If you use Ulysses for Mac, iPad, and iPhone, you already know that this Apple Design Award-winning writing app offers a focused, pleasant writing experience. You might also know that Ulysses publishes to WordPress with just a few clicks or taps. If so, you’ll be happy to hear that the newest version improves the already-smooth integration between WordPress and Ulysses.
For anyone who might be unfamiliar with the writing tool, Ulysses provides a distraction-free Markdown editor that is customizable to fit your style. Its powerful features help you organize your writing projects and be more productive. When you are satisfied with the content you’ve written, Ulysses can export the text into several formats. Most importantly, it is easy to publish your creation directly to your WordPress.com blog or your self-hosted WordPress site.
Let’s take a closer look at how publishing from Ulysses to WordPress works. First, you will need to connect Ulysses to your WordPress account. If you are a WordPress.com user, you will simply input your user name and password. WordPress self-host users will also supply the URL of the WordPress site. Once the connection is made, Ulysses will also sync with your other devices. You’ll now be able to turn any text you write in Ulysses into WordPress blog posts via the app’s export feature.
Ulysses is unique because it automatically transfers not only images and text but also other settings and characteristics. Some of its smart features include:
Your text’s first heading will become your post’s title.
Keywords you attached in Ulysses will become tags or categories if they match your blog’s tags or categories.
If there’s an image attached to your text, it will become your post’s featured image.
If there’s a note attached to your text, it will become your post’s excerpt.
You can, of course, edit any of these smart settings during publishing. Furthermore, you can set your post’s slug and choose to publish instantly, schedule for later, or upload as a draft. This video walks you through the process.
And now for the big news — with the latest Ulysses version, you can also update previously published posts directly within the app, which adds even more convenience to your publishing workflow. Consider this common scenario:
Sometimes when blogging, a typo or other issue escapes our notice, and we only spot it when looking at the published post or the post’s preview. Until now, Ulysses users needed to switch to WordPress to edit or publish the post a second time. With the latest version, that process is unnecessary. Editing text in Ulysses now enables you to update the corresponding WordPress blog post right within the app. During the publishing workflow, Ulysses will highlight the changes you’re about to make.
Ulysses’ newest version improves its time-saving integration with WordPress, making publishing and revising WordPress posts even more convenient than before.
Here’s a fun bonus! To celebrate this latest integration update, Ulysses is giving away five (5) free one-year licenses! To win, simply comment below, letting us know that you’d love to try the Ulysses app. Remember: this is an Apple product, so it only works with Mac, iPad, and iPhone. The first 5 people who ask for it in the comments will win. We’ll send the name and email address you supply when you comment to Ulysses and they’ll contact you with the details on how to claim your one-year license.
You may already know that WordPress mobile apps are the easiest way to manage your WordPress site any time, anywhere. Helpful features in the apps include our Stats widgets, which make it simple to keep an eye on your site’s activity without even opening the app. We recently rebuilt our widgets for iOS 14, and we’re happy to announce that they’re available now in WordPress 16.9.
Now, your WordPress Stats can live right on your iPhone or iPad’s home screen, always visible and up to date when you unlock your device. With one tap, the widgets will open WordPress straight to the Stats page for your site. They are available in a variety of sizes, from small ones that give you a bite-sized piece of information at a glance, to large ones that give you a comprehensive look at your site activity.
Three types of widgets are available: Today, This Week, and All Time.
The Today widget focuses on the most up to date information: how many views, visitors, likes, and comments has your site received today? This Week lets you compare your daily stats from the past week to see the rise and fall of your site’s activity. All Time shows the total number of views, visitors, and posts on your site as well as the views from your best day ever.
If you have multiple WordPress sites, you can edit a widget after placing it on your home screen to choose which site’s stats you want it to display. You can even mix and match multiple widgets to create a dashboard that shows you how all your sites are doing at once.
Widgets adapt to Dark Mode when it is enabled on your device.
The new widgets are available for WordPress.com sites as well as WordPress sites using Jetpack. Once you’ve updated to the latest version of WordPress on your device, you can use these instructions to add a widget to your home screen. Your device must be running iOS 14.0 or higher to use the new widgets. If you use an Android phone, widgets are available there, too.
We hope our new widgets make it even easier to keep up with your site’s activity. We’re always thinking about how we can make the apps more useful for you. What other kinds of widgets would you like to see in WordPress? Let us know in the comments!
In this episode, Josepha Haden Chomphosy explores the WordPress release process. Tune in and learn the phases of a release and catch this week’s 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.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the WordPress briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of some of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project and the community around it, as well as get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go!
