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The second release candidate (RC2) for WordPress 6.5 is ready! 

This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it’s recommended that you evaluate RC2 on a test server and site.

While release candidates are considered ready for release, testing remains crucial to ensure that everything in WordPress 6.5 is the best it can be.

You can test WordPress 6.5 RC2 in four ways:

The current target for the WordPress 6.5 release is March 26, 2024. That’s a mere two weeks away! Get an overview of the 6.5 release cycle, and check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.5-related posts in the coming weeks for further details.

What to expect in WordPress 6.5 RC2

Thanks to the many contributors testing up to this point, this release includes approximately 20 bug fixes for the Editor and 30+ tickets for WordPress Core. For more technical information related to issues addressed since RC1, you can browse the following links: 

• GitHub commits for 6.5 since March 5
• Closed Trac tickets since March 5

Update on content overrides for synced patterns

As synced patterns evolve and improve, every enhancement must continue to provide the best experience possible. With this in mind, WordPress 6.5 will not include the ability to override content in synced patterns. This allows more time for feedback and testing to ensure it can really shine. Expect this feature to debut in the next major release!

Contribute to this release

WordPress is open source software made possible by a passionate community of people collaborating on and contributing to its development. The resources below outline various ways you can help the world’s most popular open source web platform, regardless of your technical expertise.

Get involved in testing

Testing for issues is critical to ensuring WordPress is performant and stable. It’s also a meaningful way for anyone to contribute. This detailed guide will walk you through testing features in WordPress 6.5. For those new to testing, follow this general testing guide for more details on getting set up.

If you encounter an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums or directly to WordPress Trac if you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs.

Curious about testing releases in general? Follow along with the testing initiatives in Make Core and join the #core-test channel on Making WordPress Slack.

Search for vulnerabilities

From now until the final release candidate of WordPress 6.5 (scheduled for March 19), the monetary reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities is doubled. Please follow responsible disclosure practices as detailed in the project’s security practices and policies outlined on the HackerOne page and in the security white paper.

Update your theme or plugin

For plugin and theme authors, your products play an integral role in extending the functionality and value of WordPress for all users. 

Thanks for continuing to test your themes and plugins with the WordPress 6.5 beta releases. With RC1, you’ll want to conclude your testing and update the “Tested up to” version in your plugin’s readme file to 6.5.

If you find compatibility issues, please post detailed information to the support forum.

Help translate WordPress

Do you speak a language other than English? ¿Español? Français? Русский? 日本? हिन्दी? বাংলা? You can help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages.

Release the haiku

RC2, a bridge,
From development to launch,
One more step forward.
– submitted by @huzaifaalmesbah

Thank you to the following contributors for collaborating on this post: @dansoschin

Over 1,300 attendees gathered at the Taipei International Convention Center in Taiwan for WordCamp Asia 2024. This three-day event emerged as a vibrant celebration showcasing the collaboration, diversity, and innovation that drive the world’s most popular web platform.

The Asian WordPress flagship event started with a dedicated Contributor Day, followed by two days of engaging talks, panels, hands-on workshops, and networking. Notable guests, including WordPress Cofounder Matt Mullenweg and Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy, joined the diverse lineup of speakers. Popular topics featured cutting-edge web technologies and trends, use cases, open source dynamics, and more. WordPress enthusiasts seized the opportunity to gain insights from international and local industry experts and to learn about the project’s future.

Converting walled gardens into community gardens

On March 8, Josepha Haden Chomphosy took the stage for an insightful journey comparing and contrasting the “walled” and “community” gardens in software ecosystems, drawing an analogy between closed and open source platforms. After exploring both concepts, she posed an important question to the audience.

What would it take for someone to move from a walled garden to a community garden?

Open source software, symbolized by community gardens, represents freedom from copyright restrictions and usage limitations. Unlike proprietary software (described as walled gardens), the core value lies in long-term empowerment, giving people control and ownership of their digital presence.

Acknowledging the longstanding values held by WordPress and its open source community for two decades, Josepha focused on the importance of caring for foundations that make us strong, managing what distracts us, and nurturing growth by embracing new opportunities. She celebrated the strengths of the WordPress community and how its shared ethos furthers a thriving ecosystem.

Quoting artist and activist Audrey Hepburn, Josepha expressed that, much like a community garden, the power of contributions—whether through time, knowledge, or product use— sustains and maintains shared spaces like WordPress.

In the Q&A portion of her presentation, Josepha addressed inquiries about community involvement and contributions. Highlighted resources included the WordPress job board for opportunities within the ecosystem and the Data Liberation project, emphasizing its role in fostering a more open web and helping the transition out of proprietary platforms.

