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In this series, we share some of the inspiring stories of how WordPress and its global network of contributors can change people’s lives for the better. This month we feature Leo Gopal, from South Africa, a back-end Developer and Customer Support agent on the encouragement and learning support the WordPress community can give.

Writing as a channel of expression

Curiosity, writing, and resilience are recurring themes in Leo’s story, and have mapped with his WordPress journey. 

High school was a difficult time for Leo, as he had a speech impediment which only subsided when he was with close friends or family.

He began writing a journal as an avenue of expression and found every word arrived smoothly for him.  

It all began with WordPress 1.2 ‘Mingus’

In 2004, Leo discovered the joy of blogging as a way of combining keeping a journal with ‘conversations’ he could have with those who commented on his blogs. The potential and power of blogs would be an influence in the rest of his life.

As Leo’s confidence grew through expressing himself in writing, he was determined that his stutter would ‘no longer hold power over him’. In 2005, with the encouragement of his blog readers, he spent his school summer break in his room working on reducing his stutter. WordPress would be the tool that would enable him to connect with his blog readers and to express his creativity and thoughts.

Making WordPress your own

In high school, Leo had opted for programming as one of his subjects. In 2008, he built his first website using WordPress for the students at the school. This was the first time he saw the real value of WordPress and open source.

During the following years, he increasingly spent time searching online for information on ‘Customising WordPress’ and ‘Making WordPress your own’.

Leo wanted to keep busy and as soon as he finished school, he applied for every entry-level web-related job that he could find. He was hired by a company for the role of webmaster for its Marketing team focused on WordPress.

He continued to grow his skills as a WordPress developer with the help of useful documentation that he could find and through his helpful local WordPress Community. This helped him earn a living and support his family.

Helping yourself through helping others in the community

In 2015, Leo moved full-time to Cape Town, South Africa, and started as a developer at a web development agency, eventually progressing to its Head of Development and managing a small team.

He chose WordPress as his main platform for development mainly because of the community behind it.

“Had it not been for those searches on how to make WordPress your own, my life would have turned out a lot differently.” 

Leo Gopal

Leo felt he had a hurdle to overcome working in web sector. He didn’t feel like a ‘real developer’ being self-taught. However, through the community, he realized that there were many self-taught developers and he was not alone.  

Alongside his development path, Leo faced a mental health journey. He had suffered from depression and found the community to be accepting and understanding of this. 

At WordCamp Cape Town 2016, he stood in front of an audience and gave a talk: “The WordPress Community, Mental Wellness, and You”. Following this talk, he was greeted by many attendees who thanked him for talking so openly about mental health issues.

Leo has been diagnosed with bipolar, previously known as manic depression. In 2017, he hit a low period and struggled to keep going. He found support and understanding in the community in WordPress.

He has openly written about his experiences with depression and started an initiative where topics of mental health and general wellbeing can be freely and non-judgmentally discussed.  

He said that by helping others, he is helping himself, every day.

Contributing to WordPress

Leo has contributed to the community as a Co-organizer in South Africa for the 2016 and 2017 WordCamp Cape Town, WordPress Meetup Cape Town 2015 – 2016, and WordPress Durban 2017 – 2020. He has also spoken at a number of WordCamps.

Maintaining connections with people he had met through these events Leo felt was a great aid to his mental wellbeing during the Covid pandemic.

He has contributed to core and plugins and believes that WordPress and its community make it extremely easy to contribute.

“The cost to start contributing is extremely low – start now”.

Leo Gopal

When the ability to create and add patterns to the WordPress.org library came out in 2021, Leo used it almost immediately and created a call-to-action box which could be used by both his clients and the community. He plans to release a few more complex patterns.  

Yes, we can.

Leo’s mantra is “I can do it!”

Getting over a stutter, overcoming poverty, being urgently self-taught, growing up in a country with “load shedding” electricity outages, and one of the slowest rated internet speeds in the developing world, and strengthening mental wellness are not easy feats., And yet, he knows he can do it.

“Never, ever think you do not have the ‘right’ circumstances for success. Just keep going, progress over perfection – you can do it.”