All right, so last week, we wrapped up and shipped the WordPress 5.7 release. The release team this time around was smaller than we’ve had in the last couple of years. By the numbers, it looks really good: 66 enhancements or feature requests went in, 127 bugs were fixed, and seven versions of a Gutenberg plugin were merged and backported. If you use WordPress, you are probably aware that we have new releases throughout the year, but you probably don’t know much about the release process. There’s not really a reason to know unless you’re actively contributing to a release. For those interested in knowing more about how we improve WordPress, this week’s exploration is for you.
We’re gonna take a look at what goes into WordPress releases and just kind of zoom our way in from the highest level. At the highest level, there are three major WordPress releases a year, plus the minor releases, plus Gutenberg releases. So if you’re following current WordPress work and future WordPress work, that’s going to get you to probably around 30 releases a year. If we zoom in one level to the release itself, a single release of WordPress takes four to five months from start to the day that we ship, and an additional four to six weeks on support and translations, and minor releases after that. If you’re looking from my vantage point, you’ll see that WordPress releases have essentially five parts, some of which happen kind of simultaneously.
The first part is planning and includes the project lead, lead developers, design; groups like that. The second phase is the creation phase when we’re actually building the things that have to go into the CMS that involves the design, core, editor, mobile, and other teams. Then there’s this phase that I like to refer to as the distribution phase. This is mostly done by the teams that make sure that WordPress is widely distributable; the polyglots team work on translations, accessibility does some work, docs make sure that everything is documented, and training, of course, gets things ready for when we have to be able to tell people how to use the release.
Then there is the fourth phase; I really don’t think they go sequentially or in a waterfall format. The fourth-ish phase that I include, and that I tend to see, is this extending and iteration phase. It’s the phase where we see our theme authors and our plugin authors, folks who are doing support, show up and help us to make sure that WordPress is available not only widely but broadly to ensure that their audiences as theme authors and plugin authors are covered in the features that they need based on what they are using WordPress for. The fifth phase is the part of our communication that involves the community team, especially marketing, WordPressTV, and learn.wordpress.org. Basically, anyone who’s showing up to make sure that we all share what happened in the release, the features that are coming, and how that affects the users is involved in that particular phase. So five big phases of what happens over those four to five months, and then for the month or month and a half afterward.
If we zoom in a bit more on the creation phase, each release has people who lead the work and coordinate contributor efforts during the course of the release. For any given release, hundreds of people contribute and receive credit for moving the WordPress project forward. Okay, hold on a second. Let’s pump the brakes and zoom in a bit on that. Hundreds of people work on every major release for a project that powers over 40% of the web that feels like a small number. But for the people who process the contributions in preparation for release, it’s actually pretty substantial. For every release, there is a small team of leaders who asked the hard questions. Is this a usable feature? Does this make WordPress better overall? And, of course, is this ready to ship? Some of those leaders, a smaller subset of even the leaders that we have already, are committers who actually prep and merge patches to the CMS; they don’t do all the work to create a design or write all the code. This tiny group of people processes hundreds and hundreds of bug fixes, improvements, and enhancements that have been submitted over the course of months and sometimes years. As a side note, that whole process is a little smaller, a little faster in the Gutenberg featured plugin, but the basic parts are still there. Alright, so we’ve zoomed from the big picture way into some of the finer details, and it really looks like any other project cycle. So now, I’m going to layer in the filter of open source to that process.
There are a couple of things that make building software in an open source environment so different. The first is that the code is readily available. If you have a basic understanding of the languages, you can see the code, learn from it, and make suggestions about improving it. Second, you consider the user a co-developer in the process, which means that as long as people use your product, they will have opinions on what you shipped. This way of iterating improves WordPress and ties back to one of my favorite open source principles. The idea that with many eyes, all bugs are shallow. To me, that means that with enough people looking at a problem, someone is bound to be able to see the solution.
This brings us to our community highlight, the segment where I share a note about contributors who have helped others along the way or a WordPress success story. This week’s highlight is from Nok in our Bangkok community. When asked to help her find her way into the WordPress community, she said, “@shinichiN who started the WordPress community in Bangkok and encouraged me to contribute, and also @mayukojpn has introduced me to the WP community team to join as a deputy. “ Thank you for sharing those two inspiring people with us. And if you, listener, have any stories that you would like to share of your own WordPress success or people that you have been so grateful to help you find your way in the project, you can feel free to email those to me at wpbriefing@wordpress.org.
