

Try it Out Now Using the Gutenberg plugin

The duotone feature was released in version 10.6 of the Gutenberg plugin, so you can try it out now prior to the WordPress 5.8 release in July.


Thanks to @joen and @mkaz for assistance writing and reviewing this post.

The Best of Both Worlds: WordPress.com Managed Hosting

Posted by download in Software on 25-05-2021

How you can get the total freedom to create without the hassles that come with managing your own website. 

The open source WordPress project has given the world a powerful publishing platform that now powers 41% of the web. While this is the most widely adopted CMS on the internet, you’re also going to need a hosting provider to make your website available online. 

When choosing a web host, it’s important to think about how hands-on you’d like to be with maintenance. If you aren’t familiar with technical website operations, it can be daunting to install updates, fear of breaking something or forgetting to backup! (it’s ok, we’ve all been there) Good news: there’s another way and it’s called managed hosting. 

Managed hosting is a convenient service offered by WordPress.com, which is 100% dedicated to hosting the open source WordPress software. Managed hosting is a great option for people who don’t want to deal with the backend technical operations of running a website. You get all of the freedom of WordPress, with none of the hassles. 

Here’s what you get with WordPress.com managed hosting: 

A faster website. 

Because slow websites are the worst! Especially if you plan on growing your audience and customers. To keep it fast, WordPress.com runs on its own global CDN with 28 state-of-the-art data centers (and counting) all over the world with servers, switches, and routers we own instead of lease. This environment is especially unique because it’s specifically designed and optimized for WordPress sites, so you’re never at the mercy of another provider. The result: baseline page load speeds for a website running on a WordPress.com Business plan clock in around 1 second compared to the industry standard 2.4 seconds. That’s more than speed. It’s a platform that you can depend on. 

Powerful, built-in SEO. 

WordPress.com has great SEO right out of the box. That means you don’t have to do anything extra to reap the benefits. In fact, WordPress takes care of 80-90 percent of the mechanics of SEO for you, according to Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team. All of our themes are optimized for search engines, which means they are designed to make it easy for the Googlebot (and other search engines) to crawl through them and discover all the content.

WordPress.com also automatically sends notifications to Google every time you publish or update a post or page. This is similar to how your subscribers get email updates. Every time you post, you’re telling Google, “hey! Check this out.”

Security and systems experts.

Your website is only as good as it is safe. And managed hosting makes security simple by handling patches, spam protection, updates, and more without having to lift a finger. At WordPress.com, we take security a step further with dedicated systems and security teams who make sure your site stays secure. 

Scalability and uptime you can depend on. 

What’s the worst thing that could happen if your site gets popular? Crash. We’re here for you when it really matters and we’ll make sure this doesn’t happen. Our systems are built to scale as you grow and we have experience hosting some of the largest brands on the internet, like Facebook, Spotify, Microsoft, and CNN. We know how to seamlessly scale your website for millions of visitors, without additional costs for increased traffic. 

Automatic WordPress Updates.

One of the ways we keep your site working in top condition is by automatically handling all version upgrades to make sure you’re on the latest version of WordPress. The best part is that you won’t even notice that we’re doing it for you, so there’s no need to stress about doing something wrong. 

Real-time backups.

We don’t want anyone to lose their hard work. That’s why all WordPress.com plans come with automated backups to save your content. With the Business plan, we take that a step further and do real-time backups so you’ll always have peace of mind. We also diversify our locations, so each time you upload an image to WordPress.com, six copies are made in different locations with a 7th going to an Amazon s3 bucket –– just to make sure.  Losing all your content is the worst feeling on earth. Constantly having to think about manual backups is a pain. That’s why we do it all for you. 

This is just a small sample of how managed hosting can make running your website easier. When you leave the website maintenance to us, you can save so much time that you can refocus towards making your content instead. Plus, there’s no need to install WordPress software – it’s ready to go instantly –– as soon as you sign up. 

If you’d like to learn more about how our managed hosting services can help your website run better, join us at our upcoming webinar Wednesday, June 16th at 1am PT | 11am MT | 12pm CT | 1pm ET | 5pm UTC.

 

WP Briefing: Episode 9: The Cartography of WordPress

Posted by download in Software on 24-05-2021

In this episode, Josepha Haden Chomphosy provides a map of how to navigate WordPress teams and communication channels, along with her small list of big things.

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

Credits

References

Transcript

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  00:10

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

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  00:40

Almost every episode of this podcast, you can hear me invite you to join in the WordPress project, to contribute back, to get involved. And I’m sure that every time I say that there’s at least one of you who’s like “Yes. Challenge accepted!” And you wade in sight unseen, to immerse yourselves in the cheerful cacophony of open source at scale that is WordPress. You see before you all 158 ways you can start contributing and you are exhilarated by this lostness. This you think, is the lostness of infinite possibility. And for you, I’m really thankful. My work here today would not be possible if it weren’t for the brave souls who leap into something with hope as their primary plan and tactic. You are heroes, and I thank you very much for your service. For everyone else, I’m going to give you a quick tour of where WordPress collaborates and a little bit of how they collaborate. We’ll cover the Make network, the Making WordPress Slack, events for WordPress, and a rundown of the teams. 

