WordCamp Europe 2024 kicks off on June 13, gathering WordPressers from across the globe to Torino, Italy.
The highly anticipated conference has a packed schedule starting with Contributor Day and will feature a notable roster of speakers. Other highlights will include engaging workshops covering a variety of disciplines (including one for youth and teens) and WordCamp Connect, a dedicated space for attendees to meet and network with additional community-led sessions.
The conference will conclude with an exciting mid-year project update from WordPress Cofounder Matt Mullenweg, including a live Q&A session. You can watch Matt’s presentation on June 15, 2024, streaming live on the WordPress YouTube channel starting at 4:30 p.m. Central European Summer Time (2:30 p.m. UTC).
If you’re unable to attend WordCamp Europe 2024 in person, you’re welcome to email your questions instead. Given the number of questions expected both in-person and online, only some of the submitted questions may be answered live.
Whether you’re touching down in Torino or streaming from elsewhere, see you very soon!
If you want your WordPress website to scale and accommodate anywhere from 10 to millions of site visits a month, you need to choose your hosting wisely. When a site is business-critical, you need scalable hosting that can support its performance and security requirements.
WordPress.com is a managed WordPress hosting solution that accommodates the growing demands of your site, allowing it to scale with you and your clients.
In this article, we’ll take a look at the importance of scalable WordPress hosting, as well as how to ensure that your sites are as highly available, secure, and performant as possible. We’ll cover:
When evaluating WordPress hosting options in terms of scalability, it’s important to understand the differences between shared hosting and managed hosting.
Shared hosting is like going to the gym where you need to share access to all of the equipment like treadmills and weights. If there are too many people using the treadmills, you may need to wait your turn, which can impact the amount of time you need to spend at the gym to get your desired workout.
With shared hosting, your website shares server space and resources with other websites; if one website gets a lot of visitors or needs more resources, it can slow down the performance for everyone else on the same server.
Managed hosting, like what we offer at WordPress.com, is like having a home gym. The equipment is yours, and you can use it whenever you want––no need to wait in line!
With managed hosting, your website has its own dedicated server and resources, so you don’t have to worry about other websites affecting its performance. Not only that, similar to how a personal trainer establishes your workout schedule and nutritional suggestions, a managed hosting provider manages all of the technical stuff for your website, like keeping it safe and making sure it runs smoothly.
Building upon the workout analogy, as your goals change, whether it’s weight loss, muscle gain, or general fitness, a personal trainer will customize your workout plan to meet the desired goals. Similarly, when the demand of your website grows with a larger audience or new service requirements, a managed hosting provider ensures appropriate resources are allocated to support those needs so that your website continues to perform in high traffic.
So when trying to find the best hosting solution for scalability, managed hosting is typically recommended over shared hosting.
Why managed hosting is best for growing sites
Shared hosting can be a great budget choice to start, especially for small-scale hobby sites and other sites that aren’t business-critical. However, when you are working for clients or customers, you often have requirements that even the best shared hosting providers aren’t always equipped to handle.
Especially when developing a complex site, it’s important to have hosting that can grow with a site, as your host will need to support more traffic, a greater number of plugins, or different types of editorial content.
Unfortunately, many shared WordPress hosting platforms have some difficulty meeting this need, and there are a number of common problems you may face when using shared hosting:
Security
Security can be an issue with some of the shared hosting providers due to the fact that multiple sites are sharing resources. Depending on how the infrastructure is configured, a vulnerable plugin on someone else’s site could affect yours, even if you keep all your plugins, themes, and WordPress core up to date!
As your site grows, you’ll also likely need to add more users with permissions to log in and manage the site. Thanks to WordPress’s user roles, it’s easy to restrict what parts of a site users are able to change. However, as this list of users grows, so do the opportunities for less-secure practices to sneak into your site and potentially compromise things.
One major concern is authenticating users who need access to the backend of your site. With a solution like WordPress.com, you get our Secure Sign-On, which allows you to use a single set of credentials to access both the WordPress.com dashboard and the backend WP Admin dashboard of any of your sites, quickly and securely. It also allows you to enforce two-factor authentication or security key authentication to ensure that everyone who has access to your site is accessing it in the most secure way possible.
