On Episode fifty-one of the WordPress Briefing podcast, join WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy as she makes a case for why routine is a good thing– in life and in the WordPress project.
Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording.
Hello everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of 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 00:00:29]
All right, my WordPress wonders; it’s time to join me for one of my gentle rants on basic leadership principles. Today we’re talking about the importance of routine and predictability in everyday life. But don’t worry, I’m gonna tie it all together with WordPress, too. So by now you’re probably aware that I don’t really consider myself one of those “born leaders.”
[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:00]
Over the years, I’ve put a lot of effort into researching characteristics of good leaders and general leadership methods overall. But one of the things I encountered early on in my leadership learning journey was the concept of routine.
As with most leadership practices I hold, routine has more than one purpose. From a very pragmatic standpoint, routines provide predictability and the more predictable something is, the lower the cognitive load becomes, which in turn lets you use your thinking power for something better. For instance, if you know that in every check-in with your team lead, she’s gonna ask you what you were proud to have shipped last week, what you want to ship next week, and what things stand in the way of your plans, then you know that that is what you have to prepare for.
The knowledge work, the thinking part. The thinking part stops being, what is my team lead going to ask me and starts being what is the problem that she can help me solve?
[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:00]
But from a more human standpoint, that kind of predictability helps us to understand when something that happened is out of the ordinary. Whether it’s a notification of a comment left on your blog or syntactical highlighting that lets you know that you’ve written something that’s out of voice or against grammar standards, it just lets you know that something is unusual there and deserves your attention.
Now for me, this has a lot of applications across the WordPress project. There are the obvious things like the cadence of our major release cycles or our notification system, which honestly could use a bit of TLC, a little bit of elbow grease.
But there are also less obvious things that this idea still applies to simply because of the way our brains work, the information architecture on our sites, for instance. It should make sense visually and semantically because that makes it easy for us to skim and predict where the highest value content is for us. Or the user interface across the back end of our software.
[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:00]
Having familiar tasks or actions across any type of content or area of content makes it easier for a site maintainer to flow from one area of a site to the next, fixing things as they find them without necessarily having to stop and put down their hammer and pick up a screwdriver or whatever metaphor works for you. Or if you’re doing more nuanced work, like put down your timpani mallets and pick up your xylophone mallets.
So, yeah, consistency. Consistency is the topic of today’s gentle rant. I get really worked up about it because I feel like consistency ends up being this euphemism for being boring. But I honestly believe that it’s the consistency and the dependability that make it clear what is supposed to be exciting, the things that are different enough that they merit our attention.
[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:38]
Which, fortunately, now brings us to our small list of big things. It’s actually a pretty big list today and also a bunch of pretty big things. So first thing to know, there was an additional beta added to this release cycle.
[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:00]
It was beta five; it came out last week, I think. There was a bit of a regression that we worked our way through. And so RC1, release candidate one, is going to be postponed a little bit because of that. But don’t wait until RC to start testing, obviously RC is tomorrow, so that means you get to test, like, today!
The second thing on our small list of big things is that we have the WordPress 20th anniversary coming up. That’s May 27th. And you can join in the celebrations. So at WordPress’s 10th anniversary and 15th anniversary, we had like a big, ongoing global set of parties, like Meetup events got together and made cakes, or did a concert, or did a hackathon for various reasons.
Like they all got together on May 27th or thereabouts and did some really fun, like celebration of how far WordPress has gotten them and how far they hope to be able to go with WordPress.
[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:00]
So if you are from the before times WordCamp kind of organizing timeframe, you know that we always consider WordCamps to be like an annual celebration of the excellence of your community and how much you all come together and how different you are as part of this overall big WordPress-y thingy.
All right. Third item that we have is that, I know that I mentioned this in the last WP Briefing as well, but we have another session of the diverse and inclusive WordPress events coming up that’s happening on March 16th. So coming up really fast, we’ll put a link to that in the show notes as well.
And the final thing, I don’t remember what list number we’re at, but the final thing is that there is a proposal out there right now to modify the events and news widget that we use inside the WordPress dashboard. If you’re not familiar with it, it is a place where all of the local-to-you Meetup events get listed.
[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:00]
It’s where all of the news items from various WordPress media outlets get published. We just have a link to it there. And so, we would like to make some changes to that so that we’re able to include not only specific location types of events but also events that are location agnostic because they’re online but might have a specific, identifying niche that you particularly find interesting.
So it might be for Spanish speakers or for women in particular, or whatever it might be. There’s a proposal out for that. We’ll put a link to that in the show notes as well.
And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Thanks 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.
At WordPress.com, we’re always pushing our platform to do even more so that you can create, design, and publish amazing things with ease. Our newest features go a little deeper into the settings, making them particularly suited to those who call themselves tinkerers. Even if you don’t think of yourself as a pro, get in there and play around anyway! You’re more capable than you think, and if you break something our team can always get it back — we’ve all been there.
And in this case, a little experimentation can reap big rewards. All it takes is a small change or two to make a huge difference in how people see (and interact with) your website.
Let’s jump in and take a look.
Make your site’s buttons pop
Giving your buttons a shadow effect is an easy and powerful way to give your pages some extra panache. Now, new preset options available in the Styles menu let you apply that across your site.
From the Styles sidebar, click “Blocks,” and then “Buttons.” From there, you’ll see four options for how to style your buttons. This feature is only available on block themes.
When to use this feature: You’re a master of the CTA (call to action) and you put a button at the end of every blog post asking readers to watch a YouTube video, listen to a podcast, or buy a book. You’ve been thinking that those buttons are looking a little stale and flat. Use the new shadow presets to invigorate your default buttons with a depth and freshness that wasn’t there before.
Reuse a beautiful design
Not only can you copy and paste text from one block to another, you can now copy the entire styling of a block — colors, typography, and anything else — and paste it to another block of the same type.
From a block’s settings menu, select “Copy Styles.” Then once you add a new block, select “Paste Styles” from the settings menu to transfer all those design goodies.
When to use this feature: You’ve spent some time playing with gradients and type settings to make a Quote Block look really nice, and it’s paid off — now you want to bring that primo styling over to a Quote Block on a different page. Rather than recreating the steps you took, simply use “Copy Styles”/”Paste Styles” and get a gold star for efficiency.
Give readers a sticking point
A “sticky” component on your website is a piece of content (often a header + menu, though not always) that stays stuck at the top no matter how far down you scroll through a page or post. It’s a handy feature for visitors to your site, especially on mobile, where scrolling back up to a menu can be annoying.
There are other uses as well, such as an important announcement or promotion that you want visible at all times.
However, only a group can be made sticky rather than any individual template part. So you’ll first wrap your desired sticky blocks in a group, select that group, then access the “Sticky” option from the settings sidebar.
When to use this feature: Your website features long pages or posts that require a lot of scrolling. Maybe you’re a baby name consultant and have numerous lengthy lists of names. Utilize a sticky header and menu so that visitors don’t have to scroll all the way back up in order to quickly access the next category of names to peruse.
Twice as nice: copy your entire site!
Are you a professional in the web-building space? We’ve launched a new feature that allows you to easily copy the entirety of a site. Once you create your base template site, you’ll be able to spin up new client sites without starting entirely from scratch.
An important note: copying a site creates a new plan as well. For instance, copying a business site creates a new business plan at the same time.
From the wordpress.com/sites dashboard, click the three-dot menu, hit “Copy site,” go through a couple confirmation steps, and you’ll be set. This feature is available on Business and Commerce plans with Hosting Features active.
When to use this feature: You’re a solopreneur website builder and you often use previously built sites as inspiration for current builds. If you’re working on a new site and thinking about using a framework or feel that you’ve already created, copy the site with a single click and start the project with some of the work already done.
In Case You Missed It
If you missed our other recent updates, below is a quick snapshot.