First, the Make network. The Make network of sites can be found at make.wordpress.org. That page includes information on most of our teams. Teams like Core and Design and Community. All of those teams require some technical skills since we’re a project built around a piece of software. However, some require a little more than others. You can think of this set of sites as the desk of each team in the WordPress project. It’s where they update each other, where they host discussions, where they refine proposals, and where they coordinate admin tasks. Contributors can write posts on most sites in the network as long as they follow the guidelines and best practices. And anyone with a wordpress.org profile can join in discussions in the comments. Most work on the Make network is asynchronous, and discussions stay open for a long enough time to allow anyone in the world to weigh in when they have the time. It’s how we try to remember that we are a globally-minded project. 

The second area is the Making WordPress Slack instance. The Making WordPress Slack instance can be found at wordpress.slack.com, and it requires an account that is associated with your wordpress.org profile. Each team in the project has a channel, although not all channels in that Slack instance, represent a standalone team. You can think of this Slack instance as a set of conference rooms. It’s where contributors connect, gain a more nuanced understanding of problems that we’re trying to solve. They host synchronous meetings and also coordinate working groups.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  03:31

Contributors can post in most channels, although there are a few that are restricted. We don’t have any social channels in this Slack instance, but most WordPress-ers do tend to find friends that they connect with. The work done here is synchronous, and most meetings last about an hour. There are about 35+ meetings a week, so you can basically always find someone around. 

The last area we work is actually at WordPress events. Word Camps and WordPress meetups happen all over the world. Unless there’s a global pandemic, then they’re kind of all over the computer and at all times of day and night. You can keep track of those on wordcamp.org or on WordPress’s meetup page, which I’ve linked in the notes below. These events bring together all sorts of facets of the WordPress project. And they are an event where local WordPress communities aim to connect, inspire and educate each other. There’s always someone at these events, who knows a little bit more about WordPress than you do. If you’re headed to want to learn more about contribution, look out for any that have a contributor day or are hosting a contribution drive. These are clearly synchronous events. And when we do get back to doing them in person, they’re also tied to physical locations. When we get back to them, I encourage you to find one that’s close to you. They are incredibly valuable. 

Okay, so that’s the map of the area. Those are the three big places where we get this stuff done. Let’s do a quick map of the teams themselves. If you’re a developer and you’re looking to work inside the technology space, work with code a bit, then your best chances for teams are Core and all of its related components. They’re like 50 components, including core editor and various other things. There’s also the Mobile team WP CLI, the Tide team, Security, our brand new team, Openverse, and Meta. Those all take a fairly high amount of code knowledge to contribute there. 

If you’re more into design and product work, then we have a few teams for that as well. There’s of course, the Design team, but we also have Accessibility, Test, Triage, Polyglots kind of falls in there for me. But if you are a programs person, and we’re talking like programs, getting people together programs, not programs, as in programming or code. So if you’re a programs person, you’re looking more at the Community team, at the Themes team, the Plugin team, Polyglots, again, Training support, probably a number of others that have like program components in it as well.

If you are really interested in learning more about contributor experience, which is how we build tools, and again, programs for all of the contributors who are showing up, then the teams for you will be teams like Meta and Documentation, Hosting, the Community team, the Training team, arguably any team that has a program as part of it is considered contributor experience because that’s how we help our contributors know what to do, what not to do, how to help them get onboarded, find their way, stuff like that. 

And if you’re more in the communications area of things, we have quite a few teams there as well. We do have Marketing, of course, but also I think that Support ends up in our communications area, WordPress TV, obviously ends up in communications. But I think Training, Meta, Documentation, and arguably, maybe also Testing ends up in that space as well. 

I realize that there are a handful of teams that I mentioned multiple times, especially Polyglots, Support, Test, Triage, Meta, Community. The reason they end up in a number of different places is that all of those teams also have a fair amount of admin and infrastructure stuff that goes into the WordPress project and community as a whole. So it touches a lot of other teams, and so they get a lot of mentions. All right. So WordPress adventurers, you now have a beginner’s map. I hope it helps, and I hope we see you around the community.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  07:54

If you’re still with me, that brings us today to my small list of big things. I’ve got four things for you, and I’m excited about all of them. The first two are events actually. WordCamp Europe is coming up from June seventh through the ninth. It will include a presentation from the WordPress project co-founder, Matt Mullenweg, so I encourage you to hop over, grab a ticket to check out the rest of the sessions that are happening while you’re there. The next one is WordCamp, Japan, which is happening June 20th through the 26th. And you heard that right that is seven whole days of WordCamp. It’s a little bit of a different format than we normally take, but it’s five days actually of contribution on ten specific projects. Then that’s bookended on either side of those contribution days, with full days of sessions. There’s some in English, but it’s primarily in Japanese. But either way, I think it’s going to be a really excellent event, and I encourage everyone to check it out. 

