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";s:7:"attribs";a:1:{s:0:"";a:1:{s:7:"version";s:3:"2.0";}}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:1:{s:0:"";a:1:{s:7:"channel";a:1:{i:0;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:61:"
	
	
	
	




















































";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:1:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:16:"WordPress Planet";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"http://planet.wordpress.org/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:8:"language";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:2:"en";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:47:"WordPress Planet - http://planet.wordpress.org/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"item";a:50:{i:0;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:56:"WordPress.org blog: Highlights from WordCamp Europe 2024";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:35:"https://wordpress.org/news/?p=17374";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:72:"https://wordpress.org/news/2024/06/highlights-from-wordcamp-europe-2024/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:8325:"<p><em>2,584 attendees participated in the 12th annual WordPress event in Europe, held at the </em><a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/2024/venue/"><em>Lingotto Conference and Exhibition Centre</em></a><em> in Torino, Italy.</em></p>



<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/wordpress.org/news/files/2024/06/wceu-torino-night.jpg?resize=1024%2C683&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-17376" />The <a href="https://www.museocinema.it/en/museum-and-ma-prolo-foundation/mole-antonelliana">Mole Antonelliana</a> in Torino, illuminated to celebrate WordCamp Europe 2024



<p>From June 13-15, 2024, WordPress enthusiasts from across the globe gathered in Torino to explore and celebrate the world’s most popular web platform. A dedicated team of 250 volunteers, led by WordCamp veterans Wendie Huis in ‘t Veld, Juan Hernando, and Takis Bouyouris, organized and produced the event.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Impact in Action on Contributor Day</h2>



<p><a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/2024/contributor-day/">Contributor Day</a> brought together 726 contributors working across 25 teams to support the WordPress project. Their accomplishments included translating 79,059 “strings” for the WordPress user interface across 29 languages, updating documentation for the forthcoming 6.6 release, onboarding new contributors for the support forums and testing teams, and identifying ways to improve plugin security.</p>



<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/wordpress.org/news/files/2024/06/Contributors-at-work.jpeg?resize=1024%2C683&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-17377" />Contributors gathering during WCEU 2024 Contributor Day



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Sustainable open source is the future</h2>



<img width="1024" height="576" src="https://i0.wp.com/wordpress.org/news/files/2024/06/day1-keynote.jpg?resize=1024%2C576&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-17378" />Keynote presenters, Joost de Valk and Juliette Reinders Folmer



<p>Joost de Valk and Juliette Reinders Folmer delivered the event&#8217;s opening keynote address on <a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/2024/session/sustainable-open-source-is-the-future/">sustaining open source software projects</a>. Their keynote covered funding open source, contributing beyond code, and convincing buyers in commercial enterprises that open source is a viable alternative to proprietary platforms.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Two days of engaging sessions</h2>



<p>Friday and Saturday saw 60 presentations and workshops held across <a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/2024/schedule/">three tracks</a>. Topics included WordPress development, accessibility, design, business, community, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity.</p>



<div class="wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-core-columns-is-layout-1 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex">
<div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow">
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/wordpress.org/news/files/2024/06/session-photo2-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C683&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-17381" />Speed Build Session
</div>



<div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow">
<img width="1024" height="783" src="https://i0.wp.com/wordpress.org/news/files/2024/06/session-photo1-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C783&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-17382" />Connect Series
</div>
</div>



<p>A youth workshop gave younger attendees hands-on opportunities to build WordPress websites, explore new tech, and learn about internet safety. Meanwhile, a wellness-themed track included yoga lessons and walking tours of Torino, encouraging attendees to step away from their screens and explore the beauty of this year’s host city.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Mid-year project update</h2>



<p>WordPress Cofounder Matt Mullenweg shared a <a href="https://youtu.be/ELW4Jdvujbc">mid-year project update on WordPress</a> and concluded by fielding questions from the audience on various topics, from Gutenberg Phases to the WordPress Playground, and acknowledging a request to escalate a bug fix.</p>



<p>Matt’s presentation highlighted the success of the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community/2024/06/15/wordpress-contributor-mentorship-program-q4-2024-call-for-interest/">contributor mentorship program</a> and WCEU Contributor Day, demoed Translate Live, and shared an update on the <a href="https://wordpress.org/data-liberation/">Data Liberation</a> initiative.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Matt also covered the latest innovations with <a href="https://wordpress.org/playground/">WordPress Playground</a>, highlighted <a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2024/04/how-wordpress-is-creating-a-faster-web/">performance gains</a>, and previewed features anticipated in future releases, like rollbacks for auto-updates and zoomed-out view.</p>



<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/wordpress.org/news/files/2024/06/matt.jpg?resize=1024%2C683&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-17383" />WordPress Cofounder Matt Mullenweg



<p>Acknowledging an exciting new trend in the WordPress community, Mullenweg discussed “speed build challenges,” where onlookers watch WordPress experts build websites in real-time, showcasing tips, shortcuts, and best practices. One such event took place during a WCEU session, and in the Q&amp;A portion of Matt’s presentation, he was invited to participate in one–an invitation he accepted!</p>



<p>Matt reflected on WordPress reaching its 21st anniversary since he and Mike Little launched the first version in 2003. He <a href="https://ma.tt/2024/05/wp21/">shared 11 things</a> to ensure that WordPress remains sustainable for decades to come:</p>



<ol class="wp-block-list">
<li>Simple things should be easy and intuitive, and complex things possible.</li>



<li>Blogs and dynamic sites are better.</li>



<li>Documentation should be wiki-easy to edit.</li>



<li>Forums should be front and center.</li>



<li>Plugins and themes with community infrastructure.</li>



<li>Great theme previews and diverse aesthetics.</li>



<li>We can’t over-index for guidelines and requirements.</li>



<li>Feedback loops are so important.</li>



<li>Core should be opinionated and quirky.</li>



<li>If you make WordPress, use WordPress.</li>



<li>Stay close to our end-users</li>
</ol>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">

</div><a href="https://youtu.be/ELW4Jdvujbc">Watch Matt’s project update</a> on the WordPress YouTube channel



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Closing remarks</h2>



<p>In their closing remarks, the event organizers expressed gratitude for the endorsements of the <a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/2024/wordcamp-europe-receives-patronage-from-the-european-parliament/">European Parliament</a>, the city of Torino, and Turismo Torino, the regional tourism board. The volunteer team was celebrated for their hard work in producing the event.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Closing out a robust three days of programming, the organizing team announced that <a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/2025/">WordCamp Europe 2025</a> would be held in Basel, Switzerland, from June 5 to 7, 2025. The announcement was met with hearty applause and plans to meet in a year’s time.</p>



<img width="1024" height="682" src="https://i0.wp.com/wordpress.org/news/files/2024/06/group.jpg?resize=1024%2C682&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-17384" />Attendees gather for a photo at WCEU in Torino



<h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Stay connected</strong></h2>



<p><a href="https://events.wordpress.org/">WordPress events</a> enable technologists, open source enthusiasts, and community members around the globe to meet, share ideas, and collaborate to drive WordPress and the open web forward.</p>



<p>Mark your calendars for <a href="https://us.wordcamp.org/2024/">WordCamp US</a> (Portland, Oregon, United States), <a href="https://wordpress.org/state-of-the-word/">State of the Word</a> (Tokyo), and next year’s <a href="https://asia.wordcamp.org/2025/">WordCamp Asia</a> in Manila!</p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity" />



<p>This post is a collaboration between the contributors who produce content for <a href="https://wordpress.org/news">wordpress.org/news</a> and the WordCamp Europe Communications team.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Sat, 15 Jun 2024 21:29:42 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:11:"Dan Soschin";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:1;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:81:"Do The Woo Community: Learn About All the Shows on the Do the Woo Podcast Channel";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=84156";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:80:"https://dothewoo.io/learn-about-all-the-shows-on-the-do-the-woo-podcast-channel/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:99:"With our launch we now have 12 shows on the Do the Woo podcast channel. Learn about all them today.";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Sat, 15 Jun 2024 08:10:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:2;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:68:"Do The Woo Community: Do the Woo Podcast Channel 4.0 Official Launch";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=84105";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:67:"https://dothewoo.io/do-the-woo-podcast-channel-4-0-official-launch/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:55:"How does one even summarize our launch in this excerpt?";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 14 Jun 2024 07:40:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:3;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:71:"Do The Woo Community: Thinking About Our Launch on WCEU Contributor Day";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=84098";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:70:"https://dothewoo.io/thinking-about-our-launch-on-wceu-contributor-day/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:112:"As I ponder this launch, there is a lot of crossover between it and the Contributor Day here at WordCamp Europe.";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 13 Jun 2024 07:00:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:4;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:69:"Do The Woo Community: A Pre-Launch Chat with Jay Walsh at WooCommerce";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=84147";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:68:"https://dothewoo.io/a-pre-launch-chat-with-jay-walsh-at-woocommerce/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:118:"Jay Walsh, Public Relations at WooCommerce and BobWP have a conversation about what Do the Woo means to the community.";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 12 Jun 2024 08:02:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:5;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:174:"HeroPress: Providing great value to WordPress without coding – Denna text finns även på svenska nedan – Это эссе также есть на русском ниже";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:56:"https://heropress.com/?post_type=heropress-essays&p=6848";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:172:"https://heropress.com/essays/providing-great-value-to-wordpress-without-coding/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=providing-great-value-to-wordpress-without-coding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:22927:"<img width="1024" height="512" src="https://heropress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/061124-min.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Pull Quote: I want the WordPress community to become even stronger and more sustainable." />
Here is Tobi reading his own story aloud.





<p><a href="https://heropress.com/feed/#svenska">Denna text finns även på svenska nedan.</a></p>



<p><a href="https://heropress.com/feed/#russian">Это эссе также есть на русском ниже.</a></p>



<p>There are a lot of ways to contribute to WordPress, many of which require no coding skills. Here, I’d like to share my journey into WordPress and what this project means to me.</p>



<p><em>Who am I?</em></p>



<p>I’m Swedish but have been living abroad for the last 23 years. I like technology in general, IT and Telecom in particular. I love writing and do it regularly in three languages: English, Swedish, and Russian.</p>



<p>Professionally, I’ve gained lot of experience over the last 30 years as Project Manager, Product Manager, and Change Manager, mainly in Telecom and IT. During this time, I have lived and worked in ten countries. I’ve been leading small and large teams, working both on-site and remotely, in positions with both system vendors and operator companies (startups, as well as large, mature companies). I’ve been doing both traditional “waterfall” projects, and leading Scrum teams.</p>



<p>In parallel, between projects, I’ve also worked many years as a professional linguist (English, Swedish, and Russian).</p>



<p><em>Discovering WordPress</em></p>



<p>I started blogging in Russian on a different platform in early 2005. A couple of years later I picked up writing poetry and short form fiction in Swedish, publishing it initially on a specialized Swedish resource.</p>



<p>In 2011, I decided to gather most of my writing in one place. I got me a domain, installed WordPress and built my own three-language web site. I still remember how magically easy it was to migrate my Russian blog from LiveJournal to WordPress already in 2011.</p>



<p><em>Initial contribution to the WordPress eco-system</em></p>



<p>For use on my own sites, I improved the Swedish and Russian translations of the theme I was using and shared these translations with the theme developer for other people to use.</p>



<p><em>Contributing more actively</em></p>



<p>Using WordPress was fun. Now and then I help friends and family setting up simple sites. I was gradually becoming more interested in participating in the making of WordPress as a way of giving back to the community. I happened to have some spare time available when WordPress 4.7 was being prepared. Being a professional translator, I quickly suggested several hundreds of strings for the Swedish translation and was quickly promoted to General Translation Editor for Swedish. Soon I was expanding and mentoring the Swedish translation team.</p>



<p><em>But there was more to it</em></p>



<p>As an experienced Project Manager and Change Manager, I strived to understand the fuller picture better, and helped fellow GTEs for other language teams to discuss and solve problems they encountered. Here, too, I was soon promoted to team representative and global mentor.</p>



<p>Since then, I’ve been contributing in several ways: co-organizer of a WordCamp in Stockholm, co-organizer of several translation events, Support contributor (especially in the Swedish support forum), as speaker, and more.</p>



<p>Recently, I’ve participated actively in discussions around improving “discoverability” of contributing to WordPress and creating smoother on-boarding for new contributors. I also participated as mentor in the pilot cohorts of our new mentoring program for new contributors. This kind of building structure and improving processes come naturally to me, because of my professional experience and my interests in general.</p>



<p>I want the WordPress community to become even stronger and more sustainable. There’s much more to be done, especially when it comes to building up strong local communities that can translate, train, popularize and support WordPress in many different languages and locations around the world.</p>



<p>I’d be enormously happy to contribute much more to these processes. A perfect solution would be to become a full-time sponsored contributor, where I’d be fully able to bring big value. It may go the other way, too: If I get hired for some intensive project, I may not have time and energy for WordPress, even if contributing here brings me happiness and fulfillment.</p>



<p>Tor-Björn (Tobi) Fjellner</p>


<div class="kb-row-layout-wrap kb-row-layout-id6848_4286a0-c6 alignnone kt-row-has-bg wp-block-kadence-rowlayout"><div class="kt-row-column-wrap kt-has-1-columns kt-row-layout-equal kt-tab-layout-inherit kt-mobile-layout-row kt-row-valign-top kb-theme-content-width">

<div class="wp-block-kadence-column kadence-column6848_c4c0da-d7"><div class="kt-inside-inner-col">
<p><strong>You can start contributing to WordPress today:</strong></p>



<p>There are more than 20 volunteer teams contributing to WordPress.</p>



<p>For instance, there are teams that:</p>



<ul>
<li>translate WordPress to more than 60 language versions</li>



<li>develop and maintain documentation (in several languages)</li>



<li>create trainings and self-study material (in several languages)</li>



<li>edit, subtitle, and publish video recordings of presentations</li>



<li>organize meetups and WordPress conferences</li>



<li>gather photos and other media files that are free to use on any site</li>



<li>… and much more</li>
</ul>



<p>Go to <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/contribute/">https://make.wordpress.org/contribute/</a> to find which team suits you the best.</p>



<p>You can also:</p>



<ul>
<li>See a list of the main teams at <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/">https://make.wordpress.org/</a></li>



<li>Register your personal forum account at <a href="https://login.wordpress.org/register?locale=en_US">https://login.wordpress.org/register?locale=en_US</a>&nbsp;</li>



<li>Search a WordPress event near you at <a href="https://events.wordpress.org/">https://events.wordpress.org/</a>&nbsp;</li>
</ul>
</div></div>

</div></div>


<p class="kt-adv-heading6848_c1e170-ec wp-block-kadence-advancedheading">Welcome!</p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity" />



<h1 id="svenska" class="kt-adv-heading6848_83d9c3-1c wp-block-kadence-advancedheading">Att tillföra stort värde till WordPress utan programmering</h1>



Här läser Tobi själv sin berättelse på svenska.





<p>Man kan bidra till WordPress på många sätt, och långt ifrån alla kräver kunskaper i programmering. Här vill jag berätta om hur jag hittade fram till WordPress och vad projektet betyder för mig personligen.</p>



<p><em>Vem är jag?</em></p>



<p>Jag är från Sverige men bor utomlands sedan 23 år. Jag gillar teknik i allmänhet, framför allt IT och telekom. Jag älskar att skriva och gör det regelbundet på tre olika språk: engelska, svenska och ryska.</p>



<p>Genom mina jobb har jag samlat på mig stor erfarenhet under de senaste 30 åren som projektledare, produktchef och change manager, främst inom telekom och IT. Sammanlagt har jag bott och arbetat i tio länder. Jag har lett både små och stora team, arbetat direkt på plats och på distans, för både systemleverantörer och telekomoperatörer (både nystartade och etablerade operatörer). Jag har både arbetat med traditionellt projektformat och lett Scrum-team.</p>



<p>Mellan projekten, har jag också arbetat många år som professionell översättare och redaktör (på engelska, svenska och ryska).</p>



<p><em>Hur jag upptäckte WordPress</em></p>



<p>Jag började blogga på ryska på en annan plattform i början av 2005. Ett par år senare började jag skriva poesi och korta skönlitterära texter på svenska, som jag i början publicerade på en specialiserad webbplats (poeter.se).</p>



<p>År 2011 bestämde jag mig för att samla det mesta av mitt skrivande på en plats. Jag skaffade en domän, installerade WordPress och byggde min egen trespråkiga webbplats. Jag minns fortfarande hur magiskt enkelt det var att migrera min ryska blogg från LiveJournal till WordPress redan år 2011.</p>



<p><em>Mitt första bidrag till WordPress ekosystem</em></p>



<p>Jag förbättrade de svenska och ryska översättningarna av temat jag använde för eget bruk och skickade dem även till temats utvecklare så att andra kunde ha nytta av dem.</p>



<p><em>Bidrar mer aktivt</em></p>



<p>Det var roligt att använda WordPress. Ibland hjälpte jag familj och vänner att skapa enkla webbplatser. Efterhand började jag intressera mig mer för att bidra till WordPress som ett sätt att ge tillbaka till communityn. Jag råkade ha tid över när WordPress 4.7 var på väg att lanseras. Med min erfarenhet som professionell översättare föreslog jag svenska översättningar för hundratals strängar och blev snabbt befordrad till svensk översättningsredaktör för WordPress (General Translation Editor). Kort därefter var jag sysselsatt med att hitta fler översättare och fungera som mentor för det svenska översättningsteamet.</p>



<p><em>Mer än så</em></p>



<p>Som erfaren projektledare och förändringsledare strävade jag efter att förstå helhetsbilden bättre och hjälpte även GTE:er med råd och stöd om de undrade över något. Även här blev jag snart befordrad till teamrepresentant och global mentor.</p>



<p>Sedan dess har jag bidragit på flera sätt: jag var med och organiserade en WordCamp-konferens i Stockholm, medorganisatör av flera översättningsevenemang, aktiv i supportforumen (särskilt det svenska supportforumet), talare på konferenser, med mera.</p>



<p>På senare tid deltar jag aktivt i diskussioner kring hur vi kan göra det enklare att ”upptäcka” möjligheter att bidra till WordPress och göra processen smidigare för nya volontärer. Jag deltog också som mentor i pilotomgångarna av vårt nya mentorprogram för nya bidragsgivare. Att strukturera verksamhet och förbättra processer är naturligt för mig, som en följd av min yrkeserfarenhet och intressen i allmänhet.</p>



<p>Min önskan är att WordPress-communityn ska bli ännu starkare och tåligare. Det går att göra mycket mer, i synnerhet när det gäller att bygga upp starka lokala communities som kan översätta, skapa utbildning, popularisera och stödja WordPress på många olika språk runt om i världen.</p>



<p>Jag vore enormt glad om jag får möjlighet att bidra mycket mer till dessa processer. En perfekt lösning skulle vara att bli en WordPress-volontär på heltid med sponsring från något företag i branschen. Jag kommer att kunna tillföra stort värde. Det kan gå åt andra hållet också: Om jag får anställning med något intensivt och krävande projekt utanför WordPress kanske jag inte kommer att hinna eller orka att bidra till WordPress, trots att det ger mig glädje och tillfredsställelse.</p>



<p>Tor-Björn (Tobi) Fjellner</p>


<div class="kb-row-layout-wrap kb-row-layout-id6848_182f9a-32 alignnone kt-row-has-bg wp-block-kadence-rowlayout"><div class="kt-row-column-wrap kt-has-1-columns kt-row-layout-equal kt-tab-layout-inherit kt-mobile-layout-row kt-row-valign-top kb-theme-content-width">

<div class="wp-block-kadence-column kadence-column6848_e5a438-c6"><div class="kt-inside-inner-col">
<p>Du kan börja bidra till WordPress idag:</p>



<p>Det finns över 20 volontärteam som bidrar till WordPress på olika sätt.</p>



<p>Till exempel finns det team som:</p>



<ul>
<li>översätter WordPress till fler än 60 språkversioner</li>



<li>utvecklar och underhåller dokumentation (på flera språk)</li>



<li>skapar utbildningar och självstudiematerial (på flera språk)</li>



<li>redigerar, undertexter och publicerar videoinspelningar av presentationer</li>



<li>organiserar träffar och WordPress-konferenser</li>



<li>samlar foton och andra mediafiler som är fria att använda på vilken webbplats som helst</li>



<li>och mycket mer</li>
</ul>



<p>Gå till https://make.wordpress.org/contribute/ för att hitta vilket team som passar dig bäst.</p>



<p>Du kan också:</p>



<ul>
<li>Se en lista över de viktigaste teamen på <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/">https://make.wordpress.org/</a></li>



<li>Registrera ditt personliga forumkonto på <a href="https://login.wordpress.org/register?locale=sv_SE">https://login.wordpress.org/register?locale=sv_SE</a></li>



<li>Söka efter ett WordPress-evenemang nära dig via https://events.wordpress.org/</li>
</ul>
</div></div>

</div></div>


<p class="kt-adv-heading6848_5a4fda-7d wp-block-kadence-advancedheading">Välkommen!</p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity" />



<h1 id="russian" class="kt-adv-heading6848_f180c3-95 wp-block-kadence-advancedheading"><strong>Как быть полезным для WordPress если ты не программист</strong></h1>



Тут Тоби сам читает свой рассказ.





<p>Есть ряд способов внести свой вклад в WordPress, и многие из них не требуют навыков программирования. Хочу поделиться своим путем в WordPress и тем, что этот проект значит для меня.</p>



<p><em>Кто я?</em></p>



<p>Я швед, но живу за границей последние 23 года. Мне нравится технологии в целом, а IT и телекоммуникации в частности. Я люблю писать и делаю это регулярно на трех языках: английском, шведском и русском.</p>



<p>За последние 30 лет я был менеджером проектов, менеджером по продуктам и менеджером по изменениям, главным образом в телекоммуникациях и IT. Жил и работал в десяти странах мира, в разных культурах. Я руководил малыми и большими командами, работал как на месте, так и удаленно. Работал и у поставщиков систем, и у операторских компаний (стартапы и крупные, зрелые компании). Я вел как проекты в традиционном стиле, так и руководил Scrum-командами. Как видите, у меня богатый и разносторонний опыт.</p>



<p>Кроме этого, между проектами, я также много лет работаю профессиональным переводчиком и редактором (на английском, шведском и русском). Языки моë особое увлечение.</p>



<p><em>Как я пришел в WordPress</em></p>



<p>Я начал вести блог на русском языке на другой платформе в начале 2005 года. Спустя пару лет я начал писать стихи и короткие рассказы на шведском. В начале я публиковал эти тексты нa специализированном сайте.</p>



<p>В 2011 году я решил собрать большую часть своих произведений в одном месте, и выбрал для этого WordPress и построил свой собственный трёхъязычный сайт. Я до сих пор помню, как неожиданно легко было перенести мой русский блог с ЖЖ на WordPress, уже в 2011 году.</p>



<p><em>Первый вклад в экосистему WordPress</em></p>



<p>Я исправил русский и шведский переводы моей темы, и отправил их разработчику той самой темы, чтобы и другие люди могли пользоваться ими.</p>



<p><em>Активное участие</em></p>



<p>WordPress увлëк меня по-настоящему. Время от времени я помогал друзьям и семье настраивать простые сайты. В благодарность за то, что мне дал WordPress, мне захотелось внести свой вклад в проект.&nbsp;</p>



<p>За месяц до выхода WordPress 4.7 у меня появилось немного свободного времени. Как профессиональный переводчик, я смог быстро предложить сотни строк для шведского перевода и тут же меня назначили общим редактором шведского перевода (GTE). После этого я начал расширять и наставлять шведскую переводческую команду.</p>



<p><em>Но это ещë не всë!</em></p>



<p>Как опытный Project Manager и Change Manager, я стремился лучше понять общую картину и помогал переводчикам на другие языки, когда у них возникали проблемы и вопросы. И вскоре я стал представителем команды и глобальным наставником.</p>



<p>С тех пор, я вносил вклад в развитие WordPress различными способами: как соорганизатор WordCamp в Стокгольме, как соорганизатор нескольких переводческих мероприятий, как активный участник команды поддержки (особенно в шведском форуме поддержки), выступал на конференциях, и многое другое.</p>



<p>В последнее время я активный член команды, которая популяризирует участие в развитие WordPress среди пользователей. Для новых участников проекта мы максимально облегчаем вход в проект. Я также был ментором в двух пилотных группах нашей новой программы по наставничеству. Оптимизация рабочих структур и процессов мне хорошо знакома по моей профессиональной деятельности, как Project Manager и Change Manager.</p>



<p>Я хочу, чтобы сообщество WordPress становилось крепче и устойчивее. Есть много работы, особенно в формировании сильных команд в разных странах, для перевода, обучения, популяризации и поддержки WordPress на языках всего мира.</p>



<p>Я буду рад внести гораздо больший вклад в эти процессы. Идеальным вариантом было бы стать полностью спонсируемым участником. Так я мог бы максимально приносить большую пользу. Когда занят другими проектами, не связанными с WordPress, не остаëтся ни времени, ни сил для WordPress, несмотря на то, что мое участие приносит мне радость и удовлетворение.</p>



<p>Тур-Бьëрн (Тоби) Фьелльнер</p>


<div class="kb-row-layout-wrap kb-row-layout-id6848_0880ac-95 alignnone kt-row-has-bg wp-block-kadence-rowlayout"><div class="kt-row-column-wrap kt-has-1-columns kt-row-layout-equal kt-tab-layout-inherit kt-mobile-layout-row kt-row-valign-top kb-theme-content-width">

<div class="wp-block-kadence-column kadence-column6848_b235cc-a4"><div class="kt-inside-inner-col">
<p>Вы можете начать участвовать в развитии WordPress уже сегодня:</p>



<p>Есть более 20 волонтерских команд, вносящих вклад в WordPress.</p>



<p>Например:</p>



<p>&#8211; переводят WordPress на более чем 60 языков</p>



<p>&#8211; разрабатывают и поддерживают документацию (на нескольких языках)</p>



<p>&#8211; создают учебные материалы и материалы для самостоятельного обучения (на нескольких языках)</p>



<p>&#8211; редактируют, создают субтитры и публикуют видеозаписи презентаций</p>



<p>&#8211; организуют встречи и конференции WordPress</p>



<p>&#8211; собирают фотографии и другие медиафайлы, которые можно свободно использовать на любом сайте</p>



<p>&#8211; и многое другое</p>



<p>На странице <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/contribute/">https://make.wordpress.org/contribute/</a> можете проверить, какая команда вам лучше подойдет.</p>



<p>Вы также можете:</p>



<p>&#8211; Посмотреть список основных команд на https://make.wordpress.org/</p>



<p>&#8211; Зарегистрировать свой личный аккаунт на форуме на <a href="https://login.wordpress.org/register?locale=ru_RU">https://login.wordpress.org/register?locale=ru_RU</a>&nbsp;</p>



<p>&#8211; Найти мероприятия WordPress рядом с вами на https://events.wordpress.org/</p>
</div></div>

</div></div>


<p class="kt-adv-heading6848_325732-c3 wp-block-kadence-advancedheading">Добро пожаловать!</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://heropress.com/essays/providing-great-value-to-wordpress-without-coding/">Providing great value to WordPress without coding &#8211; Denna text finns även på svenska nedan &#8211; Это эссе также есть на русском ниже</a> appeared first on <a href="https://heropress.com">HeroPress</a>.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 12 Jun 2024 05:30:59 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:19:"Tor-Björn Fjellner";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:6;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:40:"WordPress.org blog: WordPress 6.6 Beta 2";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:35:"https://wordpress.org/news/?p=17355";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:56:"https://wordpress.org/news/2024/06/wordpress-6-6-beta-2/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:7351:"<p><br />WordPress 6.6 Beta 2 is here! Please download and test it.</p>



<p id="block-79834dd4-c99a-477a-b722-091806a32976"><strong>This beta version of the WordPress software is under development. </strong>Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites—you risk unexpected results if you do.</p>



<p id="block-aa4b335e-b1a2-4904-a68c-c3e73e574386">Instead, test Beta 2 on a local site or a testing environment in any of these four ways:</p>



<table class="has-fixed-layout"><tbody><tr><th>Plugin</th><td>Install and activate the <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-beta-tester/">WordPress Beta Tester</a> plugin on a WordPress install. (Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream).</td></tr><tr><th>Direct Download</th><td>Download the <a href="https://wordpress.org/wordpress-6.6-beta2.zip">Beta 2 version (zip)</a> and install it on a WordPress website.</td></tr><tr><th>Command Line</th><td>Use this <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/cli/">WP-CLI</a> command:<br /><code>wp core update --version=6.6-beta2</code></td></tr><tr><th>WordPress Playground</th><td>Use a <a href="https://playground.wordpress.net/#{%20%22preferredVersions%22:%20{%20%22php%22:%20%228.0%22,%20%22wp%22:%20%22beta%22%20},%20%22features%22:%20{%20%22networking%22:%20true%20},%20%22steps%22:%20[%20{%20%22step%22:%20%22login%22,%20%22username%22:%20%22admin%22,%20%22password%22:%20%22password%22%20},%20{%20%22step%22:%20%22importFile%22,%20%22file%22:%20{%20%22resource%22:%20%22url%22,%20%22url%22:%20%22https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wpaccessibility/a11y-theme-unit-test/master/a11y-theme-unit-test-data.xml%22%20}%20},%20{%20%22step%22:%20%22importFile%22,%20%22file%22:%20{%20%22resource%22:%20%22url%22,%20%22url%22:%20%22https://raw.githubusercontent.com/WordPress/theme-test-data/master/themeunittestdata.wordpress.xml%22%20}%20},%20{%20%22step%22:%20%22installPlugin%22,%20%22pluginZipFile%22:%20{%20%22resource%22:%20%22wordpress.org/plugins%22,%20%22slug%22:%20%22query-monitor%22%20},%20%22options%22:%20{%20%22activate%22:%20false%20},%20%22progress%22:%20{%20%22weight%22:%202%20}%20},%20{%20%22step%22:%20%22installPlugin%22,%20%22pluginZipFile%22:%20{%20%22resource%22:%20%22wordpress.org/plugins%22,%20%22slug%22:%20%22create-block-theme%22%20},%20%22progress%22:%20{%20%22weight%22:%202%20}%20},%20{%20%22step%22:%20%22installPlugin%22,%20%22pluginZipFile%22:%20{%20%22resource%22:%20%22wordpress.org/plugins%22,%20%22slug%22:%20%22debug-bar%22%20},%20%22progress%22:%20{%20%22weight%22:%202%20}%20},%20{%20%22step%22:%20%22installPlugin%22,%20%22pluginZipFile%22:%20{%20%22resource%22:%20%22wordpress.org/plugins%22,%20%22slug%22:%20%22health-check%22%20},%20%22progress%22:%20{%20%22weight%22:%202%20}%20},%20{%20%22step%22:%20%22installPlugin%22,%20%22pluginZipFile%22:%20{%20%22resource%22:%20%22wordpress.org/plugins%22,%20%22slug%22:%20%22test-reports%22%20},%20%22progress%22:%20{%20%22weight%22:%202%20}%20},%20{%20%22step%22:%20%22installPlugin%22,%20%22pluginZipFile%22:%20{%20%22resource%22:%20%22wordpress.org/plugins%22,%20%22slug%22:%20%22user-switching%22%20},%20%22progress%22:%20{%20%22weight%22:%202%20}%20}%20]%20}">6.6 Beta 2 WordPress Playground instance</a> to test the software directly in your browser. This might be the easiest way ever—no separate sites, no setup. Just click and go!&nbsp;</td></tr></tbody></table>Three ways to test WordPress Beta 2.



<p id="block-7e6a92e6-dba7-4f69-9226-f4dcab4a0b91">The target release date for WordPress 6.6 is <strong>July 16, 2024</strong>. Your help testing Beta and RC versions over the next five weeks is vital to making sure the final release is everything it should be: stable, powerful, and intuitive.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="block-aebce12b-08f8-40a7-9fe6-5a08f75d2254">If you find an issue</h2>



<p id="block-b9e58289-f6cb-4bdd-85a1-eb8d9a704ae4">If you run into an issue, please share it in the&nbsp;<a href="https://wordpress.org/support/forum/alphabeta/">Alpha/Beta area</a>&nbsp;of the support forums. If you are comfortable submitting a reproducible bug report, you can do so&nbsp;<a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/newticket">via WordPress Trac</a>. You can also check your issue against a list of&nbsp;<a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/tickets/major">known bugs</a>.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The bug bounty doubles in the beta period</h2>



<p>The WordPress community sponsors a&nbsp;<a href="https://make.wordpress.org/security/2024/06/04/wordpress-6-6-is-coming/">financial reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities.</a>&nbsp;That reward doubles between Beta 1, which landed June 4, and the final Release Candidate (RC) that will happen July 9. Please follow the project’s responsible-disclosure practices detailed on this&nbsp;<a href="https://hackerone.com/wordpress">HackerOne page</a>&nbsp;and in this&nbsp;<a href="https://wordpress.org/about/security/">security white paper</a>.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The work continues</h2>



<p><strong>Catch up with what&#8217;s new in 6.6:</strong> <a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2024/06/wordpress-6-6-beta-1/">check out the Beta 1 announcement for the highlights.</a></p>



<p>Beta 2 packs in more than 50 updates to the Editor since the Beta 1 release, including 40+ <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/query?status=closed&changetime=02%2F14%2F2024..02%2F19%2F2024&milestone=6.5&col=id&col=milestone&col=owner&col=type&col=priority&order=id">tickets for WordPress core</a>:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/commits/trunk?since=2024-06-04&until=2024-06-07&before=c7f51bdbe10bec0c0ab7f987a3f01caaa717c1db+70">GitHub commits for 6.6</a> since June 4</li>



<li><a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/query?changetime=06%2F04%2F2024..06%2F11%2F2024&resolution=fixed&milestone=6.6&max=1000&col=id&col=summary&col=type&col=milestone&col=owner&col=status&col=priority&order=priority">Closed Trac tickets</a> since June 4</li>
</ul>



<p>The beta cycle is all about fixing the bugs you find in testing. Thanks again for this vitally important contribution to WordPress! </p>



<p class="has-text-align-right is-style-default"><em>Props to <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/priethor/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>priethor</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/dansoschin/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>dansoschin</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/davidb/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>davidb</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/atachibana/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>atachibana</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/meher/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>meher</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/webcommsat/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>webcommsat</a>, and <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/juanmaguitar/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>juanmaguitar</a> for collaboration and review.</em></p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">A Beta 2 haiku</h2>



<p>Testing is vital:<br />It makes everything better.<br />Let&#8217;s find all the bugs!</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 11 Jun 2024 16:26:15 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:8:"marybaum";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:7;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:71:"Do The Woo Community: A New Show. Scaling Enterprise, WordPress and OSS";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=84118";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:68:"https://dothewoo.io/a-new-show-scaling-enterprise-wordpress-and-oss/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:131:"The Scaling Enterprise show features hosts Brad Williams, Karim Marucchi, and Tom Willmot discussing WordPress, OSS and enterprise.";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 11 Jun 2024 08:06:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:8;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:24:"Matt: Apple Intelligence";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:23:"https://ma.tt/?p=114880";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:41:"https://ma.tt/2024/06/apple-intelligence/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:1839:"<p>It was so cool to see <a href="https://wordpress.org/">WordPress</a> highlighted (although with a lowercase P in in the closed captioning) on the Apple keynote today.&nbsp;</p>



<img width="604" height="396" src="https://i0.wp.com/ma.tt/files/2024/06/IMG_0350-1024x672.jpeg?resize=604%2C396&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-114881" />



<p>I recommend <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXeOiIDNNek">watching the entire keynote</a>, but especially the <a href="https://youtu.be/RXeOiIDNNek?t=3870">Apple Intelligence section starting at 1:04</a> not because we&#8217;re mentioned but because it shows the future of computing, which is the future of society.</p>



<p>Apple is an exciting company because they push so much compute and capability to the edge with their devices, it gives people superpowers. The Grammarly-level editing and spell-check alone is amazing, on par with their math stuff. Some of these superpowers will be directed into blogging, and I can’t wait to to see what people do with all these new generative tools at their disposal. I really love the Promethean model where all of us have devices in our pocket or desktop that can turn us into superheroes.</p>



<p>I think it’s actually going to turn the hosting world upside down because complex transformations that would be difficult to run on the server-side will be trivial to run client-side with these millions and billions of processors being distributed through people’s smartphone upgrades. This innovation should exist at the operating-system layer (I include browsers  and <a href="https://webassembly.org/">WASM</a> in this) not be replicated in every application. <a href="https://wordpress.org/playground/">WordPress Playground</a> plays into this trend. (Interesting that Apple has now started to adopt the playground terminology.)</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 11 Jun 2024 02:35:22 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4:"Matt";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:9;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:81:"WordPress.org blog: WP Briefing: Episode 81: It’s your first WordCamp? Welcome!";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:53:"https://wordpress.org/news/?post_type=podcast&p=17352";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:78:"https://wordpress.org/news/2024/06/episode-81-its-your-first-wordcamp-welcome/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:19406:"<p>Get ready to dive into the vibrant world of WordCamps with this special episode of the WordPress Briefing, hosted by Josepha Haden Chomphosy! This episode is designed for first-time attendees; we’ll explore what to expect, from Contributor Day activities to mastering the art of socializing and networking. Whether you’re aiming to contribute to the WordPress community or simply looking to make new connections, this episode will help you navigate your first WordCamp with confidence and excitement. Join us for a fun and informative guide to ensure you’re prepared and energized for all the activities these dynamic events have to offer.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Credits</h2>



<p>Host:&nbsp;<a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/chanthaboune/">Josepha Haden Chomphosy</a><br />Editor:&nbsp;<a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/dustinhartzler/">Dustin Hartzler</a><br />Logo:&nbsp;<a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/javiarce/">Javier Arce</a><br />Production:&nbsp;<a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/bjmcsherry/">Brett McSherry</a><br />Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Show Notes</h2>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://asia.wordcamp.org/">WordCamp Asia</a></li>



<li><a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/">WordCamp Europe</a></li>



<li><a href="https://us.wordcamp.org/">WordCamp US</a></li>



<li><a href="https://events.wordpress.org/upcoming-events/filtered/type/wordcamp/">Upcoming Smaller WordCamps</a></li>



<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/">Learn WordPress</a><br /><strong>Small List of Big Things</strong>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/9T3ZFSB" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Gender Equality in WordPress Businesses Survey</a></li>



<li><a href="https://asia.wordcamp.org/2025/dates-and-venue-revealed/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">WordCamp Asia 2025: Dates and Venue Revealed</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/contribute/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Try the Contributor Wizard Questionnaire</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2024/05/23/five-for-the-future-program-updates-may-2024/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Five for the Future Program Updates: May 2024</a></li>
</ul>
</li>



<li>Have a question you’d like answered? Submit them to&nbsp;<a href="mailto:wpbriefing@WordPress.org">WPBriefing@WordPress.org</a>.</li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Transcript</h2>



<span id="more-17352"></span>



<p>[00:00:00] <strong>Josepha:</strong> 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&#8217;m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go.</p>



<p>[00:00:28] (Intro Music) </p>



<p>[00:00:40] <strong>Josepha:</strong> A pivotal moment in my WordPress journey was when someone invited me to a WordCamp. I was sort of aware of WordPress, but certainly not aware of the community or the ways of open source. And when I look back, there were a few things I wish I had known going in. I am, of course, an unapologetic extrovert and therefore unstoppable at events, but if you are headed to your first WordCamp and are feeling a little nervous or confused, then pop in some earbuds because the next 10 minutes are for you.</p>



<p>[00:01:11] <strong>Josepha:</strong> We&#8217;re going to first take a look at some basic tactical things about WordCamps, and then I&#8217;m going to tell you a few, like, human things about being a human going to events. If you&#8217;re a dog going to these events, I think that your prep is different, but also that is not my area of expertise. So the first thing, some tactical stuff about going to WordCamps. All of this happens before you even get in the front door. And so this is stuff that you can do in the comfort of your own home, on your own time, using your own computer. If you&#8217;ve got questions, you&#8217;ve got a search engine nearby to take some quick searches. Make sure you know what you&#8217;re talking about.</p>



<p>But first things first, the shape of a WordCamp. All WordCamps have at least one day of talks, one social event, and sponsors to connect to. Some also have extra events that you need to sign up for, like Contributor Days, workshops, things like that. But we&#8217;ll start with the main event, right? We&#8217;re going to start with the day of talks and things.</p>



<p>[00:02:09] <strong>Josepha:</strong> So when we&#8217;re looking at the main event of a WordCamp, what you should do is you should head to the WordCamp&#8217;s website and check out the schedule. I suggest that you plan for two, maybe three things that you might want to learn and look around at the schedule to see if there are any presenters or presentations that look like they fit those things that you think you might want to learn. Because if it&#8217;s not working for you, if it&#8217;s not teaching you something, then you don&#8217;t necessarily need to be in that one. Even if you&#8217;re not sure about a session a talk that you&#8217;re planning to go to, I recommend that you stop by, and then if you find out that it&#8217;s not for you, you can leave again.  That&#8217;s fine. But I do encourage you to go to at least one thing that feels a little bit outside of your comfort zone. Even if you feel lost right now. It at least gives you an idea of what to search for once you do get to that point. I would never have known the things to search for early on in my learning of WordPress without going to at least one or two sessions that were just way over my head. </p>