Cocoamattic ERG, an employee resource group at Automattic, partnered with Nappy.co to release a collection of 90+ beautiful photos of Black people interacting with technology.
WordPress 6.2’s first release candidate (RC1) is here and ready for testing.
Reaching this part of the release cycle is a key milestone. While we consider release candidates ready for final release, additional testing and use by the community can only make it better.
The official release of 6.2 is just three short weeks away on March 28. In open source, we say with many eyes, all bugs are shallow, so we ask everyone across the WordPress ecosystem—theme and plugin developers, educators, agencies, and creators—to jump in and help test.
This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it is recommended that you test RC1 on a test server and site.
You can test WordPress 6.2 RC1 in three ways:
Option 1: Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream).
WordPress 6.2 comes packed with enhancements to make everything you do smoother, faster and a little more inspired:
A refreshed Site Editor for easier template browsing
A new sidebar experience in the Navigation block for simpler menu management
Reorganized block settings with separate tabs for Settings and Styles
New inserter design that lets you add Media—including Openverse and its more than 600-million-item catalog, plus your entire Media Library—and better categories
More header and footer patterns for block themes
A new Style Book that shows your entire site’s look and feel all in one place
New controls to let you copy and paste block styles for faster, simpler design across your whole site
Custom CSS you can add for those finishing touches, per block and globally
Sticky positioning to keep important blocks fixed when scrolling
Distraction Free mode for moments you want to focus on writing
New options that let you import certain widgets from classic to block themes
The removal of the Site Editor’s beta label—welcome to the next generation of WordPress
Want to see some of these featured highlights in action? Check out the WordPress 6.2 Demo recorded March 2, 2023.
Do you crave a deep dive into tech specs? These recent posts cover a few of the latest technical updates. This is not an exhaustive list, but it should get you started:
Without your testing support, hitting important product milestones would be a much bigger challenge. It’s also a meaningful way to contribute to the project. If it’s your first time, or it’s been a while, this detailed guide is a great resource to lean on.
From a global perspective, every time you test a pre-release version, you help secure the future of WordPress. How? By helping the community prove the software is stable, easy to use, and as bug-free as possible.
If you think you have run into an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. If you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, you can file one on WordPress Trac. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs.
Interested in the details on the latest Gutenberg features? Find out what’s been included since WordPress 6.1 (the last major release of WordPress). You will find more details in these What’s new in Gutenberg posts for 15.1, 15.0, 14.9, 14.8, 14.7, 14.6, 14.5, 14.4, 14.3, and 14.2.
A special thanks to WordPress plugin and theme developers
Do you build plugins and themes? Your products play a special role in helping WordPress do more things for more people across the world. In turn, more people in the WordPress Community mean a bigger, more robust open web.
Chances are, you have already been testing your latest versions against the WordPress 6.2 betas. With RC1, you will want to finalize your testing and update the “Tested up to” version in your plugin’s readme file to 6.2.
If you find compatibility problems, please post detailed information to the support forums.
This learning hub also provides quick access to our live webinars (and replays) where you can join us for demonstrations, instructions, and Q&As. Get registered today for our March sessions:
It’s worth repeating: there’s no registration or login required to view any of our materials! It’s as easy as clicking the button below to get started today.
There’s never been a better time to learn the ins and outs of creating a new site, blogging like a boss, podcasting like a pro, and optimizing your content! Join us at wordpress.com/learn to get started on the path towards pursuing your dreams.
On March 2, release squad members Anne McCarthy and Rich Tabor presented a live product demo of all the delights coming in WordPress 6.2, set to release on March 28, 2023.
A first-of-its-kind event in the world of WordPress releases, the showcase was moderated by fellow community member Nathan Wrigley and joined by nearly 90 participants.
During the demo, Anne and Rich highlighted some of the new features and enhancements that will continue to revolutionize the way you interact with WordPress. They gave a quick tour of the Site Editor’s refreshed interface, which lets you browse and preview templates before editing. They also covered all the new and highly anticipated ways to manage styles, as well as improvements to the Navigation block, new collections of header and footer patterns, the new distraction-free mode for focusing on writing, and plenty more.
It was a jam-packed hour that sparked plenty of excitement—and a lively question and answer session that wrapped up the event on a high note. Any questions the presenters couldn’t get to will be collected and answered in a follow-up post on Make.Wordpress.org/Core and subsequently linked to this post.
Watch the recording of the live demo in case you missed it, or want to relive the moment (and the funky fresh demo site designed by Rich). You can find a full transcript of the live demo below.
Nathan Wrigley 0:22 How are we doing? Should we go for it?
Anne McCarthy 0:24 I think we can start.
Nathan Wrigley 0:26Why not? The recording has started. So let's get, let's get cracking.
Hello, welcome everybody to the WP 6.2 Live Demo outline. I'm Nathan Wrigley. I do a few things around the WordPress community, mainly to do with video and podcasting and things like that. But it's not about me.
Today, we've got two fabulous guests. We've got Anne McCarthy and Rich Tabor, and they're going to do a full on Product Demo. It's a little bit unlike things that you may have seen, because in the more recent past, lots of new features have been added. And so Rich, and Anne are going to spend the time on the screen in a moment, and they're going to show you all of the bits and pieces that you may find dropping into a WordPress install near you. Let's hope. There's been a lot that's been happening, so there really will be probably 20 or 30 minutes of live demos, so look forward to that. I've got to get them to introduce themselves in a couple of moments.
Just before that, though, a little bit of housekeeping. This is going to be recorded, so if you have to drop out halfway through and go elsewhere, completely fine. It's going to be posted at the Make/Core website, but it will also come fully complete with a transcript as well. So, if that's something that you're looking for, that will all be there. Also to say that if you want to post any questions, we'd love that. In fact, there's a whole portion at the end when Rich and Anne have finished speaking, where we're going to field questions toward them. Now there's really two places to do that. If you're live with us on Zoom, then if you hit the Q&A button at the bottom of the screen and post your questions in there, I guess specifity... specific... Whatever that word is, be specific. Help us out. Tell us exactly what you want to know and we'll get the questions to them. The other way to do that is to go into Slack. And there is a channel in there, #walkthrough. And if you want to post any questions in there as well, that would be great. So yeah, just to recap, Q&A button if you're in Zoom, and use the Slack #walkthrough channel, if you are in the Making WordPress Slack. Okay, right. I think we'll take you guys one at a time if that's alright. First off a little bit of an introduction from both of you. Let's begin with with Anne McCarthy, shall we? Hello, Anne!
Anne McCarthy 2:42Hello, hello. It's so good to be back on literally any sort of live stream with you.
I appreciate that you're a part of this
Nathan Wrigley 2:48Yeah, that's really nice.
Anne McCarthy 2:49Well, I'm Anne McCarthy. I'm a product wrangler at Automattic. I live in Seattle. I also run the FSE Outreach Program, which is basically dedicated to testing all the latest and greatest of WordPress, which is part of why I'm so excited to be part of this demo, is because so much neat stuff has come through this that I've had the privilege of going through a little bit early on with the ever growing calls for testing. So that's a little bit about me, I'll pop it over to Rich.
Nathan Wrigley 3:17Yeah. So Rich, if you want to take the baton there.
Rich Tabor 3:21Yeah. Hey, everyone. I'm Rich Tabor. I'm a product manager at Automattic. And I work on WordPress and Gutenberg, in particular. From a little bit south of Atlanta, Georgia, in the US, and been building and tinkering with WordPress for I think, close to 11 years now. So it's, it's been a good run, and I'm super stoked about where things are heading.
Nathan Wrigley 3:43Yeah, and things definitely have been moving in a very much a forward direction, WordPress, 6.1. And WordPress 6.2. There's so much clear blue sky between the two of them. I think probably the best thing at this point is if we can have it, I don't know what whose screen is coming on. I think it might be Rich's, or maybe it's Anne's, I don't know.