The rest of my list is not events. We have opened our sixth call for testing, it’s specifically looking at the template editing mode for Full Site Editing. It is an iteration on one of our earliest tests for the Full Site Editing outreach program. And so it has incorporated a lot of the feedback that we got in that test the first time around. So if you look at that test, which by the way, are all guided, if you’ve never tested anything before, don’t let this scare you. It’s really well written, it’s got a good guide on it and, and also allows for a little bit of exploration. But if you participated in the landing page test that we did early on, this is the follow-up to that. It incorporates a lot of the feedback that we got, so this is closing that feedback loop and I encourage you to stop by and participate in that test. It will be linked in the show notes and also I tweet about it a bit so you can run over there and find it also.

 WordPress is dropping support for Internet Explorer 11. That’s happening over the summer, so around the middle of July is when that’s going to happen. If you’ve been using WordPress for a while you’ve been getting notifications. If you happen to get to WordPress with IE11, letting you know that that this particular browser is reaching the end of its life for support in general on the web, but now WordPress also is making the choice to drop support for that. And so there’s a post out on wordpress.org/news, which I will also link to in the show notes in case you have not heard about this yet. It shouldn’t have any immediate and noticeable effects on anyone who’s visiting a site that’s built using WordPress. There might be a few things in the dashboard that don’t work if you are administering a WordPress site from IE11. So there’s a lot of good information in that post. Give it a read and if you have questions, always feel free to stop by the Core chat and ask those as we go. 

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

Dropping support for Internet Explorer 11

Posted by download in Software on 19-05-2021

Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) was released over 7 years ago and is currently used by less than 1% of all users on the Internet with usage rapidly declining. A large majority of popular websites have already stopped supporting IE11 (including Microsoft Teams in 2020), and even the Microsoft 365 apps and services will be dropping support later this year.

When WordPress 5.8 is released in July of this year, Internet Explorer 11 will no longer be supported.

If you are currently using IE11, it is strongly recommended that you switch to a more modern browser, such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, or Microsoft Edge. IE11 users have been shown a warning that IE11 is considered outdated in the WordPress dashboard for the last 17+ months.

If you are already using one of the more modern browsers above, you will only be positively impacted by this change, as there are performance benefits to dropping IE11 support. However, if any other users of your site are still using IE11, it’s possible they will be affected.

What does “dropping support” mean?

When support for a browser is removed from WordPress, new features are no longer tested on those browsers and are not guaranteed to function optimally.

Automated tools that generate parts of the WordPress Core source code are also updated to exclude unsupported browsers. This means that any feature relying on these generated files will likely have bugs or stop working for users of those browsers.

The block editor will be the area of WordPress most heavily impacted by this change because almost all of the files related to the block editor are compiled using these automated tools. Other areas of the WordPress dashboard also use CSS built with these tools and their appearance will potentially be impacted when using IE11.

All other areas of the code base that are IE11 specific will need to be identified, evaluated, and removed on a case-by-case basis as the rest are manually maintained. This process will begin in the WordPress 5.9 release, and will likely happen gradually over several major releases. Additionally, any bugs which are reported for IE11 will not be fixed.

How will this affect themes?

No changes will be made to any of the default bundled themes as a result of this plan. No code related to IE11 support (or any other browser that may have been supported when each theme was released) will be removed from default themes. However, any new features added going forward will not be tested in IE11.

If you are not using a default theme, it’s still unlikely that your theme will be affected by this change. Themes typically have their own browser support policies, and changes in WordPress Core do not affect those. It’s possible that your theme author may have removed support for IE11 already.

If IE11 support is important to you and you are unsure whether your theme supports IE11, it is recommended that you reach out to your theme’s developer to confirm.

More information on this change can be found on the Making WordPress Core blog.

One-click Portfolio Designs, Instant PDF Embeds, and More Improvements to the Block Editor

Posted by download in Software on 18-05-2021

We have some exciting new block editor updates to share with you today including fresh collection of Portfolio block patterns, a new and improved way to embed a preview of PDF documents, and better editing tools for Cover and Buttons blocks.

Let’s dive in!

One-Click Portfolio Layouts

Block patterns are pre-designed templates that make creating beautiful pages a breeze. This time we’re bringing you a curated collection of portfolio patterns, perfect for showcasing your creative work. 

To access block patterns, click on the + icon in the WordPress Editor, and switch to the Patterns tab. All portfolio patterns can be found in the Portfolio category.

Embed PDFs with the File Block

The File block allows you to place a download button for documents and other files on your website. With the latest block editor update you can also use it to show a preview of a PDF file. The preview will be displayed automatically, with an option to be disabled from the block settings panel.

Go Large on Buttons

Capture your audience’s attention with eye-catching buttons! You can now make the buttons bigger by customizing the font-size and line-height settings.

