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This episode of the WP Briefing features all the Josepha bloopers our little elves have stored away over the year.

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: Javier Arce
Production: Santana Inniss
Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod

Transcript

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00] 

Hello everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can normally catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project with the hope that deeper understanding creates deeper appreciation.

But on today’s bonus episode, instead of catching quick explanations, you’ll catch some quick bloopers. 

The end of the year is a time when many people and many cultures gather together, and whether you observe traditions of light or faith, compassion, or celebration from everyone here at the WordPress Briefing Podcast, we’re wishing you a happy, festive season and a very happy New Year.

Sit back, relax, and enjoy some of the laughs and outtakes from recording the WP Briefing over the year.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:00] 

Hello everyone, and welcome to the WordPress. This is the thing I’ve done 25 times, and I know how to do it for reals.

Welcome to WordPress Briefing, episode 20. Oh no, 7? 27? 26? Episode 27. I know how many things I’ve done.

Ooh, neat. This is Josepha recording episode 46 of the WP Bonus Briefings. Not because we’ve had 46 bonus Briefings, but because this is the 46th one and it is a bonus, it will also have a fancy name. But right now, I’m just calling it the bonus. It’s gonna be quick. Here I go. 

Group them into two big buckets, themes, uh, themes and tools. Mmm, I’m gonna have to redo the whole thing! No! I thought I could save it, and I didn’t save it. I had a typo in my script, and then I messed it up. I, it said into you big buckets instead of into two big buckets. 

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:00] 

I’m gonna start over from the target release date because I kind of smeared it all together, um, despite what I intended to do.

And gives everyone, no. What is this ringing of phones? Oh, I was doing so well. Where was I? Let’s see if I can just pick it up.

All righty, live from my closet. It’s episode 20, the WordPress Briefing, WP Briefing. So I have a title for this, and when I started writing it, I really had every intention of writing it to the title. And then what I wrote doesn’t fit the title at all, but does really hang together well. And so we’re gonna have to come up with a new title, but at the moment, it’s called So Many Ways to WordPress.

Here in a minute, you will see why it doesn’t fit. Also, at the end, I feel like I get very, like, angry nerd leader.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:00]  

And so I may, I may at the end, give that a second go and see if there’s a way that I can soften it a little bit, but, I, I don’t know that I can soften it. I feel very strongly about it. So, maybe I am just an angry nerd leader.

Oh, okay. I’ll get us started now that I apparently have filled the room with apologies, not the room, the closet. 

We’ll figure out something very catchy as a title or as an alternative. Very descriptive, and people will click on it because they must know, but we’ll figure out the title later.

@wordpress.org. However, I don’t know why I decided to do an invitation to email me in the middle of that. I’m gonna start from the top of that paragraph. I just got too excited by the opportunity to get mail.

I gotta slow it down. I’m like the fastest talker, had too much coffee. Okay, slowing it down now. 

Huh? What am I saying? No, no, that’s what I’m saying. It’s fine. I, I can do this. 

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:00]

Hold on. Oww. Sorry. I was adjusting my microphone, and then it fell down. I happened to be holding it at the time, so it didn’t, like, slam down, I think, and hurt your ears and so I apologize. Good thing I stopped so it didn’t just, like, slam down in the middle of a recording.

That’s all right. I’m gonna give myself that win, even though it’s a hollow one. All right. Trying again. Starting right there, at now since.

This year, it starts on October 18th, 2001. That’s the year? No, 2021. That’s the year. Oh man. I’m doing such a great job of this.

Um, I’m recording this slightly before, um, you’re hearing it? What, how am I gonna start this? Hold on. I don’t know how to start this. All right. I’m, I can do it.

Oh, I’m so glad I remembered. We had guests that could have been so embarrassing.

Now for me, the trade-offs work well. How many times can I say now?

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:00] 

Do I just start every sentence with now now? Is this just how I do things? Uh, now, now, now, now. I’m gonna start all over again because I’m in my head about the words in my mouth now. So.

