As we’re witnessing with schools and learning communities around the world, education is shifting dramatically. With the right set of tools, your class, team, or group can learn to communicate and collaborate more efficiently online. Since our company was founded over fifteen years ago, the people behind the scenes at WordPress.com have worked from home — or from anywhere they choose in the world — and have learned a lot along the way.

A tool we call P2 has been indispensable to us, and to a growing number of educators. Want to learn our tips and tricks? Join us for a free webinar on Thursday, November 5, so you and your team can learn to make the most of this tool for remote collaboration. You can also sign up for the free beta version of P2 that is now available.

• Date: Thursday, November 5, 2020
• Time: 10:00 am PT | 12:00 pm CT | 1:00 pm ET | 18:00 UTC
• Registration link: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/4016033198190/WN_WjX8jQhIQ0iZVPpfGAklhQ
• Who’s invited: Anyone looking to improve internal team collaboration or build a public forum with P2 are welcome, but this webinar is specially designed for educators and teachers.

Register for the webinar today! We look forward to seeing you.

The WordPress Editor is a powerful tool that can help bring your design ideas to life but one of the best parts is, you don’t have to start from scratch. Building sophisticated designs can be as easy as picking Patterns from our growing library, and snapping them together to create beautiful-looking posts and pages. As of today, we’re now offering over 100 individual Patterns — with more being added all the time!

If you’ve never used Patterns before we’ve got an introduction to help you get started and also highlight some new features.

The best way to introduce Patterns is to use them. Here’s how you can add them to a post or a page on WordPress.com.

1. Head to the WordPress Editor and click the + icon to add a new block.
2. Click on the Patterns tab.
3. Click on the Pattern you’d like to see in your document and it’ll be inserted at the location of your cursor.

Here’s a quick demo that shows how to add an image gallery. 

If you’re familiar with the Block Editor, the process will look similar. Once you’ve inserted a Pattern into a post or a page, you’ll be able to see how you can customize and edit the Pattern by clicking on different areas. The image below reveals the editing options that appear with our example. 

Each Pattern is a collection of different blocks carefully put together to help you produce great looking blog posts and pages in the Editor. In the example above, it’s a collection of Image, Paragraph, Spacer, and Column Blocks. All pre-arranged into a simple but elegant Pattern for displaying images. Using Patterns in the Editor is kind of like having a WordPress web designer right there with you building up a design element by element.

The idea is that, once you’ve inserted a Pattern, you can start customizing it to make it yours.

For even more customization options with Patterns, try combining them with the updated fonts on WordPress.com.

Over 100 Patterns to Choose From

This is where the number of Patterns gets exciting. Think of it like having over 100 templates you can add to your posts and pages. You can browse by category to see all the available Pattern options.

Taking a look at a few all together might be helpful. Here are some of my recent favorites. 

They’re not favorites because they look great, but instead because these Patterns use so many different Blocks to produce a unique and useful design. Take the center Registration Form Pattern, for example. It combines a Heading Block, Paragraph Blocks, the Form Block, and the Columns Block into one Pattern that together, can make up an entire page.

More Patterns are on the Way

We’re just getting started creating new Patterns for you. What type of Pattern would make it easier to create Posts and Pages on your site? More are on the way and we’d love to hear your ideas and feedback so we can make your publishing and site-building experience even better.

And if you have anything to share that you’ve made with a Pattern or with the Editor let us know! We’d love to see and hear how you’re using Patterns on WordPress.com.

For many years, WordPress enthusiasts have filled out an annual survey to share their experiences and feelings about WordPress. Interesting results from this survey have been shared in the annual State of the Word address and/or here on WordPress News. 

This survey helps those who build WordPress understand more about how the software is used, and by whom. The survey also helps leaders in the WordPress open source project learn more about our contributors’ experience.  

To ensure that your WordPress experience is represented in the 2020 survey results,

You can also take the survey in French, German, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish! The survey will be open for at least 6 weeks, and results will be posted on this blog.

2019 Survey Results

The 2019 survey included some new questions to better understand why people continue to use WordPress as their preferred CMS, as well as a section directed toward WordPress contributors. For the first time in 2019, this survey was translated into 5 different languages: French, German, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish.