Since eligible WordPress.com plans also run on WP Cloud’s architecture, your site gets double protection through the use of their Linux namespaces and control groups; they separate your site data from other sites and users.
WP Cloud also encrypts site traffic with Transport Layer Security (TLS), protecting any data your users share with your website (and vice versa).
Cost containment
A common pattern among shared hosting companies is to be relatively cheap but charge for additional features a la carte, such as a content delivery network (CDN) or increased bandwidth.
While this might make sense for someone just starting out, more advanced sites may need additional features, which can rapidly make hosting your site an expensive proposition. A better choice is finding a managed hosting provider that gives you everything you need to scale your site for a flat rate.
As your site scales, you’ll be adding more content and getting more traffic. Your server needs to handle the increased demands and load that a bigger, more highly-trafficked site requires. A managed hosting company handles traffic spikes and increased demands on the server behind the scenes, so that you can rest assured that your site won’t be held back by the hosting infrastructure it sits on.
When comparing hosts, the ability to handle increased infrastructure demands should be a primary consideration; you don’t want your website to go down just when it’s getting more exposure than normal or while your business is growing.
PHP workers process PHP code to build pages, execute processes, and fulfill requests. The number of PHP workers provided by your host impacts the amount of uncached requests your site can handle at once. The more PHP workers your site has, the quicker content can be shown to your audience.
Our custom resource management system automatically scales to over 100 PHP workers that will support your sites and keep things running efficiently, regardless of the number of visitors trying to access them at once.
Performance
One of the major downsides to shared hosting is speed. Because you’re sharing the same server and resources with many other customers, there are limits to how fast your site can load, especially if your site or someone else’s site on your shared server experiences heavy traffic. And as you probably already know, sites that perform better and load more quickly are more attractive to customers and do more business overall.
Even though many shared hosting solutions claim to offer “unlimited” bandwidth or other resources, there are practical infrastructure limitations due to the fact that you’re sharing with others.
As your site grows, shared hosting can also lead to decreased stability and uptime. With multiple sites competing for resources, there’s a higher likelihood of performance bottlenecks and server strain, potentially causing frequent downtimes and slower loading speeds. Consequently, you may find yourself spending more time on maintenance tasks to address these issues.
With WordPress.com, your site resources will scale with your website as it grows, so you never need to pay overage charges or worry about being too successful. Eligible WordPress.com hosting plans include WP Cloud’s robust and automated burst scaling to ensure that your website will never slow down or crash as a result of heavy traffic spikes or excessive concurrent users.
How to make your site more scalable
No matter where your site is hosted, there are some best practices that you can implement to make it more scalable:
Use a Content Delivery Network
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) provider has dedicated servers around the country or world that can serve your site’s static assets quickly, dramatically improving page load time. Serving static assets from a dedicated CDN, instead of serving them from your web server, frees up your web server to process requests to the actual site, and helps these resources load faster for users around the world. When you can, you should always use a CDN to make your site load more efficiently.
If you decide to use WordPress.com for your site’s hosting, you can take advantage of the Site Accelerator from Jetpack and offload the responsibility of serving static assets, such as images, JavaScript, and CSS, to the CDN. This will ensure that even as you add more media to your site, performance won’t be affected, because the heavy lifting will be handled by your CDN.
Caching
Another way to make your WordPress site more scalable is to effectively utilize caching. Hitting the database or an external API to fetch data for rendering a page can slow down your site. By caching some of these performance-impacting pieces, you can significantly speed up page load and ensure your site remains performant.
A form of caching uses the transient system built into WordPress, which can store the result of a long-running database query or API call in the wp_options table of the WordPress database, allowing quick lookups. In general, any data that takes a long time to generate is a good fit for a transient. Transients expire over time, so they won’t always be cached, but when they are, they can significantly speed up page load time. Check out this complete guide on WordPress Transients to learn more.
There are also caching plugins that do some of this work for you. However, in many cases, hosting providers implement their own caching systems that conflict with these plugins, so be sure to check with your hosting provider to see if the caching plugins you’re interested in are compatible with their infrastructure.
