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October 2021 brought a lot of new things to WordPress, from release updates to new versions of Gutenberg. More notably, in the latest episode of WP Briefing, Executive Director Josepha Haden reminded us about the importance of freedom in open source platforms like WordPress.

Free speech has with it a lot of responsibility, just like being a part of a community. Governments or communities, or in our case, this software is built by the people who show up.

For WordPress, at 42% of the web, every small choice we make can cause huge changes in the way that people experience the web today and tomorrow.

Josepha Haden, Executive Director of the WordPress project

Last month was yet another chapter in this journey. So keep reading to learn what’s new. 

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WordPress 5.9: All proposed updates will likely be included

• We announced the go/no-go for WordPress 5.9 features in mid-October. The release will probably include all the proposed features—though not all of them are ready yet, they should be by the proposed release date (December 14, 2021).
• WordPress 5.9 will include a new default theme called Twenty Twenty-Two! The theme’s foundation will be strong, and the unpredictable yet reliable behavior of birds inspired the intentionally subtle design. 

• 5.9 bug scrub sessions began in September and will continue each week until the release on December 14, 2021. View the full bug scrub schedule. 
• Many of you requested a few “must have” enhancements for the 5.9 release—follow the 5.9 Must-Haves project board to track their status.
• The Test Team shared an overview of the team’s approach to testing WordPress 5.9.

Interested in contributing to WordPress core? Join the #core channel, follow the Core Team blog, and check out the team handbook. Also, don’t miss the Core Team’s weekly developer chat on Wednesdays at 8 PM UTC.

Gutenberg releases: 11.6, 11.7, and 11.8 are here

We released three new versions of the Gutenberg block editor between the end of September and October:

• Version 11.6 brings site logo cropping and rotation, block-level locking, improvements to Query Pagination block, support for child themes and thunks, template focus mode, and enhancements to the writing flow.
• Gutenberg version 11.7 includes bug fixes and polishes to the navigation block and editor, global styles and full site editing (including a handy back button that lets you quickly return to the site editor), and columns block support, among other improvements.
• Finally, Gutenberg 11.8 is the second to last version to make it into the WordPress 5.9 release, and it comes with plenty of developments to the editing experience: featured Block Patterns, new animations for a few elements (like Dropzone and Insertion Point), spacing tools for heading blocks, and a lot more.

Want to get involved in developing Gutenberg? Follow the Core Team blog, contribute to Gutenberg on GitHub, and join the #core-editor channel in the Make WordPress Slack. For details on the latest updates, follow the “What’s next in Gutenberg” post.

WordCamp US returned virtually this year with more than 3,600 attendees

WordCamp US 2021 was on October 1, and it was online for the first time. The event drew more than 3,600 attendees, 27 sponsors, and 18 remarkable speakers on topics ranging from accessibility and sustainability to e-commerce, to name a few. 

Matt Mullenweg’s “State of the Word” is expected to be held as a separate event later this year, rather than being part of WordCamp US.

If you missed the live event, you can still watch the Yukon Track and the Columbia Track of WordCamp US 2021.

Team Updates: Polyglots monthly newsletter, a new Performance team, and more

• The first edition of the Polyglots monthly newsletter went out on October 15, 2021.
• The following teams opened up their call for team representatives last month, and more are coming soon: Core, Community, Themes, Accessibility, Support, Training, and Hosting.
• A draft of the 2022 Global Community Sponsorship program proposal was released on October 8, 2021. 
• The October 2021 edition of People of WordPress, featuring WordPress e-commerce specialist Ronald Gijsel, went live.
• Following excellent responses to the initial proposal, members of the Core Team announced the next steps in launching a performance team that aims to increase the performance (speed) of WordPress.
• The Polyglots Team kicked-off bi-weekly Glotpress meetings aimed at improving the functionality of the plugin that powers translate.wordpress.org.
• A sprint is planned on November 10-12 to explore a dedicated volunteer program for the Training Team, similar to the Deputy program in the Community Team.
• WordPress.org profiles now display activity from the WordPress GitHub organization.
• The Test Team shared results of the tenth Full Site Editing (FSE) Outreach Program: Pattern Party. 
• Answers from the third round of questions from the FSE Outreach Program are now out!
• The Docs Team is consulting with independent legal experts to explore whether there are issues with having Gutenberg (which is dual-licensed GPL + MPL) coexist with other contents in WordPress (our documentation has a CC0 license and the code is GPL). 
• The Themes Team shared a recap of work happening on automation and improvement processes for the WordPress Themes directory. The Team also shared a p2 post highlighting the performance impact of jQuery on WordPress themes.
• The Marketing Team participated in a contributor ladder workshop to help plan their future activities.
• The feature recap of the WordPress Translation Day 2021 is out from the Polyglots and Marketing teams, with the results of the Polyglots appreciation nominations 2021.

Sign up for the Polyglots monthly newsletter, if you haven’t already.

Feedback/Testing requests: Deadline for redesigned Gutenberg landing page is November 5, 2021

• The Design Team is working on redesigning the wordpress.org/gutenberg landing page, and has already shared a prototype. 
• The team has also shared a few other concepts where they have requested feedback from contributors:
  • Site Editing iA Concepts: Part1 and Part 2
  • Block theme switching concepts
• Version 18.5 of WordPress for iOS and Android are now available for testing!
• The Accessibility Team is requesting feedback on a new Gutenberg Pull request that announces formatting changes or screen readers.

Share your feedback on the new Gutenberg landing page design in Trac or by commenting on the blog post by November 5, 2021.