In some near timeframe, some near timeframe. This is not a thing that people say, Dustin, I’m sorry. That’s not a thing people say. I’m just gonna retry that one sentence to sound like I speak with other human beings sometimes.

Today is the start of… I can do these things.

This was a terrible ending. I need to just finish that last part. I’m gonna redo the part where I started with my name and not the name of the podcast. Um, and we’ll do that.

And if you’re supporting or building anything to hand off to clients, you know that timely, easy to ship changes on a site are considered a vital part of any overarching brand and marketing strategy. Wow. It’s like, I don’t know what words are right there. 

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:00] 

I tripped over my own tongue a lot. I’m gonna sit, I’m gonna do that paragraph again because I didn’t do a very good job of it.

I’ll do a better job.

I literally digress, and now I don’t know. I am in my thing. What was I saying? Oh, there we go. 

Topher DeRosia, who founded Word not WordPress. Holy moly. That was a, I knew I was gonna say that, and I was like, don’t say that when you actually get around to saying this, but here I am, and I did it. Even though I knew I was gonna do it and I told myself not to. Doing it again. Right from there.

Not which audiench segment. Oh man. Audiench is not a word, folks. I was on a roll. I’m gonna start right from the primary thing.

I don’t even remember how I started this podcast. What is the last thing I said? I said, here we go. All right. 

Kind of covered some interesting ground, and so, oh no, this is not where I’m gonna start it. I know exactly where I’m gonna start it. Okay. I’m really ready now. Here we go.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:00] 

I suddenly, I’m gonna pause right here because I suddenly got really worried that I didn’t actually hit record. Oh my gosh. I did. Woo. I’m all over the place. Okay. We’ll now continue. Wait, did I? Oh my goodness. I did, super sorry.

Of the WordPress Briefing. I’m gonna do some singing in the middle of some talking, but I keep trying to talk myself out of the singing, so I’m gonna go ahead and do the singing, and then I’ll do the talking before I talk myself out of the singing. Here I go, probably.

I added a word. That was so good. I’m gonna start again. I’m gonna get some water, and then I’m gonna start again. Not again. Again. Just from the ‘and finally.’

I don’t know how I finish my show. Y’all, I do this literally every week. I never know how to finish my show. Here we go.

I don’t know why I shouted at you from the other side of the tiny closet. I apologize. I’m gonna start again from ‘and finally.’

Tada we did it.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:08:00] 

Ha. I hate it. I hate the whole podcast. It’s gonna be fine. 

Done. Nailed it.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00] 

With that, I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Merry Christmas from me. Happy holidays to you, and we’ll see you again in the new year.

Done.

If the recent Gumroad price change announcement has you considering a migration from Gumroad to WooCommerce, we’re here to welcome you with open arms. Changing eCommerce platforms may seem like a big hurdle to overcome, but we have an expert team in place to help you migrate your Gumroad store to the WordPress.com eCommerce Plan with WooCommerce.

With lower fees and transparent pricing, you’ll improve your margins and expand your earning potential. 

We’ve also created a tailored migration guide to walk merchants through importing from Gumroad to WooCommerce. This step-by-step process requires no technical expertise and will enable you to seamlessly transition your store.

When the import is complete, you’ll have a ready-to-go site with your content preloaded. Your customers will never know the difference. 

If you’re looking to get help moving from Gumroad, reach out now.

Do you build sites for others? Have you ever struggled to coordinate and manage access to in-progress projects? How often do you have to help clients reset their passwords? We feel your pain, and we’re excited to announce Site Preview Links, a feature that will let you easily share a “Coming Soon” Business or eCommerce site.

Use Site Preview Links to Share Your Work

With Site Preview Links, you can generate a unique preview link for your in-progress Business or eCommerce site, allowing your team or clients to access the Coming Soon site without having to log in. This way, you can easily show off your work-in-progress and get feedback from your stakeholders without having to resend invites, update user roles, or reset passwords.

You can create and access the preview link directly from the Sites page:

You can then share the link with your team or client. When they access the preview link, they’ll bypass the Coming Soon screen and be able to view your site.