Drag-and-drop Cover Block Backgrounds

This update makes it easier to swap the Cover block background image. Simply drag a new image over from your computer, and it will automatically replace the current one.

You keep building, we’ll keep improving

Your feedback helps us make the editor better – thank you! We’re excited to see what you build next with the block editor. In the meantime, watch this space for more updates!

Happy editing!

WordPress 5.7.2 Security Release

Posted by download in Software on 13-05-2021

WordPress 5.7.2 is now available.

This security release features one security fix. Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately. All versions since WordPress 3.7 have also been updated.

WordPress 5.7.2 is a short-cycle security release. The next major release will be version 5.8.

You can update to WordPress 5.7.2 by downloading from WordPress.org, or visit your Dashboard → Updates and click Update Now.

If you have sites that support automatic background updates, they’ve already started the update process.

Security Updates

One security issue affecting WordPress versions between 3.7 and 5.7. If you haven’t yet updated to 5.7, all WordPress versions since 3.7 have also been updated to fix the following security issue:

Thank you to the members of the WordPress security team for implementing these fixes in WordPress.

For more information refer to the version 5.7.2 HelpHub documentation page.

Thanks and props!

The 5.7.2 release was led by @peterwilsoncc and @audrasjb.

Thank you to everyone who helped make WordPress 5.7.2 happen: @audrasjb, @ayeshrajans, @desrosj, @dd32, @peterwilsoncc, @SergeyBiryukov, and @xknown.

Welcome to Openverse

Posted by download in Software on 11-05-2021

Following the recent statement by WordPress’s co-founder Matt Mullenweg and the Creative Commons CEO, Catherine Stihler’s post, I’m happy to formally announce that CC Search is now part of the WordPress open source project, newly coined Openverse. Both Matt and I are long-time supporters of Creative Commons. I hope that this will provide a long-term, sustainable challenger to closed source photo libraries and further enhance the WordPress ecosystem.

How Does This Affect Current Users?

Current CC Search users will continue searching and using openly licensed images from around the internet. WordPress plans to continue the great work started by the Creative Commons project and expand search capabilities and features.

What’s Next?

We look forward to indexing and searching additional media, such as audio and video. As we expand our capabilities and grow the project, we look forward to integrating directly into WordPress and the media library. We hope to not only allow search and embeds of openly licensed media but pay it forward by additionally licensing and sharing your media back.

How Can You Contribute? 

Stop by the Slack channel, #openverse, and take a look at the code repositories moved under the WordPress organization here on GitHub. You can also follow along with the project on its own make page at: https://make.wordpress.org/openverse. We are working on setting up the new team, process, and procedures.

Join us in welcoming the team and community. As a treat, check out the most recent WP Briefing episode, The Commons of Images, in which Matt and I discuss CC Search and our hopes for it as part of the WordPress community.

People of WordPress: Fike Komala

Posted by download in Software on 11-05-2021

WordPress is open source software, maintained by a global network of contributors. There are many examples of how WordPress has changed people’s lives for the better. In this monthly series, we share some of the amazing stories that are not as well known.

Creating content with WordPress and blogging helped Fike Komala, from Indonesia, build a career where she can work remotely from different locations in the world.

In 2020, Fike joined a US-based company that specializes in form building to work as a content marketer. Using her experience as a freelancer and later a full time employee, she encourage others, particularly women in Asia, to consider remote work as a career option. She is so impressed by remote working benefits, that she is now considering writing about it for a thesis for her Master’s Degree, which she started this year in Europe.

Fike pictured with a snow background

As a keen blogger, WordPress immediately impressed Fike. Her dad is a programmer, and he helped her create the first of many blogs at the early age of 10 years old. She had private and public blogs, and even an English language one to help her practice and learn better English skills.

“I got satisfaction and happiness from pouring my thoughts in writing and publishing them in my blog. Writing my thoughts and feelings often helped me process them, even now.”

Fike

With a natural talent and love for languages, Fike pursued an Information Systems degree after graduating from high school. Her course covered business learning Java, HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Android programming. She also took courses to learn Bootstrap and Ruby on Rails. 

Earning Through Building With WordPress

During her education, Fike’s parents had a business building websites. She helped them proofreading and formatting the articles, and that is how she first encountered WordPress. “I saw WordPress as something more advanced than other platforms, with more themes and plugins to choose from. The default WordPress websites already looked more professional than others.” Throughout school, Fike’s experience with WordPress and blogging helped her earn extra money online in various legal and safe ways, including translating texts from English to Indonesia, online surveys, and writing articles in English.

Discovering Work You Enjoy 

The last year at University required a year-long full-time internship. Fike worked as an intern at a big general insurance company within the IT quality control staff. She enjoyed working with the people she met and learned a lot through this opportunity, but she declined the offer of a full-time position. 

Fike is a good student who loves learning and did well in her education. Her traditional internship experience led her to realize that programming in an office job did not fulfill her, and she knew that she really wanted to pursue remote opportunities. 