Rich Tabor 4:00Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley 4:01If we can get that screen shared, then I will slide my way out of this call and say, Rich and Anne, it's... it's over to you. I'll be back soon as you're finished for any Q&As.
Anne McCarthy 4:14Awesome. Thank you.
Rich Tabor 4:17Alright, everybody can see my screen right now?
Anne McCarthy 4:19 Yes. Rich did an excellent job designing this. I do want to call this out that I love, absolutely love this.
Rich Tabor 4:26Thanks, Anne. Yeah, this is actually running Twenty Twenty-Three. So it's kind of showcasing some of the things you can do just with the core theme. And some of the design tooling that we are, that has been built into 6.2. So this view here is the site editor. So I'm going to orient you here. There's one big change here in particular, I want to call out visually, is this idea of the frame here on the right, and this will pull up the local template. So I'm looking at my homepage of the site right now. If I navigate into other templates, I can pull those up here on the right as well. And then you can also navigate template parts. So this part's not very new to 6.2. But the idea of zooming in on different template parts and templates and having them appear here in the frame is. And that's important because of this concept of browse mode. And this is where you could dive into an actual page from the site editor. So here, I just pulled up the about page of the site, and I can click into it and actually start making changes. Now, the changes here within the post content block are going to be relative to this about page. But I can also modify the template which then changes the about, or changes the page on any instance of this particular template. So it's a new concept and how we can browse the site. But it's a very powerful, and really the first iteration of that way of managing a site.
Anne McCarthy 5:50And also lightly introduced content editing in the site editor, as you mentioned. So it's a kind of a neat merging of the two worlds, which I know folks have long been wanting to see that unified. And same with the frame, it kind of adds a nice layer where instead of just being dropped in, like before, you kind of are given a more zoomed out view, which I think helps address a lot of the feedback that we saw around the orientation when you're entering the site editor.
Rich Tabor 6:12 Yeah, exactly. And really, if we think a little bit further out than 6.2, this could also house setting to use. So we do have, you know, one view here that that is relative to 6.1, where you can see all of your different templates. But imagine if we had any other different types of settings and controls and different pages loaded within here, doesn't have to be just the front end templates and renders of your site.
Alright, so we're gonna dive into this here. So you can go into it just by clicking on the frame. I'll do that one more time just to show, you just click on it. And now you entered right into it. You can edit it right off, so we can make changes, just as if we zoomed into it in the other way in 6.1. And then we have a bunch of styling tools that have been added to 6.2, so I want to kind of hone in on these. Like, this panel itself is not new. We have style variations, you can zoom in here, we've got this new zoomed out view, where you can apply different ones at a time. And then we also have this icon here, which triggers the style book. Now the style book is a very interesting tool here that really lets you customize the theme's style guide, essentially. So I can go through each of these tabs, which are relative to the block categories, and see all of the blocks loaded on this particular site. So right here, I've got like Button blocks and Columns block and whatnot. So if I click on one of these, it'll pull up the Style panel of that particular block. And then when I make changes over here, these are applied globally throughout my entire site. So if I want to change the way this button looks, let's say we do some smaller tags, maybe we'll add a little bit of letter spacing, and maybe make it capitalized. See, it's getting applied everywhere that the button is used. Also do some changes here to padding, perhaps. We'll do something custom here. I think that looks nice. And now...
Anne McCarthy 8:13
Real quick while you're doing this, I wanted to note that like this is something that folks have really struggled with previously with the site editor, where if you're editing a block that isn't in the template already, you're not able to see this. So as Rich is showing, you can actually look at any block that's being used in your theme and see how the change that you're making in styles will impact that. Where before, if the block wasn't present in that template that you were editing, it was hard to know exactly what was happening. And so now you have both the style book and this inline preview that you see in the Style section to rely upon, which is pretty neat.
Rich Tabor 8:43
Yeah, exactly. And really, you could theoretically go in and design your entire theme with the style book. Now, I know there's some advantage to design in context of pages and whatnot. And I'll go into that in a bit. But the idea is that you really can quickly browse through all of the different blocks and tighten up what you want to within these controls. And it's not limited to the standard variation as well. There's also these style variations of each block that you can now manipulate as well. So we're gonna go in, say, we'll change the radius of this one. So we want it to be sharp like our other button. But we have these new controls. Like, this is a shadow control we've added in 6.2, where you can apply, say, like this shadow here might be nice. This one here, and so some fallback shadows, within core that a theme can provide as well, its own values. But this now will apply for every single variation of the outline on my site here.
Anne McCarthy 9:39
And you'll notice that it's not in the style book right now. And that's just part of the future feature development is showing the variations of blocks as well.
Rich Tabor 9:47
Exactly, yes, I would imagine that this would this would show up the variations of the button block, yeah. Which is a nice way to really customize these, like it used to be only CSS would be used to manipulate these variations here. And now it kind of abstracts that away and you can do it within the editing experience. That's really nice. It really is. There's also this idea of block CSS, so you can add custom CSS that is scoped to a particular block. So if I add CSS here, it'll be applied for the button block wherever it's used. Now, I wouldn't recommend using additional CSS in most cases. I would, I would suggest using all the different controls that we've built, that are built into 6.2. But the idea of using CSS to add a little pizzazz to this particular button block is fine. But just with that caveat that you wouldn't want to use it exclusively. Like I wouldn't apply a background color via CSS, I would rather use the background elements color here. There's also additional CSS, which emulates what was previously in the customizer. So we do have site wide CSS that can be applied within the site editor and also on the front end of your site. Again, I wouldn't emphasize using this exclusively, as there are a lot of new design tools that I would explore first, from the top level styles here where you can apply colors to the background, text and buttons. But if there was anything extra you wanted to add, you could do so within the stylesheet here.
Anne McCarthy 11:21
And I'll note we'd love to hear feedback if there are certain things that you're repeatedly adding custom CSS for. So either commenting on a currently open issue, or if you don't find one, opening an issue would be super helpful, because it's neat to see what folks are using for CSS so we can fill those gaps.
Rich Tabor 11:36
Yeah, exactly. So that's the global Style panel here. But there are some quite a few other improvements along with styling. So the first is the idea of pushing styles globally. So if I'm in here, and I'm designing, let's say I want to add a radius, I want to do some different typography as to appearance like this, like bold, italic look. And then we'll also...
Anne McCarthy 12:07
That's cool.
Rich Tabor 12:07
Thanks. Also, let me make the letter spacing, maybe we'll make it a little bit bigger, actually, and then, I think that'll work. Do these changes here and see I've just styled this one particular block this button up here. And this button down here is still using the global styles that we designed earlier. But now I can go through my settings panel here and hit Apply globally. And I'm going to here so we can see that happen. The styles are now pushed globally to all the other blocks. So this is really helpful for when you're designing in flow. And you don't necessarily want to abstract out into the style book and you want to push your changes that you just did here, because you like the way the button looks and want those applied everywhere, all at once. I think this is really powerful way to to quickly design within the editor. Another tool that is quite useful, I'm going to take this heading here and manipulate this. It's the idea of copying and pasting styling. So we're going to use that same bold italic look, maybe we'll make that a little smaller, we can even manipulate this size to be a little bigger. Now we go here to copy styles. And then I can come all the way down here to this other heading that's very similar, and paste it in. And there we have that style applied just to these two headers. And you would do this when you don't necessarily want every single heading to have this effect. But perhaps there are like elements on this page that you want to push those changes to, specifically. So copying and pasting allows you to be very granular, whereas applying styling globally, lets you be more of a holistic design experience for pushing styles. Another neat...