Another improvement you can make to your site, regardless of your hosting provider, is checking how many autoloaded queries you have. By default, certain options in WordPress are autoloaded, meaning they’re queried from the database on every page load, regardless of whether they’re needed on that particular page.
By only autoloading the options that are actually required everywhere on your site, you can reduce the number of database queries made on each page load, which will make your site load much more efficiently.
If you’re not sure what’s getting autoloaded, you can check the total size of all the options you are autoloading by running the following SQL query:
SELECT SUM(LENGTH(option_value)) as autoload_size FROM wp_options WHERE autoload=’yes’;
This will give you the total size, in kilobytes, of options that are autoloading. If this is more than a megabyte, you should investigate what you are storing in wp-options and what’s being autoloaded to see if there are any optimizations you can make here.
Wrapping up
When it comes to building and growing your WordPress site, the last thing you want to worry about is your hosting provider not being able to handle your expansion. By choosing scalable, managed WordPress hosting that takes care of all of the core features required to host your site, you’ll be able to grow without issue, keeping your customers and users happy.
As a reminder, we’ve built Studio to be the fastest and simplest way to build WordPress sites locally.
A new default local WordPress development environment
In less than one month, Studio has thousands of active users, and those users have created hundreds of demo sites. Plus, since Studio is open source, we’ve received and merged bug fixes and enhancements from community users over on GitHub.
It has been so exciting to see the WordPress community embrace a better local development setup with Studio:
Last week I streamed creating a To-do app with the Interactivity API and I tried Studio by @wordpressdotcom.
Not only was it rock solid, but it has this REALLY COOL feature to host your local site.
Wow! Local WordPress development 2.0 – install, work, and go straight into Visual Studio if you need to. Mac for now, but a Windows version is on its way. PS Studio is open source, it can be forked. https://t.co/k5jaklVHIx
Of course, we knew that a Windows version of Studio was also needed, as over 25% of WordPress developers develop on a Windows machine. We worked on a Windows version alongside the Mac version, but the Windows version required us to solve some additional challenges before making it widely available.
Plus, developers started requesting it immediately:
Note: If you use an early version of Studio for Windows (downloaded before May 29, 2024), please follow the steps above to install the latest version to ensure you receive updates when available.
Just like in our Mac version of Studio, Studio for Windows allows you to access WP Admin, the Site Editor, global styles, and patterns, all with just one click—and without needing to remember and enter a username or password. You can also easily open your site code in File Explorer, PhpStorm, VS Code, or your terminal for easy editing and shipping.
You can also effortlessly create demo sites on the Windows version of Studio so you can share your local work with your clients, teams, and colleagues.
Development on Studio is fast and quick thanks to our use of WordPress Playground helping us run the app behind the scenes.
Ready to get building?
Download Studio for Windows today to start creating and running WordPress sites directly on your local Windows machine.
Welcome to another episode of the WordPress Briefing! In this episode, your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, delves into the incredible resources available to help you broaden your WordPress expertise. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to deepen your skillset, these tools and tutorials offer something for everyone. Join us as we explore how Learn WordPress can be your guide on the journey to mastering WordPress, providing invaluable support and community connections along the way.
[00:00:10] Josepha: 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!
[00:00:28] (Intro Music)
[00:00:40] Josepha: My friends, I don’t know about where you live, but where I live, it’s graduation season. Students all across the region are either gearing down for a little bit of a brain break or gearing up for the next big adventure in their lives. And as I watch these students discover the next phases in their lives, whether it looks good or bad, whether it feels fearful or faithful, I can’t help but think back to my last big change.
[00:01:07] Josepha: The one that brought me here to WordPress. I was working in insurance at the time and investing in a side hustle. And as is often the case with side hustles, discovered that knowing something about marketing myself was going to be key. Now, this next bit, I know that a lot of you will understand immediately. After that realization, I entered a period in my life where I was learning how to invest in my hoped-for side hustle so that I could realize my hoped-for dreams while also having to succeed at the job that I was using to pay my bills.