“I was a good student, I love learning algorithms, but I didn’t love programming. I’m not that person who can stay calm finding errors in their codes, and then finding out that it’s only missing a character,” says Fike. She added: “I don’t really like the fact that I have to wake up at 6 AM and be back home at 7 PM, and do it all over again the next day.”

Adventure Into Remote Work 

Fike spent time improving her freelance profile, revising it, and applying to jobs as a virtual assistant. She was willing to do any small jobs such as formatting WordPress posts, designing social media posts, and processing orders for online shops. Through a freelance job submission site, she was able to work with people from across the globe, including Singapore, Australia, Europe, and America. Through the site, Fike was able to gain experience with remote working tools like Slack, Asana, Trello, and Google Suites, and the work gave her practice writing in English. 

It was through this site that Fike saw a job opportunity with a WordPress plugin company. She sent in her profile and blog. 

“This was my first time being interviewed via a video call. I was ecstatic but panicked. On the day, I woke up at 4 AM, got dressed, and opened my laptop. Weirdly, my wi-fi died that morning. So I went to the nearest cafe to get the interview done, and it went great!”

She was hired to deliver consistency on the company’s blog. 

Through her job, Fike first began to contribute within the WordPress community and was able to attend her first WordCamp, WordCamp Jakarta 2018, sponsored by her firm. Through WordPress, Fike has met many generous, trusting, and helpful people. She says, “Because I’ve experienced the generosity of the WordPress people, I wanted to give back to the community.”

WordCamp swag
Swag from WordCamp Jakarta 2018, that’s Wapuu ondel-ondel!

“I got to know the amazing community behind WordPress. How people voluntarily contribute their time, energy, and skills to the community, from development, marketing to translating. It was really inspiring.”

Fike

You Can Inspire Others Through Contributing

Fike has been an inspiration to people in her local community and globally within the WordPress community through her enthusiasm and energy. 

She talks about her joy in contributing during a live interview as part of WordPress Translation Day in 2020. 

So determined to encourage others to become translators of WordPress, she joined the Global Translation Day event with the Indonesian Community last year and took part in wider marketing of the event. She is pictured below with some of the Indonesian polyglots team.

She continues to support the polyglots and is a General Translation Editor for the Indonesian language. Last year, she also voiced an Indonesian translation of the onboarding video for new contributors joining WordPress.org. She has been a regular contributor to the PerempuanWP, an initiative for Indonesian women working in the WordPress world. Working with a firm which uses the WordPress platform has strengthened her familiarity with projects in the community and encourages her interest in contributing.

Indonesian translation team

To learn more about contributing to WordPress, visit make.wordpress.org/ and follow the “get involved” link. You can join any of the weekly team meetings to get started, and there is a lot of help available. 

Fike says, “I want to represent Asian women. In the future, I hope I can inspire more women, especially Asians, to work remotely.” She is now studying in Europe for a Master’s in Digital Communication Leadership. She hopes to use her learning to help other women, particularly back in her home country of Indonesia.

She continues to share her energy for learning and remote working.

Just learn things. As much as you can. From anywhere, about anything. Keep an open mind. Read books, listen to podcasts, and learn new skills.”

She added: “If you’re working in the WordPress world, join the WordPress community. It’s a great place to learn from and connect with great people.”

Contributors

Thanks to Meg Phillips (@megphillips91) and Abha Thakor (@webcommsat) for writing this feature, to Surendra Thakor (@sthakor), Meher Bala (@meher), Larissa Murillo (@lmurillom), Josepha Haden (@chanthaboune), Chloé Bringmann (@cbringmann) for additional support and graphics, and to Topher DeRosia (@topher1kenobe) who created HeroPress. Thank you to Fike Komala (@fikekomala) for sharing her #ContributorStory.

HeroPress logo

This post is based on an article originally published on HeroPress.com. It highlights people in the WordPress community who have overcome barriers and whose stories would otherwise go unheard.

Meet more WordPress community members in our People of WordPress series.

#ContributorStory #HeroPress #WPTranslationDay

WP Briefing: The Commons of Images

Posted by download in Software on 10-05-2021

In this episode, Josepha is joined by the co-founder and project lead of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg. Tune in to hear Matt and Josepha discuss the relaunch of CC Search (Openverse) in WordPress and the facets of the open source ecosystem. 

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

Credits

References

Openverse Repositories

Tech Stack Outline

  • Frontend– Languages:
    • JavaScript, CSS/SCSS
    • Libraries/Services: Vue.js, Nuxt.js# 
  • API– Languages:
    • Python, PostgreSQL
    • Libraries/Services: Django, Elasticsearch, Redis
  • Catalogue– Languages:
    • Python, PostgreSQL
    • Libraries/Services: Apache Airflow, PySpark

Join the WordPress Slack instance, #openverse

Transcript

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  00:10

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing. This is usually the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of some of the ideas is behind the WordPress open source project. Today, I have a little bit of a different topic. It’s still WordPress, it’s still open source, but it’s kind of peering into some stuff for the future as opposed to looking at where we are today or how we got to where we are today.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  00:36

You might have recently seen an announcement from Matt that CC Search is joining the WordPress project. This is a really exciting thing for open source, for sure, and definitely, from my perspective, for WordPress. And so I invited Matt to join me today to take a look at what he had in mind with bringing that particular project into our project and what we have in mind for the future. And so, today, this is the WordPress Briefing with Matt and Josepha. And I hope you enjoy the conversation we had. Here we go!