Site Preview Links is an easy-to-use feature that will save you time and hassle. It’s perfect for anyone who builds websites for others, whether you are an agency with a growing client roster, a contractor with just a handful of projects, or simply someone who knows a lot of people who need websites.

How Site Preview Links Work

WordPress.com uses a secure HMAC hashing algorithm to generate Preview Link that is unique across all sites. The possible number of unique hashes is 2²⁵⁶, which heavily exceeds the number of grains of sand in the world!

Users who access your site using the shared preview link can continue navigating through the site, as WordPress.com uses a browser cookie to preserve the link value for the user’s session.

The link won’t expire, but you can disable it anytime. Users who already have access to your site using the preview link won’t be able to access the site anymore once you disable the link.

If you change your mind, you can always enable the link again, and we will generate a new, unique, ready-to-share URL.

If you need help with Preview Links, check out our more detailed guide.

Build Your Next Site on WordPress.com

Try Preview Links today and see how it can help you save time and make your life easier. Your clients will be impressed with the convenience, and you’ll be able to get their feedback faster.

Preview Links are just one of the reasons WordPress.com is the best managed WordPress hosting on the planet alongside other features we released this year: the Sites page, SSH access, SSH keys, and our data center picker. If you are interested in more details, you can follow our Developer Blog.

What other feature would you find valuable? How could we make WordPress.com an even more powerful place to build a website? Feel free to leave a comment or submit your ideas in our short feature request form.

In the forty-fifth episode of the WordPress Briefing, WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy discusses highlights from this year’s State of the Word address.

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: Javier Arce
Production: Santana Inniss
Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod

References

LearnWP
WordPress Playground
ICYMI: State of the Word Recap
Take the 2020 WordPress Survey!
Exploring WordPress Certifications
Community Summit WordCamp Site
Submit Topics for the 2023 Community Summit
20th Anniversary– Stay Tuned for Updates
Check Out Style Variations and the 2023 Theme

Transcript

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00] 

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 00:00:39]

Last week, WordPress hosted its annual State of the Word. As usual, this was delivered by our project co-founder Matt Mullenweg and represented a year-long labor of love from the WordPress community as a whole. There are many things I love about State of the Word, but consistently the thing I love the most is being able to shine spotlights on the great work of our global network of contributors.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:02] 

Since that presentation goes by at the speed of light, I wanted to highlight a few things as well. First things first, I wanted to highlight that we had nearly 1,400 contributors, and by nearly, I mean just one too few. We had 1,399 contributors. So that is a big deal in general, but it’s an especially big deal to me because that’s before we start looking at any contributions that aren’t specifically tied to a release. 

You may be wondering what those non-release contributions are. An incomplete list of those contributions would include organizing WordPress events, training others how to use WordPress, the myriad podcasts, articles, and newsletters that make up the WordPress media community, and any participant in a call for testing. Not to mention the unglamorous ways to contribute, like reviewing themes or reviewing plugins.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:58] 

Things like patching security vulnerabilities and the bazillion things that Meta does to make sure that our community has all the tools that it needs to function. So I want to echo, once again, the huge, huge thanks that Matt already shared in State of the Word, and thank all of you for showing up for our project and for each other this way.

The next thing I wanted to be sure to highlight was LearnWP. It was briefly noted that 12,000 learners had found their way to courses on learn.wordpress.org, and then during the Q&A, there was a related question about certifications in WordPress. 

The need for certifications has been a regular topic in our project, and I mentioned that there are two different ongoing discussions at the moment. One of those discussions is happening directly on the make.wordpress.org/training site, so I’ll share a link in the show notes for that.

But I’ve also been personally chatting on and off with Training team reps and other members of the community about what makes that so hard. In case you have not heard my whole spiel about what makes it difficult, it’s the logistics and our speed of iteration, and public perception. 

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:05]

So not exactly a small set of hurdles. I’ll be doing a more complete post on this in the New Year so that we can get some solid documentation of the state of things and not let it be lost forever in this podcast. But I do know that it is something that we are very interested in as a community and something that, historically, I have really been resistant to.