Q&A with Matt Mullenweg

WordCamp Asia concluded with a live audience Q&A session featuring WordPress Cofounder Matt Mullenweg. Attendees gained insights into the future of WordPress, including ongoing projects like Data Liberation, community inclusion initiatives, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and more.

The atmosphere was filled with excitement when Matt revealed that this year’s State of the Word will take place in Tokyo, Japan, on December 16, 2024.

Additional questions from this session will be addressed in an upcoming post on the Make WordPress Project blog.

Stay connected

WordPress events enable technologists, open source enthusiasts, and community members around the globe to meet, share ideas, and collaborate to drive WordPress and the open web forward.

Don’t forget to mark your calendars for WordCamp Europe (Torino, Italy), WordCamp US (Portland, Oregon, United States), and next year’s WordCamp Asia in Manila, Philippines!

Thank you to @angelasjin, @dansoschin, @eidolonnight, @bmcsherry, and the WordCamp Asia organizers who made this event and post possible.

The foundational infrastructure for the websites you build and manage is crucial for ensuring a safe, secure, fast, and reliable environment. That’s where WP Cloud comes in. 

Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, built WP Cloud because we wanted a cloud platform constructed from the ground up just for WordPress. We’ve hosted millions of websites across the WordPress ecosystem and have become one of the most trusted providers in cloud services. 

At WordPress.com, the WP Cloud infrastructure powers all websites on our Creator and Entrepreneur plans. 

We’re proud of WP Cloud’s 99.999% uptime, automated burst scaling and failure detection, and failover redundancies that allow you to spend time focusing on building your business or serving your clients instead of worrying about whether a traffic spike will crash the site. 

WP Cloud is also incredibly secure. With DDoS protection, malware scanning, anti-spam measures, SSL certificates, TLS traffic encryption, and real-time backups, you’ll have peace of mind from day one. 

We’re confident that there’s no better cloud platform for your WordPress site(s) than WP Cloud. And we’re not the only ones to think so. 

Today, WP Cloud is announcing that Bluehost—one of the largest website hosts in the world—is launching a new product built atop WP Cloud’s best-in-class infrastructure. 

Bluehost Cloud includes all the technical excellence of WP Cloud, with bundled options for hosting multiple websites. Plus, as with all of the sites on WordPress.com, it comes with Jetpack’s highly acclaimed performance and security features built right in. 

To kick off this partnership, we’re showcasing Bluehost Cloud on WordPress.com’s pricing page, so that you can choose the product that best fits your business needs. As fellow supporters of the WordPress ecosystem, we’re glad Bluehost has chosen WP Cloud for this powerful new offering.

Take advantage of these robust WP Cloud solutions with the Creator, Entrepreneur, or Bluehost Cloud plan.

Jelly Pixel Studio, a web development agency based in Indonesia, specializes in crafting unique and illustrative websites for clients worldwide. The company serves a wide variety of clients, from small businesses to larger corporations, utilizing WordPress.com as their primary hosting platform due to its exceptional stability, fast performance, and robust features.

Over the years, the agency has migrated numerous websites to WordPress.com and has seen consistent uptime and improved efficiency, saving both time and money. The agency’s founder, Andika Purnawijaya, better known as Dika Fei, cites WordPress.com as the magic solution that helped solve many hosting challenges for the agency’s clients.

Let’s explore a bit more about Jelly Pixel and how WordPress.com helps keep their clients happy.

Dika’s path to web development

Dika Fei embarked on his web development journey right after university, learning and mastering IBM’s WebSphere. His first interaction with WordPress.com came when he joined Codeable to work with various clients whose sites were hosted on the WordPress.com platform. Dika saw the immense value in WordPress.com and adopted it for the majority of his projects.

Jelly Pixel Studio was born out of a failed startup venture by Dika and three of his friends from college. After their initial attempt at creating something similar to Shopify for the Indonesian market didn’t work out, the team decided to channel their expertise into a highly successful web development agency. When choosing a platform, they settled on WordPress due to its simplicity and intuitiveness.

The team later branched out to form a second agency, WP Stronk, which handles subscription-based web maintenance and content entry.

When asked if the agencies focused on any specific niche, Dika said, “YES! Jelly Pixel is exceptionally skilled at creating illustrative websites with subtle scrolling animations. Our websites leave a lasting impression even after you close the tab.”

The impact of WordPress.com

WordPress.com has been instrumental in helping Jelly Pixel Studio streamline its operations and deliver outstanding services to clients. With a mix of projects in maintenance and those being actively developed, Dika and his team of seven, or “the magnificent seven” as they like to call themselves, have benefited greatly from the platform’s robust features and top-notch performance.