Anne McCarthy 13:57
Oh, real quick, I just wanted to know like I think one of the things that's interesting is, as we've added more design options to blocks like this is part of the experience of scaling things and making it easier to use. So when we think about like intuitive and delightful. Some of these tools coming into 6.2 really take you know, the tons of design tools that we've added over the last couple releases and makes it easy so you can actually tweak things and then reuse. So I think that's one of the things I want to call out is it's kind of this crescendo. Where now the tools that are coming to 6.2 to really ease the experience and allow you to do a lot of neat stuff where rather than having to re-tweak everything through every single heading block. A lot of stuff is used. So...
Rich Tabor 14:34
Yeah, exactly. WordPress is moving towards a design tool and less of like, what you see is what you can only have. It's more of an expression of creativity and it really does open up the doors for for designing beautiful pages on the web. I think it's really powerful.
Another cool bit that we've added is the idea of sticky positioning. So headers would be nice sometimes if they stick to the top, so for top level group blocks, this is a group block here, there's this new position attribute where you can assign it to sticky. And as you can see, right in the editor, it's already showing me that this is sticky on the front end. And also here as well. It's only available for top level blocks for now, there's still some some odd stuff to figure out on how we communicate when something is not going to stick due to the the parent height of the elements around it. But for top level, it's still fine. So we have it here. But there are some iterations that are already happening for the next release that will kind of bring this into more, bring some more capabilities to this particular feature.
Anne McCarthy 15:44
Yeah, and I'm very excited because one of the things I wanted to briefly call out was the how the header, the template part has that purple. So another neat thing coming to this release, that was a big part of feedback for the outreach program was having to look parts and reusable blocks having a different coloring, because there are different kinds of blocks are synced across the site, when you make little changes and impacts everything everywhere. So that's another neat thing that's coming with this release, is that you can kind of see those a bit differently in the List view as well as when you're in the editor. I see Nathan has his hand raised. Is that intentional? Oh, it's removed. Okay.
Nathan Wrigley 16:23
It was not intentional. That's my mistake. I'm sorry.
Rich Tabor 16:28
Yeah, it helps you see quickly too like, what is the template part, particularly for headers and footers, it makes it easier to browse quickly.
So speaking of template parts, and patterns in particular, so headers and footers, are new patterns added within WordPress 6.2. And now that they're loaded, actually from the pattern directory, which is kind of neat. And I'm going to show you how to replace a footer with one of those other patterns. So if you have your footer template parts selected, you can go to replace footer. Now this flow is not new to 6.2, but it's going to call out these other improvements. And then you just click one there, and you have it loaded here, that's the site logo that I'm using up here as well. And you can modify this text without having to do any any funky PHP filters or moving actual templates. And if you want to change it again, you go back to replace say, let's pick this other one, let's try this one. It's kind of nice. And there's this focus view, or you can zoom in to just the footer itself. You can even check the responsiveness of it and see how it, how it reacts on mobile, and make any of your changes here and have those persist over to the actual template whenever you close it out. It's a nice way to really kind of clean up the editing experience. So you're not seeing this entire group of groups and instead kind of focusing on what you're actually wanting to complete. You can do the same for the header as well.
Anne McCarthy 18:01
Yeah, and as Rich mentioned, there are some new patterns that are being bundled from the directory, which I think are really extensive. Regardless of what theme you're using, there's going to be some pattern for group patterns that help democratize design where you can use them in anything.
Rich Tabor 18:15
Yes, that's right. All right. So navigation. Navigation has gone under a... quite a bit of work in the last a couple of months. And really, this is all about trying to make it easier to manage your site's navigation and also add pages and links and then even styling. So there's this new dedicated list view for the navigation block. So it's essentially emulating a little bit of what's available over here except for you had to kind of get down to it. Now it brings it top of mine and the surface area here. You can drag them around, move them up and down, even add submenu links and remove them as well. And then you can style it like normal. And now apply different styles via the styles tab to the block itself, or even individual page links and whatnot, you can dive into them and manage them all from here, instead of having to only manage them from up here. This really kind of abstracts the complexity from from this particular canvas interface into a more familiar interface here on the sidebar. It's really a great effort. And it's it's taken some time to refine but it's getting there and it's feels a lot nicer.
Anne McCarthy 19:30
Yeah, there's been a lot of good feedback about this as well just because it kind of is meant to marry the classic experience with bringing blocks into it. So it is in addition to being edit, editing on canvas, so if you really want to continue to edit as a block you still, you can continue to do that. But it does add a nice interface and the block settings where you're able to do it. And I'll briefly call out here the split settings, which we'll probably talk about later. But you'll see here for more complex blocks, there's some nice split settings making it a little bit easier, more intuitive to go through.
Rich Tabor 20:02
Yeah, that's right. And if you take a look at navigation here, this is very similar to this component added here. And, and that's, that's purposeful, we want it to look and feel familiar. Either way you're managing navigation. So you can also add some menu items here, remove them and drag them around and reset them here, as well as browse into the individual pages. So that's what I have for the site editor portion of the demo. And did you have anything else you wanted to add to this, Anne?
Anne McCarthy 20:37
Oh, could you resize the Browse mode for me? I just love the resizing. I think it's kind of cool. This is just like a fun, you know, thing to call out. But maybe you won't noticem but you can resize it. So as you're quickly going through your site, if you want to see how it looks in different ways, you can also do that. So that's the final thing I'll shout out.
Rich Tabor 20:56
Yeah. So then, yeah, exactly. It's... there's a lot of fine, fine touches like that. Well, we can't obviously can't call them all out today. But it is really getting tightened up overall as an admin experience for the site.
Anne McCarthy 21:12
It's such a great foundation in the future, for sure.
Rich Tabor 21:15
Exactly, exactly. Alright, so if we press this back button here, it goes right back to the dashboard, I'm gonna go and leave...
Anne McCarthy 21:25
That back button was a big piece of feedback people had they would get into the site or not know how to get back out. So I appreciate you calling that out.
Rich Tabor 21:32
Yeah, exactly. It's been through a number of iterations. And I think we've settled on something that feels feels nice; it does feel nice.
Anne McCarthy 21:41
I agree.
Rich Tabor 21:43
So...
Anne McCarthy 21:44
Ah yes, the removal of the beta label.
Rich Tabor 21:46
You want to talk to this, Anne?
Anne McCarthy 21:48
Yeah, I would love to jump in on this actually. So you'll notice that the beta label is removed for this release. And part of why we wanted to show it now is to see how all the features, how the experience has changed, how much more you can do. And all of that has led to the removal of the beta label. And that doesn't mean that feature development is done that it's like, you know, gonna stay this way forever, it just means it's in a place where we invite you all to try to the site editor, it is out of beta. And a lot of development work has gone into testing this. So we've had almost, I think, 20 calls for testing with the outreach program. It's been through multiple major WordPress release cycles, there is still more work to be done. But I'm very excited to see the beta label removed, I think the features that are coming to 6.2. And the foundation that is set with 6.2 really marks a level of maturity. That is pretty exciting. So consider this an invitation to try out modern WordPress, and to check it out.
Rich Tabor 22:43
A hundred percent, I couldn't have said it better.
Alright, so another neat part that's added recently for 6.2 is this idea of distraction free mode. So it's not turned on by default, but I have it on so we can see the results here. So you can go in and type right here. And then actually, I'm gonna throw in some Lorem here. So you can see it in action. So this feels more like a text editor and less like a Block Editor. Whenever distraction free mode is on even the the multi block selection, it feels really nice. It doesn't there's not this idea of blocks, even it's kind of abstracted from here, there's less noise, there's less distraction. And just think that the idea is that it's just you and your words, it's just writing and publishing. And if you want to publish, you can hover over here, you'll see the toolbar come down, you can hit Publish or draft. And then this is how you would turn it off and back on here. And then you still have control of all the existing tool. And it's just a much simpler, streamlined interface. And you do have access to blocks, you can still add them if you'd like to, but the idea is just being able to write without the distractions is really powerful. And a really nice publishing experience overall.