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  01:22

So, we recently announced for WordPress that we essentially acquired CC Search, a project that’s been part of Creative Commons. And they recently chose a different kind of roadmap for the work they’re doing in the future. And so it seemed like a really great opportunity to bring this tool and this, I don’t know, this kind of experience for our users into the WordPress project. So Matt, what are your thoughts about how, like this commitment to images with CC licenses, with Creative Commons licenses, can impact WordPress and how we work in the open web.

Matt Mullenweg  02:09

I think it’s pretty exciting because Creative Commons exists to do for media, you know, images, audio, etc., what open source has done for code. And so for people who choose to want to donate their creative work under these licenses, much like anyone who contributes a plugin, or code or documentation or translations for WordPress, now people for whom their method of expression is, let’s say, photography, can put that into the comments like literally, I like why it’s called the Creative Commons, it’s such a good name. It can be accessed within everyone’s dashboard for WordPress. And those images can start to really be part of the fabric of the web the same way that code that runs WordPress or its plugins is part of the fabric of the web.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  02:57

For anyone who’s listening who’s not actually already familiar with this concept of the tragedy of the commons, do you want to give us the elevator pitch of what that means and why it’s so important for WordPress to try to counterbalance that in our work?

Matt Mullenweg  03:12

Sure, the tragedy of the commons, you know, I think the canonical example is as a shared field in a town, and it doesn’t belong to anyone, so anyone can use it. And when too many farmers took their sheep there, they would overeat the grass, and then there was no more grass left because it was being overutilized, and there was no one owning the field to say, Hey, we need to practice a more sustainable amount of sheep. grass in

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  03:39

Put more grass in there.

Matt Mullenweg  03:41

So basically, the idea is like a shared resource that gets overused and then disappears. With software, we have the opportunity to have the opposite, which is a wealth of comments where every person using the thing actually has the opportunity to make it a little bit better. And that is really beauty of like Wikipedia, open source where every person using it might contribute a small fix, or a translation or a bug report or tell a friend about it, or basically be part of making this thing better, which you know, WordPress is history is very much an example of, and then as it gets better, more people want to use it. And the beautiful thing about software is you can have economics of abundance versus the economics of scarcity. There’s not one field used, but every additional incremental user of WordPress makes this community stronger and creates a larger market for the products inside it. So those types of dynamics can have the opposite of the tragedy of the commons.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  04:39

Absolutely. I love this idea that you brought it up in your question, not your question, in your answer right at the top. I love this idea of acknowledging that code isn’t the only fabric available in open source and certainly not the only fabric of the internet as we know it. This idea of like, let’s bring Creative Commons licensed images into a more long-term space for WordPress. Do you think that that at some point can apply to videos and other sorts of audio files?

Matt Mullenweg  05:21

Absolutely. There already is a ton of Creative Commons licensed content out there that people can use. But there’s a discoverability problem, you know? Each individual image or audio file or video is, is a little bit of an island. So that’s why it’s so important that there’s the equivalent of a search engine that allows people to discover all the great stuff that’s out there. And what happens today is there’s stock photography sites, some of which used to be Creative Commons-based, but many have moved away from that. So they essentially relicense their user contributions. Or people, if we’re being real, people just go to Google images, and they might utilize images that they don’t actually have rights to. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s not ideal. And so we can create this really compelling directory experience of imagery, which people have chosen to share and want to be used. I think that’s a much better outcome than the equivalent of piracy.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  06:21

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I leapt right into this and didn’t really give any context to what CC Search is or anything, but for anyone who is not familiar with this tool already, CC Search is, as Matt mentioned, a search engine that currently is focused specifically on images that use open licenses. The Creative Commons licenses are like the content-specific version of GPL for code, which is a really big deal, I think. If wishes were fishes, Matt, and you had your total hope ahead of you, what is your hope for the relaunch of this product and this tool in WordPress?