WordPress developers and agencies are no strangers to the perils and pitfalls of hosting. But WordPress.com solves those problems for Jelly Pixel Studio clients:

What I love about WordPress.com is its exceptional stability and blazing-fast performance, regardless of your setup. Even with other managed hosting providers, you often need to be mindful of  various settings such as: cache parameters and PHP workers. However, with WordPress.com, everything just works seamlessly. It’s a true “set it and forget it” experience. 

As long as your site is hosted on WordPress.com, you can rest assured that it won’t go down and it won’t slow down, no matter the traffic. I have no idea how you accomplished it, but it’s absolutely AMAZING! 

Literally magic

The team considers WordPress.com to be a good fit for their clients. Why?

You have amazing support, and your infrastructure is LITERALLY MAGIC. We have monitored our clients’ uptime, and 100% is a number we often see. How is this even possible? “Amazing” would be an understatement. You have saved me from a ton of urgent calls at night.

Jelly Pixel Studio believes WordPress.com has one well-kept secret:

I firmly believe that WordPress.com is the best hosting option for WooCommerce, particularly those with high traffic. 

He thinks this is a missed opportunity for many freelancers and agencies who may not have considered using WordPress.com for their hosting clients. He shares this example:

I have a client on a different host. They get HUGE traffic. Every time they have a sale, they need to purchase a package upgrade and I have to constantly monitor their ad parameters to ensure proper caching. With the way WordPress.com works, all of this would be seamlessly handled out of the box.

He adds:

Unfortunately, the knowledge of WordPress.com as a highly stable WooCommerce hosting solution seems to have been lost over time. It almost feels like a well-kept secret! 

The verdict

Dika and his team at Jelly Pixel Studio view WordPress.com as a valuable partner in their web development journey. Dika credits the platform for providing peace of mind, leading to a happier and more productive work environment for his team, as well as clients who no longer complain about their site’s performance. He looks forward to further cooperation with WordPress.com and hopes for the continued evolution of the platform’s capabilities.

At the heart of his work, Dika stands by this quote from Victor Frankl:

“For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself.”

This approach is echoed in the success story of Jelly Pixel Studio and WP Stronk, marking the agencies as businesses of kindness, dedication, and commitment to problem-solving.

The power of hosting with WordPress.com

WordPress web design and development agencies are discovering the power of WordPress.com hosting and the benefits it offers their clients. With full-stack performance, robust security, and developer-friendly features, WordPress.com provides agencies with a platform they can confidently recommend to their clients.

If you’re interested in getting access to the tools and features on WordPress.com that can support your development process, click here to enable our “I am a developer” setting on your WordPress.com account.

Finally, if you’re in search of an agency specializing in illustrative websites and CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization), Jelly Pixel Studio can help you. For web and content maintenance, check out WP Stronk for their comprehensive services.

February saw significant progress towards the upcoming WordPress 6.5 release and final preparations for WordCamp Asia. The results of the annual WordPress survey were released, and discussions began on the next steps for the Data Liberation project. Read on for the latest happenings in the WordPress space.

Get ready for WordCamp Asia

The stage is ready for the first WordPress flagship event of the year in Taipei, Taiwan. WordCamp Asia 2024 will kick off on March 7, promising three days of learning, networking, and inspiration.

This year’s schedule features an extensive lineup of speakers, including guests Josepha Haden Chomphosy, Ben Thompson, Noel Tock, and JU-CHUN KO. To conclude the summit, attendees can engage with WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg in a Q&A session. Find out how to submit your questions.

Can’t make it to Taipei? Watch the event live stream on the WordPress YouTube channel.

Countdown to WordPress 6.5

WordPress 6.5 is on track for its much-anticipated release on March 26. Following last month’s beta releases, the first release candidate (RC1) is now available for testing—marking another significant milestone in the development cycle.

This major release will add finesse and fine-tuning to how you control your site-building experience, with lots to explore specifically for developers. Get a detailed overview of highlighted features in the Beta 1 announcement.

Stay on top of the latest updates in WordPress development with February’s edition of What’s New for Developers?

New in the Gutenberg plugin

Two new versions of Gutenberg shipped in February:

• Gutenberg 17.7 introduced multiple performance improvements, refinements to the link control UI, and shadow support for more blocks, among other notable highlights.
• Gutenberg 17.8 focused on stability updates. New features included a grid layout variation for the Group block, bulk export of patterns, and the ability to browse and try alternative templates from the editor’s sidebar.