Not because I think it’s a bad idea, but because as someone who’s looking out for our operations side of things and our logistics side of things, it is not clear how we’re gonna get that done. Like I said, in the New Year, keep an eye out for a big, big post that takes a look at the benefits versus the costs and everything that we can do to help make those match each other a bit better.

And then the last thing I wanted to highlight was the WordPress Playground. Okay, so this was the last thing that Matt mentioned, and I want to be sure that it’s clear what’s going on with this project because when I first heard about it, I very nearly lept from my chair! 

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:03] 

It was such a remarkably big deal. Okay, so the WordPress Playground uses technological magic called ‘web assembly.’ I don’t know what it is, but it’s magic. And when I say magic, I mean that this tool makes it possible to run WordPress, an instance of WordPress, including a theme and a handful of plug-ins entirely inside your browser as a logged-in admin.

You don’t need a server. You don’t need to select a host. You don’t need to download anything at all. You don’t need to know what your domain’s going to be. You simply select the theme you want to test. Add some dummy content and see how all of the posts and pages function as though we’re a real live WordPress site running on your favorite top-tier host.

Then when you close the tab, it’s gone forever. Poof. Just like that. Now, this is a brand new project. It’s brand new to us and has a long way to go. So if working on that sounds cool, stop by the Meta Playground channel in the Making WordPress Slack. 

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:09] 

But this, in my mind, changes the way that we stage sites.

It could change the way we determine whether a theme or plugin is right for us. And arguably, it can become a stress-free way to introduce new or undecided users to WordPress’s admin area so that they can tell what they’re getting into. So when I say that this is a mind-blowing thing, and when I say that it is powered by magic, like it is astounding, it is astounding.

And the applications for our users as a whole, I think, are untapped yet, and potentially even the applications for our learners and future learners of WordPress– equally untapped. I’m very excited to see what we can do with this project in the future. So stop by the Meta channel. Stop by Meta Playground.

See what’s going on over there. We would love to have you. 

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:00] 

So those are my highlights of the day for State of the Word. Like I said, there are a few things I want to do more of a deep dive on in the text, so keep an eye out on make.wordpress.org/projects for most of those. But right now, let’s make some time for the small list of big things.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:17] 

Today I actually have kind of like a big list of big things. But I pretended it was small, so you didn’t turn off the podcast. So the first thing that I have is that in case you missed State of the Word, if you didn’t have a Watch Party to go to, or you didn’t know it was happening and so you didn’t really tune in at the time, I’m going to drop in a link of the recording.

It’s gonna probably start right when everything gets going. And so you shouldn’t have to scrub through anything. If you end up on one of the recordings that includes like the whole live stream, there is jazz for the first 30 minutes, and just, you know, skip through that.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:00]

The second thing on my big list of big things is our annual community survey. So Matt mentioned this in State of the Word, and he pointed out that one of the things that makes WordPress and open source in general so effective is that we have a way to communicate with people who are using our software and we make every effort to be responsive to it.

So the annual survey that we send out, it used to be quite big, and we’ve cut it down to 20 questions. If you want, you can think of it as like a census, so have your type of work and how long you’ve been working in WordPress, and what you wish to do with WordPress– have all those things be counted so we have a good idea of the type of person who’s currently using WordPress, and we can account for your needs and wants.

But also, if you want to think of it more as an opportunity to share the things that were especially useful for you in the project this year or especially valuable for you as a contributor, this is also an excellent place to do that.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:08:01] 

There’s a QR code running around on the internet somewhere, but I’ll also put a link in the show notes. If you do not know where the show notes are, by the way, they are at wordpress.org/news/podcast, and you’ll be able to get to the survey.

The third thing on my big list of big things is that next year we’re hosting a community summit. So if you’ve never been to a community summit, Matt mentioned that it is an opportunity for the best and most prolific contributors that we have to show up and discuss the things that are the biggest problems for the WordPress project right now.