Matt Mullenweg  07:15

Well, first and foremost, I think we can improve the experience of designing and contributing themes and then modifying them with this really fantastic image directory if we’re able to build it in the media library. And lots of plugins like Jetpack do some version of this. I think that Jetpack uses Pexels or one of the proprietary, but open libraries. And so we can make it fully, like you said, the equivalent of GPL and open source, all the better. I think longer-term, I’d love to have a way for people who are adding media to the WordPress site to set it to be available under a Creative Commons license. So just to make it easy and built-in for people to create more Creative Commons license imagery. And then, you know, with the integration of Gutenberg and other things, we can make it easy for other people to use it and credit back the original author if they choose to. And what we find is that even though with CC0, which is essentially a kind of like putting something into the public domain, credit is not required. If you make it the default to link back to the original photographer, author, most people believe that because they like creating things that they use. So you get the best of both worlds; you have the freedom of use for any purpose, including not requiring the credit. But then, just by having it by default, when you insert one of these images, a lot of people are going to leave that and link back to the original author, which I think is also really cool. Like you’re not required to have a credit link on WordPress, but most people leave the Powered BY WordPress on there. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  08:45

One of the interesting areas, you mentioned Pexels in this case. One of those interesting areas that we, as a project, can really explore here is how to make it so that the metadata gives you confidence in the origin of the image. Like I don’t believe that there are any set standards for that. I’ve just started my research, obviously, because they’re brand new to us, but I just don’t think there are any standards available there. And, I think that there is an opportunity for WordPress as a true supporter of the open web to help change the fact that we don’t have that’s one of the main competitive disadvantages that open source libraries have been trying to combat and especially with Unsplash, who eventually did get purchased by Getty Images. Still, I feel like part of what must have driven that decision to change the licensing terms had to be that they are up against that behemoth of Getty Images where people know where the things came from. They know where the images came from, and they can trust that lineage and model releases and all that stuff. I’m just really interested to see how we can; I don’t know; I hate to say dignify contributors who are offering their contributions to open source in this way. But, it also is kind of that there’s no sense in saying that just because you did not accept payment from getting images, your photos weren’t any good, or your images did not have an excellent path to where they are housed at that moment.

Matt Mullenweg  10:39

I mean, it’s really fun to contribute to something larger than yourself. And for many folks, you know, their gift, their craft is something like photography. And so there’s always going to be the sort of paid marketplaces and, and something like Shutterstock, I think really fantastic companies and services. I think a marketplace for paid content. But we just want to make an alternative, so those who want to donate their work to the world, much like engineers, and designers, and translators of WordPress, donate their work some of that effort to the world, they can do so. Right now, there are some places for that, but we’re going to try to create one that is fully open, has no advertising, has an open API. So other CMSs can access it too.  You know, we’re going to try to bring the WordPress philosophy to this space. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  11:29

Gosh, I just love that. While we’re on the question of contributing to something bigger than yourself, bringing the WordPress philosophy into this space, how do you think CC Search will impact the current media library and how WordPress handles media in general? Or do you have an idea about how it will impact that? Sometimes we don’t know until we get in?

Matt Mullenweg  11:53

Yeah, I think within Gutenberg, the idea of adding an image from an online library or a search is something we’ve wanted to do for a while. But either the licensing made it a little tricky, or, you know, some of the sites that did have open things, maybe the site itself had like a lot of advertising or pop-ups or things like that. So by having this hosted by wordpress.org, we’ll have a clean, open source, and ad-free place that people can access. I suppose it’s also worth saying that CC Search, which we’re rebranding as Openverse, is actually all the code behind is open source as well. So there is going to be a new project on WordPress’s GitHub that will be this open source search engine. So that’s also part of the contributions; we’ll be pointing this search engine to try to index and collect Creative Commons license media, but perhaps it could also provide a base for someone else wanting to build a different characters engine or just host Openverse themselves and run it themselves; that is totally fine.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  13:00

I should probably mention, for any of the WP Briefing listeners who are contributing to the WordPress project itself, there is a brand new team that we’re working on building, and for one wander over and welcome everybody, we are welcoming in an open source community into our open source community. And so, of course, we want to make sure that they know how to get around and feel welcome in the space. But also, anything that you are interested in helping to contribute to that particular project, I think would be helpful. WordPress is big; we have a long history. And so I think I feel confident in saying that, if I were on that team that’s bringing in this new tool, I would hope that there were some OG WordPressers, who were available to help me discover the ins and outs of things, especially as its 18 years of us.

Matt Mullenweg  14:04

Yeah, it’s also a new technology stack. So let’s say you want to be involved in WordPress, but your expertise is more on the Python side, or Elastic Search or something like that. We now have a project where people who are into that or want to learn about it can get involved. Because, of course, you know, contributing and being involved with open source is probably the best way to learn a technology, better than any college degree.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  14:28

I was just talking to some folks about that; our active learning opportunities and our passive learning opportunities get into a different balance as we get older. And active learning opportunities are for real in school, right? And our passive learning opportunities where you get to look at someone else’s code, you get to review proposals on user flows, and things are harder and harder to come by unless you happen to be in an open source project where we’re just working on that in the open all day, every day. And I’ll put a link to the repos in the show notes, and also, I’ll include a list of the tech stack that we’re looking at there, just so that no one has to like, chase it down. But yeah, I’m excited about this new integration, not only for the CMS but also for the community.

Matt Mullenweg  15:26

And the whole library will be available to any plug-in who wants to call to it. And like we said, even other CMSs, much like we designed Gutenberg to be able to be used by other CMSs, how cool would it be if Drupal or Joomla or others were also able to leverage this library and allow their users to contribute to it as well?