Leo Gopal

As Leo puts it, the WordPress community doesn’t just power a percentage of the internet; it empowers too.

Share the stories

Help share these stories of open source contributors and continue to grow the community. Meet more WordPressers in the People of WordPress series.

Contributors

Thanks to Nalini Thakor (@nalininonstopnewsuk), Larissa Murillo (@lmurillom), Meher Bala (@meher), Abha Thakor (@webcommsat), Chloe Bringmann (@cbringmann) for work on this feature, and to all the contributors who helped with specific areas and the series this last few months. Thank you too to Leo Gopal (@leogopal) for sharing her experiences.

Thank you to Josepha Haden (@chanthaboune) and Topher DeRosia (@topher1kenobe) for support of the People of WordPress series.

Every day we’re connected to a million apps, and we browse through multiple browser tabs just to complete a single action item. We have busy schedules that would benefit from streamlined processes, simple tools, and powerful workflows. With that in mind, our team asked for feedback, and that inspired us to put together a new solution—your Professional Email inbox baked right into your WordPress.com site.

You can now manage your inbox and website from the same place, eliminating the need for multiple sets of credentials and URLs. Once you’re securely logged in, we’ll save you the clicks and multiple tabs that managing your work used to take, allowing you to operate directly from your website dashboard.

A few time-saving hacks to get the most from your embedded inbox:

• Easily connect with your audience or community from your site while checking your site followers.

• Post a blog post, head directly to your inbox, and share it with your customers. 

• Create a new product to sell and share the news directly from your site dashboard.

Ready to try it out?

In the thirty-fourth episode of the WordPress Briefing, hear WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy discuss planning for the major release and how you can get involved in the WordPress 6.1 release cycle!

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: Santana Inniss
• Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod

References

• WordPress 6.1 Planning Roundup Core Post
• All WordPress 6.1 posts on Make Core
• Speaker Workshop for Indian Women in the WordPress Community
• Submit photos to the WordPress Photo Directory

Transcript

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:10]  

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

Here we go.

All right my friends. So it’s been about a month since WordPress 6.0 came out and you know what that means. It means we are already looking at the next major WordPress release because,  as most of you know, WordPress never sleeps. Y’all are honestly up and hustling like 24/7 as far as I can tell, which is great! And is one of the many benefits of being a global community, I suppose. 

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:05]

But anyway, back to this major release. There was a high-level roadmap shared by Mattias Ventura at the start of June. And it lists some focus areas for the Block Editor, continued refinements to the template editor and navigation block, and some work on global styles and more / better blocks and design tools that are slated to ship with WordPress 6.1. From the WordPress core side, though, there are a couple hundred tickets that are milestoned for the next major.

Being milestoned for a release means that either a ticket wasn’t ready for the last release and was moved to the next available one, or a ticket has become ready for a release since the last major release occurred. That list as it stands might be a little bit too big for a single release. However, honestly, no list is too big if we have enough folks contributing.

So if you’ve never contributed to a major release of WordPress before, and you’re interested to know how that works, there are some things to keep an eye out for over the next few weeks. We are in what is considered the planning phase for the next big release. And so there are two or three things you’re gonna see pretty soon.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:11] 

First is a planning kickoff post. That post gets published on make.wordpress.org/core, and it includes notes on volunteering for the release squad, some guesses at areas of focus based on the tickets that we’re seeing in track, a schedule, the whole kit, and caboodle. It’s all in there. If you are wanting to know how to lend a hand and how to take your first steps to core contribution, apart from the new contributor meeting that happens before the dev chat, that post is the place to start. 

So keep an eye out on make.wordpress.org/core for that. And then the second thing that shows up in the planning phase for any major release is bug scrub and ticket triage meetings. Like I mentioned, there are the new contributor meetings where they scrub tickets and talk through the basics of what we’re seeing on good first bugs.