That brings us to our final segment of the WP Briefing, the small list of big things. I only have three things to share with you this week. The first one is that about a week ago, we had our first release of 2021. It was the WordPress 5.7 release, titled Esperanza. If you have not yet seen it, go ahead and update your website or check with your host and make sure that they have updated you if you’re on a managed host. And then take a listen to the artists that it’s named after.
The second thing that I want you to keep an eye out for is wordpress.org/news. We are starting a new series of content that gets at the heart of some of Gutenberg’s basic parts; there’s a lot of change coming up in the next few releases of WordPress. And the most important thing to me is that you understand what we’re trying to change and where those changes are primarily taking place. There will be a couple of tutorials that go up there over the course of the of the next few weeks. The third item on the small list of big things is to remind you of our call for testing. As I mentioned earlier in the podcast, the users of any open source software are the code developers; the software built is supposed to make your life and work easier. When you test things and find interactions that can use a little bit of refinement or features that are not working exactly as expected, it’s incredibly helpful for us to have that information to always make sure that we’re solving problems instead of accidentally creating them. If you want to participate in the Current call for testing, you can head over to make.wordpress.org/test. Or, if you’ve been doing your own testing, you can also submit any bugs you have found in the GitHub repo, which I will share in the show notes below. So that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks!
From time-saving features to enhancements in your favorite blocks, these block editor improvements will help you build posts and pages on your site, no matter what you publish:
Crop and rotate your images with built-in editing tools
Drag and drop blocks and patterns for more control
Display a list of your pages with the new Page List block
Match your brand palette with an improved Social Icons block
Strategically place your CTAs with a better Buttons block
Manage your preferences in a refreshed panel
Let’s take a closer look.
Crop and rotate your images with built-in editing tools
Tired of switching between WordPress.com and an editing tool like Photoshop or Canva to make quick fixes to your images? There’s no need to leave the block editor to crop or rotate your photographs — you can now make changes with a few clicks in the toolbar that appears above the image.
Your original image is always saved in your Media Library, so you can crop and re-crop until you get it just right.
Drag and drop blocks and patterns for more control
Here’s a usability win: you can now drag and drop blocks and block patterns from the Block Inserter on the left directly into your editor canvas on the right. This gives you finer control over where you place new content on a post or page.
Display a list of your pages with the new Page List block
Say hello to the new block on the block: the Page List block! Let’s say you want to show a list of all of your recipe blog’s pages on a single page so readers can see an overview of your culinary content. You can use the new Page List block to automatically compile and display a hierarchical list of all your site’s published pages.
Match your brand palette with an improved Social Icons block
Does your current site background make certain social icons invisible or difficult to see? Do you want to customize the colors? With updates to the Social Icons block, you can now set custom colors for the icons and the icon background by using the color picker or specifying a HEX color code. Match your business or brand palette if you wish!
Strategically place your CTAs with a better Buttons block
A strong and visual call to action, or CTA, encourages interaction on your site, whether you’re a tax consultant seeking new leads with a Contact Me page or an online meditation teacher presenting your membership tiers on a Services page. Using the Buttons block, you can align your CTA buttons on a page, either horizontally (in a row) or vertically (stacked in a column). You’ll see this new vertical option in the block’s settings, so you can switch between layouts with ease.
Manage your block editor preferences in a refreshed panel
We’ve repackaged various options and settings for your block editor into a separate panel, sorted into four sections: General, Appearance, Blocks, and Panels. We hope this more streamlined panel helps you set up your block editor exactly as you want it.
Keep building with the block editor. We’ll keep improving it.
The block editor is continuously growing and improving as a result of your feedback — thank you. We can’t wait to see what you build next with it. In the meantime, we’re working hard behind the scenes, with more updates to come!
Bringing you fresh colors in the admin, simpler interactions in the editor, and controls right where you need them, WordPress 5.7 lets you focus on the content you create.
Meet “Esperanza”, the first WordPress release of 2021. “Esperanza” is named in honor of Esperanza Spalding, a modern musical prodigy. Her path as a musician is varied and inspiring—learn more about her and give her music a listen!
With this new version, WordPress brings you fresh colors. The editor helps you work in a few places you couldn’t before without getting into code or hiring a pro. The controls you use most are right where you need them. Layout changes that should be simple, are even simpler to make.
Now the new editor is easier to use
Font-size adjustment in more places: now, font-size controls are right where you need them in the List and Code blocks. No more trekking to another screen to make that single change!