Keep an eye out for WordCamp Spain, Sâo Paulo, and Taiwan 2021

We had several WordPress events in October, and several more to look forward to the rest of the year:

• We’re seeking a new host city for WordCamp US 2022.
• WordCamp Europe 2022 has extended its call for organizers.
• WordCamp Italia 2021 was held online on October 22-23, 2021. The event had 23 speakers, 17 sponsors, and more than 1,000 registrants. Check out its YouTube channel to watch the event replay.
• Another highlight of the month was WordCamp Nicaragua 2021 which was held on October 8-9, 2021.
• The #WPDiversity working group of the Community Team organized an Allyship workshop for event organizers on October 28. Sign up now for the diversity events planned by the team for November! 
• A two-day contributor event focused on Learn WordPress, took place on October 29 and 31, 2021. There was also another contributor day on October 8, 2021, which involved working groups across the board, from accessibility to user testing.
• The Test Team organized the following Hallway Hangouts this week—check out their recaps:
  • Pattern Party Testing Walkthrough 
  • 5.9 Go/No go, Site Editor Internal Audit, and more

Don’t miss the following upcoming online WordCamps: WordCamp Spain 2021, WordCamp Sâo Paulo 2021, and WordCamp Taiwan 2021!

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Have a story that we could include in the next ‘Month in WordPress’ post? Let us know by filling out this form.

The following folks contributed to October 2021’s Month in WordPress: @anjanavasan, @harishanker, @rmartinezduque, @callye, @webcommsat, and chaion07.

In this nineteenth episode, WordPress’s Executive director, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, discusses and expresses gratitude for the inspiration behind the People of WordPress series, HeroPress.

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

Credits

• Editor: Dustin Hartzler
• Logo: Beatriz Fialho
• Production: Chloé Bringmann
• Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod

References

People of WordPress series

HeroPress

HeroPress Network

WordPress 5.9 Development Cycle

Call for Team Rep Nomination

Transcript

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  00:11

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!

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  00:29

The month of November includes the Thanksgiving holiday in my part of the world and in my familial traditions. And one of the things that November always brings up for me is the concept of gratitude. I have a gratitude practice that lasts throughout the year. But this time of year always kind of lets me look outside what makes me feel routinely grateful and explore areas that I don’t always notice. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  01:05

This year, I’m taking some time to do that in the context of the WordPress project, and it’s reminded me of one of the foundational things I talk about a lot that may be a little harder for folks to see. I am routinely grateful, of course, for the people who show up to maintain WordPress, the people who keep the back office work going, the contributors who contribute directly to the WordPress CMS and project, the folks who routinely go out and tell other people about WordPress and make sure others know how to use it. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  01:35

But there’s another group that I talk about a lot that is a little harder to grasp. And that’s this conceptual group of people whose lives have been changed by WordPress. I used to run into people like this all the time when I was organizing WordCamps. And the small but meaningful successes that they share year after year made me realize that my small contribution of organizing these events was really quite valuable; valuable to them, and I assumed also valuable to just other people in the WordPress project. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  02:09

Now, if you’re contributing in a way that doesn’t let you have contact with the same users consistently over time, or if contributing doesn’t quite balance out in your ledger at the moment, it can be hard to put names to faces in a way that lets you see how your contributions are making an impact. To help with that, a few years ago, the WordPress project partnered with the community Marketing team and the HeroPress team to share the People of WordPress series which you can find monthly on wordpress.org/news. For me, this series provides a glimpse into the humanity of the people who use WordPress, and for me, that’s enough. If all the series ever did was to remind us that WordPress was made for people whose needs matter, that would be enough to continue to have that series forever. But fortunately, the series does quite a bit more than that. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  03:04

The People of WordPress series also lifts up the stories of people who we don’t always hear from in technology. It highlights the wide array of origin stories that lead people to WordPress. It reminds us of the global nature of what we’re doing. It reconnects us to the hopefulness of our own first WordPress successes. And it draws a direct line to why we should care about refreshing the commons of this open ecosystem. I’m sure that there are more things that do as well. But those are just the things off the top of my head, we draw all of the people of WordPress stories that are inside that series directly from the HeroPress essays that have been submitted by users. And I was gonna say users like you in a kind of Reading Rainbow way. But I actually don’t know if any of you are everyday users who are also using WordPress but maybe not contributing yet. If you are then like I’m talking to you. And if you’re not, I’m probably still talking to you. Because all of these stories that go to HeroPress are very valuable and very important for us to know. Anyway, I digress.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  04:14

Topher DesRosia, who founded HeroPress, is among the first people I met in the community lo these many years ago. And I think the impact that HeroPress has on the WordPress community as a whole is not always well recognized. So in the spirit of expanding the scope of my gratitude, and in the context of refreshing the commons, I would encourage you to head over to HeroPress.com and their newly launched HeroPress Network and see if there’s any little way that you can contribute to their commons, submitting your story donating to their network offering a small bit of volunteer time if you happen to have any spare time lying around. I know that the team would be delighted to hear from you.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  05:01

That leads us now to our small list of big things. We are about a week away from the feature freeze for WordPress 5.9, the final release of the year. Feature freeze caused a little confusion last time. So I just want to clarify there won’t be a package released with this milestone. But no more enhancements or features will be worked on at that point. And bug fixing will become the primary focus. That will be on November 9, which I believe is next Tuesday. It’s definitely next week whenever the calendar turns to nine of November 2021. That’s the day that we’re going into feature freeze. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  05:38

The second big thing in our small list of big things is that team rep nomination season is upon us. If you are a team rep or want to learn more about being one, now is the time to kind of look at what’s going on and how to keep everything moving in that way. I’ll include a link to the announcement post of that in the notes below. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  05:57

And finally, Daylight Saving Time movements are also upon us. Some parts of the world are ending Daylight Saving Time others are starting it and some have already started or stopped that already. So no matter where you are, don’t forget to check and double-check the timing of things across time zones for the next few weeks. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  06:21

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