And I mentioned that here often, I just mentioned it in the last, in the last bullet point, but there are also regular bug scrubs and ticket triaging sessions where a kind contributor chooses a set of tickets to review and then leads other contributors through the process of checking to see if a ticket is valid to see if it can be replicated to see if it has a patch.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:23] 

If there are decisions that are blocking it and how to move those decisions forward, and generally just kind of discuss what else has to be done in order to take the ticket to the next step. Those get announced in the dev chat every Wednesday, but also there is a post that will go up on make.wordpress.org/core.

I wish I had a faster way to say that instead of just racing through the whole URL every time. But it’ll be okay. We’ll put it in the show notes in case you would rather just click some stuff. And the third thing to keep an eye out for. If development is not your thing, so writing code is not already part of your tool belt, that’s totally fine. There are many other important areas where you can contribute, too. Design, training, support, polyglots, marketing, documentation, and more. These teams all do work in and around a release that is vital to WordPress’ overall success. 

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:19] 

And a final thought of all. If that felt a little too intense if you want to see where this ship is headed, but you can’t quite commit to grabbing an oar today, that’s fine, too. The most important thing is that if you are a member of the community, as an extender or a user or a die-hard contributor, or a new contributor, the most important thing is that you have some general awareness of what the overall direction is. 

You might do that by experimenting with blocks in your products or by testing screen readers against your workflow or even by setting aside an hour to participate in the latest testing prompt. Being aware of what’s happening in and around your area of the project will help to keep you kind of prepared and knowledgeable to lend a hand whenever it is that you are ready.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:14] 

And that then brings us to our small list of big things. My friends, registration is now open for the WordPress Speaker Workshop for Women Voices in India. That’s taking place on September 24th and 25th. Uh, it’s happening over Zoom, so location or travel shouldn’t really be an obstacle for you. I’m going to leave a link to some information about that in the show notes. It should be an excellent opportunity that [the] WP Diversity initiative that WordPress has, that the community team helps to foster, is really an excellent experience. And so I hope that you register and attend that. 

And the second thing actually is a bit of a celebration. The Photo Directory recently hit a huge milestone of 3000 photos! And you also can submit your photos to wordpress.org/photos. If you feel so inclined to make a contribution of that type. 

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:07] 

And then the third thing on my smallest of big things is actually kind of a, a WordPress tooltip a little bit of a WordPress project did-ya-know? So, there is a special channel in WordPress Slack for sharing thanks to folks who were especially helpful to you. It’s called the Props Channel. And when someone shares props with you, it even shows up in your activity on your wordpress.org profile. Pretty cool, huh? Props to the Meta team for that one.

And 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. And I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks.

In the thirty-third episode of the WordPress Briefing, hear Josepha Haden Chomphosy recap important questions from WordCamp Europe, and a selection of Contributor Day interviews.

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: Santana Inniss
• Production Assistance: Héctor Prieto
• Special Guests: Milana Cap, Daugirdas Jankus, and Jonathan Desrosiers
• Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod

References

• L’esprit de l’escalier
• Flexbox Layout Blocks
• Translating Content on Learn WordPress
• Translating Subtitles
• Collaboration Across Cultures (Blog)
• Collaboration Across Cultures (YouTube Video)
• WordCamp Europe Athens: Call for Organizers
• 6.1 Release Planning Twitter Thread
• 6.1 Release Planning Roadmap Post
• Make WordPress Meetings Calendar

Transcript

[Daugirdas Jankus 00:00:04] 

Honestly, it’s not a secret. It’s a big part of our business. And I think it’s like WordPress is a big part of all the hosting company, company’s, businesses, you know? So for us, it is like, we want to make it better. We want to give back. We want to understand, you know, where we can contribute the most. And we see it as a, you know, win, win, win situation for everyone, for clients, for the whole ecosystem.

And for us as a business, of course!

[Milana Cap 00:00:32] 

My favorite WordPress component is WP CLI. That’s my crush, haha, because I love terminal. I love doing it. I’m not a really UI type of person, I get lost in UI. But in terminal, you just type command and it does what you want. And a WP CLI is much more powerful than WordPress dashboard. You can do so many things there and you can have fun.

Uh, so that’s my go-to tool!