Reusable blocks: several enhancements make reusable blocks more stable and easier to use. And now they save automatically with the post when you click the Update button.
Inserter drag-and-drop: drag blocks and block patterns from the inserter right into your post.
You can do more without writing custom code
Full-height alignment: have you ever wanted to make a block, like the Cover block, fill the whole window? Now you can.
Buttons block: now you can choose a vertical or a horizontal layout. And you can set the width of a button to a preset percentage.
Social Icons block: now you can change the size of the icons.
A simpler default color palette
This new streamlined color palette collapses all the colors that used to be in the WordPress source code down to seven core colors and a range of 56 shades that meet the WCAG 2.0 AA recommended contrast ratio against white or black.
Find the new palette in the default WordPress Dashboard color scheme, and use it when you’re building themes, plugins, or any other components. For all the details, check out the Color Palette dev note.
From HTTP to HTTPS in a single click
Starting now, switching a site from HTTP to HTTPS is a one-click move. WordPress will automatically update database URLs when you make the switch. No more hunting and guessing!
New Robots API
The new Robots API lets you include the filter directives in the robots meta tag, and the API includes the max-image-preview: large directive by default. That means search engines can show bigger image previews, which can boost your traffic (unless the site is marked not-public).
Lazy-load your iFrames
Now it’s simple to let iframes lazy-load. By default, WordPress will add a loading="lazy" attribute to iframe tags when both width and height are specified.
Ongoing cleanup after update to jQuery 3.5.1
For years jQuery helped make things move on the screen in ways the basic tools couldn’t—but that keeps changing, and so does jQuery.
In 5.7, jQuery gets more focused and less intrusive, with fewer messages in the console.
Check the Field Guide for more!
Check out the latest version of the WordPress Field Guide. It highlights developer notes for each change you may want to be aware of. WordPress 5.7 Field Guide.
The Squad
The WordPress 5.7 release comes to you from a small and experienced release squad:
This release is the reflection of the hard work of 481 generous volunteer contributors. Collaboration occurred on nearly 250 tickets on Trac and over 950 pull requests on GitHub.
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 lesser-known.
From a natural interest in computers and fixing things as a young woman, Olga Gleckler from St Petersburg, Russia, found WordPress took her on a journey to becoming a successful female tech entrepreneur. On International Women’s Day, we share her story.
Finding your path can take longer than you expect
From the age of 15, Olga found herself under pressure to find a free place for her professional studies. She said: “I didn’t know how high or low my chances were even if I had very good marks. I could have been just the biggest fish in a small pond. But anyway, I made up my mind to go to technical school.”
On leaving school in St Petersburg with her certificate, Olga felt her knowledge of opportunities was very narrow. She had pictured being an ecologist or guide translator based on the subjects she had been taught at school. There was also an advertising boom in Russia and she began to explore this as a career avenue. She had developed her computer skills and found opportunities to practise by helping her teachers with administrative work.
Though she did not have access to any formal career advice, her journey led her into programming. She said: “The range of technical schools was not wide. I spent four years studying transistor markings, soldering and drawing PCB layouts. Programming courses using Pascal didn’t do anything useful with it.”
A lack of suitable access to English-language courses made things harder for Olga. She was determined that she would master the language later in her life. In the meantime, she left technical school with an honors degree and improved typing skills.
“I faced it was a wild, unfriendly market. I didn’t know how to recognize a genuine job offer or how to avoid the bad ones. It was difficult and I don’t know how long I would’ve looked for work without help.”
Think differently to find where you belong
Olga’s father worked in an IT company and was able to give her some advice and help with potential introductions. When she was still studying, he suggested her strong technical skills might be useful as a substitute typist. When she finished her studies, he helped her apply for a job updating a legal system on clients’ computers.
Six months later, she got a full-time job in the same service department. She liked her position and her clients. However, she was given friendly advice that without a university degree she would not be able to have any further promotions.
At this time, Olga was trying to study PHP from a book. She found it very exciting at first, but a lot of their functions did not give her explanations on how to build something useful. She found when she tried to build practical items from book reading, it did not always make sense and the solutions would often fail.
She said: “It was hard to admit a failure even to myself and it was nagging me for a long time. I had to choose something I could handle, that I was interested in and could afford. It turned out to be advertising.”
She spent most of the family’s holidays on learning sessions during the next six years. Olga recalled: “It was tricky for my husband to make me leave a computer, once I was glued to it, so he bought me my first laptop. English was still hard for me, I got high marks through just memorizing all the words in a textbook and how they should sound.”