The first WordPress Contributor Survey was conducted in 2015, but unfortunately the results were never published. This report includes Contributor Survey results from both 2015 and 2019. 

Survey Segments

Major groups in the survey included: WordPress Professionals, WordPress Users, and Others. 

The WordPress Professionals group consists of those who: work for a company that designs/develops websites; use WordPress to build websites and/or blogs for others; design or develop themes, plugins, or other custom tools for WordPress sites; or are a designer, developer, or other web professional working with WordPress.

This WordPress Professionals group is further divided into WordPress Company Pros (those who work for a company that designs/develops websites) and WordPress Freelancers/Hobbyists (all other professional types) subgroups.

The WordPress User group consists of those who: own or run a blog that is built with WordPress; own or run a website that is built with WordPress; write for or contribute to a blog/website that is built with WordPress; use WordPress for school as a teacher; use WordPress for school as a student, or are learning to build websites using WordPress.

The Others group consists of those who did not self-identify with any of the options provided for the question, “Which of the following best describes how you use WordPress?”

2019 Survey Results Summary

WordPress remains the platform of choice for future projects among those surveyed. Overwhelmingly, the reasons cited for this are that WordPress is the CMS people already know, and that the community supporting it is valuable. Professionals and users report similar levels of frustration with updates and Gutenberg. Both groups also love the ease of use they find in WordPress.

The number of professionals who report providing a heavily customized experience to clients has increased substantially, while at the same time the amount of time reported on creating those sites has decreased. Regardless of frustrations felt with various features, this seems to indicate that ease of use has been on the rise.

More details on sentiment, usage, and other interesting topics are available in the report: check it out!

Before you go: take the 2020 Survey!

Knowing why and how people use WordPress helps those who build WordPress to keep your needs and preferences in mind. 

The survey will be open for at least 6 weeks, and results will be published on this blog. All data will be anonymized: no email addresses or IP addresses will be associated with published results. To learn more about WordPress.org’s privacy practices, check out the privacy policy.

Like last year, the 2020 survey will be promoted via a banner on WordPress.org, as well as by WordPress enthusiasts. Each of the translated surveys will be promoted through banners on their associated localized-language WordPress.org sites. Please encourage your WordPress pals and social media followers to take the survey too!

To ensure your WordPress experience is represented in the 2020 survey results… don’t delay!

(Also available in French, German, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish!)

WordPress 5.6 beta 2 is now available for testing!

This software is still in development, so we recommend that you run this version on a test site.

You can test the WordPress 5.6 beta in two ways:

• Try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (choose the “bleeding edge nightlies” option).
• Or download the beta here (zip).

WordPress 5.6 is slated for release on December 8, 2020, and we need your help to get there!

Thank you to all of the contributors that tested the beta 1 development release and provided feedback. Testing for bugs is an important part of polishing each release and a great way to contribute to WordPress.

Some highlights

Since beta 1, 53 bugs have been fixed. Here is a summary of a few changes included in beta 2:

• 6 additional bugs have been fixed in the block editor (see #26442).
• Unified design for search forms and results across the admin (#37353).
• Exposed the embed Gutenberg block to Core (#51531).
• Updated Twemoji (#51356), React (#51505), and Akismet versions (#51610).
• Added accessibility improvements (among other things) to Application Passwords (#51580).
• Added indicator to image details for images attached to a site option (#42063).

Developer notes

WordPress 5.6 has lots of refinements to the developer experience as well. To keep up, subscribe to the Make WordPress Core blog and pay special attention to the developers’ notes for updates on those and other changes that could affect your products.

How to Help

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.

WordPress 5.6 Beta 1 is now available for testing!

This software is still in development, so we recommend that you run this version on a test site.

You can test the WordPress 5.6 beta in two ways:

• Try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (choose the “bleeding edge nightlies” option).
• Or download the beta here (zip).

The current target for final release is December 8, 2020. This is just seven weeks away, so your help is needed to ensure this release is tested properly.