By some singular coincidence, I wound up being introduced to the WordPress project, where I found not only the tools it turned out I needed but also people who were willing to help me learn them. For me, during that time, the cost to get access to both the tool and that support was basically zero. Like the whole cost to me was get those WordPress people together in a room to talk about WordPress for an hour.
[00:02:04] Josepha: And that’s something that I always want to do anyway. I always want to get people together. And if what we’re talking about is WordPress, and that is what I need to learn about, then so be it. I realize that there is a little bit of privilege in that story and a whole lot of persistence. It’s not like I discovered it, and overnight, everything worked out well, and perfectly, and correctly.
However, all of the struggles to get what I got accomplished done aside. One of the things that I love the most about how the WordPress project has evolved over time is that we took that already low-cost, low-barrier concept and did everything in our power to take that low-cost, low-barrier and make it available to as many people as possible in as many points in their journey as possible.
So, if you’re at the start of your career or thinking about a bit of a career change, I have some resources for you. Like, stick around. But before we get to the resources, I want to make sure that you hear this. Learning WordPress things, whether that’s the software itself, or how to run a business supported by WordPress, or how to support other businesses by building them WordPress stuff, learning these skills now is an investment in who you want to be.
[00:03:20] Josepha: It’s placing a bet that’s grounded in what you think you can bring to the world before anyone else might have figured out it’s what they need in their lives. And when you do that, in WordPress, you’re accessing and hopefully one day contributing to an equitable framework that doesn’t require you to understand it in order for you to benefit from it.
You can do hard things, and hopefully, these resources make those hard things a little easier. I’m going to take us through a whirlwind wayfinding list. I’ll generally be focused on time required and then kind of like necessary actions or context that would be useful for you to know. But remember that your mileage may vary.
[00:04:01] Josepha: If something sounds close but not perfect, I encourage you to give it a try anyway. The worst that happens is you try something different next time. Or, in the best-case scenario, you create something that other folks also have been missing. There was something that was close for them but not perfect either, and maybe you found the thing that’s perfect for them.
So, here is my whirlwind wayfinding list. Let’s go. Only have one hour a week and prefer a little company in your learning? Check out a meetup event near you. You can find those listed in your dashboard or on events.WordPress.org, but frequently, they happen during the week, after work hours, sometimes they happen on the weekend, they happen like in libraries or coffee shops.
So, there are a lot of different ways that these events come together, and surely, there will be something that is the sort of low-key event that you want. But if not, you can always reach out to your local chapter and see how you can get involved with that, how you can help them create a new meetup event.
[00:05:02] Josepha: The next option, if you only have an hour a week, but you actually don’t want company but still use some external support, I would check out one of our online workshops. There are cohorts for each workshop, and they’re run by facilitators so that you can learn and socialize from the comfort and safety of your own space, or if you really are super strapped for time, that can help with like not having to commute anywhere. Next up on our list, feel like you could average an hour a week, but honestly, would prefer it to be in one big chunk? Check out a WordCamp near you.
Those are a little bit like the meetups but quite a bit bigger and a lot more content, a lot more learning available, and gets you into a different kind of group of people in your local area. Those happen about once a year per city or region, but if there’s not one within a comfortable traveling distance for you, it might be a good chance for you to do a mini business trip, or if you’re doing it as current career development, see if your boss, or your boss self, if you are your own boss, has a continuing education budget available for you.
[00:06:08] Josepha: Have 30 minutes or so a week and don’t need any external motivation? On the one hand, I am a little jealous. I sometimes need my own external motivation. But, if that’s not you, if you can just self-drive forever, then courses over on learn.WordPress.org are just about your speed. We even have a series of learning pathways in development that curate all the courses you need to achieve particular milestones.
You can also help to create those. If you have been all the way through your learning journey and you’re, like, the most WordPressy WordPresser we’ve ever seen, and you just want to make sure that other people have the same opportunities you’ve had, that’s an excellent opportunity to show up and make sure that the knowledge is still available, still free, still can be accessed.