Doubting your professional skills can happen when you are at home isolated looking after children. Keeping up your interests is important.
Olga’s life took a change after having a new baby and she spent three years doubting her professional skills and her chances of getting a good job. She tried to get back into other interests through studying, baking and drawing, but found ‘the pram was pulling me back’. She found she became very isolated and felt less able to contribute as the family was relying on her husband’s income as she tried to focus on looking forward.
She said: “I was convinced (and saw) that not too many companies wanted a woman in the office, who with a small baby might need lots of leave.”
She finished her education when she returned to work after three years caring for her son. She secured a promotion but with changes in the company’s staffing, things were tense. She found the difficulties there had become more heightened and felt that young female colleagues were treated as ‘pieces of furniture’ by one manager. She did not want to stay in this environment and in a few months time decided to leave.
Your next chapter may be nearby
Determined to not repeat this type of experience, Olga looked at the brighter side. She said: “I wanted to be a marketer. Knowing how tricky it is to sell intangibles, I wanted a solid product to work with.”
It turned out to be more difficult to find a job outside traditional IT as a young mother. Some human resource officers advised her to remain within the technology arena.
Olga remained hopeful and continued to study hard. She had many learning experiences along the way, which she hopes others can learn from too. One was setting a low bar to employers. She said: “Companies I worked in wanted to get all publicity and sales increases achieved through deductions from my salary.” This happened once and the next time she was in this situation she asked specifically about the budget before signing up. “I was assured this would not be the case, but again I found the budget for publicity came out of my wages. It was a tough period of disappointments. So when I was offered a part-time administrative job with basic sick leave, I took it gladly as a reprieve.”
The job was far from home and involved a lot of travelling. Olga spent two to three hours a day on buses with Harry Potter audio books for company. “In these traffic jams, I started to feel English at last and loved it. It gave me a freedom no money can buy. Life was getting better.”
Though the job did not pay highly, it gave her something valuable – a working website. After her boss and the developer parted company, she was asked to maintain the site. Through some studying and reverse engineering, she discovered how it worked and it gave her an insight into how to write simple websites from scratch.
Olga’s first encounter with JavaScript wasn’t easy: “My first JavaScript calculator almost made me crazy, but I pursued it.”
Quickly she started to get small tasks from friends and relatives, usually to solve some urgent problems and started to meet popular content management systems. One of the first she met with was WordPress. There was an issue in a website theme used by a website which had been changed and not maintained. It took a whole weekend to solve, but she was determined to work it out. Back then, WordPress was ‘just a system’. She didn’t know then how much it was to become part of her life.
Olga spent the next two years in this role. As time went on, she started to feel worried and less satisfied with the work. The last straw for her was a negative statement from her boss, who was not a programmer and who hadn’t seen any of the work done on the website. She felt the approach was unfair as she had done extensive work on the site. She recalls: “I became angry, but it was exactly what I needed to move jobs.”
When Olga was job hunting, she didn’t feel she had the courage to apply for a developer’s role, despite the learning and work she had already done. So instead she started working on projects where she felt she was more like a ‘seller of box-ready websites’. It was another tough half a year for her with a lot of work, low payment and plans not turning out as she had hoped. On top of long hours, she ended up with pneumonia. She said: “I see now that I was doing a disservice to customers, websites are not a microwave meal – quick, cheap and dummy. There was no life in the sites without a lot of work which no one was willing to buy. Most of the sites I sold back then died after the first year and they never were truly alive and useful.”
You need to be brave and have courage
Olga really wanted a developer job but seeking jobs of this type was very frustrating. From the job adverts she found, it felt like most IT companies were asking for geniuses who already knew a lot of technologies and frameworks. She found this very demotivating.
She then found a job offer on a website outside the most popular job portals and it seemed like a perfect fit. They wanted someone with experience to write from scratch, understand someone else’s code and maintain it, with an ability to translate technical documentation and articles, and make simple designs for printing products. After completing a trial task, she was taken on, and enjoyed a better salary, in a calm environment with good colleagues and without the requirement for a lot of extra hours.
The advert turned out to be a direct ad from one of the sales departments in a technology company. By succeeding in the task set, Olga had bypassed the Human Resources team which she felt would not normally have considered her.
Her boss agreed to her working remotely most of the time. It solved any potential leave problems which Olga had thought may be an obstacle.
For Olga it had been 14 years since the original decision to become a programmer and it was only the beginning.