<p>[00:03:14] <strong>Josepha:</strong> Second thing is don&#8217;t forget to check when lunch is available. And if you have dietary restrictions, let them know ahead of time. I realize this sounds silly, and I don&#8217;t know about you, but I can&#8217;t focus when I&#8217;m hungry. But also, it&#8217;s really a great, low-stakes networking time, and I think one of the overlooked networking times as well. I mean, everyone&#8217;s gotta eat, right? And it&#8217;s easier to strike up a conversation over a meal than just out of thin air or, you know, in the middle of a presentation when you&#8217;re supposed to be listening to a talk. So yeah, check out when lunch is happening! And yeah, make a friend or two, sit down at a table, and ask somebody what they&#8217;re doing with WordPress and how long they&#8217;ve been doing it.</p>



<p>And the third thing that I would recommend that you do when you&#8217;re looking at kind of the main event for a WordCamp is to schedule in time to wander around and meet the event sponsors. They are all experts in some WordPress problem or other, so probably they have a solution to a problem that you have got. But they&#8217;re also how we keep our prices super low, so even if you have no problems or you think you have no problems. Still, check them out. They&#8217;re also staffed with wonderful people that are building really cool stuff with WordPress and so you might just get some inspiration out there. </p>



<p>[00:04:28] <strong>Josepha:</strong> Now for the side events.</p>



<p>So the side events, we&#8217;re going to kind of start close to the main event and work our way out. So you&#8217;ve got generally three types of side events if you don&#8217;t count the networking things, which, in this case, I&#8217;m not. But just know that almost every WordCamp has some networking event, either an after-party or, like, a happy hour, a social that happens before the event.</p>



<p>You&#8217;ll get emails about those if you have signed up for updates on the website. Also, you can look on the website directly. Just check out the schedule. Always go to those. The networking is the best at a WordCamp. But the side events—we&#8217;re talking about specific types. Like I said, we&#8217;re going to start close and work our way out.</p>



<p>[00:05:11] <strong>Josepha:</strong> So, workshops. These are just what they sound like. They&#8217;re classroom-style opportunities to practice the things you&#8217;ve learned at meetup events or on learn.WordPress.org, depending on how you found your way to this WordCamp. They mostly happen during the WordCamp itself. in a separate track, and there are like stacks of workshops in that track in that series of sessions. But a lot of them do require preregistration simply so that the trainer has an idea of how many people to expect. Again, if you get in the workshop and it&#8217;s way over your head, you feel like you absolutely cannot get it done, you&#8217;re always welcome to leave and check out some other area. But, in general, the workshops that we have WordCamps are pretty solid.</p>



<p>So a little bit further removed from that are our Youth and Teen Days. So this is more of an event series that is specifically designed for teens or kids who are trying to learn more about WordPress and other related business and entrepreneurial topics. It&#8217;s kind of a catch all but also has a lot of WordPress content in it. They have age limits, of course, and require separate registration for safety and planning purposes both. And those, in general, are either half-day during the WordCamp itself or a full-day during that WordCamp. </p>



<p>[00:06:32] <strong>Josepha:</strong> Which brings us then to the big one, the major side event. This is a full-day side event called Contributor Day. If your WordCamp has a Contributor Day, it will happen either the day before or the day after the WordCamp itself. It is an entire day where attendees come together to learn how to contribute to the future of the WordPress open source project. Now, if you are listening to this as part of, like, you&#8217;re getting ready to go to a WordCamp, and you don&#8217;t know what I meant by open source or open source project or WordPress open source project, that&#8217;s fine.</p>



<p>[00:07:08] <strong>Josepha:</strong> You&#8217;re going to learn all about it at the Contributor Day if you go, but the TLDR is that this software that you are about to choose to build your website on is built by thousands of people across the planet who are looking for the best solutions to problems that they have in their businesses that probably you will encounter or have encountered before. There&#8217;s no new problems under the sun, and open source methodologies kind of use the collective wisdom of everybody who has ever worked with a WordPress project or site and ran into a problem that they had to solve on their own, like this open source project, this community of people just make sure that that wisdom is collected and standardized and made available for all of eternity.</p>



<p>That&#8217;s all you need to know. Low key. I&#8217;ve made Contributor Days sound so calming. However, that is a whole day thing. It happens before or after the WordCamp. It has separate registration so that organizers of your WordCamp can plan for how many folks need to be there to teach new and returning contributors, what to do. If I&#8217;m going to be honest, if you&#8217;re going to get overwhelmed at any WordPress event, it&#8217;s going to be one of these, but they are well worth the effort.</p>



<p>[00:08:30] <strong>Josepha:</strong> Even if you just make a single contribution and never return, which I hope is not the case for you. I hope you do return. Even if you make a single contribution and never return, there&#8217;s something really grounding about seeing how much expertise and time, and care goes into this software that is, against all odds, completely free. So that&#8217;s all the tactical stuff, or a lot of it anyway.</p>



<p>It at least gives you a sense for what you&#8217;re getting yourself into for your first-ever wonderful WordPress weekend. But I promised you some human stuff too. So here is my considerably shorter list of stuff to bring as a human being going to a WordCamp. There&#8217;s an optional one. I&#8217;ll start you off with an optional one. Come with an idea of what you think you want to learn. You don&#8217;t have to come with that if you don&#8217;t want to. Some of us don&#8217;t know what we don&#8217;t know yet, and that&#8217;s fine too. But if you have a sense for what you think you need to learn, you&#8217;ll have an easier time figuring out how to spend your time while you&#8217;re here.</p>



<p>[00:09:30] <strong>Josepha:</strong> So, the non-optional things. Bring some way to exchange information. It can be QR codes, business cards, or pen and paper. It doesn&#8217;t really matter as long as it&#8217;s something that works for you to be sharing information with people that you meet. Because you never know when you&#8217;re going to meet your business soulmate, but the odds that you&#8217;re going to do it at a WordCamp are pretty dang high.</p>



<p>The second thing to bring is bring what you need to be comfortable. Bring your water bottle, a change of shoes if you need it, spare battery for your phone, your glasses. This day is going to be long enough without worrying about small inconveniences. So bring what you need to make yourself comfortable. </p>



<p>[00:10:09] <strong>Josepha:</strong> And finally bring your bravery. You will not know by looking at someone whether they&#8217;ve been doing WordPress stuff for two years or two weeks. But you can know that at some point, they were in the first two days of trying to figure this all out. One of the most endearing things about this community is the zeal they bring to solving a problem. So if you get lost or stuck, just ask the person next to you. We all remember what it was like to know nothing, and we are rooting for you to succeed. And that&#8217;s it. That&#8217;s your whole list. That&#8217;s everything you need to know to be the most prepared first-time attendee to a WordCamp ever. If that all sounded more overwhelming than just showing up, don&#8217;t worry.</p>



<p>You can also just show up. That&#8217;s what I did. And even though I knew next to nothing, those WordCampers made me feel welcome and included and kept me coming back to learn more.</p>



<p>[00:11:04] <strong>Josepha:</strong> Ah, WordCamps. Gosh, I love those things. So glad that we&#8217;re all getting back together for them.&nbsp;</p>



<p>[00:11:10] (Music interlude) </p>



<p>[00:11:18] <strong>Josepha:</strong> That brings us now, my friends, to our small list of big things. If you&#8217;re a first-time WordPresser, if you&#8217;ve never been to a WordCamp, and you don&#8217;t know what any of these things are, don&#8217;t worry; you can still go take a look at them, or you can wait until later when you&#8217;re less overwhelmed.</p>



<p>Either way, but this is our small list of big things for middle of the year 2024. First thing on my list, the gender equality in WordPress businesses survey is still open. It aims to gain critical insight into the gender composition of leadership teams, the experiences of women and gender-diverse leaders and employees, and also take a look at the challenges and barriers to their career success. I care deeply about making sure that we have a way for folks who are traditionally and historically underrepresented in technology have a way to get into our space. Obviously, women and nonbinary folks are an area that I feel particularly called to help build those on-ramps for, but I have a great concern for that across the entire ecosystem and any intersection that we run into as we get more and more users into our space. </p>



<p>[00:12:30] <strong>Josepha:</strong> If you are a woman, if you work with women, if you work in WordPress, if you work in a WordPress business, go take that survey, and let&#8217;s see what we find out about what it&#8217;s like to work in this space, as somebody that we normally don&#8217;t see. </p>



<p>The second thing on our list is that WordCamp Asia 2025 dates and venue have been revealed. So WordCamp Asia 2023 and 2024 were both major successes, and we are excited to share that the dates and venue for next year will be February 20th, 21st, 22nd in 2025 in Manila, and you&#8217;ll be able to go over to that website, take a look at it, we&#8217;ll have a link in the show notes as always and maybe start planning your your next big Asian adventure.</p>



<p>[00:13:13] <strong>Josepha:</strong> The third thing on my list is this new contributor wizard questionnaire. So, there are more than 20 teams to contribute to in the WordPress project. They all show up at those Contributor Days that I talked about. But there are more than 20 of them. They work on different parts of the WordPress project every day. And our passionate community offers contribution opportunities for everyone. I know, we know, that finding the right team is the key to a meaningful contributor experience. So, our interactive questionnaire is here to help you determine where to start. It is sometimes difficult to know whether you can contribute to a software if you are a designer, if you are a writer, if you are in marketing.</p>



<p>And it turns out that you can contribute to WordPress with a bunch of skills that you otherwise would not have realized. So, we&#8217;ll have a link to the questionnaire in the show notes again. Also, it&#8217;s probably going to pop up on WordCamp sites, Contributor Day sites, anything that helps you all understand where you might find a little bit of success as a contributor is a good place for it to be. Take the questionnaire, see where you land, the WordPress sorting hat. </p>



<p>[00:14:18] <strong>Josepha:</strong> And item number four. So we&#8217;ve made some updates, not we&#8217;ve made some updates, we have some updates from the Five for the Future program. So the Five for the Future program has a long history in the WordPress project. There are a couple of different episodes in this podcast where you can learn more about it.</p>



<p>But, to bolster transparency and openness, we have an update on the current state of WordPress contributions as of the end of May 2024. In the past few months, we&#8217;ve made a lot of efforts to improve the program and contributor experience in WordPress. We&#8217;ve also done a little bit of work to kind of clean up the pledges that are in there for, people or companies or teams that have found that they couldn&#8217;t continue their contributions over time. That is fine too. But we&#8217;ll have a link to that update in the show notes as well.</p>



<p>[00:15:09] <strong>Josepha:</strong> And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Don&#8217;t forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app or subscribe directly on WordPress.org/news. You&#8217;ll get a friendly reminder whenever there&#8217;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 am your host, Josepha Haden Chomposy. Thanks for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing, and I&#8217;ll see you again in a couple of weeks. </p>



<p>[00:15:36] (Music outro) </p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Mon, 10 Jun 2024 12:00:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"Brett McSherry";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:10;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:112:"Do The Woo Community: Press Release: Do the Woo 4.0 Official Launch: Elevating Voices in the WordPress Community";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=84172";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:95:"https://dothewoo.io/do-the-woo-4-0-official-launch-elevating-voices-in-the-wordpress-community/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:125:"Press Release: The official launch of the Do the Woo Podcast Channel 4.0 takes place during WordCamp Europe in Turino, Italy.";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Mon, 10 Jun 2024 09:09:41 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:11;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:66:"Do The Woo Community: Do the Woo 4.0, This Week at WordCamp Europe";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=84091";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:64:"https://dothewoo.io/do-the-woo-4-0-this-week-at-wordcamp-europe/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:79:"This coming week we are at WordCamp Europe where we a launching Do the Woo 4.0.";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Mon, 10 Jun 2024 07:00:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:12;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:22:"Matt: Gravatar is Back";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:23:"https://ma.tt/?p=114859";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:39:"https://ma.tt/2024/06/gravatar-is-back/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:614:"<p><a href="https://gravatar.com/">Gravatar</a>, which has been humming along quietly serving hundreds of billions of avatars into every app you love like Slack, Github, ChatGPT, Atlassian, Coinbase&#8230; <a href="https://blog.gravatar.com/2024/06/03/profiles-as-a-service/">has a new API which allows people to bring in not just the avatar but more profile data</a>. Check it out. Gravatar continues to be a useful <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)">Schelling point</a> for the internet to allow to choose what they want to share and liberate their data from a single platform.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Sun, 09 Jun 2024 21:24:54 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4:"Matt";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:13;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:94:"Gutenberg Times: Gutenberg Changelog #101 – WordPress 6.6 Beta 1, Gutenberg 18.3, 18.4, 18.5";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:53:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/?post_type=podcast&p=28856";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:73:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-101-wordpress-6-6/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:58988:"<p>In this episode, Magdalena Paciorek and Birgit Pauli-Haack discuss WordPress 6.6 Beta 1, Gutenberg releases 18.3, 18.4, 18.5 and WordCamp Europe</p>



<p><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-101-wordpress-6-6/#shownotes">Show Notes</a> / <a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-101-wordpress-6-6//#transcript">Transcript</a></p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Music:&nbsp;<a href="https://soundcloud.com/xirclebox">Homer Gaines</a></li>



<li>Editor:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandy-reed/">Sandy Reed</a></li>



<li>Logo:&nbsp;<a href="https://markuraine.com/">Mark Uraine</a></li>



<li>Production:&nbsp;<a href="https://icodeforapurpose.com">Birgit Pauli-Haack</a></li>
</ul>



<p class="has-larger-font-size" id="shownotes"><strong>Show Notes</strong></p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Special Guest: Magdalena Paciorek</h2>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/paciorekmagdalena/">Connect on LinkedIn </a></li>



<li><a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/news/2024/04/11/a-first-look-at-the-interactivity-api/">A first look at the Interactivity API</a> by Magdalena Paciorek </li>



<li><a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/2024/session/building-custom-post-types-with-blocks/">Building custom post types with blocks</a> w/ Magdalena Paciorek</li>



<li><a href="https://x.com/luisherranz/status/1780322340166939039">Tweet By Luis Herranz</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Upcoming Events</h2>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/seven-talks-about-blocks-block-themes-and-beyond-at-wordcamp-europe-2024/">Seven talks about blocks, block themes and beyond at WordCamp Europe 2024</a></li>



<li>WordPress 6.6 Beta 1 version <a href="https://www.meetup.com/learn-wordpress-online-workshops/events/301323283/">Developer Hours: Exploring Overrides for Synced Pattern in WordPres 6.6</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/06/05/hallway-hangout-theme-building-with-playground-create-block-theme-plugin-and-github/">Hallway Hangout: Theme Building with Playground, Create-block-theme plugin, and GitHub</a></li>



<li><a href="https://www.meetup.com/learn-wordpress-online-workshops/events/301323283/">Developer Hours: What&#8217;s new for theme developers in WordPress 6.6</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">WordPress 6.6 </h2>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2024/06/wordpress-6-6-beta-1/">WordPress 6.6 Beta 1 version</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2024/06/03/help-test-wordpress-6-6/">Help test WordPress 6.6</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Gutenberg Releases</h2>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/05/08/whats-new-in-gutenberg-18-3-8-may/">What’s new in Gutenberg 18.3? (8 May)</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/05/23/whats-new-in-gutenberg-18-4-22-may/">What’s new in Gutenberg 18.4 (22 May)</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/06/09/what-is-new-in-gutenberg-18-5-05-jun/">What is new in Gutenberg 18.5 (05 Jun)</a></li>
</ul>



<p class="has-large-font-size">Stay in Touch</p>



<div class="wp-block-group"><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow">
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Did you like this episode? <a href="https://lovethepodcast.com/gutenbergchangelog"><strong>Please write us a review </strong></a></li>



<li>Ping us on Twitter or send DMs with questions. <a href="https://twitter.com/gutenbergtimes">@gutenbergtimes </a>and <a href="https://twitter.com/bph">@bph</a>.</li>



<li><em>If you have questions or suggestions, or news you want us to include, send them to <a href="mailto:changelog@gutenbergtimes.com">changelog@gutenbergtimes.com</a>. </em></li>



<li><em>Please write us a review on iTunes! <a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/itunes/">(Click here to learn how)</a></em></li>
</ul>
</div></div>



<p class="has-large-font-size" id="transcript"><strong>Transcript</strong></p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Hello and welcome to the 101st episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. In today&#8217;s episode, we will talk about WordPress 6.6 beta one. The last three Gutenberg plugin releases 18.3, 18.4, and 18.5, and WordCamp Europe, not necessarily in this order. I&#8217;m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and a full-time core contributor for the WordPress Open Source project, sponsored the Automattic’s five for the future program. Today, I&#8217;m also happy to have Magdalena Paciorek as co-host with me. Magda has been one of the shining tutorial writers for the WordPress developer blog, and I&#8217;m also looking forward to learning more about building custom post types with blocks at WordCamp Europe. It&#8217;s definitely a topic that many developers have questions about. Magda, welcome to the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. Thanks for making the time today. How are you?</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: Hi, Birgit. Yeah, I&#8217;m great. I&#8217;m happy to present the new features.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Awesome, awesome. So happy to have you on the show. So please tell us all more about you, where you live and what is your day job when you&#8217;re not writing for the developer blog, or presenting, or being a co-host.</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: Okay. I live in Poland and well, I&#8217;m basically a WordPress developer. I work in the marketing department, where I do maintenance of our websites that are built with WordPress. I&#8217;m mostly responsible for maintaining our blocks that we built for our team, so that they can build landing pages for marketing purposes. So that&#8217;s where my interest in Gutenberg came from my team, because that&#8217;s what I do in my everyday job, but I also work in marketing, so I write content around WordPress. I present at WordCamps and other WordPress events. My company also sponsors WordPress events, so I would always also attend these events. So yeah, so my work life is pretty much also WordPress, and also sometimes after work, because of the community that I&#8217;m involved with. So it&#8217;s a big part of my life.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Do you have family?</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: No, I don&#8217;t have kids.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. Wonderful, wonderful. So you might not have seen the tweet by Luis Herranz, &#8220;By the way. I think this is the best tutorial on the interactivity API available so far. It&#8217;s going to be my new recommendation for anyone looking for a quick introduction to the interactivity API.&#8221; That&#8217;s great. Kudos from one of the lead developers on the Interactivity API project, so congratulations.</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: Well, thank you. I actually haven&#8217;t seen it, because I haven&#8217;t looked into Twitter for a long time, so wow, this is nice. Yeah, I&#8217;m really happy that I could contribute to this project, because I feel like the interactivity API is one of the most important features that are coming to work. I mean, it&#8217;s already in WordPress, but it&#8217;s just the first iteration, but I feel like when it&#8217;s going to be finished, wow, this is one of the most important things that is happening right now in WordPress. So yeah, it&#8217;s well cool.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, and you help people to get acquainted with it. So thank you for that. And I agree with you, the interactivity API is probably the most interesting pieces also for people that come over to Gutenberg and from PHP developers, that are not so much interested in JavaScript, but they can also use that and hydrate their pages with interactivity, without page loads. So it&#8217;s really cool.&nbsp;</p>



<p>So before we go into the Changelogs and talk about all the releases that are happening since we last had a podcast, well the 100th episode was a special episode as you dear listeners already know, hopefully. And so, we skipped a Gutenberg release and now we are putting it all in one show, and you will also notice that at the end of the show, that there will be a different music. And I thought, okay, for the next 200 episodes, I think it would be good to change the music, the intro music and the outro music, but to not confuse listeners right away, we didn&#8217;t do it for this one, but only for the outro music.</p>



<p>Next time we will have it on. So at the beginning of the show, just to warn you, it&#8217;s a totally different vibe on that music. While I have you, dear listeners, at the beginning of the show, I wanted to also let you know start with a few announcements.&nbsp;</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Announcements of Upcoming Development Hours, WordCamp Europe and Hallway Hangouts</h3>



<p>So WordCamp Europe is happening next week and there will be awesome presentations there, and I put together a list of the seven block-related talks that you will see in the live stream. So I will link it in the show notes, but one of them is Elena&#8217;s presentation. Then we have a presentation on the interactivity API with Michael and on block themes, and all the good things that come with 6.6, or are already in WordPress. It&#8217;s also Jessica Lessig is talking about the Twenty Twenty Four. Then Erica Gill and Luis Rosales talk about migrating from two blocks from a legacy website.</p>



<p>Bernie Rider, developer on the Gutenberg team, talks about the block hooks, how to extend block themes, and then there&#8217;s also the Gutenberg speed build challenge that Jamie Marsland has put up on YouTube, and you will get to see it live. And we just found out that Jessica Lessig and Rich Tabor are the contestants, so that&#8217;s going to be really cool. And then, Jamie also has a talk about the three key principles for beginners on blog themes, and then of course Magdalena&#8217;s building custom post types blocks. So you see this all and you can get this all through the WordCamp Europe live stream, if you&#8217;re not there to watch it live.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Then there are three developer hours and two hallway hangouts scheduled in the next few weeks, so on June 11th, and of course all of them will have recordings and resources to share. So June 11th will be a developer hour on exploring overrides for the sync patterns that come with WordPress 6.6.</p>



<p>That&#8217;s a very exciting feature and I&#8217;m really looking forward to using that. It was punted from 6.5, but the developers took a totally different approach now. One is they use the block bindings API to drive all the overrides, and then also you have to name the pieces so they can be displayed in the sidebar, but we are going to talk about it a little later. But that is definitely something you don&#8217;t want to miss, or want to catch on the rerun.&nbsp;</p>



<p>On June 17th, no, it&#8217;s the 19th, sorry. On June 19th at 1100 UTC there will be a hallway hangout on building a workflow for themes with the CreateBlock theme plugin using Playground and GitHub. So you could use Playground to make all the changes to your theme. Use the plugin CreateBlock theme block theme plugin to save those things, and then use also Playground to save it all back to GitHub as a PR for a theme update.</p>



<p>So that&#8217;s going to be really cool. And then on June 25th, there&#8217;s developer hours on what&#8217;s new for theme developers in WordPress 6.6. That&#8217;s more an overview and kind of sometimes deep dive. And then on June 26th, a day later, 1100 UTC, there will be a hallway hangout on the grid layouts that come to WordPress 6.6, and we will discuss all the cool things with Isabel Brison, who was one of the lead developers on the grid layouts. And then July 2nd, and that&#8217;s the end of it. July 2nd is again another developer hours and building theme with the CreateBlock theme plugin, so you can learn more about all that. So that&#8217;s it. Discussions and QA also happen asynchronously, in the Make WordPress Outreach Channel, that&#8217;s a new name for a channel that was the FSE outreach experiment, but it&#8217;s now a standard channel on the WordPress makeup for extenders, developers, site builders to come together and discuss things, or have Q&amp;A with people.</p>



<p>And so, join us there. All right, that brings us to what&#8217;s released.&nbsp;</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">What’s Released &#8211; WordPress 6.6 Beta 1</h3>



<p>Most, but not all items in the Gutenberg plugin releases we&#8217;ll cover today will come to WordPress 6.6 version at the end of July. I think release date is, no, release date is July 26th, but you can already start testing WordPress 6.6 beta 1 version, because it was just released and I would like to point out that it&#8217;s the best way to learn about new features coming to the WordPress version, when you heed the call for testing. It has been out for together with the WordPress 6.6 beta 1 release, and you get to test 10 features coming to WordPress 6.6.</p>



<p>And those are all the new data views that are in the site editor for pages, templates, patterns and template parts, and how they kind of work the same pattern overrides, so you can change the content of a pattern per instance, and then if you change the design, all the other patterns will change the design as well, but not change the content. So the updates to the insert are showing all blocks. A user feedback was there that it was a little bit confusing. It now shouldn&#8217;t be, but test it out. Unified and refresh publishing workflow. We have additional information about that later on. And then, mix and match the typography and color palettes from all style variations, and then section styles, and the changes to CSS, cascading style sheets, specificity. That&#8217;s a very difficult word, specificity.</p>



<p>Okay. And then, another feature coming to WordPress 6.6 is a grid layout, and then a new pattern experience for the classic themes. I did some brief testing with a classic theme activated and it works real nicely. Also, the sync pattern works as well. Of course the sync pattern overrides are only enabled for certain blocks, so it does not work on all patterns, but that&#8217;s a different story. Another feature that a lot of people have been waiting for are the negative margins in the UI of the global styles. And then, there is a feature also coming to WordPress 6.6 that allows for the rollback of auto updates if they run against some error message, or something like that. A team of developers has been working probably for, if not longer, a year on that, and now it&#8217;ll come to WordPress 6.6 and it&#8217;s definitely great to test this. Now Magdalena, are there any features in 6.6 release that you are particularly excited about?</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: Well, yes, quite a few of these features are really exciting, but I&#8217;m the most excited about sync pattern overrides. I think this is a very important feature, especially for people who build websites for clients, because it solves the problem that the page builders basically have, that you build views of pages, and then you have some common elements that you add to a few pages for example. But then when you want to change something, well you had to visit every page separately and make these changes. For example, change background code. And so, that&#8217;s of course, if you have a very small brochure website with five pages, not a problem, but it doesn&#8217;t scale, the website grows, then it&#8217;s not really usable. So these synchronized patterns that you can overwrite are a really great solution for this, because you can keep styles synchronized, but then allow overwriting text for example, the content of these patterns per page. So it&#8217;s a great feature, I really like it. I think everyone should get interested in it actually.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, and I think a lot of people got already excited for 6.5, when it was pulled off the beta 1, because it wasn&#8217;t ready yet, but I think the additional two or three months maturing of the feature definitely helped to make it even more clear how to assign those allowed overrides, and how a user that uses them, an editor that hasn&#8217;t created them, but wants to use them, can identify the areas where they can override things. Now there are a few caveats there. One is that the overrides are only enabled for headings, paragraphs, buttons, and images, and in images only for the alt text and the file name. So if you put captions in, the captions are not part of the overrides. So somebody did some great testing there and you need to, if you want to test it out with captions and yeah, it&#8217;s probably not going to work as you expected.</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: And there&#8217;s one more limitation, because I&#8217;ve tested it with gallery block and you can override the images, but we can set them to be able to be overwritten. But the problem is when the number of photos that add to the gallery, it can&#8217;t be changed. So if you add for example, two pictures, there can only be two, they can be three or one. So it&#8217;s not a hundred percent usable, but I&#8217;ve read the discussion on GitHub, and I feel like this is going to be solved in probably the next release, but for now, this is something to be aware of. Also, the same situation with the list book, where you have a few items, and then you can&#8217;t add or remove these items from the async pattern.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, list block is not part of that. Yeah, that&#8217;s true. Gallery block is not assigned yet that it works. So yeah, those are the limitations, but for a first version to get in a major WordPress release, it&#8217;s in really great shape.</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: Yes, yes, I confirm it.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: And every other feature, there&#8217;s a good first version and then we iterate on for the next steps on that. So yeah, I&#8217;m also quite excited about the section styles and the grid layout, because that&#8217;s also a part of what other page builders do, is that you can assign different styles to sections and not have to go to each part of it. So if it&#8217;s a cover block or a groups block of certain elements, you can change all the colors with a color palette kind of thing, and assign a style to it, and have that on a button change over to either dark view, or light view, or blue view, or red view kind of thing. But you don&#8217;t have to do it for each single block in that group.</p>



<p>So those are really time savers, but they also give designers a little more granular control over the designs that they create. And the grid layout is definitely something that a lot of people have been waiting for, that you arrange everything on your page in a grid, and then you can wrap the handles of a block and kind of make it larger, or have a row span of a block, be it an image, or a paragraph block, or anything, and to organize the blocks differently on a page.</p>



<p>I think that really helps with that, some people are still looking for pixel perfect, although that one went out of the window when we had mobile, and different kinds of screen sizes and we now have. I don&#8217;t know, from brownie size screen to big TV screens that are 80 inches. So yeah, we need some fluid things there. And the grid layout, if you use the automatic grid layout, it will be responsive and adhere to the various screen sizes. And negative margin is part of it as well, with the section styles and the grid layout to give more tools to the designers to have really great designs that are not following conservative flows of content and assets. Well if your listeners have a comment on that, just use the comment section on the website and let us know what you think about all the new features that are coming to WordPress 6.6. And as I said, go and test it, heed the call for testing, and you learn all about it quite by doing.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Gutenberg 18.3</h3>



<p>Which brings us now to the first Gutenberg plugin release that we are going to cover. That&#8217;s Gutenberg 18.3. There were 165 PRs in there. It was released on May 8th, by 44 contributors and three contributors who were first timers, Jason Crist was the release lead for that release. Well, one definitely stands out is that Gutenberg is updated to a new React version. I think it&#8217;s 18.3, was it? I&#8217;m not quite sure. Yeah, it&#8217;s just a coincidence that 18.3 Gutenberg release also uses React 18.3, so I was a little confused at the moment here. And that will be important when you use some of the newer features, or if you have to update some of the legacy React features on your blocks. I&#8217;m not quite sure how much of a disruption that is or if it is at all, but I just wanted you to be aware of it.</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: Yeah, this one I don&#8217;t actually know. I&#8217;ve checked it out, but I couldn&#8217;t make it work.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Okay, yeah, that&#8217;s a different story. It&#8217;s a different story. It doesn&#8217;t have to work.</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: Okay. It&#8217;s there.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Everything needs to be tested of course, and it&#8217;s supposed to work.</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: Onto the next thing. Also, the plugin document settings panel is now available, a slot is available in the template inspector controls, because before this release it was only available I think in post inspector contract, but now it&#8217;ll be also available in the template.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: The site editor. Yeah, and that is so plugins can have additional fields and create their own little interfaces there. The next one is classic themes get now exposure to the patterns page, and what it also removes is the template parts menu item. So classic themes now have access to the site editor design for patterns and template parts. There was a request from quite a few theme developers if that would be possible, or agency developers if that would be possible, because then they can also do all the documentation, everything for the patterns can be also used for classic themes, or users that use the classic theme. So that&#8217;s really cool.</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciore</em>k: Yeah, that&#8217;s a great feature. And also patterns, the data view is changing. The team has removed icons and right now it&#8217;ll just have this label that says that if the pattern is synchronized or not. So yeah, that&#8217;s also a really nice improvement. Small, but very useful.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. And one other PR I wanted to point out is that now you can insert patterns on the end of the canvas, or the route section of a content piece. Until then you couldn&#8217;t get to that. It was really hard to put anything on the end of a post or pages, but now you can insert patterns to the end of it by drag and drop, or just by using it.</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: Yeah, this is a really nice usability improvement. I actually tested it and it worked really nicely. It&#8217;s a natural flow. It seems very natural to add new.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: You can now just drop and drag them to the end, because then you can stack your patterns first before you make all the changes that you need to do on the page. So you can get a really good layout very fast to just combine a few patterns, and you don&#8217;t have to rearrange them on your site. Next one is a new text alignment control component that&#8217;s for developers, when you have a few&#8230; Most text aligns are actually in the block toolbar, but some of the blocks don&#8217;t have have it in their block toolbar, but you can have it in the font section, the typography section of that block, so you can have a left center or right alignment on the text, even if the block toolbar is not there. So it&#8217;s really cool. That&#8217;s especially helpful also for custom blocks.</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: Yes, and we also have a new improvement on the inserter tabs, because now the search bar is moved into inserter tabs. So when you type, for example, you look for the keyword, like for example, image, and you look on the block tab. Then when you switch to the patterns tab, then you still have this search phrase there and it already filters out the patterns based on this keyword. So this is a really nice improvement.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, I saw that too, and I really love that, that I don&#8217;t have to tap in my keywords multiple times just because I&#8217;m going from blocks to patterns to the other thing. Well, I mentioned it with 18.3 Gutenberg plugin. There is now the possibility to add negative values to margin controls. So you can have overlaps, so you can have a picture and then the next paragraph you can have the margin negative 200, and it goes a little bit into the picture on the bottom of it if you want to do that. That is something that many designers have done for many, many years with just plain Cascading Style Sheets, and it was available through the theme JSON where you could add negative margins already, but now it&#8217;s also coming to the user interface, and it will be in the dimension controls on the bottom of the margin, you can see add your negative values for any of the margins, be it left, right, top or bottom.</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: In the next feature, I think it&#8217;s only relevant for the team developers. I think so, because there is a big change to how the style variations are handled in Orpheus 6.6. Okay, so another feature is I think it should only concern the theme developers.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Are you trying to tell me that this is something that developers actually wouldn&#8217;t be able to use, or that&#8217;s not for developers that it&#8217;s actually just Gutenberg internal?</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: I think it&#8217;s internal for Gutenberg.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: So we don&#8217;t talk about it.</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: Yeah, yeah, of course.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: If it&#8217;s not for extenders, then it&#8217;s not really&#8230;</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: I don&#8217;t think they have to do anything. It&#8217;s just how it handles when you define two or three type variations, and then people mix and match it, so it&#8217;s something internal that handles it. Not to create too many styles under the hood, something like that, but I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s&#8230;</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, and I think I saw another filter to have the color controls and the typography styles, that they are not duplicated and all that. The team is working on that. That&#8217;s the next one, is the filter out color and typography variations. That&#8217;s also an internal one, but I think it could open up the system for the next version to be able to maybe opt out of the presets, the automatic creation. So color and typography variations when they come in, they are taken from the style variations the theme has, and isolates in a separate section, all the color palettes that come with the style variations, and in a separate section also all the typography choices that could be made for the style variations. And there is a discussion for extenders. Well, if a theme is following brand standards that has four style variations for the different brands of a company, then you don&#8217;t want colors from brand two and the typography from brand three to be maxed, and that is not yet available to opt out of that.</p>



<p>But I think how the filters were created, I think it would only be a small step to provide that opt out for theme developers. So I think we need to watch that space quite a bit in terms of what feedback is coming in from the beta version, and also see how that can be solved. It might not be part of 6.6, because we are six weeks away from release, but there might be time. So it&#8217;s certainly something to discuss with theme developers, agency developers, and the good mood developers. Which also brings us to the new preset, there are default font sizes in theme JSON version three, that for those you can opt out of course. Core has a few font sizes in the theme JSON and provides some. So those don&#8217;t have to be worried about theme developers if they don&#8217;t want to.</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: Especially if you create a custom for a company, then you might want to opt out from the default font sizes and declare your own ones. And onto the next one. There are some changes in the post editor sidebar. There are a few data information about the post was shuffled around in the top area of this site editor. For example, post status work count, also the thumbnail was moved to the top of site panel. So there are quite a few changes that I&#8217;ve seen throughout these three releases of Gutenberg that we&#8217;re talking about. So it&#8217;s not a big change, because the data is still there, the same data, but it got moved up or down, and I think at the moment it&#8217;s looking quite nice. It&#8217;s quite usable, so it&#8217;s definitely worth it to take a closer look at how it looks like at the moment.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, it definitely is a change that gives you much more information about the nature of the post or the page that you have. And I&#8217;m seeing that the word count might disappear from the inserter, no from the list view tab, because not a lot of people are going there, but you have all the information in the top section of the post editor. And they also moved up the featured image, and that is part of the also data views, because now they can use the same component and show off in a grid layout for pages or posts. They can show off the card with the featured image, and just the post metadata about their post status, and word count, and last edited information.</p>



<p>So there&#8217;s also a feature that comes in actually is the duplicate post feature that you can just grab from that section, where you can say, okay, duplicate that post and then restart a new one. Up until now, you actually had to use a plugin for that, and right now it&#8217;s actually only available in the Gutenberg plugin. I&#8217;m not sure it comes to WordPress 6.6, I need to research that. So you might get too excited now, but if you use the Gutenberg plugin, you definitely have it, but it seems to be only for the plugin right now.</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: But it&#8217;s such a needed feature, just to be only available through plugins, but now it&#8217;s coming to WordPress, it&#8217;s really great.&nbsp;</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Documentation</h3>



<p>Okay, so now we have documentation. There&#8217;s a lot of going on in the documentation field, especially the editor package of Gutenberg. The documentation for this package was updated and at the moment I think almost all components are documented, so it&#8217;s great for developers who want to use these components from the editor package.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: It definitely made some strides with the documentation on the components. Some of the components actually moved from one package to the other, because of the synchronization from the site editor and the post editor. So there is no duplication of code anymore, but they had to move the packages. And so, they also moved some of the documentation and made the discovery that some of the components were actually not documented well enough. So there were two birds with one stone so to speak. Speaking of moving the interactivity, API documentation has also moved from the package area to the reference guide area. When you go to the developer.wordpress.org/block editor documentation, you&#8217;ll find it under different heading in the reference guide and another update that you as if you do theme development or create themes for clients, you definitely want to look at the documentation for the theme JSON version three.</p>



<p>There are quite a few changes and you need to declare it in your theme JSON, which schema you&#8217;re following to make sure that you are still compatible. All right, that was 18.3. See that was pretty harmless. Cool. Yeah, we&#8217;re getting better at it.&nbsp;</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Gutenberg 18.4</h3>



<p>We are going to the Gutenberg 18.4 release, which was released two weeks ago with 185 PRs, merged by 58 contributors, seven of them were new with their first merge PRs, and release lead was Alex Lende and he has all published release post what&#8217;s new in Gutenberg 18.4. So let&#8217;s dive in.&nbsp;</p>



<p>The first item I wanted to point out was that the grid layout, visualizer and resizer features have been stabilized, and we can always cheer about that. The listeners, I think grid layout is going to be the new gradient. I had an early times on the podcast, even with Mark Uraine. Again, I was always very happy to say gradients and new features, and now it&#8217;s grid layout with new features. I&#8217;m really happy about that.</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: Yes, this feature is definitely going to be useful, very useful, very excited about it. And the next feature that&#8217;s coming, this Gutenberg version is the aspect ratio presets are now supported through theme JSON. So you can define your own aspect ratios for images basically. That will be available in the controls for the cropping images. So I think this is great, especially for the theme developers, that you can now have your own dimensions of the images that are custom to the theme.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, it definitely makes some nice designs when you can have images uploaded and they follow your personalized, so to speak, aspect ratio presets. Also, there was an update on color variations. I mean, the PR isn&#8217;t very descriptive what that means, but it is that it moves the color presets to the palette tab in the global styles. So there will now be a palette section in the sidebar, in the right sidebar under the global styles, where you see palettes, and then you click on it and it gives you all the palettes that are set for the themes, or the style variations, or something. So it&#8217;s a nice UI change. It also follows quite a few other design tools that have a similar feature. So I&#8217;m really glad about that.</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: Okay, the next change is interesting for developers, because it&#8217;s a change to the register block style function. This function now accepts an array of blocks and it used to accept only a string with the block name. So what it means, you can now register a block style for multiple blocks at once with this one function, and you don&#8217;t have to do it separately. So this is nice if you have some common style that you would like to apply to a few blocks, you can do it at once. Now with register block site function.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, that&#8217;s an excellent explanation. Thank you so much. Because I wasn&#8217;t quite sure when I read this beyond what actually changed, but now you can have the green border with the yellow background on not only the paragraph block, but also the group block as well, as the cover block, so you don&#8217;t have to write the code multiple times. And then, the next thing next is more about the block library. So some blocks have additional features, the list block has now block class name on the list, that is really, yeah, people were waiting to style the list block. It&#8217;s now the WP dash block dash list class, so you can style the overall list as well. I think the list items already had their own class names.</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: And also, the new variation was added to the embeds block in Bluesky.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: What&#8217;s Bluesky?</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: I don&#8217;t know, I have no idea.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Bluesky. And yeah, the proliferation of social networks is kind of going on and on and on. And Bluesky is a new social network that comes close to Twitter now, and it was actually founded by a former Twitter developer, and it kind of opened up now to the public. It was for two years now, just on invitation only, but now more people can go into Bluesky. They&#8217;re still not ready to open source it, but I think they at least open it up.</p>