But we also want to make sure that we are making space for the voices that we know that we are missing from the community as well as contributors who look like they are probably excellent future stewards of this open source project that we are taking care of together. And so there is a whole website for that.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:08:55] 

I believe it’s communitysummit.wordcamp.org. Right now, there is a form up asking for topics that you want to be able to discuss while we are there, but it’s taking place, if I recall correctly, on August 22nd and 23rd of 2023.

Number four on my big list of big things is that next year is WordPress’s 20th anniversary. So on May 27th of next year, WordPress will officially be 20 years old. So on our 10th birthday, anniversary rather, and our 15th anniversary, we pulled together some parties all across the world. 

We had some images, some logos, and things that were specific to the celebration that we printed into stickers and that folks put on, like, mugs and backpacks and cakes and stuff. So if you want to learn more about that, keep an eye out in the community channel in making WordPress Slack. They will keep you posted on how to one, find any of those logos and designs so that your local community can join in the celebrations.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:10:03] 

But they will also help you learn how to have any sort of WordPress celebration party that we’re doing there in May of 2023. 

And then the final thing on my big list of big things, it was mentioned that on the 2023 theme that was shipped with a bunch of style variations and there was this really, I think, excellent illustrative video that Rich Tabor put together for us that shows that you can switch through style variations on a single theme and have a site that looks totally different.

Now, that feels like that’s just a thing that should always have been in WordPress, but it is new this year. And so, if you have not yet had a chance to look at the 2023 theme, it is the default theme that shipped with 6.1. And so, if you have it on your website and just haven’t had a look at it yet, I encourage you to do that.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:11:00]

It’s a really interesting implementation that makes a single theme potentially look like an infinite number of other themes, and those style variations can be specific to the theme or can just kind of be around and about in the patterns that are also available in Core. 

Give that a look. I think it’s super worthwhile.

And that, my friends, is your big 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 the New Year.

Today we’re excited to announce that you can now add chapter breaks to the videos you upload to your website with our VideoPress feature. Chapters offer a quick way to navigate longer videos and can be a great addition for your viewers.

Streamlined interface

We’ve built a streamlined and easy-to-use interface for your viewers to interact with video chapters. You can hover over the timeline to preview the next chapter and then simply click to navigate to it. The current chapter name is shown after the video timecode, and when you click it opens a menu to quickly jump to the start of any chapter:

How to add chapters to your videos

To add chapters to your video, all you need to do is edit its description in the block editor and add the timestamp for each chapter, followed by a title you’d like to display:

After saving, you’ll see the video block update and automatically display your chapters.

In the video below — which is a showcase for WordPress 6.1 — you can see how chapters work and look. Play around with the bottom toolbar to navigate to different chapters and bring up the chapter list.

We hope you enjoy this feature! Please share any feedback you have or an example of where you’ve used chapters for your videos. We love to see our features in action!

VideoPress is available on our WordPress.com Premium, Business and eCommerce plans. If you have a self-hosted site, check out Jetpack VideoPress to get high-quality and ad-free videos for your site.

WordPress enthusiasts tuned in last week for the State of the Word address to celebrate the project’s yearly accomplishments and explore what 2023 holds. But that’s not the only exciting update from the past month. New proposals and ideas are already emerging with an eye on the year ahead—let’s dive into them!

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Highlights from State of the Word 2022

WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg delivered the annual State of the Word address on December 15, 2022, before a live audience in New York City. Most attendees joined the event via livestream or one of the 33 watch parties held across 11 countries.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy, Executive Director of WordPress, kicked off this year’s event with an introduction to the Four Freedoms of open source and the importance of WordPress in ensuring “a free, open and interconnected web for the future.”

Similar to past State of the Word events, Matt reflected on the project’s achievements over the past year, including Gutenberg’s adoption beyond WordPress, the steady progress in advancing the site editing experience, and the return to in-person events. In addition, he took the opportunity to remind everyone of the 2023 Community Summit and the 20th anniversary of WordPress coming up next year.

Ahead of 2023, Matt announced new taxonomies in the WordPress.org theme and plugin directories to help users identify the extensions that best fit their needs and plans for Phase 3 of Gutenberg—Collaboration—among other notable updates.