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  15:47

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. There is a burning question that I feel like we probably should just go ahead and answer here. I’ve been asked a few times, and I think you have been asked a few times whether this is an actual acquisition. And If yes, then what entity is it under? Is it under the WordPress Foundation? Is it under Automattic?

Matt Mullenweg  16:10

It’s a little complicated because, as you know, WordPress.org is not part of the Foundation. So basically, Automattic paid Creative Commons, the nonprofit. They will essentially redirect the old URL, so old links to Creative Commons Search won’t break. And we ended up hiring some of the people that they were parting ways with into Automattic. And then we put that open source code, and we’ll run the service on WordPress.org, and then those we hired, Automattic hired, will contribute to WordPress.org and the open source projects that power what we’re calling Openverse now.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  16:54

I am.

Matt Mullenweg  16:56

That’s kind of an acquisition, but also from a nonprofit, and then going into something, which is not a nonprofit, but is open source and sort of freely available, which is WordPress.org, the website.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  17:06

Yeah, that has been hard for me to answer because you’re right, it’s not like it was donated to WordPress or something. But everything that we’re doing is being donated back to the project, and of course, hopefully, really living into that WordPress ethos that we have of giving back to, to the project, something that made your work and your life better. So there’s some, some finger-crossing going on in there.

Matt Mullenweg  17:37

We could have skipped some of the steps because the code was open source; we could have just used it or something like that. But it was also a good opportunity, I think, to support the Creative Commons organization. And like we said, as part of that donation, there’ll be redirecting Creative Commons Search to WordPress.org. And honestly, we don’t need that, but it just from the point of view of keeping links workings, which is a big passion of mine. I like that none of the links will break or things to the Creative Commons Search, which I think has been around for… I don’t actually know the exact timeline, but a very long time. It’s been part of the internet for a long time. So we’re happy that it can now continue and be something that can plausibly be around for many decades to come.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  18:23

Yeah, we’re going to build ourselves a little sustainable program around this project, and it’s going to be beautiful; I’m excited.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  18:31

I did want to give everybody a cultural heads up. When I say crossing my fingers, I know that for some of our cultures, that means I was lying. That is not what I’m saying—crossing my fingers and moving forward on this with a lot of hope.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  18:51

I tried to be careful about my local idioms when I’m talking to folks who don’t know that I’m from Arkansas, so I sometimes say weird things. But I’ve given up on y’all, for instance, like that has made its way right back into my language. 

Matt Mullenweg  19:09

Y’all is great. In Texas, we had a funny thing, which maybe applies to you now, which is “more nervous than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.” I bet you haven’t heard that one. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  19:21

I have not, but I love it, and I’m going to fold it into my personal vocabulary for later use. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  19:30

The response to this has been overwhelmingly positive, and I know that I am incredibly positive. I just mentioned like I’m moving forward through this with hope, even though there’s a lot of stuff that I don’t actually know about how we can implement it. I have never brought an existing open source community into an open source community that I’m currently working with. So there’s a lot of learning to be done in there. But, from your side Matt, like, are there any things that you are feeling anxiously hopeful about for this? Anything that you hope is right, but you’re not sure about?

Matt Mullenweg  20:14

Oh, this is just the first step of many. So just having the search engine, is I think good to provide a service to the internet. But where we can really leverage it is those next steps we already talked about, which is really building out the API and integrating the API with the WordPress admin to make it easily accessible within people’s dashboards. And the Gutenberg blocks to embed these images, quickly and easily, and with all the proper credit and everything. And then the next step, which was probably the one I’m most excited about, which is enabling folks to contribute to the Creative Commons. And by that, I mean the Commons of Images, which have open licenses and are encouraged for reuse and remixing and all those sorts of great things. And I think that anything we can do to increase more of that stuff on the internet also enables a lot of creativity and innovation.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  21:10

All right. Well, that was an excellent conversation. I am really excited about this. I want to, for my work, just say a huge welcome to the folks over at CC Search and our brand new group around Openverse, and a big thanks to the folks over at the Creative Commons group. Matt, do you have anything else you want to share with any of our audience?

Matt Mullenweg  21:39

No, I feel great that we could support the Creative Commons, keep this going for the open internet, and so excited to work alongside the folks who have been working on Openverse and take it to the next iterations and the next level. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  21:56

Beautiful. Well, Matt, thank you so much for joining me today. This was a wonderful conversation. My friends, this has been Matt Mullenweg, WordPress project co-founder, and project lead.

Matt Mullenweg  22:08

Thank you so much for having me.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  22:17

Thank you for tuning in today to the WordPress Briefing. I hope that conversation made you as excited as I am about this new adventure that we’re embarking on with CC Search and that whole team. I’m going to put in the show notes a few links to where you can find them, where they’re doing their work, what you can collaborate on, and also some notes about the tech stack that goes into it. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy.Thanks again for joining me and I’ll see you in a couple of weeks.