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:10] 

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 00:01:36] 

Many, many people were at WordCamp Europe a couple of weeks ago. And at the end, Matt and I closed out the event sessions with a little question and answer time from the community. I was excited to see everyone and excited to answer their questions. But as with all spur of the moment answers, I experienced this l’esprit de l’escalier and I found that there were a few things that I would have answered a little more completely if I had taken more than two seconds to think about them.

So today I’m going to augment some of the answers from that session with a little more context and clarity. There was a question from Laura Byrne about favorite blocks in recent WordPress releases. And given that I was exclusively holding WordCamp Europe information in my brain at the time, I couldn’t think of which block was my favorite. While I was sitting there on that stage,

I realized that one of my favorite things about WordPress’s 6.0 release, like Matt, wasn’t really a block, but it was a functional workflow sort of thing. So my favorite thing was the ability to lock blocks, but I mean, the question was about favorite blocks. And so I do know that some of the most anticipated blocks are the Flexbox layout blocks. Whew. What a sentence!

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:46]

Try to say that three times fast! Those blocks are the Flexbox layout blocks, they are sort of shortcuts that show up when you’re selecting multiple blocks and allow for easy side-by-side layouts. I’m not explaining it in a way that does it much justice, but I will share a link in the show notes that has more information and you can kind of see how empowering that particular block is in the block editor.

The next question I wanted to give a little more context to came from Courtney Robertson. She asked about how to make translated content more readily available on learn.wordpress.org. My answer was pretty far ranging and talked about why it’s harder to commit to prioritizing that over, for my example, translating WordPress core. 

But I also understand that there are people who want to help and just need someone to point them in the right direction. And so I want to be clear that it is possible to have workshops in any language on learn.wordpress.org right now. We just don’t have a lot of people contributing those translations.

So there are conversations going on right now in the training team about using Glotpress on learn.wordpress.org, and also how to translate subtitles. So, if you are looking for ways to give back through translation and training is an important kind of area of your focus. I will have links to both of those things in the show notes as well.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:11]

I also gave a quick answer, uh, after this question about how hard it is to recognize contributions that are separate from a major event or major release. In this case, when I say recognize, that’s recognized as in thank, not recognize as in, know it exists. In case it’s not clear why that was connected, why that answer was connected to the question, training materials are self-serve and not always specific to individual releases of WordPress.

So that means the maintenance of any content around training happens routinely over the course of time, rather than because of a specific release or a WordCamp. What sometimes can make it a little harder to entice people to join us in that work. 

And now the third question I’d like to tackle is the one that came from Megan Rose. She asked how we can encourage better diversity as we go back to in-person events. My answer was more about the big picture, program-wide work that has been done and specific awarenesses that I, as a leader, have been keeping top of mind. That answer is still true and is still important, but again, it doesn’t really help anyone who’s wondering how they can show up today in their own communities, and do the hard work of fostering an inclusive space there so that we can confidently welcome more diverse voices together. 

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:27]

A great place to start is to have conversations with people who aren’t like you and really listen. Also recognizing that we all come from different backgrounds that give us more or less opportunity and always be asking yourself, who is missing from this conversation and why, how can I find them and invite them into our own WordPress spaces?

If that all kind of feels right up your alley, I would check out the show notes. I’ll have some links in there to the community team’s site, as well as a few posts that will help you to explore that a bit further as well. 

There were also a couple of questions about market share slash usage of WordPress, and Five for the Future that I really do want to answer, but as I was writing up the context and just kind of exploring the questions that people were raising, it turned out to really be quite a big set of answers.

So I will do those in either two separate episodes of their own or one surprisingly long, for me, episode. And so there you have it, a lightning round, deep dive on a few questions from WordCamp Europe.

[Jonathan Desrosiers 00:06:41] 

Yeah, it’s definitely great to be back in person. Um, it’s been a long two years, two or three years for a lot of people and it’s, it’s, it’s great that we’re such an asynchronous community and we can all stay connected online through Slack and different means. Um, but there are some things that you can’t replace, like making friends with people and learning people’s demeanors and having some discussions in person that you can’t replace.

And so, uh, I’m really excited to see people I haven’t seen in a long time. Meet new people and, um, you know, have some of those discussions here today in Portugal.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:21] 

Which then brings us to our small list of big things. 