Anne McCarthy 24:08
And this is for everyone. So this is like a lot of stuff we're coming to say it or using a block theme. This is available for anyone who's using the Block Editor. And to be honest, I use this for basically all my writing now. Especially for any post or page, I typically will go into this mode. So I'm very excited about this. And I hope folks feel the same way.
Rich Tabor 24:28
Yeah, exactly. I've been using that too for quite a bit. But the thing is, is also not only for post editing, so I have a page here that I've created. And I have distraction free mode turned on, which kind of removes all the extraneous tooling and it really lets me focus in on the actual blocks here so I can manipulate them to an extent. I can even drop in different imagery for these images here and modify the buttons and whatnot and even add more blocks but the idea is it's almost like a simplified editing experience for pages as well, not only for posts. And here, I'll come up here and turn off distraction free mode to see it all in real time.
Anne McCarthy 25:13
And this isn't yet available for the site editor, but I have a feeling a number of folks are going to be keen to see that put in there as well.
Rich Tabor 25:20
Exactly, yeah, I don't see why it wouldn't work in the site editor as well. I think it'd be very nice. Yeah. So we have some other improvements here that are fun. So this inserter here has gotten a couple of changes here. So blocks looks familiar, it's still the same, but patterns is where we started seeing some changes. Instead of having some featured patterns loaded in a block category selector, we've split them out individually as their categories here, you're gonna load up some of the different header patterns that are loaded in WordPress 6.2. So you can load them here and see them in this tray, and then click to add them to your site. Which is really nice, it's a nice way to kind of go through them quickly and see a bunch of different ones. We also have the media tab up here, which is new, which splits out the images from your Media Library, videos, and audio as well, including the Openverse library. So this is a catalogue of, I believe, over 600 million free, openly licensed stock imagery. And you could search from right here in the inserter. So let's type in birds. And click on one, and it will add an image block with the image already added to it, we have got the caption down here. If you don't want the caption, you just turn it off right here, this little control that was added. And now you can manipulate it right off. So let's say this, drop it into here. Maybe we'll make these about the same size and move it over to something interesting.
Anne McCarthy 26:53
And I'll note that there was a GDPR concern around the images being properly uploaded rather than hotlinked. And I wanted to just note that that's been addressed. So the images are uploaded to your Media Library. That's why. So in case anyone has that question. Sorry, continue.
Rich Tabor 27:08
Yeah, no, that's a good point. It's very important. A key benefit to have this flow here is that instead of instead of having to add an image block, and then open your Media Library, and then pick an image, and then you have it here, it's really this one flow of searching visually, and searching here, as well. And then having it added as an image block already. So it kind of skipping all the extra steps that you always have to do anyhow, it's really nice. And we have a couple of interface changes. So there's the settings icon up here that used to be a cog, and now it represents the sidebar itself. So when you open it, the sidebar is triggered, if that's closed. And that's changed for a couple of reasons. But one of the bigger reasons is, as I mentioned earlier, this idea of split tabs, so we have the cog for settings. And that's when a block has additional settings that are not per the norm of the styles that are available within WordPress, then you'll have a new settings tab pulled out here. And that's to keep the density nice whenever you're editing and it feels good instead of having everything kind of in your face all at once. Now for other blocks, like the paragraph block, there's not additional settings, so automatically not included. The tabs up top and just be everything top level. But when a third party plugin adds like a different settings panel, or even if you extend one of these core blocks that does not have one, and a detects one should be auto added as well. So it's kind of just like a nice, fluid way to continue improving the experience of editing within WordPress.
Anne McCarthy 28:49
Yeah, so plugin authors can also kind of make sure where they want settings and styles to show that it shows up correctly. And there's a dev note about that as well.
Rich Tabor 28:58
Yes, that's right, you can you can decide as when you're extending or adding your own inspector controls. That's what these are called here, whether or not they're included within styles or settings as well. Yeah.
Then another smaller change that's kind of nice is this idea of pulling the outline from its own toolbar item up here into the list view. It's because they're very relative, you know, a list of all the blocks on your page, also an outline of what's going on. So they're combined now into this one view. We also have time to read word count and character count here, which is nice. And then this is a little guide here that just helps you understand the structure of the importance of the structure of the document and making sure that it is properly structured. All right, was there anything else that we wanted to add you think, Anne?
Anne McCarthy 29:51
I'll add one last call out just because I'm trying to think about like little dev tidbits if you want to disable it prefers there is a way to disable Openverse as well I know that's always a concern. We add something it's like, okay, how do we get rid of because I don't want a client getting into it, there is a way to disable that is documented as well. The other thing is the pattern. So there's new categories, the patterns. And so query is now posts, a couple of things were merged, there's no call to action. And there's also some lovely, which I'm gonna brag on Rich, again, some new text based, query patterns. We have a lot of visual patterns for the query loop, and now there's wonderful, more text focused ones, which I think is really exciting. And just another great way where patterns have evolved and patterns is obviously a huge part of the future building with WordPress. So I'm very excited about those and keen to see just more variation with query loop, I think it's really powerful block to make easier to use. So I'm excited to see it. Otherwise, I think that's, I think that covers a lot of what we were trying to go through.
Rich Tabor 30:57
Yeah, and there's certainly more. There's a lot of interesting, minute details that are, you know, quality of life improvements around editing and designing. And we can't cover them all today. But it's just, there's a lot of exploratory ideas and cool, interesting pieces that have been the result of lots of feedback and lots of testing, like I mentioned earlier. And, you know, it's really a testament to open source and contributing and really working together as a team to make this thing we call WordPress ours and making it a brilliant publishing experience. So just thank you to everyone who's put in time ideas, effort, code, design, marketing, copy, all of that, and more to making this what it is. It wouldn't be possible without you.
Anne McCarthy 31:46
Totally agree. And thank you, Rich, for doing such an excellent job building this site and demoing all this.
Nathan Wrigley 31:51
Yeah, indeed. Thank you, Rich. Thank you, Anne. Just to let you know that, in theory, there's possibly up to about 25 minutes left. If anybody wishes to pose a question, we're going to do our best to get the answer directly from Rich and Anne. Whether that means putting the screen back on, I don't really know. But we've got a few that have come in. The place to put those, it would appear that some people have figured out how to do that in Zoom. But if you go to the walkthrough channel, in the making WordPress Slack, you can post some questions in there and all things being equal, we'll get them raised as quickly as we can. So we've got a few. In all honesty, because they've been copied and pasted from various different places, I can't necessarily say who the name of the person is that sent them. But first question I've got over here for either of you. It says when you save globally, under the Advanced tab, does this change the stylesheet? Interesting.
Rich Tabor 32:54
So this will change the attributes of the blocks. So if I throw in that example, there, I pushed the attributes of that one block globally. So they're applied to every block. So it does affect some styles, but not writing any style sheet or writing to the core style sheets.
Nathan Wrigley 33:11
Can I ask the question? It's not something that's been submitted by anybody else, but it just occurred to me that as you were clicking the global button, I just wondered if there was a "get out" from there. In other words, if you inadvertently click the global button, is there an undo option in there? In other words, can you back away from all of the buttons suddenly changing or all of the H1s?
Anne McCarthy 33:32
You do have to hit save after. You can't just hit Apply globally. You have to hit save, and that's where the multi-entity saving pops up. The multi-entity saving is kind of strange in that it's not good at discarding changes. So you basically would just have to like leave. Like it would be like, Whoops, I hit that. You probably also have to hit the undo. Like there's - those are the two kind of options. So, yeah.
Rich Tabor 33:54
Yeah. The undo is like a global thing. It works there as well. Yes.
Anne McCarthy 33:58
And there's a reason that feature is hidden, like under Advanced and collapsed. That's not necessarily for everyone. But for folks who do like to tinker, it is available.
Rich Tabor 34:08
Right. And it's also only available in the site editor as well. So it's the more the global view of editing your site is where you can access that.