And finally, if you have unpredictable time and also still comfortable being completely self-driven, We have in the WordPress ecosystem countless videos, blogs, tutorials, and a ton of content creators that are behind them that specialize in teaching WordPress basics but also leveling up existing knowledge. And if your type of existing knowledge is in the, like, gathering the network to succeed, sort of area. We even have podcasts and blogs that are dedicated to the more businessy side of WordPress, how to make this function in the WordPress ecosystem.
[00:07:32] Josepha: As always, I’ll have links for everything in the show notes—just myriad links because this isn’t even all that we need to share with you today. And I’m going to say this last thing one more time because I really, really mean it like a whole, whole lot. I know it’s hard, bordering on impossible sometimes, to carve out time to learn new things. But when you’re ready to invest in yourself, I’m pretty sure that these resources will be here to support your hoped-for dreams.
[00:07:58] (Music interlude)
[00:08:05] Josepha: And that brings us now to our small list of big things. First up is speaking of learning, speaking of investing in your future. WordCamp Europe has a youth and teen workshop going on. The registration for that is still open. It is open for students aged 10 to 16. It’s gonna be a hands-on workshop. They’ll get to build their own website with WordPress and then explore some cutting-edge technology from VR to AI and learn essential internet safety skills. We’re going to be running that on June 13th. It will be in both English and Italian. I will leave a link to the registration in the show notes.
And the next thing on our list is pretty much related. It’s kind of related. At WordCamp US this year, we have a Showcase Day. Now, this is new to WordCamp US, and it’s all about pushing the boundaries of what WordPress can do. It will feature presentations, demos, and technical workshops for all kinds of projects, from high-profile, large-scale builds with innovative integrations to more niche creative implementations that still have a big impact. Submissions are now open for it. If you are working on something that is really cool and uses WordPress and want to show it off to the WordPress community, wander over there, submit your project; let’s take a look at it and see if we can get it into that showcase lineup, but if you are looking for inspiration about what WordPress can do, if you’re still figuring out how this can work the best for you, that’s going to be a great opportunity to look at some unusual implementations so that you can get an idea for how big this thing can get.
[00:09:43] Josepha: And just some tactical things. The next two things on my small of big things are two tactical items. One is that WordPress 6.6 is on the move; as always, we have Beta 1 scheduled pretty soon here. So, dig into our priority features. I will leave a link to the roadmap for WordPress 6.6. We’re targeting, if I recall correctly, middle of July for that release. And so it’s coming up faster than you think. And we would absolutely love for you to come in, test the Beta, tell us what’s broken so that we can fix it before it gets out. We can’t fix the things if you don’t tell us they’re broken.
[00:10:17] Josepha: And then the final thing on our small list of big things is that speaking of not being able to fix things that we don’t know are broken. So, we use meetup.com to manage all of our meetup series. Well, most of our meetup series anyway, but they are planning to invest in some product improvements, and they have asked for feedback from the WordPress community. Historically, we are one of the largest, most active communities on their platform. And so, if you could fill out the feedback form, if you’ve been to a meetup, or if you tried to find a meetup using meetup.com and did not succeed, that’s probably also relevant information. I’ll have a link to that here as well. It will go directly to their product team. And hopefully we’ll see some product improvements for the WordPress community in the future.
[00:11:01] Josepha: And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Don’t forget to follow us, follow me on your favorite podcast app, or subscribe directly on WordPress.org/news. You’ll get a friendly reminder whenever there’s a new episode, and if you liked what you heard today, share it with a fellow WordPresser. Or, if you had questions about what you heard, you can share those with me at WPBriefing@WordPress.org. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Thanks again, and I’ll see you in a couple of weeks.
From List View to keyboard shortcuts to the powerful Command Palette, the WordPress Block Editor is loaded with time-saving tricks that will streamline your workflows and ensure that you’re operating at peak efficiency. In this Build and Beyond video, Jamie Marsland shows us his five favorite WordPress Block Editor time savers.
An “anchor” link is a link that takes readers to a specific spot on the same page (rather than taking them to a new page altogether). It’s like a shortcut. In most cases, clicking that link brings readers to the desired place with an abrupt jump. In today’s Build and Beyond video, Jamie Marsland shows you how to make that transition a smooth scroll instead of a jump, making for a more pleasant reading and browsing experience.