After a few years at what she describes as an ‘amazing experience’ in this workplace, Olga felt able to move on to her next challenge as a developer.
Decision-making can benefit from wider knowledge
After working with different systems Olga became sure that WordPress is the best CMS for developers and clients. But she was disappointed to find that the ease of use meant that good code was not always a priority for some of the sites she looked at.
“The biggest flaw of WordPress – it’s so easy to make things work that some may feel they don’t need to bother to do things right, but this becomes a problem later.”
In custom themes for a site, she also saw sites being made and clients left without any further support, or items hard coded when clients actually needed more control to change regularly.
Olga used to rely on examples she could easily find, documentation and search engines to improve her understanding in using WordPress. She discovered that just by searching for a specific feature or a solution, you can miss the whole picture.
She turned to online courses to get more comprehensive knowledge and then started to attend WordPress events, firstly online and then by foot, trains and planes! She discovered a worldwide community that was very much alive. She didn’t know when she started studying online materials and attending discussions that she would end up contributing herself to the Learn WordPress platform a few years later.
WordCamps and contributor days became a big part of her life. From her early days attending events and starting out contributing to WordPress, she is an active member of the WordPress.org Global Marketing and Polyglots Teams, and supported the recent WordPress release. She is just beginning her first WordCamp organiser experience, joining WordCamp Europe 2021 on the Contribute Team.
Olga said: “Through the wider WordPress community, I knew not only where to look but also whom to ask. Most importantly, I found allies who don’t think I’m going crazy by speaking with delight about work, and with whom I share a passion and fondness for WordPress. This is what matters.
“Now, after more than seven years of full time development, I am still enjoying endless learning, frequent discoveries, mistakes and an impassioned wish to do better.”
This and a desire to help others use WordPress.org is part of Olga’s continued contribution to its Support and Marketing Teams, and led her to be involved in the Release Marketing questions and answers in 2020.
There is no chequered flag on the way
The road to freedom and becoming her own boss has not been easy for Olga. It is the path that got her where she is today, and she continues to find joy in it. She retains the lessons she’s learned and is always hungry to learn more.
“I travelled through a very uneven path, with a lot of obstacles and noise, but for me it’s like a kaleidoscope where a little turn presents a new picture, a new “ah-ha” moment, new excitement after seemingly pointless efforts.”
She added: “When in doubt I remind myself about David Ogilvy (generally considered the Founding Father of the modern advertising industry) who tried a lot of things before he struck gold with advertising, and maybe that’s why he did.”
Finally, she learned not only to keep a good spirit and try different things, but also to dare as you move forward.
This post is based on an article originally published on HeroPress.com, a community initiative created by Topher DeRosia. It highlights people in the WordPress community who have overcome barriers and whose stories would otherwise go unheard.
Since the early days of Snapchat, which made the format so popular, Stories have become a powerful way to engage audiences on social media. Today, over 500 million Instagram accounts use Stories every day. Now, you can publish Stories on your website — a place where you truly own your own content.
With Stories, you can combine photos, videos, and text to create an engaging, tappable, full-screen slideshow that your visitors will love. You can conveniently publish Stories from your phone, giving you more ways to keep your site fresh and optimized for your increasingly mobile audience.
Introducing WordPress Stories: A New Way to Engage Your Audience
Stories are the perfect format for:
Step-by-step guides
Recipes and cooking tutorials
Updates on your DIY or art projects
A behind-the-scenes look at your latest product
The Stories you know, but better
WordPress Stories are different in a few ways.
Stories are published on your site as a blog post, which means they can be viewed, liked, and commented on by your site visitors, just like any other blog post. Your Stories have a permanent URL that can be shared and linked to from other platforms. And if you’re using the Publicize feature on your WordPress site, your Story can automatically be shared with your social media fans and followers, expanding the reach of your content.
We know it takes a lot of effort to create great content. Unlike the Stories you’re familiar with on other social platforms, Stories on your WordPress site won’t disappear after 24 hours! This means you can edit or add to your Stories long after you first publish them.
Ready to try it out?
Introducing WordPress Stories: A New Way to Engage Your Audience
You can start using Stories on your site today with the free WordPress app for Android or iOS. The Stories feature will be available for iPad and in the desktop block editor in the near future.
You don’t have to be rich to have an online presence. You don’t have to find loopholes in proprietary platforms and hope that they never change their terms of service. You own all of the content that you create on a WordPress site and have the liberty to move it to a new host if you need to, or switch your theme if it fits your mood.