Beyond major features, many small yet mighty updates are coming in WordPress 6.5 that will make a big difference in your WordPress experience. Read more »

Team updates

• Results of the 2023 annual WordPress survey were announced last month.
• An update on the Data Liberation project informs the next steps of this initiative and how to contribute to current conversations.
• The Community team shared key findings from the 2023 WordPress meetup survey.
• Meet the new cohort of the Contributor Mentorship Program.
• The Photos team posted recommendations for improving alternative texts when submitting images to the Photo Directory.
• Following discussions on the evolution of the Outreach Program, a new outreach group has been created on GitHub. This group aims to provide expertise and feedback to those seeking additional testing or voices on a new feature or solution.
• Core team members introduced the WordPress Core Trac Sustainability Focus, a part of the Sustainability team’s effort to enhance the sustainability of the WordPress codebase.
• A new release of WP-CLI is now available.
• Learn WordPress is regularly updated with new tutorials, online workshops, and more learning resources. Check out what’s new.
• The latest edition of People of WordPress features Sunita Rai, a content marketer and volunteer translator from Nepal.

Requests for feedback and testing

• Your help testing WordPress 6.5 is key to ensuring everything in this release is the best it can be. New to testing? Read this post for more details on getting set up.
• The Training team is discussing how to bring accessibility-first approaches into their content creation and processes. Feedback is open until March 9.
• Version 24.3 of the WordPress mobile app for iOS and Android is ready for testing.

WordPress events

• WordCamp Europe 2024 is looking for photographers.
• The WordPress Kerala Photo Festival wrapped up with great success. The event received over 1,500 images from 163 participants, contributing to the Photo Directory passing the 15,000 photo milestone. Winners were announced in this post.
• Don’t miss these other WordPress events happening soon:
  • Women WordPress Day, Costa Rica, on March 8
  • Switzerland Community Day on March 23
  • WordCamp Torrelodones, Spain, on March 23-24
• Find out more local events or apply to organize one on the Events page.

Have a story we should include in the next issue of The Month in WordPress? Fill out this quick form to let us know.

The first release candidate (RC1) for WordPress 6.5 is ready for download and testing!

This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it’s recommended that you evaluate RC1 on a test server and site.

Reaching this phase of the release cycle is an important milestone. While release candidates are considered ready for release, testing remains crucial to ensure that everything in WordPress 6.5 is the best it can be.

You can test WordPress 6.5 RC1 in four ways:

The current target for the WordPress 6.5 release is March 26, 2024. Get an overview of the 6.5 release cycle, and check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.5-related posts in the coming weeks for further details.

What’s in WordPress 6.5 RC1?

Thanks to the many contributors testing up to this point, this release include more than 20 bug fixes for the Editor and more than 40 tickets for WordPress Core.

Get a recap of WordPress 6.5’s highlighted features in the Beta 1 announcement. For more technical information related to issues addressed since Beta 3, you can browse the following links:

• GitHub commits for 6.5 since February 27
• Closed Trac tickets since February 27

Want to look deeper into the details and technical notes for this release? These recent posts cover some of the latest updates:

• Introducing Plugin Dependencies in WordPress 6.5
• Unification of the Site and Post Editors in 6.5
• Updates to the HTML API in 6.5
• Interactivity API in 6.5
• I18N Improvements in 6.5 (Performant Translations)
• WordPress 6.5 adds AVIF support
• Core Editor Improvement: Power in the Details
• Core Editor Improvement: Robust Revisions in the Site Editor
• All 6.5-related developer notes

How you can contribute

WordPress is open source software made possible by a passionate community of people collaborating on and contributing to its development. The resources below outline various ways you can help the world’s most popular open source web platform, regardless of your technical expertise.

Get involved in testing

Testing for issues is critical to ensuring WordPress is performant and stable. It’s also a meaningful way for anyone to contribute. This detailed guide will walk you through testing features in WordPress 6.5. For those new to testing, follow this general testing guide for more details on getting set up.

If you encounter an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums or directly to WordPress Trac if you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs.

Curious about testing releases in general? Follow along with the testing initiatives in Make Core and join the #core-test channel on Making WordPress Slack.

Search for vulnerabilities

From now until the final release candidate of WordPress 6.5 (scheduled for March 19), the monetary reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities is doubled. Please follow responsible disclosure practices as detailed in the project’s security practices and policies outlined on the HackerOne page and in the security white paper.

Update your theme or plugin

For plugin and theme authors, your products play an integral role in extending the functionality and value of WordPress for all users. 

Thanks for continuing to test your themes and plugins with the WordPress 6.5 beta releases. With RC1, you’ll want to conclude your testing and update the “Tested up to” version in your plugin’s readme file to 6.5.

If you find compatibility issues, please post detailed information to the support forum.

Help translate WordPress

Do you speak a language other than English? ¿Español? Français? Русский? 日本? हिन्दी? বাংলা? You can help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages. This release milestone (RC1) also marks the hard string freeze point of the 6.5 release cycle.