People who watched the State of the Word enjoyed a demo of WordPress Playground, an experimental project to explore, experiment, and build apps with a WordPress instance that runs entirely in the browser.

Missed the event? Read the recap or watch the State of the Word recording and Q&A session on WordPress.tv.

The 2022 WordPress Survey is open

The annual WordPress survey helps project leadership and those who build WordPress understand more about the contributor experience, how the software is used, and by whom.

This year’s survey will remain open through the end of 2022 and is available in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish.

Take the 2022 WordPress Survey to help make an impact on the project.

What’s new in Gutenberg

Two new versions of Gutenberg have shipped in the last month:

• Gutenberg 14.6, released on November 23, 2022, came with many refinements to core blocks. Notable highlights include a variation picker that allows users to choose a desired layout when a Group block is inserted on a page, a new list view for editing the Navigation block, and a keyboard shortcut to transform paragraph blocks into headings.
• Gutenberg 14.7, released on December 7, 2022, introduced an experimental tabbed sidebar, colors to help identify some block types in list view, and improvements to the Page List block to make it easier to manage page links in the content.

Follow the “What’s new in Gutenberg” posts to stay on top of the latest enhancements.

Team updates: Introducing the block editor in the support forums, a revamped Showcase page, and more

• The Support and Meta Teams are bringing the block editor experience into the WordPress.org support forums.
• WordPress.org’s redesign continues with a refreshed Showcase page.
• A proposal for the 2023 Global Community Sponsorship Program has been published.
• WordPress is accessible to more people thanks to 19,357 contributors who translated more than eight million strings this year. Learn more about the Polyglots Team’s achievements in 2022.
• Speaking of accomplishments, supporters of the Global Meetup Reactivation project helped reactivated 126 meetup groups in 2022! There are also some discussions on how these efforts can support the Polyglots Outreach Effort project, and vice versa.
• The Community Team met with members of the Meetup.com team to help report some feedback and issues with an accessibility overlay that they ultimately agreed to remove.
• The Training Team highlighted the latest updates that have been made to Learn WordPress. In addition, part 1 and part 2 of the Developers Guide to Block Themes are now available on the platform.
• The Themes and Polyglots Teams announced their team representatives for 2023.
• The final releases for WordPress 3.7-4.0 were made available on November 30, 2022, with a notice that they are no longer receiving security updates. WordPress 4.1 and later will continue to receive such updates.
• Fresh off the press, the December 2022 edition of the Polyglots monthly newsletter is available for reading.
• The latest edition of People of WordPress features Huanyi Chuang, a front end developer from Taiwan.

Curious about why WordPress has so many releases? Tune in to Episode 44 of WP Briefing to learn about the role of major and minor releases in the project.

Feedback & testing requests

• Help efforts to wrap up Gutenberg Phase 2 by testing the Site Editor’s latest updates. Leave your feedback by January 6, 2023.
• The Performance Team shared a new proposal for enhancing the Scripts API with a loading strategy.
• The Full Site Editing (FSE) Outreach Program is looking for volunteers to use Replay.io for capturing bugs. Express your interest by December 28, 2022.
• Version 21.4 of the WordPress mobile app for Android and iOS is available for testing.

The Community Team is calling on WordPress contributor teams to suggest topics for the 2023 Community Summit by January 16, 2023.

WordPress events updates

• The #WPDiversity working group organized several workshops during the past few months. Among other highlights, attendees of the Speaker Workshop for Women Voices in Latin America reported a 52% increase in self-confidence to speak in public. Stay tuned for the next events.
• The WordCamp Europe 2023 organizing team shared their content vision for next year’s flagship event in Athens, Greece.
• WordCamp Asia 2023 is just a few months away, scheduled for February 17-19, 2023, in Bangkok, Thailand. Organizers have announced the first recipient of the WordCamp Asia Diversity Scholarship, Awais Arfan.
• Three more WordCamps are happening in the next few months:
  • WordCamp Zaragoza, Spain on January 20-21, 2023
  • WordCamp Birmingham, Alabama, USA on February 4-5, 2023
  • WordCamp Cebu, Philippines on February 11, 2023

WordCamp Europe 2023 is calling for sponsors and speakers.