<p>So now you can have your social embed Bluesky posts as well with the embed block. So make block popover component public, meaning that now developers can also use it. And that is an additional block toolbar that you can use to kind of put your own stuff in there. I&#8217;m not quite, and have your own navigation pretty much in the block toolbar. I really am eager to try that out. I only saw some WooCommerce implementations, but I have not yet seen any documentation about that. So it definitely has the label needs dev note on the PR, but I&#8217;m excited about for any extension that is in the block editor.</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: And the next thing is a new keyboard shortcut was added. This shortcut, which is common G or Ctrl G, you can now create a group from the selected box. So we can select a few blocks and then with the shortcut, the group will be created for the&#8230;</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, that&#8217;s really nice. Yeah, it removes the searching for menu items that are kind of multiple levels deep in the block toolbar settings. The next one is enhanced block outlines and selection interactions. That means that you know where interactions happen, and there&#8217;s a blue outline on certain sections, and group blocks and all that. I think that has been a major improvement on the UI when you create content, that you actually have the outlines where you are and what you&#8217;re doing. I think with the sync patterns, those outlines also become quite important to signal where is the place where I can override some of that from sync pattern.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Documentation</h3>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: In this version of Gutenberg also, the documentation was updated. We have quite a lot of items on the list, but I think it&#8217;s worth mentioning there were some new pages added to the interactivity API documentation about and FAQ. So I think it&#8217;s really important to read about it, as the interactivity API will have become more and more important in themes, especially in theme creation. I think it&#8217;s good to learn about it and I&#8217;m happy that the team provides the documentation for it.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: And I just want to highlight that for the interactivity API, there is some change that in the block JSON, you started to put in view script and that changed to view script module. So for the developers who have already been testing out some of the interactivity API directives, that&#8217;s a slight change. It&#8217;s not a breaking change, because I think they put in the controls, but just make sure that that is something to update. Yeah, that&#8217;s pretty much all I wanted to point out, except I mentioned it before that the pattern overrides, they&#8217;re now using block bindings API. So the pattern overrides are its own source for the block bindings API, but it follows the same block markup notation. So you could use a pattern and rewrite some of the block bindings or some of the overrides in code if you&#8217;ve ever wanted to do that.</p>



<p>But I think it opens up the feature to maybe even be available for themes to add it to the theme patterns in further releases. Not for this one, but because it uses a common API. And if that is already in the markup of a pattern that comes with a theme in the patterns folder, those overrides could even be updated through a theme update or those patterns could even be updated through a theme update. So when the theme developer has a new way of designing those patterns, they could override the certain things and then every site who has that theme gets an update to it. That is actually a dream of a block theme developer right now, but I think with the pattern overrides using that block bindings API, it might come to pass. Definitely not in 6.6, but maybe 6.7 or 6.8. All right, I&#8217;m talking maybe I haven&#8217;t rolled that out, but it&#8217;s definitely on the list or it&#8217;s on the roadmap so to speak, to make those extensible. So we&#8217;ll see how that happens.&nbsp;</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Gutenberg 18.5</h3>



<p>That concludes our Gutenberg 18.4 and we are going right into Gutenberg 18.5 was released this week. The release lead was Vincente Canales with 295 PRs, just short of 300 PRs. That&#8217;s a mammoth release. There were also more contributors, and 71 contributors and 10 of them with first time contributors. So great. It&#8217;s not surprising that there are so many PRs in there, because Gutenberg 18.5 is the last Gutenberg plugin release that goes into WordPress 6.6 from the feature set. So everything after that, and if it&#8217;s a new feature or something that will not be part of WordPress 6.6, only bug fixes get in. So if there was an enhancement that needed to be made and to be valid for 6.6, it needed to get into that plugin release. And as we all know, if it weren&#8217;t for the last minute, not a whole lot would get done in the world, so we were all kind of just in time on some of the features.</p>



<p>And I promise you we would talk about some of the post summary updates. In 18.5, we had quite a few that were the sidebar for the documentation settings, or document settings, or post settings, or page settings. So you get some post format controls. They moved around the URL and the author on it, the trash button has been removed; it was too prominent. It&#8217;s now in the three.menu, where you also find the duplicate post feature and also the remove feature. And then, there is a post sticky setting is now a tarter. Yay. Anything else that if I get something? Oh yeah, the revisions panel is also under the three point menu, so if you want to look at revisions, you need to go three point menu and then click on the revisions. So it&#8217;s all a little bit well organized. Some of them new designs or the alignment was kind of adjusted and some of the features were not removed. They were in the three.menu. I think it&#8217;s important to know that because it looks a little bit different in the new version.</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: Yes, it definitely does. I also checked it out and at first you might be surprised, there is no trash button, there&#8217;s no revisions panel. But yeah, it&#8217;s just hidden under the menu, so it&#8217;s good to know about it. And then the next change in Gutenberg is how the custom CSS is handled, because you can add your custom CSS to override the ones that you can choose from the controls. Before, whenever you change the variation, the style variation, you would lose the changes to custom CSS that you&#8217;ve made. But now they are saved, and so you can switch the variations and your custom CSS will override the variation, the style that is in the variation. So yeah, actually this was needed, so it&#8217;s great.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, I actually don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s an enhancement. I think that&#8217;s a bug fix, because there was pretty much the expectation of anybody who put in custom CSS, that they are not disappearing when you&#8217;re just going to switch on the variations. You can make the argument on the other side as well, but I think the user put in the custom CSS, because neither the theme nor the variations gave them what they needed. So yes, that&#8217;s definitely a good bug fix. I don&#8217;t know if you checked out the data views, just as on our aside, the data views, they&#8217;re really coming together, and I like the modern look of that, and I wish they would come earlier to WPAdmin. But if you go to the make design site, Joen Asmussen just showed off the designs for the media library, and to bring some of that new admin also to the media library.</p>



<p>So they have great things to come. And I am going to share that design share from, I share the link to the design update, but Joen Asmussen in the show notes, so you can look up what&#8217;s in store for the next version or at least for the next time. That was just an aside. Yeah, I like the grid views, I like the layouts, I like the different actions. The only thing that I don&#8217;t like is when you look at the drop-downs in the data views on the right-hand side, they&#8217;re on top. They&#8217;re all kind of overlapping and it&#8217;s hard sometimes to see which one level deep am I looking at now. And for what I think there needs a little bit more refinement, but I think they&#8217;re really glorious.</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: Yes, because there are quite a few options to customize it to your needs. I really like it. I really like it that you can bring the thumbnail featured image to the list. It&#8217;s great. I think it was missing in all the current WPAdmin list, but here you can just switch it on with a click. It&#8217;s great. And also, I think the metadata, I don&#8217;t know if at the moment, but at some point I think it&#8217;ll be able to also switch it on the list view. So yeah, it&#8217;s very useful.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, I&#8217;m really looking forward to what other plugin developers are going to do with it for their own plugins, because of course that&#8217;s a pre-built component. Why not use it, when everybody else knows how to use it already? So use it.</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: But it&#8217;s not ready for extending, right?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, no, well, not as the old admin. If you have in your plugin create a list view of something, some data, like you go out and grab some data from Spotify or something like that, and you want to display that in an admin section, you could use the list view component. That&#8217;s a public component that you could use for that particular plugin page. If you use custom post types, it&#8217;ll still be the old one, because that&#8217;s just the same interface, but because it&#8217;s not yet available for posts, it&#8217;s only for pages. So though there are some things that still need to be happening, of course. But yeah, if you have a separate page for your plugin settings or something like that, use it.</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: You can use the component, yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: You can use the component, yeah. And it has I think some good documentation on these things. Yeah. All right. Where were we, side of the data views?</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: I think we&#8217;re on the background image, add support for relative theme path, URLs, and top level JSON styles.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: What that means is that you can now set a background image for the body content if you want to through the theme JSON, and add it to the assets folder of your theme. And then everybody who uses the theme can use the background image. You don&#8217;t have to upload it through the media library to get it to be recognized as a background image, which is one step further that any theme developer would want the user to have to go. That sounded weird, but yeah. Yeah, you&#8217;ll figure it out. So the next thing is, as we had the default font size spacing in 18.4, I think in 18.5 theme JSON, or it also comes with default spacing sizes. So you can create your own presets for spacing the margins and the dimension, or the dimension controls through the JSON. And it&#8217;s theme JSON version three, so you need to look at the documentation that&#8217;s also been updated.</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: And you can also create and edit shadows in the global styles now. So there is a new control for that, but I must say I haven&#8217;t tested it, so I don&#8217;t really know how it works. But it&#8217;s great to see it, that you can create it in no code in the editor.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: There will be in the global styles, there is now typography, and colors, and layouts, and now you also have a fourth one that&#8217;s called shadows. And then you can log all the things that you want to style on the shadow. It&#8217;s the color, it&#8217;s the angle, it&#8217;s the blur character and that. So you can really create your own styles, and it shows up on every block that supports box shadows, but it&#8217;s not all of them. And then there are presets as well that come in the natural, deep, sharp, so you can give them names as well, and add them to your global styles. So it&#8217;s the position, the blur, and the spread, and outside range set on the shadow. So they will show up with the core shadows, unless you disable the core shadows through the same JSON. So it&#8217;s not entirely, you cannot do this through the interface, but yeah, you can definitely create some nice shadows. It&#8217;s almost as good as gradients.</p>



<p>Yeah, I like all these design tools that you can use. So the block style variations mechanism is now extended, so you can do section styling. I think we mentioned a similar PR earlier today, but you can create sections, and then you can do block style variations for that. Oh yeah, we did this, that you can apply certain styles to multiple blocks. Now you can create sections, and then attach block styles for that. I think we should have better naming conventions, but it&#8217;s what we have right now. We need to make sure, because we have the style variations, we have block style variations, then we have section styling. It&#8217;s all kind of getting a little bit convoluted, complex, but we&#8217;ll figure it all out. I&#8217;m definitely sure that once everything is in place, we can combine it and do it how we need it.</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: And so, the next feature is block bindings, and especially the block bindings panel that is now added to the block inspector. So when you bind certain attributes from the block to the post meta, and then they will show up in the block inspector in the site panel, so that you&#8217;ll know which attributes are connected to the meta. So I think this is really nice, because you get to see what is connected. And before, I think it was only, you can only tell it is binded by the violet like icon, or something like that, by the color, but there was no way of telling what is connected to what. So yeah, that&#8217;s definitely an improvement.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, definitely an improvement. Yeah. Yeah, the icon was that kind of connector icon in purple on the block toolbar, but you only could see that per block. But the bindings panel, you see all the pieces, all the data that is connected to that block. And where it also tells you, because you can, for the block bindings, you can assign custom data sources. So it also adds the data source to the inspector controls. So you know okay, this comes from post meta, this comes from another data source, so that&#8217;s nice too. I really like it. And they also, that comes together with that, allow editing of the post meta source. So if you have a URL somewhere or an additional data point in the block, you can actually change it there. And it&#8217;s also then updated in the post meta table that comes with it. They didn&#8217;t put in a nice video or so they used to do it with the PRs.</p>



<p>Oh, here it is. So now you can edit in the block canvas, change the data, and then it will be updated also throughout every block that uses that metadata for that particular post item. So if you have that binding also for the archive templates, it&#8217;ll also be updated in the archive templates, wherever that particular post meta is showing up. So that&#8217;s a pretty cool feature. I think that is something that was never possible with WordPress until this time, that you can actually have additional custom fields be edited through core. You always needed a plugin for that.</p>



<p>Most developers went with advanced custom fields, but there are also others that allow you that. It&#8217;s certainly not as rich as advanced custom fields. So you can&#8217;t do field groups and all that, but it definitely gets there sooner or later. And I really like it. Yeah, it&#8217;s really cool. That can be, it also an answer to what happens to all the meta boxes that were on the bottom of the screen. So if you bind them to a block, then you don&#8217;t have to create a custom block for that. You just need to create the binding for it. So I think it gets there where a lot of people wanted the block editor to be in year two. Well we are in year, year seven, but they needed a lot of other things to come in place before this happens.</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: But this is such a powerful API, the block bindings API. It&#8217;s also one of the most important APIs that are coming to WordPress right now. And it&#8217;s worth mentioning and it&#8217;s worth getting interested in that and learning how to use it. Especially if we build with blocks, we don&#8217;t really want to have these meta boxes on the bottom of the editor. So this is a great way to get rid of them.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: And also, for plugin developers, that they don&#8217;t need to go through all the hoops to create blocks for some of the things that they could do just in block bindings. There are two articles on the developer blog, one part one and part two, where the block binding has been a tutorial on using the block binding API. And I will share the links to those in the show notes. So Justin Tadlock had one that says, building a review site with block bindings. And the part one covers the custom fields and block variations. Part two will be released later in a couple of days. And that is about how to actually create input things in the inspector controls. So it&#8217;s kind of a predecessor. So if you don&#8217;t want to wait for WordPress six to come out, you can use that variation, but sometimes it might be just more user-friendly to use those inspector controls and control them yourselves, rather than use what comes from the editor.</p>



<p>Of course, we need to find a way if we could actually switch them off at some point. So I&#8217;ll share those articles in the show notes of this podcast. All right, again, a lot of documentation went in this release documentation, updates in this release, it&#8217;s all about components and blocks, and I think they updated the JSON docs for a lot of components. So they actually are automatically graded from for the documentation. So I think these are the changes for that. Check them out. All right. Wow, this was a long show.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Well, it&#8217;s probably about an hour. So I think we come to an end of this show. Magdalena, thank you so much for being here and going through this with me. Explained quite a few things that I didn&#8217;t understand. So I&#8217;m really happy that you joined me today. When people wanted to reach you or connect with you, what would be a good place to catch up with you?</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: I think the best place would be on LinkedIn, because that&#8217;s what I use as social media. I&#8217;m not that active on social media, not like I&#8217;m everywhere. But yeah, if you reach me out on LinkedIn, then I&#8217;ll get the message. Yes.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. So I&#8217;m going to share that information as well in the show notes. Is there anything else that you want our listeners to know about your company, or your presentations, or there&#8217;s an article coming out, I know.</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: Yeah. Well, I need to start writing, but I would like to invite everyone to my talk at WordCamp Europe, happening next week. I&#8217;ll be covering some of the things that we&#8217;ve talked about today, like pattern overrides or block bindings. And also, I&#8217;ll be sharing some of my, I don&#8217;t know, experiments also that I&#8217;ve done with Gutenberg with custom blocks. So I hope this will serve as inspiration of how we might create post types in the future. Maybe we could actually create them now in this new way, a new block way, block editor way, not in the custom fields way we used to do, or how it&#8217;s still popular to create them.</p>



<p>And this talk, I think it&#8217;s mainly, I&#8217;ve made it for people who build websites for clients, so like agencies and freelancers that maybe want to take a look at how you could build this typical for agency websites, in the new approach, like you build it with blocks, with some custom code as well, but in a different way that you would do it with, for example, ACF. So yeah, so I invite everyone. I&#8217;ll be talking I think in the morning on Saturday, on the second day of WordCamp. So I see you in Torino. I&#8217;m super excited.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Right. Yeah. And I&#8217;m definitely going to be there, unless it&#8217;s Saturday, I need to see, I&#8217;m seeing on track one, so I&#8217;m not quite sure if I&#8217;m going to be there. But I will definitely catch it on the rerun through the live stream video. And I will share that also on that particular single post on the Gutenberg times about the WordCamp Europe. So yeah, and I&#8217;ll see everybody who is going to be in Europe and in Turin next week, and I hear the others on the next Gutenberg Changelog podcast.&nbsp;</p>



<p>So as always, the show notes will be published on Gutenbergtimes.com/podcast. This is podcast number 101. And if you have questions or suggestions, or news you want us to include, send them to <a href="mailto:Changelog@Gutenbergtimes.com">Changelog@Gutenbergtimes.com</a>. That&#8217;s <a href="mailto:Changelog@Gutenbergtimes.com">Changelog@Gutenbergtimes.com</a>. And if you like our podcast, please write us a review on any of the podcast directories and it would help for other people to find us. All right, so thank you all so much, and I&#8217;ll see you around next time. Bye-bye.</p>



<p><em>Magdalena Paciorek</em>: Bye.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Sun, 09 Jun 2024 14:13:21 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:18:"Birgit Pauli-Haack";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:14;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:24:"Matt: Cowen Life Lessons";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:23:"https://ma.tt/?p=114806";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:41:"https://ma.tt/2024/06/cowen-life-lessons/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:2452:"<p><a href="https://sriramk.com/">Sriram Krishnan</a> calls Tyler Cowen one of the best talent spotters.</p>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Convinced <a href="https://twitter.com/tylercowen?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@tylercowen</a> is one of the best talent spotters on the internet. <br /><br />You see several remarkable people and Tyler is in there early helping them at a key point in their early life. <br /><br />I’m filled with admiration and jealousy.</p>&mdash; Sriram Krishnan &#8211; sriramk.eth (@sriramk) <a href="https://twitter.com/sriramk/status/1799476976928903607?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 8, 2024</a></blockquote>
</div>



<p>I take a few life lessons from Tyler, who I consider a mentor even though we&#8217;ve spent, at most, dozens of minutes together in the past several decades. (Don&#8217;t constrain your mentors by their availability, engage with their work!)</p>



<ol class="wp-block-list">
<li>He has blogged consistently on <a href="https://marginalrevolution.com/">Marginal Revolution</a> since 2003. As he learns he shares, and that&#8217;s a lighthouse beacon attracting smart people around the world with similar interests. So the lesson is: blog!</li>



<li>He keeps himself open to engagement, with his email address being public. He reads and responds to his own emails.</li>



<li>He treats everyone with with respect. I was a kid no one had heard of when I met him at an economics conference in 2003, but he spoke to me with the same respect and attention he gave to Milton Friedman, <a href="https://ma.tt/2003/10/gallery-10-23-2003/#jp-carousel-24345">who was also there</a>.</li>
</ol>



<p>His advice to me was simple but true: <a href="https://ma.tt/2003/11/a-thousand-resolutions/">Write every morning</a>. Be more ambitious. Because it was coming from him I took it seriously. It&#8217;s all very open source. (I&#8217;m very curious to see how economic theory and open source intersect in the coming years, I think there&#8217;s a lot in the open source world that is novel and useful.)</p>



<p>I&#8217;m inconsistent compared to him in those three things but I look up and aspire to the example he sets, especially within the WordPress community where I keep myself easy to reach on the community Slack or talking to people at WordCamps. (Like <a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/2024/">WordCamp Europe in Turin next week</a>!)</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Sat, 08 Jun 2024 23:35:19 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4:"Matt";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:15;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:140:"Gutenberg Times: WordPress 6.6 Beta 1, Blueprints to power Playground, Block Bindings API tutorial and so much more —  Weekend Edition 295";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:35:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/?p=28681";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:146:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/wordpress-6-6-beta-1-blueprints-to-powered-playground-block-bindings-api-tutorial-and-so-much-more-weekend-edition-295/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:22913:"<p>This weekend, my husband I are traveling to Torino, Italy for work. We&#8217;ll do some sightseeing over the weekend, during the week we&#8217;ll start work as early as possible so we can explore the city some more in the afternoon and evening.  </p>



<p>On Wednesday, I start first meetings around WordCamp Europe. Thursday is Contributor Day and more meetings.  Friday I will head first into the first day of the WordCamp, meeting plenty of friends in the community in the Hallway Track. Saturday morning, I&#8217;ll be the MC in Track 1, then more session and conversations, Mullenweg&#8217;s Summer updated and After Party. Sunday we&#8217;ll head home.  </p>



<p>This weekend edition covers updates from the last three weeks. So it&#8217;s stoke full of great information, tutorials, and videos. You&#8217;ll find below a few plugins for the block editor. </p>



<p>This edition needs to last for two weeks, as the next one (#296) will come out on June 22, 2024. </p>



<p>Until then, hope you have a great start of the Summer or Winter and you can enjoy the time with family and friends. </p>



<p>Yours, 💕<br /><em>Birgit</em></p>



<div class="wp-block-group has-light-background-background-color has-background"><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow">
<p><strong>Table of Contents</strong></p>



<ol><li><a class="wp-block-table-of-contents__entry" href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/wordpress-6-6-beta-1-blueprints-to-powered-playground-block-bindings-api-tutorial-and-so-much-more-weekend-edition-295/#0-word-press-release-information">Developing Gutenberg and WordPress</a><ol><li><a class="wp-block-table-of-contents__entry" href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/wordpress-6-6-beta-1-blueprints-to-powered-playground-block-bindings-api-tutorial-and-so-much-more-weekend-edition-295/#gutenberg-plugin-releases">Gutenberg plugin releases</a></li><li><a class="wp-block-table-of-contents__entry" href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/wordpress-6-6-beta-1-blueprints-to-powered-playground-block-bindings-api-tutorial-and-so-much-more-weekend-edition-295/#upcoming-developer-hours-and-hallway-hangouts">Upcoming Developer Hours and Hallway Hangouts</a></li></ol></li><li><a class="wp-block-table-of-contents__entry" href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/wordpress-6-6-beta-1-blueprints-to-powered-playground-block-bindings-api-tutorial-and-so-much-more-weekend-edition-295/#0-p">Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners</a></li><li><a class="wp-block-table-of-contents__entry" href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/wordpress-6-6-beta-1-blueprints-to-powered-playground-block-bindings-api-tutorial-and-so-much-more-weekend-edition-295/#2-word-press-6-0-1-and-6-1-scheduled">Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks</a></li><li><a class="wp-block-table-of-contents__entry" href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/wordpress-6-6-beta-1-blueprints-to-powered-playground-block-bindings-api-tutorial-and-so-much-more-weekend-edition-295/#3-building-themes-for-fse-and-word-press">Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor. </a></li><li><a class="wp-block-table-of-contents__entry" href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/wordpress-6-6-beta-1-blueprints-to-powered-playground-block-bindings-api-tutorial-and-so-much-more-weekend-edition-295/#wordpress-playground">WordPress Playground</a></li></ol>
</div></div>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="0-word-press-release-information">Developing Gutenberg and WordPress</h2>



<p><a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2024/06/wordpress-6-6-beta-1/"><strong>Beta 1 of WordPress 6.6</strong></a>  was released. The new version entails Gutenberg plugin versions 17.8 to 18.5. Soon we have more information coming out. For now, the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/05/03/roadmap-to-6-6/">Roadmap 6.6</a> post is the closest document to what we will see in the release. </p>



<p>If you want to dive into all the features and enhancements, the fastest way is to heed the call for testing with test instructions for 10 new WordPress features. <strong>Anne McCarthy</strong> put it all together for you in <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2024/06/03/help-test-wordpress-6-6/"><strong>Help test WordPress 6.6</strong></a>. The table of contents allows you to pick your priorities. </p>



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<p>The first Dev Notes for the Field Guide have been published, too. </p>



<p><strong>George Mamadashvili</strong>, core developer sponsored by GoDaddy, explains in his post what plugin developer need to know to <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/06/07/preparation-for-react-19-upgrade/">prepare for the React 19 Upgrade</a>. </p>



<p><strong>Rian Benguella</strong> write about <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/06/06/jsx-in-wordpress-6-6/">JSX in WordPress 6.6</a>. First he explains how to use the new JSX transforms in React and then how to update the build tools to take advantage of this new feature. </p>



<p>In the following weeks there will be more Dev Notes about the new features coming to WordPress 6.6 </p>



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<p>Meanwhile, <a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2024/06/wordpress-6-5-4-maintenance-release/"><strong>WordPress 6.5.4 Maintenance Release</strong></a> was published and if you have automatic updates enabled your sites have already updated. Otherwise updates as soon as  possible. The minor release fixes five Core bugs, among them the plugin redirect fix. </p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="gutenberg-plugin-releases">Gutenberg plugin releases</h3>



<p><strong>Alex Lende</strong> was the release lead for Gutenberg 18.4. The version comprises 185 PRs by 58 contributors, 7 contributors with their first merged PRs. In his post <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/05/23/whats-new-in-gutenberg-18-4-22-may/"><strong>What’s new in Gutenberg 18.4 (22 May)</strong></a>, Lende highlighted:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/05/23/whats-new-in-gutenberg-18-4-22-may/#visualize-grid-layouts">Visualize grid layouts</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/05/23/whats-new-in-gutenberg-18-4-22-may/#group-blocks-shortcut">Group blocks with a keyboard shortcut</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/05/23/whats-new-in-gutenberg-18-4-22-may/#define-custom-aspect-ratio">Define custom aspect ratio presets with theme.json</a></li>
</ul>



<img width="600" height="338" src="https://i0.wp.com/gutenbergtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Aspect-Ratio-600.png?resize=600%2C338&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-28813" />



<p><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/releases/tag/v18.5.0">Gutenberg 18.5</a> was released this week. The release post is still in the works. </p>



<p>My special guest on the Gutenberg Changelog 101st episode, <strong><a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/magdalenapaciorek/">Magdalena Paciorek</a></strong> and I had fun talking through the last three Gutenberg releases as we also covered what will be in WordPress 6.6. I hope you&#8217;ll listen in. It will land in your favorite podcasting app over the weekend. </p>



<a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast"><img width="652" height="186" src="https://i0.wp.com/gutenbergtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Screenshot-2024-06-07-at-16.56.40.png?resize=652%2C186&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-28815" /></a>



<p class="has-accent-color has-light-background-background-color has-text-color has-background has-link-color wp-elements-f177aa95d38cec3bee70ac6dc4e58ab3">🎙️ Latest episode: <a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-100-nasa-wordpress-block-editor/">Gutenberg Changelog #100 – NASA’s New Website – the Switch to WordPress and Block Editor</a> with Stacy Holtz and Gary Kovar, Lone Rock Point</p>



<p><strong>Joen Asmussen</strong> published two updates on the work of the WordPress design team since the last Weekend Edition.</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/design/2024/05/21/design-share-56-may-6-may-17/">Design Share #56 (May 6-May 17)</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/design/2024/06/03/design-share-57-may-20-may-31/">Design Share #57 (May 20-May&nbsp;31)</a></li>
</ul>



<p>In the first post, you can see work in progress about Block Bindings, revamp of Learn.WordPress and update to Openverse design. The second post shows a mockup for the Media library using Dataviews component, UI to control background images and Openverse&#8217;s About page. </p>



<img width="652" height="235" src="https://i0.wp.com/gutenbergtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Media.webp?resize=652%2C235&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-28817" />



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="upcoming-developer-hours-and-hallway-hangouts">Upcoming Developer Hours and Hallway Hangouts</h3>



<p>As I will be traveling again next week, this time to Torino for WordCamp Europe, I did a little research and surface the upcoming Developer Hours session and Hallway Hangout. The difference is that Developer Hours are prepared structured presentations while Hallway Hangout are more informal discussions with lots of input from the attendees. The links lead to the announcement post. Save the Date anyway for those without links, if you are interested. </p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Jun 11,&nbsp;15:00 UTC <a href="https://www.meetup.com/learn-wordpress-online-workshops/events/301323283/"><strong>Developer Hours: Exploring Overrides for Synced Pattern in WordPres 6.6</strong></a></li>



<li>Jun 19 11:00 UTC <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/?p=113345&preview=1&_ppp=bb76cb1d4a"><strong>Hallway Hangout: Theme Building with Playground, Create-block-theme plugin, and GitHub&nbsp;</strong></a></li>



<li>Jun 25, 15:00 UTC <strong><a href="https://www.meetup.com/learn-wordpress-online-workshops/events/301323283/">Developer Hours: What&#8217;s new for theme developers in WordPress 6.6</a></strong></li>



<li>Jun 26 11 am UTC <strong>Hallway Hangout: Grid Layouts for WordPress 6.6</strong></li>



<li>July 2, 2024 15:00 UTC <strong>Developer Hours: Building themes with the Create Block Theme plugin</strong></li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="0-p">Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners</h2>



<p><strong>Rich Tabor</strong> and <strong>Jonathan Jernigan</strong> were contestants at <strong>Jamie Marsland</strong>&#8216;s  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9FCjVifylE">Speed Building Challenge on YouTube</a>. Tabor used a block theme (<a href="https://github.com/Automattic/themes/tree/trunk/assembler">Assembler</a> by Automattic) and the site editor out of the box, while Jernigan used a classic theme <a href="https://generatepress.com/theme/">GeneratePress</a>  to build a landing page by ConvertKit. </p>



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<p><strong>Ryan Welcher</strong> released an update for his <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-query-loop/"><strong>Advanced Query Loop plugin</strong></a>. In version 3.0 it now includes sorting by comment count as well as by postID. &#8220;To mark the occasion, I have just released version 3.0.0 that contains a major overhaul of the codebase to make it easier to extend. Additionally, it adds support for sorting my Comment Count and Included Post Ids.&#8221; <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ryanwelcher_my-advanced-query-loop-plugin-hit-the-1000-activity-7203846707384643584-QwhR?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop">Welcher wrote on LinkedIn </a></p>



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<p>As reported by <span><i>WP </i></span><em>Weekly</em>, <a href="https://x.com/itusharimran"><strong>Tushar Imran</strong></a>, founder and CEO of <a href="https://kodezen.com/">Kodezen</a> and <a href="https://academylms.net/">Academy LMS</a>, from Bangladesh,  released a new block collection plugin via the WordPress repository, called <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/ablocks/"><strong>aBlocks</strong></a>. It&#8217;s a fully functional beta version and offers quite a few customizable blocks, i.e. Container, Divider, or Star Ratings blocks. At its core it offers courses Block that goes well with its Video block for the Academy LMS. </p>



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<p><a href="https://x.com/pedrodntech/"><strong>Pedro Dornelas</strong></a> updated his <a href="https://wpalpha.io/wpalpha-patterns-2/"><strong>free patterns collection</strong></a> at WP Alpha. It now includes 100+ free patterns that work on any WordPress theme. It also offers 10+ full page patterns for a premium. (<em>TY to WPWeekly&#8217;s <a href="https://x.com/idavinder">Davinder Singh Kainth</a></em>)</p>



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<p><a href="https://mastodon.social/@threadi"><strong>Thomas Zwirner</strong></a>, Web developer from Leipzig  released an update of hits <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/download-list-block-with-icons/"><strong>Download List Block plugin</strong></a>. This is quite a unique plugin for a very narrow use case. It provides you with block to build a list of download files and automatically adds icons according to the file types. Users have a choice of three icon set or can upload a custom icon set. It also offers a few options on for the display. It also provides a Live Preview, powered by Playground.</p>



<a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/download-list-block-with-icons/"><img width="652" height="302" src="https://i0.wp.com/gutenbergtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Screenshot-2024-06-08-at-12.34.00.png?resize=652%2C302&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-28832" /></a>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="2-word-press-6-0-1-and-6-1-scheduled">Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks</h2>



<p>The contributor team of the <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/create-block-theme/"><strong>Create Block theme plugin</strong></a> released a new version as well. In version 2.2 you&#8217;ll find, among other updates</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Update modal width to 65vw (#638)</li>



<li>Fixed font utilities to work with font sources as an (optional) array. (#645)</li>



<li>Handle font licenses when editing theme metadata (#649)</li>



<li>Handle font credits in the backend (#647)</li>
</ul>



<img width="600" height="509" src="https://i0.wp.com/gutenbergtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/screenshot-2-web.jpg?resize=600%2C509&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-28819" />



<p><strong>Justin Tadlock </strong>published his <a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/news/2024/06/06/building-a-book-review-site-with-block-bindings-part-2-queries-patterns-and-templates/"><strong>part 2 of Building a book review site with Block Bindings tutorial </strong></a>to tackle queries, patterns, and templates of the new features to extend core Blocks. </p>



<p><strong>&nbsp;<a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/references/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">&#8220;Keeping up with Gutenberg &#8211; Index 2024&#8221;</a>&nbsp;</strong><br />A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test, and Meta team from Jan. 2024 on. Updated by yours truly. The previous years are also available: <strong><strong><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/references/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index-2020/">2020</a>&nbsp;|&nbsp;<a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/references/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index-2021/">2021</a></strong>&nbsp;|&nbsp;<strong><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/references/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index-2022/">2022</a></strong></strong>&nbsp;|&nbsp;<strong><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/references/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index/gutenberg-index-2023">2023</a></strong></p>



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<p><strong>Fränk Klein</strong> contemplates in his post <a href="https://wpdevelopment.courses/articles/pattern-or-post-type/"><strong>Pattern or Post Type: Discover the Best Way to Structure Your Content</strong></a> how the approach to handling different content types has changed from classic to block themes. You can use block patterns to display various kinds of content. Only when you need more data handling power, a custom post type might be needed. <a href="https://wpdevelopment.courses/articles/pattern-or-post-type/">See the post for details</a>. </p>



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<p>With his post <a href="https://kau-boys.com/3643/wordpress/moving-the-sidebar-into-a-theme-pattern"><strong>Moving the sidebar into a theme pattern </strong></a> Bernhard Kau continues to share in on his block theme building journey. </p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="3-building-themes-for-fse-and-word-press">Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor. </h2>



<p><strong>Nate Finch</strong> takes you on the journey on <a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/news/2024/05/22/setting-up-a-multi-block-using-inner-blocks-and-post-meta/"><strong>Setting up a multi-block&nbsp;plugin using InnerBlocks and post meta</strong></a>, a tutorial on how to  use ‘create-block’ to set up a multi-block plugin and create two blocks: a Rating block and a Review Card block.</p>



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<p><strong>Ryan Welcher </strong>took his livestream audience along <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdubKJ7IczI"><strong>Creating a slide deck with the Interactivity API</strong></a> to add transistions. </p>



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</div>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="wordpress-playground">WordPress Playground</h2>



<p>The recording of the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKrij8V3nK0"><strong>Developer Hours: Creating WordPress Playground Blueprints for Testing and Demos</strong></a> is now available on YouTube. Nick Diego and I first discussed what Playground and Blueprints are and then showed some examples from the<a href="https://github.com/WordPress/blueprints/blob/trunk/GALLERY.md"> <em>Blueprint Gallery</em></a> on how to configure Playground for specific use cases. Then I walked the audience through an example from beginning to end: Add a dashboard widget, set permalinks, import prepared content including features images. <a href="https://github.com/bph/hellodashboard/">The code is available on GitHub</a>. </p>





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<p><strong>Nathan Wrigley</strong> interviewed <strong>Adam Zieliński</strong> on <a href="https://wptavern.com/podcast/122-adam-zielinski-on-how-playground-is-transforming-wordpress-website-creation"><strong>How Playground Is Transforming WordPress Website Creation</strong></a>. &#8220;This project really does change the way that WordPress can be used, and there are so many exciting prospects for how it might shape the future of website design and development. If you’re interested in hearing about cutting-edge advancements reshaping the WordPress landscape, this episode is for you.&#8221; Wrigley wrote and it&#8217;s not hyperbole. </p>



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<p><a href="https://x.com/dwinrhys/"><strong>Rhys Wynne</strong></a>, WordPress freelancer from Manchester, England explored <a href="https://dwinrhys.com/2024/05/08/can-wordpress-run-doom-of-course-it-can-heres-how/"><strong>Can WordPress run Doom? (of course it can, here’s how)</strong></a> and share his process to making it work, including his success with blueprints to demo the plugin and the game.</p>



<p><strong><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/need-a-zip-from-master/">Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg&#8217;s master branch?</a></strong><br />Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review. </p>



<p>Now also available via <a href="https://playground.wordpress.net/?blueprint-url=https://gutenbergtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/playnightly.json">WordPress Playground</a>. There is no need for a test site locally or on a server. Have you been using it? <a href="mailto:pauli@gutenbergtimes.com">Email me </a>with your experience</p>



<p><img alt="GitHub all releases" src="https://img.shields.io/github/downloads/bph/gutenberg/total?style=for-the-badge" /></p>



<p class="has-text-align-center has-small-font-size"><em>Questions? Suggestions? Ideas? </em><br /><em>Don&#8217;t hesitate to send <a href="mailto:pauli@gutenbergtimes.com">them via email</a> or</em><br /><em> send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph</em>.</p>



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<p class="has-text-align-center has-small-font-size">For questions to be answered on the <a href="http://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast">Gutenberg Changelog</a>, <br />send them to <a href="mailto:changelog@gutenbergtimes.com">changelog@gutenbergtimes.com</a></p>



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<p>Featured Image: Montreal &#8211; Sunrise from the 20th Floor photo by Birgit Pauli-Haack</p>



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<p class="has-text-align-left"><strong>Don&#8217;t want to miss the next Weekend Edition? </strong></p>


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<hr class="wp-block-separator has-css-opacity is-style-wide" />";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Sat, 08 Jun 2024 11:25:57 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:18:"Birgit Pauli-Haack";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:16;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:65:"Do The Woo Community: And Now, Some Speakers from WordCamp Europe";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=83983";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:63:"https://dothewoo.io/and-now-some-speakers-from-wordcamp-europe/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:88:"Listen in as we hear 11 speakers from WordCamp Europe 2024 invite you to their sessions.";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 07 Jun 2024 07:23:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:17;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:85:"Do The Woo Community: The WordPress Community, Training, and DEIB with Laura Adamonis";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=83970";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:82:"https://dothewoo.io/the-wordpress-community-training-and-deib-with-laura-adamonis/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:126:"Laura Adamonis, a dynamic member of the WordPress community, shares her journey, contributions to training, and DEIB advocacy.";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 06 Jun 2024 09:39:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:18;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:55:"WordPress.org blog: WordPress 6.5.4 Maintenance Release";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:35:"https://wordpress.org/news/?p=17340";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:71:"https://wordpress.org/news/2024/06/wordpress-6-5-4-maintenance-release/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4619:"<p><strong>WordPress 6.5.4 is now available!</strong><br />This minor release features <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/query?status=closed&milestone=6.5.4&group=status&col=id&col=summary&col=owner&col=type&col=priority&col=component&col=version&col=keywords&order=priority">5 bug fixes in Core</a>. You can review a summary of the maintenance updates in this release by reading the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/05/30/wordpress-6-5-4-rc1-is-now-available/">Release Candidate announcement</a>.</p>



<p>WordPress 6.5.4 is a short-cycle release. The next major release will be <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/6-6/">version 6.6</a> planned for July 2024.</p>



<p>If you have sites that support automatic background updates, the update process will begin automatically.</p>



<p>You can <a href="https://wordpress.org/wordpress-6.5.4.zip">download WordPress 6.5.4 from WordPress.org</a>, or visit your WordPress Dashboard, click “Updates”, and then click “Update Now”.</p>



<p>For more information on this release, please <a href="https://wordpress.org/support/wordpress-version/version-6-5-4">visit the HelpHub site</a>.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Thank you to these WordPress contributors</h2>



<p>This release was led by <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/hellofromTonya">Tonya Mork</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/costdev">Colin Stewart</a>, and <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/jorbin">Aaron Jorbin</a>.</p>



<p>WordPress 6.5.4 would not have been possible without the contributions of the following people. Their asynchronous coordination to deliver maintenance fixes into a stable release is a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress community.</p>



<p class="is-style-wporg-props-medium"><a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/jorbin">Aaron Jorbin</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/adrianduffell">adrianduffell</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/azaozz">Andrew Ozz</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/afragen">Andy Fragen</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/beaulebens">Beau Lebens</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/bernhard-reiter/">Bernhard Reiter</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/ironprogrammer">Brian Alexander</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/costdev">Colin Stewart</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/nerrad">Darren Ethier (nerrad)</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/davidbaumwald/">David Baumwald</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/lopo">Enrico Battocchi</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/estelaris/">Estela Rueda</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/johnjamesjacoby">John James Jacoby</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/johnbillion">John Blackbourn</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/desrosj">Jonathan Desrosiers</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/kevinwhoffman">Kevin Hoffman</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/louiswol94">Louis Wolmarans</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/hmbashar">Md Abul Bashar</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/illuminea">Miriam Schwab</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/mukesh27">Mukesh Panchal</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/narenin">Narendra Sishodiya</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/swissspidy">Pascal Birchler</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/peterwilsoncc">Peter Wilson</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/pooja1210">Pooja N Muchandikar</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/mikachan">Sarah Norris</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/coffee2code/">Scott Reilly</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/smub">Syed Balkhi</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/hellofromTonya">Tonya Mork</a></p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">How to contribute</h2>



<p>To get involved in WordPress core development, head over to Trac, <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/report/6">pick a ticket</a>, and join the conversation in the <a href="https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C02RQBWTW">#core</a> and <a href="https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C06U06K50Q5">#6-6-release-leads</a> channels. Need help? Check out the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/">Core Contributor Handbook</a>.</p>



<p class="has-text-align-right"><em>Props to @<a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/afragen/">afragen</a>, @<a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/hellofromtonya/">hellofromtonya</a> , and </em><a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/angelasjin/">@<em>angelasjin</em></a><em> for proofreading.</em></p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 05 Jun 2024 15:57:15 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:12:"Aaron Jorbin";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:19;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:81:"WPTavern: #123 – Jamie Marsland on the WordCamp Europe Speed Building Challenge";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:48:"https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=156141";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:95:"https://wptavern.com/podcast/123-jamie-marsland-on-the-wordcamp-europe-speed-building-challenge";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31023:"Transcript<div>
<p>[00:00:00] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.</p>



<p>Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, a new fun, exciting event happening at WordCamp Europe next week.</p>



<p>If you&#8217;d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcasts players.</p>



<p>If you have a topic that you&#8217;d like us to feature on the podcast, well, I&#8217;m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox and use the form there.</p>



<p>So on the podcast today, we have Jamie Marsland.</p>



<p>Jamie runs a WordPress plugin business, and has recently become a full-time content creator on YouTube. You might know Jamie from his popular WordPress speed builds on that channel, where contestants have just 30 minutes to build a website from scratch.</p>



<p>In this episode, we dive into Jamie&#8217;s involvement with WordCamp Europe, where he&#8217;ll be bringing this speed build format to the live stage. Contestants will race against the clock to recreate a prebuilt website, all while being interrupted with questions from Jamie and the audience.</p>