Release the haiku

What’s this? RC1?
Three weeks left until it’s done.
Come and test. It’s fun!

Thank you to the following contributors for collaborating on this post: @dansoschin, @courane01, @hellosatya, @huzaifaalmesbah

As Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg teased in a January blog post, our team at WordPress.com is working hard to enhance our developer experience. Improving what you see in your dashboard when you log into WordPress.com is one of our biggest goals.

Today, we’re excited to unveil a more powerful wp-admin experience (if you know, you know), which will soon be available to all sites on Creator and Entrepreneur plans. Read on to find out how to get early access.

Don’t call it a comeback

For many years, the default view for WordPress.com users has been a modernized, more friendly version of the classic WordPress experience. Around the office, we call this interface “Calypso.” It offers sleek post/page management, easy profile edits, built-in tips and resources for starting or growing your site, and more.

While the Calypso interface is ideal for some folks, we’ve heard from a lot of developers that you’d prefer easy access to the classic WordPress dashboard experience. So, we’re doing just that by making it possible for wp-admin to be the default view when you log in. 

Our mission here is to empower our power users—those on Creator and Entrepreneur plans—to leverage WordPress to its fullest. This update promises:

• Enhanced flexibility: Tailor your interface to seamlessly match your workflow.
• A familiar, WordPress-centric experience: Enjoy an interface that feels right at home, mirroring the robust capabilities you expect from other WordPress hosts.
• Superior management for complex sites: Handle sophisticated sites and client projects with ease.

While this initial launch is for Creator and Entrepreneur subscribers, our commitment extends to all WordPress.com users. We’re excited about the possibility of expanding these features to everyone in the future. 

Join the early access list

To access the wp-admin interface you know and love, please join our email list below to be considered for early access.

And stay tuned for even more updates coming your way, including a few menu and navigation changes that you won’t want to miss.

WordCamp Asia 2024 is just a few days away—starting on March 7 in Taipei, Taiwan. This unique three-day summit will feature a distinguished lineup of speakers, numerous networking opportunities, and a closing Q&A experience with WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg. The live Q&A session will be streamed for WordPress enthusiasts worldwide, beginning at 3:30 p.m. China Standard Time (7:30 a.m. UTC) on Saturday, March 9, 2024.

Watch the event live stream on the WordPress YouTube channel or visit the event website for more details.

What: Q&A Session with Matt Mullenweg
When: March 9, 2024 at 7:30 a.m. UTC (Start of live stream)
Where: Taipei International Convention Center
Streaming: Watch the live stream on the WordPress YouTube channel.

Have a question for Matt?

If you want to participate, please submit your question via Slido from March 7 until about 10:00 a.m. UTC on Friday, March 8.

Given the expected volume of submitted questions, only some will be answered live, while others will be covered in a follow-up post published after the event on make.wordpress.org/project.

See you in-person and online on March 7!

谢谢!

Thank you to @rmartinezduque, @eidolonnight, @cbringmann, and @bjmcsherry for reviewing this post.

Explore the impact you can make on WordPress without coding in this WordPress Briefing episode hosted by Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy. She’ll guide you through diverse non-coding contributions suitable for all skill levels, including content translation, photo submissions, event organization, and software testing. Listen and discover how you can enhance the WordPress community in ways that align with your interests and expertise.

Credits

Host: Josepha Haden Chomphosy
Editor: Dustin Hartzler
Logo: Javier Arce
Production: Brett McSherry, Chloé Bringmann
Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod

Show Notes

• WordCamp Asia 2024
  • Contributor Day
• WordPress Photo Directory
• Polyglots
• WordPress Support Forums
• Upcoming WordPress Events
• Make WordPress Testing
• Learn WordPress
• Small List of Big Things
  • 2023 Annual Survey Results and Next Steps 
  • Gather Press Pilot Program 

Transcripts

[00:00:00] Josepha: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go. 

[00:00:29] (Intro music) 

[00:00:40] Josepha: At the end of this week, WordCamp Asia is happening. It’s one of our largest events dedicated to WordPress, and it will cover a wide range of topics. From advanced concepts like running thriving businesses to more beginner things like building your first theme, there is bound to be something for you at this event.

For folks who have the opportunity to attend in person, you might also be going to your first-ever Contributor Day. Now, as much as I want there to be something for everyone there, I recognize that it’s a little more frenetic than your average WordPress event. It’s not any less welcoming than the event that has like a schedule and, tracks, and rooms.