Today, we’re continuing the streak with our latest feature: scheduled updates for plugins.
Say goodbye to the hassle of manual updates because streamlined plugin management tools are here and designed to elevate your site’s reliability and performance.
Plugin updates on your terms
With our newly launched scheduled updates, you can set the exact time and day for updates to occur, ensuring they happen when it’s most convenient for you and your clients. Best of all, this feature is free to use on our Creator and Entrepreneur plans. We won’t name names, but update scheduling is often a paid add-on at other hosts.
At the selected time, our system automatically checks for available updates for the plugins included in your schedule. If updates are available, the system initiates the process, starting with a health check to ensure your site’s stability. Each plugin is updated individually, with another health check performed after each update to verify everything is functioning as expected.
Should a health check fail, our system will automatically roll back the update and restore the previous version. In the rare event that a rollback is unsuccessful, our dedicated Happiness Engineers are standing by to manually restore your site and assist you further.
To stay on top of what’s running in the background, you can opt to receive an email notification after each scheduled update summarizing the plugins that were updated as well as any update or health check failures. (These emails aren’t sent if no updates are found.) Additionally, you can easily monitor the results of the most recent schedule run on the Scheduled Updates screen under Plugins → Scheduled Updates.
Let’s say you run an ecommerce store on WordPress.com. Your site relies on key plugins for inventory management and payment processing. In the past, updating plugins during business hours led to downtime and lost sales. With scheduled updates, you can now plan updates for off-peak hours, when you’re at home restfully sleeping, ensuring essential functionality remains intact during busy periods while keeping your site secure and up-to-date. Scheduling updates for your payment processing plugin to occur every Sunday at 2:00 AM will greatly minimize shoppers’ disruptions.
Why our scheduled updates are better
No additional charge: Scheduled updates are included with our Creator and Entrepreneur plans at no extra cost.
Multiple schedules: Create separate schedules for different plugins, offering greater flexibility and control compared to competitors.
Specific scheduling: Schedule updates at a specific hour for precise timing control.
Customizable health check paths: Specify custom paths for health checks and testing on a per-site basis, providing unparalleled flexibility.
Granular schedule pausing: Pause individual update schedules for targeted control, a feature not offered by other hosts.
Detailed logging: Comprehensive logging of update activities, including successes, failures, and rollbacks, ensures transparency and accountability.
Faster setup: Our setup process is lightning-fast, with no need for extra information collection or onboarding.
How to get started
Creating a schedule for plugin updates is fast and convenient:
Install your desired plugins on a Creator or Entrepreneur site. (Plugins included in our plan offerings or purchased through the WordPress.com Marketplace are kept up-to-date by WordPress.com and do not need to be scheduled.)
It may be hard to believe, but we’re nearly halfway through 2024, which means it’s not too early to start thinking ahead to next year. In this Build and Beyond video, Jamie Marsland speaks with Nick Diego, a Developer Relations Advocate and Core Contributor at WordPress.org, about ensuring you’re prepared for the exciting developments in store for WordPress in 2025.
Ready to get going? Click below to embark on your free trial today:
The WordPress.com team is always working on new design ideas to bring your website to life. Check out the latest themes in our library, including great options for bloggers, visual designers, and art aficionados.
Fewer is perfect for showcasing portfolios and blogs. With a clean, minimalist design, it offers excellent typography and style variations that make it easy to present your work or business. Fewer is highly versatile, offering a range of customizable options that allow you to tailor your site to your exact needs.
Ron is a theme that’s laser-focused on delivering an exceptional reading experience. It’s set apart by its offset post layout and sticky navigation. We’ve also intentionally omitted a header, allowing readers to dive straight into the content without distractions.
Texty isn’t just another blog theme, it’s a celebration of pure, unadulterated storytelling. This theme dances to its own beat by relying entirely on post excerpts on the homepage to captivate and intrigue. A remix of the beloved Issue theme, Texty can also bring a burst of color to your blogging with its vibrant variations in blue, maroon, burgundy, and neon green. Whether you’re sharing tales of adventure, pouring out your thoughts, or spinning poetry, this theme provides the perfect backdrop for your journey. Let your creativity run wild and let your words shine, because with Texty, your stories are the stars of the show.