If you missed the announcement, WordCamp Europe will be in Athens next year. And the call for organizers is open already. It’s an experience that is absolutely irreplaceable. So I’ll link to that in the show notes, in case you’ve always wanted to give back to WordPress that way.

The second thing on my list is that work on the next major release of WordPress is already underway. There is a post with roadmap info that was published recently, as well as a slightly more casual thread on Twitter. I’ve linked both of those in the show notes, so that you have some concept of what it is that we are aiming for in 6.1, and also a concept of where to go to get started working on it if that’s what you feel like doing, uh, for the next three to four months– 120 days, roughly.

Uh, and finally. This is less of like a thing to be aware of in the next two weeks and kind of a little WordPress project tool tip. Did you know that we have a calendar that shows all meetings for all teams all week long? It will make you feel tired by the amount of work that gets done in the WordPress project every week, but it’s right there on make.wordpress.org/meetings.

So you never have to wonder where folks are meeting to talk about things ever again. And 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, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks.

[Santana Inniss & Héctor Prieto 00:09:11] 

Hello! Mic test. One, two, one, two. 

We are testing the USB microphone. Let’s hope we’re using it actually. 

I think so. I think so. 

Yes. Because now I am far, and now I am much closer to the microphone. Yes. 

And I am sitting in the same spot. 

Good. Hello? 

Hello! 

Mic test one, two.

Mic test one, two. 

[record scratching sound effect]

[laughter]

And, close.

Mic check. 

Mic check. 

[record scratching sound effect]

I’m close to the mic. I’m far from the mic. 

I’m far from the mic. Wow.

Not so far.

[laughter]

Plugins are the building blocks and the rocket fuel for your WordPress.com website. They can help make your site faster and easier to manage but also bring essential elements to your fingertips. From email opt-ins and contact forms, to SEO, site speed optimization, calendars, and booking options — the list is nearly endless.

If you can imagine it, there’s a high likelihood that there’s a plugin to help you accomplish whatever your endeavor on your WP.com website.

And because of the vast community of WordPress developers, there are always new plugins being added to our marketplace. To better help you select the plugins for your business or passion, we are listing three of our hand-picked, most popular premium plugins below, in addition to several others, recently added to our marketplace.

WooCommerce Bookings

This invaluable plugin allows customers to book appointments, make reservations, or rent equipment. Both you and your customers can save valuable time since there’s no need for phone calls, emails, or other forms of communication to handle bookings. Prospects simply fill out the information themselves.

The benefits of WooCommerce Bookings are hard to overstate. For example, you can: 

• Define set options, like fixed time slots for a class, appointment, or guided tour
• Let customers choose the times that work best by giving them the flexibility to book whatever range they need, like checking into a hotel
• Set certain time periods as off limits and un-bookable, providing yourself a buffer between bookings

Perhaps best of all, the plugin integrates seamlessly with your Google calendar. Use the calendar view to see how your day or month is shaping up. Update existing bookings or availability, or filter to view specific services or resources. And if you have customers who insist on calling in to make bookings the old-fashioned way, you can add them manually from the calendar while you’re on the phone.

Whether you’re running a small bed and breakfast, a fishing guide service, or anything in between, WooCommerce Bookings can give you back valuable time, ensuring your customers have a friction-free booking process, which allows you to focus your energies elsewhere. 

• View the live demo here.
• Purchase WooCommerce Bookings

WooCommerce Subscriptions

With WooCommerce Subscriptions, customers can subscribe to your products or services and then pay for them at the frequency of their choosing — weekly, monthly, or even annually. This level of freedom can be a boon to the bottom line, as it easily sets your business up to enjoy the fruits of recurring revenue. 

Better yet, WooCommerce Subscriptions not only allows you to create and manage products with recurring payments, but you can also introduce a variety of subscriptions for physical or virtual products and services, too. For example, you can offer weekly service subscriptions, create product-of-the-month clubs, or even yearly software billing packages. 