<p>Jamie shares how this concept evolved from his own website recreations, and how it quickly gained popularity within the WordPress community. He talks about the insights and feedback that both participants and viewers have gained from these speed builds, making it more than just a fun challenge.</p>



<p>We also get into the technical aspects of the competition, including what tools and plugins are allowed, and how the time constraints add both pressure and excitement.</p>



<p>Jamie discusses the importance of bringing more interactive and engaging content to WordCamp events, hoping to make them more dynamic and participatory in the future.</p>



<p>Towards the end we talk about how these speed builds can bring a fresh perspective to the WordPress community, potentially attracting a younger, more diverse audience.</p>



<p>If you&#8217;re attending WordCamp Europe, or you&#8217;re just curious about how WordPress can be made fun and engaging, this episode is for you.</p>



<p>If you&#8217;re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com forward slash podcast, where you&#8217;ll find all the other episodes as well.</p>



<p>And so without further delay, I bring you Jamie Marsland.</p>



<p>I am joined on the podcast again by Jamie Marsland. How you doing, Jamie?</p>



<p>[00:03:12] <strong>Jamie Marsland:</strong> Good morning. I&#8217;m very good.</p>



<p>[00:03:14] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> You are one of the few people that I&#8217;ve had back on, and I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;ve ever had anybody back on quite as quickly as you are. But this is time sensitive, which is not often the case because we&#8217;re going to be talking about something which is going to be featuring in WordCamp Europe, which is happening in the next few days, actually it&#8217;s about 10 days out. Something like that.</p>



<p>Do you want to just introduce yourself to those people who haven&#8217;t come across you before? Although that is now a dying breed of people, I suspect. But do you want to introduce yourself, and give us a little bit of background to this particular topic?</p>



<p>[00:03:46] <strong>Jamie Marsland:</strong> Sure. I&#8217;m Jamie and I run a WordPress plugin business, and that&#8217;s all I do. Oh, and occasionally I do some YouTube videos now, and YouTube&#8217;s kind of taken over. I&#8217;m pretty much full-time content creator, but I do have a plugin business as well. So go and check that out if you&#8217;re listening.</p>



<p>And I&#8217;ve been running these WordPress speed builds on my YouTube channel, and I&#8217;ve run about four or five, I think, so far, where contestants get 30 minutes to basically build a website. So it&#8217;s fast and furious, loads of fun. We get loads of people on the live chat. We&#8217;ve had some real stars of the WordPress space on so far, and it&#8217;s coming to Word, WordCamp Europe next week.</p>



<p>[00:04:23] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> So you are going to be on the stage at WordCamp with, what, two contestants vying to build the exact same thing in a very confined amount of time?</p>



<p>[00:04:33] <strong>Jamie Marsland:</strong> Yeah.</p>



<p>[00:04:33] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Do you basically put a website, a pre-built website from out there on the internet somewhere and say, okay, you&#8217;ve got 30 minutes to make that. Go.</p>



<p>[00:04:42] <strong>Jamie Marsland:</strong> Yeah, exactly. They haven&#8217;t seen it. They see it when we see it on stage, and then they get five minutes to prep then we start the clock, they get 30 minutes to build it whilst at the same time being hassled by me asking lots of extraordinarily stupid questions, and we get people from the crowd asking questions as well.</p>



<p>They&#8217;ve got to build it while actually commentating on what they&#8217;re doing, whilst getting lots of questions from people as well. So it&#8217;s high pressure. It&#8217;s a great format. It&#8217;s a really short and sharp thing to watch.</p>



<p>[00:05:12] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> So did you initially do it as just a bit of fun to create some content and then unexpectedly realized there was some pearls of wisdom to be gained from it?</p>



<p>[00:05:21] <strong>Jamie Marsland:</strong> Yeah, the inspiration came from, &#8217;cause I did, on my YouTube channel for a while, I&#8217;ve been doing website recreations. I&#8217;ve done about 10 or 15 or something. Famous websites I recreate in half an hour. So I&#8217;ve been doing it myself and my channel, just me. And I thought actually this, would be a great format if you had two.</p>



<p>It just popped in my head one day. You put two people actually competing to build exactly the same website in 30 minutes. So I put a tweet out just to gauge, as often do, gauge interest and people were really interested in it. And then I approached Brian Coords and Mike McAllister, two good friends of mine, to see whether they&#8217;d be willing to be the first on the show, and they agreed. They were amazing.</p>



<p>And then we&#8217;ve run about five, I think, so far, with some really famous people in the WordPress space. But it is a very fun format, deliberately fun, and aimed at being fun. But the feedback I&#8217;m getting, especially from people in the WordPress product space, like Ben Ritner from Kadence came on last week.</p>



<p>They find it really useful from a, just a stress testing, product user testing experience to do that. They&#8217;re finding real value in it, over and above just being a fun format. So it&#8217;s a really interesting space. And there&#8217;s lots of ideas I&#8217;ve got of where we could take it next as well.</p>



<p>[00:06:30] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Do you, give them the same WordPress version? What I mean by that is in the five minutes, are they allowed to go and install into their WordPress website a whole collection of plugins, which may make the job them a little bit more straightforward? Or is it vanilla WordPress, core blocks all the way?</p>



<p>[00:06:47] <strong>Jamie Marsland:</strong> Yeah, no, they&#8217;re allowed to do whatever they like. So I do a little bit of prep for them. So for example, for Ben, I installed Kadence and Kadence Pro. Over and above that I don&#8217;t really want to install too much, but they&#8217;re allowed to go off and basically install anything that they like. There&#8217;s no limits on, they can go and use Bricks or Beaver Builder or Elementor, but obviously every time they go off and install a plugin that&#8217;s eating up into their time.</p>



<p>So it&#8217;s a bit of a time penalty every time they want to do that. But there&#8217;s no limits. Once the clock starts, they can do whatever they like.</p>



<p>[00:07:16] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> And I&#8217;m guessing you are not picking, for example, the Google homepage has got one search field and a logo. I&#8217;m guessing that you are trying to get them to do much more complicated things? Loops and all sorts of other things. Just describe the level of complexity. Are you deliberately trying to the most difficult website that you can manage? Lings Cars, for example?</p>



<p>[00:07:37] <strong>Jamie Marsland:</strong> Lings Cars is coming up at some point.</p>



<p>[00:07:40] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Oh, really?</p>



<p>[00:07:40] <strong>Jamie Marsland:</strong> Yeah, it&#8217;s definitely going to come up. Rich Tabor would be, Rich Is coming on this Thursday actually, as well as next week. I mean I just think seeing Rich Tabor with someone with such a defined and beautiful design aesthetic, taking on Lings Cars. It&#8217;s just got to happen at some point. I don&#8217;t think I can stop myself from that happening.</p>



<p>[00:07:57] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> But you are picking a difficult website?</p>



<p>[00:07:59] <strong>Jamie Marsland:</strong> I&#8217;m picking, what I&#8217;m trying to do is a combination of a few things. One famous, so people know it. That&#8217;s not always the case. But also there&#8217;ll be some challenging, and there&#8217;ll be some good learning for people watching it.</p>



<p>So it&#8217;s not just 30 minutes of fun, although it is. Cause a lot of the feedback I get, after the 30 minutes is up, we ask the players to go into the back end of the sites and tell us how they built it. And people love that. They get lots of learning from it.</p>



<p>I try and choose sites which are visually beautiful and interesting, have some challenges, but also there&#8217;s going to be some really good learning for people as well. So those sort of combination of things.</p>



<p>Obviously Lings Cars meets all those criteria anyway, so it&#8217;s right in the sweet spot.</p>



<p>[00:08:38] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> If you haven&#8217;t come across the Lings Cars website, dear listener, please pause the podcast now. Just and Google it. Lings, L-I-N-G-S.</p>



<p>[00:08:47] <strong>Jamie Marsland:</strong> And actually, Lings Cars, has had a lot of people talking about it, because as a piece of design, it has some real. Like I was chatting to Tammie Lister about it the other day. People have written articles about Lings Cars, because it actually works as a piece of design.</p>



<p>It has enormous personality and there&#8217;s no other sites really like it, and it&#8217;s driving a lot of business to them. So, although I scoff about it, it is, as a piece of web design, it&#8217;s very effective.</p>



<p>[00:09:13] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> It&#8217;s a full assault on the senses in every way, it really does demonstrate what&#8217;s possible on the internet.</p>



<p>[00:09:19] <strong>Jamie Marsland:</strong> My accessibility friends don&#8217;t particularly think it&#8217;s great, but it has some issues on that regard.</p>



<p>[00:09:25] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Yeah, I would imagine. So, everybody that you&#8217;re putting against each other. There&#8217;s two people and there&#8217;s you sitting in the middle if you like, and they&#8217;re trying to do things as rapidly as possible. Now, presumably, a lot of muscle memory for them will come in, they&#8217;re just familiar with, okay, I can see that I need to lay out this, I need a sidebar here, and what have you.</p>



<p>Do you get to interrupt and say, wait, hang on, what happened just then? Or do you wait until the 30 minutes is up and then quiz them? Or are you allowed to say just repeat that little bit.</p>



<p>[00:09:54] <strong>Jamie Marsland:</strong> I interrupt continually, &#8217;cause I think that&#8217;s quite interesting. And it puts more pressure on them. And we actually had Nick Diego on a few weeks ago, and he was at, he was answering questions from the live chat about what&#8217;s going on in core at the moment, which is just brilliant.</p>



<p>I have this amazing idea that I think I&#8217;m going to introduce a bit more jeopardy. So halfway through the build, at some point I&#8217;m going to have a siren go off and it&#8217;s going to be a change spec request from the customer or something like that. We suddenly veer off in a different direction. Or the customer says, can you make the logo a little bit or something like that.</p>



<p>[00:10:24] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Can you make it pop?</p>



<p>[00:10:25] <strong>Jamie Marsland:</strong> Can you make it pop? Yeah.</p>



<p>[00:10:27] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Essentially we&#8217;re giggling about this because it feels like a lot of fun. And I do wonder, the reason that you&#8217;ve brought it into WordCamp Europe, do you have an opinion about that in terms of, do you think that the events could do with livening up a little bit? I mean we all talk about how wonderful WordCamps are. I think it&#8217;s fair to say that of us enjoy them when we go there. But do you think they could do with a little bit of excitement, drama, gimmicks, whatever the word is?</p>



<p>[00:10:52] <strong>Jamie Marsland:</strong> Yeah, I mean it&#8217;s not just WordCamp. I think all live events, it&#8217;s like worth thinking about, what can you bring to that event that you can&#8217;t watch online, that you can&#8217;t get if you&#8217;re just sitting at home in your office? And I think events like this, you want to be in the room for an event like this, because there&#8217;s going to be audience participation. To be in the room is going to be a different experience than watching it on your computer screen, because you can watch the live streams.</p>



<p>And I think the more stuff we can bring that to WordCamps, because for me the real value of WordCamps is the people bit, you know, whether it&#8217;s inside or outside. And I think this is going to be highly interactive and fun. So I think, yeah, if we can do more stuff like this, which aren&#8217;t traditional kind of event type things, then that&#8217;d be great. That said, I have no idea how this is going to go. It might be a complete disaster, in which case, we&#8217;ll come back in a month and say, that was a really bad idea.</p>



<p>[00:11:40] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> But you&#8217;re interested in filling up that room, and trying to get people involved. And, is it going to be a bit more pantomime than workshop? In other words, are you hoping that the crowd will, he&#8217;s behind you, that kind of thing? Are you hoping for people to be literally interjecting and yelling out, no, no, no, do it this way, that kind of thing?</p>



<p>[00:11:56] <strong>Jamie Marsland:</strong> Yeah, absolutely. It&#8217;s been a fairly, because I pitched it in, I don&#8217;t know, about a month ago. So it&#8217;s been a fairly, we&#8217;re still working out some technical stuff with the technical team, but, yeah, there&#8217;s going to be music, I hope. And a big part of the online ones is that there&#8217;s a clock constantly ticking down, that people can see the whole 30 minutes, which just ramps up the pressure. So we need to have a big clock on stage and stuff like that.</p>



<p>[00:12:16] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> But the technical aspects, so there&#8217;s going to be three people on the stage, your two contestants, for want of a better word, plus you. How is everybody going to be able to see what they&#8217;re doing? Are you going to have one big screen on one side, and one big screen on the other, showing what your two contestants are actually doing at that moment?</p>



<p>[00:12:32] <strong>Jamie Marsland:</strong> To be decided, at the moment. The backstop is that we do it the same way that I do it online, which is I&#8217;m kind of operating, and I&#8217;m flicking back and forth between the screens. So if we had one screen, it still works, because we can just flick back and forth between, so we can see what Rich is doing, and what Jessica is doing at different times. So ideally we&#8217;d have two screens, but I&#8217;m not sure at the moment whether that&#8217;s technically going to be possible. But we&#8217;ll see. I don&#8217;t know.</p>



<p>[00:12:56] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> So just speak to the actual learning then, because obviously you started this, and it was a little bit of fun. But prior to clicking record, you&#8217;ve said that you&#8217;d had a few people on who did some fairly remarkable things. Not just in terms of the speed with which they could do it, but also presumably fairly creative. Have you managed to get actual learning out of it, not just purely entertainment?</p>



<p>[00:13:16] <strong>Jamie Marsland:</strong> Do you mean me as a WordPress user?</p>



<p>[00:13:18] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Well, yeah. Do you feel like your audience are getting something, or does the format kind of lend itself more to entertainment and less to, I don&#8217;t know, introspection of what they were actually doing?</p>



<p>[00:13:28] <strong>Jamie Marsland:</strong> There&#8217;s definitely more, if you&#8217;re going to have a pie chart, there&#8217;s definitely more entertainment than learning. The learning slice is relatively small, but there is a lot of learning. I was, watching, there was a great episode with Fabian and Kim Coleman, and they were incredibly quick, and a lot of that speed was through shortcuts.</p>



<p>So I suddenly, in my personal WordPress usage, I&#8217;m now using a lot of shortcuts, and that has saved me a whole bunch of time. The last one was Justin Tadlock and Ben Ritner from Kadence, and they were building the Rolling Stone website. There was quite a lot of complexity in the grid layouts. A lot of people wouldn&#8217;t know that stuff, or the feedback I get, don&#8217;t know that stuff is possible, and so I think there&#8217;s loads of learning.</p>



<p>There&#8217;s also loads of learning in terms of what&#8217;s possible in Core, and what&#8217;s possible in add-on plugins like Kadence. That was really interesting to see that direct comparison of Core can do this much, and it&#8217;s because it&#8217;s got a query loop block. But the Kadence query loop block is a lot more advanced. So if you really want to go advanced, then that&#8217;s an interesting comparison to make.</p>



<p>So I think there is lots of learning, and the feedback we get, because we do a washup after the half an hour is up, where we get the players to go into the front end and then the back end, and talk us through how they built it. I think that&#8217;s really interesting.</p>



<p>What they also do is, they always say how they would&#8217;ve done it, not just how they did it, how they would&#8217;ve done it, or how they do it for clients. Because obviously there&#8217;s, nobody&#8217;s building sites in 30 minutes for clients. So there&#8217;s obviously a big gap between the way they do it on the show and the way they do it in their real life. So they&#8217;ll share that, you know, what they would&#8217;ve done, the purest way, I guess.</p>



<p>So it&#8217;s a bit like speed climbing, if you&#8217;ve ever watched that, where you&#8217;ve got the wall really, really, quickly, versus the purest sort of alpine climbing. It&#8217;s a bit like that. But there&#8217;s lots of value in a shorter format.</p>



<p>[00:15:00] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Yeah, just being able to cram that in, and obviously get lots and lots done in a very short space of time, because you&#8217;re highly engaged and highly focused on it. And you&#8217;ve got the competition of beating your opponent. How has that all gone down? You know, because obviously you could get fairly, well, your ego could be wounded, let&#8217;s put it that way. You know, if you really reach a brick wall and you can&#8217;t figure out how to progress. Have you had any of that?</p>



<p>[00:15:20] <strong>Jamie Marsland:</strong> I mean, that&#8217;s one of the most amazing things. I&#8217;m completely in awe of everyone that comes on the show. Completely in awe, because we are having like 128 people watching live, you are a WordPress professional, and yet you are prepared to go on and give it a bash. I think that&#8217;s just an incredible, incredible thing to do. And so I come out and everyone&#8217;s done great so far. And even if they don&#8217;t do great, I think people are enthralled by watching people that will have a go. And the stuff they&#8217;re doing is just incredible.</p>



<p>And these are people that like Ben Ritner&#8217;s the founder of Kadence. He&#8217;s got an incredibly successful business, and yet he&#8217;s coming on for 30 minutes of fun, and we are watching him build a site. And we&#8217;ve had lots of these people that are just the top of the game, like Nick Diego and Brian Coords, and Fabian, Kim, and a Rich Tabor this week. And Jonathan Jernigan, these people are like, these are serious WordPress people, and yet they&#8217;re prepared to come on, and be prepared to fail. Nobody has, but that&#8217;s an incredibly brave thing to do. So I&#8217;m completely in admiration of them.</p>



<p>[00:16:14] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Do you have a winner?</p>



<p>[00:16:15] <strong>Jamie Marsland:</strong> Well, maybe I should do. I haven&#8217;t yet. That was the idea. So in the first few I kind of got the people in the live chat to vote, but a lot of them were just voting for the people they liked. It was a bit like a popularity contest. At the moment it&#8217;s not necessary, because it doesn&#8217;t feel like there is needing to be a winner at the moment. And that&#8217;s not really the idea of it, I don&#8217;t think.</p>



<p>But that said, I can definitely see where I have a day of, like a world championships of speed building, where there is a sponsor, and there is a prize, and it gets a little bit more competitive. To be honest, I&#8217;m just kind of feeling my way in the format. Some people say the format&#8217;s too short, and I understand that viewpoint. But it&#8217;s short deliberately, because it&#8217;s half an hour of people&#8217;s time. It&#8217;s half an hour of fun. And I don&#8217;t want it to be, you know, people&#8217;s time is precious, and I think it&#8217;s good to have time pressure. But the format may change a little bit, but I don&#8217;t foresee it changing a lot of moment. But yeah, no, there&#8217;s no real winners at the moment.</p>



<p>[00:17:06] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Do you think WordPress, the ecosystem of WordPress, and I know that you think about this rather a lot, you know, how WordPress pitches itself into the marketplace of website building, amongst commercial competitors like Wix and Squarespace. Do you think WordPress needs something like this? Does it need a bit of a shot in the arm to make it a bit more fun, interesting, entertaining? Do you feel like projects like this give WordPress a bit of a boost, in a way that it may not have had otherwise?</p>



<p>[00:17:32] <strong>Jamie Marsland:</strong> Oh, I hope so. I do think about this a lot, too much probably. My view on WordPress is it&#8217;s this incredibly beautiful, radical idea that was started 21 years ago, and yet some of the content doesn&#8217;t reflect that always, especially when it&#8217;s compared to its competitors. It&#8217;s almost like, I don&#8217;t want to be too harsh, but some of the content&#8217;s almost like local government type content, in a way. It&#8217;s quite dry and technical. So yeah, I think that there is definitely a space to create some more entertaining type, fun content around WordPress, which has kind of been the rationales of my channel anyway.</p>



<p>[00:18:03] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> I think also we&#8217;re living in an era where, and I don&#8217;t actually have any statistics about this, but it feels like the demographics are skewed towards older rather than younger, in adoption of WordPress. And I don&#8217;t know what the throughput is of teenagers coming in and being interested by it, but in a generation brought up on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, where entertainment really does directly lead to interest in certain things.</p>



<p>So I can just point to my own children and see, absolutely, the straight line that&#8217;s gone from the mobile phone, the silly video that they&#8217;ve watched, into something that they&#8217;re curious about in the real world. We do need things like that because, well, we have to engage them where they are, and if WordPress as a platform wishes to continue, I suspect we are going to have to do more of these kind of entertaining, interesting, engaging pieces of content.</p>



<p>[00:18:50] <strong>Jamie Marsland:</strong> I mean there&#8217;s a shocking stat, which is, because I&#8217;m in a YouTube mastermind group with a few people, and generally the female demographic on YouTube runs about 10% of our audiences. Now, mine&#8217;s just gone up to 20%. If you compare that to, my guess is if you compare that to Wix, or Canva, I know Canva is running about 50% female audience, definitely users.</p>



<p>So just from a purely kind of selfish market point of view, WordPress has a big, and I&#8217;m not talking about equality here, I&#8217;m just talking about if you were trying to reach a market, WordPress has some big challenges in terms of its aging demographic, and its male, female split for sure.</p>



<p>[00:19:25] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> So tell us when it&#8217;s happening, because I suspect a few people listening to this. We&#8217;re going to try to push this out. It&#8217;ll come out hopefully before the event, but let&#8217;s just imagine a worst case scenario, I fail to do that, and it comes out after the event. But nevertheless, tell us what day it&#8217;s on, and if you are in Turin or Torino for WordCamp Europe, when is it happening? What time?</p>



<p>[00:19:44] <strong>Jamie Marsland:</strong> Okay, yep. So we&#8217;re on June the 14th at 5:00 PM, and we&#8217;re in track three, which is hall one. So please everyone, come along, pack out the room. It&#8217;s going to be loads of fun to finish the day.</p>



<p>[00:19:56] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> If this ends up being really, really popular, you are going to be the one event that nobody wants to be in the speaker lineup at the same time as. It would be a little bit like if we put you on at the same time as Matt Mullenweg&#8217;s closing address. You can be fairly confident that the, you know, lots of people are going to go in that direction, yeah.</p>



<p>[00:20:12] <strong>Jamie Marsland:</strong> If it okay as well, I&#8217;m hoping that they&#8217;ll invite me on all the WordCamps around the world, and this will be part of the, I mean, wouldn&#8217;t that be great.</p>



<p>[00:20:18] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Part of the gimmick, yeah. Part of the infrastructure. That would be really nice. Okay, Jamie, we&#8217;ve managed to get to about 22 or three minutes there. Is there anything you want to add before we knock it on the head?</p>



<p>[00:20:27] <strong>Jamie Marsland:</strong> We probably haven&#8217;t mentioned who&#8217;s actually on it, which is Rich Tabor and Jessica Lyschik, are going to be the two players. So again, an epic battle. We&#8217;ve got male, female, we&#8217;ve got Europe, USA. What else do you want in 45 minutes of fun?</p>



<p>[00:20:41] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Honestly, it sounds like real entertainment. I hope that it goes well, that there&#8217;s no technical gremlins, and that you manage to get through it all, and that it&#8217;s an enjoyable experience for you, as well as the audience.</p>



<p>[00:20:52] <strong>Jamie Marsland:</strong> Honestly, there&#8217;s so many moving parts. It&#8217;s like juggling while trying to write a speech, and a lot going on.</p>



<p>[00:20:56] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Well, very best of luck. Congratulations for getting this into WordCamp, and hopefully you&#8217;ll do many more online in the near future too.</p>



<p>[00:21:03] <strong>Jamie Marsland:</strong> Cool. Thank you.</p>
</div>



<p>On the podcast today we have Jamie Marsland.</p>



<p>Jamie runs a WordPress plugin business and has recently become a full-time content creator on YouTube. You might know Jamie from his popular WordPress speed builds on that channel, where contestants have just 30 minutes to build a website from scratch.</p>



<p>In this episode, we dive into Jamie’s involvement with WordCamp Europe, where he will be bringing this speed build format to the live stage. Contestants will race against the clock to recreate a pre-built website, all while being interrupted with questions from Jamie and the audience.</p>



<p>Jamie shares how this concept evolved from his own website recreations and how it quickly gained popularity within the WordPress community. He talks about the insights and feedback that both participants and viewers have gained from these speed builds, making it more than just a fun challenge.</p>



<p>We also get into the technical aspects of the competition, including what tools and plugins are allowed, and how the time constraints add both pressure and excitement. Jamie discusses the importance of bringing more interactive and engaging content to WordCamp events, hoping to make them more dynamic and participatory in the future.</p>



<p>Towards the end, we talk about how these speed builds can bring a fresh perspective to the WordPress community, potentially attracting a younger, more diverse audience.</p>



<p>If you&#8217;re attending WordCamp Europe or you&#8217;re just curious about how WordPress can be made fun and engaging, this episode is for you.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Useful links</h2>



<p><a href="https://www.pootlepress.com/">Jamie&#8217;s plugin business</a></p>



<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/JamieMarsland/videos">Jamie&#8217;s YouTube Channel</a></p>



<p><a href="https://www.kadencewp.com/kadence-blocks/">Kadence Blocks</a></p>



<p><a href="https://bricksbuilder.io/">Bricks</a></p>



<p><a href="https://www.wpbeaverbuilder.com/">Beaver Builder</a></p>



<p><a href="https://elementor.com/">Elementor</a></p>



<p><a href="https://www.lingscars.com/">Lings Cars website</a></p>



<p><a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/2024/session/gutenberg-speed-build-challenge/">Gutenberg Speed Build Challenge: A Web Design Duel!</a> at WordCamp Europe 2024</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 05 Jun 2024 14:00:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"Nathan Wrigley";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:20;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:54:"Gravatar: Maximize Engagement with Profile Page Design";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:32:"http://blog.gravatar.com/?p=1496";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:64:"https://blog.gravatar.com/2024/06/05/user-profile-page-examples/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:20154:"<p>Everyone is unique, and our uniqueness is what makes the internet a great (admittedly, sometimes wild!) place. One way users can express individuality on your site is through profile pages, which gives them control over their online information and presentation.</p>



<p>When designing user profiles for your websites or web apps, it&#8217;s important to create a clean and user-friendly design. Profile pages are the first point of interaction, setting the tone for the overall experience. A well-designed profile page enhances user satisfaction by providing easy navigation and interaction. It also boosts retention rates by making users feel valued and understood.</p>



<p>Let&#8217;s explore the important elements of a well-designed profile page, check out some examples, and see how <a href="https://gravatar.com/">Gravatar</a> can make things easier!</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Essential components of your website’s profile page design</strong></h2>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Profile picture or avatar</strong></h3>



<img width="660" height="427" src="https://blog.gravatar.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/image.jpeg?w=660" alt="Upload a profile picture" class="wp-image-1499" />



<p>Allowing users to upload a profile picture is the easiest and most basic way to start a profile page. A profile picture lets someone establish their identity on your website and helps users feel more connected to the platform and each other.&nbsp;</p>



<p>To maintain consistency, provide guidelines for acceptable image sizes and resolutions. For example, a standard size of 400&#215;400 pixels at 72 DPI is usually sufficient. Ensure content is relevant and follows community standards. A reporting system can create a safe and respectful environment instead of approving profile pictures one by one. This method combines effective moderation with community empowerment.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Name and username</strong></h3>



<img width="660" height="428" src="https://blog.gravatar.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/image-1.jpeg?w=660" alt="Insert your own name" class="wp-image-1500" />



<p>Deciding whether to display the user&#8217;s real name, username, or both is an important aspect of profile page design. This decision impacts personal branding and privacy. For instance, using real names can enhance authenticity, which is beneficial for professional networking. On the other hand, usernames might be better for privacy, making them suitable for social or gaming communities.</p>



<p>Implement validation rules to make sure usernames are appropriate, unique, and memorable. Consider constraints like minimum and maximum character limits, prohibition of offensive terms, and the inclusion of alphanumeric characters only.</p>



<p>For example:&nbsp;</p>



<p><img src="https://s0.wp.com/wp-content/mu-plugins/wpcom-smileys/twemoji/2/72x72/2705.png" alt="✅" class="wp-smiley" /> Allow usernames like LucyMcMuppet</p>



<p><img src="https://s0.wp.com/wp-content/mu-plugins/wpcom-smileys/twemoji/2/72x72/274e.png" alt="❎" class="wp-smiley" /> Prevent usernames like LucyXoXoMcMup&lt;3</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Bio section</strong></h3>



<img width="660" height="426" src="https://blog.gravatar.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/image-2.jpeg?w=660" alt="Bio section " class="wp-image-1501" />



<p>A bio section allows users to introduce themselves, share their interests, or provide a brief professional background. This section adds a personal touch and can be a great way to build connections.&nbsp;</p>



<p>To maintain consistency and readability, consider implementing character limits (e.g., 150-300 characters) and providing basic formatting options like bold or italic text. This ensures bios are concise and informative without overwhelming the reader.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Interests or skills</strong></h3>



<p>Including fields for users to list their interests, skills, or expertise enhances the social aspect of your platform by facilitating connections based on common interests. Implement a system that allows users to select from predefined categories or add custom tags to their profiles. This helps users express themselves and makes it easier for others to find and connect with them based on shared interests or skills.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Contact information</strong></h3>



<img width="660" height="459" src="https://blog.gravatar.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/image-3.jpeg?w=660" alt="Contact information button" class="wp-image-1502" />



<p>Allow users to provide contact information, such as an email address or social media handles, to enable communication and networking opportunities.</p>



<p>For instance, users should be able to choose whether their email is visible to everyone, only to connections, or kept private. This flexibility helps users feel secure and in control of their information.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Other design elements to make your user profile pages stand out</strong></h2>



<p>Incorporating various elements can significantly enhance user experience and engagement when designing user profile pages. However, it&#8217;s important to note that these features are unnecessary for <em>every </em>profile template. Choosing to incorporate them depends on the specific kind of website you&#8217;re building and the level of interaction between users.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Work information</strong></h3>



<p>Incorporating sections for users to show their professional experience, skills, and achievements adds depth to user profiles. Features like timelines, bullet points, or multimedia elements make work history engaging and easy to read.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Timelines help visualize career progression, while bullet points highlight skills and achievements succinctly. Multimedia elements, such as videos or project images, provide a richer context and make profiles more dynamic.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Verified accounts and essential links</strong></h3>



<p>Giving users the choice to show badges or indicators for verified accounts boosts credibility and trust. Verification can involve confirming emails or integrating with social media accounts. For instance, users can link their profile to their <a href="https://www.facebook.com/">Facebook</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/?lang=en">X/Twitter</a>, or <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/learning">LinkedIn</a> accounts, which helps verify their identity through these established platforms. This assures other users of their authenticity and adds an extra level of security.</p>



<p>Create a system for users to include significant links, such as personal websites, portfolios, or relevant external resources. Using icons or logos to represent various types of links or verified accounts ensures they are easily recognizable and visually appealing.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Customization options</strong></h3>



<p>Customization options allow users to personalize the look and feel of their profile pages, increasing their sense of ownership and satisfaction. Let users choose color schemes, layouts, or background images while ensuring these options align with your website&#8217;s overall branding and design guidelines.&nbsp;</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Multimedia elements</strong></h3>



<p>Incorporate features that let users display their work, portfolios, or media files directly on their profile pages. This is particularly valuable for creative professionals who want to display their projects.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Make sure that these multimedia elements are optimized for fast display and loading times to maintain a smooth user experience. Use responsive design principles to ensure that multimedia content looks good on all devices.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Privacy and security settings</strong></h3>



<p>With <a href="https://www.nortonlifelock.com/us/en/newsroom/press-kits/2022-norton-cyber-safety-insights-report-special-release-online-creeping/">85% of adults</a> worldwide eager to take additional steps in protecting their online privacy, it’s important to ensure that settings are in place so users can control the visibility of their contact details. Implement granular privacy settings that enable users to control the visibility of their profile information to different user groups or the public.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Follow best practices for data security and privacy to protect user information. This includes using secure protocols for data transmission, regularly updating your security measures, and being transparent about data use policies.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Examples of websites with stunning user profile page design</strong></h2>



<p>If you&#8217;re looking for some inspiration for beautifully designed user profiles, these websites are great examples. Let’s take a look so you can gather ideas to build a standout profile page template on your own platform.&nbsp;</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Gravatar</strong></h3>



<img width="660" height="403" src="https://blog.gravatar.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/image.png?w=660" alt="Gravatar homepage" class="wp-image-1503" />



<p><a href="https://gravatar.com/">Gravatar</a> is an online profile management system widely used by platforms like <a href="http://wordpress.com">WordPress.com</a>, <a href="https://github.com/">GitHub</a>, and <a href="https://slack.com/intl/en-gb">Slack</a>. It is a central hub for users to manage their online identity, adding essential information such as their name, location, bio, work details, connected accounts, important links, and contact information.</p>



<img width="660" height="259" src="https://blog.gravatar.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/image-1.png?w=660" alt="Contact information in Gravatar" class="wp-image-1505" />



<p>Gravatar profiles form the basis of users&#8217; online identities, enabling integration across various websites. When a user with a Gravatar profile signs up on an integrated site, their profile information is automatically imported, streamlining the registration process. This integration allows websites to design user profiles around Gravatar’s template, customizing it as needed by removing unnecessary elements.</p>



<img width="660" height="307" src="https://blog.gravatar.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/image-2.png?w=660" alt="Customization in Gravatar" class="wp-image-1506" />



<p></p>



<p>Simplifying profile management, Gravatar allows users to update their profile image and information from a single location, with changes reflected across all integrated platforms. This ensures consistency and saves users the hassle of updating multiple profiles.</p>



<img width="660" height="357" src="https://blog.gravatar.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/image.gif?w=660" alt="Profile hovercards with Gravatar" class="wp-image-1507" />



<p></p>



<p>As a platform, Gravatar continually redefines user profile design with innovative features like the <a href="https://blog.gravatar.com/2023/10/02/new-gravatar-hovercards-faster-open-source-and-everywhere/">hovercard feature</a>, available on platforms like WordPress.com and <a href="https://jetpack.com/">Jetpack</a>. Hovercards provide a quick preview of a user&#8217;s profile information when hovering over their Gravatar image, enhancing user interaction and engagement. This feature is one of many that shows how Gravatar pushes the boundaries of profile design, offering a dynamic user experience.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>WordPress.com</strong></h3>



<img width="660" height="404" src="https://blog.gravatar.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/image-3.png?w=660" alt="Michelle Kogan WordPress.com page" class="wp-image-1508" />



<p></p>



<p><a href="http://wordpress.com">WordPress.com</a> user profiles are both functional and customizable, catering to the diverse needs of its users. These profiles allow individuals to manage their personal information, profile pictures, and biographical details easily. Effortlessly integrated into the WordPress ecosystem, these profiles enable users to show their blog posts, comments, and other activities cohesively.</p>



<p>The design of WordPress.com profiles is clean and user-friendly, ensuring easy navigation and updates. Users can quickly access and modify their information, making the experience smooth and efficient. WordPress.com also supports the addition of custom fields through plugins or custom code, allowing for further personalization and detailed data collection. This flexibility allows users to create profiles that truly reflect their unique identities and interests, enhancing the overall user experience on the platform.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Dribbble</strong></h3>



<img width="660" height="401" src="https://blog.gravatar.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/image-4.png?w=660" alt="Adam Quest Dribbble profile" class="wp-image-1509" />



<p></p>



<p><a href="https://dribbble.com/">Dribbble</a>&#8216;s user profiles have been designed to show off the creative work of designers through &#8220;shot&#8221; thumbnails. These profiles are aesthetically pleasing and highly functional, presenting a designer&#8217;s portfolio in an engaging and easily navigable format. Each profile includes statistics, such as the number of likes, views, and comments on their shots, providing insights into the popularity and reach of their work.</p>



<p>Dribbble profiles also highlight a user&#8217;s skills and include links to external sites, such as personal portfolios or social media accounts. Dribbble is great for those within the design niche looking to network and get their name out there.&nbsp;</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Behance</strong></h3>



<img width="660" height="381" src="https://blog.gravatar.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/image-5.png?w=660" alt="Arushie Wing Behance profile" class="wp-image-1510" />



<p></p>



<p>Like Dribbble, <a href="https://www.behance.net/">Behance</a>&#8216;s user profiles are tailored for creative professionals who want to display portfolios and individual projects. These profiles provide a platform for artists, designers, and other creatives to present their work in an aesthetic and organized way. Each profile features a gallery of projects, allowing users to explore an artist&#8217;s body of work easily.</p>



<p>Behance profiles include detailed statistics, such as the number of views, appreciations, and comments on each project. This data offers valuable insights into the engagement and popularity of the user’s work. Another standout feature is the customizable cover image, which allows users to add a personal touch to their profile and make it visually distinctive.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>GitHub</strong></h3>



<img width="660" height="402" src="https://blog.gravatar.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/image-6.png?w=660" alt="Kedasha Kerr GitHub profile" class="wp-image-1511" />



<p></p>



<p><a href="https://github.com/">GitHub</a>&#8216;s user profiles are catered to developers, providing a clear and straightforward layout to show their contributions, repositories, and activity. Each profile offers a view of a developer&#8217;s work, highlighting their coding projects, collaborations, and overall engagement within the GitHub community.</p>



<p>Features of GitHub profiles include the ability to display followers and following counts, which creates a sense of community and allows users to connect with peers and industry leaders. Additionally, developers can pin their favorite or most significant repositories to their profile, making it easy for visitors to see their best work at a glance.</p>



<p>This structured and minimalistic approach ensures that the focus remains on the code and contributions, providing a valuable tool for the coding community to share their work, track their progress, and engage with other developers. The simplicity and efficiency of GitHub profiles make them a powerful resource for showing technical skills and building professional connections.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Medium</strong></h3>



<img width="1233" height="605" src="https://blog.gravatar.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/image-7.png" alt="Scott Lamb Medium profile " class="wp-image-1516" />



<p></p>



<p><a href="https://medium.com/">Medium</a>&#8216;s user profiles are centered around the content created by the user, prioritizing the display of published articles, claps (similar to likes), and followers. The design ethos is minimalist, focusing on readability and content discovery.</p>



<p>Each Medium profile is a curated collection of the user&#8217;s writing, providing readers with easy access to their articles and insights. The clean layout and typography enhance readability, ensuring that the focus remains on the content itself.</p>



<p>By prominently featuring metrics such as claps and followers, Medium profiles offer writers a way to gauge the reception and impact of their work within the Medium community. This feedback loop encourages writers to create engaging content while creating a sense of community and interaction among readers.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Spotify</strong></h3>



<img width="660" height="542" src="https://blog.gravatar.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/image-4.jpeg?w=660" alt="James Vickery Spotify profile " class="wp-image-1513" />



<p></p>



<p><a href="https://open.spotify.com/">Spotify</a> profiles provide a dynamic and interactive platform for users to share their love of music, connect with friends, and discover new artists and songs. Its user profiles offer a preview of users&#8217; music tastes and listening habits, showing their top artists, recently played tracks, and public playlists. The design aesthetic is modern and sleek, with a strong emphasis on music imagery that creates a personalized experience.</p>



<p>The design prioritizes music imagery, with vibrant album artwork and artist photos all over the profile. This visual emphasis creates an immersive user experience, making the profile a reflection of the user’s musical identity.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Take your user profiles to the next level with Gravatar integration</strong></h2>



<p>As we&#8217;ve seen, user profile design plays a super important role in shaping the overall user experience and creating engagement on your platform. By taking user profile design seriously, you can create a more personalized and immersive experience for your users.</p>



<p>By integrating Gravatar, you can:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Centralize profile management</strong>: Users can manage their profile information in one place, and updates are reflected wherever their Gravatar is used. This ensures consistency and saves time.</li>



<li><strong>Streamline profile creation</strong>: New users can quickly set up their profiles by importing their Gravatar information, reducing the friction often associated with the initial sign-up process.</li>



<li><strong>Enhance user experience</strong>: Consistent and recognizable profile images contribute to a great user experience across different applications and platforms.</li>
</ul>



<p>Using the Gravatar API for importing profile data helps establish attractive and consistent profile designs. This improves the overall look of your application and guarantees the accuracy of profile information.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Gravatar&#8217;s profile integration is already revolutionizing user profile design for leading websites such as <a href="https://pocketcasts.com/">Pocket Casts</a> and WordPress.com. These platforms use Gravatar&#8217;s features to enhance user engagement and provide a more dynamic profile experience to users worldwide.</p>



<p>Join the thousands of people customizing their unique profiles today with <a href="https://docs.gravatar.com/">Gravatar</a>!&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 05 Jun 2024 13:01:22 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:11:"Ronnie Burt";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:21;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:66:"Akismet: Lead Generation Forms — 25 Best Practices with Examples";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"http://akismet.com/?p=283968";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:47:"https://akismet.com/blog/lead-generation-forms/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:39086:"<p>The purpose of a lead generation form is to collect information from people who have the potential to become customers. Seems simple enough, right?&nbsp;</p>



<p>Well, if you’ve spent any time trying to make this work, you’ve discovered it’s not so simple. People have become quite familiar with filling out online forms. And, they’ve become more wary about giving away their information.&nbsp;</p>


<p>Those two realities need to guide your thoughts and decisions about how to create and use lead generation forms on your website. People today are more suspicious about online activity than they were 15 years ago, and they are more demanding of what a “good” lead generation form will do and how it will&nbsp;work.</p>