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

The following folks contributed to this edition of The Month in WordPress: @cbringmann, @webcommsat, @sereedmedia, and @rmartinezduque.

Newsletters have become one of the most powerful and popular ways to reach audiences directly with your content. What you might not know is that WordPress.com has built-in features to send new posts out as an email newsletter – automatically. We’re proud to power tens of millions of emails from WordPress.com sites every day, keeping readers up to date with the latest stories from their favorite creators. 

We’re introducing WordPress.com Newsletter – with its own dedicated theme – to make it even easier to get up and running without going through the full website-building process. Newsletter gives you a place to write and build an audience, with the flexibility of WordPress under the hood to grow in many different directions.

The simplicity of a newsletter. The power of WordPress.

One of the things that sets Newsletter apart is having the power and tools of WordPress.com to hand when it comes to personalizing and growing your newsletter. 

With WordPress.com Newsletter you can:

• Add unlimited email subscribers
• Import subscribers from other platforms
• Launch with a beautiful, ready-made theme or customize every detail with a myriad of Block Patterns 
• Stylize your newsletter with a background image, site icon, and accent color 
• Schedule email publishing
• Monetize your site (stay tuned for more paid subscription features)
• Use a free .blog subdomain or connect a custom domain with one of our paid plans
• Publish on the go with Post by Email – making writing a newsletter as simple as sending an email

Connect directly with your audience.

Whether you’re publishing brilliantly-crafted essays, updates for friends and family, or running a flash sale for your store, having a direct connection with your audience can make all the difference. 

Newsletters have become an incredibly popular way to reach your followers through their email inboxes. Email newsletter engagement is that much higher than on social channels, with a much better shot of your readers clicking through to your site.

Start a Newsletter from scratch.

If you’re thinking about starting from scratch, we’ve added a streamlined flow to create your own beautiful newsletter site in minutes. 

Choose an accent color, add a logo, pencil in a quick description, give your newsletter a name, and you’re ready to start writing your first post.

Add a Newsletter to your existing site.

If you already have a WordPress.com website, it’s pretty simple to let your audience subscribe to it as a newsletter. 

Add a Subscribe Block or one of our Newsletter Subscription Patterns to your site, and you’re done. Readers who subscribe by adding their email address will be notified whenever you publish new posts. If you need a little more help getting set up, check out our support guide to get started. 

And if you’d rather make a fresh newsletter – separate from your existing site – you can get started here. 

Help shape what comes next.

Just as WordPress.com continues to evolve, we’re also progressing the WordPress.com Newsletter experience. We’ll continue to roll out additional features to help you connect with your readers through newsletters. Give WordPress.com Newsletter a try and let us know what you think! 

WordPress belongs to all of us, but really we’re taking care of it for the next generation.”

Matt Mullenweg

A small audience of WordPress contributors, developers, and extenders gathered on December 15 for the annual State of the Word keynote from WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg. Those who could not join in person joined via livestream or one of 33 watch parties held across 11 countries, with more than 500 RSVPs.

Executive Director, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, introduced the event with a reminder of why so many of those gathered choose WordPress—the Four Freedoms of open source. As Haden Chomphosy noted, open source is an idea that can change our generation, and WordPress is one of the most consistent and impactful stewards of those freedoms.

As with past State of the Word events, Matt reflected on the year’s accomplishments, learnings, and aspirations as the project moves into 2023. From Gutenberg concluding its second phase of site editing in preparation for phase three—Collaborative Workflows, to the reactivation of meetups and global WordCamps, to the introduction of a new theme and plugin taxonomy to musings on the potential of machine learning, WordPress enters its 20th year continuing to define bleeding edge technology in thanks to the ecosystem’s vibrant community. 

The one-hour multimedia presentation was followed by an interactive question and answer session where Matt fielded questions from the livestream and studio audience. All questions will be responded to in a follow-up post on Make.WordPress.org/project. 