Fontaine is a dynamic portfolio and personal profile theme that celebrates minimalist design and Brutalist aesthetics. Created especially with visual designers in mind, Fontaine gracefully steps back, allowing your work to shine and captivate your audience. With a strikingly simple yet dynamically elegant design, Fontaine’s dramatic font scale and transparent header (check out the demo to see this in action!) blend seamlessly to create compelling contrasts and modern sophistication. At its heart, Fontaine invites you to showcase your work and share your story with confidence.
Inspired by the iconic art movement, Surrealist merges clarity with a touch of whimsy, capturing the essence of Surrealism in every pixel. In our font pairing of PT Sans with Kame, we’ve set the tone for an immersive, delight-inducing experience.
As you navigate the front page, you’ll encounter the statement-making site title, inviting you to explore further into the quirky atmosphere of Surrealist. With distinctive design treatments and blocks that spark the imagination, Surrealist invites you to unleash your creativity and embark on a journey of self-expression.
To install any of the above themes, click the name of the theme you like, which brings you right to the installation page. Then click the “Activate this design” button. You can also click “Open live demo,” which brings up a clickable, scrollable version of the theme for you to preview.
Premium themes are available to use at no extra charge for customers on the Explorer plan or above. Partner themes are third-party products that can be purchased for $99/year each on the Creator plan and above.
You can explore all of our themes by navigating to the “Themes” page, which is found under “Appearance” in the left-side menu of your WordPress.com dashboard. Or you can click below:
There’s a new initiative in the WordPress community: the WordPress Media Corps. In today’s episode of the WordPress Briefing, you’ll find out how it came to be, first as a nugget of an idea during the pandemic and now as an active experiment. Learn how this shift in focus values the ongoing impact, and often invisible effort, of independent WordPress media—and seeks to help them more easily deliver engaging, high-quality WordPress content to their audiences.
[00:00:00] Josepha: 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!
[00:00:28] (Intro Music)
[00:00:39] Josepha: If you’ve been keeping an eye on the WordPress marketing space for the past few months, today’s topic will be no surprise to you. Today, we’re talking about the WordPress Media Corps. It’s a bit of a controversial topic; there’s no point denying that, so today, I want to take a little journey through its history.
The WordPress Media Corps is an idea that goes back probably four, maybe five years ago. I don’t know what year it is—four years, five, four, or five years ago. It was the height of our COVID isolation. So I was spending a lot of time with our WordPress media folks, people who hosted podcasts, who gathered weekly roundups, and who were writing these nuanced and thoughtful newsletters.
[00:01:19] Josepha: And during the prep phases for these, I was witnessing all the work that goes into them, researching questions and topics, marketing both before and after any appearance, and consistently engaging with the audiences they had grown over time. Over the course of the year, I wound up in two or three different conversations with these hosts about how this does or doesn’t fit in the WordPress project as a way to contribute.
Now, invisible contributions are a persistent concern for any open source project and is one of the problems I am often most desperate to solve. As with so many long-standing problems, if the solution were easy, it wouldn’t still be a problem. And that’s the case here as well. I’ve got a quick side note on why this is a hard problem to solve at the end of the episode. It’s relevant to the overall discussion, but not if you’re only here to learn about how we arrived at the Media Corps. So, choose your own adventure!
[00:02:16] Josepha: So, during one of those discussions, Allie Nimmons reminded me that we have always relied on third-party supporters to share information about WordPress. It was a smaller group than we have now, much less variety in the format, but they didn’t have contribution acknowledgments either, right?
And she was right. They were included in something called the WP Planet. And I remember that I said to her what I wouldn’t give to be able to acknowledge the value that WordPress media folks bring to our ecosystem. These folks who have more flexibility than us can be a little more, more nimble who are canonical power users of WordPress, sharing not only what they are excited about now and in the near future but also the things that they had to learn in order to get the most out of the features and the software.