<p>The good news is, companies and website owners also have access to at least two decades of A/B testing data on thousands of websites, plus lots of real&#8209;world experience. So we’ve learned a few things, and there’s a robust body of knowledge about how to create high&#8209;converting lead generation forms. When implemented correctly, these tactics minimize the number of people who turn away for avoidable&nbsp;reasons.</p>

<p>With that in mind, let’s look at 25 lead generation form best&nbsp;practices.</p>


<span id="more-283968"></span>


<h2 id="1-keep-it-short-and simple" class="wp-block-heading">1. Keep it short and&nbsp;simple</h2>


<p>Short is good.&nbsp;</p>



<p>And short applies to all aspects of the lead generation form. Fewer fields to fill out makes for a shorter form. Less text in the headline makes the form look shorter, and makes it easier to digest in a single glance. Shorter call-to-action buttons tend to work better than longer ones.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Of course, there’s more to all of these aspects than just the length. Testing matters. The point here is, only include in your form what you need to include. Cut the excess. Trim the fat. Discard the non-essentials.&nbsp;</p>


<p>In other words, keep it simple. Short is good. Simple is better. Sometimes simple might mean a slightly longer lead generation form. But whatever results in the easiest possible user experience is probably the better way to&nbsp;go.</p>

<h2 class="wp-block-heading">2. Use a benefit&#8209;oriented&nbsp;headline</h2>

<p>The worst kinds of headlines on lead generation forms say some variation of&nbsp;this:</p>

<p>“Join our newsletter!” The exclamation point isn’t going to make the difference&nbsp;here.</p>

<p>In all seriousness, if the rest of your website is doing its job, some people will join your email list and fill out your forms even with a generic headline like this. But more people will respond if you write a headline on your form that provides a benefit for filling it&nbsp;out.</p>

<p>Some companies hear this, and they change their headline to “Join our newsletter to stay updated,” or “Get the latest news — join our email&nbsp;list.”</p>

<p>You can do&nbsp;better.</p>


<p>What are the real benefits to filling out your form? Since most forms connect people to your email list, we’re using that as the example for most of these tips. But some forms have other purposes, like registering for a webinar, getting notified when a new product’s released, or becoming a member.&nbsp;</p>


<p>Whatever the purpose of your lead generation form, spell out a key benefit in the headline. Promise something your target audience will want. For&nbsp;example:</p>


<ul class="wp-block-list"><li>Stay ahead of the stock gurus when you join our&nbsp;newsletter</li>

<li>Become a master gardener with weekly&nbsp;emails</li>


<li>Get exclusive email-only deals&nbsp;</li>
</ul>


<p>You can also include the benefit in the name of your newsletter. Give your email subscriber list a cool name that will resonate with your target audience. It’s no longer just your “email list” or “newsletter” anymore. Now, it’s The Market Leader’s Daily Tips, The Weekly Green Thumb, or the VIP Insider&nbsp;Track.</p>


<p>Those are just quick examples, of course. You can probably do even better. But your target audience will respond more favorably and in greater numbers to a cleverly-named email list. It feels more unique, tailored to them, original, desirable, established, and credible.&nbsp;</p>


<h2 id="3-include-a-clear-value proposition" class="wp-block-heading">3. Include a clear value&nbsp;proposition</h2>


<p>The value proposition is similar to a benefit, except now it’s one of your foundational attractions to your target customers and leads.&nbsp;</p>


<p>You’re promising to solve a problem they care about, answer questions that matter to them, or deliver an outcome they desire, and you’re doing this by spelling out exactly what they get for filling out your&nbsp;form.</p>


<p>One great way to do this is to offer something tangible in exchange for joining your email list. This could be a PDF like an eBook or a special report that delivers an instant reward of great value. It could be a special coupon or offer for new customers. Find something your target audience desires, and give it to them as a reward.&nbsp;</p>



<p>You can also make a promise, without taking it too far. For example, Get Daily Writing Tips to Become a Best-Selling Author.&nbsp;</p>



<p>In that example, the value proposition is right in the headline —&nbsp;it’s the thing that your target audience wants most.&nbsp;</p>


<p>If it’s a webinar, specify that signing up reserves their spot, and include a core value proposition that the webinar will deliver. If it’s a free course, say when they have access to the course. If it’s a coupon, say when the coupon becomes active — “Sign up and save 20%&nbsp;instantly”.</p>

<h2 class="wp-block-heading">4. Feature action&#8209;oriented&nbsp;language</h2>

<p>If you look back over the examples from the previous sections, you’ll notice lots of active&nbsp;verbs:</p>


<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Sign up</li>



<li>Get&nbsp;</li>



<li>Access</li>



<li>Stay ahead</li>



<li>Become</li>
</ul>



<p>You want your leads to do something, take action, seize the moment, grab the benefit, take a chance, be the first. Action-oriented language is more compelling, especially in your call-to-action buttons, but also in your headlines and subheadings if you use one.&nbsp;</p>


<h2 id="5-use-contrasting colors" class="wp-block-heading">5. Use contrasting&nbsp;colors</h2>

<p>So far, we’ve been talking mostly about the text and content, as well as the offer you’re making to your prospects when they fill out your lead generation&nbsp;form.</p>

<p>But design matters, too. Contrasting colors get more attention than colors that blend in with the rest of your website. Online forms have become commonplace, and it’s very, very easy to gloss over them and not even notice. They blend in with the background noise we’re all used to&nbsp;seeing.</p>


<p>Your lead generation forms need to stand out from the surrounding colors. You may have rarely used, but still approved, accent brand colors in your guidelines. This is the time to use them.&nbsp;</p>


<h2 id="6-avoid captcha" class="wp-block-heading">6. Avoid&nbsp;CAPTCHA</h2>

<p>CAPTCHA is a form&#8209;conversion destroyer. <a href="https://medium.com/rareview/why-your-captcha-is-killing-conversions-f9be6fe17d1f">One study found</a> that an astonishing 30% of visitors abandon lead generation forms because of&nbsp;CAPTCHA.</p>


<p>That’s serious short-term revenue if your lead generation tool incentivizes an immediate purchase. And it’s serious long-term revenue if your leads turn into repeat customers with high lifetime value.&nbsp;</p>



<p>The problem is, you don’t want hordes of bots and scammers filling out your forms and gumming up your database with non-leads. That just annoys your sales team, when they first glance at the database and see 200 new leads, only to discover that 160 of them are spammers.&nbsp;</p>


<p>A better&nbsp;way?</p>

<p>Use<a href="https://akismet.com/features/"> Akismet, a frictionless solution</a> that blocks spam form submissions using an ever&#8209;growing AI&#8209;guided database of IP addresses, email addresses, words, and names. To date, this powerful <a href="https://akismet.com/blog/captcha-alternatives/">alternative to CAPTCHA technology</a> has blocked over 500 billion spam submissions.&nbsp;</p>


<img width="1600" height="648" src="https://akismet.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/image-7.png" alt="stats about Akismet spam" class="wp-image-283970" />



<p>Plans are <a href="https://akismet.com/pricing/">competitively priced</a> (especially when you understand their instant positive impact on your bottom line) and Akismet also has an <a href="https://akismet.com/enterprise/">enterprise version</a> for larger companies.&nbsp;</p>


<h2 id="7-include-social proof" class="wp-block-heading">7. Include social&nbsp;proof</h2>


<p>Remember, you want to keep your lead generation forms short and simple. But you also want people to fill them out. Social proof is a powerful tool because it motivates and reassures at the same time.&nbsp;</p>


<p>For lead generation forms, the best testimonials will be short sentences, even just a few words or excerpts from longer ones. And as for placement, they work best near the call to action (CTA) button. Anyone hovering in that area has filled out the form and is now deciding whether to actually click the&nbsp;button.</p>


<p>Effective social proof can help push them to take action.&nbsp;</p>


<h2 id="8-add-trust signals" class="wp-block-heading">8. Add trust&nbsp;signals</h2>


<p>With so much spam and cybercrime, establishing trust online has become harder. There are some trust signals you can employ that reassure potential leads that you are a legitimate business or organization.&nbsp;</p>


<p>The most common trust signals include security certifications and noticeable privacy&nbsp;policies.</p>


<p>A security certification is typically just the logo of whatever online security or malware protection service you might be using. Most such services include a logo as part of their service for exactly this reason, and because it serves as marketing for them.&nbsp;</p>


<p>And privacy policies serve as a confirmation that your company cares about the data of customers and leads. Few people will read your policy, so for most leads, the mere display of one accomplishes the goal of increasing trust in the reliability of your lead generation&nbsp;form.</p>

<h2 class="wp-block-heading">9. Ensure&nbsp;mobile&#8209;friendliness</h2>


<p>By this point in the digital age, this should go without saying. But make sure your lead generation forms look right and function well on mobile devices. In addition, make sure the web pages on which they appear function, too.&nbsp;</p>


<p>You need the lead gen form to show up on the mobile device in the appropriate place and at the appropriate time. It is a featured asset, not just background. It should not be possible to miss&nbsp;it.</p>


<p>So make sure your forms show up and can be easily filled out and navigated on mobile devices.&nbsp; Test this. Once your form is up, get on a variety of mobile devices and see if it’s working.&nbsp;</p>


<h2 id="10-minimize distractions" class="wp-block-heading">10. Minimize&nbsp;distractions</h2>


<p>The form itself is a “content sanctuary.” Only vital and relevant text or imagery should be allowed in.&nbsp;</p>



<p>But the areas near your form should also be guarded closely. Busy websites with tons of features can be okay, but the form should not be buried in the midst of other content and widgets.&nbsp;</p>



<p>For example, you may have sections on your website with testimonials, screenshots, videos, photos, and text boxes. You might be using tables to compare the features of your various plans and products.&nbsp;</p>



<p>These are not the place for your lead generation forms.&nbsp;</p>



<p>The form needs to break the flow of whatever else is on the web page.&nbsp;</p>



<p>If you have a sidebar, don’t make the form just one of many things on the sidebar. Make it the only thing, at least in that section of the sidebar.&nbsp;</p>



<p>If you want to put forms in the middle of blog articles and web pages, don’t wrap the text around the form. Make the form the featured and centered item wherever it appears.&nbsp;</p>



<p>The idea is — make it impossible to miss. Yes, some visitors and potential leads will ignore your forms, but at least make sure they’ll see them.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>


<h2 id="11-use-descriptive labels" class="wp-block-heading">11. Use descriptive&nbsp;labels</h2>


<p>Make sure the labels for your form fields are clear and accurate. ‘First name’ is probably better than ‘First’, for example.&nbsp; Yes, most people know what the single word means, but you have to remember that the internet is for everyone. You have people from all sorts of educational backgrounds, all languages, and countries all over the world.&nbsp;</p>


<p>Your target audience plays a role in this, of course, but when in doubt, it’s best to be clear and not invite any confusion or uncertainty into the process of filling out lead generation&nbsp;forms.</p>


<p>And make sure it’s clear which label applies to which field. It’s better to put the label next to the form field, rather than above or below it.&nbsp;</p>


<h2 class="wp-block-heading">12. Utilize a single&#8209;column&nbsp;layout</h2>

<p>It’s been generally accepted for a while that single&#8209;column forms work better than two&#8209;column forms.<a href="https://www.foxit.com/blog/elements-of-good-form-design-single-column-beats-multi-column-forms/"> Studies like this one</a> have found that single&#8209;column forms get completed much faster. Quicker form completion implies higher&nbsp;conversions.</p>

<p>So, when in doubt, use single column&nbsp;forms.</p>


<p>However, just about any lead generation form best practice needs to be taken with this caveat: Test everything to be sure.&nbsp;</p>



<p>For example,<a href="https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/one-vs-two-column-form-conversion-test"> this HubSpot study</a> details their own experience with switching to a two-column form. When they tested it, the two-column version got higher conversions. But the likely reason for this is that their form is quite long.&nbsp;</p>


<p>The single column version looks much longer and thus probably intimidated more people from filling it out. The two&#8209;column one can be more easily seen in its entirety. With shorter forms, single&#8209;column should outperform two&#8209;column almost every&nbsp;time.</p>

<p>However, on mobile devices, two&#8209;column forms are more difficult to make work because of spacing, so your form needs to be well&#8209;designed and tested for all screen formats. Interestingly, Hubspot later altered their form to include elements of both one and two&#8209;column&nbsp;formats.</p>

<h2 id="13-minimize-mandatory fields" class="wp-block-heading">13. Minimize mandatory&nbsp;fields</h2>


<p>Every lead generation form has a purpose. If you’re just collecting email addresses and trying to build your list, you don’t need very many forms&nbsp;because you can collect more information about your subscribers through additional marketing offers. You can qualify leads over time.</p>



<p>Other companies prefer to get more information up front to save themselves the trouble of having huge lists with mostly unprofitable leads.&nbsp;</p>



<p>In either situation, you want to try to minimize the number of mandatory fields. What do you really need to know, and what would it be nice to know? For the nice to know stuff, you might keep the field in your form, but consider making it non-mandatory. That way, leads who want to quickly move through your form can do so.&nbsp;</p>



<p>For example, do you need a last name? In some cases you do, but in many, you don’t. It might be nice to have, but it’s definitely asking more of a lead to divulge that information than just their first name. Do you really need a country or a city? Do you really need both a home and work phone number?&nbsp;</p>



<p>Reduce your form fields, and your form will get filled out by more leads because it will be less intimidating.&nbsp;</p>


<h2 id="14-avoid dropdowns" class="wp-block-heading">14. Avoid&nbsp;dropdowns</h2>


<p>Dropdown menus have a host of problems, which have been exposed through a<a href="https://baymard.com/blog/drop-down-usability"> series of studies</a> on the topic.&nbsp;</p>



<p>With long dropdown menus, such as country selections, you can’t see all the options, and it can be difficult to scroll through the list since every device works differently. The experience often frustrates users, and they end up skipping it altogether.&nbsp;</p>


<p>With short dropdown menus, the question becomes, why not just offer radio buttons&nbsp;instead?</p>

<p>You can see all the choices and just pick the one you want. On a mobile device in particular, dropdowns are much more difficult to navigate than simple radio&nbsp;choices.</p>


<p>And for countries, the study recommends just using an autocomplete field. As the user begins typing their country, possible matches will quickly narrow down to the obvious choice.&nbsp;</p>


<p>Dropdown menus are distracting, hard to navigate, and reduce the quality of the user experience. None of that can be good for your conversion&nbsp;rate.</p>

<p>Opt for radio buttons, checkboxes, autocomplete fields, or just leaving that field off your&nbsp;form.</p>

<h2 id="15-use-inline validation" class="wp-block-heading">15. Use inline&nbsp;validation</h2>


<p>This is a surefire winner.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Inline validation isn’t a very appealing term, but it definitely does wonders for your conversion rates. Why? Because it shortens completion time, increases information accuracy, and makes your leads happier.&nbsp;</p>



<p><a href="https://www.zuko.io/blog/inline-validation-in-online-forms" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">One study</a> of inline validation found a 22% decrease in form field errors, a 31% increase in satisfaction, and a 42% drop in completion times, among other benefits.&nbsp;</p>


<p>What is inline&nbsp;validation?</p>


<p>It’s a tool that detects if information a user has entered is probably incorrect. For example, putting two @ symbols in your email address, or a phone number with an extra digit can be detected by inline validation software. A note shows up in the form, telling the user they may have made a mistake.&nbsp;</p>


<p>You can see why this would reduce errors, but why does it decrease completion&nbsp;time?</p>

<p>Because the alternative form of validation is to wait until the form is all filled out, and then hit them with a bunch of red marks pointing out the fields that aren’t correct. Now, they have to revisit them all, which takes much more time, and is a frustrating experience that brings back memories of red ink in your&nbsp;schoolwork.</p>


<p>Plus, if you’re using multistep forms, having to go back several steps to correct errors is cumbersome and frustrating.&nbsp;</p>


<p>Inline validation eliminates most of these problems, making the whole experience of completing a web form easier and better for&nbsp;everyone.</p>

<h2 id="16-activate autofill" class="wp-block-heading">16. Activate&nbsp;autofill</h2>


<p>This was mentioned earlier, but it qualifies as its own lead generation form best practice. The reason is again because of the time it saves the user. Autofill lets you input common information that shows up frequently or is associated with other information.&nbsp;</p>


<p>If the user is new to the website, you can still autofill things like the email mailbox such as ‘yahoo.com.’ Once they type in the @ and the ‘ya’, you know what the rest will likely be. Autofill accelerates the process for fields with characteristics like this. And it can even work for fields with information unique to your&nbsp;website.</p>


<p>For instance, a form could ask its leads what kind of car they drive. There are only so many makes and models, and autofill can accelerate the process.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Autofill can also work for visitors who have been to your site before (or have stored, and allow access to, certain information saved in their browser). It can fill in their information, such as cities, zip codes, and phone numbers, saving them lots of time tediously filling these out again and again.&nbsp;</p>


<p>Autofill will speed up form completion, and it will also increase form conversion&nbsp;rates.</p>

<h2 id="17-use-progress indicators" class="wp-block-heading">17. Use progress&nbsp;indicators</h2>


<p>Especially for multistep forms, the progress indicator bar across the top of the form builds momentum for the user as they see it get closer and closer to the other side. Humans like closure. We like finishing things. It feels faster when you can see the visual effect of your progress reacting in real-time to what you’re doing.&nbsp;</p>



<img width="1474" height="1318" src="https://akismet.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/image-8.png" alt="example of progress bars" class="wp-image-283971" />



<p>Users think, “I’m already this far along, no reason to quit now”.&nbsp;</p>


<h2 id="18-switch-to-multistep-forms-for-longer processes" class="wp-block-heading">18. Switch to multistep forms for longer&nbsp;processes</h2>


<p>We’ve brought up multistep forms a few times already. For longer forms, especially combined with progress bars, this approach tends to work much better because it simplifies the experience of filling out a form by breaking it down into manageable steps.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Instead of a form with 20 fields, the user can fill out five smaller forms with just four fields each. It’s much less intimidating because each step requires just a few items. And with the progress bar, the whole experience feels faster than if you had to do it all in one form.&nbsp;</p>


<p>Plus, with mobile devices, you can’t even see the entire form on your screen if it’s too long. That makes it even harder to tell how much more you have to do. And the scrolling invites usability frustrations. But with a multistep form on mobile, you can see the entire form for each step, the whole way&nbsp;through.</p>


<p>One site<a href="https://instapage.com/blog/multi-step-form-part-2/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> discussed here</a> increased its conversion rate from 11% to 46% when they switched from a single form to a multistep form. If you have a long lead generation form, that ought to get your attention and motivate you to make this change immediately.&nbsp;</p>


<h2 id="19-highlight-the-benefit-in-the cta" class="wp-block-heading">19. Highlight the benefit in the&nbsp;CTA</h2>


<p>Returning to your lead generation form copy, the text you use for the CTA button should be carefully chosen. Don’t settle for bland and overused calls to action like “submit”, “join now”, or “subscribe today!” Again, the exclamation point doesn’t help such a cliché CTA.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Your lead generation form is making a promise and asking people to do something — reveal personal information and enter your circle of influence. They’re opting in to receive marketing from you, and they know it. That’s not a small thing.&nbsp;</p>



<p>With action-oriented, benefit-focused CTA button copy, you can make them feel great about the decision to click that button and engage with your website.&nbsp;</p>


<p>The earlier tip about action&#8209;oriented language applies here too, except with buttons — try to keep the text brief. You can also personalize the button text with first person language, so the reader puts themselves in the situation. Here are some examples of great CTA button&nbsp;copy:</p>


<ul class="wp-block-list"><li>Get my free&nbsp;report</li>

<li>I’m in! Send my VIP access&nbsp;code</li>

<li>Grab your&nbsp;coupons</li>

<li>Gain access to exclusive&nbsp;deals</li>

<li>Stake my&nbsp;claim</li>

<li>Start your subscription&nbsp;today</li></ul>


<h2 id="20-incentivize-immediate action" class="wp-block-heading">20. Incentivize immediate&nbsp;action</h2>


<p>Within your forms, either in the CTA button, the headline, the subhead if any, or perhaps a phrase right below the button, do what you can to add urgency to your form. So many website visitors never return again, so this is your only chance to capture most of the people who will see your lead generation forms.&nbsp;</p>



<p>There’s no reason to be timid about it. Offer a limited time special, free bonus, or valuable promise. Use language like now, today, immediately, and right away. There’s no reason to wait&nbsp;because waiting will mean, most likely, never.&nbsp;</p>


<h2 id="21-ensure-form accessibility" class="wp-block-heading">21. Ensure form&nbsp;accessibility</h2>


<p>Accessibility is all about ensuring that all potential leads, regardless of any impairments or cognitive differences, can interact with your form.&nbsp;</p>



<p>For example, there are far more people with some sort of visual impairment than you may realize. About<a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaophthalmology/fullarticle/2800246" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> a quarter of U.S. adults</a> over the age of 71 have some sort of impairment. In many of these cases, text on screen becomes harder to read or colors may blend together.&nbsp;</p>



<p>So ensure your forms work with screen readers. Consult color contrast guides and make sure your page complies. Enlarge the text on your page, label form fields appropriately, and use helpful alt text.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Overall, look to <a href="https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">the WCAG</a> for accessibility guidelines that aim for everyone to use your site to its full potential and become a quality lead.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>


<h2 id="22-boost-page-load times" class="wp-block-heading">22. Boost page load&nbsp;times</h2>


<p>Improving page speed always helps website engagement, including with your lead generation forms. The longer it takes for your pages to load, the more people will abandon the site. And mobile tends to be slower than desktop for many sites.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Use a tool like<a href="https://pagespeed.web.dev/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> Page Speed Insights</a> to find out what you can do to speed up your website, for both desktop and mobile.&nbsp;</p>



<img width="1600" height="823" src="https://akismet.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/image-9.png" alt="Jetpack Boost homepage" class="wp-image-283972" />


<p>WordPress sites can turn to <a href="https://jetpack.com/boost/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Jetpack Boost</a> for near instant performance analysis and automatic&nbsp;improvements.</p>

<h2 class="wp-block-heading">23. Offer real&#8209;time assistance via live&nbsp;chat</h2>

<p>For website visitors who get stuck on some part of your form but are motivated to fill it out, having a live chat service can bridge the gap and be the difference between a potential lead filling out your form or walking&nbsp;away.</p>

<p>If you have high website traffic, a service like this could make a big impact on your form conversion&nbsp;rates.</p>

<h2 id="24-optimize-the-confirmation page" class="wp-block-heading">24. Optimize the confirmation&nbsp;page</h2>

<p>So far, everything you’ve seen here has involved the lead generation form itself. But lead generation doesn’t stop once someone fills out your form. That’s just the beginning. If you burn them out or turn them off the next day, no one&nbsp;benefits.</p>


<p>You want to continue to deliver an excellent user experience from the moment the person has filled out your form.&nbsp;</p>


<p>It begins on the confirmation page. After a new lead has filled out your form, sustain the momentum by putting a lot of thought into the confirmation page. Too many lead generation forms just leave the default text in place, which is&nbsp;usually….awful.</p>

<p>Switch that out for something better. A few&nbsp;suggestions:</p>


<ul class="wp-block-list"><li>Thank them! This should be impossible to miss, right at the top of the confirmation&nbsp;page</li>

<li>Reinforce the decision they just made to join your list by restating the benefit or promise they will&nbsp;receive</li>

<li>Give any instructions they need to claim their benefit, get started, or take the next&nbsp;step</li>

<li>Consider including an upsell right here and turn your new lead into a&nbsp;customer</li>

<li>Include a link that takes them somewhere else on your site to keep them&nbsp;engaged</li></ul>



<p>If you offered a lead magnet of some sort, that should be featured prominently on your confirmation page. This is often the thing they want most, and it’s the main reason they joined or filled out your form. So don’t hide it. Don’t make them click through a bunch of hoops to get it.&nbsp;</p>



<p>If you want to offer upsells or other options for things to do next, that’s fine, but make sure they get what they want without any hassle.&nbsp;</p>


<h2 id="25-follow-up promptly" class="wp-block-heading">25. Follow up&nbsp;promptly</h2>


<p>After the new lead has completed your form and gotten past your confirmation page, keep them engaged and continue to build on your new momentum.&nbsp;</p>



<p>You should be sending out an automated welcome email that thanks them again and gives more information about whatever they just signed up for. You could also send a welcome series, which can introduce them more to your brand, point them to other products and services, give them a sense of your brand voice and personality, and make them feel part of a community if that’s relevant to your form.&nbsp;</p>



<p>You can also use SMS in a similar way, as long as you get explicit permission to use this channel.&nbsp;</p>



<p>And if you got their mailing address, you could also ship them something, even as simple as a thank you card. Again, the more they feel wanted, respected, and valuable, and the more you deliver on what you promised, the happier they’ll be to continue receiving your marketing.&nbsp;</p>


<p>For higher&#8209;priced lead generation processes, you might consider a follow&#8209;up phone call to new leads. Email and SMS are great, but if you’re selling high&#8209;ticket items, the more personal you can get, the&nbsp;better.</p>

<h2 id="examples-of-great-lead-generation-forms-in action" class="wp-block-heading">Examples of great lead generation forms in&nbsp;action</h2>

<p>A few forms that employ the lead generation form best practices you’ve just read about are on display&nbsp;below.</p>


<p>Use these lead generation form examples to inspire you to spruce up your forms and increase your conversion rates.&nbsp;</p>



<img width="1536" height="936" src="https://akismet.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/image-10.png" alt="example of lead gen forms from Empire Flippers" class="wp-image-283973" />



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><a href="https://www.responsify.com/multi-step-form-conversion-rate-optimization" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Empire Flippers</a></h3>


<p>This multistep form from Empire Flippers uses a progress bar and inline validation to increase completion rates and reduce errors. It also features some credibility statistics at the bottom of the form, serving as trust signals that this is a reputable company that delivers&nbsp;results.</p>


<img width="1600" height="833" src="https://akismet.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/image-11.png" alt="short, concise contact form example" class="wp-image-283974" />



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><a href="https://www.samvanderwielen.com/legal-workshop" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Sam Vanderwielen</a></h3>



<p>This form is short and simple, and uses all the copywriting best practices discussed earlier. It has a benefit-oriented value proposition and headline, offers a lead magnet in the form of an online course, and uses a personalized CTA button. The button copy could be better though — something like ‘Join the Course’ or ‘Show Me How’ would work better. It also uses descriptive labels and makes the phone number optional.&nbsp;</p>


<p>It also avoids CAPTCHA, eliminating that potential conversion&nbsp;destroyer.</p>


<img width="1600" height="827" src="https://akismet.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/image-12.png" alt="CTA for a free kitchen garden planning guide" class="wp-image-283976" />



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><a href="https://urbantaproots.com/product/gardencoachingpackage/">Urban Taproots</a></h3>



<p>This form collects leads for a gardening coach, and offers a free 24-page kitchen garden planning guide. The form even lists four desirable elements of the guide, and includes a nice cover image. The headline uses action-oriented language. The CTA button isn’t benefit-oriented, but it is specific to what will happen when you click it. And the form is just about as short as you can get, asking only for a first name and email.&nbsp;</p>


<h2 id="frequently-asked questions" class="wp-block-heading">Frequently asked&nbsp;questions</h2>

<h3 id="what-are-common-mistakes-when-creating-a-lead-generation form" class="wp-block-heading">What are common mistakes when creating a lead generation&nbsp;form?</h3>


<p>Many websites include too many fields, and make too many of them required when they could be optional. Other mistakes include making the form too long when a multistep form could simplify it, using CAPTCHA, using ineffective dry language, burying the form, so most website visitors overlook it, and having ineffective or non-existent follow-up.&nbsp;</p>


<h3 id="should-i-use-captcha-to-protect-my-form-from spam" class="wp-block-heading">Should I use CAPTCHA to protect my form from&nbsp;spam?</h3>

<p>No. CAPTCHA has been shown to negatively impact form conversion rates. CAPTCHA adds frustration to the form completion process and lowers conversions by&nbsp;3.2%.</p>

<h3 id="what-is-akismet-and-how-can-it-improve-my-lead-generation-form-conversion rate" class="wp-block-heading">What is Akismet, and how can it improve my lead generation form conversion&nbsp;rate?</h3>

<p>Akismet offers a frictionless approach to protecting your forms from being filled out by spammers and bots. It blocks IP addresses, email addresses, and names known to be associated with spammers using a continually&#8209;growing database and AI&nbsp;analysis.</p>

<h3 id="what-types-of-companies-generally-use akismet" class="wp-block-heading">What types of companies generally use&nbsp;Akismet?</h3>


<p>Akismet is used by companies of all sizes, from small businesses to large multinational corporations.&nbsp;</p>


<h3 id="what-is-the-ideal-number-of-fields-for-a-lead-generation form" class="wp-block-heading">What is the ideal number of fields for a lead generation&nbsp;form?</h3>


<p>There is no ideal number of fields. It depends on the purpose of your form, the type and quality of leads you are attracting, your target audience, the price point of your products and services, and more. The general rule is to use as few fields as you need, and keep the non-essential ones optional.&nbsp;</p>


<h3 id="how-does-the-placement-of-a-lead-generation-form-affect-its performance" class="wp-block-heading">How does the placement of a lead generation form affect its&nbsp;performance?</h3>


<p>Your form needs to be visible and impossible to overlook. It should not be placed too close to other items that will clutter up the experience and make it easy to miss. You can place it on the page in multiple locations such as at the top, on a sidebar, in the middle, or at the bottom. You can also feature multiple CTA buttons that all link to the same form.&nbsp;</p>


<h3 id="can-the-design-of-a-lead-generation-form-impact-user engagement" class="wp-block-heading">Can the design of a lead generation form impact user&nbsp;engagement?</h3>

<p>Yes, forms that have poor color contrast, unclearly labeled form fields, poorly sized buttons, and too much clutter can make them harder to engage with. Plus, features like dropdown menus and two&#8209;column forms can make it harder to complete a form, especially on mobile&nbsp;devices.</p>

<h3 id="what-types-of-questions-should-be-avoided-in-a-lead-generation form" class="wp-block-heading">What types of questions should be avoided in a lead generation&nbsp;form?</h3>


<p>Avoid questions asking anything you don’t really need to know at this point in the lead generation process. Unless you need it to qualify leads at the very beginning of the process, leave those questions for later.&nbsp;</p>


<h3 id="how-can-ab-testing-improve-the-effectiveness-of-lead-generation forms" class="wp-block-heading">How can A/B testing improve the effectiveness of lead generation&nbsp;forms?</h3>

<p>As long as your website gets enough traffic to conduct a statistically valid A/B test, this is the best way to determine which form features and details are most effective on your website, with your target market. Simply create two forms that are different in just one key detail, make it, so each one shows up during the testing phase, and see which one gets higher conversion rates. Then, take the winner, change another aspect of it, and run another test to continue improving the&nbsp;form.</p>

<h3 id="what-strategies-can-be-employed-to-reduce-form abandonment" class="wp-block-heading">What strategies can be employed to reduce form&nbsp;abandonment?</h3>

<p>You can reduce form abandonment by using multistep forms, inline validation, autofill, single&#8209;column layout, progress bars, benefit&#8209;oriented language and headlines, an inspiring offer, and fewer&nbsp;fields.</p>

<h3 id="how-does-the-copy-text-on-and-around-the-form-affect conversions" class="wp-block-heading">How does the copy (text) on and around the form affect&nbsp;conversions?</h3>


<p>Good copy motivates leads to want whatever your lead generation form promises. All copy should point to the same place — fill out this form and get what you want.&nbsp;</p>


<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Akismet: The #1 anti&#8209;spam solution for businesses and&nbsp;marketers</h3>


<p>Akismet helps your lead generation forms perform as they should, without spammers and bots ruining the party. Our frictionless software prevents spammers from filling out your forms and making you wade through hundreds or thousands of fake signups.&nbsp;</p>



<p>And it does this without requiring the use of any silly CAPTCHA puzzles that just annoy everyone and make your leads feel like you don’t want them to fill out your forms.&nbsp;</p>



<p><a href="https://akismet.com/pricing/">Get Akismet</a>.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 05 Jun 2024 13:00:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:11:"Jen Swisher";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:22;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:96:"Do The Woo Community: Exploring Web Accessibility Success and Strategies with Christian Behrends";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=83958";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:95:"https://dothewoo.io/exploring-web-accessibility-success-and-strategies-with-christian-behrends/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:173:"Join Anne, Taeke, and Christian Behrends on the Do the Woo Accessibility podcast as they chat about web accessibility, share success stories, and provide valuable resources.";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 05 Jun 2024 09:12:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:23;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:40:"WordPress.org blog: WordPress 6.6 Beta 1";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:35:"https://wordpress.org/news/?p=17289";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:56:"https://wordpress.org/news/2024/06/wordpress-6-6-beta-1/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14081:"<p>WordPress 6.6 Beta 1 is here! Please download and test it.</p>



<p><strong>This beta version of the WordPress software is under development. </strong>Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites—you risk unexpected results if you do.</p>



<p>Instead, install Beta 1 on local sites and testing environments in any of these four ways:</p>



<table><tbody><tr><th>Plugin</th><td>Install and activate the <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-beta-tester/">WordPress Beta Tester</a> plugin on a WordPress install. (Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream).</td></tr><tr><th>Direct Download</th><td>Download the <a href="https://wordpress.org/wordpress-6.6-beta1.zip">Beta 1 version (zip)</a> and install it on a WordPress website.</td></tr><tr><th>Command Line</th><td>Use this <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/cli/">WP-CLI</a> command:<br /><code>wp core update --version=6.6-beta1</code></td></tr><tr><th>WordPress Playground</th><td>Use a <a href="https://playground.wordpress.net/#{%20%22preferredVersions%22:%20{%20%22php%22:%20%228.0%22,%20%22wp%22:%20%22beta%22%20},%20%22features%22:%20{%20%22networking%22:%20true%20},%20%22steps%22:%20[%20{%20%22step%22:%20%22login%22,%20%22username%22:%20%22admin%22,%20%22password%22:%20%22password%22%20},%20{%20%22step%22:%20%22importFile%22,%20%22file%22:%20{%20%22resource%22:%20%22url%22,%20%22url%22:%20%22https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wpaccessibility/a11y-theme-unit-test/master/a11y-theme-unit-test-data.xml%22%20}%20},%20{%20%22step%22:%20%22importFile%22,%20%22file%22:%20{%20%22resource%22:%20%22url%22,%20%22url%22:%20%22https://raw.githubusercontent.com/WordPress/theme-test-data/master/themeunittestdata.wordpress.xml%22%20}%20},%20{%20%22step%22:%20%22installPlugin%22,%20%22pluginZipFile%22:%20{%20%22resource%22:%20%22wordpress.org/plugins%22,%20%22slug%22:%20%22query-monitor%22%20},%20%22options%22:%20{%20%22activate%22:%20false%20},%20%22progress%22:%20{%20%22weight%22:%202%20}%20},%20{%20%22step%22:%20%22installPlugin%22,%20%22pluginZipFile%22:%20{%20%22resource%22:%20%22wordpress.org/plugins%22,%20%22slug%22:%20%22create-block-theme%22%20},%20%22progress%22:%20{%20%22weight%22:%202%20}%20},%20{%20%22step%22:%20%22installPlugin%22,%20%22pluginZipFile%22:%20{%20%22resource%22:%20%22wordpress.org/plugins%22,%20%22slug%22:%20%22debug-bar%22%20},%20%22progress%22:%20{%20%22weight%22:%202%20}%20},%20{%20%22step%22:%20%22installPlugin%22,%20%22pluginZipFile%22:%20{%20%22resource%22:%20%22wordpress.org/plugins%22,%20%22slug%22:%20%22health-check%22%20},%20%22progress%22:%20{%20%22weight%22:%202%20}%20},%20{%20%22step%22:%20%22installPlugin%22,%20%22pluginZipFile%22:%20{%20%22resource%22:%20%22wordpress.org/plugins%22,%20%22slug%22:%20%22test-reports%22%20},%20%22progress%22:%20{%20%22weight%22:%202%20}%20},%20{%20%22step%22:%20%22installPlugin%22,%20%22pluginZipFile%22:%20{%20%22resource%22:%20%22wordpress.org/plugins%22,%20%22slug%22:%20%22user-switching%22%20},%20%22progress%22:%20{%20%22weight%22:%202%20}%20}%20]%20}">6.6 Beta 1 WordPress Playground instance</a> to test the software directly in your browser. This might be the easiest way ever—no separate sites, no setup. Just click and go!&nbsp;</td></tr></tbody></table>



<p>The scheduled final release date for WordPress 6.6 is <strong>July 16, 2024</strong>. Your help testing Beta and RC versions over the next six weeks is vital to making sure the final release is everything it should be: stable, powerful, and intuitive.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">How important is your testing? </h2>



<p><strong>Features in this Beta release may be changed or removed between now and the final release.</strong> Early attention from testers like you is critical to finding and reporting potential bugs, usability issues, or compatibility problems to make sure developers can address them before the final release. You don&#8217;t need any contribution experience, and this is a fantastic way to begin your WordPress contributor story!</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">If you find an issue</h2>



<p>If you run into an issue, please share it in the <a href="https://wordpress.org/support/forum/alphabeta/">Alpha/Beta area</a> of the support forums. If you are comfortable submitting a reproducible bug report, you can do so <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/newticket">via WordPress Trac</a>. You can also check your issue against a list of <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/tickets/major">known bugs</a>.</p>



<p>Want to know more about testing in general, and how to get started? Follow the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/">testing initiatives in Make Core</a> and join the <a href="https://wordpress.slack.com/messages/core-test/">#core-test channel</a> on <a href="https://wordpress.slack.com/">Making WordPress Slack</a>.</p>



<p>Like every version since 5.0 in 2018, WordPress 6.6 will integrate a host of new features from the last several releases of the Gutenberg plugin. Learn more about Gutenberg updates since WordPress 6.5 in the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/tag/gutenberg-new/">What’s New in Gutenberg</a> posts for versions <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/02/28/whats-new-in-gutenberg-17-8-28-february/">17.8</a>, <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/03/13/whats-new-in-gutenberg-17-9-13-march/">17.9</a>, <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/03/27/whats-new-in-gutenberg-18-0-27-march/">18.0</a>, <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/04/10/whats-new-in-gutenberg-18-1-10-april/">18.1</a>, <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/04/24/whats-new-in-gutenberg-18-2-24-april/">18.2</a>, <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/05/08/whats-new-in-gutenberg-18-3-8-may/">18.3</a>, and <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/05/23/whats-new-in-gutenberg-18-4-22-may/">18.4</a>. The final version will also include Gutenberg 18.5; the Beta 2 post will link to that.</p>



<p class="is-style-default">WordPress 6.6 Beta 1 contains 97 enhancements and 101 fixes for the editor, in a total of about 206 <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/query?status=closed&milestone=6.6&group=component&max=500&col=id&col=summary&col=owner&col=type&col=priority&col=component&col=version&order=priority">tickets for WordPress 6.6 Core</a>.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The vulnerability bounty doubles in the beta period</h2>



<p>The WordPress community sponsors a <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/security/2024/06/04/wordpress-6-6-is-coming/">monetary reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities.</a> That reward doubles during the period between Beta 1 on June 4 and the final Release Candidate (RC) that will happen June 25. Please follow the project&#8217;s responsible-disclosure practices detailed on this <a href="https://hackerone.com/wordpress">HackerOne page</a> and in this <a href="https://wordpress.org/about/security/">security white paper</a>.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">What’s coming to WordPress 6.6?</h2>



<p>This year’s second major release is about polish and finesse. Features that landed in the last few releases have new flexibility and smoother flows—and a few new tricks. And of course there are a few brand-new features.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Data Views updates</h3>



<p>Part of the groundwork for phase 3, Data Views get new and improved experience of working with information in the Site Editor. A new layout consolidates patterns and template parts, gets you to general management views in fewer clicks, and packs in a wide range of refinements.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Overrides in synced patterns</h3>



<p>What if you could keep a synced pattern‘s <em>look and feel</em> everywhere it appears—keeping it on brand—but have different <em>content</em> everywhere it appears?</p>



<p>For instance, maybe you‘re building a pattern for recipes. Ideally, you want to keep the overall design of the recipe card consistent on every post that will have a recipe. But the recipe itself—the ingredients, the steps, special notes on technique—will be different every time.</p>



<p>And perhaps, in the future, other people might need to change the design of the recipe pattern. It would be nice to know they can do that, and that the content in existing recipes will stay right where it is.</p>



<p>In version 6.6, you can make all that happen, and overrides in synced patterns are the way you do it.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">See all the blocks</h3>



<p>Up to now, when you had a block selected and then opened the block Inserter, you only saw the blocks you were allowed to add to your selected block. Where were all the others?</p>



<p>In 6.6, when you have a block selected, you get two lists. First, there&#8217;s the list of blocks you can insert at your selected block. Then you get a list with all the other blocks. So you can get an idea of what you can use in your selected block, and what other blocks you could use in another area. In fact, if you select a block from that second list, WordPress 6.6 will add it below your block, to use in whatever you build next.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">A new publish flow</h3>