Improvements in the Editor

WordPress 5.6 includes seven Gutenberg plugin releases. Here are a few highlighted enhancements:

• Improved support for video positioning in cover blocks.
• Enhancements to Block Patterns including translatable strings.
• Character counts in the information panel, improved keyboard navigation, and other adjustments to help users find their way better.
• Improved UI for drag and drop functionality, as well as block movers.

To see all of the features for each release in detail check out the release posts: 8.6, 8.7, 8.8, 8.9, 9.0, 9.1, and 9.2 (link forthcoming).

Improvements in Core

A new default theme

The default theme is making its annual return with Twenty Twenty-One. This theme features a streamlined and elegant design, which aims to be AAA ready.

Auto-update option for major releases

The much anticipated opt-in for major releases of WordPress Core will ship in this release. With this functionality, you can elect to have major releases of the WordPress software update in the background with no additional fuss for your users.

Increased support for PHP 8

The next major version release of PHP, 8.0.0, is scheduled for release just a few days prior to WordPress 5.6. The WordPress project has a long history of being compatible with new versions of PHP as soon as possible, and this release is no different.

Because PHP 8 is a major version release, changes that break backward compatibility or compatibility for various APIs are allowed. Contributors have been hard at work fixing the known incompatibilities with PHP 8 in WordPress during the 5.6 release cycle.

While all of the detectable issues in WordPress can be fixed, you will need to verify that all of your plugins and themes are also compatible with PHP 8 prior to upgrading. Keep an eye on the Making WordPress Core blog in the coming weeks for more detailed information about what to look for.

Application Passwords for REST API Authentication

Since the REST API was merged into Core, only cookie & nonce based authentication has been available (without the use of a plugin). This authentication method can be a frustrating experience for developers, often limiting how applications can interact with protected endpoints.

With the introduction of Application Password in WordPress 5.6, gone is this frustration and the need to jump through hoops to re-authenticate when cookies expire. But don’t worry, cookie and nonce authentication will remain in WordPress as-is if you’re not ready to change.

Application Passwords are user specific, making it easy to grant or revoke access to specific users or applications (individually or wholesale). Because information like “Last Used” is logged, it’s also easy to track down inactive credentials or bad actors from unexpected locations.

Better accessibility

With every release, WordPress works hard to improve accessibility. Version 5.6 is no exception and will ship with a number of accessibility fixes and enhancements. Take a look:

• Announce block selection changes manually on windows.
• Avoid focusing the block selection button on each render.
• Avoid rendering the clipboard textarea inside the button
• Fix dropdown menu focus loss when using arrow keys with Safari and Voiceover
• Fix dragging multiple blocks downwards, which resulted in blocks inserted in wrong position.
• Fix incorrect aria description in the Block List View.
• Add arrow navigation in Preview menu.
• Prevent links from being focusable inside the Disabled component.

How You Can Help

Keep your eyes on the Make WordPress Core blog for 5.6-related developer notes in the coming weeks, breaking down these and other changes in greater detail.

So far, contributors have fixed 188 tickets in WordPress 5.6, including 82 new features and enhancements, and more bug fixes are on the way.

Do some testing!

Testing for bugs is an important part of polishing the release during the beta stage and a great way to contribute.

If you think you’ve found a bug, please post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. We would love to hear from you! If you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on WordPress Trac. That’s also where you can find a list of known bugs.

Props to @webcommsat, @yvettesonneveld, @estelaris, @cguntur, @desrosj, and @marybaum for editing/proof reading this post, and @davidbaumwald for final review.

Automattic — a leader in publishing and e-commerce software and the parent company behind the industry-leading brands WordPress.com, WooCommerce, WordPress VIP, Jetpack, Tumblr, and more — was awarded a coveted spot on the prestigious Forbes Cloud 100 list, the annual ranking of the world’s top private cloud companies. In partnership with Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures, the Forbes Cloud 100 recognizes standouts in tech’s hottest categories from disruptive startups to internet giants.

A pioneer in democratizing publishing and e-commerce, WordPress powers 38 percent of all websites globally, has 10x the content management market share of its nearest competitor, and is the platform of choice for tens of millions of websites around the world. 

WooCommerce, Automattic’s e-commerce solution, powers 30 percent of the top one million global e-commerce websites — allowing anyone to sell anything from anywhere. With WooCommerce, people can build exactly the business they want, with everything they need to run their store on a single platform. 