That was Josepha Haden Chomphosy on WordPress is Free(dom) episode of the WP Briefing Podcast, speaking about the four freedoms of open-source software. Those four freedoms are core to how WordPress is developed. A lot of the updates we bring you this month will resonate with those freedoms.
WordPress now powers 40% of the web
W3Techs reported that WordPress now powers 40% of the top 10 million websites in the world! Every two minutes, a new website using WordPress says, “Hello world”! For the top 1000 sites, the market share is even higher at 51.8%. Over the past 10 years, the growth rate has increased, which is reflected by the fact that 66.2% of all new websites use WordPress!
WordPress release updates
February was an eventful month for WordPress releases!
WordPress maintenance releases — version 5.6.1 and version 5.6.2 — came out this in February. Update to the latest version directly from your WordPress dashboard or by downloading it from WordPress.org.
Gutenberg celebrates its 100th release with version 10
The 100th release of the Gutenberg plugin — Version 10, launched on February 17th, more than four years after the project was first announced at WordCamp US 2016. Matias Ventura’s post offers a bird’s eye view of the project over the last four years. Version 10 adds the basic pages block and makes the parent block selector visible in the block toolbar. Version 9.9 of Gutenberg — coincidentally, the 99th release of the plugin, which is also the latest Gutenberg release that will be featured in WordPress 5.7, also came out in February. Key highlights of the release include custom icons and background colors in social icons, a redesigned options modal for blocks (which is now called block preferences), and text labels in the block toolbar.
Full Site Editing (FSE) is an exciting new WordPress feature that allows you to use blocks outside the post or page content. The main focus of the Core team for 2021 is to merge FSE into WordPress core. Here’s the latest on the Full Site Editing project:
The Community Team has published handbook pages and a decision-making checklist for organizers to restart in-person meetups at areas where it is safe to do so (e.g., countries such as New Zealand, Australia, and Taiwan, where there are lower COVID-19 risks). However, WordPress meetups and WordCamps in most parts of the world will remain online due to COVID-19.
Pooja Derashri of India was featured in February’s People of WordPress series. A cross-team initiative led by the Marketing Team with support from HeroPress, the series aims to highlight lesser-known stories of WordPress contributors. The Contributor Story series is collecting new features. If you are an active contributor to a WordPress.org team or a local WordCamp, contact the Marketing Team in the #marketing Slack channel for more information.
Have a story that we should include in the next “Month in WordPress” post? Please submit it using this form.
Thank you to all of the contributors who tested the Beta/RC releases and gave feedback. Testing for bugs is a critical part of polishing every release and a great way to contribute to WordPress.
Plugin and Theme Developers
Please test your plugins and themes against WordPress 5.7 and update the Tested up to version in the readme file to 5.7. If you find compatibility problems, please be sure to post to the support forums, so those can be figured out before the final release.
If you think you’ve found a bug, you can post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. We’d love to hear from you! If you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on WordPress Trac, where you can also find a list of known bugs.
In this episode, Josepha Haden Chomphosy speaks to her role as the Executive Director of WordPress. Learn about the day-to-day of her role and how it supports the mission of WordPress.
Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the WordPress briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of some of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project and the community around it, as well as get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go!
I’ve been asked many times what the day-to-day work looks like for the Executive Director of the WordPress project. I don’t really think I’ve done a great job of answering that question. My default answer is either too broad, and I say, “I helped turn the WordPress vision into reality by supporting the community of contributors,” or way too narrow, and I start telling people what’s on my calendar. Probably no one cares about each entry on my calendar, and almost every contributor is covered by “I get things done by helping people.” So today, I invite you to join me in exploring the type of work required and the balance it takes to keep WordPress working.
First, some context on the weekly activity I see in WordPress, on average, 1,800 to 2,000 contributors a week, participate in conversations and tickets across the entire WordPress project in our entire ecosystem. There are about 20 volunteer teams that are each led by two to three team reps. Each of those teams actually has smaller groups that work on specific things; all told, it’s probably about 50 distinct teams. And probably quite a few more if you are very generous in your counting about what makes up a team for us.
Among those teams, a minimum of about 35 meetings a week are held, plus more for working groups. That doesn’t take into account the things most people are aware of externally. It doesn’t take into account the big quarterly or annual activity things like WordPress software releases or any of our events. When those sorts of things do happen, there’s a bit of an increase in our activity.