<p>Version 6.6 brings the post and site editors closer together than ever. So whether you’re writing for a post in the post editor or a page in the Site Editor, your experience will be about the same.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Style variations</h3>



<p>If a block theme comes with style variations, 6.6 vastly expands your design options right out of the box, without installing or configuring a single thing. Because in 6.6, your theme  pulls the color palettes and typography style sets out of its installed variations to let you mix and match for a whole world of expanded creative expression.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Section styles </h3>



<p>Do you build themes? Now you can define style options for separate sections of multiple blocks, including inner blocks.</p>



<p>Then your users can apply those block style variations to entire groups of blocks, effectively creating branded sections they can curate across a site.</p>



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">A note about CSS specificity</h4>



<p>To make it easier for your variations to override the global styles CSS, those styles now come wrapped in `:root`. That limits their specificity. <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/discussions/61810">For details, read the full discussion on GitHub.</a></p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">A native Grid layout</h3>



<p>Grid is a new variation for the Group block that lets you arrange the blocks inside it as a grid. If you&#8217;ve been using a plugin for this, now you can make your grids natively.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Better pattern management in Classic themes</h3>



<p>You heard right: You can do everything with patterns in Classic themes that you can in a block theme. You can see all the patterns available to you in a single view and insert a pattern on the fly. </p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Negative. Margins.</h3>



<p>They&#8217;re here: negative margin values, so you can make objects overlap in your design. As a guardrail, you can only set a negative margin by typing an actual negative number, not by using the slider. That’s to keep people from adding negative values they didn&#8217;t intend.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Rollback auto-updates</h3>



<p>Now you can have the convenience of setting all your plugins to auto-update and the inner peace you get from knowing that if anything goes wrong, 6.6 will do a rollback. Automatically.</p>



<p><strong><em>This post <strong><em>reflects the latest changes</em></strong> as of June 4, 2024.</em></strong> </p>



<p><strong>Again, the features in this first beta may change, based on what testers like you find.</strong></p>



<p>Get an overview of the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/6-6/">6.6 release cycle</a>, and check the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/">Make WordPress Core blog</a> for <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/tag/6-6/">6.6-related posts</a> in the next few weeks for further details.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Just for you: a Beta 1 haiku</h3>



<p>Negative margins<br />Embellish all the new ways<br />To design and build  </p>



<p class="has-text-align-left is-style-default"><em>Thanks very much to <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/meher/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>meher</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/audrasjb/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>audrasjb</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/fabiankaegy/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>fabiankaegy</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/colorful-tones/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>colorful-tones</a>, </em><a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/davidbaumwald/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>davidbaumwald</a>,<em> <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/dansoschin/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>dansoschin</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/desrosj/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>desrosj</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/atachibana/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>atachibana</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/ehtis/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>ehtis</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/adamsilverstein/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>adamsilverstein</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/joedolson/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>joedolson</a>, and <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/webcommsat/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>webcommsat</a> for reviewing and collaborating on this post!</em></p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 04 Jun 2024 17:44:29 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:8:"marybaum";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:24;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:66:"Do The Woo Community: For a Good Time, Four Developers, Four Hosts";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=83948";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:63:"https://dothewoo.io/for-a-good-time-four-developers-four-hosts/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:171:"New Woo DevChat hosts Mike and Marcel join Zach and Carl for an all out conversation about the state of the WordPress and Woo developer and what's to come in future shows.";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 04 Jun 2024 08:27:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:25;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:22:"Matt: Melt Your Butter";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:23:"https://ma.tt/?p=114712";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:39:"https://ma.tt/2024/06/melt-your-butter/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:1896:"<p>In my life I like to experience things high/low, to stay grounded. So while I&#8217;ve been taken on culinary adventures with the best chefs in the world like <a href="https://noma.dk/">René Redzepi</a> or <a href="https://www.singlethreadfarms.com/">Kyle Connaughton</a>, sometimes I find myself on a United flight, as I am today, ordering the chicken.</p>



<p>When you move between two extremes it&#8217;s not the big things that bother you, for example I&#8217;m sure this <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/17/dining/in-pursuit-of-tastier-chickens-a-strict-diet-of-four-star-scraps.html">chicken wasn&#8217;t raised on scraps from Michelin star restaurants</a>, as I was once told in New York, but the little things, like &#8220;Why is this butter as hard as a rock?&#8221;</p>



<p>Butter, one of the most magical of ingredients, should spread. Yet it is served in so many places at a temperature that makes you feel more like you&#8217;re carving Play-doh. So I will now give you one of my favorite travel hacks: On United they nuke the main entree too hot to eat when it arrives, but this is now to your advantage because you can open the small butter tin and put it on the scorched entree and let thermodynamics turn it from rock-hard butter-ice to supple, delicious butter. </p>



<p>The process takes a minute or two, just enough time to eat your salad (be careful opening the pressurized balsamic dressing!) and allow the bread to cool a bit and be palatable.</p>



<p>On occasion I have left the butter in the heat too long, and it liquifies, but then I just use it as a pour or dip my bread into it, imagining myself at <a href="https://peterluger.com/">Peter Luger&#8217;s</a> dipping my steak into the collected deliciousness at the bottom of the dish. If you&#8217;re serving at home, softening the butter and warming plates is an easy way to elevate your game.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 04 Jun 2024 00:57:45 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4:"Matt";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:26;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:64:"Gravatar: Introducing Profiles-as-a-Service and our new REST API";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:32:"http://blog.gravatar.com/?p=1415";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:59:"https://blog.gravatar.com/2024/06/03/profiles-as-a-service/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4475:"<p>For two decades, Gravatar has been an unsung hero of the internet, quietly powering billions of avatars across websites like Slack, OpenAI, Atlassian, and more. Today, we are excited to introduce the latest addition to the Gravatar suite of tools: our new REST API. We redesigned the new API from the ground up to make it simpler and more efficient for developers to integrate Gravatar’s globally recognized avatars <em>and profile data</em> into their apps and websites.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">What Is Profiles-as-a-Service?</h2>



<img width="1171" height="1152" src="https://blog.gravatar.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/allprofiles.gif" alt="" class="wp-image-1478" />



<p>We&#8217;re moving beyond the humble avatar and aiming to be the open platform of choice for publicly sharing all kinds of profile data — bios, interests, preferences, work history, social connections, and more.</p>



<p>We make it simple for anyone to curate the information they want to share, all tied to an email address. Users can share as little or as much as they want and have multiple profiles using different email addresses.</p>



<p>The API allows businesses and developers to access and manage user profile data, simplifying development and enabling more personalized interactions and engaging user experiences.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Getting Started is Simple</h2>



<p>Gravatar is free for both end users and developers. We just ask developers to link back to Gravatar to make it easy for users to update their profile information.</p>



<p>Visit our <a href="https://gravatar.com/developers">Developer Dashboard</a> to register an API key and access the interactive console, which will help you get up and running quickly.</p>



<p>We have <a href="https://docs.gravatar.com/api/rest-api/">detailed docs</a> and a <a href="https://docs.gravatar.com/api/rest-api/tutorial-user-profile/">reference tutorial</a>, too.</p>



<p class="wp-elements-c8809cf92c9062a9dc33ceedd5584c30"><a href="https://gravatar.com/developers">→ Get a free API key</a></p>



<div class="wp-block-media-text alignwide has-media-on-the-right is-stacked-on-mobile"><div class="wp-block-media-text__content">
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Tailored for Developers</h2>



<p>You can retrieve detailed profile information, including avatars, display names, job titles, verified accounts, and contact info — all linked to a user’s email address.</p>



<p>The API is designed to be developer-friendly, and comprehensive documentation makes it easy to integrate into any application or website. We’re also rolling out open-source <a href="https://docs.gravatar.com/sdk/">mobile SDKs</a> and <a href="https://docs.gravatar.com/sdk/web-components/">web components</a>.</p>



<p class="wp-elements-a4a78db5adebe192d778110eb5bfd87a"><a href="https://github.com/Automattic/gravatar/discussions">→ Join us in discussions on GitHub</a></p>
</div><img width="660" height="495" src="https://blog.gravatar.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/image-28.png?w=660" alt="" class="wp-image-1424 size-full" /></div>



<div class="wp-block-media-text alignwide has-media-on-the-right is-stacked-on-mobile"><div class="wp-block-media-text__content">
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Why Integrate With Gravatar?</h2>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Smooth user onboarding</li>



<li>Know your customer better</li>



<li>Foster community</li>



<li>Simplify development</li>
</ul>



<p>You choose exactly the data you need to optimize for performance and user experience.</p>
</div><img width="660" height="495" src="https://blog.gravatar.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/image-78.png?w=660" alt="" class="wp-image-1436 size-full" /></div>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">This Is Just The Beginning</h2>



<p>The real power of this API will evolve over time as more data points are added, including user-managed interests and social graphs.&nbsp;</p>



<p>We&#8217;ll soon roll out more customization options on public profile pages, including the option to use any domain, with the end goal of a domain being another option for identity on the web.</p>



<p>Plus, we are exploring options for being a Web3 bridge with decentralized profiles and more user control in data storage and access. Stay tuned!</p>



<p class="wp-elements-346da5fe400f43937221001cc31a7a6e"><br /><a href="https://docs.gravatar.com/join-beta-waitlist/">→ Subscribe to be notified of future updates</a></p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Mon, 03 Jun 2024 14:36:53 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:11:"Ronnie Burt";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:27;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:93:"Do The Woo Community: Running a WordPress Plugin Business Single Handedly with Mark Westguard";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=83939";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:92:"https://dothewoo.io/running-a-wordpress-plugin-business-single-handedly-with-mark-westguard/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:130:"This episode of Woo BizChat we chat with Mark Westguard from WS Form, sharing his journey as a solopreneur in the plugin business.";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Mon, 03 Jun 2024 09:00:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:28;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:89:"WordPress.org blog: WordCamp Europe 2024: Mid-Year Update and Q&amp;A with Matt Mullenweg";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:35:"https://wordpress.org/news/?p=17286";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:99:"https://wordpress.org/news/2024/05/wordcamp-europe-2024-mid-year-update-and-qa-with-matt-mullenweg/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:2047:"<p>WordCamp Europe 2024 kicks off on June 13, gathering WordPressers from across the globe to Torino, Italy. </p>



<p>The highly anticipated conference has a packed schedule starting with <a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/2024/contributor-day/">Contributor Day</a> and will feature a notable roster of speakers. Other highlights will include <a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/2024/workshops/">engaging workshops</a> covering a variety of disciplines (including one for youth and teens) and <a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/2024/wordcamp-connect/">WordCamp Connect</a>, a dedicated space for attendees to meet and network with additional community-led sessions.</p>



<p>The conference will conclude with an exciting mid-year project update from WordPress Cofounder Matt Mullenweg, including a live Q&amp;A session. You can watch Matt’s presentation on June 15, 2024, streaming live on the <a href="https://youtube.com/wordpress">WordPress YouTube channel</a> starting at 4:30 p.m. Central European Summer Time (2:30 p.m. UTC).</p>



<p><strong>What:</strong> <a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/2024/session/wordpress-project-summer-update/">WordPress Project Summer Update</a> + Q&amp;A Session with Matt Mullenweg<br /><strong>When: </strong>June 15, 2024 at 2:30 p.m. UTC (Start of live stream)<br /><strong>Where: </strong><a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/2024/venue/">Lingotto Conference and Exhibition Centre<strong><br /></strong></a><strong>Streaming: </strong><a href="https://youtube.com/wordpress">Watch the live stream</a> on the WordPress YouTube channel.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Have a question for Matt?</h2>



<p>If you’re unable to attend WordCamp Europe 2024 in person, you’re welcome to <a href="mailto:ask-matt@wordcamp.org">email your questions</a> instead. Given the number of questions expected both in-person and online, only some of the submitted questions may be answered live. </p>



<p>Whether you’re touching down in Torino or streaming from elsewhere, see you very soon!</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 31 May 2024 16:45:04 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:12:"Lauren Stein";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:29;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:106:"Do The Woo Community: The Impact of WordPress Mentorships and Inclusion with Birgit, Hari, Kruper and Tobi";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=83923";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:103:"https://dothewoo.io/the-impact-of-wordpress-mentorships-and-inclusion-with-birgit-hari-kruper-and-tobi/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:119:"A conversation about the WordPress mentorship program, featuring personal experiences and program development insights.";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 30 May 2024 11:24:46 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:30;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:94:"WPTavern: #122 – Adam Zielinski on How Playground Is Transforming WordPress Website Creation";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:48:"https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=156003";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:108:"https://wptavern.com/podcast/122-adam-zielinski-on-how-playground-is-transforming-wordpress-website-creation";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:54466:"Transcript<div>
<p>[00:00:00] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley. Jukebox is a podcast, which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, making it significantly easier to create WordPress websites with Playground.</p>



<p>If you&#8217;d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.</p>



<p>If you have a topic that you&#8217;d like us to feature on the podcast, I&#8217;m keen to hear from you, and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.</p>



<p>So on the podcast today we have Adam Zielinski. Adam is the creator of WordPress Playground, a WordPress core committer, and tech editor release lead for WordPress 6.0. He works as a WordPress developer at Automattic. In his spare time, he can be found bouldering, practicing improv comedy, and playing badminton.</p>



<p>In this episode, we talk about Playground, a groundbreaking project that is redefining the way we interacted with WordPress. Adam&#8217;s visionary approach to creating a seamless WordPress experience with a web browser has revolutionized how easy it is to access WordPress.</p>



<p>We discussed Playground&#8217;s history, from the initial frustrations that sparked the idea, to the development process that brought it to life. We gain an understanding of the profound impact Playground is having on the WordPress landscape, and its potential to shape the future of web development. It&#8217;s not often that the word profound is rightly used, but it feels appropriate here.</p>



<p>We explore the enormous potential uses of Playground, from simplifying setup processes to enabling experimentation with plugins and themes. Adam&#8217;s vision for Playground as a catalyst for democratizing website creation, and enabling a culture of innovation within the WordPress community, is something that&#8217;s still evolving, and it&#8217;s clear that the direction that the project takes is still being figured out.</p>



<p>This project really does change the way that WordPress can be used, and there&#8217;s so many exciting prospects for how it might shape the future of web design and development.</p>



<p>If you&#8217;re interested in hearing about cutting edge advancements reshaping the WordPress landscape, this episode is for you.</p>



<p>If you&#8217;d like to find out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptaverm.com/podcast, where you&#8217;ll find all the other episodes as well.</p>



<p>And so without further delay, I bring you Adam Zielinski.</p>



<p>I am joined on the podcast by Adam Zelinski. Hello Adam.</p>



<p>[00:03:21] <strong>Adam Zielinski:</strong> Hello Nathan. Thank you so much for having me.</p>



<p>[00:03:23] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> He&#8217;s giving me the thumbs up. You can&#8217;t see it, but I had to practice Adam&#8217;s surname several times. And I&#8217;m going to just say it that once, because there&#8217;s a high chance I got it wrong.</p>



<p>[00:03:31] <strong>Adam Zielinski:</strong> It was perfect.</p>



<p>[00:03:32] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Thank you so much. We&#8217;re going to talk today a little bit about a very, very exciting development in the WordPress space. You probably have caught sight of it, if you follow the WordPress project closely. It&#8217;s called Playground, and it is profoundly interesting. And if you&#8217;ve not touched it, it may be that some of the things that we&#8217;re going to talk about today will, I&#8217;m going to say, it will shock you. Because what Adam has thrown together is something truly remarkable, to help you create WordPress websites on the fly.</p>



<p>Let&#8217;s get into that a little bit later. Before we do that, Adam, would you just spend a moment just telling us a little bit about yourself. Your WordPress journey, where you work, where you live, whatever you like.</p>



<p>[00:04:09] <strong>Adam Zielinski:</strong> Absolutely. So I live in Poland. I work at Automattic, I&#8217;m sponsored to work on the open source WordPress project full time. I&#8217;ve been doing software for like 20 years now. I started back in secondary school. I found this little website on the internet where you could get little geeks, just to make a website for a furniture store. Nothing, like an e-commerce store. I just, hey, we exist.</p>



<p>And no one there asked if I&#8217;m 13 or not, so I was able to get going like this. And also my brother, he was doing video games at the time. So I also had someone to coach me. Yeah, these days I spent my entire professional time building WordPress Playground.</p>



<p>I also do some bouldering. I do improv comedy. In fact, like in a couple of weeks, I go to some workshops. And then In July, there&#8217;s one musical workshop on a festival, and after that we&#8217;ll have a short performance on the main stage. So that will be my first time on a big event like that in the improv scene. So I&#8217;m as excited as nervous.</p>



<p>[00:05:09] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Absolutely fascinating. May I ask, do you do your comedy in your native language, or do you stray into other languages as well? Because I imagine the barrier to being funny in a different language is quite considerable, because of all the nuances and the little phrases that people use, and the quirks of the lilt, and the rise, and the fall, and all of that.</p>



<p>[00:05:28] <strong>Adam Zielinski:</strong> Yeah, I do it in Polish and in English. But in improv comedy, you don&#8217;t have to be as concerned about the little phrases, because if you play a character truthfully, and your partner on the scene plays a character that has interesting interactions with you, like with your character, the comedy is in the scene, right? Like you don&#8217;t have to try to be funny. In fact, if you try being funny, you probably won&#8217;t be. So it&#8217;s about being real.</p>



<p>[00:05:52] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Yeah, so you&#8217;re in character during these? Wow, honestly, I feel there&#8217;s a whole other podcast that we could have done right here.</p>



<p>[00:05:58] <strong>Adam Zielinski:</strong> Oh yeah.</p>



<p>[00:05:58] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> We&#8217;re going to drag it, kicking and screaming, back to WordPress. Thank you for your bio though. That is amazing.</p>



<p>So you are working for Automattic, and you are a full-time contributor to WordPress. Now, did you say WordPress Core? But then I also think I heard you say that you are working on Playground full-time, at the same time. So are you on Core, Playground, or both?</p>



<p>[00:06:19] <strong>Adam Zielinski:</strong> I think I&#8217;m more like, way more on Playground side of things these days. So I started with the Gutenberg project, then I became a Core committer there. I was also contributing to WordPress Core. And now I am spending like virtually my entire time on Playground side of things.</p>



<p>But this involves interacting with WordPress Core and WordPress Core teams. So these days we use Playground, for example, during the plugin review process, theme review process. There is a Gutenberg block that allows you to embed Playground in a post or WordPress page. I think it&#8217;s been recently deployed to learn.wordpress.org. Now I&#8217;m interacting with that team to get some interactive courses and learning materials online.</p>



<p>I haven&#8217;t committed anything to Core in a, yeah, in a couple of months. But you have to choose where to allocate your time. It&#8217;s very difficult to split your attention between multiple projects, like we just discussed that off the record.</p>



<p>[00:07:12] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Before we hit record, we had a conversation about shattered attention and things like that. Can I ask, when you created Playground, and obviously, dear listener, apologies, you may not know yet what it is, but we&#8217;ll just get this bit out of the way.</p>



<p>When you created Playground, was that a project that you were working on as a side project? Were you just doing that in your spare time, or was this something that Automattic, for example, wished to bring into existence, and so you got the job of doing that? So yeah, how did it actually begin?</p>



<p>[00:07:41] <strong>Adam Zielinski:</strong> I don&#8217;t think anyone dreamt it was even possible at the time. I was just writing a technical tutorial for something in WordPress. And I wrote the lessons, and then I realised that before publishing it, I also have to write lesson number one, setup. And there it opened a Pandora box of, oh, install Docker. Oh, maybe you&#8217;re on Windows, maybe you need WSL. Oh, install, Node.js. What&#8217;s Git, right? Like, here some resources about Git.</p>



<p>And I get so annoyed with that. I wanted to write none of it. I wanted a set up checklist that just says, click this button. And so I wondered, well, you could do this with a cloud setup, an infrastructure, right? Like, sort of like GitHub code spaces, where you spin up something in, I don&#8217;t know, like Amazon Cloud or Google Cloud.</p>



<p>But that costs money. That&#8217;s difficult to maintain. It&#8217;s also not that easy to set up, right? It takes time. And then you have all sorts of problems like, what if someone uploads illegal content in there? Are you hosting that now? And so I thought, well, we should be really running WordPress in the browser. Only that&#8217;s impossible, right? But I wonder, maybe it&#8217;s not impossible.</p>



<p>And I knew about this technology, WebAssembly. It was the promise of running all the regular desktop software in web browsers. I&#8217;ve been hearing about it for like 10 or 15 years, at that time maybe. So I felt like, I wonder if that went anywhere. And so I started digging and tinkering. And two weeks later, I had a very rough prototype.</p>



<p>A lot of things didn&#8217;t work. You sometimes got kicked out of WP Admin. You know, like styles wouldn&#8217;t load all that. It was super slow, but it worked. And my manager at the time, I think he was like preoccupied with other stuff, so he didn&#8217;t mind. When I came up with this prototype, I got very mixed reactions actually. Like some people were super amazed and like, whoa, there&#8217;s so many implications to this, and, wow, it&#8217;s magic.</p>



<p>But actually, most people were like, yeah, it&#8217;s a cool toy. What are we going to do with it? It has no practical uses. And it took months to get the perception of Playground further, to get people to perceive Playground as something actually revolutionary, because it absolutely is.</p>



<p>And something that takes WordPress into so many new possible applications. It solves the most annoying problems WordPress. Setup, resetting your site, right? Like, when you want to try new plugins, everyone&#8217;s always creating new sites, and then deleting them, or resetting the same site to its original state, or previewing code changes on GitHub, I can keep going like that. But yeah, I think, did I answer your question?</p>



<p>[00:10:10] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Yeah, yeah. that&#8217;s great. So I&#8217;ll just paraphrase what my experience of Playground is, because we haven&#8217;t laid that foundation out. I don&#8217;t understand the underlying technology, so Adam is going to have to shepherd me through that, as we have this conversation.</p>



<p>But from the end user&#8217;s perspective, when I&#8217;ve set up WordPress websites in the past, there&#8217;s always been some kind of interaction with a file structure. You have to download WordPress from .org in my case. And you take it from there, and you upload that, and then you create a database, and you bind the database to the wordpress.org repo that you&#8217;ve created, and then you&#8217;re off to the races. And you have to host that somewhere, and that whole process now can be done with the click of a button inside of a lot of hosting companies and so on.</p>



<p>But there&#8217;s some kind of wall there. You either have to interact with files, or you have to pay a hosting company to make that happen. And the first time I saw a Playground, I clicked a button, and there was a WordPress website, a moment or two later. And I genuinely do mean a moment or two later, I think the time it&#8217;s taking me to say this sentence is significantly longer than the time that it takes to get your website up there.</p>



<p>And I remember I had no context around what it was. Nobody told me what was going to happen. They just said, oh, click this. So I clicked that. And I was staring at the screen thinking, what, there&#8217;s WordPress, but I didn&#8217;t have to pay for anything, I didn&#8217;t have to go anywhere, it just appeared. And then the cogs start going in my head. Where&#8217;s the database? Where&#8217;s the files? Where&#8217;s all this come from? How is this possible?</p>



<p>And then being truly flawed by it, thinking, no, this is some kind of implementation of, as you said, WebAssembly. This is happening inside the browser. And then of course, the admiration comes in like, how did that get done? Who did that? And of course it was you.</p>



<p>So, this is the ability to install WordPress, inside the browser, at the click of a button. A fully functional WordPress site. So there&#8217;s no impediment to using it, apart from if you don&#8217;t have three seconds to wait, give up. That&#8217;s the only problem. If you don&#8217;t have three seconds to spare, then okay, fine.</p>



<p>Okay, so the technical bit I want to dig into a lot, it&#8217;s a podcast, so we won&#8217;t go right into the weeds. But, when I click that button, and I want Playground to be invoked, to have my WordPress website, broadly what&#8217;s going on? Like, there must be files somewhere. There has to be the file structure of WordPress. There has to be a database in some way, shape, or form, because that&#8217;s how it&#8217;s built? Where are they coming from? And once they&#8217;ve come from there, where are they now living?</p>



<p>[00:12:49] <strong>Adam Zielinski:</strong> They all live in your browser. Playground, very broadly, is a technology to run the entire WordPress tech stack in your browser. So to run it on a server, you typically need something like, people call it LAMP stack, right? Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. And Playground brings all these pieces into the browser, in some shape, or form.</p>



<p>So PHP, for example, we are running as WebAssembly. So PHP, the programming language, is a program in itself, right? Like, it&#8217;s written in C, you can look it up on GitHub, and you can build it as something you can run on a server. But now with WebAssembly, you can also build it as something you can run in JavaScript, which means the web browsers can run it, and Node.js can run it, and a lot of other environments can run it.</p>



<p>Then the database, MySQL. We don&#8217;t run MySQL in the browser. Technically, maybe we could do that, but there&#8217;s a lot of reasons not to. Instead, we are running SQLite, and SQLite doesn&#8217;t require a separate program. It&#8217;s just a library, and it writes all your data to a file. So when you run Playground, it actually downloads a pre-populated database with WordPress already installed, so you don&#8217;t have to go through the installation wizard. All the queries, all the SQL queries go through that database.</p>



<p>Now the syntax is a little bit different than with MySQL, and we have an entire translation layer to take MySQL queries, and express them in SQLite, and take SQLite results, and express them as something that came from MySQL.</p>



<p>So really the same W DB object works for interacting with the database. Then we have Apache. Normally you run a web server, and this allows you to request different pages. Now, WordPress works as a, you navigate it as a classic website, right? So we click a link, and then the URL changes in your browser bar. Which means the browser had to perform a request, ask some server somewhere, get a response, and then maybe there are images, and scripts, and styles in that response. So it has to go and fetch all these resources.</p>



<p>And normally you have an Apache, or Nginx, or another server software running somewhere, and the browser goes there. Obviously we don&#8217;t have that in the browser, but there&#8217;s a cool technology web browser supports these days. It&#8217;s called Service Workers. And you can intercept all HTTP requests. And it&#8217;s meant for progressive web apps, so we can run offline. But we are playing a little trick on that Service Worker. And instead of caching things, we are just rerouting that to PHP, where WordPress can serve them.</p>



<p>Finally, in the LAMP stack you have Linux, which provides you with all the external world, right? So it allows you to allocate memory, write files, read files, interact with the network. It gives you access to all the devices on your computer. Again, like, we don&#8217;t have access to all of that in the browser, but we are shipping implementation of all these bits written in JavaScript. So we have a JavaScript file system, it&#8217;s just three objects in trench coat, right? Like, pretending to be a directory structure.</p>



<p>We have a networking bridge that can rewrite network traffic as fetch calls. We have memory allocator, which is the compiler that turns PHP source code into WebAssembly. And so on and so forth. So it&#8217;s the entire tech stack running in the browser. And you can also ship it to so many other devices. We have a CLI tool. We have a VS Code extension. So we just installed it from the marketplace, and boom, we have a WordPress server. No dependencies at all.</p>



<p>Ella Van Durpe, I hope I&#8217;m pronouncing that right, she built an app called Blocknotes. It&#8217;s Playground, it&#8217;s WordPress, in an iOS app, in App store. I bet you would be able to run it on your smart fridge, right? If you had enough time. So really this turns WordPress into an application engine, so to speak. You could write a WordPress plugin, bundle it as Playground, and ship it to all these places where Playground can run, which means most devices these days.</p>



<p>[00:16:42] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> I just want to make sure that the listeners have really grasped what&#8217;s going on here. So this is WordPress purely inside the browser. Through all of the contrivances and clever things that Adam has just described, it&#8217;s all happening inside the browser. And so just dwell on that for a moment, because that is actually pretty profound.</p>



<p>I do wonder, when you&#8217;d been working on it for a couple of weeks, and you actually had this version working, you said it had various faults, which I guess you&#8217;ve been tackling as time has gone on. Did you get that sense of, wait, what have I done here?</p>



<p>You know, this is quite remarkable, because the stated mission of WordPress is democratise publishing. Let&#8217;s just concentrate on the word democratise there. It&#8217;s get anything into the hands of everybody. That&#8217;s really what the endeavor of the project is, get publishing into the hands of everybody.</p>



<p>And a big impediment to that is the experimentation part, playing with WordPress, being able to judge whether it&#8217;s a good fit for you, your business, the agency that you run, whatever. And especially for non-technical people, trying WordPress out is a bit of a faff. You could either do it on the desktop, with downloading additional software, but again, if you&#8217;re not very technical, that is a bit of a hurdle.</p>



<p>This is a one button install, three second wait, whatever it may be. And then you&#8217;re off to the races. So, again, now that I&#8217;ve said all of that, did you get a sense of the profundity, the profound nature of what you&#8217;d built, after you&#8217;d worked for those two weeks?</p>



<p>[00:18:12] <strong>Adam Zielinski:</strong> Yes. I was staring at the screen, I distinctly remember thinking, this is profound. I didn&#8217;t fully understand all the implications with all the devices. WordPress as a vector for delivering apps. Maybe setting up a site, not even knowing how to code, and then pressing a button, and exporting that as something you can run on a desktop.</p>



<p>And by the way, we are not there today. Technology allows that we don&#8217;t have that button. But I knew this is going to change the way we think about WordPress, and the way we use it, the way we learn WordPress. But I guess I was mostly focused on things that annoyed me specifically. So maybe that tutorial, right? Oh, now I will be able to teach people without asking them to go through all these steps. Or maybe now I will be able to try out plugins, or do development environments, again, like without spending all that time. And maybe that can work on Windows.</p>



<p>But honestly, I feel like we&#8217;re only still scratching the surface. And I understand more and more about Playground every month, like the apps angle I just told you about. That came up I think in April, right?</p>



<p>There&#8217;s another idea, if you can run an app on your mobile phone. And we were also exploring synchronising data between Playgrounds and WordPresses. So maybe you would write an article in a Playground, and it&#8217;ll get published in a website somewhere. And then maybe that website could have five different copies, and they would all synchronise in real time. And I think we&#8217;re like quarters, or years away from that. But assuming we had that, maybe WordPress could power a social network app, right? Since you can run it on every device, and you can exchange data in a distributed way. There&#8217;s all sorts of wild ideas.</p>



<p>[00:19:48] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Okay, so we&#8217;re back at the beginning, you&#8217;ve spent a couple of weeks building it, and you&#8217;ve got this working, functional prototype, let&#8217;s call it like that. It feels like that got picked up fairly rapidly, because then I started hearing about it, Playground, at various different points. I remember attending one of the WordPress flagship events, I can&#8217;t remember which one it was. Matt Mullenweg was on the stage, and he was just basically saying, oh, and there&#8217;s this, you know, everybody should check this out. This is pretty amazing. And I was thinking, gosh, okay, this is now a serious endeavor if it&#8217;s getting mentioned at that kind of event, that&#8217;s fascinating.</p>



<p>So you then were able to start working on it, more or less full time. And I&#8217;m guessing that there must have been some conversation to be had there, within Automattic. People must have realised, yeah, let&#8217;s get Adam on this. We can see some blue sky in this project. We can see some useful things that we could do with it. Is that kind of what happened, that your work week got turned around and, okay, Adam, you are on Playground now?</p>



<p>[00:20:47] <strong>Adam Zielinski:</strong> Yeah, you got it more or less right. I&#8217;m saying more or less because, so Automattic is sort of choose your own journey type of place, where you can be in a team where you&#8217;re very directed, or you can be in a team where you&#8217;re very autonomous, right? There&#8217;s all sorts of teams out there. And I was always a free electron type of person.</p>



<p>So I just started working on Playground. I like saying no one stopped me, that&#8217;s more of what happened. And these days, team for Playground. So there&#8217;s three of us, and it&#8217;s a very nice change. So there&#8217;s Brandon, there&#8217;s Bero, and there&#8217;s me. And, man, it&#8217;s so nice just working on this with other people, because it&#8217;s been quite a lonely journey for some time.</p>



<p>I had support from Dennis Snell, who&#8217;s been also maintaining Playground while I was on a sabbatical. I appreciate Dennis so much, and he&#8217;s done so much good for Playground. We don&#8217;t have enough time to discuss it. At the same time, he&#8217;s also had a lot of other projects on his plate.</p>



<p>I was mostly trying to figure out, oh, let&#8217;s communicate about Playground. Let&#8217;s publish something. Let&#8217;s prepare a video for a State of the Word. But let&#8217;s also keep developing new features. Let&#8217;s also focus on the vision, and let&#8217;s also fix any bug people report, right? Like, I was all over the place. And these days, I feel Playground is in a much better place, in terms of focus.</p>



<p>One of the things we want to do in a short term is figure out all the ways Playground can crash. We&#8217;ve seen a uptick in usage of Playground. It&#8217;s been featured on a few workshops, on learn.wordpress.org. I think Ryan Welcher featured it. Jonathan Bossenger, I think Anne McCarthy also did, and a few other people. This really inspired some folks to start using it, building blueprints for the plugin directory, to share a live demo of their plugin.</p>



<p>And of course, when you see more users, they discover more issues in the software. So that&#8217;s what happened, and that&#8217;s fantastic because now we can fix all of that. But this also means new feature development isn&#8217;t going forward as quickly, as if Playground was already stable. But stability, building trust, releasing a high quality documentation, that&#8217;s a big priority right now. Because if the platform isn&#8217;t stable, it won&#8217;t be as useful. So that&#8217;s what we&#8217;re trying to do.</p>



<p>[00:22:59] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> I remember using it, as I said, for the first time, and pressing the button, getting my WordPress website, and there it was, everything working as you would expect, the brand new, up-to-date version of WordPress. And then closing the browser, and wondering, okay, what&#8217;s going to happen now? And at that point, that was that. Everything that I just created, was gone. So, well, that&#8217;s fine. I had no expectations beyond there.</p>



<p>I&#8217;m wondering if, in the future, the disposable nature of it might be something that you are working on, so that it could persist. Let&#8217;s say that I click the button, get the WordPress Playground going, but then choose to come back to it, I don&#8217;t know, a week later, two weeks later, it&#8217;s something that I&#8217;m doing as a side project. The way that I&#8217;ve interacted with it, that would&#8217;ve been impossible. Everything is disposed of the moment you close the browser window. But just wondering if persistence was something that might even be possible.</p>



<p>[00:23:56] <strong>Adam Zielinski:</strong> Absolutely. And there&#8217;s a bunch of ways to tackle that. So right now in Playground, in the upper right corner, there&#8217;s a little button, it says like WordPress 6.5, PHP 8.3. And it allows you to change versions of WordPress current PHP, but it also allows you to change the way Playground is persisted. So the default mode is that it&#8217;s temporary, and it&#8217;s gone the moment you close your browser tab. But there&#8217;s also a browser cache mode, so then when you return to Playground website, it&#8217;ll remember your last site.</p>



<p>And there&#8217;s also an experimental mode, that allows you to synchronise Playground to your local directory on your computer, from your web browser. So if you choose that, the entire WordPress structure will be recreated on your machine. And if you make changes in Visual Studio Code, for example, they will show up in Playground.</p>



<p>There&#8217;s also an export button, so you can download your site as a zip file. You can export it to GitHub as a pull request. That feature also exists. With pull request specifically, I&#8217;m exploring a static site collaboration workflow. So the idea is this, you have a GitHub repository, you have a lot of content in there. Maybe that&#8217;s a documentation for something, maybe that&#8217;s entire website. So you have HTML pages, you have uploads, you have some plugins. And that repo is used to create a static site, and it&#8217;s hosted somewhere.</p>



<p>But then you can also go to that static site, and let&#8217;s imagine it&#8217;s a documentation site. So maybe every article has a little button called Edit in Playground, and you click it, and it opens Playground with that article already loaded in the editor. You change it, you upload something, you click export to GitHub as a pull request, and boom, there it goes, there is a change proposal.</p>



<p>Now, someone else would be able to review it by clicking a button in that pull request, and loading your changes in Playground, and say, hey, good job, or, oh, there&#8217;s a typo, let me fix it. And they will just update that pull request.</p>



<p>[00:25:50] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> That is truly fascinating. And it is just really blowing apart the very nature of what it is. Because when you first came up with it, I feel like the word Playground was just the perfect encapsulation for what it is. You know, you just mess around, and then you close it down, start something else, mess around, close it down. You&#8217;re just messing about. You just want to test out a new plugin, you want to try something new, you just want to see what the latest default WordPress theme looks like, and how you do full site editing, and all of that. You just want to have a tinker, and you just want to do it. You&#8217;ve got a little bit of time, and then you close the browser and it goes away.</p>



<p>But it seems like the intuition here is that, you&#8217;re stepping away from Playground&#8217;s roots, if you like, of just, it&#8217;s disposable, it&#8217;s just for a bit of fun. And it&#8217;s moving into the territory of something more permanent. So not just, it can be retained and persists in the browser, but we&#8217;ve got ways of shipping this. We can take this from your Playground, we can put it up to GitHub, and then from GitHub, who knows where that could end up. You know, it could end up in a CDN somewhere as a static website, like you said, or it could do a multitude of other things. It sounds like it&#8217;s going from more Playground, to developing actual real world projects.</p>



<p>[00:27:04] <strong>Adam Zielinski:</strong> Yes. So that static site, for example, it could be completely static. So you could run it without any PHP hosting, so very cheaply on a CDN. But then you could go to slash WP Admin, and you could have a running Playground there.</p>



<p>[00:27:18] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> So it&#8217;s static without the static.</p>



<p>[00:27:21] <strong>Adam Zielinski:</strong> Yes. Perhaps block markup could replace markdown for a lot of use cases actually. Because in markdown, it&#8217;s great for simple documents, but then if you want to go beyond that, people started inventing ways of extending that. So maybe you have MDX that brings React to markdown. Maybe you have syntax extensions. I think Gutenberg repo uses some of that, right?</p>



<p>There&#8217;s a lot of these projects, and all these things amount to blocks essentially. Just give me more ways, more widgets in markdown, give me more things I can express, right? And with Playground, yeah, like you can express any WordPress block. Just install it in WordPress, export, use it in a post, save that content of that post, that&#8217;s your block markup. And there&#8217;s a lot of ways you can interact with it. Render it, right? You can edit it in WordPress.</p>



<p>But to your point, there is a development environment these days. It&#8217;s been released by wordpress.com, it&#8217;s called Studio. And it&#8217;s actually built on top of Playground, right? So we don&#8217;t need any Docker. You don&#8217;t need any virtual machines. It&#8217;s running Playground inside an Electron app, and it just works. You don&#8217;t need any dependencies. Just install it, there it goes. Maybe that same environment, with the Playground for its WordPress for Apps paradigm, right? Maybe we&#8217;ll see it on tablet at one point. With all the ways to utilise Playground, actually, I have a note, let me refresh my memory a little bit.</p>



<p>Alright, so if you&#8217;ve ever been to a contributor day, you&#8217;ve probably seen how difficult the setup can be, right? Just getting WordPress running on your machine for a new person, it can easily take the entire contributor day, even if you have full access to WordPress Core developers during the event. Playground can reduce that to a single step. And there can be even multiple, predefined WordPress builds, right?</p>



<p>Are you a Gutenberg developer? Are you a Core developer? Do you want to just contribute to docs? Then we could take it to a browser, right? So you wouldn&#8217;t even have to do anything locally, and you could still take advantage of Git, and pull requests, and all these workflows.</p>



<p>Further along, perhaps we could encapsulate some contribution workflows without ever reasoning about code, right? So I imagined a theme directory on wordpress.org. It could have Playground, where you would just build a theme, you would be able to go back to it, submit it for a review, right? If we add a code editor to that, now we can have a plugin contribution workflow.</p>



<p>These days, we&#8217;re about to launch a community space for Playground Blueprints. So Blueprints are these configuration files that express an entire WordPress setup. So maybe you want a WordPress with WPCLI and a specific plugins, or maybe you want a WordPress with a so and so theme, and a bunch of content, right? Maybe that&#8217;s your site. Or maybe you want to preinstall your plugin, and configure it with a useful default content for the demo.</p>



<p>So you can now encode that as a JSON file, and the blueprints community space, it&#8217;ll be just that. It&#8217;ll be what wordpress.org/plugin is, but for these blueprints. So everyone will be able to share a blueprint, review the blueprints that are already there, immediately launch a WordPress site from any of these blueprints. And I hope this will spark a lot of cool ideas for Playground usage. Honestly, people are teaching me so much about what you can do with Playground these days.</p>



<p>Someone recently mentioned this idea, they really don&#8217;t like working with PowerPoint, and there are ways of building slides in WordPress. So now I have a blueprint that turns WordPress into a slide building, presentation building program. It&#8217;s configured with the right theme, it has some slides already in it, it has an export to PDF button, and you can just start editing and then save a presentation, export it as a PDF, host it as a static site, right? If you want to share a link with the world.</p>