[00:03:07] Josepha: Like that’s practically a gold standard of the people that we want to have talking about us. And, for folks who’ve worked with Allie, you probably can predict what’s next. You know she’s not afraid to call it like she sees it, and she called me on my excessive dreaming. She asked me what actually was stopping me from getting that done. I don’t recall if I had an answer for her at the time. I, I probably didn’t, but ultimately, I think the answer was, most likely, that I was afraid to try.
So you might be asking yourself, what has changed my mind since then? What has changed since 2020, when I was maybe too scared to get this done? Why does now feel like the right time compared to when I was first thinking through it? Well, for starters, when we look at then, we look at the context of then; it was my second year leading us. It was 2020, the year of COVID. And I was desperately trying to roll out a disaster recovery plan, incomplete though it was.
[00:04:06] Josepha: I wasn’t sure how much more disruption we as a community could stand, so I didn’t want to take any more risks than I had to. Which brings us to today. One of my big obstacles to tackle this year is our plateauing growth. I said it right there in my big-picture post for 2024. Re-engaging those gold standard users who are talking about us while making it clear that their contributions add to the success of the project seems like a high-impact opportunity to me.
We’ve kicked off our initial experiment for the Media Corps. As with many high-impact projects, there’s also a high potential for risk, so I’m trying to get a clear indication of success as early as possible. Because of that, the experiment is time-limited and has pretty strict guidelines up front. It’s also being paired with a pause on the current work with the marketing team, just so that we can focus as much attention to get that signal sooner rather than later.
[00:05:01] Josepha: Not everyone agrees with this plan, which is to be expected. There are so many seasoned marketing professionals in WordPress, myself included, and I mean, our software is a primary tool in so many marketing tool belts. It probably would be odd if we didn’t have any marketers around. So there you have it, a brief explanation of how we got to today’s Media Corps experiment.
Quick side note on why it’s a hard problem is that a good first step to acknowledging invisible work is removing the need for human recognition of the work. I’ve worked with teams, guided them since I got here to define contributions as granularly as possible so that we can find ways to attach automated triggers to them so that you don’t have to do a ton of invisible things for someone to notice them and give you props for them. Obviously, the more automation, the more dehumanization, and of course, the work of breaking things into tiny chunks feels like micromanagement; it feels like value assessment.
[00:06:01] Josepha: It also often felt like kind of a toxic tallying of who was doing what where. None of that is what any of us wanted when I started that work, and it’s certainly not what I want now. But because it is so often misread as a way to, like, separate out good contributions from bad, not all teams have embarked on that journey with me. And for those who have done that with me, not all of them have actually implemented, kind of that definition of the individual types of contributions you can make so that we can do that kind of automated acknowledgment of the work.
[00:06:40] (Music interlude)
[00:06:47] Josepha: Which brings us now to our small list of big things.
First on our list is WordPress 6.6. It’s our next major release. There are still a few volunteer roles that are available. I think documentation lead is one. So, if you are the sort of folk who just loves to write the docs, it’s been a while since you have done that for the WordPress project, with the WordPress project. That’s a great opportunity for you to kind of dip your toe in and see what’s going on in the world of WordPress.
[00:07:15] Josepha: The second thing on our list is a minor release that actually came out last week. It’s a maintenance release, but it’s one of those where it’s really important to get upgraded and make sure that you have the latest security and maintenance releases on all of your sites that are in production.
The third thing on our list is about Openverse. Openverse is now offering a new way to explore our collection. We’ve got over 800 million images and audio files in there. And so, the collection search makes it easier to view works that are belonging to an individual tag, creator, or source. It just kind of helps you filter it out a little bit more so that there are more decisions than there are options available in there.
And the fourth thing on my list is that the WordCamp Europe 2024 schedule has been released. We’ll be talking a bit more about this event as we get closer and closer to it. We are racing our way. It’s like a month away as we go. So take a look, plan your activities, and come and check out our community.
[00:08:16] Josepha: And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Don’t forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app or subscribe directly on WordPress.org/news. You’ll get a friendly reminder whenever there’s a new episode. If you liked what you heard today, share it with a fellow WordPresser. Or, if you had questions about what you heard, you can share those with me at WPBriefing@WordPress.org. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Thanks for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks.