[00:01:19] Josepha: But in my experience of any group of open source contributors, they get really excited when they are tackling problems together. And that’s most of what happens at a Contributor Day. It can make it a little difficult to see how you can join in. But never fear; the crew at the WordPress Briefing has you covered. We’ve got a couple of ways you can contribute immediately, no code required, and a handful of good next steps when you’re feeling comfortable and ready to level up.

For total beginners, so you’ve got a WordPress site, or you know, you’re about to launch one. And you’re here to learn and meet people and hopefully find someone who answers the questions you feel too shy to mention in public.

So these two ways of contribution are for you. First, you can contribute photos. WordPress has a photo directory for openly licensed photos, which are included in Openverse searches. Users can submit photographs to be used by folks all over the world. There are some basic guidelines, such as no faces or identifying characteristics. It can’t be overly edited or processed, but even photos taken on a smartphone are accepted. Because we understand that the best camera is the one you have on you.

[00:02:30] Josepha: You can also contribute translations. If you speak a language other than English, you can visit translate.WordPress.org and help translate not only the WordPress software but also plugins, themes, and other parts of the WordPress project into your native language. Since more than half of all WordPress installations are in non-English languages, adding or improving translations is really impactful. We are actually at WordCamp Asia trialing a new self-serve translation day process. So that’s a great place to have a double impact.

[00:03:03] Josepha: So those are your two completely code-free ways that you can contribute, completely beginner friendly ways to contribute at Contributor Day coming up later this week. And then for your next steps, so say that you’ve had your site for a while, you are an absolute expert in the admin, you’ve had to answer a few tough questions for yourself, you’ve watched a lot of tutorials, and so now you’re thinking of ways you can share that knowledge.

[00:03:29] Josepha: Here are a few ways that you can exercise your new knowledge and really solidify it in your brain.

Firstly, you can contribute help. Supporting other WordPress users is a great way to give back to WordPress. This can involve answering questions, providing guidance, or even providing the right resources to users. You can check out the WordPress support forums for more information, and they actually have a dedicated support team as well that works toward making sure that WordPress users have answers to the questions they are asking. You can head over to WordPress.org/support/forums and just pick an appropriate area for you, something that you are currently an expert in, and start answering questions. Start contributing.

[00:04:10] Josepha: Second thing you can do is you can contribute patterns. So WordPress has a dedicated Patterns directory, which stores a list of Block patterns. So custom designs that were created using blocks in Gutenberg that then can be used across any WordPress site, anyone’s WordPress site. You can submit those patterns, any pattern that you built, to the directory, and then they can be used by people all around the world. Basically, like anything with WordPress, if you put it in there, it can be used by anyone all around the world. 

The third thing is that you can contribute events. This is one of my favorite ways to contribute. Organizing in person events to an extent has no code requirement to it, but also it does kind of require that you have a good understanding of your local community and have a willingness to get out there and build your network. 

WordPress is where it is today thanks to its excellent community and all the lovely in-person events that happen all over the world. They bring our community together, and anyone can contribute by helping to organize just a small gathering or support an in-person event.

[00:05:13] Josepha: The fourth way that you can level up your contributions is to contribute by breaking things. I know that sounds weird, but testing the software to see where it breaks is actually a really valuable contribution. It’s as easy as downloading the WordPress beta tester plugin and the test reports plugin to a WordPress installation, Preferably a testing one, not one that’s currently publicly in use. But you can test out the newest version of WordPress before the release and provide useful feedback to the development team. 

And the fifth way that you can level up your contribution is to contribute learning. Not that you are learning as a contribution, but what one person can learn through a tutorial or documentation, another person has to learn through discussion and hands-on learning.

This team, the folks over at learn.WordPress.org, they are the official team and official learning platform and resource for WordPress. They host video tutorials. Yes, but also host live online workshops, courses and even provide lesson plans on different topics related to WordPress. So if you are an educator or otherwise really like to help spread knowledge around, pass around the knowledge that has been hard-earned by you, this is an excellent opportunity.

[00:06:28] Josepha: And of course, if you are brave and afraid of nothing, then you can just go to Contributor Day and move from table to table until something sounds interesting to you. You don’t have to have a plan. Your whole plan can absolutely be to wander until you are found.

[00:06:45] (Music interlude) 

[00:06:52] Josepha: That brings us now to our small list of big things. It’s actually a very small list today. I’ve got two things on it.

[00:07:00] Josepha: The first is that a couple of weeks back, we published the results from the 2023 annual survey. So, each year, we collect some high-level data about trends and themes across this vast ecosystem of users and site builders, people who extend WordPress core, and contributors who build WordPress core to help inform decision-making and provide valuable feedback on the project status. I looked at the results from our last survey. We had a bit of an increase in the respondents, not as much as we would have liked, but still a little bit greater number than we had in the past couple of years. And I have a lot of questions myself about what we are doing compared to what we are being asked to do and so go take a look at the blog post that has some highlights from it. It’s got a couple of contextual pieces of information in there as well, and come with your questions to WordCamps around the world or ask them in community meetings as you find them. 