Additional features include:

• Multiple billing schedules available to suit your store’s needs
• Integrates with more than 25 payment gateways for automatic recurring payments
• Accessible through any WooCommerce payment gateway, allowing for manual renewal payments along with automatic email invoices and receipts
• Prevents lost revenue by supporting automatic rebilling on failed subscription payments

Additionally, this plugin offers built-in renewal notifications and automatic emails, which makes you and your customers aware of subscription payments being processed. Your customers can also manage their own subscriptions using the Subscriber’s View page. The page also allows subscribers to suspend or cancel a subscription, change the shipping address or payment method for future renewals, and upgrade or downgrade. 

WooCommerce Subscriptions really do put your customers first, giving them the control they want and will appreciate while allowing you to automate a process and experience that saves time and strengthens your relationship with customers. 

• Learn more and purchase WooCommerce Subscriptions 

AutomateWoo

High on every business owner’s list of goals is the ability to grow the company and earn more revenue. Well, AutomateWoo makes that task much simpler. This powerful, feature-rich plugin delivers a plethora of automated workflows to help you grow your business.  

​With​ ​AutomateWoo, you can create workflows using various triggers, rules, and actions, and then schedule them to run automatically.

​For example, you can set up abandoned cart emails, which have been shown to increase the chance of recovering the sale by 63%.

One of the key features small business owners are sure to enjoy is the ability to design and send emails using a pre-installed template created for WooCommerce emails in the WordPress editor. 

This easy-to-appreciate feature makes it a breeze to send targeted, multi-step campaigns that include incentives for customers. AutomateWoo gives you complete control over campaigns. For example, you can schedule different emails to be sent at intervals or after specific customer interactions; you can also offer incentives using the personalized coupon system.

Also, you can track all emails via a detailed log of every email sent and conversion recorded. Furthermore, with AutomateWoo’s intelligent tracking, you can capture guest emails during checkout.  

This premium plugin comes packed with a host of other features as well, including, but not limited to:

• Follow-up emails: Automatically email customers who buy specific products and ask for a review or suggest other products they might like
• SMS notifications: Send text messages to customers or admins for any of AutomateWoo’s wide range of triggers
• Wishlist marketing: Send timed wishlist reminder emails and notify when a wished-for product goes on sale; integrates with WooCommerce Wishlists or YITH Wishlists
• Personalized coupons: Generate dynamic customized coupons for customers to raise purchase rates

AutomateWoo will make an indispensable asset for any business looking to create better synergies between their brand’s products or services and the overall experience customers have with them. 

• Learn more and purchase AutomateWoo

Additional Business-Boosting Plugins

In addition to WooCommerce Bookings, WooCommerce Subscriptions, and AutomateWoo, our marketplace has also launched a number of additional premium plugins, including:

• WooCommerce Points and Rewards: Allows you to reward your customers for purchases and other actions with points that can be redeemed for discounts
• WooCommerce One Page Checkout: Gives you the ability to create special pages for customers to select products, checkout, and pay, all in one place
• WooCommerce Deposits: Customers can place a deposit or use a payment plan for products. 
• Min/Max Quantities: Make it possible to define minimum/maximum thresholds and multiple/group amounts per product (including variations) to restrict the quantities of items that can be purchased. 
• Product Vendors: Enables multiple vendors to sell via your site, and in return take a commission on the sales.  
• USPS Shipping Method: Provides shipping rates from the USPS API, with the ability to accurately cover both domestic and international parcels.

Get the Most Out of Your Website 

Keep an eye on the plugin marketplace, as we’re continuing to offer premium plugins that help you best serve your site visitors and customers. At WordPress.com, we’re committed to helping you achieve your goals. 

To get the most out of your WordPress.com website, upgrade to WordPress Pro, which puts the power of these plugins at your fingertips. Currently, only WordPress Pro plans or legacy Business + eComm customers can purchase plugins.

WordPress has a lot to celebrate this month. The newest release “Arturo” is here. WordPress turned 19 years old last week. And WordCamp Europe, the first in-person flagship WordCamp in two years, is starting today in Porto, Portugal. Read on to learn more about these and other exciting news around WordPress!