Discover everything that was covered by watching the official event recording and join the ongoing #StateOfTheWord conversation on Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter. For another way to get involved, consider sharing your experience with WordPress in the 2022 WordPress Community Survey.

Referenced Resources 

• WordPress on Tumblr
• Engineawesome.com using Gutenberg
• WordPress Community Summit 2023
• WP20.wordpress.net
• learn.WordPress.org
• Openverse
• Create Block Theme plugin
• Make.WordPress.org
• WordPress Playground
• Matt on Tumblr
• Distributed.blog

Special thanks to @laurlittle and @eidolonnight for review and collaboration.

Do you want even more control over how your site is hosted? We’re excited to add a new feature to our hosting toolbox: you can now choose your primary data center when enabling hosting features on your WordPress.com Business site.

While all sites on WordPress.com benefit from high-frequency CPUs, automatic data center failover, and worry-free burst scaling, selecting your primary data center gives you the ability to keep your content closer to your audience. 

Choose Your Primary Data Center

By default, all WordPress.com sites are added to the optimal data center. If your audience is primarily in a specific region, you can maximize performance by picking the data center in that region.

To select a primary data center, click on “Choose a data center instead” when visiting Settings > Hosting Configuration and activating hosting features. Once you do so, you’ll be able to select your preferred primary data center.

WordPress.com has four primary data centers to choose from — with more on the way: US West, US Central, US East, EU West. We also operate over 20 secondary data centers across six continents. Our platform automatically stores and serves your content from the closest server to your users. By selecting a primary data center, you can shorten the distance your content has to travel.  

Our Data Center Secret Sauce

Many hosting providers resell existing solutions built for hosting a variety of web applications. We built our hosting for WordPress, and running our own data centers is the “secret sauce” that makes our sites so fast.

The key ingredients to our secret sauce: 

• High-Frequency CPUs. We use high-frequency CPUs to process WordPress and WooCommerce-specific queries at incredible speeds. Other hosts use lower performance CPUs and charge extra for better CPUs, if they’re even available.  

• Automatic Data Center Failover. In addition to backups, every WordPress.com site is replicated in real-time to a second data center in a different region. Under the hood, we use ZFS to provide snapshots and also block-based replication. This unique, geo-redundant architecture helps ensure your site operates with maximum uptime.

• Worry-Free Burst Scaling. WordPress.com runs an in-house PHP build that integrates with our resource management tools and monitoring. It even allows for configurations to be changed dynamically on a per-request basis. Any WordPress.com site can instantly scale to over 100 PHP workers if the need arises.

Custom data centers are just one of the many reasons why WordPress.com is the best managed WordPress hosting on the planet.

Host Your Next Site on WordPress.com

Building on our multi-site management and SSH access, the primary data center picker is yet another reason to host on WordPress.com. Our goal is to make WordPress.com an enjoyable, indispensable part of your workflow.

What other features would you like to see available? How could we make WordPress.com an even more powerful place to build a website? Feel free to leave a comment or contact our friendly support.

It’s almost time for State of the Word 2022! Join us for this live stream event on December 15th at 1pm ET.

State of the Word is the annual keynote address delivered by the WordPress project’s co-founder, Matt Mullenweg. Every year, the event shares reflections on the project’s progress and the future of open source. Expect this and more in this year’s edition.

This year’s event will take place in person in New York City and live-streamed via various WordPress.org social media platforms. 

Join Matt as he provides a retrospective of 2022, the latest WordPress releases, Site Editor advancements, and a return to in-person events around the globe, among other topics.

How to Watch Live

What: State of the Word 2022

When: December 15, 2022, 1–2:30 P.M. EST (18–19:30 UTC)

How: The live stream will be embedded in this post at the time of the event and will also be available through the WordPress YouTube channel. Additionally, there are a number of locally organized watch parties happening around the world if you’d like to watch it in the company of other WordPressers.

Don’t worry, we’ll post the recorded event early next week if you aren’t able to catch it live.