[00:07:58] Josepha: And then the second thing is actually that we have kind of a pilot program going on. There’s a proposal out right now about GatherPress. It’s a group of community leaders that have built a tool, a community plugin, to help gather WordPress events a bit better and a bit more “open source-ely”. It’s open currently to anyone who is running a WordPress meetup group that is interested in learning more about how a WordPress-first and open source first community gathering tool might look.

[00:08:32] Josepha: I’ll have a link to the proposal in the show notes that’ll give you more detailed information and give you an opportunity to figure out how you can join that pilot and help us figure out whether it will work or not ultimately for WordPress. 

And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Don’t forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app or subscribe directly on WordPress.org/news. You’ll get a friendly reminder whenever there’s a new episode. If you liked what you heard today, share it with a fellow WordPresser or fellow brand new WordCamper. But if you had questions about what you heard, you can share those with me at wpbriefing@WordPress.org. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy.

[00:09:13] Josepha: Thanks again for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. 

In the last few weeks, our team here at WordPress.com has rebuilt developer.wordpress.com from the ground up. If you build or design websites for other people, in any capacity, bookmark this site. It’s your new home for docs, resources, the latest news about developer features, and more. 

Rather than creating a unique, custom theme, we went all-in on using Twenty Twenty-Four, which is the default theme for all WordPress sites. 

That’s right, with a combination of built-in Site Editor functionalities and traditional PHP templates, we were able to create a site from scratch to house all of our developer resources. 

Below, I outline exactly how our team did it.

A Twenty Twenty-Four Child Theme

The developer.wordpress.com site has existed for years, but we realized that it needed an overhaul in order to modernize the look and feel of the site with our current branding, as well as accommodate our new developer documentation. 

You’ll probably agree that the site needed a refresh; here’s what developer.wordpress.com looked like two weeks ago:

Once we decided to redesign and rebuild the site, we had two options: 1) build it entirely from scratch or 2) use an existing theme. 

We knew we wanted to use Full Site Editing (FSE) because it would allow us to easily use existing patterns and give our content team the best writing and editing experience without them having to commit code.

We considered starting from scratch and using the official “Create Block Theme” plugin. Building a new theme from scratch is a great option if you need something tailored to your specific needs, but Twenty Twenty-Four was already close to what we wanted, and it would give us a headstart because we can inherit most styles, templates, and code from the parent theme.

We quickly decided on a hybrid theme approach: we would use FSE as much as possible but still fall back to CSS and classic PHP templates where needed (like for our Docs custom post type).

With this in mind, we created a minimal child theme based on Twenty Twenty-Four.

Spin up a scaffold with @wordpress/create-block

We initialized our new theme by running npx @wordpress/create-block@latest wpcom-developer. 

This gave us a folder with example code, build scripts, and a plugin that would load a custom block.

If you only need a custom block (not a theme), you’re all set.

But we’re building a theme here! Let’s work on that next.

Modify the setup into a child theme

First, we deleted wpcom-developer.php, the file responsible for loading our block via a plugin. We also added a functions.php file and a style.css file with the expected syntax required to identify this as a child theme. 

Despite being a CSS file, we’re not adding any styles to the style.css file. Instead, you can think of it like a documentation file where Template: twentytwentyfour specifies that the new theme we’re creating is a child theme of Twenty Twenty-Four.

/*
Theme Name: wpcom-developer
Theme URI: https://developer.wordpress.com
Description: Twenty Twenty-Four Child theme for Developer.WordPress.com
Author: Automattic
Author URI: https://automattic.com
Template: twentytwentyfour
Version: 1.0.0
*/

We removed all of the demo files in the “src” folder and added two folders inside: one for CSS and one for JS, each containing an empty file that will be the entry point for building our code.

The theme folder structure now looked like this:

The build scripts in @wordpress/create-block can build SCSS/CSS and TS/JS out of the box. It uses Webpack behind the scenes and provides a standard configuration. We can extend the default configuration further with custom entry points and plugins by adding our own webpack.config.js file. 

By doing this, we can:

1. Build specific output files for certain sections of the site. In our case, we have both PHP templates and FSE templates from both custom code and our parent Twenty Twenty-Four theme. The FSE templates need minimal (if any) custom styling (thanks to theme.json), but our developer documentation area of the site uses a custom post type and page templates that require CSS.
2. Remove empty JS files after building the *.asset.php files. Without this, an empty JS file will be generated for each CSS file.