Nathan Wrigley 34:17
Perfect.
Okay, so I have a question from Zoom. Is copying and pasting styles as demonstrated just for core blocks? They go on to say more, which I'll read out. Some blocks collect, some block collections have their own C&P, and I'm curious what might carry over, if anything? And then there's a follow up. Also, if CSS classes are assigned to a block, will applying global styles to a block be to all of the same block, i.e. H2? Or, hopefully, will a custom class allow for a more granular global CSS? There's a lot in that question, but if we start with the: is copying and pasting styles demonstrated just for core blocks?
Rich Tabor 34:56
So it works for blocks that have leveraged the block support system within core. So if you have opted your block into using background color, and text color, link color, any of the layout settings, anything that was in the styles tab, then all of those would get pushed to or get copied or pasted or even pushed to the global application of styles as well. Now, if there's, if a block has done its own sort of background color attributes, I don't know that those would persist as well. But if you use what's available in core, it's really one or two lines of JSON will get you the background color support that you need.
Nathan Wrigley 35:35
Anything to add to that, Anne?
Anne McCarthy 35:37
No, just another reason to rely on what core is building. So it's a another great example of how these features will work together and how adoption helps whenever these new things come out.
Nathan Wrigley 35:49
Okay, so we'll go on to the next question then. So this is from Zoom, and apologies, I don't know your name. Can we have this as a feature request? Can we have sticky sidebar block for some groups next release, please?
Anne McCarthy 36:05
Probably would do a separate block, I'm guessing. Yeah, do you have anything to add to that?
Rich Tabor 36:11
Yeah, I would say we wouldn't need a sticky sidebar block. Right now that group lock in top level-only does support position sticky. And the only reason it was turned off like we did have it on for one of the Gutenberg releases for everything - for every group block - but it was turned off just because there was too much confusion around if you had a sticky element that wasn't didn't have enough space to stick for and enough height to stick. So it wouldn't actually be sticking. You wouldn't see a result of you applying a sticky position to it. So I think we can figure that out with some some UX to really clean that experience up so that you do expect and understand what's going on. When you apply that to a block. That's not the root level of the document. So it'll be there. It just takes a little bit more iteration.
Nathan Wrigley 37:00
Okay, another question. This time from Slack. When there are changes made in the site editor, are the templates still marked with the blue dots to indicate that the changes are in the database?
Rich Tabor 37:14
Yes, from that Manage Templates view that I shared in the canvas, it will show up just like it did previously, when there are changes to one of the templates provided by the theme.
Anne McCarthy 37:25
You can revert the changes, as well, as you're used to doing.
Nathan Wrigley 37:30
Okay, thank you. Anne's shared a link related to the question that we just posted. I don't know how Zoom works well enough to whether or not we can share the screen.
Anne McCarthy 37:40
I can briefly share my screen.
Nathan Wrigley 37:42
Yeah, that'd be great. Show us the GitHub.
Anne McCarthy 37:43
Let me try that. I just wanted to mention this in case people want to follow along in the follow up tasks related to this. I love to look at links. I'm a nerd like that. So in case anyone else is, this is a lot of the follow up tasks and a great issue to chime in on or just follow if you're interested in this because there are some improvements to be made. But this is a neat report for now. So it's - oh, I just copied and pasted. So it's issue number 47043 in the GitHub repo.
Nathan Wrigley 38:11
So 47043 related to the question that we just had. Okay, so another one from Zoom. This is Robin, who asked the question, can you show? It's just moved on my screen. There we go. Can you show us how to trigger the focus mode to view, say, for example, the footer on its own? So I guess we're back on the screen again.
Rich Tabor 38:34
Sure. Everyone can see? Yep. So when you have a template part selected, you just hit the Edit button here and then it's focused into that as well. And then you have, again, the responsive controls here. All the existing controls, it's just localized to this template part.
Nathan Wrigley 38:54
Hopefully that answers your question. Thank you, Robin. Just for anybody who's kind of lurking who has a question but hasn't yet posted it, please do. What are the chances that you're going to get Rich and Anne on the on the phone in the next few weeks? Pretty minimal, I'd say, so make use of them while they're here. Ellen has done just that. She's in Slack. Ellen says, is there a plan to allow no title templates in the block editor as they are still included even in header and footer-only templates?
Rich Tabor 39:28
No title templates. Like templates without a title? I'm not quite.
Anne McCarthy 39:35
You can just remove that block.
Rich Tabor 39:36
Yeah, you can you can remove the post title block from a template. I'm not quite sure if that's if that's what the question is asking.
Nathan Wrigley 39:46
Ellen, if you're still in Slack and watching this, if you heard Rich and Anne queerying that, then if you can give some more clarity, we'll endeavor to get that answered.
Anne McCarthy 39:57
Knowing Ellen she knows exactly how to remove things. So I'm like, I'm curious. I'm definitely - we're misinterpreting something because she's very - Not showing the title in the editor...?
Nathan Wrigley 40:07
Yeah. Not showing the title in the editor. She says she's here.
Anne McCarthy 40:12
I'm like, "Say more."
Nathan Wrigley 40:14
Yeah. Give us more. Give us more Ellen, and we'll get right back to you.
Anne McCarthy 40:17
Let's follow back up on that, because Ellen always has some good questions and good feedback.
Nathan Wrigley 40:21
All right. We'll do just that. Again, another question from Zoom. This is posed by some anonymous person. Will the list views icon get the same treatment as settings?
Rich Tabor 40:33
I don't think it's in the plans. I don't think there are plans to change that. But list view icon, it's always the list view. So when you toggle it on and off, it's relative to what it is. Whereas on the other side, the settings can be block settings, page settings, template settings. Global styles is in that same area. So it's a little bit more context for the list view to stay a list view item.
Anne McCarthy 40:58
And I know that the question came up because the settings icon looks like there's that sidebar. And so there are who people have been asking like, will the same thing happened over here? Just for context. That was part of a discussion in a different GitHub issue.
Nathan Wrigley 41:12
Okay, thank you very much. I appreciate very much those people who are posing questions. That's really great. Again, just to prod you once more, feel free to add your own questions in no matter how big or small they are. We're here to help. So now we have a question on Zoom from Abdullah. And he coincides beautifully with a question I've written down. Any good resources to learn FSE theme-based development? Can either of you point to a particularly good resource that you know of?
Anne McCarthy 41:41
Yeah, Learn WordPress. There's tons of stuff on Learn WordPress that I would recommend. I also, Daisy Olson, who's Developer Relations at Automattic, has a Twitch stream going and some YouTube videos around block theme development. But I would recommend going to Learn WordPress. There's also some contributor-led initiatives. Carolina, who's one of the theme folks has, I think, it's fullsiteediting.com. And that was kind of like the original, go-to resource. And she's done an incredible job working on that and keeping it up to date. So yeah, there's tons of tons of resources. I will spare you from from sharing more, I don't know, Rich, you have more hands-on experience there. What's the most helpful for you?
Rich Tabor 42:22
Yeah, there's some really great tutorials and guides on Learn that are relatively new, that are really helpful. And I see that the team there has been really cranking it out on the last year or two, like really putting a lot of effort into this. So I would, I would start there.
Nathan Wrigley 42:38
So if you're not familiar with that, I guess it would be apropos to say go to your browser of choice and type in learn.wordpress.org and go and explore. Basically, there's a ton of materials that are getting updated on what feels like a daily basis at the moment. So, once more, learn.wordpress.org. Go and check that out. But also, Anne in the chat that we've got going on here has linked to Daisy Olsen's Twitch channel, which - I'm just going to read it out but hopefully I'll make it into the transcript. twitch.tv/DaisyonWP. And it's all one word. D-A-I-S-Y-O-N-W-P. Daisy on WP. So there's two great places to go. But the learn.wordpress.org is perfect.