Automattic’s technology also powers the largest brands on the web. The WordPress VIP Platform is used by more than 250 enterprises, including Salesforce.com, Facebook, Microsoft, New York Times, Spotify, and CNN, to publish content to hundreds of millions of readers and users.  VIP’s purpose-built infrastructure delivers flexibility, security, and control with unrivaled performance and effortless scaling.

Automattic’s innovation is also attracting a growing and diverse array of platform interactions  —  e.g. 1.7 million new users registering each month across the Automattic ecosystem, 1.2 billion monthly unique visitors on WordPress.com, and 9 billion monthly page views on Tumblr. 

“We are incredibly proud to be included in the Forbes Cloud 100 list — for the fifth year in a row — among so many other noteworthy companies,” said Matt Mullenweg, CEO, Automattic. “Our passion is making the web a better place, and I credit the extraordinary results over the years to the talented and wonderful people — both inside and outside our organization — who bring the Automattic vision to life every day.”

Publishing WordPress content on Twitter just got a whole lot easier. You can already bring single Tweets or threads, also known as Tweetstorms, over from Twitter to WordPress, and now we’re bringing the process full circle. With just two extra clicks, you can transform your entire blog post into a Twitter thread. By publishing your quality content on Twitter, you can open new lines of engagement and conversation.

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When you share a WordPress post as a Twitter thread, nothing is left behind: Text, images, video, and embeds will be inserted into the thread right where they’re supposed to be.

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We know that Twitter threads work best without breaks and other quirks. That’s why, in building this feature, we paid special attention to formatting. If a paragraph is too long for a single Tweet, for instance, it will automatically be split into multiple Tweets. And rather than squishing as many words as possible into the first Tweet and letting the rest spill to the second one, the break will come at the end of a sentence. Also, if you have a list block in your post, it will be formatted as a list on Twitter.

To give you extra control, while you’re writing a post, we’ll show you where Tweet splits will happen. That way, you can shape how your post will appear on Twitter as you write.

How to publish a blog post as a Twitter thread

1. At any time while you’re working on a post, you can click on the Jetpack icon that’s located on the far right of the header menu at the top of the page.

2. If you don’t already have your Twitter account connected to your website, click “Connect an account” to allow WordPress to publish content on your Twitter feed. You can add multiple Twitter handles if you’ll be Tweeting from more than one account. You only need to connect each account once.

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3. Make sure the right Twitter handle is selected, write a custom message, and then choose whether you want to share a single link to your blog post or all of the post’s content as a thread.

5. Hit publish! Your blog post and the Tweet or thread will be shared simultaneously. Be sure you’ve selected your Twitter account when you publish, as this is the only time you’ll be able to share your blog post as a Twitter thread.

Sharing your full blog posts on Twitter is a great way to amplify your content, increase engagement, and build an audience for your work. You most likely have a number of followers on your WordPress blog who aren’t following you on Twitter, and vice versa. This feature allows you to tap into both groups.

Connect your Twitter account to your WordPress site today, and start publishing to both platforms at the same time. Get creative, and have fun. We’re excited to see how you use this first-of-its-kind tool.

As your website grows, it becomes challenging for visitors to find exactly what they need. Being prolific and publishing lots of posts and pages is a net positive for engaging and growing your audience, but it also means visitors may be more likely to find content that isn’t relevant to their interests.

This is where Jetpack Search comes into the picture: It turns your website into a place where visitors can search, refine their results, and find the specific content and products that interest them. 

Built by the same team that created WordPress.com, Jetpack Search is a powerful search solution backed by Elasticsearch (an open source search platform), Jetpack Stats, and our globally distributed data centers — the very same ones that keep your WordPress.com website up, running, and secure day in and day out. Jetpack Search uses multiple technologies to build a modern search experience that improves website engagement. You can now add Jetpack Search to your WordPress.com site with just a few clicks.

What makes Jetpack Search better than regular search?

A modern search experience combines great result rankings with a fast and intuitive user interface. Most WordPress themes can’t do this yet, because the default WordPress search function offers only basic options to show the most relevant content to viewers.