Since the build process in WordPress Scripts relies on Webpack, we have complete control over how we want to modify or extend the build process. 

Next, we installed the required packages:

​​npm install path webpack-remove-empty-scripts --save-dev

Our webpack.config.js ended up looking similar to the code below. Notice that we’re simply extending the defaultConfig with a few extra properties.

Any additional entry points, in our case src/docs, can be added as a separate entry in the entry object.

// WordPress webpack config.
const defaultConfig = require( '@wordpress/scripts/config/webpack.config' );

// Plugins.
const RemoveEmptyScriptsPlugin = require( 'webpack-remove-empty-scripts' );

// Utilities.
const path = require( 'path' );

// Add any new entry points by extending the webpack config.
module.exports = {
	...defaultConfig,
	...{
		entry: {
			'css/global':  path.resolve( process.cwd(), 'src/css',   'global.scss' ),
			'js/index': path.resolve( process.cwd(), 'src/js', 'index.js' ),
		},
		plugins: [
			// Include WP's plugin config.
			...defaultConfig.plugins,
			// Removes the empty `.js` files generated by webpack but
			// sets it after WP has generated its `*.asset.php` file.
			new RemoveEmptyScriptsPlugin( {
				stage: RemoveEmptyScriptsPlugin.STAGE_AFTER_PROCESS_PLUGINS
			} )
		]
	}
};

In functions.php, we enqueue our built assets and files depending on specific conditions. For example, we built separate CSS files for the docs area of the site, and we only enqueued those CSS files for our docs. 

<?php

function wpcom_developer_enqueue_styles() : void {
    wp_enqueue_style( 'wpcom-developer-style',
        get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . '/build/css/global.css'
    );
}

add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'wpcom_developer_enqueue_styles' );

We didn’t need to register the style files from Twenty Twenty-Four, as WordPress handles these inline.

We did need to enqueue the styles for our classic, non-FSE templates (in the case of our developer docs) or any additional styles we wanted to add on top of the FSE styles.

To build the production JS and CSS locally, we run npm run build. 

For local development, you can run npm run start in one terminal window and npx wp-env start (using the wp-env package) in another to start a local WordPress development server running your theme.

While building this site, our team of designers, developers, and content writers used a WordPress.com staging site so that changes did not affect the existing developer.wordpress.com site until we were ready to launch this new theme.

theme.json

Twenty Twenty-Four has a comprehensive theme.json file that defines its styles. By default, our hybrid theme inherits all of the style definitions from the parent (Twenty Twenty-Four) theme.json file. 

We selectively overwrote the parts we wanted to change (the color palette, fonts, and other brand elements), leaving the rest to be loaded from the parent theme. 

WordPress handles this merging, as well as any changes you make in the editor. 

Many of the default styles worked well for us, and we ended up with a compact theme.json file that defines colors, fonts, and gradients. Having a copy of the parent theme’s theme.json file makes it easier to see how colors are referenced.

You can change theme.json in your favorite code editor, or you can change it directly in the WordPress editor and then download the theme files from Gutenberg.

Why might you want to export your editor changes? Styles can then be transferred back to code to ensure they match and make it easier to distribute your theme or move it from a local development site to a live site. This ensures the FSE page templates are kept in code with version control. 

When we launched this new theme on production, the template files loaded from our theme directory; we didn’t need to import database records containing the template syntax or global styles.

Global styles in SCSS/CSS

Global styles are added as CSS variables, and they can be referenced in CSS. Changing the value in theme.json will also ensure that the other colors are updated.

For example, here’s how we reference our “contrast” color as a border color:

border-color: var(--wp--preset--color--contrast);

What about header.php and footer.php?

Some plugins require these files in a theme, e.g. by calling get_header(), which does not automatically load the FSE header template. 

We did not want to recreate our header and footer to cover those cases; having just one source of truth is a lot better.

By using do_blocks(), we were able to render our needed header block. Here’s an example from a header template file:

<head>
<?php
wp_head();
$fse_header_block = do_blocks( '<!-- wp:template-part {"slug":"header","theme":"a8c/wpcom-developer","tagName":"header","area":"header", "className":"header-legacy"} /-->' );
?>
</head>
<body <?php body_class(); ?>>
<?php
echo $fse_header_block;

The new developer.wordpress.com site is now live!

Check out our new-and-improved developer.wordpress.com site today, and leave a comment below telling us what you think. We’d love your feedback. 

Using custom code and staging sites are just two of the many developer features available to WordPress.com sites that we used to build our new and improved developer.wordpress.com.

If you’re a developer and interested in getting early access to other development-related features, click here to enable our “I am a developer” setting on your WordPress.com account.