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Say hello to WordPress 6.0 “Arturo”

WordPress 6.0 “Arturo” was released on May 24, 2022. Named in honor of the Latin jazz musician Arturo O’Farrill, the awaited release brings more customization tools and numerous updates to make the site-building experience more intuitive.

Check out the WordPress 6.0 video and the announcement post for an overview of the most important changes. Interested in knowing more about the features that will help you build with and extend WordPress? Then the WordPress 6.0 Field Guide might be for you.

Over 500+ people in 58+ countries made WordPress 6.0 possible – Thank you!

Happy 19th birthday, WordPress!

Time flies, doesn’t it? Believe it or not, May 27 marked the 19th anniversary of WordPress’ first release! To celebrate, the community put together a special site (wp19.day) where contributors shared thoughts, videos, live shows, and more.

You can still join the fun using the hashtag #WP19Day on social media, or even contribute photos of the swag you used to celebrate to the WordPress Photo Directory.

New in Gutenberg

Two new versions of Gutenberg were released last month:

• Gutenberg 13.2 shipped on May 11, 2022, and brings a new API to save editor preferences on the server, visual guides for padding and margins, and improvements to the Comment block.
• Gutenberg 13.3 comes with a new Table of Contents block and a number of enhancements to existing blocks to provide more ways to display content, among other highlights. It was released on May 25, 2022.

Team updates: Five for the Future, guidelines for in-person regional WordCamps, and more

• Following an earlier discussion on in-person regional WordCamps, the Community team announced new guidelines for these WordPress events.
• The Five for the Future (5ftF) initiative is key to ensuring the future of the WordPress project. As part of the ongoing efforts to improve this initiative, Executive Director Josepha Haden suggested a definition for 5ftF pledges and contributions.
• Tonya Mork posted a summary of the core test stats for WordPress 6.0.
• The Meta and Theme Review teams shared an update on the work done over the past year to improve the theme review process. As a result, the average time for themes to be reviewed has decreased by 90%.
• Josepha Haden kicked off a discussion post to gather feedback on the Community Code of Conduct section of the new Contributor Handbook.
• On a similar note, the Community team created a new Incident Response Training. The course, which is live on Learn WordPress and considered a work in progress, addresses how WordPress contributors take and respond to code of conduct reports.
• The Training team published new lesson plans, workshops, courses, and Social Learning Spaces on Learn WordPress. See what’s new.
• The #WPDiversity working group organized several Allyship and Diverse Speaker Workshops in April. Attendees reported a 40% increase in public speaking confidence after attending the Speaker workshops. Stay tuned for the next events!
• A summary of the 14th testing call of the Full Site Editing (FSE) Outreach program – “Rallying Recipe Reviewers” was recently published.
• You can also find high-level feedback on the FSE Program in this May 2022 post.
• Learn more about the projects the Design team contributed to over the past month.
• Anne McCarthy hosted a Hallway Hangout to talk about various FSE pull requests and designs. The recording is available in this post. 
• The May editions of the Meetup Organizer Newsletter and the Polyglots Monthly Newsletter were published.
• The latest edition of People of WordPress features the story of Dee Teal.

Open feedback/testing calls

• The Core team is working on ​​an experimental pull request (PR) to implement fluid typography. They welcome feedback on design, functionality, and API.
• Version 20.0 of WordPress for Android and iOS is now available for testing.
• Were you involved in the WordPress 6.0 release? Take some time to reflect on what you learned and participate with your feedback in this retrospective.

WordCamp Europe is here!

• WordPress Foundation’s Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship returns for WordCamp US 2022. Visit this post for more information.
• The WordCamp US Call for Sponsors is now open.
• Two more in-person WordCamps are happening this month:
  • WordCamp Warsaw, Poland on June 11-12, 2022
  • WordCamp Montclair, NJ, USA on June 25, 2022
• The WordPress community is meeting today at WordCamp Europe (June 2-4) in Porto, Portugal. This edition celebrates the return to in-person events and the 10th anniversary of WCEU. For everyone heading to Porto, have a great WordCamp!

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The following folks contributed to this Month in WordPress: @rmartinezduque, @laurlittle, @harishanker.