I work 40 to 60 hours a week on WordPress, depending on what’s going on, to make sure that I know what’s happening now; so that I have insight into what the next three to five years will bring. All of that is in support of the WordPress community, which I define as anyone who has ever interacted with WordPress ever, regardless of whether they know it or not. In case you’re feeling a bit lost right now, we can shorthand that entire context as this is really big and really complex.
Given that giant scope, it makes sense that people wonder what the work looks like. So I’ll talk about it in three big chunks: what I focus my time on, what I focus my attention on, and what helps me balance my decisions.
So first, what I focus my time on. I spend about a quarter of my time in meetings, mostly with current contributors, project leadership, and community members. I spend another quarter of my time in WordPress community outreach, checking in with current folks, reaching out to future WordPressers, and checking in with people that I haven’t heard from in a long time to make sure that I know what they need and if there’s anything that I can do to help. After that, I spend a bit under 15% of my time each on writing/communications work or ad hoc project work. I then spend 10% of my time reviewing proposals, editing, communication drafts for others, and determining my stances on discussions that we’re having in tickets and elsewhere. I spend all of my remaining time planning for various goals, projects, initiatives and personally working to remove blockers for our volunteer contributors. So the bulk of my time, about 50% or more, is spent in calls with people, which makes sense if you’ve ever worked with me; personal connections with the community have been the best part of my job for a long time. Since the community is what makes WordPress so great, it’s only natural that I want to stay connected.
The second big chunk is what I focus my attention on. I pay attention to four big pillars of work in the project. The first one is the WordPress CMS itself. So that’s the core team, accessibility, design, and many, many others. The second one is the WordPress community. And that’s the training team, everybody who is working on the Learn initiative, and the actual community team as well.
The third big pillar that I focus on is the WordPress contributor experience, which is mostly the meta team but includes all of the teams they work with: plugins, themes, polyglots, etc. The fourth big pillar that I turn my attention to is our communication; what I am saying about the WordPress project to people outside of it and what I am helping our team reps to say about the work that we’re accomplishing for the WordPress project inside the project. In general, we have to make sure that we coordinate a big group of contributors around a common idea or a common practice as we move forward.
Now, the way I focus both my time and attention probably isn’t quite right if you’re focused on a single feature or team. And it’s definitely not right if you aren’t spending 40 hours a week in the project; what that probably looks like for you is more like an hour in a team meeting, 30 minutes or so on clarifying conversations, and any remaining time that you are able to contribute focused on the feature that you’re actually contributing to. And so, there you have it all my time and attention. That is WordPress in a nutshell.
This brings us to the third chunk, the balance part. You might be wondering, how do I make sure I am fair and balanced in decisions that I have to make. That is something that I think about all the time, and I take very seriously. It’s hard to make decisions that might affect 2,000 people. It’s even harder when those decisions might affect 40% of the web. I know that I don’t have all the answers. And I’m fortunate enough to have 50 or 60 people in the community who offer me advice and guidance every single week. I’m in constant contact with the project lead, of course, but I also prioritize messages and concerns raised from team reps. And I always strive to understand before I try to problem solve. I don’t always get it right, but I do always work to get better. And that is the day-to-day work of a WordPress executive director.
That brings us to our community highlight. I tweeted out into the community asking for excellent examples of Freelancer success stories, and today I’m going to share a story from Arūnas Liuiza. Their story goes like this:
“For almost a decade, freelance WordPress gigs allowed me to support myself and my family and keep my full-time teaching position at the local college, which was paying peanuts but was an awesome, meaningful, and fulfilling. I am sincerely grateful for that.”
That brings us to our final segment of this brief podcast. The small list of big things to keep an eye out for in the next two weeks in WordPress. I only have two things this week. The first one is daylight saving time. It is that time of year where daylight saving time starts or stops at various parts in the globe. If you are a team rep here at WordPress, don’t forget to talk to your teams in your meetings in the next few weeks to decide what you’re going to do. You can move your team meeting if you want, and you can keep it where it is and see what new voices show up when it moves around for various people. Either way, make sure that you chat it out with your team and make sure that everybody understands what is and isn’t moving on your calendar. That will also be relevant to any of our brand new work-from-home folks in the middle of this global pandemic.
The second thing to share is that there is a major release of WordPress coming up that’s going to happen on March 9th. It’s WordPress 5.7; it’s going to be a good release. We’ve been working on it since December or maybe a little bit earlier. So keep an eye out for announcements about that here on wordpress.org/news, or if you want to follow more about the developer details and the process details you can head on over to wordpress.org/core. That, my friends, is your small list of big things. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks!