<p>And I&#8217;m not even like touching on things like classroom usage, or education use cases, right? There&#8217;s a professor using Playground to teach students about building websites, and it&#8217;s very easy for them because it doesn&#8217;t require installing anything. So I think like the university computers are like locked down so you cannot install custom software, but you can open websites. So you can go to a Playground site, or this version of Playground site where you have a code editor. And you can just start hacking with a plugin, or just a setup. And then you can export it, or submit it for grading, publish what the entire class created. There&#8217;s a lot more.</p>



<p>[00:31:44] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Yeah, I mean, truly, the sky is the limit really, isn&#8217;t it? Because, again, just to take you back to that moment where you had spent two weeks on it, and there it was in its nascent form, none of this was going through your head. And now here we are a little while later, and it&#8217;s almost like, you know, you&#8217;ve got the theme repository, you&#8217;ve got the plugin repository, and I feel like we need a Playground repository. And, you know, you&#8217;ve described it as blueprints.</p>



<p>That just seems to have so much utility. Just different flavors of WordPress. Okay, do you want a super stripped down version of WordPress? Are you just beginning? Do you just want to look at WordPress for the first time? Click this button. Are you more experienced? Do you want to get straight into the full site editing? Okay, click this button, and you&#8217;ll be hit with that as soon as you launch it.</p>



<p>But then of course, all of the different things, the companies who produce plugins, who would like to be able to demonstrate what their plugin does, well that, until now, required you click a button, and you connect it to some third party service that they pay for, which spins up a WordPress website with their configuration. Now, you just click a button and it&#8217;s there in the browser, and it can now come with the dependencies that it needs.</p>



<p>So let&#8217;s say you&#8217;re a WooCommerce plugin house, and obviously you need WooCommerce built into it. You can have that set as a dependency. So click the button, not only does our plugin come, but it&#8217;s fully configured, ready to go with WooCommerce and everything.</p>



<p>Just so many uses. And then it feels to me, this is kind of like not really stretching the horizon very far, but it feels to me that, then the ability to be able to click a button inside of your Playground, and then take it to more traditional hosting, so that you do have something more permanent. Might be kind of useful, but from everything that you&#8217;ve said, there&#8217;s a thousand different directions, tendrils going all over the place, you know, the education space. Just a million different things. And I guess that must be one of the nice things from where you are sitting. You&#8217;re just seeing all of this interaction in a project that you built, and that must be joyous.</p>



<p>[00:33:49] <strong>Adam Zielinski:</strong> It is. And, man, like there&#8217;s so many great ideas floating around in the community. Use cases I would never come up with in a million years. And I just love seeing more and more of these.</p>



<p>[00:34:00] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> I do like the idea of being able to go to an official blueprint repository, if you like, and just sift through user submitted versions of WordPress. Let&#8217;s say you&#8217;ve just decided that you want to start selling a course online, here&#8217;s a perfectly pre-configured LMS experience for you, just so that you can see how that works. And, you know, or a shop, a WooCommerce shop, or just a regular WordPress website with full site editing, all done for you. But now we&#8217;re going to use this theme, oh, you are not happy with that one, try this Playground over here, we&#8217;ve got a different theme, but everything else is just the same.</p>



<p>1,001 user submitted, varients of WordPress, and that&#8217;s never been possible. We&#8217;re always starting from, basic WordPress then build things on top of it, because of the fact that there&#8217;s a lot of work which needs to go in before your site is working. Now with all these dependencies built in, the click of a button, there it is, ready to go. Like you said, it&#8217;s profound. It really is incredibly profound.</p>



<p>[00:35:01] <strong>Adam Zielinski:</strong> One more cool thing I wanted to share though, we have a plugin for WordPress. You install it, and then you go to WP Admin plugins directory, and every plugin has install now button, it has it now, but it also has preview now button. And that preview now button clones your website in Playground, installs that plugin, and opens it in a new tab, so you can see, oh, do I like using it? Would it break my website? Is it even doing what I need it do? And you don&#8217;t like it, you just close that tab, and your production site is as it was before.</p>



<p>[00:35:33] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Yeah, I&#8217;d forgotten about that. Yeah. But if you go to wordpress.org, now there&#8217;s a button. I remember there was a little bit of a kerfuffle where, it was a few months ago, where Playground got launched on the plugin repository, and for various different reasons, dependencies largely being the thing I think, that got withdrawn. Then, I think now it is that the plugin developers need to just tick a box to say, yes please on my plugin listing, please put Playground there because that will be something that I want.</p>



<p>And now I would imagine the majority, so long as it works, why wouldn&#8217;t you have that? You can go and experiment. So that&#8217;s new. If you haven&#8217;t been to the wordpress.org plugin repository recently, there is now, on a lot of plugins, a button just to use Playground. Click the button, you&#8217;ll see it, you&#8217;ll be able to see it immediately, and all the wonderful things that it does.</p>



<p>[00:36:16] <strong>Adam Zielinski:</strong> Yeah, although that&#8217;s not what I meant.</p>



<p>[00:36:17] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Ah, apologies.</p>



<p>[00:36:19] <strong>Adam Zielinski:</strong> What I meant is, there&#8217;s a separate plugin called the Playground. And if you install it on your WordPress site, you will get that preview button inside WP Admin, and it&#8217;ll preview that plugin a copy of your site.</p>



<p>[00:36:31] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Wheels within wheels. It&#8217;s very meta that isn&#8217;t it? I didn&#8217;t know that existed. So you&#8217;ve got a Playground site. Inside of that Playground site, you can install the Playground plugin. I guess you could get inception going on there, couldn&#8217;t you? Playground within Playground. within Playground, all the way.</p>



<p>[00:36:49] <strong>Adam Zielinski:</strong> Yeah, that is actually possible. So there&#8217;s a Playground Gutenberg block, and it&#8217;s in the WordPress plugin directory, and it has a preview button and it opens a Playground with that block inside Playground. So yeah, there are multiple levels.</p>



<p>[00:37:00] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> We&#8217;ve obviously waxed lyrical. I think it&#8217;s a fabulous project. Just what it&#8217;s going to open up in the future, who knows. I think the word profound, I think that&#8217;s the exact appropriate word at this point.</p>



<p>However, all of this light that we&#8217;re shining on it, I presume there&#8217;s still things that you would like to fix. Things that don&#8217;t yet work as expected, that maybe some things which you&#8217;ll never be able to overcome, given the state of what browsers can do at the moment. Should we just talk about that? What are some of the limitations that you know of at the moment?</p>



<p>[00:37:28] <strong>Adam Zielinski:</strong> Absolutely. So not all PHP extensions are supported in the browser, and we support more every month. But not yet at the place where you would have 100%. It&#8217;ll never be 100% right? Like for example, you cannot use Curl in a web browser. You can use it in a node version of Playground.</p>



<p>We&#8217;re just bringing in support for different image formats. So WebP and surprisingly jpeg. Png was already in there. Network is a large challenge. So WordPress would sometimes open, let me speak with a little bit more jargon. WordPress would sometimes open a TCP sockets to specific addresses, and you don&#8217;t have that API in the browser, right. You can only do fetch and few more things, but not that. So that may never be supported. Like if browsers had that, it would be large security risk. You can however do that in a node version of Playground.</p>



<p>The database support. I think all core features work well. And we even had a 99% of unit tests passing in Playground. But there are some plugins using MySQL features that are not yet supported. So I think one of them is select union. So we still have some work to do with the database support.</p>



<p>So by default Playground doesn&#8217;t have access to network, and you have to enable it in Playground options. That&#8217;s a performance thing. Playground is significantly slower with that. So just to give everyone snappy experience by default. However, we do have something going on to have networking by default and also have it being very performant. That will hopefully go away sometime soon.</p>



<p>And honestly, like we&#8217;re learning about new limitations. Yeah, I would say like every week of every month, people come to Playground repository, they ask about their use case and someone wanted to use soap client. It&#8217;s not supported at the moment.</p>



<p>Someone else wanted to run a real server, right? So send a link to someone, somewhere and it&#8217;s just running in your browser. So we cannot really do that at the moment. But maybe it will be possible actually in the future. Like, I&#8217;m playing with a few ideas about that. So if you use Playground and something isn&#8217;t working right, come say hi to the Meta Playground channel on WordPress org Slack, or the WordPress slash WordPress dash Playground repository on GitHub, and tell us, we may not know.</p>



<p>[00:39:50] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> I feel like you&#8217;ve created a bit of an iPhone moment with WordPress. What I mean by that was, everybody had a mobile phone prior to the iPhone, and then the iPhone came along, and then everybody really wanted an iPhone because it was so profoundly different. And it feels like you&#8217;ve done something profoundly different with WordPress, and when apps came along and suddenly, yeah, there was an iPhone, but it was an iPhone and it looked nice and everything, and then apps came along and made the iPhone more profoundly interesting.</p>



<p>You&#8217;ve enabled more profoundly interesting things to be done with WordPress than could be done two years ago, and the supplying of that is crucial. But it&#8217;ll be interesting if we have this conversation in, let&#8217;s say three years time, I think the real interest will be, not necessarily the Playground bit, and forgive me, I&#8217;m not denigrating what you&#8217;ve done because it&#8217;s remarkable, but it&#8217;s what everybody will do with the Playground that you&#8217;ve built. And the unique things that they&#8217;ve created. And the hither to as yet unimagined things, which will become commonplace and normal with WordPress, that at the moment nobody&#8217;s even conceived. And you&#8217;ve hinted at a few of those now. And so you&#8217;ve genuinely stirred interest, and something novel in the WordPress space and that isn&#8217;t often happening..</p>



<p>[00:41:16] <strong>Adam Zielinski:</strong> Thank you so much. I&#8217;m blushing. Yeah. truly amazing.</p>



<p>And think that iPhone moment analogy, it&#8217;s excellent. And if you don&#8217;t mind, I&#8217;ll borrow that.</p>



<p>[00:41:27] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> When the App Store came to the iPhone, that moment where the iPhone, which was fun and you could play songs with it, but you couldn&#8217;t do all the other things, like store your notes and sync them to the cloud and communicate with other people on chat apps.</p>



<p>I imagine the developer community will jump on board and come up with a thousand different ways to build on top of Playground.</p>



<p>[00:41:46] <strong>Adam Zielinski:</strong> The analogy may be going further than it seems at first because every blueprint is like an app, right? You have WordPress as your vehicle for setting things up. And then you can create a slide building app, as I said earlier. But I had someone running Doom, like the video game in the Playground.</p>



<p>Yeah, you can build a course website with it, right? If you just pre-configure it in the correct way. We have a pull request previewer running in a couple of projects, right? You have a preview link on GitHub just posted automatically. You have plugin previewers. You have project demos. So many different things.</p>



<p>I have a blueprint that if you run it, it doesn&#8217;t actually create a Playground you can use, but it gives you a zip file. And in that zip there is a static version of what you started with, right? So now you can not only produce different WordPress setups and website setups, but also artifacts, right?</p>



<p>Maybe another blueprint could, I don&#8217;t know, render a PDF, right? And that would be another version of your slides, to keep using this example.</p>



<p>You can embed Playground. You can ship Playground on all the devices. So I&#8217;m imagining a world where you can build a WordPress plugin, click a button, and now you have a desktop app. You have a server app. You have a front end app. You have a progressive web app. You have a phone app. You have a tablet app. You have a terminal app, right from a single code base. We don&#8217;t have that button today, but I think it&#8217;s very possible to build one.</p>



<p>[00:43:16] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> It feels like the slogan is Playground, taking the friction out of using WordPress. Making that first step so much easier. No matter what your level of experience, if it&#8217;s the first time you&#8217;ve used WordPress, or if you want to do something more complicated. Just that frictionless step that you&#8217;ve created is, yeah, absolutely brilliant.</p>



<p>So just before we go, I know that you mentioned the Slack channel where you are hanging out. Maybe you want to mention that again, just so it&#8217;s gone into people&#8217;s heads. But also if anybody is curious, maybe there&#8217;s other places where you can help with the Playground project, but also if you&#8217;re willing, are places where people can get in touch with you.</p>



<p>[00:43:52] <strong>Adam Zielinski:</strong> Absolutely. Twitter is one of them. I&#8217;m most attentive to GitHub, cause I&#8217;m spending a lot of time in the Playground repo and all the Playground related activity. So probably the easiest way to reach me is through issues and discussions.</p>



<p>If you have something unrelated to the product, but just wanted to explore your use case, ping me on Twitter. There&#8217;s WordPress.org Slack, called meta-playground and that&#8217;s another good place. And also I&#8217;ll be on WordCamp EU in June. I&#8217;ll be having a talk on the main stage about WordPress Playground. So come, say hi. Watch the talk and let&#8217;s talk in person.</p>



<p>[00:44:28] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Nice. Thank you very much. Adam Zelensky, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.</p>



<p>[00:44:34] <strong>Adam Zielinski:</strong> It&#8217;s been so lovely, naan. Thank you so much for having me.</p>
</div>



<p>On the podcast today we have <a href="https://x.com/adamzielin">Adam Zielinski</a>.</p>



<p>Adam is the creator of WordPress Playground, a WordPress core committer, and Tech Editor release lead for WordPress 6.0. He works as a WordPress developer at Automattic and lives in Wrocław, Poland. In his spare time, he can be found bouldering, practising improv comedy, and playing badminton.</p>



<p>In this episode, we talk about Playground, a groundbreaking project that is redefined the way we interact with WordPress. Adam&#8217;s visionary approach to creating a seamless WordPress experience within a web browser has revolutionised how easy it is to access WordPress.</p>



<p>We discuss Playground&#8217;s history, from the initial frustrations that sparked the idea, to the development process that brought it to life. We gain an understanding of the profound impact Playground is having on the WordPress landscape and its potential to shape the future of web development. It’s not often that the word profound is rightly used, but it feels appropriate here.</p>



<p>We explore the enormous potential uses of Playground, from simplifying setup processes to enabling experimentation with plugins and themes. Adam&#8217;s vision for Playground as a catalyst for democratising website creation and enabling a culture of innovation within the WordPress community is something that’s still evolving, and it’s clear that the direction the project takes is still being figured out.</p>



<p>This project really does change the way that WordPress can be used, and there’s so many exciting prospects for how it might shape the future of website design and development.</p>



<p>If you&#8217;re interested in hearing about cutting-edge advancements reshaping the WordPress landscape, this episode is for you.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Useful links</h2>



<p><a href="https://wordpress.org/playground/">WordPress Playground</a></p>



<p><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/blueprints">Blueprints GitHub repo</a></p>



<p><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/meta/2024/05/15/the-blueprint-gallery-share-your-wordpress-creations-with-playground/">The Blueprint Gallery: Share your WordPress creations with Playground</a></p>



<p><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress-playground">Playground GitHub repo</a></p>



<p><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/">Learn WordPress</a></p>



<p><a href="https://webassembly.org/">Web Assembly</a></p>



<p><a href="https://apps.apple.com/za/app/blocknotes/id6450189974">Blocknotes</a> by Ella Van Durpe</p>



<p><a href="https://x.com/adamzielin">Adam on X / Twitter</a></p>



<p><a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/2024/speaker/adam-zieliski/">Adam&#8217;s presentation at WordCamp Europe 2024</a></p>



<p>The playground team:</p>



<p>Dennis Snell:&nbsp;<a href="https://github.com/dmsnell/">https://github.com/dmsnell/</a></p>



<p>Brandon Payton:&nbsp;<a href="https://github.com/brandonpayton">https://github.com/brandonpayton</a></p>



<p>Bero: <a href="https://github.com/bgrgicak">https://github.com/bgrgicak</a></p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 29 May 2024 14:00:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"Nathan Wrigley";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:31;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:69:"Do The Woo Community: All Things WordCamp Canada with Shanta Nathwani";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=83911";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:68:"https://dothewoo.io/all-things-wordcamp-canada-with-shanta-nathwani/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:106:"Shanta shares the challenges, diverse initiatives, and cultural elements in preparing for WordCamp Canada.";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 29 May 2024 12:27:22 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:32;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:128:"Do The Woo Community: The WP Includes Gender Equality in WordPress Businesses Survey with Siobhan McKeown and Francesca Marano";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=83888";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:125:"https://dothewoo.io/the-wp-includes-gender-equality-in-wordpress-businesses-survey-with-siobhan-mckeown-and-francesca-marano/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:184:"Rae Morey chats with Siobhan McKeown and Francesca Marano about the WP Includes' initiative, the gender equality survey, upcoming presentation, personal experiences, and future impact.";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 28 May 2024 08:13:51 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:33;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:10:"Matt: WP21";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:23:"https://ma.tt/?p=114533";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:27:"https://ma.tt/2024/05/wp21/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:3309:"<p>It seems like just yesterday WordPress was <a href="https://ma.tt/2016/05/wordpress-is-a-teenager/">becoming a teenager</a>, and in a blink of the eye it&#8217;s now old enough to drink! 21 years since <a href="https://mikelittle.org/">Mike</a> and I did the first release of WordPress, forking <a href="https://miche.lv/">Michel&#8217;s</a> work on b2/cafélog.</p>



<p>There&#8217;s been many milestones and highlights along the way, and many more to come. I&#8217;ve been thinking a lot about elements that made WordPress successful in its early years that we should keep in mind as we build this year and beyond. Here&#8217;s 11 opinions:</p>



<ol class="wp-block-list">
<li>Simple things should be easy and intuitive, and complex things possible.</li>



<li>Blogging, commenting, and pingbacks need to be fun. Static websites are fine, but dynamic ones are better. Almost every site would be improved by having a great blog.</li>



<li>Wikis are amazing, and our documentation should be wiki-easy to edit.</li>



<li>Forums should be front and center in the community. <a href="https://bbpress.org/">bbPress</a> and <a href="https://buddypress.org/">BuddyPress</a> need some love.</li>



<li>Every plugin and theme should have all the infrastructure that we use to build WordPress itself—version control, bug trackers, forums, documentation, internationalization, chat rooms, P2, and easy pathways for contribution and community. We shouldn&#8217;t be uploading ZIPs in 2024!</li>



<li>Theme previews should be great, and a wide collection of non-commercial themes with diverse aesthetics and functionality are crucial. </li>



<li>We can&#8217;t over-index for guidelines and requirements. Better to have good marketplace dynamics and engineer automated feedback loops and transparency to users. Boundaries in functionality and design should be pushed. (But spam and spammy behavior deserves zero tolerance.)</li>



<li>Feedback loops are so important, and should scale with usage and the entire community rather than being reliant on gatekeepers.</li>



<li>Core should be opinionated and quirky: Easter eggs, language with personality even if it&#8217;s difficult to translate, jazzy.</li>



<li>Everyone developing and making decisions for software needs to use it.</li>



<li>It&#8217;s important that we all do support, go to meetups and events, anything we can to stay close to regular end-users of what we make.</li>
</ol>



<p>A bonus: <a href="https://wordpress.org/playground/">Playground is going to change everything</a>. What would you add?</p>



<p>Fun fact: On May 27, 2003 I blogged &#8220;Working backwards, earlier tonight was great. Put&nbsp;WordPress&nbsp;out, which felt great.&#8221; as one sentence in a <a href="https://ma.tt/2003/05/locked-out/">953-word entry written from the porch of my parent&#8217;s house</a> where I was accidentally locked out all night until my Dad left in the morning to go to work. Had no idea WordPress would be as big as it is. Earlier that night had set up WP for my friend Ramie Speight, and done some phone tech support for another friend Mike Tremoulet I had met through the local blogger meetup. My friends from high school all had their own domains with WP and that feedback loop was magical for shaping the software.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Mon, 27 May 2024 23:50:04 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4:"Matt";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:34;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:106:"WordPress.org blog: WP Briefing: Episode 80: Unlocking Your WordPress Potential with Learn WordPress Tools";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:53:"https://wordpress.org/news/?post_type=podcast&p=17278";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:108:"https://wordpress.org/news/2024/05/episode-80-unlocking-your-wordpress-potential-with-learn-wordpress-tools/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14791:"<p>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&#8217;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.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Credits</h2>



<p>Host:&nbsp;<a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/chanthaboune/">Josepha Haden Chomphosy</a><br />Editor:&nbsp;<a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/dustinhartzler/">Dustin Hartzler</a><br />Logo:&nbsp;<a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/javiarce/">Javier Arce</a><br />Production:&nbsp;<a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/bjmcsherry/">Brett McSherry</a><br />Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Show Notes</h2>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://events.wordpress.org/">WordPress Events </a></li>



<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/">Learn WordPress</a>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/online-workshops/">Online Workshops</a></li>



<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/tutorials/">Tutorials</a></li>



<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/lesson-plans/">Lesson Plans</a></li>
</ul>
</li>



<li><strong>Small List of Big Things</strong>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/2024/youth-teens-workshop-at-wordcamp-europe-2024/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">WordCamp Europe Youth &amp; Teen Workshop Registration is Open</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/05/03/roadmap-to-6-6/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Roadmap to WordPress 6.6</a></li>



<li><a href="https://us.wordcamp.org/2024/introducing-showcase-day/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">WordCamp US 2024 Showcase Day</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community/2024/04/08/share-your-feedback-with-meetup-com/">Share Feedback with&nbsp;Meetup.com</a></li>
</ul>
</li>



<li>Have a question you&#8217;d like answered? Submit them to&nbsp;<a href="mailto:wpbriefing@WordPress.org">WPBriefing@WordPress.org</a>.</li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Transcript</h2>



<span id="more-17278"></span>



<p>[00:00:10] <strong>Josepha:</strong> 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&#8217;m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy.</p>



<p>Here we go!</p>



<p>[00:00:28] (Intro Music)&nbsp;</p>



<p>[00:00:40] <strong>Josepha:</strong> My friends, I don&#8217;t know about where you live, but where I live, it&#8217;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&#8217;t help but think back to my last big change.</p>



<p>[00:01:07] <strong>Josepha:</strong> 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.</p>



<p>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.</p>



<p>[00:02:04] <strong>Josepha:</strong> And that&#8217;s something that I always want to do anyway. I always want to get people together. And if what we&#8217;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&#8217;s not like I discovered it, and overnight, everything worked out well, and perfectly, and correctly.</p>



<p>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.</p>



<p>So, if you&#8217;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&#8217;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.</p>



<p>[00:03:20] <strong>Josepha:</strong> It&#8217;s placing a bet that&#8217;s grounded in what you think you can bring to the world before anyone else might have figured out it&#8217;s what they need in their lives. And when you do that, in WordPress, you&#8217;re accessing and hopefully one day contributing to an equitable framework that doesn&#8217;t require you to understand it in order for you to benefit from it.</p>



<p>You can do hard things, and hopefully, these resources make those hard things a little easier. I&#8217;m going to take us through a whirlwind wayfinding list. I&#8217;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.</p>



<p>[00:04:01] <strong>Josepha:</strong> 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&#8217;s perfect for them.</p>



<p>So, here is my whirlwind wayfinding list. Let&#8217;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.</p>



<p>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.</p>



<p>[00:05:02] <strong>Josepha:</strong> The next option, if you only have an hour a week, but you actually don&#8217;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&#8217;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.</p>



<p>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&#8217;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&#8217;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.</p>



<p>[00:06:08] <strong>Josepha:</strong> Have 30 minutes or so a week and don&#8217;t need any external motivation? On the one hand, I am a little jealous. I sometimes need my own external motivation. But, if that&#8217;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.</p>



<p>You can also help to create those. If you have been all the way through your learning journey and you&#8217;re, like, the most WordPressy WordPresser we&#8217;ve ever seen, and you just want to make sure that other people have the same opportunities you&#8217;ve had, that&#8217;s an excellent opportunity to show up and make sure that the knowledge is still available, still free, still can be accessed.</p>



<p>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.</p>



<p>[00:07:32] <strong>Josepha:</strong> As always, I&#8217;ll have links for everything in the show notes—just myriad links because this isn&#8217;t even all that we need to share with you today. And I&#8217;m going to say this last thing one more time because I really, really mean it like a whole, whole lot. I know it&#8217;s hard, bordering on impossible sometimes, to carve out time to learn new things. But when you&#8217;re ready to invest in yourself, I&#8217;m pretty sure that these resources will be here to support your hoped-for dreams.</p>



<p>[00:07:58] (Music interlude)&nbsp;</p>



<p>[00:08:05] <strong>Josepha:</strong> 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&#8217;s gonna be a hands-on workshop. They&#8217;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&#8217;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.</p>



<p>And the next thing on our list is pretty much related. It&#8217;s kind of related. At WordCamp US this year, we have a Showcase Day. Now, this is new to WordCamp US, and it&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;re still figuring out how this can work the best for you, that&#8217;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.</p>



<p>[00:09:43] <strong>Josepha:</strong> 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&#8217;re targeting, if I recall correctly, middle of July for that release. And so it&#8217;s coming up faster than you think. And we would absolutely love for you to come in, test the Beta, tell us what&#8217;s broken so that we can fix it before it gets out. We can&#8217;t fix the things if you don&#8217;t tell us they&#8217;re broken. </p>



<p>[00:10:17] <strong>Josepha:</strong> 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&#8217;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&#8217;ve been to a meetup, or if you tried to find a meetup using meetup.com and did not succeed, that&#8217;s probably also relevant information. I&#8217;ll have a link to that here as well. It will go directly to their product team. And hopefully we&#8217;ll see some product improvements for the WordPress community in the future.</p>



<p>[00:11:01] <strong>Josepha:</strong> And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Don&#8217;t forget to follow us, follow me on your favorite podcast app, or subscribe directly on WordPress.org/news. You&#8217;ll get a friendly reminder whenever there&#8217;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&#8217;m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Thanks again, and I&#8217;ll see you in a couple of weeks.&nbsp;</p>



<p>[00:11:29] (Music outro)&nbsp;</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Mon, 27 May 2024 12:00:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"Brett McSherry";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:35;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:83:"Do The Woo Community: The Next Gen in WordPress with Allison Dye and Sophia DeRosia";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=83856";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:82:"https://dothewoo.io/the-next-gen-in-wordpress-with-allison-dye-and-sophia-derosia/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:177:"The episode features our new hosts Sophia and Allison discussing their early exposure to WordPress, personal experiences, skill development, community impact, and future topics.";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Mon, 27 May 2024 08:55:06 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:36;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:11:"
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:1:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:79:"HeroPress: HeroPress in Spain, Accessibility and Inclusivity at WordCamp Europe";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://heropress.com/?p=6827";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:201:"https://heropress.com/heropress-in-spain-accessibility-and-inclusivity-at-wordcamp-europe/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=heropress-in-spain-accessibility-and-inclusivity-at-wordcamp-europe";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:7063:"<img width="1024" height="768" src="https://heropress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/4436637dfd73554f4.37436592-1024x768.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="A pale fish with large eyes and rounded fins swimming in clear blue water with a few tiny bubbles visible around it." /><div class="wp-block-kadence-spacer aligncenter kt-block-spacer-6827_da78c2-d2"><div class="kt-block-spacer kt-block-spacer-halign-center"><hr class="kt-divider" /></div></div>


<div class="kb-row-layout-wrap kb-row-layout-id6827_e5d91a-c4 alignnone kt-row-has-bg wp-block-kadence-rowlayout"><div class="kt-row-column-wrap kt-has-1-columns kt-row-layout-equal kt-tab-layout-inherit kt-mobile-layout-row kt-row-valign-top kb-theme-content-width">

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<h2 class="kt-adv-heading6827_f51751-1b wp-block-kadence-advancedheading">HeroPress At WordCamp Europe 2024</h2>



<a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/2024/accessibility-and-inclusivity/"><img width="1024" height="296" src="https://heropress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/wceu_updates-1024x296.jpg" alt="WCEU Latest Updates" class="wp-image-6680" /></a>



<h3 class="kt-adv-heading6827_acae33-d3 wp-block-kadence-advancedheading">Accessibility and Inclusivity</h3>



<p>The organizing team at WCEU this year have made a great effort to make the event inclusive and accessible. <a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/2024/accessibility-and-inclusivity/">They&#8217;ve created a page</a> which details information about the venue, transportation, food, allergies, etc. for a very wide range of people, from attendees who are deaf, hard-of-hearing or sound sensitive, attendees who are blind, partially-sighted, photo or light sensitive, and attendees with autism, anxiety or neurodivergence. All of this in addition to solutions for people who move around differently.</p>



<p>Who are we going to see at WCEU? Stop by the <a href="https://heropress.com/slack/">HeroPress Slack</a> and let is know, I&#8217;d love to touch base with you!</p>
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<h2 class="kt-adv-heading6827_823314-e0 wp-block-kadence-advancedheading"><a href="https://heropress.com/">HeroPress.com</a> &#8211; <a href="https://heropress.com/essays/from-blogging-to-wordpress-communities-a-bolivian-tale/"><a href="https://heropress.com/essays/discover-where-you-belong/">Discover Where You Belong</a></a></h2>




<div class="wp-block-image is-style-default">
<a href="https://heropress.com/essays/discover-where-you-belong/"><img width="287" height="300" src="https://heropress.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/angela_jin-287x300.jpg" alt="Angela Jin" class="wp-image-3468" /></a></div>


<p>Angela Jin wandered the world looking for her place in it until she found WordPress. It allowed her to move to Spain and live the life she wanted.</p>



<p><em>I saw WordPress as a way for anyone to have a voice online, and as a result, I was also drawn to the idea of creating these tools that non-developers, like myself, could use in an increasingly online world.</em></p>



<p>Angela&#8217;s essay is <a href="https://heropress.com/essays/discover-where-you-belong/">available</a> on <a href="https://heropress.com">HeroPress.com</a>.</p>
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<h2 class="kt-adv-heading6827_c64b75-39 wp-block-kadence-advancedheading"><a href="https://wppodcasts.com">WP Podcasts</a></h2>





<a href="https://wppodcasts.com"><img src="https://heropressnetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/pocket_casts_single_315.png" alt="Pocket Casts image" class="wp-image-4316" /></a>



<p>There were <em>Twenty-four</em> WordPress podcast episodes released this week! Noy only that, we&#8217;ve passed 13,000 episodes!</p>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://elarroyo.dev/episodio-61-la-verdad-que-te-estan-ocultando-sobre-el-hosting/#new_tab">Episodio 61 – La verdad que te están ocultando sobre el hosting</a> from <a href="https://wppodcasts.com/podcast/el-arroyo-dev/">El Arroyo Dev</a></li>



<li><a href="https://underrepresented-in-tech-1.castos.com/episodes/diversity-isnt-for-the-naked-eye#new_tab">Diversity Isn’t for the Naked Eye</a> from <a href="https://wppodcasts.com/podcast/underrepresented-in-tech/">Underrepresented in Tech</a></li>



<li><a href="https://remkusdevries.com/podcast/from-failed-blogs-to-head-of-content-this-is-emma-youngs-journey/#new_tab">From Failed Blogs to Head of Content. This is Emma Young’s Journey</a> from <a href="https://wppodcasts.com/podcast/within-wordpress/">Within WordPress</a></li>



<li><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-100-nasa-wordpress-block-editor/#new_tab">Gutenberg Changelog #100 – NASA’s New Website – the Switch to WordPress and Block Editor</a> from <a href="https://wppodcasts.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog/">Gutenberg Changelog</a></li>
</ul>



<p>There are new episodes every single day, so be sure to stop by <a href="https://wppodcasts.com">WPPodcasts.com</a> and search for things that interest you!</p>
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<p>The banner at the top of this post is a <a href="https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/">CC0</a> licensed <a href="https://wordpress.org/photos/photo/4436637dfd/">photo</a> by <a href="https://wordpress.org/photos/author/ajithrn/">Ajith R N</a> from the <a href="https://wordpress.org/photos/">WordPress Photo Directory</a>.</p>





<p>That&#8217;s it for this week! If you&#8217;d like to get this post in your email every week, <a href="https://heropressnetwork.com/newsletter">make sure you sign up</a>!</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://heropress.com/heropress-in-spain-accessibility-and-inclusivity-at-wordcamp-europe/">HeroPress in Spain, Accessibility and Inclusivity at WordCamp Europe</a> appeared first on <a href="https://heropress.com">HeroPress</a>.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 24 May 2024 17:03:48 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:37;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:83:"Do The Woo Community: Building Community and Driving Innovation with Mohammed Moeez";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=83715";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:82:"https://dothewoo.io/building-community-and-driving-innovation-with-mohammed-moeez/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:133:"Moeez from Cloudways shares insights on community engagement, product development, and navigating challenges in the hosting industry.";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 24 May 2024 08:31:52 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:38;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:94:"WPTavern: #121 – Alexander Gilmanov on Transitioning From Developer to Entrepreneur. Part 2.";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:48:"https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=155933";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:106:"https://wptavern.com/podcast/121-alexander-gilmanov-on-transitioning-from-developer-to-entrepreneur-part-2";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:50984:"Transcript<div>
<p>[00:00:00] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.</p>



<p>Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, one person&#8217;s story of the struggles of transitioning from a freelancer into an agency manager, but this is part two. If you&#8217;d like to subscribe to the</p>



<p>podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.</p>



<p>If you have a topic that you&#8217;d like us to feature on the podcast, I&#8217;m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the form there.</p>



<p>So on the podcast today we have Alexander Gilmanov. Alex comes to us today from Belgrade, Serbia. He&#8217;s a full stack developer with a rich heritage of freelance and agency work. His company officially launched in 2014, and they&#8217;ve continued to work with clients as well as creating a range of WordPress plugins and their own SaaS apps, mainly in the online booking space.</p>



<p>Slightly usually for this podcast, I decided to break the content up into two parts. You can hear the first episode, from last week, by going to wptavern.com and searching for episode 120.</p>



<p>Alexander brings a wealth of experience from his journey within the WordPress ecosystem. And this podcast is all about his transitioning from being a freelancer towards a more managerial role, now overseeing a team of 43 employees.</p>



<p>Alexander gets into the intricacies of team management, emphasizing the effective use of tools like Google Suite, Slack, Jira, Notion, Confluence, and GitLab.</p>



<p>We begin with Alexander reflecting upon his evolving role, from an individual contributor, to a leader. Responsible for a midsize team. He talks about the lessons learned along the way, particularly trying to steer clear of negative motivation tactics. He now advocates for positive reinforcement, and fostering a culture of trust and calm, where mistakes are viewed as opportunities for growth.</p>



<p>We then chat about the complexities of balancing automated and human support, and Alexander offers his perspective on managing support requests effectively whilst maintaining high customer satisfaction.</p>



<p>He also explains about the structure of his team, telling us about the benefits of smaller, independent teams, and the need for coordination across departments, such as product development, marketing, and support.</p>



<p>Towards the end, we talk about the WordPress community and Alexander contrast this with other industries, sharing insights from events and conferences that have shaped his approach to team management.</p>



<p>He mentions learning from established companies like Visual Composer or WP Bakery, noting the openness and knowledge sharing that define the WordPress ecosystem.</p>



<p>Finally Alexander underscores the importance of building the right team. He discusses the need to recognize when team members are not a good fit, and now it&#8217;s not always realistic to expect every employee to be the perfect fit for his way of doing things. Seeking the right people and learning continuously forms a key part of his managerial philosophy.</p>



<p>If you&#8217;re interested in team management and the dynamics of the WordPress community, this episode is for you.</p>



<p>If you&#8217;re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com forward slash podcast, where you&#8217;ll find all the other episodes as well.</p>



<p>A quick note before we begin, Alexander&#8217;s audio was not great at the start, but I&#8217;ve done my best to clean it up, and it is more than listenable.</p>



<p>And so, without further delay I bring you Alexander Gilmanov.</p>



<p>I am joined on the podcast once again by Alexander Gilmanov. Hello. How are you doing?</p>



<p>[00:04:43] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> Hi. I&#8217;m doing good. How are you?</p>



<p>[00:04:45] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Yeah, really great. So, just to give you some context, dear listener, if you haven&#8217;t listened to the previous episode of this podcast, if you&#8217;ve missed a week, then it&#8217;s probably a good idea to go back because this is part two, kind of unexpectedly actually.</p>



<p>When Alexander and I began our conversation for the podcast, just the intention was to get it all done in one hit. And then the conversation got away from us. I was really interested in it, and so we kept talking. And about halfway through what we intended to cover, I said, let&#8217;s do it as a two-parter. So that&#8217;s where we&#8217;re at, at the moment.</p>



<p>Now, if you were to replay last week&#8217;s episode, Alexander will be able to introduce himself. So we won&#8217;t go through that whole process again. But what you&#8217;ll hear there is Alexander&#8217;s journey from being a freelancer, to a more managerial role, and the different things that he went through in his professional journey, in order to get where he is today.</p>



<p>So it was the story of his work life, you could encapsulate it as. And the bit that we never got to was all of the bits and pieces that make up the work life. How to do things, and the decisions that Alexander has made over the years, mistakes that have been made, and things that have been improved and, what have you. So that&#8217;s where we&#8217;re going to go for the next little episode. Let&#8217;s see where this goes to. But firstly, thank you for joining me again. I really appreciate it.</p>



<p>[00:06:05] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> Thank you for having me.</p>



<p>[00:06:07] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Yeah, no, you&#8217;re very welcome. So we&#8217;ve got you at the point where you are now a project manager. Your career has ended up with a 43, I think you said, person company. It&#8217;s a lot of responsibility, and decisions will have been made on that journey. Things will have been done badly, some things will have been done brilliantly.</p>



<p>Let&#8217;s just go through the bits and the pieces that you think make you good at your job. Now, I&#8217;m not suggesting that you believe yourself to be brilliant at your job or anything, no big headedness here. But what are some of the kernels, the bits of wisdom that you could give us about managing a company, a web agency, with 43 people? And we can go in any direction you like.</p>



<p>[00:06:46] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> While we were phrasing the question, you already mentioned one of the things that was on my mind because, exactly, many things are done, were done maybe wisely. Some things were mistakes, and I can&#8217;t consider myself to be a perfect project manager, or founder, or CEO. And I think this is one of the key things, like never to go to any extreme about thinking I&#8217;m doing things perfectly, and this is the only way to do it, and not to go to other extreme.</p>



<p>Some people have this tendency of blaming themselves for every mistake, seeing it as failure, complete failure, something that cannot be redone. Almost never in business life it happens like that. But the attitude about the problem sometimes can create bigger problem than the problem itself. So that&#8217;s one thing that came to my mind as you were speaking. Try to stay calm about things, about failures, about success. Everything is learning. Everything will pass.</p>



<p>[00:07:42] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Do you have moments where you didn&#8217;t obey that little golden rule though? Do you have moments where the anxiety, the stress, I don&#8217;t know, the financial consequences of decisions you made, all felt like it was getting a bit too much? I think it&#8217;s easy to tell yourself after the fact, be kind to yourself, but reality is, when the clients are not happy, when the projects are not coming to fruition in a timely way, I think it&#8217;s all too easy to get into blaming, and anger, and all of those kind of things.</p>



<p>[00:08:10] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> Yes. I think one of my early mistakes, not failure like mistakes, but one of the wrong way of approaching things was using anxiety and fear as a motivator. Because for the first year or two, as I think I mentioned last time, we were depending on each and every project, each client. It created a lot of tension.</p>



<p>I didn&#8217;t like it, but when you feel constant stress, stress also gives you some adrenaline, some power, and then you can go for hours and hours. Long term, stress, and fear, and anxiety is a bad motivator, because you don&#8217;t feel good about those projects. You don&#8217;t create positive energy in the company, you exhaust yourself.</p>



<p>This is something I realised maybe after two years of running the company, and I started restructuring my way of thinking about it. And this is something I would advise entrepreneurs, young founders, and young managers to avoid, because many people tend to do that. They start creating, they start exaggerating potential scenarios, potential problems that might happen.</p>



<p>What happens if this project fails? What happens if this client cancels? We are all doomed then. And let me stay until 2:00 AM today, and do everything possible. Okay, this gives you like short term boost, and short term motivation and fuel, but long term it&#8217;s going to exhaust you, and people around you.</p>



<p>[00:09:28] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> It can be very easy though to fall into that trap, can&#8217;t it? Because I think in some situations, fear, anxiety, and even anger, they are so close at hand. You know, they&#8217;re the natural thing that comes out in certain scenarios, especially fear. And to be calm, and to be equanimous, and to have that capability to take a step back and see that probably the doom scenario is not necessarily the scenario that&#8217;s going to come out.</p>



<p>And I guess if you, as the leader of the company, are exemplifying what the company stands for, and the way to behave in the company, if that&#8217;s the way that you are handling yourself, then in a way you are giving permission to everybody lower down to start to freak out, and believe that everything&#8217;s going wrong, and become angry and what have you. So changing that behavior to be more calm, there&#8217;ll be a knock on effect with your employees, and probably a lot calmer, and a lot more productive as well.</p>



<p>[00:10:20] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> Yes, exactly. Allowing yourself to make mistakes is, I think, crucial. Being too relaxed about this is also important, but if you are setting expectations for your team, and you are too upset about every single mistake, it&#8217;s going to create a lot of stress.</p>