Anne McCarthy 43:24
I have to add one more thing, which is if you're not fully ready for block themes, one of the big things that I feel like needs to be emphasized more is you can gradually adopt. So all these features are being done. But maybe you want to only give access to a client to edit the header. You can do that. Maybe you want to leverage theme.json in your classic theme, you can do that. If you want to expose the template editor.
But use the rest of your themes across them, you can do that. So I want to also encourage folks to look into resources around gradual adoption, because it makes sense that this stuff isn't - From day one, there has been a focus on that. Adopt what you what you want, when you want and it's going to make sense to different people at different times. Matías once said that to me, and I think it rings really true. And so now that we're at this level of maturity, I think we're looking again and revisiting again, like okay, what can I use? What do I want to use? I think it's really important to mention. So if you're not ready to go all in, I encourage you not to just wipe it all away, but to think about how you can gradually adopt and also what would help you gradually adopt. So there is actually a label on GitHub started a couple months ago around - It's called blocks adoption. So if there's something that you see that you're trying to adopt the site editor, and it's preventing you from doing so, like we want to know about that. And you're welcome - I'm going to just put this out here - @annezazu is my GitHub username, feel free to just like @ annezazu, ". This is blocking me from using the site editor." We want to know these things. Open issues. Please share, because that is also part of the phase of this work is making sure people can adopt as they can and that the tools are robust. There's a ton of resources as well. There's a page in the Theme Handbook around gradually adopting to block themes. So I just wanted to call that out.
Nathan Wrigley 45:06
And just one more time, what was that? Give us, the give us the username.
Anne McCarthy 45:11A-N-N-E-Z-A-Z-U. So like Zazu from The Lion King. It's an inside joke from middle school.
Nathan Wrigley 45:19
Okay, possibly the shortest question. This is from Sandy, I should say, Can Lotties be added to 6.2?
Rich Tabor 45:28
I would say that I did a quick search a few minutes ago and there are various blocks built by the community, which do allow you to add or embed LottieFiles to your site. I haven't tested any myself but feel free to dig into those. And if they're open source, they can contribute ideas or feedback on on those GitHub repos.
Nathan Wrigley 45:49
Thank you very much. And Eagle has posted a question. When there are changes made in the site editor, are the templates still marked up - Did we have that one? We have, right? We've done that.
Anne McCarthy 46:01
We answered that one. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley 46:02
I think we did. Okay, moving on directly then to Ian, what is - oh! Okay, what is the philosophy for mobile in the editor? Are there any plans to have a mobile view?
Anne McCarthy 46:16
That's part of the dragging and resizing. And there's a lot of work being done around intrinsic design. And you can see on the developer.wordpress.org? What is the blog? I think it's /news. Do you hear audio?
Nathan Wrigley 46:35
I hear only your audio. I don't hear anything I don't wish.
Anne McCarthy 46:36
Okay, sorry. Something just started playing in the background out of nowhere and that just scared me. It's like all of a sudden, I was like, woah! Where was I?
Nathan Wrigley 46:50
So we were talking about mobile views?
Anne McCarthy 46:53
Yes, intrinsic design. There is a developer blog that if you're not following that, you definitely should, that addresses this around, basically showing that the mobile view points have exploded over time. It's now really not sustainable to try and have CSS and all this sort of stuff, mobile queries allowing for each view. So instead, how can we think about intrinsic design? And so that's like the best answer I can give. And for now, there is this nice resizing that you can do to kind of see how things scale. 6.1 introduced fluid typography, which was really exciting and part of this larger, intrinsic design set up. And I think we'll expect to see more of that over time. Sorry, for the brief mental break.
Nathan Wrigley 47:36
Just a quick reminder, we probably got 5, 6, 7 minutes or something like that before we start to wrap things up. So if you've got any questions, please, please do post them in here. We have one from Paul who asks, is there any more work planned for pattern management in the future? And then WP Engine has released a plugin allowing easier management of patterns recently, I believe that was yesterday, it would be good to know if we should wait for core or assume that nothing else is coming soon.
Rich Tabor 48:07
Yeah, I would say that pattern management is an important part of this new WordPress experience and having a way to create and manage local patterns, but also maybe push them to the pattern directory. And then on top of that, having a functionality built in where - it's kind of like a component based system where you have patterns where the design is the same across patterns, but content can change. All of that kind of falls into the same category of work. And that is something I believe WordPress will eventually do as well.
Nathan Wrigley 48:41
Okay, we've got no more questions on the screen. So I'm going to ask a question, if that's all right. You were demonstrating the distraction-free mode there where you could move things up, move things down, and resize pictures and images and so on. I was just wondering what the constraints on that are. So in the case of images, I could see that you could resize things. And with the text, I could see that you could, you know, highlight things and start typing wherever you wish. But I just wondered how the decisions had been made to set those parameters and those only. So yeah, around that, what's available in distraction-free mode? What limitations are there?
Rich Tabor 49:17I would say, generally, it's what's available is what happens when you click on a block. The tooling is there available on the canvas before so resizing was available on the image but not the toolbar. So the resizing is still available when you're in distraction-free, but maybe not adding the caption piece or you know, those other toolings. It's almost like the content locking or content only locking API. It's very similar to that in a sense, but a little bit more tightened up. Where just text and dropping in images - you can't necessarily open the Media Library from there unless you dive out of it. But you can drop another image onto that existing image to replace it. Some things like that.
Nathan Wrigley 49:59It looks like a really excellent interface for people who just, well, want to concentrate on their writing. It sounds like Anne's all in on it.
Anne McCarthy 50:05
I use it every single day. It's amazing.
Nathan Wrigley 50:09
It almost felt like a Google doc minus all the bits and pieces at the top. Yeah, really, really nice. Okay, so we have some more questions. Weston is asking, what about optimizing the experience of editing using a mobile device on the web? So I guess that's a little bit maybe the question that we had earlier. How can... we how can we do things on a actual mobile device?
Anne McCarthy 50:30
That's a great question. There are mobile apps. So there is the mobile team and using the mobile apps. I personally don't use mobile apps and sometimes will edit things from Safari on my iPhone SE 2.
I actually was talking to someone - their username is Nomad Skateboarding. And from what I understand, he only builds client sites from his phone. And so one of the things I said to him, I was like, "Give us your feedback. That's really cool. It's really unique. That's fantastic. Like, what pain points you're running into, what can we improve?" Because there is obviously like, we are in a mobile first world. My phone is sitting right next to me. I would love to hear particular pain points folks have when trying to edit in that way. You can obviously use the apps. There are some quirks with the site editor, and that I know is partially being looked into and resolved. But yeah, I think there are probably - what we're building now should always translate back and there are teams trying to sync back and forth. And there was a recent post from the mobile team talking about what's the future of mobile editing. And so I would recommend - it's somewhere on Make/Core. I recommend digging that up and getting involved and honestly sharing your feedback. Because I don't think that is an experience that we talked about enough personally.
It's a great question.
Nathan Wrigley 51:40
Rich, anything or should we move on?
Rich Tabor 51:42
I think that was great.
Nathan Wrigley 51:44
Okay, perfect. Um, um, um. Okay, we have an anonymous question. It says as page speed is a big challenge, how are we optimizing the blocks for better LCP score?
Anne McCarthy 52:00
There are, some interesting - sorry, Rich, I don't know if you wanted to jump in. I was going to start link dropping.
Rich Tabor 52:05
Yeah, you go ahead. Yeah.
Anne McCarthy 52:07
Yeah, there's some interesting work from André. Part of it involves actually adding tracking and making sure there's really good front end metrics. So there's kind of a twofer going on. In one fell swoop, we're focusing on better tracking and improving the tracking that we have for performance, particularly the front end. And then at the same time, also work is being done to optimize like style sheets. There's been some really neat stuff in previous releases that I bet I can pull up if you'll give me one moment.