Jetpack Search combines modern ranking algorithms with your traffic stats so that the best results will float to the top and engage your visitors. Our search algorithms work well with numerous languages and provide custom handling for 29 of the most widely used languages in the world. A large percentage of searches contain typos or spelling errors, but Jetpack Search instantly corrects the search query when there are no matches — so if a potential customer is looking for, say, collectables, they will still see the most popular collectibles you offer on your online store. Any changes you make to your site will be reflected in your search results within a few minutes.

Great algorithms are not enough, though. Jetpack Search displays results instantly, as your readers type into the search box. It does its magic equally well on both mobile devices and desktop computers, and in any theme — even those without widget areas. As the user refines their search terms or filters the results, Jetpack Search continues to update the results instantly. The user’s search terms will be highlighted in the results, which they will be able to narrow down further with displayed filters. 

All of these benefits come together to provide a compelling and beautiful user experience that will encourage people to stay on your site longer.

Get Started with Jetpack Search

We wanted to make Jetpack Search accessible for website owners of all stripes, from those who publish a personal blog to owners of thriving online stores. So we’re offering this new add-on at a price that takes into account how many searchable items — posts, pages, products, and custom post types — your site contains.

Record Limit	Price Per Month
100	$5
1,000	$10
10,000	$25
100,000	$60
1,000,000	$200
Over one million	$200 per million

All purchases are fully refundable for 30 days. Even better, when you add Jetpack Search to your site with an annual subscription, you get two months free — so you only pay for 10 months every year. When your purchase renews after a year, the price will automatically adjust based on the number of items in your search index.

We think you’ll love Jetpack Search — but more importantly, your site visitors will love it too.

Follow the link below to purchase your Jetpack Search subscription. Once you buy it, Jetpack Search will automatically be enabled for your site. You can then customize the colors, filtering, and other details if you’d like — though the out-of-the-box settings work great, too.

Get Jetpack Search

Read about how we made Jetpack Search

Video has quickly become one of the most engaging mediums on the internet. Whether you have a personal blog, virtual classroom, business vlog, collaboration website for your team, or something in between, there’s no doubt that you’ve come across video as a way to build and engage your following. By 2022, online videos will make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic – 15 times higher than in 2017! (Cisco)

Videos come in all shapes and sizes, and we know that the ability to easily add and embed them is important for engaging your audience. We’ve been hard at work making sure that you can add the video content you want to your WordPress.com website.

We’re pleased to share today a new Loom block that supports Loom video embeds on any page or post. Loom is a video messaging tool for work, and now all you need to do is copy and paste a Loom URL directly into a new block to embed it.

The new Loom block joins a number of other video embed features available to WordPress.com users—for instance, you can copy and paste a video URL from YouTube, TikTok, DailyMotion, or Vimeo, or you can use a Video block to upload your own video files.

3 Simple Steps to Embed a Loom Video on Your Website

1. Grab your Loom video URL – copy it.
2. Paste that URL directly into the WordPress editor in a new block.
   • Alternatively, you can search for “Loom” in the block selector or enter /loom and hit enter in a new line to add it quickly. Then paste the URL into the block interface from here.
3. Publish!

Adding video content to your website is as easy as 1-2-3. Trying adding some to a page or post today to kick off deeper engagement with your site’s visitors.

We recently updated WordPress.com’s fonts and wanted to give you a behind-the-scenes look at how we chose the list. Here’s an example of a few of them in use.

We looked at several criteria when curating our selections to give your site’s visitors the best experience.

First, we looked at the overall popularity and quality of each font, paying close attention to the letterforms of the most common and most quirky characters.  We made sure that these worked well in specific layouts, at different scales, and as part of the entire collection.

To make the cut, fonts had to contain a breadth of styles and weights, including true italics.

It was important to select fonts with broad character and language support beyond basic Latin. We also looked to showcase a diversity of type designers and open source fonts.

Careful consideration of all the criteria mentioned above allowed us to end up with a list that facilitates attractive font pairings for headings and body text.

Here’s a closer look at a few patterns you can create with a keen typographic eye.

For an even closer, hands-on look, you can check them out in Global Styles and the Customizer today.