<p>And I did this mistake, as I said. In the early days, I was looking at all the successful examples, successful entrepreneurs, companies that have success stories because all you see online are success stories, and you think they have everything figured out. And then you look at your own company and you see all those things that other people don&#8217;t see from the inside, all the problems, maybe things not implemented to 100%, things you know can be done better. And you start blaming yourself and people around you.</p>



<p>For the first years, I also believed in negative motivation too much. I was trying to establish some sort of penalties if something isn&#8217;t delivered on time, try to scare people if we are not going to deliver the project by day. I don&#8217;t know what&#8217;s going to happen with the company, something like that. And this is really a wrong thing, I think now, as of today, to do for a leader, because you&#8217;re not creating trust.</p>



<p>People maybe will, as also short term, do more. Maybe they will become more motivated, deliver more, because they&#8217;re at fear for their positions. Long term, especially if you&#8217;re building products of your own, like deadlines, penalties, trying to scare people, creating anxiety, it&#8217;s poison long term. You&#8217;re not going to get a team you can trust, team to trust you. You&#8217;re not creating the ownership feel you want from your key employees.</p>



<p>[00:11:58] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Yeah, and presumably you are coming to work not feeling great about anything as well. You are at the top of the tree there, and it all looks bad all the way from top to bottom. That&#8217;s really interesting though. I&#8217;m no psychologist, I don&#8217;t really know how the brain reacts to fear, as opposed to positivity.</p>



<p>But my intuition is that, if you are told that you are doing a good job more frequently than you are told that your work is not up to scratch, and there&#8217;s this deadline coming, and there&#8217;s these penalties you&#8217;re about to fall into the trap of receiving, my guess is that you&#8217;re just going to enjoy that work experience, and be much more motivated to make the job successful, if you are constantly being praised and rewarded.</p>



<p>[00:12:39] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> Yes, you need the right people. Some people that would be a brilliant employee, for some other company it will not be perfect match for your team, for your project, for the combination that you&#8217;re building.</p>



<p>Yes, I wanted to say it&#8217;s a good skill you need to learn to identify those people. One of the early mistakes I did, I tried to change people. I tried to either adjust the way we do things as a company to certain people, or try to adjust certain people, and get into something which is really not job of a manager. Change the habits, change the mindset, change the values of a person.</p>



<p>Sometimes when there is no match, the best solution for everyone to part ways and to look for a different person. Also, it&#8217;s a common mistake, and I&#8217;m also guilty of doing it, is to punish the members that do everything, and punish the rights team members for something the team members haven&#8217;t done right. By introducing penalties, by scaring the team in group emails, or something like that, but I don&#8217;t do anymore.</p>



<p>[00:13:39] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> That&#8217;s good to hear. One of the things that you mentioned there was how easy it is to assume that everybody&#8217;s getting everything right. To look online, and with the best will in the world, more or less everybody paints best picture of themselves online. Not many people are going to go out there and share all of the things that are going wrong in their business or their life. So you do have this very skewed impression.</p>



<p>You know, if you head onto YouTube and look at management videos, how to manage a web design agency. There&#8217;ll be loads of different ideas, and maybe some of them are just not going to fit with your way of doing things. And so that leads me to this next thought, which is, basically, where did you learn to make these changes in the way that you manage things?</p>



<p>Was it an incremental thing? Did you have some sort of guru, or course, or tutor that you went to? Or was it merely a case of, over the years, making mistakes and looking and thinking, okay, I need to change that one little thing, and then another few months goes by and, okay, I need to change that one little thing? Where did you get your inspirations from?</p>



<p>[00:14:38] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> It&#8217;s an incremental thing, and it&#8217;s an ongoing process. In the early days of transitioning to a manager, I really almost physically felt this hunger for knowledge and mentorship. And I used each and every opportunity I could. I was writing emails, and as we are in the WordPress ecosystem, I can even maybe mention a couple of companies that were really, really helpful.</p>



<p>For example, Visual Composer, WP Bakery, they were my early role model. They were very successful in the marketplaces where we also started selling our plugins. And I was looking up to them. I got the inspiration from their websites, from their social media. And one day I took the courage and wrote them a message through a contact form telling them, I really admire what you do, and I would love to share experiences.</p>



<p>I received an answer from their CEO the next day. And he was very kind, and he answered many questions. And then in one of the WordCamps a couple of years after, I saw that they&#8217;re attending it. And, again, I wrote them a message and we got to know each other, and they were all very open about how they do things, what they do right, what they did wrong. And this was something that, it was just one acquaintance, and just one step I took without any hope that someone will answer, which answered a lot of things that on my mind.</p>



<p>Some things were just, you need proof that you&#8217;re not doing something wrong. Sometimes you will try doing, let&#8217;s say Google ads or Facebook ads, and they don&#8217;t produce any results, and you think, maybe I&#8217;m just no good at it, maybe others have everything figured out. But then you talk to other, two, three people in the industry, and you see that it&#8217;s actually a common thing.</p>



<p>Also Sujay from Brainstorm Force, Astra, I keep mentioning him. Getting to know him was a very insightful experience. He would share many of the things that they have done, that they changed in their journey. Some of the findings that they had, for example, switching from selling plugins on the marketplace, towards selling plugins directly on the website. It was something that was on my mind for years. I thought we just can&#8217;t afford it. We don&#8217;t have the traffic, we don&#8217;t have the demand generation on our end, and we depend so hugely on this marketplace.</p>



<p>And he shared, I think even the revenue numbers, things other people wouldn&#8217;t share in different industries. He showed me the, you will drop for certain percentage when you move away from the marketplace, but then it&#8217;ll give you a push to build your own customer base, and you can work with them better, you can nurture this better. Eventually we&#8217;ll recover, and long-term effect, compound effect, will be much better.</p>



<p>Such interactions were maybe the mentoring sessions. I didn&#8217;t have a mentor I could talk to. But also, I tried to use every opportunity I could. I was attending events, I was attending talks, conferences. Sometimes it was just basic stuff like how to do accounting, how to fire people, how to hire people. And from every conferences, webinar, education piece, I took away something.</p>



<p>Sometimes it wasn&#8217;t much, the event itself, but I would meet a person that is maybe in a different industry, but at a similar role. And I would ask them like, we are really struggling with managing all this different stuff in the office, bulbs keep going out, and we need paper towels and, I don&#8217;t know, toilet paper, things like that. And we already have 15 people, but still there is not enough time to hire full-time office manager.</p>



<p>And at the same time, I feel it&#8217;s not wise for me to keep doing all this as a CEO and founder. I&#8217;m wasting time for trivial things. They would just give me advice how they maybe hired someone who is combining office management and HR, or accounting. I never thought about it this way.</p>



<p>[00:18:17] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> One of the things which I keep coming back to, you may have strong intuitions about this, you may agree, you may disagree, I don&#8217;t know. I do think that being a part of an open source project is different in some way. I don&#8217;t know what that is, I can&#8217;t put my finger on it. But the willingness to communicate with, in some cases, direct competitors is really quite startling.</p>



<p>You know, you go to a major WordCamp, and there will be all these companies who are directly competing against each other. Let&#8217;s take hosting, for example, that would be a good example. They&#8217;re all there, and obviously they&#8217;re pitching their product, and they&#8217;ve got their booth, or what have you. But when it&#8217;s all over, and the evening rolls around, they&#8217;re all having a bit of a chat and sharing information.</p>



<p>There may be some things which are confidential, but I do think that making use of those connections at those kind of events is really useful. And that was very surprising to me when I first turned up to a WordPress event, that all of these competitors would be quite willing to talk through their problems. And you may be not competing with the companies that you&#8217;ve mentioned, I&#8217;m not entirely sure.</p>



<p>But still very nice of those people, to take time out of their schedule to give you a bit of a leg up, and some tutoring, and some mentoring. And I&#8217;m not really sure that that would happen in every kind of industry. Like I said, I don&#8217;t know why that is, but I have an intuition that that&#8217;s a thing. So I don&#8217;t know if you want to comment on that, but I&#8217;m just offering it up.</p>



<p>[00:19:45] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> I fully agree. It&#8217;s very different in WordPress. I had some experience with the agency work, and with some industries. We had contact with as an agency, and also I attended lots of SaaS conferences. The overall atmosphere is very different. And competitors, they would be, of course, polite and professional towards each other. Last WordCamp in Taipei, there was a picture, like BB Builder, Divi and Elementor walk into a bar, and three guys sharing a beer, it might be even forbidden by corporate policy.</p>



<p>[00:20:17] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> I think it would. I really think it would, and so that is curious. The piece of the jigsaw that I can&#8217;t quite understand, and I think it&#8217;s what makes open source such an interesting and friendly environment. Again, dear listener, if you&#8217;re listening to this and you haven&#8217;t been to one of these events before, I think it&#8217;s worth a shot. You know, if there&#8217;s parts of your business that you are not that sure about, obviously you could hop in a contact form and hope like you did, that you would get a reply.</p>



<p>But turning up to some of these events, and seeing if anybody in the room has had the same experience, or is trying to figure out the same thing that you are, is really, really valuable. We call it the hallway track, and it&#8217;s the bit where everybody just hangs out outside of the presentations, and the bits and the pieces that have been organised.</p>



<p>Okay, let&#8217;s move on to some of the things that you&#8217;ve shared. Now, I said in the last episode that Alexander had created this Google Doc, not necessarily for me, but he shared it with me, and it was really a dumping ground, I think you&#8217;d explained, you were just letting your thoughts out into text. And I&#8217;m going to sort of latch onto a few bits and pieces.</p>



<p>So this is some of the process stuff, some of the things that you&#8217;ve figured make your business run more smoothly. And one of the things which is right at the top, and I think you mentioned this quite a few times, making sure that your projects and your products are always with the target audience in mind.</p>



<p>Now, I know that&#8217;s easy to say, right? Okay, always think about the audience, we must think about the audience. That&#8217;s obvious, right? Tell me about that. Why have you put that as right at the top, and you keep repeating it? What&#8217;s going on there?</p>



<p>[00:21:46] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> It&#8217;s sort of a mantra, I think every product builder needs to return to. Everybody knows that. I think every product company would have, like we are not building it for beautiful UX. We are not building it for ourselves, we are building it for the end customer. And the end customer, as they say, they don&#8217;t want to buy a drill, they want to put a picture on their wall, or they want holes in their walls.</p>



<p>And because you get carried away by the process, and it&#8217;s never ending. I know that I&#8217;m sharing this with you like I&#8217;m a guru of that, but tomorrow I may get driven away by working with a designer again. So if a large percentage of your customers is telling you that your product is doing something wrong, and you know that it doesn&#8217;t, they&#8217;re right because you&#8217;re building it for them. And it&#8217;s so easy, and for different segments it&#8217;s so easy to just right it off, especially for support or something like that.</p>



<p>You know that every day you&#8217;re going to receive a hundred of new requests, you feel them as never ending. Support agents, it&#8217;s a very tough part of our job, and it&#8217;s very easy for them to get into that mindset. Those guys keep annoying me, they keep writing these repeating stupid questions. You start seeing them in your head as something, as a crowd of people, and they keep asking the same question, you think they&#8217;re all somehow connected. And you need to repeatedly wake yourself up because you act as a company, work for those people, you exist because of those people, and you need to make them happy</p>



<p>[00:23:16] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> You know, it&#8217;s really interesting because, I&#8217;m sure you have done the same thing that I&#8217;m about to describe, that you have used some service, product, whatever it may be, and you&#8217;ve written in with a suggestion or support, and you get something which feels angry back. It&#8217;s jarring, isn&#8217;t it?</p>



<p>Very quickly, you have a very negative impression of the company. And all it took was for one employee, who maybe is a bit fed up with their job, or was having a bad day, or whatever that might be, and you are skewed. And I suppose, in a sense, the best company on earth would be a company where you could sell the product and have no users. Nobody would write in. Nobody would need any support. Every feature that you shipped would be welcomed, and everything that you didn&#8217;t ship, nobody needed.</p>



<p>But that&#8217;s just not how it is. You have users, and unless you&#8217;re actually making them the core then, what&#8217;s the point? But how do you make sure that you are servicing your users? Is it talking to people at events, people that are using your product? Is it just inspecting the support tickets periodically? What&#8217;s the process, which means that you are fairly confident that you are listening to your user base?</p>



<p>[00:24:28] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> It&#8217;s one thing where I want to highlight, you never can do it 100% perfect, you just said yourself. And in this part, I don&#8217;t want to sound like we have it all figured out.</p>



<p>[00:24:38] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> No, I understand, yeah.</p>



<p>[00:24:39] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> We are constantly working on improving it. We know how we would do this in the ideal scenario, but the resources aren&#8217;t there yet. We would love to have 24/7 support. We would love to have three tiers of support. We love to have a real time sync between all the departments. And we are going towards this ideal solution but, you know, we also have restrictions.</p>



<p>43 people company is a lot of people, but still not enough for everything to be ideal. And getting back to the question, we try our best to do all of this. We have open channels for people to suggest features, and vote for features. But we also try to be honest with them that, this is not how we determine the roadmap, how we define the roadmap.</p>



<p>Sometimes people get angry. They say, this feature has 800 votes, and it&#8217;s still not in the process of development, it doesn&#8217;t look like rocket science to build. For example, hotel booking, into the booking plugin that we have. From the outside it doesn&#8217;t, but from the inside, when you have all these other things going on, it&#8217;s tough to even give estimate on when we start working on this.</p>



<p>So, yes, we have this channel. We are trying to build communities. This is something that we don&#8217;t do good enough, and I think we should do a much better job at it. Communities in Facebook, we launched a Discord channel where people can communicate and help each other, even if our support manager is not there.</p>



<p>Maybe they already had question about how to configure something, and then some other user can help. And I&#8217;m also in this community, and from time to time I would monitor and see like what are the common frustrations. And I also try to appear at least once per month in this feature vault system, and monitor what&#8217;s most requested, what are the frustrations, because unfortunately frustrations will happen. You can&#8217;t keep everybody happy, even though we want to.</p>



<p>[00:26:28] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Do you encourage your staff to use your product? So let&#8217;s take the example of the booking system, Amelia. Now, I&#8217;m guessing that a proportion of your staff will have no need to use a booking plugin, because they&#8217;ve already got a job, and they&#8217;re not booking out their time, or whatever it may be that that plugin most frequently gets used for.</p>



<p>But I guess, unless you know the ins and outs of that plugin, and the pain points that a real user experiences, you don&#8217;t really understand. You haven&#8217;t got under the skin of what that thing is, and it&#8217;s too easy to just sit there and be the developer. I&#8217;m working on the technology, I&#8217;m working on the code to make it work, look it works. Yeah, but nobody needs that.</p>



<p>Do you encourage your staff to use it and implement And I know that you&#8217;ve got a variety of different booking solutions, as well as a data tables management suite. We&#8217;ll put the links in the show notes. So yeah, do you get your staff to use what you produce?</p>



<p>[00:27:20] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> Yes we do. As you said, not all of them need booking solutions. But for example, myself, I have a booking page, where people can book a call with me when needed. By configuring it, found a couple of bugs, and issues, and couple of inconsistencies while developing something, it seemed like a logical scenario, but when I tried to configure it and use it for myself, I saw that, okay, it doesn&#8217;t quite follow the thought process.</p>



<p>Also what we do is, all the managerial roles, project managers, team managers, team lead of the project managers, and myself, whenever we receive, and because there are so many channels, every now and then certain support request or comment would reach us, somewhere through the contact form, or in a comment somewhere in the social media or in private messages.</p>



<p>Customer would reach out to us with a support request, or some comment, or some concern. If we have the time, we would try first to answer, and take care of these customers ourselves, because then it helps for example, to keep the hand on the pulse, as we say it. Not necessarily this one customer would have the most typical problem, it helps me to remember what I just said a couple of minutes ago.</p>



<p>We are building this for the customers. They&#8217;re not here because of us. We are here because of them, and this is what we do. And then it helps us to see the real use case scenarios, scenarios we would never even think about. Language schools, yoga studios. Many, many different use cases.</p>



<p>Very logical sometimes for them to request a feature we don&#8217;t have, and we would never even think about such a feature, because we had a totally different use case in mind when we were building something.</p>



<p>[00:28:57] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Yeah, a room full of 43 developers and associated managers, you&#8217;re not going to have all the intuitions, are you? There&#8217;s bound to be somebody that comes very left field, and suggests something which, you never know as well, do you? It may be that somebody in a conversation in a Facebook group just says something, and that just launches your business off in a completely different direction, and you can pivot. So I think you&#8217;ve got to be open to those things.</p>



<p>Can I just ask, I don&#8217;t want to get into this particularly, but you were talking about support there, and some of the mechanisms that you&#8217;ve got for support. So just very, very briefly, what do you think about the sort of rising trend to automate support?</p>



<p>More and more I see that, if I go to a website, for a while it was Intercom, that was a new thing. There was that little bubble in the bottom corner and you could type something in, and you would either get a reply over email or you&#8217;d get somebody in real time writing.</p>



<p>Now we see this trend towards AI, where the AI tries to be the go-between. I get the feeling that it&#8217;s to protect the company from the support burden. Often it&#8217;s just to insulate, can we get the answer to them before we need a human involved? But I also have this notion that, for most people they find it quite frustrating. So it&#8217;s entirely up to you if you want to answer that or not, but I just thought that was curious.</p>



<p>[00:30:10] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> Yeah, it can be frustrating. And I think the most important part is to always keep the option open to, forward it to a real person. Of course, yeah, that&#8217;s the conflict of the paradox, whatever you want to put it. You don&#8217;t want to invest too much in tier one support because, indeed, a lot of people don&#8217;t want to browse through the data and the knowledge base that is already there.</p>



<p>A lot of frequently asked questions already have a very detailed answer somewhere online, but they don&#8217;t want to dig through this, even if it&#8217;s two clicks. It&#8217;s always easier for them to ask a question. And for this, AI can be pretty good. And it can be really frustrating. But what I would mention there is that, sometimes a real human can be even more frustrating, because sometimes they can get more, I don&#8217;t want to say any bad words, but they can give you answers that are even more off than AI would give you.</p>



<p>And with some very large corporations, I don&#8217;t want to call the names but, for example, for configuring some pay per click ads, I wanted specific support. And first, I had to wait to be switched from an AI that doesn&#8217;t know anything to a real person. And then this person had also completely no idea. They tried to send me the same copy paste template replies, and I wasted an hour of my time.</p>



<p>[00:31:27] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> I&#8217;m not sure. We&#8217;ll have to keep an eye on this debate, but it does seem like that kind of support system is going to the way that things are done in the future.</p>



<p>Okay, so we talked about the relationship between your company and the users. Let&#8217;s just turn for the next 10 minutes or so to the sort of structure that you&#8217;ve got within your own company, and how you manage that.</p>



<p>We don&#8217;t need to go through the evolution of it, but right now you&#8217;ve got 43 people. Just tell us what your company looks like, in terms of how you&#8217;ve got that cake layered from top right to bottom. Where have you got to? By employee number 43, what does it look like, and how do you have people, working underneath other people? What does it all look like?</p>



<p>[00:32:04] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> An ongoing process. Not to take too much time, I will just share my current take on high level, how we try to structure things. First of all, we try to keep teams at five to seven people maximum, for them to be able to sync with each other. And this is the number, I think everything higher than five is hard for a manager to follow. For one person to know what each and every one team member are doing, if there is 10 people.</p>



<p>At the moment we have product teams and we try to structure those as almost mini businesses, within our overall business. For example, a developer that works on wpDataTables wouldn&#8217;t have tasks to deliver on some other products, and the project manager in this team would also only focus on their own product development.</p>



<p>What we still share, to a certain extent, is the support or customer happiness team is shared between three different products, mostly for redundancy when someone is away, or there are so many tickets that the assigned person can&#8217;t cover all of them. We need to have redundancies so all the support agents are onboarded to all the products. As we evolve, we want to also have the support team within the product team, so that it would be more or less independent from each other.</p>



<p>And we also share the marketing team. Also not an ideal setup. This is something which is optimal for now, given the resources. I think that it&#8217;s perfect if the marketing is also focused on one product only. This is something that is still luxury as of now.</p>



<p>We are also sharing the marketing team at the moment. It&#8217;s not an ideal setup. As we go ahead, we would also love to divide the marketing team and merge the different marketing teams with the corresponding product teams, because this is actually the best way to do this. When every person focuses on one role, on one product, then you get the best results.</p>



<p>But this is a luxury you only get with scaling. Yeah, so this is probably the principle we are following now. One manager for five to seven people max. More independence within teams. See what&#8217;s the level of decision making independence we can give them. And then some managers that would be responsible for syncing different teams, because customer support, customer happiness has the inputs that the product development needs.</p>



<p>Also, the product development needs to sync with the marketing to market the features, and to the support, so that support would know what are all the new features that we are releasing in the new versions. Yes, and we are sharing naturally the admin part of things like office management, HR, those things. But this is, I think, natural for any company.</p>



<p>[00:34:47] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> So if I&#8217;ve understood it correctly, you&#8217;ve got teams of five to seven developers. That then has a manager.</p>



<p>[00:34:53] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> Five to seven people. This would also include designers, developers.</p>



<p>[00:34:57] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Right, so each of those has a manager, so you&#8217;ve got a bunch of those teams, and then those managers then report to, what, another manager, slightly higher up. And then, do those managers then report to you? And then separately you&#8217;ve got the marketing and the support teams, who have to communicate with all of those teams, so that they&#8217;re aware of what the product actually is on a day-to-day basis, okay. For 43 people, you&#8217;re happy with the way that&#8217;s going.</p>



<p>Let&#8217;s just, very quickly, before we run out of time, because we&#8217;re probably approaching the time that we&#8217;ve got available. You&#8217;ve written down a section of tools that you like, which I think is quite interesting. We don&#8217;t really get into this conversation. So, what are some of the things that you are using in the year 2024? Obviously it&#8217;ll evolve over time. I&#8217;m sure you&#8217;re happy to jettison some tools, and adopt new ones as they come out. But where are you at right now? What are the mainstays of your tooling?</p>



<p>[00:35:44] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> Yeah, one note I would probably, one comment I would mention before going into the tools is that, it&#8217;s not really about the tools. It&#8217;s a mistake many managers and many beginners do, that they think that tool will solve a problem for them. But no, tool can only help you to solve a problem.</p>



<p>[00:36:01] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> I will never, ever get over thinking that the tool will solve the problem. I make this mistake multiple times a year. Just get a new tool, and imagine it will fix all the things, and it never does. Anyway, sorry, an aside. You carry on.</p>



<p>[00:36:13] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> We all do this mistake. It&#8217;s a nice idea that you install the software, and you don&#8217;t have to worry about organising tasks anymore, something like that. So when I just became a manager, I was actually just doing some to-do lists, checklists, and it was sufficient. And I had a higher level checklists, and then drilled down into every point. Every point would have checklists under it.</p>



<p>As of today, 2024, I believe the tools stack is more or less standardised in the industry. We use the Google Suite for docs, for sheets, for emails. We use Slack for real time communication. And sometimes I think if we should maybe reduce using Slack, because it creates sometimes too much of context switching, too many distractions throughout the day, especially for managers. That&#8217;s a pain point for managers, that they have so many messages, and people expect them to answer like within 10 minutes. Where is this doc you shared with us on Friday?</p>



<p>We use Jira for tracking the projects. And we use different kind of boards for different projects, because I think every team needs to decide on the process that works for them. We use agile for all projects, but somewhere we use more kanban kind of approach. We have no strict deadlines in terms of two week sprints, and for most projects we use two week sprints. And then we have sprint planning, sprint review, and all that.</p>



<p>Tasks are estimated in story points. Probably you&#8217;re familiar with agile scrum and with all this methodology. And it then also helps with the estimating, with reporting, with looking back at how many story points every release had.</p>



<p>We are using some of the Confluence, but actually for longer term, structured kind of project, and team documentation, we use Notion. It&#8217;s a very nice, very handy tool for that.</p>



<p>And we have different layers like company policies, team structure, product related assets, product related standards, coding standards, marketing standards. Whenever we figure out an SOP, we put it there, we all know this is the app we use, and everything is in there. And it&#8217;s very helpful for onboarding new guys, because before that we had all those chaotic Google Docs folders, and every time we had to remember where to look for those, and now everything is in one place.</p>



<p>What else do we use? There are tools we use here and there, like Discord for communities. Those are more task relevant tools, like for Google ads, Facebook ads, we use some of downloadable software to monitor and track, but this is less relevant for project management.</p>



<p>But for project management, I think Jira is the most important part. And we use GitLab for developers. It&#8217;s connected to all the servers, to the continuous integration, continuous deployment process, and to Jira. Whenever something is pushed for a certain task, Jira has a reference to it. Yeah, I think from the major software all of us use, that would be it. But as I said, it&#8217;s really about, really not about the tools.</p>



<p>[00:39:09] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Exactly right. It really isn&#8217;t about the tools. Also curious that you have selected what many other teams have selected. There are definitely some sort of star players out there, in those project management software, and things like that. They&#8217;re popular for a reason. But I think trying to wrangle the communication between a growing team, especially when you&#8217;re trying to onboard people, really a difficult thing to do. It&#8217;s almost impossible to keep everybody on the page.</p>



<p>I share your frustration with Slack. One of the things that I find difficult about Slack is just being able to keep up with something if you&#8217;ve had a day off or something. You know, you&#8217;ve suddenly got this linear feed of information, you&#8217;ve got to scroll right up there, and the expectation is the link that was buried in some threaded comment you should have seen and, well, I didn&#8217;t see it, I&#8217;m really sorry about that.</p>



<p>I think probably we&#8217;ve gone through all of the different bits and the pieces that I wanted to go through. I am so appreciative of the amount of time that you&#8217;ve given to me. Enormous thanks.</p>



<p>The other thing that I would like to say is, what&#8217;s coming out of the conversation that we&#8217;ve had, I think is that, you view this as a journey. There&#8217;s no actual destination here, well, maybe there is. When you are 65 years old or something, and you are finally wishing to retire. But this whole process is just a constant process of tweaking, changing, modifying, taking people on for different roles, trying things out, forgiving yourself when they go wrong. And I&#8217;ve learned a lot from all of the different things that you&#8217;ve said to me over the last couple of hours.</p>



<p>As I said, the show notes will be able to, well, you&#8217;ll be able to use the show notes to track down any of the links for anything that Alexander has mentioned.</p>



<p>Just before we go, Alexander, do you want to drop once more where people can find you? I know we did this in the last episode, but we might as well do it again before we round off.</p>



<p>[00:40:47] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> Yeah, I&#8217;m most active in LinkedIn, so you can always find me there. And I&#8217;m happy to connect if you have a question, concern, comment, please contact me.</p>



<p>[00:40:55] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Okay, I will put that in the show notes. Thank you so much for chatting to me. I really have enjoyed this conversation, and I appreciate your time. Thank you very much.</p>



<p>[00:41:03] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> Thank you. And it&#8217;s actually very interesting to share my thoughts, and to structure my thoughts. It helps me also to iterate and reflect on all those things. Thank you very much.</p>
</div>



<p>On the podcast today we have <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-gilmanov-tms/">Alexander Gilmanov</a>.</p>



<p>Alex comes to us today from Belgrade, Serbia. He’s a full-stack developer with a rich heritage of freelance and agency work. His company officially launched in 2014, and they’ve continued work with clients, as well as creating a range of WordPress plugins, and their own SaaS apps, mainly in the online booking space.</p>



<p>Slightly unusually for this podcast I decided to break the content up into two parts. You can hear the first episode from last week by going to the WP Tavern website and searching for <a href="https://wptavern.com/podcast/120-alexander-gilmanov-on-transitioning-from-developer-to-entrepreneur">episode 120</a>.</p>



<p>Alexander brings a wealth of experience from his journey within the WordPress ecosystem, and this podcast is all about his transitioning from being a freelancer towards a more managerial role, now overseeing a team of 43 employees.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Alexander gets into the intricacies of team management, emphasising the effective use of tools like Google Suite, Slack, Jira, Notion, Confluence, and GitLab.</p>



<p>We begin with Alexander reflecting upon his evolving role from an individual contributor to a leader, responsible for a mid-sized team. He talks about the lessons learned along the way, particularly trying to steer clear of negative motivation tactics. He now advocates for positive reinforcement and fostering a culture of trust and calm, where mistakes are viewed as opportunities for growth.</p>



<p>We then chat about the complexities of balancing automated and human support, and Alexander offers his perspective on managing support requests effectively while maintaining high customer satisfaction.&nbsp;</p>



<p>He also explains the structure of his team, telling us about the benefits of smaller, independent teams and the need for coordination across departments such as product development, marketing, and support.</p>



<p>Towards the end we talk about the WordPress community, and Alexander contrasts this with other industries, sharing insights from events and conferences that have shaped his approach to team management. He mentions learning from established companies like Visual Composer or WP Bakery, noting the openness and knowledge-sharing that define the WordPress ecosystem.</p>



<p>Finally, Alexander underscores the importance of building the right team. He discusses the need to recognise when team members are not a good fit, and how it’s not always realistic to expect every employee to be a perfect fit for his way of doing things. Seeking the right people and learning continuously forms a key part of his managerial philosophy.</p>



<p>If you’re interested in team management and the dynamics of the WordPress community, this episode is for you.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Useful links</h2>



<p><a href="https://visualcomposer.com/">Visual Composer</a></p>



<p><a href="https://wpbakery.com/">WPBakery</a></p>



<p><a href="https://brainstormforce.com/">Brainstorm Force</a></p>



<p><a href="https://wpastra.com/">Astra</a></p>



<p><a href="https://workspace.google.com/">Google Workspace</a></p>



<p><a href="https://wpdatatables.com/">wpDataTables</a></p>



<p><a href="https://wpamelia.com/">Amelia booking plugin</a></p>



<p><a href="https://trafft.com/">Trafft</a></p>



<p><a href="https://slack.com/">Slack</a></p>



<p><a href="https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira">Jira</a></p>



<p><a href="https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence">Confluence</a></p>



<p><a href="https://www.notion.so/">Notion</a></p>



<p><a href="https://about.gitlab.com/">GitLab</a></p>



<p><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-gilmanov-tms/">Alexander on LinkedIn</a></p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 22 May 2024 14:00:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"Nathan Wrigley";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:39;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:45:"Do The Woo Community: Episode 500, Thank You!";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=83696";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:42:"https://dothewoo.io/episode-500-thank-you/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:27:"Short and sweet, thank you!";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 22 May 2024 13:16:26 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:40;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:97:"Do The Woo Community: Groundbreaker Talents, Opening Tech Opportunities for Young Women in Uganda";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=83671";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:95:"https://dothewoo.io/groundbreaker-talents-opening-tech-opportunities-for-young-women-in-uganda/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:186:"Learn about mentorship, sponsorship, and the impactful work of Groundbreaker, a program drives powerful experiences for mentors, talents, and the tech industry for young women in Uganda.";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 21 May 2024 14:14:34 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:41;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:58:"Akismet: Elementor Adds Akismet to Stop the Spread of Spam";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"http://akismet.com/?p=283943";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:64:"https://akismet.com/blog/akismet-elementor-form-spam-protection/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:3145:"<p>Elementor users have a new reason to rejoice: Form spam is a thing of the past! The Elementor Form widget is a great tool to build powerful forms with minimal effort. And when combined with the power of Akismet, you’ll have peace of mind that you’re receiving only legitimate responses, and not wasting time on&nbsp;spam.</p>

<p>That’s why Elementor users will be pleased to hear about the new Akismet integration in <a href="https://elementor.com/blog/elementor-319-display-conditions-akismet-integration/">Elementor&nbsp;3.19</a>.</p>


<span id="more-283943"></span>


<h2 id="what-is akismet" class="wp-block-heading">What is&nbsp;Akismet?</h2>

<p>Akismet is an AI&#8209;powered anti&#8209;spam technology that blocks spam with 99.99% accuracy. It works in the background, so it doesn’t force site visitors to complete an annoying CAPTCHA. Moreover, Akismet’s cloud technology means that it won’t slow down your site. To date, Akismet is used on more than 100 million websites built on WordPress and&nbsp;beyond.</p>

<h2 id="what-is-elementor forms" class="wp-block-heading">What is Elementor&nbsp;Forms?</h2>

<p><a href="https://elementor.com/">Elementor</a> is a feature&#8209;rich website builder for WordPress. Alongside the flagship drag&#8209;and&#8209;drop editor, Elementor also offers 100+ widgets for extra functionality.<br />Among these is <a href="https://elementor.com/features/form-builder/">Elementor Forms</a>, one of many widgets included in the premium version of the plugin. Elementor’s form builder is easy to learn and customizable. But, more than that, it’s convenient — you don’t need to download a different form&nbsp;plugin.</p>

<h2 id="elementor-and-akismet-working together" class="wp-block-heading">Elementor and Akismet working&nbsp;together</h2>

<p>Seeing the potential for a useful collaboration, Elementor began work on integrating Akismet into their tools. While this feature ran in beta back in January, now all Elementor users on version 3.19 and above can enjoy Akismet protection within Elementor&nbsp;Forms.</p>

<p><a href="https://elementor.com/help/block-spam-messages-from-forms/">Enabling Akismet in Elementor Forms</a> just takes a few clicks. Akismet protects forms without the need for inconvenient CAPTCHA elements that slow down your site and drive away&nbsp;visitors.</p>

<p>Note that you can only add spam protection to the Name, URL, Email, and Message fields. This should cover most use cases. Other fields, like the Password or Date selector, don’t require spam&nbsp;protection.</p>

<h2 id="welcome-more-akismet integrations" class="wp-block-heading">Welcome more Akismet&nbsp;integrations</h2>

<p>The goal at Akismet is to <a href="https://akismet.com/features/">rid the web of spam</a> for good, so more integrations are always something to celebrate. Elementor Forms has now been added to the list of <a href="https://akismet.com/support/getting-started/using-akismet-with-your-contact-forms/">supported contact form&nbsp;plugins</a>.</p>


<p>Akismet will continue doing what it does best: cleaning up spam across WordPress and beyond.&nbsp;</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Mon, 20 May 2024 14:37:24 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:11:"Ali Uğurlu";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:42;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:78:"Do The Woo Community: Building a Multichannel WooCommerce with Nitish Upadhyay";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=83617";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:77:"https://dothewoo.io/building-a-multichannel-woocommerce-with-nitish-upadhyay/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:115:"In this episode of Woo AgencyChat learn more about turning your clients WooCommerce shop into a multichannel store.";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Mon, 20 May 2024 09:23:18 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:43;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:111:"Gutenberg Times: Gutenberg Changelog #100 – NASA’s New Website – the Switch to WordPress and Block Editor";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:53:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/?post_type=podcast&p=28669";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:87:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-100-nasa-wordpress-block-editor/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:58205:"<p>In this episode, Stacy Holtz, Gary Kovar and Birgit Pauli-Haack discuss NASA’s new website &#8211; the switch to WordPress and Block Editor, the scale of the project, the block and theme development, design and migration.</p>



<p><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-100-nasa-wordpress-block-editor/#shownotes">Show Notes</a> / <a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-100-nasa-wordpress-block-editor/#transcript">Transcript</a></p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Music:&nbsp;<a href="https://soundcloud.com/xirclebox">Homer Gaines</a></li>



<li>Editor:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandy-reed/">Sandy Reed</a></li>



<li>Logo:&nbsp;<a href="https://markuraine.com/">Mark Uraine</a></li>



<li>Production:&nbsp;<a href="https://icodeforapurpose.com">Birgit Pauli-Haack</a></li>
</ul>



<p class="has-larger-font-size" id="shownotes"><strong>Show Notes</strong></p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://lonerockpoint.com/2024/04/nasas-digital-universe-shines-with-webby-awards-nominations/">NASA’s Digital Universe Shines with Webby Awards Nominations</a></li>



<li><a href="https://x.com/photomatt/status/1777807195700125744">Matt Mullenweg&#8217;s tweet</a> about the traffic of the Solar Eclipse Live stream. </li>



<li><a href="https://lonerockpoint.com/2023/10/nasa-flagship-wordpress-site-launch/">NASA’s Flagship Website Launches on WordPress</a></li>



<li><a href="https://lonerockpoint.com/2023/11/content-migration-for-nasa/">Behind-the-Scenes Look at Content Migration for NASA</a></li>



<li><a href="https://wordpress.tv/2023/10/13/for-all-userkind-nasa-web-modernization-and-wordpress/">For all userkind: NASA web modernization and WordPress</a></li>



<li><a href="https://wordpress.tv/2023/10/23/hands-on-with-nasas-new-digital-platform/">Hands on with NASA’s new digital&nbsp;platform</a></li>
</ul>



<p class="has-large-font-size">Stay in Touch</p>



<div class="wp-block-group"><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow">
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Did you like this episode? <a href="https://lovethepodcast.com/gutenbergchangelog"><strong>Please write us a review </strong></a></li>



<li>Ping us on Twitter or send DMs with questions. <a href="https://twitter.com/gutenbergtimes">@gutenbergtimes </a>and <a href="https://twitter.com/bph">@bph</a>.</li>



<li><em>If you have questions or suggestions, or news you want us to include, send them to <a href="mailto:changelog@gutenbergtimes.com">changelog@gutenbergtimes.com</a>. </em></li>



<li><em>Please write us a review on iTunes! <a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/itunes/">(Click here to learn how)</a></em></li>
</ul>
</div></div>



<p class="has-large-font-size" id="transcript"><strong>Transcript</strong></p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Hello, and welcome to our hundredth episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. Now, let that sink in a little bit. A hundred episodes. That&#8217;s about at least 80 hours together, dear listeners. And today, the hundredth show. I&#8217;m thrilled to have a special show for you, for me, and hopefully also for our guests here.</p>



<p>I have with me Stacy Holtz and Gary Kovar from the Lone Rock Point agency. But how would you know them? Yes, they worked with others on the NASA&#8217;s new website. Switch to WordPress and the block editor, and we will have a great chat about the scope of the project, how WordPress really scales and how they did it in development, as well as in user training, content creators, blocking stuff, working with blocks.</p>



<p>I&#8217;m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and a full-time core contributor to the WordPress open source projects, sponsored by Automattic for the Future Program. So let me introduce my guest today. Stacy Holtz has been with Lone Rock Point for three years, focusing on project and team management as group account director. Her significant contributions to the NASA project have been highlighted through her leadership in user support training efforts, especially in guiding users on the effective use of custom-built blocks. Welcome, Stacy. So happy you are on the show also with us.</p>



<p><em>Stacy Holtz:</em> Thank you. I&#8217;m so excited to be here.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> It&#8217;s cool. It&#8217;s cool. So also with us is Gary Kovar. Gary Kovar, principal software engineer at Lone Rock Point. And his role during the NASA project was, he was instrumental in steering the team towards the beta phase, was key in the integration of Search.gov, and oversaw the management of more than 200,000 redirects. He&#8217;s notably skilled in bringing together historic materials and managing the space station research explorer, as well as various other non-WordPress static content. Now there were a few words in there that I need to clarify later. Welcome to the show, Gary.</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> Thanks. Excited to be here.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah, it&#8217;s wonderful. I also want to point out to our listeners, what&#8217;s the connection with NASA? Apart from that you&#8217;re awesome and that you built a phenomenal block- based website. I have a high affinity for NASA. Fifteen years ago in 2009, I was part of the first tweet up for the shuttle launch 129 on Cape Canaveral. And we were two days where 150 people from Twitter that had been following NASA for the last two years or so on the platform. And they were invited to come to Cape Canaveral, spend a whole day in talks and meet some of the engineers, and meet astronauts, and I met Mike Macedonia, and Miles O&#8217;Brien was there, and quite a few engineers were there to tell us what this all entails. And we of course didn&#8217;t completely get it, but we had a very new take on it because, and that was the idea from the social media team, that the news take this in 129 shuttle starts. You can&#8217;t always, there&#8217;s no news in there unless something happens.</p>



<p>So there&#8217;s no excitement. There is no excitement about the payload, about what&#8217;s going on with the astronauts. Yeah, we raised with the astronauts from the airplane and that was really something. So we, 150 people, brought a new take on it, because it was all new to us and we wanted to share video and interviews and all that with our audience, and the story for the news, the main news outlets were the tweet up, we were the news on NASA, etc. So it was really interesting to talk to Miles O&#8217;Brien and all the others, and get the world treatment on the press mound. And of course the excitement of the shuttle start, it was really changing for me, and the Explorer part of it was really interesting. So I can&#8217;t really put it into words still. Yeah, after 15 years I am back there.</p>



<p>So I thought, oh yes, this comes good together and let&#8217;s do a show on the Gutenberg Changelog about the NASA website and bring this all together. So what will we talk about today? I think we have three main topics. One is briefly talk about the scale of the project, because it&#8217;s enormous. We talk about the sites, the people, the blocks, the processing, the time that it takes to bring something together. And then, we talk about the actual block and theme development about design systems migration. And then, the last part was, it&#8217;s the most important part actually, one of the paths was clear for the development, how did the content creators then needed to be trained, the publishing flow revamped, what new sites were built, new pages built and all that.</p>