Nathan Wrigley 52:36
Yeah, whilst you try to find that, Anne, I think it's probably important to say that, if there are any questions which you wish to have answered which don't somehow get answered in the next few moments, then there will be posts created around this piece. So anything that goes missing, any question that is unanswered, there will be endeavours to get them answered. Right? Okay, show us what you got, Anne.
Anne McCarthy 53:00
Yeah. So this was a post I did for 5.9, in conjunction with a whole ton of folks who contributed and actually did this work, I just was kind of gathering it up. But you'll see sections here around block style sheets and CSS loading. And honestly, a lot of the work with the styles engine, which is part of the global styles project, can help give a lot of opportunity to actually improve this, I recommend checking out this post to see some of what's already been done. And then in the future, one of the discussions that we had recently with some folks across the community from Google, from Automattic, 10up, all over the place, including our lovely performance lead, Felix. We talked about some of this stuff and about how to talk about particularly themes and also just blocks in general. And thinking about some performance improvements and developer education and automated testing and all sorts of stuff. So I won't go too far into this. But I think a lot of work can be done. And some of it is being done around measuring more front end metrics and very recently, LCP was added and started to be tracked here, which I think is pretty exciting.
Nathan Wrigley 54:05
I think following the performance team and Felix Arntz, in particular, would possibly get you quite a long way towards your answers there. Okay, a couple more. Firstly, there's a few people helping out in the Slack channel. So, appreciate that. We've got Matías answering questions, and so on. So that's really amazing. Thank you. Another anonymous question, any plans to support CSS Grid?
Rich Tabor 54:33
I think it's something worth exploring. Probably not the major priority coming up. But definitely some interesting aspects that we've seen other... other building applications do that we can learn from for sure.
Nathan Wrigley 54:47
Okay, we're very short on time now. I think we've got to round it off at the top of the hour. So we've got about four minutes left. I've got to wrap it up a little bit. So try to get these last two done if we can. This is from Mary. What are the typography options as of 6.2? we have Google fonts and self-hosted. Any plans for solutions like Adobe Type and Monotype?
Anne McCarthy 55:11 There's a Fonts API that got booted from 6.2 and is hopefully planned for 6.3. So I would just follow that effort. So right now, 6.2 is not introducing anything new or different there. Things are as they were. There's a private API that folks can can use with anything JSON. That's as concise as I can be.
Nathan Wrigley 55:31
No, that's perfect. I think we're three minutes to go. That's probably the best time to wrap up the Q&A. Apologies if you had a question and it didn't get answered. As I said, there will be a whole load of things created off the back of this. We will make sure that there's a transcript available and - just read something in the comment. Hopefully, any questions that have been asked but unanswered will be answered approaching that. Just very, very quickly, I have to say thank you to Anne and Rich in particular, for taking the time out of their busy schedules and demoing what 6.2 can do. It really looks like a transformational release. But also, thanks to Chloé and Jonathan and Lauren and Mary who are on the call, but, you know, you haven't necessarily seen them right now. So, appreciate them. That's really great. Following up off this, I've got three points to mention. Following the 6.2 release on Make/Core for development updates and calls, there's going to be a post. It's make.wordpress.org/core/6-2. Also, if you've been keeping a close eye on the Beta releases - I say beta, I know it's hysterical. The beta releases, we've got version beta four has just been released. And anybody who wants to test that out would be most welcome. The URL for that is far too long for me to say out loud, but you can Google it, I'm sure, and find out how to test for that. And also, if you are keen to follow WordPress, it's all over the social networks. And you can follow - basically, if you try to just follow @WordPress, then you'll get somewhere. So for example, on Twitter, it's WordPress - @WordPress. On LinkedIn, it's /company/WordPress. Instagram is @WordPress. And guess what? On Facebook, it's - what do you think it would be? It's @WordPress. So it's available all over there. And I think that's it. I think that's everything that we've got to say. We're about one minute away from closing. So particular thanks to Rich and Anne, but thanks to everybody in the background making all of this happen. Thanks for showing up. If people don't show up, the work never gets done and the project never moves forward. So fully appreciate anybody who's given up their time to ask questions today and watch this presentation.
Anne McCarthy 57:51
And thank you, Nathan. I want to call you out as being an excellent moderator and creating a safe space for us.
Nathan Wrigley 57:57
Very, very welcome. I enjoyed doing it. I would gladly do it again. All right. I don't know how to end this call. So I'm just gonna wave. Bye, everyone.
February has been an exciting month for the WordPress community, with the celebration of the first-ever WordCamp Asia bringing friends and contributors back together in person. But that’s not all; read on for the latest project updates.
Get ready for WordPress 6.2
WordPress 6.2 Beta 4 arrived earlier this week and is ready for download and testing. Work continues on track, with the first release candidate (RC1) due next week and the target for the final release on March 28, 2023—less than four weeks away!
WordPress 6.2 is one of the last major releases planned for Phase 2 of Gutenberg, taking the Site Editor out of beta with a more polished user experience and refreshed interface.
On March 2, members of the release squad hosted the 6.2 live product demo. The recording and transcript will be available soon. In the meantime, these resources will give you a taste of what’s to come:
Two new versions of Gutenberg have shipped in the last month:
Gutenberg 15.1 was released on February 8, 2023, with access to the Openverse library of openly-licensed media from the Editor. Other highlights include the ability to add custom CSS on a per-block basis and support for shadow presets in Global Styles. This is the last version of Gutenberg that will be included in WordPress 6.2.
Gutenberg 15.2is available for download as of February 22, 2023. Besides continued accessibility improvements, this release adds support for revisions when editing templates and template parts, and refines the navigation experience in the Site Editor.
Team updates: Global community sponsors for 2023, contributor mentorship program, and more
The Community Team announced the global sponsors that will support the WordPress community programs in 2023.
A few months ago, Meetup.com removed an accessibility overlay in response to some concerns from the WordPress community. A recent update reports that the company has conducted an assessment and plans to address the issues identified.
Bangkok, Thailand, hosted a successful inaugural WordCamp Asia on February 17-19. The event welcomed 1,299 attendees, and more than 600 participants joined the Contributor Day. At the event’s closure, organizers announced that WordCamp Asia 2024 will take place in Taipei, Taiwan!
Join WordPress enthusiasts from across the globe on May 27, 2023, as they come together to celebrate its 20th anniversary!
Regardless of how you use WordPress or where you call home, you are invited to celebrate this great milestone. Plan a larger party that includes your entire meetup, spend the day coworking with a group of friends, or hang out virtually online.
Whatever your style, celebrate in your time zone, your way. WordPress has some resources to help you party.
The Meetup Organizer handbook has a section dedicated to helping you plan your meetup’s anniversary celebration. You’ll find email and Meetup.com templates that make sending your announcements and creating your events simple, as well as tips for planning a fun, safe, and inclusive event, in-person or online.
The 20th anniversary website will list events as they are announced and scheduled by organizers, so check back regularly to see if there’s one in your area you’d like to join or help organize.
Meetup organizers, once your meetup’s WP20 Celebration is scheduled, email support@wordpress.org using the subject WP20 Celebration and include a link to your meetup event. Events will be reviewed to ensure they have all the necessary details before inclusion on wp20.wordpress.net.
And don’t forget the new swag!
Starting in April, meetup organizers can order complimentary kits of official anniversary swag, including limited-edition stickers, buttons, and pencils that can be shipped to your meetup at no cost to you. Additional items, such as pennants, shirts, hoodies, keychains, and more, are also available for purchase at the official WordPress store while supplies last, beginning in early March.
So, whether you’re sporting new anniversary swag or your old favorites from your closet, join WordPress enthusiasts on Saturday, May 27, for a globe-spanning WordPress celebration. Use hashtag #WP20 to share your passion for WordPress.
Don’t have an active meetup in your area? It’s not too late to start one.
